The Cobbler of Shepherd Street

Throughout my childhood and teenage years Mr Hammond was the person we took our shoes to when they needed mending. Later on I learned that he was proficient in a wide range of repair services including watches and jewellery but our relationship with him only concerned footwear. He was an old fashioned cobbler and at times was heard to claim that theoretically he should not be called a cobbler at all, but a cordwainer because he was a skilled artisan. Not so very long ago he said, he had on a daily basis constructed luxury footwear and back in those days the cobbler was simply the person who repaired the shoes that men like him had made. And warming to his theme he was heard to add that back then the cobbler was actually forbidden from working with new leather and even had to use old leather for repairs. The difference between these two trades had once been considerable to the extent that to call a cordwainer a cobbler was to greatly insult him. In Mr Hammond’s opinion the long and proud British tradition of shoe-making was slowly Going To The Dogs. None of this was of any interest to my mother or grandmother when they handed in items to be mended, the latter remarking that in her opinion he talked a lot of Twaddle which was probably on account of him being Chapel rather than Roman Catholic.

When I was a pre-schooler my extra special black patent round toed shoes with traditional ankle straps were handed over to this Cordwainer-turned-Cobbler simply to see if he was able to stretch them a little. I had outgrown them long before my mother considered it to be Normal and as they had cost a Pretty Penny and the soles showed evidence of plenty of remaining wear, stretching might solve the problem. Mr Hammond was not enthusiastic and said that in any event he was not a fan of stretching children’s shoes because in the long run it did their feet no good at all. My mother’s neck bristled with annoyance as she thanked him for his advice and later told Mrs Bassant next door that not everybody was Made of Money and new shoes for kiddies of my age not only involved expense but were hard to come by in wartime even if you had the required coupons. A few days later I inherited ankle strapped footwear that had once been red but were now a strange sludge colour, from my cousin Connie who lived in Waterdales.

No one could say that Mr Hammond was not obliging and on occasions he went above and beyond the call of duty in service of the public. When my father came back from the war, later than his compatriots because of the debilitating illness he contracted in North Africa but by mid 1946 looking hale and hearty once more, the first local shop he visited was Mr Hammond’s. His black Sunday shoes needed attention if he was to attend Mass the next day at the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption looking his best. Cognizant of the importance of the situation, Mr Hammond did not allow his own religious affinity to stand in the way of his obligations and my father’s shoes were attended to in record time causing him to remark to my mother that the Shepherd Street Cobbler was a decent chap. My mother did not respond except to sniff a bit but the good thing was that at eleven am Mass my father looked very dapper indeed in his pin-striped demob suit, white silk scarf and the newly mended shoes that had been shone to perfection. Mrs Judd whose husband had been Lost at Dunkirk, two of the Campbell girls and Sister Camilla all commented upon the fact that he was a Very Pleasant Chap and it was good to welcome him back into the Roman Catholic community.

There was no doubt that Mr Hammond was a committed Christian despite his unfortunate association with Chapel. On a number of occasions when delivering footwear to him as we grew up, he would talk to me and my friend Molly about the life of Jesus, a topic which clearly absorbed him – and to a lesser extent also interested us. He was convinced that Jesus had visited Great Britain and probably even spoke English, perhaps almost as well as we did ourselves. When we exchanged glances and wondered how The Reverend Gunner at St Botolph’s might view this information, he warmed to his theme and asked us if we agreed that Jesus would have been a strong and adventurous young lad. Molly nodded a little doubtfully and Mr Hammond turned to me and wanted to know if I believed that Jesus was the nephew of Joseph of Arimathea. I nodded enthusiastically anxious not to display my ignorance about who this particular Joseph might be. Mr Hammond became more animated because didn’t this Joseph trade with the Tin Islands? Were not the Tin Islands the very land on which we stood? Wasn’t it plain common sense to accept that a healthy and adventurous twelve year old lad would have been desperate to accompany his uncle? Yes, yes, yes we agreed! But later it turned out that The Reverend Gunner was less enthralled with the information and so I chose not to mention it to Father O`Connor or even to my own father.

The last time I remember calling upon the services of Mr Hammond was when I was twenty years old and had returned from a somewhat illicit period in Amsterdam in the company of a man who had assured me that he thought extremely highly of me but turned out to have a wife he was even more fond of in a suburb of The Hague. Although I had been forced to reluctantly relinquish him and the future we were going to have together, I was not required to surrender the very expensive shoes and matching shoulder bag he had bought for me in a pleasingly upmarket Amsterdam store. The Cobbler of Shepherd Street was on my To Do list upon my return and I was more than pleased to be told that mine were the finest shoes Mr Hammond had seen in many a long year. Fashioned from the very best leather, superbly crafted, they had been a joy to repair. He recognised their excellence he told me because of course he had begun his working life as a cordwainer rather than a cobbler and he carefully and at some length explained the difference between those two terms. Not that there was shame in simply being a cobbler of course he added, but over time the profession had diminished and leant itself to less than perfect work. Standards had fallen everywhere. Which of course, he said, half shaking his head as he handed the shoes back to me had led to that ungenerous term – Cobbling Something Together.