Rodney Archer
Actor, collector, conservationist
The Times
30 December 2018
For 35 years Rodney Archer lived in a five-storey Georgian townhouse at 31 Fournier Street, in Spitalfields, London, which, as he liked to point out, had been built 50 years before the American Declaration of Independence. The tranquil walled garden at the back of the house retained almost exactly the same view of the steeple of Hawksmoor’s Christ Church and the backs of the original neighbouring houses as it had in 1726. The only relatively new feature of the skyline was a tall silver birch tree, which Archer and his mother planted as a sapling in 1985.
Gradually over the years, Archer restored the property. The previous occupant of the house was an Indian cab rank firm. The wooden panelling had been covered by plasterboard and laminated plastic and was adorned with posters of Indian film stars. Nonetheless, most of the features of the house remained unspoilt beneath the protective overlay.
He turned it into an Aladdin’s cave of paintings, old books and curios — Minton tiles, toffee tins and Clarice Cliff pottery. “I couldn’t afford to buy any of this stuff now,” he later said. “But in the 1960s everything was so much cheaper.” One of his hobbies was cultivating cobwebs over his arrangements of objects.
He believed that his relationship with 31 Fournier Street was akin to a marriage and that the house had “its own say”. One thing that the house permitted was the installation of a pilastered chimneypiece with tall overmantel from Oscar Wilde’s last London residence in Tite Street, Chelsea, which Archer had retrieved, with permission, from a builder’s skip back in 1970. He installed a modern Rayburn, telephone and electricity but preferred “the effect of candles”, especially in the drawing room.
The district, in east London, had played host to successive waves of immigrants, misfits and eccentrics as well as traditional working-class residents. Archer was not in the first wave of Spitalfields regeneration, which began in the late 1960s with a mini-colony of artists and photographers. However, having retired from his first career of acting and switched to being a voice coach and drama teacher, he immersed himself in Spitalfields life.
He was dubbed “the King of Spitalfields” but the local glue-sniffer, George, to whom he would give a pound for a cup of tea each morning, knew him as “Uncle Rodney”. He could frequently be found dancing to jukebox records at eight o’clock in the morning with his friend Sandra Esquilant in the Golden Heart, her pub on Commercial Road. If he was confined to bed through illness Sandra would arrange for soup to be delivered from nearby restaurant St John Bread and Wine, carried on a tray by one of the waiters, and the artist Tracey Emin would drop by with flowers.
He kept a journal that combined encounters with thespian friends and homosexual exploits and love affairs, as well as an unbroken record of the Spitalfields community.
Rodney Grant Archer, was born in Gidea Park, Essex, in 1940, the son of Charles Frederick Archer, a newspaper journalist, and Phyllis Ashton Grant Archer, a secretary in Fleet Street. A flying officer in the RAF, his father served in north Africa during the Second World War and was killed in a training accident over Malta in May 1943, a couple of months before Rodney was born. The following year Phyllis took Rodney and his younger sister, Elayne, to Toronto, Canada. She became a journalist but because childcare services for working women barely existed Rodney and Elayne spent six years in foster homes and boarding schools.
In an interview, Archer once described his growing realisation as an avidly cinema-going teenager that he was gay. “At 11 years old, I knew I was different from other boys because they all had pictures of John Wayne on their walls while I had Hollywood goddesses on mine,” he explained, “but then, at 14 years old, we swapped and they had the screen goddesses and I had John Wayne.”
Archer was educated at Oakwood Collegiate and attended Trinity College, University of Toronto, where he majored in English literature, graduating in 1962. While there, he took part in many performances for the university drama society, including the works of Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. One of his favourite roles was Algernon Moncrieff in The Importance of Being Ernest.
He returned to England to study drama at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, and in 1964 he embarked on a career as an actor for various repertory companies in Britain. He was the Player Queen in the much-lauded 1966 Bristol Old Vic production of Hamlet, staring Richard Pasco as the prince and Patrick Stewart as Horatio.
However, in 1973 a Guardian review caused him to give up. He was in a panto in Greenwich, playing the back half of a cow, with an actor called Stephen Tate occupying the front half. “The review said: ‘And the back half of the cow, played by Stephen Tate, was absolutely brilliant’,” Archer later recalled. “I wondered, ‘Do they mean the front half played by Stephen Tate or the back half played by Rodney Archer?’ At that point I told myself, ‘Rodney, if it means that much to you, it’s time to give up acting.’”
Instead, Archer became a drama teacher at City Lit. At one staff party he gave a memorable rendition of the 1934 song Nobody wants a fairy when she’s forty. He would still occasionally take to the stage and one production inadvertently led to his purchase of 31 Fournier Street. His mother fell down a well at the Roundhouse and broke her hip while attending a performance of The Homosexual, or The Difficulty of Sexpressing Yourself, in which Archer was starring. Her doctor said that Phyllis was too frail to live alone, so Archer decided to find a house that was affordable and big enough for them to lead separate lives within its confines.
He purchased 31 Fournier Street for £35,000, though the decrepit locale meant that he had difficulty securing a mortgage, and when mother and son moved in they had to make do with an outside lavatory and cold water source. “It was real pioneer stuff.”
The 34 townhouses of Fournier Street were first populated by French Huguenot silk weavers, followed by Irish, Jewish, West Indian and Bangladeshi immigrants. When Archer arrived there were still Jewish tailors and furriers in the street.
He had been drawn to the roughness and grittiness of the place and once spent a New Year’s Eve in the Eighties in the Ten Bells (when it was a strip pub known as “the Jack the Ripper”), surrounded by strippers, prostitutes and taxi drivers. “There was part of me, in my loneliness, that identified with them,” he recalled.
In 2013 he began selling off some of his extraordinary collection and collaborated with his friend Trevor Newton, the artist and book dealer, to create a private exhibition space on the first floor of 31 Fournier Street, with visitors arriving by appointment.
He also wrote a number of plays with his childhood friend Powell Jones. The Harlot’s Curse (1986) was about Jack the Ripper’s last victim, Mary Kelly. First performed by candlelight in an abandoned synagogue in Princelet Street, it was staged at the Croydon Warehouse and won an Evening Standard award.
Archer was taken ill suddenly. After a couple of days of feeling sick it transpired, in hospital, that he had had a heart attack. He died two days later in the presence of friends.
The funeral cortège made the short journey from 31 Fournier Street to Christ Church with the mourners led by his sister and her family and by a long-term lover. At the top of the church steps, propped against one of the columns of the portico, was a small bouquet of flowers left by Archer’s drug dealer.
Rodney Archer, actor, collector and conservationist, was born on July 20, 1940. He died on November 21, 2015, aged 75
