Roger Mayne (centre) with residents of Southam Street  Photo: MARY EVANS PICTURE LIBRARY

Roger Mayne, who has died aged 85, was a photographer who captured the squalor and spectacle of Southam Street, a pocket of North Kensington that was to become synonymous with post-war poverty.

The series of photographs taken by Mayne, between 1956 and 1961, are one of the most important photographic surveys of city life in Fifties and Sixties Britain. The images formed a London reflection of the deprivation photographed by Bert Hardy in Glasgow’s Gorbals, a reminder that such harsh conditions could be found only a bus ride away from Westminster.

Southam Street and its W10 environs lay close to where Mayne lived as an aspiring photographer in his early twenties. On the day he discovered the street he took 64 photographs — shots which, he acknowledged, seemed “to hit people’s mental funny bone”. He worked on the move, equipped with a lightweight Zeiss Super Ikonta camera, immersing himself in the hustle and bustle of the block: a hive of activity that was as joyous as it was desperate.

All human life was here. Sharp-dressed West Indians clashed with pipe-thin, trouble-hunting Teddy Boys, girls gossiped in doorways, gangs of young men smoked and gambled. And everywhere around him children darted, danced, ran, cycled and fought. Boys and girls played football in the middle of the road and cricket against the walls. Slowly Mayne earned their trust and recorded their wild, urban upbringing.

One of the street urchins running riot was a young Alan Johnson — later the Labour Home Secretary — whose sister appears in one of Mayne’s photographs. “The houses had been jerry-built in the 19th century for a predicted population drift that never occurred. By the Thirties they’d been declared unfit for human habitation,” noted Johnson. “My sister and I were born into those slums 20 years later. Electricity didn’t arrive until roughly the same time as Roger Mayne. The 1951 census recorded that the number of people living at a density of more than two to a room was four times higher in Southam Street than in London as a whole.”

For a young photographer looking for his muse the area was ripe with dramatic potential. “The first day I discovered Southam Street I was so excited,” recalled Mayne. “I was a bit shy, and eased myself into photographing the children.” After a while he went about unnoticed. “When I had taken the photos they just went on with their games, playing football or swinging on lampposts. They got to know me and understood I wanted them photographed unawares.”

It was a community where it was better to be outdoors than in. “This was a world that had changed little since Dickens,” stated Johnson, “but one that would virtually vanish within a decade”. Southam Street was levelled in 1963 — having been declared uninhabitable — and the residents relocated to council houses and tower blocks. Erno Goldfinger’s “Brutalist” Trellick Tower now punctuates the site.

Mayne returned to the scene and photographed the ruins. “I was sad when the street was demolished,” he recalled. “I suppose there was the middle-class, left-wing view of the working class as romantic, but I just remember turning the corner into Southam Street and being greeted by this wonderful life.”

^{Boys pushing a car in North Kensington, photographed by Roger Mayne}

Roger Mayne was born in Cambridge in 1929. He studied chemistry at Balliol College, Oxford, between 1947 and 1951, a period during which his father died and he was introduced to photography (through an interest in photographic processing). “Learning to process photographs is more like learning to cook than studying Chemistry,” he recalled. “In those years I developed from a feeble amateur to a serious photographer. You could say photography discovered me.”

After university, he found a mentor in Hugo van Wadenoyen, a British photographer of Dutch origins, who introduced him to the Combined Societies, a progressive group of local photographic societies that formed an alternative to the Royal Photographic Society. As a pacifist Mayne refused to do National Service. Instead he worked as a hospital porter in Leeds. His interest in art, sparked as an undergraduate, grew and led him to St Ives, where he photographed the artistic community, including Patrick Heron and Terry Frost.

In 1956 Mayne had a one-man show of his photographs at the ICA and by the following year was established as a freelance photojournalist, working for magazines such as Vogue, Queen, and New Left Review and providing photographs for book jackets — Colin Macinnes commissioned Mayne to provide a cover image of disaffected youth for his novel Absolute Beginners (1959).

Mayne found his true calling, however, in detailing London’s working class areas and he made his reputation for photographing them with a lack of guile through his work in Southam Street. “Although my approach is documentary, using the camera as a recording machine,” said Mayne, “if the image is good enough, if everything comes together, then the picture can rise to art.”

^{Self portrait of Roger Mayne}

As a counterpoint to his work chronicling the slums, Mayne photographed at the Royal Court Theatre, where he was introduced to a young rising playwright named Ann Jellicoe. They married in 1962, the year Jellicoe’s play The Knack was a hit at the Royal Court.

During the late Sixties, Mayne taught at Bath Academy of Art, in Corsham, to which he had been introduced while compiling a photo-essay on student life. In the Seventies, Mayne and Jellicoe moved, with their two young children, to Lyme Regis in Dorset. There, Mayne worked on brooding landscapes wrought with a stark chiaroscuro. He also continued to capture the adventures of childhood — this time his subjects were his son and daughter (he would eventually also focus his lens on the early years of his grandchildren).

The following decade he began experimenting with drawing, painting and etching. A series of photographs taken in Japan, Goa and China during the mid-Eighties — of cyclists weaving around traffic, card sharps playing on the curbs and lovers in the rain — showed that he had retained an eye for a startling street scene — he considered these among his best photographs.

During the Nineties, Mayne travelled extensively, photographing in Paris, Iceland, Spain and Tuscany. At this time his Southam Street series gained a new audience when the singer Morrissey used selected photographs by Mayne for his album covers and concert backdrops.

The series were featured in the book Uppercase 5 (1961). Mayne’s other publications include The Shell Guide to Devon (1975) — in which his wife provided the text to accompany his photographs — and Roger Mayne Photographs (2001).

^{Jiving Girl (1957) by Roger Mayne}

Mayne won the Lucie Award for Achievement in Documentary in 2006 and many of his portraits — including studies of Kenneth Tynan, Harold Pinter, Lindsay Anderson, John Fowles and Duke Ellington — are in the National Portrait Gallery.

His Southam Street photographs remain his most celebrated works — they have been exhibited in the US, Australia and Japan and were a highlight of Tate Britain’s blockbuster exhibition, How We Are: Photographing Britain (2007), for which his Jiving Girl (1957) was the show’s poster image. The entire series is now held by the V&A. “My reason for photographing poor streets is that I love them,” he stated in the late Fifties. “The streets have their own kind of beauty, a kind of decaying splendour.”

Mayne is survived by his wife and their son and daughter.

Roger Mayne, born May 5 1929, died June 7 2014

What McTernan also blithely ignores is that by going into Iraq we took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan and failed to sort that country out too. He calls Saddam a fascist, which he wasn’t – just a dictator, the sort we love to cosy up to all over the world if they have resources we want. Who backed Saddam against Iran? Who sold him the anthrax? Why are we now backing the Egyptian dictator? Why haven’t we removed the leaders of countries that fund the madrasas that pour a poisonous message into youthful ears round the world?

One thing he is right upon. A majority of MPs voted for the war. About two-thirds of the Labour party and all of the Conservative party, under a three-line whip, with honourable exceptions like Kenneth Clarke, voted for the war.
Michael Dommett
Alton, Hampshire

• So, concern is rising that Iraq may disintegrate into three separate territories, or even states, based on ethnicity and religion (Crisis pulls US back towards Iraq, 13 June). Isn’t this what would have happened anyhow a hundred years ago if the British and French had not played great power politics in the region and created the geographical absurdity that is present-day Iraq?

Iraq is not a nation state and never has been. Its people have never been allowed to mature organically into a cohesive identity with a shared culture and a common understanding of itself as Iraqi. Instead, the inhabitants of Iraq have been struggling with a false identity imposed from without. Three nations, comprising the Kurds, and the Sunni and Shia Muslims, have been artificially confined in one externally defined state, each looking for its own political identity. It is as if Hitler had won the second world war and the British, French and German nations had been forced to meld into one state and compelled to assume a common national identity.

Is it not now time for western powers to leave Iraq and the wider region alone and allow the process of nation-building and statehood to work itself out in its own cultural and political context? It may be a long and painful process, but it could hardly be more painful or more lengthy than its current externally imposed agony.
Clive Wilkinson
Rothbury, Northumberland

• Events in Iraq are changing the west’s view of Islam in the Middle East. It has been dominated by the perceived divide between mainstream Muslims on the one hand and extremist fundamentalists on the other: a division between those who broadly accept the world as it is, and those who want to challenge and change the west. This is a view in which Islam is polarised by its attitude toward the non-Muslim world. But what the current events reveal is a polarisation caused by the deep sectarian divide within Islam itself. Both the external and the internal dynamics are fuelling events in Iraq.

As in Syria, non-intervention, or minimal intervention, must be the western watchword. The forces at play are beyond external control. Intervention can only put a stopper in the bottle – but the bottle itself is shattering. We may have to look on appalled, but a century of western hegemony has prevented the Arab world from finding its own resolutions to what are its own problems.
Olivier Alexis
London

• In the US, Senator John McCain and House Speaker John Boehner have accused Barack Obama of inaction on Iraq and “taking a nap” (Obama caught napping, say critics, 13 June). John McTernan bemoans the early withdrawal of US and UK troops from Iraq (only there eight years, only 100,000 dead, not enough bullets fired to bring about peace). It is to Obama’s credit that he has not rushed to hurl more hot metal into the most complex war zone imaginable. Let us hope he reads Owen Jones’s column (A nightmare foretold, 13 June) – perhaps he will take the time to assess what has happened so far, imagine the risks of making a terrible situation worse, and abstain for a second time from military action in that region. After successive abstentions from speculative military adventure, peaceful diplomacy could become a habit.
Dominic Rayner
Leeds

• Jihadists are running amok in Iraq and you say it’s all Maliki’s fault (Editorial, 12 June). Got nothing to do, apparently, with our support for the same jihadists in neighbouring Syria. The truth our foreign secretary dares not utter is that Riyadh and its kleptocratic rulers are destabilising the Middle East by playing the destructive sectarian card against “apostate” Shia Muslims. It would have the west go to war with Iran rather than seek a rapprochement. It’s time the west distanced itself from the Saudi ruling family. The arms lobbies will bleat on about loss of military export sales, but they should be resisted. The so-called Saudi oil weapon is a bluff, for the regime needs oil revenues to placate its subjects.
Yugo Kovach
Winterborne Houghton, Dorset

• Not doubting that Saddam Hussein was a vicious dictator, at least he kept the lid on religious extremism. In his Iraq, al-Qaida didn’t exist, women dressed as they pleased and went to university, and the sizable Christian community felt safe. The illegal invasion of Iraq has led to the deaths of well over 100,000, most of the Christian community having to flee, the growth of sectarianism and the emergence of al-Qaida and even more extreme jihadists in the form of Isis. Isn’t it time that George Bush and Tony Blair apologised for the chaos they have created in Iraq?
John Mann
Irchester, Northamptonshire

• The lesson must be that artificial countries created by self-interested imperialists, drawing arbitrary lines on inaccurate maps, will eventually become ungovernable. Except, of course, by a ruthless lunatic.
Mike Scott
Bath

• Senator John McCain seems to think that the US “won the conflict in Iraq”. I’d hate to see what Iraq would look like today if the US had lost it.
Karl Sabbagh
Newbold on Stour, Warwickshire

• In the midst of our commemorations of the first world war, one cannot help but see its effects still rippling across the Middle East. If only President Wilson had been allowed by his own countrymen to remain in the game and stay the hands of his allies in France and Britain, he would surely have prevented them carving up the remains of the Ottoman empire. At the very least he would have insisted on the self-determination of the three provinces that make up modern Iraq and he would surely have helped usher in a modern Kurdistan. How different things might have been at this particular moment in the Mesopotamian story.
Ted Wilson
Davenport, Cheshire

• Barack Obama is playing a double game in Mesopotamia. On the one hand he wants to help the Iraqi government fight Isis, while on the other he wants to help Isis fight the Syrian government. From the time the CIA first sponsored the holy warriors of international Wahhabism in socialist Afghanistan, successive US administrations have created a monster that has brought untold suffering to the people of the region. They have done so safe in the knowledge that those who would reap the whirlwind would not be those who had sown the wind.
Peter McKenna
Liverpool

• The problem facing John McTernan is that over 50 retired Foreign Office ambassadors and others, often second world war military men who had conducted the retreat from “East of Suez”, advised Tony Blair in letters to the Times prior to the invasion not to be so foolish because of the dangers of unleashing “sectarian conflict” on the geographic faultline in Islam re Shia/Sunni viz Iran/Saudi regional rivalries. These were not men prone to overstatement, and I remember my father being aghast at Blair’s foolish naivety.

An unprecedented human and social catastrophe stands, and it would be helpful if McTernan above all were to note the wider trillions in the financial cost of his “strategy” and that the west might have put this towards decarbonising the west’s energy supply, which it would have now substantially achieved, relieving the future of the threat of climate change. A regional peace conference backed by the wealth of the Gulf aligned with Turkish or Iranian military power is the proper vehicle of a regional solution that should include Israel.
Peter Hack
Bristol

• John McTernan’s renewed enthusiasm for intervention in Iraq is a classic case of being careful what you wish for. Certainly Saddam was an unpleasant ruler, but the west does business quite happily with many such people. The problem was that Saddam was judged to be prejudicial to western interests, so he had to go. Since Bush and Blair intervened, matters have gone from already bad to much worse. That doesn’t mean of course that the world just sits idly by. A more enlightened policy on helping refugees and providing aid and assistance is essential.
Keith Flett
London

I’m curious as to how Ms Harman could determine who is metropolitan and middle class just by looking at the audience

Sir, Richard Morrison reports (Times 2, June 13) that Harriet Harman, the shadow culture secretary, said in a recent speech that she had been to the opera and couldn’t see anyone there who was not white, metropolitan and middle class. I’m curious as to how Ms Harman could determine who is metropolitan and middle class just by looking at the audience.

When I go to London for an evening out, I always check twice to make sure I’ve changed out of my wellies and removed the hay from my hair, precisely so these sophisticated metropolitan types won’t take me for a hick.

AN Williams

King’s Lynn, Norfolk

Sir, I assume Harriet Harman was sitting in the expensive seats at the Royal Opera House when she complained that everyone around her was white, metropolitan and middle class.

If she had climbed to the highest level of the amphitheatre she would have enjoyed a greater democracy and camaraderie. For the sum of £17 the proletariat, including myself and the backpackers next to me, regularly enjoy the most exquisite singing and views.

When a very large, pierced and heavily tattooed man came along the row in front of me at The Marriage of Figaro, everyone sat sideways to accommodate him and no one complained.

In the interval I asked my friend if this was the opera with the beautiful Dove Sono aria. As she didn’t know what I meant, I sang it to her, whereupon the large man turned to say that the Countess sang it in the next act. He was charming, knowledgeable and far from middle class. Indeed, I doubt whether Harriet Harman could have had such an entertaining companion that evening as did we.

Maybe she should lift up her eyes to the heights.

Janice Ketley

Englefield Green, Surrey

Sir, It is difficult to understand how Harriet Harman could possibly criticise the Prom concerts as being elitist. The spirit of Sir Henry Wood has been kept alive and well ever since their inception. Hundreds of tickets are available for £5 each, less than the price of a packet of cigarettes; at many of the concerts the price of the most expensive tickets is £38 — which is far less the prices usually charged at pop concerts or football matches — and children under 18 can get in for half price. There is no dress code. I really cannot see how a prime London concert hall could do any more. If the concerts are patronised mainly by the middle classes it is not because no one else can afford them.

Kathryn Dobson

Liverpool

What Oxfam says may make uncomfortable listening, but those who close their ears ought to be ashamed

Sir, The fabricated outrage at Oxfam’s poster campaign (“Tory accuses Oxfam of misusing its donations”, June 11) demonstrates the contempt that many reactionaries feel for those trying to make the world a better place.

Oxfam is correct that poverty remains a troubling feature of UK life, yet this has been lost in a dispiriting display of self-serving politicking from certain MPs and commentators.

Recent research from the Trussell Trust, a provider of food banks, demonstrated that demand for food banks tripled in 2012, while earlier this year our research showed that 89 per cent of charities anticipate an increase in demand for their services over the next year.

Charities like Oxfam exist to fight poverty, and it is their duty to talk about these issues. This is not just a question of free speech but also of fostering a culture of informed public decision-making and giving a voice to the voiceless in public debate. What Oxfam says may make uncomfortable listening, but those who close their ears ought to be ashamed.

Sir Stephen Bubb

Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations (ACEVO)

Sir, We are concerned that the complaint by Conor Burns, MP, to the Charity Commission over an Oxfam tweet highlighting some of the causes of poverty in Britain is an attempt to stifle charities and campaign groups taking part in public debate.

We are already concerned about the new Lobbying Act which is likely to significantly restrict our ability to speak out on behalf of the people and issues that we represent for seven months ahead of the general election.

In the past decades campaigning organisations have persuaded reluctant governments to cancel poor countries’ debts, remove lead from petrol, prevent the selling of our forests, and allow Gurkha veterans the right of residence in the UK. Attempts to silence legitimate debate risk undermining our democracy.

Jana Osborne, National Federation of Women’s Institutes; Loretta Minghella, Christian Aid; Andy Atkins, Friends of the Earth; Lesley-Anne Alexander, RNIB; Benedict Southworth, Ramblers; Kate Allen, Amnesty International UK; Blanche Jones, Campaigns Director, 38Degrees; Richard Miller, Executive Director, ActionAid UK; Tony Dykes, Director, Action for Southern Africa (ACTSA); Ian J Govendir MA, Aids Orphans; Kate Begg, Head of Policy and Public Affairs, Anthony Nolan Trust; Thomas Hughes, Executive Director, ARTICLE 19; Ben Jackson, Chief Executive Officer, Bond; Andrew Copson, Chief Executive of The British Humanist Association; Stephen Joseph, Chief Executive Officer, Campaign for Better Transport; Baroness Ann Mallalieu QC, Commission on Civil Society and Democratic Engagement; Sandy Balfour , CEO, Canon Collins Educational and Legal Assistance Trust; Kathy Evans, Chief Executive, Children England; Catriona Williams OBE, Chief Executive/ Prif Weithredydd, Children in Wales/ Plant yng Nghymru; Philip Lymbery, Chief Executive, Compassion in World Farming; Rosie Rogers, National Coordinator, Compass; Rose Caldwell, Executive Director, Concern Worldwide; Titus Alexander, Convenor, Democracy Matters; Tom Burke, Chairman of E3G; Simon Barrow, Director of Ekklesia; Norman Kerr, Director, Energy Action Scotland; Derek McAuley, Chief Officer – Prif Swyddog, General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches; Fiona Weir, Chief executive, Gingerbread; Martin Drewry, Director, Health Poverty Action; Nick Lowles, Executive Director, HOPE not hate; Andy Benson, National Coalition for Independent Action; Alvaro Bermejo, Executive Director, International HIV/AIDS Alliance; Sarah-Jayne Clifton – Director, Jubilee Debt Campaign; Phil Barton, Chief Executive, Keep Britain Tidy; David Beattie, Vice Chair, Lancashire Badger Group; Neil Jameson, Executive Director and Lead Organiser, London Citizen; Melian Mansfield, Chair, London Play; Georgette Mulheir, CEO, Lumos; Sarah Javaid, Executive Director, MADE In Europe; Marina Pacheco, Chief Executive Office, The Mammal Society; Mike Wild, Chief Executive, Manchester Community Central; Sam Fanshawe, Chief Executive, Marine Conservation Society; Joe Irvin, Chief Executive, NAVCA; Estelle du Boulay, Director, Newham Monitoring Project; Andy Benson, National Coalition for Independent Action; Sir Stuart Etherington, Chief Executive, National Council of Voluntary Organisations; Dot Gibson, General Secretary, National Pensioners Convention; Keith Porteous Wood , Executive Director, National Secular Society; Toni Pearce, President, National Union of Students; Jeremy Taylor, Chief Executive, National Voices; Diane Sheard, UK Director, The ONE Campaign; Sarah Colborne, Director of Palestine Solidarity Campaign; Steve Ford, Chief Executive, Parkinson’s UK; Peter Tatchell, Director, Peter Tatchell Foundation; Jim Cranshaw, People & Planet; Mark Lister, Chief Executive Officer, Progressio; Paul Parker, Recording Clerk, Quakers in Britain; Aaron Oxley, Executive Director, Results UK; Dr Omar Khan, Acting Director, Runnymede Trust; Justin Forsyth, Chief Executive, Save the Children; Irene Audain MBE, Chief Executive, Scottish Out of School Care Network; Felix Spittal, SCVO; Linda Butcher, Chief Executive Officer, Sheila McKechnie Foundation (SMK); Ben Simms, Director, STOPAIDS; Gail Wilson, Coordinator, Stop Climate Chaos Scotland; Joe Rukin, Campaign Manager, Stop HS2; Malcolm Shepherd, Chief Executive, Sustrans; Natalie Samarasinghe, Executive Director, United Nations Association – UK; Alexandra Runswick, Director, Unlock Democracy; Jasmijn de Boo, Chief Executive, The Vegan Society; John Hilary, Executive Director, War on Want; Stephanie Hilborne OBE, Chief Executive Officer, The Wildlife Trusts; Jon Nott, General Secretary, Woodcraft Folk; Suzi Morris, UK Director, World Animal Protection (formerly World Society for the Protection of Animals); Joanna Kennedy, Chief Executive, Zacchaeus 2000 Trust

Our teacher was helping us with translation and advised that “le garage” is French for “garridge”

Sir, TMS (“Lost in translation”, Jun 13) brought to mind a memory of a French evening class. Our teacher was a young woman who although English, had an excellent French accent. She was helping us with translation and advised that “le garage” is French for “garridge”. Angela O’Shaughnessy Bath

United for Wildlife needs to decide whose side it is on

Sir, The new United for Wildlife movement promoted by Princes William and Harry (“Beckham signs for duke’s wildlife conservation team”, June 10), risks contributing to the destruction of tribal peoples unless it stresses that tribal hunters are neither “poachers” nor criminals.

Unfortunately, that is exactly what some states call them. The ban on hunting in Botswana, brought in by its conservationist and anti-Bushman president, is clearly another nail in the Bushmen’s coffin, and will drive them from self-sufficiency on ancestral lands into abject poverty and hunger. Meanwhile, it’s business as usual for fee-paying sport hunters, the only people now allowed to hunt there. United for Wildlife needs to decide whose side it is on.

Stephen Corry

Survival International

These statistics suggest that it is not the law enforcers who require legislative change to prevent corruption and misconduct in public office

Sir, This week the Home Office unveiled new legislation, covering cases in which a police officer acts improperly and carrying a maximum sentence of 14 years.

In 2011 while 0.13 per cent of the general population were serving prison terms, 0.61 per cent of MPs were held at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. In the same year 29 police officers received custodial sentences equating to only 0.02 per cent of the then 135,838, serving officers.

If Sir Robert Peel is right that “The Police are the public and the public are the police”, these statistics suggest that it is not the law enforcers who require legislative change to prevent corruption and misconduct in public office.

Christopher Farish

Gateshead, Tyne and Wear

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