London, 1935–6
Art, Politics and Motherhood
IThe first issue of The Listener for 1935 showed one of Edith’s photographs: an alarm clock, partly shaded and with its hands at midnight, stands on a slanted surface while calendar sheets spelling the numbers of the new year slide gently forward as if moved by an invisible wind. For the photographer, the twelve months ahead would prove a less harmonious time.
Signs of doom were visible in the world at large as well as in her private life. She still visited Alexander in South Wales, but the informer who had met the couple in Oxford and suspected they were unhappily married was not mistaken. Although Edith and Alexander had always been bound by a mutual ‘hard-boiled’ loyalty to communism, their relationship could not survive merely on the strength of a political mission. Their excitability was a symptom of their fanatical devotion to the cause as much as evidence of their growing impatience with each other – as Edith said to her MI5 interrogators many years later, their marriage ‘was nothing but upsets’.1
In January 1935, the gravity of the situation in South Wales could not be overestimated. This time it was not only about the miners and
their dismal living and working conditions. After implementation of the previous year’s Unemployment Act, a violent crisis erupted as the newly established Unemployment Assistance Board imposed harsh benefit cuts on the unemployed. Thousands of people from the country’s most disadvantaged areas were up in arms and, in the words of a trade union activist, ‘South Wales was the centre of the storm’.2 Mightier than the Hunger Marches, the demonstrations caused a level of disruption similar to the devastating effect of the General Strike. Throughout January and, in Wales, culminating with a gigantic march on 3 February –when even women, children, shopkeepers and church leaders took to the streets – people’s anger against the cuts was impossible to ignore. The wave of protests produced results, as the National Government intervened by halting the measures for the time being. Together with the NUWM and the ILP, the CPGB had played an important role in events, and the party’s influence was bolstered by the outcome.
Edith witnessed at least one of those two protests: either on 20 January, when 60,000 people marched to Pontypridd, or two weeks later, on the famous Sunday in February after which the demands of more than four times as many demonstrators were finally acknowledged by the government. One can only imagine how touched she was by those great shows of proletarian solidarity, which usually ended with the singing of the Internationale, where protesters waved and smiled at her as she took their picture. Her photograph of the demonstration at Trealaw, with the interminable line of people standing in the rain, and women, children and cyclists projecting their shadows onto the wet pavement, is her bestknown document of that experience. At this time, Polly Binder visited Edith in South Wales. Binder’s lithographs of the miners and their landscape are another testimony to the extent to which the Welsh struggle affected and inspired left-wing artists and intellectuals.
In early 1935, the communist movement was about to commit to a major change in direction which culminated, later that year, in the Comintern’s decision to unite the workers’ movement by calling for solidarity between socialist and communist forces. The move away from
Stalin’s ‘class against class’ policy, which rejected cooperation with other parties, marked the beginning of the Popular Front era. In Britain, the demonstrations of that troubled winter, when several left-wing forces fought united, had heralded the change. The Welsh events had been decisive in shaping the future of the British communist movement.
Yet the democratic hopes for the Popular Front strategy did little to dispel the threat that lay ahead, and the extreme polarisation between left and right was taking on an aggressive tinge. In the same Listener issue that had Edith’s photograph on the cover, a feature discussing a London exhibition about European propaganda posters presented an alarming display of warlike imagery. While on a Polish poster the figure of a stylised soldier wearing a gas mask loomed large against a sky traversed by enemy planes, a socialist advertisement from Spain featured blood dripping from the hands of clerics. Most disturbingly, the Austrian Heimwehr chose to portray one of its young soldiers alongside a ‘communist dragon’ with bulging, vacant eyes, spiky scales and a cloud of smoke between its big, serrated teeth.3 The prospect of war was frighteningly real.
II
As Mussolini planned the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, the results of the plebiscite in the Saar – the ethnically German region put under French control after the First World War – revealed that over 90 per cent of its citizens had voted in favour of reunification with Nazi Germany. By then, Hitler had laid the economic foundations for rearmament, and the London Declaration on 3 February – in which Britain and France revised the military limitations imposed on Germany at Versailles –helped to facilitate his plans. In March, he promptly reintroduced conscription. Soviet Russia, too, was held firmly in its dictator’s grip. In a move that blurred the distinction between the secret intelligence service and Red Army intelligence, Stalin ordered OGPU men to oversee both espionage and military operations, particularly in the West. As
Soviet defector General Walter Krivitsky would explain years later, ‘Since 1935 Stalin has regarded the Soviets as in “a war position”, and from that date Communist Parties and the Intelligence Services have been functioning in preparation for war.’4 Like all foreign communist organisations – though even more sharply, given Stalin’s particular fixation with Britain – British communists had to toe the Moscow line. In Krivitsky’s words: ‘As an organisation of the Third International, the CPGB must place absolutely all its strength and resources in this war which is waged by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, under the guidance of Stalin. The aim of Stalin’s war is the destruction of the British Empire.’5 The work undertaken by Edith and Arnold Deutsch to achieve that very objective was about to produce some impressive results, as Donald Maclean – the first of Philby’s university friends to be recruited by the Soviets – joined the Foreign Office in the autumn. For a secret agent, the combination of pressure from above and the need for concealment creates a permanent state of tension. An extract from a letter to Edith Bone illustrates how this affected her and suggests how Edith Tudor Hart, too, may have felt. At the beginning of the year Bone was in London. Involved as usual with the trade unions, she participated in various protests and corresponded regularly with comrades in Paris. In an attempt to conceal her activities, she also kept moving house and used a cover name. A letter to her from Paris written by someone called Erika conveys something of the life of communist infiltrators:
I’m very pleased to hear that . . . you are feeling better . . . I, too, know these moods, which are understandable nowadays . . . Everything is so terribly difficult today, but the good thing is that you soon get used to any form of fighting and it becomes routine. But do not despair. It’s something different when you’re in the country, which I would like to be and hope to achieve.6
These words reveal two important facts: that foreign agents were on a war mission (‘you soon get used to any form of fighting’) and that
having settled in Britain was in itself an important achievement (‘It’s something different when you’re in the country’). Edith Bone, Edith Tudor Hart and Lizzy Philby had been successful in this respect, because their marriages allowed them to remain in the country legally and indefinitely. They were not the only ones. Later that year, an Austrian acquaintance of Edith Bone, Leontine Williams, née Stiffel, was also identified by MI5 as having contracted a marriage of convenience with a member of the CPGB.
Women were crucial to Soviet illegal operations abroad. Being less likely to be suspected than men, they were routinely given minor – yet nonetheless vital – intelligence duties such as collecting money and liaising between the illegals and their spies. Cultured, multilingual, well versed in the techniques of conspiracy and usually from Central Europe, the women who enabled the smooth running of Soviet espionage in the 1930s and 1940s were a force to be reckoned with.
True, Edith’s position differed from that of most other female agents. By 1935, she had been coming to England for a decade and her marriage to Alexander had not been one of convenience. Thanks to her own ingenuity and long-standing association with the Tudor Harts, Edith had many British friends, was at home in intellectual and political circles and was well known as a photographer. Yet while she had a more secure position in England than most other émigrés, she was also living dangerously – in the words of a high-ranking defector, ‘Soviet Intelligence agents, as well as Soviet officials in general, live in fear.’7
That year, as the Russians’ control over THE ISLAND (the NKVD’s codename for Britain) intensified, their smoothly organised espionage machine encountered some serious problems. In February, the security of the London illegal residency was suddenly compromised when the Home Office summoned the acting rezident, and Arnold Deutsch’s controller, Ignaty Reif, for an interview. The new rezident after Reif’s rushed departure was Alexander Orlov, yet another shadowy figure with multiple aliases who entered Britain on an American passport and settled in London as a refrigerator salesman for a supposedly American
company with offices on Regent Street, right in the centre of town. Orlov’s new appointment was also cut short when, a few months after the Reif fiasco, he was recognised on a London street by a Russian acquaintance and left in a hurry.
Men close to Edith were also coming under renewed scrutiny. In March, MI5 agents began checking Bob Stewart’s letters from Russia for secret writing. They had been following his movements for months, recording every time he lectured at Marx House (‘the National training school for Communists’),8 as well as his London meetings and trips abroad. His dealings with Percy Glading, a prominent British comrade and known Comintern agent, were routinely monitored and, in June, his presence at the Communist International Congress in Moscow was duly noted. Stewart’s frequent encounters with Glading were especially worrying. Described by Sir Vernon Kell as ‘one of the most important members of the CPGB’,9 Glading aroused particular suspicion. An exceptionally dynamic man in his early forties who furtively met people in various corners of London and whose secretiveness was glaringly obvious, Glading was now secretary of the British section of LAI. The authorities knew about his keen interest ‘in aircraft matters’ and that he had often met Willi Münzenberg in Paris. While his first wife, Elizabeth, was a good friend of Edith Bone, Glading was the de facto husband of Rosa Shar, Edith and Alexander’s flatmate from their Paddington days.
That year Maurice Dobb was also involved in party business, both openly and undercover. He was in regular touch with Arthur Wynn, whom he asked to meet several times to discuss matters which he would rather not mention in writing. As secretary of the Cambridge Anti-War Council, Dobb also canvassed support for a protest against the military nature of the celebrations for the king’s Silver Jubilee on 6 May.
Jubilee fever gripped the nation. Newspapers had been publishing countless reports of the forthcoming ceremony: ‘The word jubilee has several inches to itself in the dictionary,’ commented the Manchester Guardian on 9 April, ‘but no dictionary would be capable of dealing with its applications at the present moment . . . there are jubilee clocks, jubilee
necklaces, jubilee colours . . .’10 Even more questionable than excessive consumerism were, to communist eyes, the enormous sums destined for the celebrations. Instead of the lavish spending planned for so many extravagant events, Dobb argued, money could be given to the unemployed or used to advocate peace in Abyssinia against the Italian invasion. As well as advancing genuine economic considerations, the anti-Jubilee initiatives – vigorously encouraged by the CPGB and promoted as a pacifist cause – were also a tool in Stalin’s war against British imperialism. For her part, Edith would soon contribute to the campaign with a memorable photograph.
III
On the night of 15 February, Boo Boo, one of the London Zoo chimpanzees, gave birth to a healthy baby daughter – ‘both doing well’, a zoo official announced the following day.11 The happy event caused a sensation and the newspapers printed stories about the young chimp –predictably named Jubilee – for months. The first ever female chimpanzee to be born in captivity in Europe, the baby chimp drew large crowds. She was filmed and photographed and her antics were described in detail, as were her mother’s moods and food preferences. Both were pampered and publicised, and the story bolstered people’s enthusiasm for the celebrations ahead.
Meanwhile, somewhere on the other side of London, Edith was taking the portrait of a little girl on her way to collect scraps of food after the market had closed (Fig. 13). Now one of her most famous photographs, it shows the child with her hair unkempt, wearing a tattered jumper and carrying an old paper bag as she lowers her eyes towards an array of pastries and buns neatly displayed in a baker’s window. Perhaps Edith asked her subject to pose, but whatever she did to emphasise the contrast between deprivation and abundance, between the injustice suffered by starving children and a world of plenty, the photograph’s power is undeniable. Its message would soon reach a wider audience.
A WOMAN
EDITH
Edith had barely returned from espousing the cause of the Welsh miners and the unemployed when she took part in another national political campaign. The two moments – the chimpanzee being showered with care and attention and the girl going hungry – were used to highlight the plight of the proletariat in a pamphlet produced by the NUWM to coincide with the royal occasion. Entitled ‘Jubilee’ Chimp: Her Birth, Food and Drink, by One of Her Poor Relations – MAN, the slim publication featured Edith’s photograph next to a picture of Boo Boo and Jubilee with plenty of food. The author of the animal picture was John Maltby, one of the founder members of the WFPL, while the article printed alongside the photographs illustrated the dangers of anaemia and the importance of a healthy diet for prospective (human) mothers.
Edith had arrived back in London sometime in April, in time for the May Day demonstration in Hyde Park and the communist initiatives planned throughout the city on the day of the Jubilee. Wasting no time, the authorities resumed their surveillance in Hampstead. At the end of the month, suspicious activity at a Belsize Park boarding house, from which someone had been sending money to Austrian communists, alerted them to the possibility that the Tudor Harts might be involved (‘Alexander Ethan Tudor-Hart and his Viennese wife strike us as likely candidates’).12 While the precise details remain obscure, it is obvious that the Tudor Harts were not only financing the Soviet cause, but also dealing with funds that came to them directly from the leaders of the CPGB. According to a report dated 26 April, ‘Miss Tudor-Hart, sister of Alexander Ethan Tudor-Hart, has an account at the Moscow Narodny Bank. She recently paid a sum of £300 and receives cheques on [sic] the bank signed by HARRY POLLITT and EMIL BURNS.’ As well as sending money to the Daily Worker, that month Beatrix also applied for the huge sum of £1,200 (£72,000 today) in bonds from the ‘Second Five Year Plan Loan’, Stalin’s second plan for the development of heavy industry and the collectivisation of agriculture. Beatrix – who had just been taken to court and fined for driving recklessly down Haverstock
Hill – was also noted for giving ‘fairly large subscriptions’ to a school in Golders Green whose principal was a member of the World League for Sexual Reform and of the Federation of Progressive Societies and Individuals.
In June, Edith was back in South Wales to document the Monmouth trial. Her life was a whirlwind of activity. For some time that April, she had shared her flat with Heinz Korte, a German doctor, and his wife Erna, educationalist and author of books about childcare and early learning. At the beginning of May, a delicate transaction caused Edith another bout of anxiety, as she was spotted cabling £25 (£1,500 today) to Árpád Haász at a hotel in Zurich. Although her watchers concluded that Haász was ‘probably quite ok’, her nervousness on that occasion –she was ‘excited and urgent’ – implies a dubious transaction, especially considering that Haász was a well-known communist journalist working for the Russians.
Around the same time, Edith’s marriage was the subject of an MI5 report in which her relationship with Alexander was described as unstable and possibly beyond repair. On the other hand, her photography business seemed to be ‘a paying proposition’. This was just as well, since she was not making any money as a Soviet agent. In the summer, according to Alexander Orlov’s ledger sheet, she was paid 5s 6d (£16.50 today), probably the equivalent of travel expenses and a miserly sum compared to the £57 and £17 18s (roughly £3,400 and £1,000 today) owed to Orlov and Deutsch respectively.
At a time when Hampstead was on the way to replacing Paris as the European hub for clandestine communist operations, the line between refugees and spies could become blurred. In July, Edith’s activities aroused suspicion, as the Home Office received an anonymous letter of complaint about German communist agitators living in the area. A check placed on her address established that she had been sharing her flat with a woman called Elfriede Neuhaus. Apparently timid and ‘unlikely to call herself a communist’, Neuhaus was learning English with Beatrix and lived with Edith for free in exchange for household
chores and photography work. Another resident was Johanna Baruch, employed as a housekeeper. Little is known about this woman, who, having arrived in England from Germany in 1928, could not have been a political refugee. Yet Baruch was connected with left-wing circles, as she later worked at the Austrian Centre – a notorious communist enclave – then for the Labour MP, and Soviet sympathiser, John PlattsMills. Even more interestingly, in the early years of the war Baruch had a relationship, and a child, with a communist refugee from Germany, Walter Weinberg, who in 1933 had been (unjustly) suspected of being involved in the Reichstag fire.
In the eyes of the Security Service, the most suspicious of the Haverstock Hill house guests in 1935 was Lotte Moos, the young German who had benefited from Edith’s hospitality months earlier, appreciating her tasty meals (probably cooked by Johanna Baruch) and warm baths. Although Lotte later denied having been a member of the KPD, there is little doubt that she had been a communist, while her husband, Siegfried (Siegi), was then secretary of the party in exile and counted influential communist émigrés among his friends.
By the time Lotte went to stay with Edith in 1934, she and Siegi had separated. In the summer of 1935, Lotte was in a relationship with Brian Goold-Verschoyle, a handsome, wide-eyed, idealistic young communist from a good Anglo-Irish family whom she soon followed to Moscow. It turned out to be a fateful journey, which marked the end of Lotte’s interest in communism and the beginning of Brian’s trouble with the Russians, who deported him to the Gulag, where he died in 1942, a few months shy of his thirtieth birthday. Before embarking on their Russian adventure, Lotte and Brian lived with Edith for a few weeks. They did not stay long, moving into two rooms at 9 Lawn Road on 20 August. But they still visited regularly, together with Edith Bone (who at this stage of her many address changes was living at 4 Lawn Road) and all the other comrades and family members who orbited around Edith’s Haverstock Hill home. Years later, suspected of being a Soviet spy and locked up in Holloway Prison,
Lotte Moos had – or pretended to have – only a vague recollection of her acquaintance with Edith Tudor Hart. Perhaps a mixture of fear and subterfuge made Lotte gloss over this obscure episode in her youth – ‘Lotte never had any difficulty concealing the truth,’ remembers her daughter.13 She was not alone, as many of the people close to Edith were good at bending the truth. In most instances, it is impossible to establish what really happened. In Lotte’s case, her youthful communist phase later became an embarrassment, something to be dismissed as a foolish mistake. She probably knew of Edith’s secret activities, or had her suspicions, and wanted to distance herself. And perhaps she was trying to protect Brian, who at the time of Lotte’s interrogation in 1940 was a missing person and, as she knew, had been a Soviet agent. Throughout the time they spent together in Hampstead, Brian had worked as a courier for the Russians, passing secret Foreign Office documents obtained from the British clerk John King to the Soviet illegal in London, Theodore Mally. Apparently, Brian thought that he was smuggling political documents and was shocked to discover that they contained secret material. But he would have been unsuitable for any kind of intelligence work. A highly strung ‘public-school type’ with big, anxious eyes and childish handwriting, he had been caught in a web of secrets too tangled for him to navigate.14 He had hardly any friends, was often in a fretful state, spent days in his room at 9 Lawn Road and sometimes wandered the streets at four or five in the morning. Though shrouded in mystery, the story of Lotte Moos and Brian Goold-Verschoyle brings into view a period marked by increased Soviet activity in London. They would soon make some fatal mistakes, but for now the Russians’ presence in Britain seemed to be secure. At the end of November 1935, Arnold Deutsch returned to London and moved into the Lawn Road Flats. Meanwhile, Edith’s career as a photographer progressed steadily. Her photographs were losing the radical style of her early work, conforming instead to the more conservative taste of the British and to Popular Front aesthetics, but they still displayed exceptional force and originality.
IV
One of Edith’s major photographic assignments that year had been for the fundraising booklet about a new extension to the South London Hospital for Women and Children at Clapham Common. Like most of her institutional commissions, the project reflected her concern with the health needs of women and children. Even though its patrons were mostly upper-class donors, this philanthropic support enabled access to public health – as an establishment founded and run exclusively by women, the hospital spoke to Edith’s sense of social responsibility. The photographs that she and her German colleague, Grete Stern, took for the slim publication exude a thoroughly modern appeal. The images are sharp, showcasing a sophisticated use of lighting and composition, with a portrayal of their subjects that is both lifelike and uniquely striking.
It is difficult to say which of the photographs in the pamphlet were taken by Stern, or whether she and Edith collaborated on all the images. In most pictures, Edith’s style is unmistakable. There is her tender yet forthright way of portraying children, as in the image of the little boy sitting on a chair and wearing a pair of goggles during ultraviolet ray treatment. Here, the brilliant use of lighting – with the large arc of the lamp dividing the picture in two and leaving the young sitter brightly lit against shadowy surroundings – is rendered even more powerful by the contrast between the boy’s soft, slightly helpless pose and the alien nature of the black goggles that protect his eyes. The most impressive picture in this series – not included in the booklet – shows a group of five children standing in a circle with their arms outstretched (Fig. 14). Before them is a cage-like enclosure, in the middle of which hangs a dark phototherapy lamp spreading its rays in every direction. Both the children and the nurses supervising the session are wearing goggles to avoid the risk of their eyes being damaged by UV exposure, and their shadows are projected onto the floor and walls around them. The photograph is wholly arresting and a technical feat, because the lamp’s brightness
would have caused overexposure of the film and damaged the negative had Edith not used additional lighting to illuminate the children and strategically placed the child at the centre of the picture in front of the lamp.
In her work, the contradiction between childhood and the adult world always produces a special depth. In this case, it also reflects a contrast between the children’s vulnerable bodies and the power of modern machinery. Moreover, these photographs reflect Edith’s concern with the benefits of light and exercise that had animated her father, who used to publish pamphlets about the importance of outdoor life for children. And it is not a coincidence that for years, starting around the time of the South London Hospital booklet, Edith collaborated on a magazine called the Sunbathing Review, for which she produced many photographs of children and adults enjoying the sun.
Perhaps her preoccupation with light – which, after all, is central to the photographer’s business – is also symbolic of the dramatic interplay between opposing forces during the times in which she lived. Although she may not have realised it, her own life, too, was being pulled in two different directions, as her desire to do good was placed at the service of a system which thrived on secrecy and deception.
VWolf Suschitzky once said that his sister’s home was ‘a centre for refugees coming across’.15 One of Edith’s main character traits and the reason for her standing within the émigré network was the apparent ease with which she helped and connected people. As a valued member of an intellectual community and a tight-knit political fraternity, she attracted a wide range of friends who shared her views, several of whom often climbed the steps to 158a Haverstock Hill in the autumn of 1935. As well as her various tenants, her husband, her sister-in-law and her brother –Wolf had separated from his Dutch wife and was back in London –regular visitors would have included Edith Bone, the Pritchards, Polly
Binder, Arnold Deutsch, Lizzy and Kim Philby, Lizzy’s doctor Manfred Altmann and his wife, Hannah,16 and Lizzy’s best friend and her husband, Lotte and Peter Smolka. The latter was the London correspondent for a Viennese newspaper. A wealthy businessman, he had long been suspected of being a Soviet spy. Lacking any proof, the British authorities confined themselves to snide remarks about his plump, bespectacled appearance and ostentatious manner, describing him as an ‘unpleasant but brilliantly clever little Jew’.17 Probably thanks to Edith and with Arnold Deutsch’s approval, Smolka – who anglicised his name to Peter Smollett – had acquired a certain degree of respectability by setting up a news agency with Kim Philby the previous autumn.
As for Edith’s role in the Soviet penetration of British institutions, she does not seem to have questioned the party’s policies or instructions coming from Russia. In Deutsch’s words:
She is modest, diligent and brave. She is prepared to do anything for us, but unfortunately she is not careful enough . . . she takes up many things at the same time. She is very honest with money (even parsimonious). One has to be very cautious when [arranging] to meet with her because she is one of the most well-known children’s photographers in Britain. We have to demand more precision and carefulness from her. She has greatly improved in this respect in the period that she’s been connected with us [the ‘illegal’ rezidentura] because it was strictly demanded of her. Her carelessness can also be explained by the fact that she is very shortsighted. 18
Deutsch and Bob Stewart entrusted Edith with delicate undercover tasks, but she was rarely at the forefront of their operations. She was neither an endlessly energetic activist like Edith Bone, nor a vivacious free spirit like Lizzy, who thrived on parties and missions abroad. And she did not devote most of her time to the party – unlike Alexander, to whom a popular communist song would certainly have applied: ‘Dan, Dan, Dan! / The Communist Party man, / Working underground all
day. / In and out of meetings, / Bringing fraternal greetings, / Never sees the light of day.’19
Edith was first and foremost a photographer, whose skill was both a political tool and a social experience. That year, for example, she took portraits of Lizzy and of Lotte Smolka. Both shots are close-ups with blurred backgrounds against which the sitters’ gaze and their clothes and accessories stand out with straightforward simplicity. Whether she was photographing children or adults, friends or strangers, her portraits convey a seemingly effortless ability to reveal the person’s most authentic self. She could capture something touchingly human in every one of her subjects – be that the contrast between Lizzy’s sense of fashion and the earnestness of her distant stare (Fig. 15), or the calm expression on Lotte’s classically beautiful face.
Another notable photograph is a portrait of Polly Binder. After their time together in Wales, the two women had worked on a book project entitled Rich Man, Poor Man. It was an original idea, involving the combination of photographs, drawings and written text and based on the juxtaposition of contrasting social environments. It was never completed, but they remained friends. They both loved Russia (from where Polly’s family originated) and they both believed in the political meaning of art. Binder – also a secular Jew – had arrived in London from Salford in the 1920s, studied at the Central School of Art and settled in the East End. The life of Jewish Whitechapel, where waning old traditions coexisted with an increasingly urban modernity, was the subject of her lithographs and delightful short stories. In 1935, the publication of a book of narrative sketches, entitled Odd Jobs and vividly accompanied by her own illustrations, provided a social document about the lives of ordinary Londoners and an imaginative depiction of human situations. Binder’s writing style is candidly simple and her characters are full of life – from her own neighbour at Spread Eagle Yard, Bill the ostler, who lost his job when horses were no longer needed and became a fairground sweeper, to the daily lives and exceptional skills of the Whitechapel bell foundry workers.
