Kurt Hutton
The 14th January 1939 issue of Picture Post magazine
included a feature on unemployment entitled "They Had No Work". For
this article Kurt Hutton took a number of photographs at the Silver Lady's
Kitchen in Trafalgar Square, London, where proprietor Betty Baxter
(nicknamed 'The Silver Lady' for her donations of a silver sixpence to her many
patrons) offered a free meal to the area's homeless.
This is one of a group of strikingly dramatic character studies of the people
there, beautifully lit as though by candle or lamp-light. It was part of a
feature in Picture Post that gave a human face to poverty and unemployment.
In Picture Post this work is reproduced reversed as the far left image of a
spread of four close-ups of me, presumably as it worked better on the page to
have him looking inwards. It is captioned with the subject's name and with some
biographical information:
"He was born in Co. Donegal and has now been in London three years. He has worked in Steel works in Lancashire, in the hotel trade as a waiter. The last crisis was a blessing to him, he dug trenches in the Park. Half the men in the queue are oldish; half young. There are few women."