Girl of 7 wins £300 for Bow’s Clara Grant School in national Ramadan poster contest
Head teacher Sue Ward with Sangeeta Digpal and her winning Ramadan competition poster - Credit: Tesco
A seven-year-old schoolgirl in London’s East End has won a national competition to have a poster she designed go on tour around Britain. Little Sangeeta Digpal won £300 for her school, Clara Grant Primary in Bromley-by-Bow, famous for the ‘Farthing Bundles’ of toys sold to poor children of her neighbourhood 100 years ago.
1913... Clara Grant's famous 'Farthing Bundle' queue at Fern Street Settlement in Bromley-by-Bow - Credit: TH Archive
Her winning poster in the Ramadan poster competition is now being displayed with her name on a Tesco supermarket van taking food to mosques around the UK to be given to those in need during the Ramadan month of fasting.
She also gets a £100 voucher for herself after coming first in the contest for a design showing what Ramadan means.
The supermarket chain has donated £20,000 in food it is delivering to mosques to help feed those in need.
Sangeeta’s school has a proud history of helping alleviate poverty in the East End.
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Clara Grant was a school teacher and settlement worker who arrived in Bow from the West Country and became headmistress in 1900 at Devons Road Elementary school.
She improved the lives of children in poverty, providing a hot breakfast and clothes and shoes if they needed them.
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But she is mostly remembered for her famous ‘Farthing Bundles’ for children who owned nothing so they would have their own possessions.The bundles had tiny toys of wood, tin, little balls, dolls without heads or headless dolls, whistles, shells, beads, reels, marbles, fancy boxes, decorated pillboxes, patchwork, odds and ends of silk or wool, coloured paper and cigarette cards.
Children queued from 6am, two hours before they went on sale. Clara created the famous small wooden arch in 1913 which youngsters had to step through in the queue to buy a bundle, to exclude the big kids.
Clara Grant died in 1949, but her farthing bundles were sold right up till 1984. The school was renamed Clara Grant in 1993 in her memory. She is buried in Tower Hamlets Cemetery at Mile End.
