John Braham
Chapter 1 - Our Family
The Boundary Housing Estate is situated in the north- west corner of Bethnal Green in London's East End behind the church of St. Leonard, Shoreditch. The church designed by Hawksmoor a pupil of Wren is a graceful example of 17th century architecture in stark contrast to the housing estate behind it. Built near the beginning of the century the estate is an early example of slum clearance by the now defunct London County Council. It was built on the site of The Old Nichol; a crowded slum made notorious by Arthur Morrison in his novel "a Child of the Jagoî.
Towards the end of the last century six thousand persons lived in its dozen narrow streets and it was the haunt home of several criminal gangs, thieves, pickpockets, murderers, lived in a warren of slum houses. They had a great time, thieving, mugging, picking pockets and coming home to display the spoils. In the event of a too zealous police raid the fugitives would slip through hidden doors and secret passages into neighbouring houses. It must have been a great loss to the hard working criminal community when an unsympathetic local authority decided to clear the area.
The Boundary estate, built like the spokes of a wheel with Arnold Circus as the hub, comprises blocks of four storey tenements set in concrete playgrounds. They were a great improvement on the crowded slum housing they displaced. They were also more expensive to rent and probably few of the inhabitants of The Nichol could afford or opted to move into them.
Perhaps to add a little glamour the blocks were all named after places along the river Thames. It was in one of these, Hedsor Buildings; I was born on the fourth of May 1916. At one time there was a bandstand in Arnold Circus and I remember being taken to listen to the band. My mother always maintained that I was much too young to recall anything of the sort.
We must have moved from there when I was quite young. We also lived for a while in Cross Hill; Glasgow where I remember sleeping in a bed built into the wall of the kitchen. Mother's younger sister Lil lived there with her optician husband. In those days it was possible to set up as an optician without any formal qualifications and mother hoped father would learn the profession and be able to set up in business. Dad did in fact become a member of an organisation called, I remember, The Association of British Practical Opticians.
My other memory of Glasgow is of being taken to Queen's Park by a servant. One could still get servants in those days for not much more than the cost of their keep. Even so we could not have been too badly off.
Most of my childhood, however, was spent in the East End of London, in Vallance Road, a long narrow street stretching between Whitechapel and Bethnal Green. We lived in a short stretch straddling the two Boroughs, bounded by the railway arch and sidings on three sides and St. Peter's hospital on the other. Our stretch of street made up of two blocks of discoloured yellow brick four roomed terraced houses was virtually a village in itself.
St. Peters, a grim looking black building was a relic of the Poor Law known locally as "The Infirmary." Beyond it there was a tiny park. It had swings, a few trees and some patches of green labelled "NO DOGS," "NO BALL GAMES," and "KEEP OFF THE GRASS." This way the only public open space for about a mile around.
Our little 'village' differed in two respects from much of the East End. Most of the houses were owner occupied, and they had gardens. We lived at number 130 right in the middle of the 'village'. A shop front with living room at the back and two upstairs bedrooms were home for two adults, three boys and two girls. All the males slept in one room while mother and my two sisters shared the other.
I cannot recall exactly how we managed the sleeping arrangements. Certainly for a time we three boys shared the bed and I rather think, at some time the four of us slept together in a head to tail arrangement. For the girls it was somewhat easier; Lily the eldest of us slept with mother and my young sister Hilda was still a baby. I suspect that mother who had had more than enough of child bearing was not displeased with these arrangements.
When we moved into the house the only cooker was a coal fired range. On this mother cooked meals for the family and baked delicious apple strudel and a fruity yeast cake. A well-scrubbed and scarred wooden table on which we did everything took up the middle of our kitchen/living room. We prepared food on it, ate off it, sat round it to play cards. It was crowded, warm, comfortable and secure. I have a memory of mother stretching the pastry for the strudel; wafer thin, while we children peeled and chopped the apples. She also made the vermicelli for our Friday night lockshen soup, rolling and folding the dough then cutting it into thin strips.
Mother was a firm and progressive believer in good diet. For the times she had quite advanced ideas about food. She insisted on our eating plenty of raw vegetables and fresh fruit; from their stay in the United States my parent's had developed liking for raw grated cabbage and carrot long before it became popular here as coleslaw.
No food processor or other mechanical aids graced our kitchen. We stood at our kitchen table grating the vegetables with a metal grater. We also grated beetroot and raw horseradish, which mixed with vinegar, gives the piquancy to Jewish fish and poultry dishes. Much as we enjoyed eating this "chrain", its preparation was not popular. Besides getting cut fingers, grating the horseradish made our eyes water.
In the backyard, there was a laundry copper; a big circular metal bowl built on bricks with a space below in which to light a fire. Several buckets of water would be heated in this copper and then the dirty laundry was boiled and washed. The water was agitated with a wooden paddle or "dolly", the laundry lifted out with tongs, scrubbed on a washboard, then rinsed and hung on the line, hopefully to dry. Despite using large quantities of soap, soda and elbow grease the grime and smoke in the air meant that whites stayed grey looking.
We did not have an electric iron so the pressing was done with an ordinary flat iron heated on the coal range or gas ring. There were no drip-dry fabrics, almost everything had to be pressed and we had a collection of irons, ranging from small smoothing irons to a fourteen pound tailors iron for pressing heavy garments and suits. Mother told me that when we were very small she would also starch all the linen and baby clothes.
Electric lighting had only recently come to our street and our house was among the first to be converted from gas lighting. We could not really afford it but mum was not going to let our house be the only one in the street without this latest modern convenience. Electricity was an unfamiliar and largely unknown power to us, and mother, used to the dangers of gas, believed that if there were no bulb in the socket the electricity would escape and electrocute us all. So when the light bulb failed, dad got out his rickety stepladder and climbed up to remove the spent bulb while my older brother Harry stood by with the replacement and the rest of us watched from as far back as we could squeeze.
"Are the steps safe?" asked mother somewhat belatedly, and then, "Careful with that bulb. Don't drop it! Make sure you screw it in properly. "All this was getting dad somewhat agitated and for a breathtaking moment the stepladder wobbled precariously. The spent lamp had jammed and dad swore inaudibly but eventually recovered his balance, took the new bulb from my brother Harry and screwed it into the holder.
"Are you sure it's in properly?" asked mum in a tone that indicated she knew it was not. "Certainly it is" said our exasperated father but he gave it a final twist to make sure before climbing down from the steps. Of course the bulb dropped straight down and shattered on the uncarpeted floor.
Chapter 2 - Our House
It was mother who bought the property. Dad had been brought up as a tailor and would have been content to follow his trade but mum was more ambitious and saw the shop as providing a better income. Tailoring in those days was a seasonal trade and poorly paid. Besides Mum was determined that Father was going to be an optician. So equipped with a testing chart and a case of lenses Dad put his imposing certificate of membership of The Association of British Practical Opticians in the window and waited for clients.
Unfortunately mother's capital and perhaps her imagination did not match her ambition. I suppose it was the best they could afford but my parents' choice of Vallance Road was not destined to make their fortune. I have no reason to doubt that father was a competent optician but the shop was not in a good position. Both place and time were against him. The profession was beginning to demand higher qualifications for admission, chains of cut-price opticians were opening up in the High streets and a side street shop window was not the best place to attract customers with money. Local people did come in for eye testing and to be fitted with spectacles. Some would simply buy a pair of reading glasses without formal testing but business was too slow, and soon half of the shop was made over for confectionery. Eventually, cigarettes and sweets completely ousted the frames and lenses.
We sold newspapers, tobacco and confectionery. Two counters, one for tobacco, the other a confectionery counter. There were brightly decorated ceramic jars of loose tobacco displayed behind one counter. On it stood a shining brass balance and a pile of tiny weights from a quarter ounce up, for weighing customers' favourite blends of tobacco and snuff. It was our job to polish them daily. When packaged brands became more popular the jars and scales went and with them some of the shop's Old World atmosphere.
There were scales on the sweets counter too, larger, of a silvery metal, and on the shelves big glass jars of brightly coloured sweets. (A lolly in those days, was specifically a fruit flavoured coloured confection on a stick). Most sweets came unwrapped and needed to be weighed out carefully. A fraction over weight meant loss of profit; a little under could lose a customer. This was in the early 1920's and I believe that for a while the shop provided a useful income although dad usually needed to go to work to supplement it. Even so most of the time there was little to spare.
Mother had two half brothers, Moojie and Benny both of who were comparatively wealthy. They did keep in touch with us but always seemed somewhat remote to me with their bespoke suits and expensively dressed wives. I believe that when we children were small they were quite good to us. When they visited we children would often be given a sixpence each which mother would collect as soon as they had gone.
Occasionally they would drop in at mealtime and this could be awkward. Usually we had barely enough to go round and no Jewish family would sit down to a meal and not invite a visitor to join them. And these were relatives! Mother greeted them as though she had only been awaiting their arrival before serving and would whisper to us "F.H.B." This stood for "family hold back" and became a family catch phrase thereafter.
We were of course impossibly overcrowded but we did have a fair sized garden. Mum decided to have another room built on. Not large, perhaps about ten feet by eight, it became a third bedroom. For us children its great asset was the flat zinc covered roof, which could be reached from an upstairs window. This roof became castle, ship's deck (Treasure Island), desert fort (Beau Geste), or any other location depending on what was showing at the cinema or what books we were reading.
With the new room we acquired a kitchen or scullery. This was a lean-to constructed with a part glass, part corrugated iron roof. In it we installed a gas cooker and a kitchen sink. This sink with its cold water tap was the only water supply in the house. It was where we washed the dishes, clothing and ourselves. The lean-to also brought the outside toilet almost inside, a great luxury.
Friday after school, clean underwear and soap in a paper bag we would make our way to the municipal baths in Cheshire Street. We paid twopence for a ticket and a towel and waited on a long wooden bench in an atmosphere of steam and disinfectant for a vacant cubicle. Many of our friends would be there; it was quite a social occasion. Once in the bath we had no control over the water supply which was turned on and off by the attendant from outside. He would ask us to test the temperature but it was years before I learned that this should be done with the elbow not the hand. The result of course was that my bath was often uncomfortably hot and for some time I was unable to summon up enough courage to call for more cold water.
Twenty minutes was allowed for a bath. If you did not finish in time the attendant simply ran the water out and if there were many waiting make you dress in the corridor while he prepared the bath for the next customer. This was done by wiping the bath round with a long handled broom dipped in disinfectant and rinsing it. Much shouting and joking went on over the cubicle partitions. The attendant who lived with it week after week would get understandably annoyed and yelled at us to "Have a bit of hush there you in number five," or whoever he decided was the ringleader. In later years we sang a little ditty to the tune of the Soldiers Chorus from Faust which went something like,
The rest of the week our ablutions consisted of a strip wash in the scullery or in front of the fire.
Chapter 3 - Our Street
The street was our real playground. There we spun our tops, tossed marbles, flicked and swapped cigarette cards. The side streets, blocked by the railway yards were ideal for cricket and football as well as "gang games" like cowboys and Indians. A popular game was "Cannon". Crossed sticks were set on a tin can and one player had to knock it down with a soft ball. He would then retrieve the ball while one of the other players would run and attempt to set the "cannon" up again before the thrower could hit him with the ball. A simple exciting game that cost almost nothing for equipment. At Passover, which was the traditional nut season, we played games with hazelnuts. Throwing "up the wall" was a favourite. A box with numbered holes was another. As in a fairground you tried to toss a nut into a numbered hole to win that amount of nuts. The young entrepreneurial box owner of course invariably made a substantial profit.
Above all however the street is alive and exciting. It is the tail end of the era of London street cries. A barrel organ plays; the muffin man, tray balanced on his head rings his bell. Rag and bone totters wheel their barrows, offering balloons and paper windmills for "any old clothes." An itinerant knife grinder pushes his tricycle with its pedal powered grindstone. The hokey pokey man, a pseudo Italian, stands outside the school selling real ice cream with his cry of, "Hokey Pokey penny a lump." Occasionally a shining hearse stands outside of John English, undertaker, drawn by four sleek black horses decorated with waving black plumes. Horses are as common as motor vehicles and a private car in our street is still an object of gawking admiration.
Several of the houses in our little stretch of street have been converted to shops. Next door to us is an Irish family, Champness the cobbler who sits at the window with a mouth full of nails tacking away while we watch fascinated. Further along is the kosher butcher, perhaps the only truly orthodox Jew in our little community. He wears a skullcap, lays phylacteries daily and seems always at prayer when we enter. At the end of the row is Mr. Abercrombie's excitingly mysterious "oil shop" stocking hardware, candles, flypapers, gas mantles and other necessities of the time. A long, dim Aladdin's cave smelling intriguingly of exotic oils mingled with paraffin and turpentine, stored in huge barrels in the dark rear of the shop.
Very little is pre-packaged. Mr. Circal the grocer weighs a quarter- pound of butter or cheese and sells biscuits loose from a tin. His evenings are spent carefully weighing sugar into blue bags. Wrapped bread is uncommon and the baker on the corner bakes delicious crusty loaves and rolls; the aroma of the bread completing with the smells from the oil shop opposite. All the shops have their distinctive odours. The butcher's which we avoid if possible smells dankly of dead meat; the grocer's has its own peculiar blend of tea, coffee and dairy products. Only John English the undertaker's across the road seems befittingly neutral. Our own shop must have smell of tobacco and all kinds of confectionery but this we hardly notice.
Twice a week there was a rubbish collection. We would drag the metal dustbin through the house onto the pavement to be emptied. The first dust carts that I remember were simply open trucks into which, with much clanking and clattering the bins would be tipped. The dustmen wore moleskin trousers tied below the knee and leather headpieces that hung half down the back. A lot of the rubbish simply blew back into the road and a street sweeper followed up, making a forlorn attempt to clear some of it.
Open fires were the only forms of heating for most families. Having a garden gave us storage space enabling us to buy coal by the hundredweight in the summer when it was cheaper. The coalman wearing headgear similar to the dustman's, carried the bags through the house while two of us would count as they were brought in. Many poorer families had to buy their coal when they had cash in twenty-eight pound bags from the local greengrocer. Of course this was more expensive and an early example of the poverty trap.
When we moved into this house soon after the First World War wireless was still in the experimental stage. We made our own entertainment. We were a gregarious family, the new kitchen scullery had given us more living space so at weekends our house was bustling with friends and neighbours.
My eldest sister Lily could play the piano and sometimes her friends and we would gather round for a singsong. Our main source of music was, however, the gramophone. We had records of all the popular songs of the day, favourites being selections from musical shows and light opera. We played numerous card games, various forms of "rummy" and other gambling games, solo whist being the most popular. Friends joined in, so our little living room would be crowded with card players and "kibitzers' often well into the night.
Our first wireless was a crystal set, a simple device almost forgotten today. It picked up the signals transmitted from the broadcasting station but did not amplify and we listened through headphones to the faint but clear sounds coming through the air. Our living room was wired up with sockets so several of us could listen at the same time. For a short while we were the envy of the neighbourhood but very soon "modern" valve sets became more easily available and the wonder ceased. These early wireless sets were powered by wet acid batteries or accumulators, which needed frequent re-charging. Mr. Blackley who kept the bicycle shop across the road fitted a battery charging circuit and developed a profitable side line in exchange accumulators. They were soon superseded by sets powered from the mains.
Mother of course insisted that we keep up with this new development, which was expensive and would have been more so but for Dad's brother, Uncle Alf. Alf was a traveller for E K.Cole a wireless manufacturer, later Ecko Radio and he let us have one of their new models at a discount. This new wireless, housed in a round case of Bakelite, (a kind of early plastic), was mains driven. Except for an occasional burnt out valve it gave us trouble free reception for many years. The model became a best seller and is still regarded as classic of design.
There was also the cinema, silent and flickering yet magical. From a very early age we paid weekly visits to the Cambridge Picture theatre, formerly the Royal Cambridge Music Hall. On Saturday soon after midday we started out to walk the mile or so to Spitalfields and queue up with a penny bag of 'monkey' nuts (peanuts) for the afternoon performance. The one time music hall had a circle and a gallery, admission being respectively penny-ha'penny in the gallery, tuppence in the circle and tuppence-ha'penny for a lordly seat in the front stalls. Rear stalls were four pence but we could not imagine how anybody could pay so much just for the pictures.
Almost every Saturday there was a western, Tom Mix and his horse Tony, Hoot Gibson, Buck Rogers, Hop a Long Cassidy. Thousands of Indians must have bitten the dust, dozens of Baddies filled with lead but we never saw them as real people. There was no blood, no gory wounds; the inevitable saloon brawl was a set semi-comic piece. They were shadows on a screen, as fictional and unreal as the comics we read, which often featured the same characters.
Sometimes there was a singsong. The lyrics appeared on the screen with a little ball bouncing over each word in time to the tune while the pianist in the pit played the music. The silent cinema pianist was as much a part of the entertainment as the film itself. There was always a serial; each weekly episode ending with the hero or heroine pushed over a cliff, tied to a railway line, falling from a skyscraper. Each following week they would escape, with it must be admitted disappointing ease yet each week we went back anxiously, to learn their fate.
Chapter 4 - The Red Menace
Small crowded houses are not comfortable in the summer. Hot evenings the adults sat outside chatting, solving the world's problems or playing dominos. This was not only from friendliness. In summer the whole East End was plagued by a pest that affected every house hold. We called it the Red Army, an invasion of predatory bed bugs.
Suffice it to say that Cimex Lectularius, the common bed bug, has an appetite for human blood only exceeded by the survival capacity of its species. It can go for a year without food; the female lays about one hundred eggs at a time and will breed three or four times a year. When attacked or crushed it gives off a vile smell like bitter almonds. The pest cannot be avoided. Move the bed away from the wall, and put the legs in tins of paraffin. That will foil him you think, naively. This parasite is too cunning and drops on to you from the ceiling for its drink of blood.
Summers were a continual battle of the bugs in which we barely held our own. This plague had nothing to do with cleanliness and plenty to do with poor housing. The bugs were endemic. They lived in the very fabric of the houses, in the woodwork, behind the paper and in the lathe and plaster of the walls and ceilings. We washed the beds with paraffin, we stripped the paper from the walls. We sealed the rooms and burned sulphur candles to fumigate them. We scrubbed and sprayed and disinfected. We even took candles to burn the clusters of eggs in the corners of the beds
We killed myriads of the ghastly things and perhaps for a few nights would have a comparatively peaceful sleep. Then the next invasion would arrive and the whole process is repeated.
The British bed bug had much in common with the British Empire. Both were widespread, both fed on the blood of the poor; both were coloured red and both faded away after the war.
Chapter 5 - Life and Death of a Chicken
Situated as it was in the heart of London's East End our house was unusual in having a small garden. Father enriched the sparse soil with horse manure scooped up from the street and grew huge runner beans and gigantic sunflowers. When my parents decided to keep poultry. Father who was a competent handy man built a chicken house at the end of the garden. Then one Sunday morning he took me with him to Club Row market to buy laying birds and chicks.
Although there is a street called Club Row it is also a generic name for a maze of streets, which was one of the earliest of "flea markets". Hare Street where the market begins, is on weekdays a quiet street of little shops, mainly housing cabinet-makers and timber merchants. On Sunday mornings it becomes transformed into a crowded market filled with a seething mass of people looking for bargains, or just looking. The shops display the bookcases and coffee tables their craftsmen have spent the week making.
Stalls crowd together while in every available space men women and children spread their pathetic surplus goods on the pavement. Here a man has a bicycle for sale; further along a child offers a puppy for a few coppers. The crowds surge and search through the boxes and piles of oddments. Much of it has (to use the popular phrase) fallen off the back of a lorry. In the side turnings if you know your way around you can pick up these illicit bargains.
The big attraction however is the animal market where every species of domestic creature can be found. Dogs of all breeds and of none; kittens, rabbits, dormice and guinea pigs. Racing and show pigeons, canaries and budgerigars; ducks and geese and hens. There are sacks of corn, wheat and bran. Pigeon racing and breeding are popular local hobbies and the fanciers handle, examine and comment knowingly on the birds. Father takes me into a shop where he seems to know the owner and after some brief bargaining we go home with six grown birds and a box containing a dozen day-old chicks.
Perhaps surprisingly the chicks thrived and for years we had a supply of new laid eggs. We also tried different breeds; a beautiful Indian Runner (I think that is what it was) with golden brown plumage and long elegant tail feathers; a Rhode Island Red and a fierce Bantam that pecked anybody daring to go near it. When a hen stopped laying we would take it to the shechta house, the kosher slaughterhouse, and we would have it for our Friday night meal. No anthropomorphic sentimentality in those days, that was for the affluent. My parents were not orthodox but it would not occur to them to kill the birds any other way. However I doubt that we killed the magnificent Indian Runner or the fiery Bantam. The birds were fed on maize, corn and bran mash with kitchen left overs, which gave them a delicious flavour unmatched by the bland tasting birds sold in today's supermarkets.
My sister Lily had a friend who sometimes shared our Sabbath evening meal. One Friday when she was expected we killed a particularly plump bird but when mother opened it she found to her- consternation that the liver was slightly discoloured. Had it been only for the family we might have gone ahead and eaten it without any fuss but under the circumstance father thought that we should get an expert opinion as to its edibility.
Now, nearby lived an elderly man well versed in Talmudic law to whom people went for advice. He was known as the Reb and although father was convinced that his was a self-conferred or at best a courtesy title this seemed a good time to make use of his services. He gave me the bird and sixpence. "Take it to the Reb and ask him if it is kosher," he instructed, "And don't give him all the money if you don't have to."
Fortunately the Reb was at home. I showed him the liver. "Radn Yiddish?" he asked. I had to confess that I spoke very little Yiddish. He looked at the liver. He peered at it doubtfully.
Afsher (perhaps) yes. afsher no, muttered this interpreter of the Jewish law. This at least I understood. "Afsher I might have sixpence," I told him. The Reb took the sixpence and the bird from me and went into the house. What tests he performed, what prayers he offered I have no idea but after a few minutes he came out and handed me our Sabbath evening dinner. "Is Kosher" he told me, then, deflatingly, "a Yiddisher boy nisht Kein radn Yiddish," and shook his head. The hen might be acceptable but I was not. At least not for sixpence
Chapter 3 - School
The Robert Montefiore elementary school was a few minutes walk from home, opposite the Infirmary. It had a bell tower with a large bell and we would dash off at the last minute when we heard it peal. The school was built in 1916 and named for a member of the well-known Jewish family who was killed in the war. It was a big school for the time, or rather three schools in one building, with about eight hundred children on three floors. Infants on the ground floor, girls on the next and boys on the top. I remember that our masculine pride thought this a just and logical arrangement.
Most children entered the infants aged four or five and stayed in the system until they left school at fourteen. A few bright, lucky ones would obtain scholarships to secondary grammar, schools or be selected for so called Central schools at the age of twelve. These latter schools were technically or commercially oriented. All of us children attended "Robert Mont" for various periods. Three of us obtained places at Central or Grammar schools but family financial problems compelled us to leave at fourteen along with our compatriots.
One of the advantages of living in a Newsagency was that we learned to read at an early age and had a familiarity with books that our parents encouraged. Mother bought books from the junk stalls on Mile End Waste just because they looked good. Once she bought the whole barrow load for five shillings and got the seller to wheel it home. There was a whole set of Israel Zangwill, beautifully bound in red, with gilt edging. I must have been all of seven years old when I laughed over "The King of Schnorrers", and cried with the eponymous little heroine of "Rose of the Ghetto".
I have vivid memories of two of the teachers at "Robert Mont". One, the headmaster C.T. Smith had a vision that all children, even deprived East End kids could be educated to the standard taught in English Public schools. He wrote a book on the theme called Apsa, a public schooling -for- all. He was a music lover who tried with some success to impart his passion to children who heard music, only, if at all from the wireless or scratchy, poorly recorded gramophone records.
From time to time Smith took a class for singing lessons. He started with breathing exercises, telling us to expand our chests but quite ignoring our diaphragms. Then he commanded us to sing, "Not like that boys. Head voice, sing head voice!" I doubt that any of us learned to sing "head voice" or even what it meant,
Smith put on a production of the "Magic Flute" in which my older brother Harry sang the First Priest. I was about seven or eight years old and although I had very little idea what the opera was about, it made a lasting impression on me. Over the years I still remember the program note, presumably written by Smith, to the effect that only Mozart could have made a masterpiece of such a libretto.
A few years later Mr. Smith followed this up with Handel's Julius Caesar for which he auditioned all the older boys in the school. We assembled in the hall as he put us through our vocal paces individually; singers to the right, rejects to the left. Auditioning was in alphabetical order so my turn came all too soon.
"Ah! Braham," said our formidable headmaster, "I remember your brother. Um, Harry was it not," rhetorically. "He sang First Priest. I considered him for Zarastro. Pity his voice was a trifle light. Can you sing boy? Let me hear you. Come on, sing up! Doh, Ray Mi, Fah."
Not long before I had been turned down as a pupil by a violin teacher who easily discovered that I had no sense of pitch and was quite unable to reproduce a note. Add to the fact that I believed that I was almost tone deaf, that my voice was breaking, the comparison with my older brother had given me a feeling of hopeless inferiority. I opened my mouth and attempted to sing up the scale. What sounds came out I have no idea but they were certainly not musical. There were subdued giggles from my contemporaries as the headmaster glowered at me obviously disappointed that I was not another Harry Braham.
"Is that the best you can do boy," obviously disbelieving, "Not like your brother. He could sing. Stand over there."
He pushed me to the left, the first of the rejects, amid ironic sympathy from the other budding Carusos who had passed or were awaiting the ordeal. Alas! although I love music I have never been able to sing in tune and have sometimes wondered how much this is natural and how much the result of this traumatic childhood experience. For all that, I can still sing, albeit, recognisable only to myself, "Thus brings Egypt to me as Conqueror," from that same Julius Caesar. Smith sowed the seed for the love of opera that I have retained and for that I am grateful to him.
The other schoolmaster whom I recall affectionately was a vegetarian socialist humanist named Charles Truman. His passions were teaching and the English countryside. Short and bespectacled, his somewhat slight frame belied a store of energy that he put into both these activities. He often sat in the classroom to eat his lunch, mostly nuts and fruit which he brought with him in a metal luncheon box. In our ignorance we thought this a meagre sort of meal but there was no doubt about Charlie Truman's fitness.
Teaching was formal in those days. The fist half of the morning was invariably allocated to mathematics, mostly arithmetic, elementary algebra and a kind of geometry known as mensuration (which we deliberately mispronounced) which involved working out areas. After morning break it was usually English grammar or composition, with other subjects in the afternoon. One master who taught geography would come in, fill two blackboards with notes, then leave us to copy them while he got on with more important matters than teaching us slum kids to emulate our betters. Much later I was told that this man was a great scholar. Maybe but he was not much good at the job for which he was paid.
Charlie Truman was different. In class he enthralled us with tales from the Ramayana and the Greek and Norse sagas. He told us of great human migrations across Europe and Asia. We discussed recent history and current events. The 1914-18 war was only a few years behind and Charlie had us discussing the morality of war. He told us of the injustice meted out to Sacco and Vanzetti the gentle American, Italian anarchists. We debated the merits of the General Strike. It would not be true to say that he kept his pacifist, socialist views from us but nor did he impose them. He held spelling competitions and organised a class library of which I was proud to be the first librarian.
"Books are friends and words are weapons," he was fond of saying, "Use, but do not abuse them and they will serve you in good stead."
But mostly it was his extra curricular activities that endeared him to us. He took us by underground train to Kew Gardens. The train was usually full so we stood, as children did in those days while he had us reciting Alfred Noyes poem "Come Down to Kew in Lilac Time." I do not know whether the other passengers were edified, amused or exasperated by this but we were proud to display our erudition. With his wife he took us on Sunday outings to the Surrey hills, walking and picking blackberries. Most exciting of all he organised a camp near Westerham in Kent to which he and his wife took parties of boys for weekends.
The rule was that only the thirteen and fourteen year olds went to the camp but when I obtained my scholarship place and would be leaving Robert Montefiore he offered to take me. Being a mainly Jewish school we finished early on Friday so we were able to have a long weekend. We were told to bring a towel, a piece of meat or fish for Saturday and a pair of pyjamas. The first two were no problem but like most boys I knew, I had never owned pyjamas. Mother resented the cost of such a luxury for one week- end, but my older brother Harry, now at work offered to pay part of the cost so I went to my first camp fully equipped. Of course that night I put on my first ever pair of pyjamas while the other, older boys crawled under their blankets, as usual in their underwear. Years later in my 'teens I went camping frequently not far from that first site but never again bothered with pyjamas.
I believe that I was fortunate to have Charlie Truman as my class teacher for three successive years. He produced for some of us a glimpse of the world outside Whitechapel. His teaching went far beyond the three 'R's that was most elementary education at the time.
There was one other, very different kind of teacher that I remember with less warmth. When I was about eleven years old my parents decided that I should be prepared for my Bahmitzvah, the religious ceremony by which a Jewish boy becomes accepted as a man. As it involves singing a portion of the Torah, the Law, I was sent to a Talmudic scholar to learn Hebrew. There were a few such about. In their younger days the main occupation of these now elderly men, in their little villages in Poland had been the study of the Law. There they had a status and the community ensured that at least their most pressing needs would be met. In this strange country they eked out a living as best they could while continuing their commentary and discussion on the finer points of the Talmud.
The man I went to ate, taught, studied and slept in a grubby front room that he rented nearby. Alongside the rear wall was a narrow bed, usually unmade, under the window an uncomfortable sofa from which the springs had long since given up their store of kinetic energy, while in the corner a gas ring held a black pot invariably giving off a rancid odour.
It was in this unsavoury room that two evenings a week he sat seven or eight boys a round a wooden table. There was little attempt at teaching. Instead we recited or read and translated passages of Hebrew Scripture. Unfortunately for me he spoke almost no English so translating was from Hebrew into Yiddish, the vernacular of European Jewry. Many Jewish children in those days with foreign-born parents spoke Yiddish as a matter of course but it was almost never heard in my house. My parents used it only when they did not want us children to understand their conversation.
So there I sat in a cold cheerless room monotonously reciting from one unknown language into another almost as incomprehensible. He had a short cane with which he would wrap the knuckles of any boy who recited too slowly. As I could neither read Hebrew nor understand Yiddish my knuckles suffered severely. This went on for several weeks until I eventually persuaded my parents that they were wasting their money. We were paying a precious sixpence a session so my parents agreed that I give him up and arranged for me to attend more formal Hebrew classes.
At thirteen I duly sang my portion of the Law in the Great Garden Street Synagogue. There were the usual congratulations and the traditional nuts and wine offered round. Nobody remarked that I was probably the only Bahmitzvah boy in the whole history of that synagogue to sing consistently flat.
Mary Hughes
Walking dreamily to school one morning when I felt a tap on my back. "Keep your head up, lad, straighten your shoulders." I turned to see a familiar little lady in a red cloak. She seemed old to me although Mary Hughes must have been in her sixties at that time.
Mary Hughes the daughter of the reverend Thomas Hughes author of 'Tom Brown's Schooldays' was born in Mayfair, socially and economically a world away from the East End of London, on February 29th 1860. Mr. Hughes was a Christian Socialist and Mary inherited both his Christianity and his social conscience.
When she was twenty-three she went to house keep for her Uncle John the vicar of Longcot in Berkshire. John died in 1895 (her father died the following year) and Mary went to help her brother in law the Reverend Ernest Carter at St. Jude's in Stepney.
Mr. and Mrs. Carter on a visit to poor emigrants in the United States went down in the Titanic, Mrs Carter giving up her seat in the last lifeboat. The tragedy had a profound effect on Mary who threw herself completely into helping the poor of Whitechapel.
Mary moved into a tenement in Fulbourne Street behind St. Peter's hospital.
It was a time when the Labour movement was developing rapidly. The socialist Co-operative movement was growing. Keir Hardie had formed the Independent Labour Party and two of its members, George Lansbury and John Scurr were in parliament Mary who knew both of them joined the Labour Party, was appointed a J/P. And for a time was a Borough Councillor. She became a Quaker.
Chapter 6 - The Depression
It was in this environment that I grew up. 1929 was the year of the great depression. There was mass unemployment. My father who was a tailor had only seasonal work. The little shop selling sweets and newspapers took less. At that time the school leaving age was fourteen and unless you could afford the fees or won a scholarship to a grammar school that is when most children left, no longer children but wage earners. Even that is an over statement. I did win a scholarship to the Davenant Foundation school in Whitechapel but for various reasons I had to leave at the ripe age of fourteen and start to learn a trade. So did my brothers and sisters, all of whom would today probably be university material.
After several different tries I ended up almost inevitably in the tailoring trade, the predominant employer in the East End for the Jewish population. Tailoring was a seasonal trade carried on predominantly in small converted workshops, (sweatshops), often on the top floor of the tailor master's house. I remember a typical one on the third floor reached up a rickety staircase. It had a bank of four sewing machines, a table for the tailors and as pressing table for two pressers. The fourteen pound press irons were heated on an open coke range Depending on whether or not it was 'the season' between six and ten workers would be in this ill ventilated space. With only a narrow flight of stairs as access it would have been a deathtrap has there been a fire. Normal working hours were from eight in the morning until six but when there was a rush of work we sometimes went in at seven and/or stayed to eight or nine at night.
It was largely casual labour. The master tailor kept a small regular team, a tailor, presser and a machiner. When it got busy these would look for more workers to help out. Unemployed men in the trade congregated in Whitechapel Road at the corner of Great Garden Street. Originally this unofficial labour market was in Great Garden Street itself where the Ladies tailors union office was. Situated and where we sometimes dropped in for a game of dominos or chess.
Chapter 7 - The Thirties, Political Ferment
Don't get the idea that life was dull or drear. Whitechapel Road especially in summer was a seething lively market and meeting place perhaps like the ancient Greek Agora or an eastern bazaar. Stalls lit by naphthalene flares stayed out until midnight. Crowds walked up and down the mile or so between Aldgate and Mile End. Queues snaked outside the Rivoli cinema (two feature films, a newsreel and a cartoon for a pre-decimal ninepence); Seck's fish and chip shop on the corner of Vallance Road served an unending stream of customers with a penn'orth of chips in newspaper; or for the flush, a tuppenny piece of cod and a penn'oth, eaten lavishly doused with salt and vinegar. Round the corner in Whitechapel itself you could buy an ice-cold fruit drink for another penny.
Everybody it seemed knew everybody else. Cries of "How's things" along with "Vie macht tzi" as friends greeted each other in Yiddish and English.
The Whitechapel/Vallance Road corner was the midway point and the centre of activity. It was in more ways than one, a meeting place. For here the Communist party almost nightly set up a platform; until the installation of traffic lights made them move a few yards along Whitechapel to Fulbourne Street. There were always enough people around to make a worthwhile audience.
They had plenty of ammunition. With mass unemployment, miners from Wales, shipbuilders from the Clyde and Tyneside organised marches on London. These 'Hunger marchers' roused a lot of sympathy and active support. We used to say that the only new building in Stepney was the unemployment exchange. Locally tenants were being evicted and the Communists organised rent strikes and barricades against the bailiffs. These were big issues but over all of them was the threat of fascism.
I was sixteen when Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933. About this time Oswald Mosley, a former Labour MP formed the British Union of Fascists (BUF) which with its Blackshirts and raised arm salute imitated the German fascist party. Although Mosley at first denied they were anti -Semitic it soon became clear that their main, indeed their only policy was to attack what they called the Jewish Conspiracy. They held meetings in Bethnal Green and Poplar on the outskirts of the largely Jewish part of the East End
The main political parties said ignore them. The press either took a similar attitude or supported them. The Daily Mail in particular was an active supporter of the fascists both here and in Germany.
It was only the Communist Party that came out unequivocally against the B.U.F. As you can imagine there was a lot of feeling especially among the Jewish population and many teenagers like myself felt that some positive action was needed and the C.P. seemed the obvious answer. Some of my friends were still at Grammar schools where an anti-fascist organisation had developed and although I was no longer at school I became a member. It was a short step from that to joining the Young Communist League (YCL) and to take part in and later speak at the street corner meetings.
The Party as it was always known, seemed to provide an answer to the poverty and class barriers of the time. They were stirring times and it was an exciting movement.
In 1936 the Spanish Civil War began. We saw this as part of the struggle for democracy against Fascist dictatorship. So did the Fascists and it was not long before the German Air Force was actively engaged on the side of General Franco. Indeed the Bombing of Guernica was a full rehearsal for the bombing of London only three years later. Had the British and French Governments been willing actively to help the legitimate Spanish republican Government the Second World War might never have started. Instead both governments adopted a policy of so called non-intervention which left the field clear for the Hitler Government
I must admit that it was not only the politics that inclined me to the YCL, We did have a very active social life. It was also a good opportunity to meet girls, at that age of course, an important part of life. The YCL rented an old workshop, which became in effect a club with a table tennis table and other social activities as well as regular meetings with visiting speakers. I made a number of new friends. In the summer we went camping or took day rambles into the country. Other weekends we went to the cinema, to Sadlers Wells theatre where we heard opera in English for about a shilling or to the Old Vic for classical plays, Laurence Olivier In Hamlet, Charles Laughton in Chekov's The Cherry Orchard. Some summer weekends we would go to Hyde Park and heckle the speakers. Drop in to Lyons's corner house cafe for a meal and walk back to Whitechapel through the parks and along the embankment. They were things I might not have done if I hadn't been a member of the YCL.
It was above all the threat of Fascism that overrode other political considerations. This threat seemed very close and real. Mosley's British Union of Fascists and the Spanish Civil War struck close to home as several members of the Stepney CP and YCL went to fight in the International Brigade. Large demonstrations were held against the Government's non-intervention policy. We collected money and medical equipment for the Spanish Government. They were exciting times and gave us a sense of purpose. We were out to save the world.
At home Mosley held meetings at which Black shirt members viciously beat protesters often with knuckle-dusters and coshes. In 1936 they announced a march through Stepney for the fourth of October. It is difficult now to appreciate the alarm and real fear that this caused. Once again the C.P. was almost alone in organising a campaign to stop the march.
The response to that campaign was tremendous. The television series on Mosley gave only a faint indication of what actually happened. Gardner's Corner, now a large one way traffic system was then a junction of five major roads and the gateway to the East end. From early morning crowds began to gather. Jewish tailors, catholic dockers, all denominations, until the whole junction was completely blocked by anti-fascists. I think the estimate was ten thousand people. And despite the efforts of the police to clear a way there was never any possibility of the Blackshirts getting through.
This was virtually the end of Mosley's attempt to build a popular fascist movement in Britain. He did continue with marches and meetings but never again tried to march through Stepney.
Socialism and Capitalism
I don't want to give the impression that events like these were all that mattered. We believed in Socialism and saw Russia as the first country to attempt to build a socialist State. Of course there were reports of famine, of persecution.
But we tended to dismiss them as capitalist propaganda. After all the entire West was anti-communist and hadn't they sent troops to Russia in 1918 to help the White Russian armies against the Red army?
We believed because we wanted, indeed needed to believe. I suppose in some ways it was akin to a religious belief but with promise of a better life in this world rather than the next. A belief founded on sound economic and historical theory. Also more evidence for we had an example. With all its faults the Soviet Union was the first country to attempt to build a Socialist State.
Nor were we alone. Writers, intellectuals, scientists were sympathisers or members of the Communist Party. Professors J.B.S. Haldane and Bernal were closely associated with the party. Victor Gollancz founder of Penguin Books who also published the Left Book Club spoke on the same platform as communists. Today, fostered by a capitalist system that sees profit as the only criterion, Communism has become a dirty word. In those days it was quite different.
I believe that we should not equate the collapse of the Soviet Union with the failure of Socialism. Obviously I have neither the qualifications nor the space to write a history of the Russian Revolution. However a couple of points stand out. One: it was an attempt to build an advanced society in a backward near feudal country with a largely illiterate population and no experience of democracy. A country moreover that was really an empire with a numerous races and languages and very little in common. Add to this the hostility of the Capitalist world, which led fed Stalin's paranoia until he trusted nobody.
Nowadays there is a tendency to treat fascism and communism as synonymous. But there was a fundamental difference. The Soviet idea, perverted though it became was to build a society where everybody would benefit from their work (this is of course a simplification). Fascism as in Germany was a projection of the capitalist profit system already existing.
I do not believe that the Western democracies, who wept crocodile tears over starving Russians really cared about the Russian peasants After all they tolerated dictatorships in Spain, Portugal, Italy and a multitude of South American countries. They didn't treat their Colonial subjects all that generously either.
I have left out a lot of course. If I tried to write everything you would never get this. Books for instance played a big part. The Left Book Club issued a book a month at nominal prices to members many now collector's items. There were (are?) a lot of books on Socialism. And a lot of good fiction, 'The Jungle' by Upton Sinclair for example, about the Chicago stockyards a great read if you can get it.