This feature first appeared in June 2024 on Londonist: Time Machine, our much-praised history newsletter. To be the first to read new history features like this, sign up for free here.
Ever heard of Ellen Keeley? Her name was plastered all over Covent Garden for much of the 20th century, but today she is largely forgotten. It’s time her story flowered once again.
“Seventy-eight years ago, a five-year-old girl sat near St Paul’s Cathedral selling flowers — she was doing so until three days before she died last March.”
So ran an obituary to Ellen Keeley in 1949. It commemorated a remarkable life, surrounded by flowers and mystery.
“Ellen of the Seven Dials” they called her, or simply “The Flower Girl”. The little woman with the big heart. She was a popular character around Covent Garden for decades, selling posies, wreaths and bouquets from her small shop in Shorts Gardens.
But there was more to this flower girl than met the eye. Hardly anyone knew it, but Ellen had a second job; one that had made her rich. And much of that money was redirected to local good causes. “They didn’t know,” ran another news report of her death, “that white-haired, simply dressed Ellen was the E. Keeley whose name was painted on almost every Covent Garden market barrow.”
Like Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion and My Fair Lady, Ellen was a flower-seller made good. But hers was a very different rags-to-riches tale, with no leg-up from high society.
Sub-rosa barrow making
Covent Garden in the first half of the 20th century was a riot of colour. It was one of the world’s biggest markets for flowers, fruit and vegetables. Most of the traders sold from barrows — basically tables with iron wheels, which could easily be moved to and from the market.
Many of these barrows — the yellow and green ones — were manufactured or leased out from E. Keeley and Co. of 33 Neal Street. This was a respected family business that stretched back decades. Some sources even claim the Keeleys invented the costermonger’s barrow, though I’ve not been able to verify this.
The Keeleys had initially set up in Dublin in 1830 but moved to London soon afterwards as refugees from the Irish potato famine. Covent Garden, with its thriving market and existing Irish population, was the obvious place to settle. A couple of generations later, and the firm was in the hands of Ellen Keeley, not that she ever talked about it.
Business boomed in the early 20th century, and Ellen became rich. She would go on long holidays to the continent without ever revealing where she’d been. According to news accounts after he death in 1949, she not only owned the flower shop and the barrow-lending business, but also five houses in the Covent Garden area. But nor did she keep all her earnings to herself…
After her death, many people came forward to praise her munificence. Teachers from Holborn Roman Catholic school revealed that Ellen would regularly supplement their meagre wages with her own savings. She made extensive donations to local charities. Yet she never talked about either her business or her charitable work. She was just a friendly flower seller, trading from the small shop she’d inherited from her parents.
Her funeral was quite something, by all accounts. Local florists stayed up all night making wreaths for their fallen comrade. At least 40 buildings in Covent Garden were garlanded in memoriam. Local boxers refused to attend training, in order to pay their last respects.
“She loved flowers,” her granddaughter Patricia told the press. “She could never see a flower lying on the ground without stooping to pick it up and putting it in water.” But it’s clear that she also loved her local community, and gave back generously from the profits of the barrow business.
Ellen’s plaque
I have to admit, I never knew any of this until recently. I’d never even heard of the Keeley business, although it remained famous into the 1980s. My curiosity was piqued, as is so often the case, by a plaque. This one, at 33 Neal Street.
The plaque from the Seven Dials Trust is remarkable for two reasons. First, it’s a rare one to commemorate a business owned by a woman — a fact few people realised when the shop was styled as E. Keeley. Second, just look at those dates. The company persevered for 33 years after Ellen’s death. But the firm also outlasted Covent Garden Market itself. All the flowers, fruits and vegetables decamped to Nine Elms in 1974. The local demand for barrows must have plummeted off a cliff. But Ellen Keeley Co. remained in business for another eight years, here on Neal Street.
Shortly after the market moved away, Ellen’s successor at the barrow firm, John Sullivan, was interviewed by the Express and Star. He had no grumbles about the displacement of his customer base. His main beef was with wheel regulations. “We tried making rubber wheels for Covent Garden some time ago but they didn’t go and we were stuck with them,” he told the paper. “I’m sticking to the traditional metal wheels.”
The shop caught the eyes of the Londonists of the time. The great Geoffrey Fletcher, who penned The London That Nobody Knows, had this to say about the shop in 1981:
“Everything about the place is in complete harmony—the Georgian house above, the shop below with a little Gothic ornament on the fascia, and painted, just as it should be, in Brunswick Green. Inside is the workshop, full of wood, lathes, pots of paint and barrows under construction, and in the window are specimens of the italic lettering they carve so expertly on the shafts and wheels of the barrows.”
That Brunswick green really shines through in this painting by David Gentleman (the same artist who created the medieval-stlye illustrations at Charing Cross tube station).
Towards the end of its time in Covent Garden, the company pivoted (as we’d say today) to hire out barrows for TV and movie productions. It continues to trade today as Keeley Hire, specialising in all kinds of prop hire including, perhaps, the occasional barrow.
Ellen’s flower shop (photo here), in Shorts Gardens opposite The Crown, also continued to bloom long after her death. An article in the Observer in 1979 notes that it was then in the capable hands of Ellen’s grand-daughter Kathy (“married with five children but everybody always calls me Miss Keeley”).
The two businesses seem to have faded away in the 1980s, and the once celebrated name of Keeley is largely forgotten in the West End. But the story of the young flower girl who secretly built up a fortune and used it to support the local community is a compelling one, which deserves to be remembered.
I sometimes hear people grumble about plaques to less celebrated people. “Never heard of her!,” they’ll say. “They give out plaques to anyone these days.” But I think that’s a rotten attitude. The very best plaques are the ones that alert us to people and stories we would not have otherwise encountered. Learning about Ellen Keeley was so much more enriching than finding another plaque to Winston Churchill or Lord Elgin. Happily, the Seven Dials Trust has funded an inflorescence of similar plaques around the area, many of which commemorate similarly obscure but fascinating characters. Long may they bloom.
