Interview Transcript

Grandpa’s memories

Let’s start by hearing about early days, what the East End was like…

To be honest, I don’t really remember the East End. I was born there but we left when I was four. So really, aside from stories I heard, I don’t really remember very much. I heard stories that my parents lived in a street called Christian St, which is where I was born. They came in 1921, and I was born 2 years later. At the time I had 2 brothers and 2 sisters – when I was born, my bris was on my next brother’s bar mitzvah. He was 13 years older than me – uncle Izzy. Auntie Pearl was born 2 years later. She was really my sibling, because my brothers and older sisters were more like aunts and uncles. I was in still in school when my brothers and sisters were married. There was such a big age gap and difference in home environment that we weren’t really close as brothers and sisters. Until Pearl came along, when we were older we went on holiday together, that was later on.

My grandparents, my mother’s parents were already in London. My grandfather, my mother’s

father, and his 2 brothers, came over to England in 1912. So they were already established here –

my grandfather had a little grocery shop, where they lived at the back of the shop, where as far as I

can remember there was a bedroom and living room. When my parents arrived, they moved in with them. The story is that they turned round the wardrobes round, dividing the bedroom, and made another bedroom. I can’t remember exactly how long they lived there. Then they had their own place in Christian St. From the stories I heard, we lived on the second floor.

Alan – above the shop?

No, my father didn’t have a shop then. He worked for one of my uncles, who had a grocery shop

in the East End. My father’s trade in Poland was porger, you know with Kosher meat they have to

take the sinews out of hindquarters, out of the thigh of the animal, which is a specialist job, and in

Poland it was one man’s job – the butcher wasn’t allowed to do it. In England, the butcher did their

own porging, so there was no trade for that. So he trained to become a shochet, to kill animals. He

passed his exams, or whatever it was, and when he turned up for work he decided no, it’s not for me – he couldn’t do it. So they found a shop in Hackney, with living accommodation…

Alan – I always thought the shop was in the East End

No, the shop was in Hackney, in Mare St, number 45.

Alan – very fashionable part of the world these days

In that time it was fashionable – there were 3 Shuls within 10 minutes walk, certainly. It was middle class area, the houses were all individually family-owned or family-rented. I suppose the first memories I have are of going to school, which was within walking distance. We certainly didn't have a car – hardly anybody had a car. The only people who had cars were commercial travellers, who had to get round the country and that was their mode of transportation. My sister, next older sister, took me to school. That was Laureston Road, which was at the top of Victoria Park Rd. It's the main street off Mare St – you may have heard of Victoria Park – its on the border of Bethnal Green and Hackney, the border was actually about 200 yards up the road where it divided. It was a nice park, when I was older I used to go there Saturday afternoon and watch them playing cricket. They had a boating lake there, there were tennis courts – it was quite a big, still is a nice park. I haven't been there for years.

That was the school that I went to for primary school and the secondary school up until 14. There was an exam when you were 11, which was later on called the 11+, and if you passed the exam you could go on to, I don't know if it was called a grammar school, may have been called a grammar school. Alternatively, you could go to more of a technical school, rather than academic, which you could also leave officially at 14, but you could go on there until 16. I left at 14, because I was encouraged by my brothers that it was more sensible to go into business than to carry on in school, for better or for worse. That was the next step.

Very small proportion of Jews. There weren't any Jewish schools at the time – except JFS, that was in the East End. My brother went there. But you had to go by tram [from Hackney], there was a tram that went to the East End, to Stamford Hill. Don't think there were any buses then, except for in the centre of London. The trams stopped at Bloomsbury, that was as far as the trams went – from then on it was only buses. But that tunnel at Queensway, that was a tram tunnel – trams used to run through there, and along the Embankement. I can remember, I think it was the coronation of George V, that was probably about 1938? 37? And the school was taken down there on trams, and we all lined up along the Embankment.

Empire Day – we sang songs, can't remember what they were. The assembly in the morning, twice a week there were religious assemblies, from which we were excused – so we did maths instead! And the other 3 days were non-religious assemblies, where we could join in, where it was just announcements, a school get-together. Whether we sang anything I can't remember – because there were some Psalms, which are non-denominational, which the Christians and Jews could sing. 23rd psalm, they're quite well-known psalms. I can't remember whether we sang them or not.

I did have one friend in school, who wasn't Jewish, who lived opposite, and I used to go over there and play or sit with him, but of course it was a problem – I wasn't allowed to eat anything there. He used to come over to us occasionally as well, but we weren't that...I didn't have any Jewish friends, I must admit. Don't ask me why.

You wouldn't see any Chasidic people in Golders Green, or Hackney. You have to realise that the Jewish community in London wasn't particularly religious. There was a big Jewish population, but the Shuls during the year were pretty empty. On Rosh Hashanah/Yom Kipur, they would take the local town hall, the local cinemas, all became shuls. Because the majority of the Jews went to Shul three times a year – Rosh Hashanah/Yom Kippur. So there wasn't that presence – a lot of the businesses were open on Shabbos. Ordinary traders, ordinary shopkeepers, whether they were newsagents or tobacconists or fashion shops – Saturday was the busiest day, so they were open. The only alternative was in the East End, you had the Jewish market, which was on Sunday morning, which was a special facility. Even our shop, my father's shop, we opened on Sunday morning because we were closed on Friday afternoon and all day Saturday, so we were allowed to open on Sunday morning. That was strict – we were allowed to open until one o clock. In fact, the policeman used to walk past, and say to my father 'put your blind down, its 1 o' clock.' He didn't say 'close the shop', just 'pull the blind down.'

But I'll tell you something, speaking about the policeman. My father's story was that when he first opened the shop, he put his name up on the top, Goschalk, and a policeman walked past and said 'good morning Mr. Goschalk,' he thought this was as it was in Poland – when if they saw a policeman they stepped out the way. Not to, by any chance get in his way. Anybody with a beard would walk around like this [covers face with jacket]... Although millions of Jews lived in Poland and had lived there 500 years, they were still...

For example, the stories I heard from my parents, before Christmas and before Easter, Jews would avoid going out in the street – because the Christians had gone to Church, they'd been, I'm not going to say brainwashed, but encouraged with the idea that Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus, and there were outbreaks of violence against Jews in the street. So they kept out of the way. Lots of them went to America in those years, and some of them went to Israel – the first Chalutzim went from Poland. In lots of cases they were taken on a boat, and they paid for a passage, and were stopped in Hull, or one of the ports here, and they were let off, they didn't know where they were, they didn't have any more money. So there were big Jewish populations in Hull, Portsmouth, Plymouth, places where boats stopped off, and they stayed there. And the same thing as far as the East End of London was concerned – they stopped at Tilbury, and they were there.

My parents lived in a flat in Warsaw, I'm trying to think of the name of the street – I did know it. Numbers I can remember but names are a bit more difficult. They lived in a flat, apparently it was quite a nice flat, they told stories about Succos, that they built a communal succah in the courtyard. A lot of the flats, certainly in Europe, you get flats built in a square, with a courtyard in the centre. So there would be a communal succah. So they would take off the doors, internal doors from all the flats, and build the succah out of the doors. So the story is that the women would bring the dinner down, and that was the best dinner they had in the year, because all the women wanted to show off. So that was the best meal they had – that's the story, how true it is, I can't tell you. My father also told me that there were instances where they'd get some of the roughs, the locals, who'd try to smash up the succah as well. But, that was par for the course. My father used to go for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, he would go to the Rebbe, his Rebbe, to a little town just outside Warsaw. My mother and the children would stay at home. He told the story that they went to the Rebbe, they didn't stay in a hotel. Wherever they were there were 20 people sleeping in one room. So they would be with the Rebbe for Yom Tov and that was there annual outing.

The Goschalk Shul

The story is there, my father had his own Sefer Torah, for as long as I can remember. I don't know whether he brought it over with him from Poland, or whether it came afterwards. But it came from Poland, that I know. Where we lived in Hackney, I can remember quite clearly the cupboard in the living room where it was kept. We used to have a minyan at home every Saturday afternoon for Mincha, because Saturday afternoon for Mincha you read from the Sefer Torah. In order for it to be used, not to stand there as an ornament, we would have a Minyan at home. That was in Hackney, and the same thing when we lived in Letchworth during the war, and when we came to Golders Green, to the Ridgeway.

We didn't have our own minyan there – we went on Shabbos, to the local Rabbi it so happens, to where the minyan was. On Shabbos afternoon, we had a minyan at home. In his later years he was an invalid, he couldn't walk, so a few of the neighbours and my uncles who lived round the corner, came in on Friday night and Shabbos morning so that my father had a minyan at home, and after he died, they said they wanted to carry on.

My mother died two years before my father. So my sister, Ray, with her husband moved - they were living in the house in Hackney where we lived before the war. They were still living there, he had a grocery shop – Joe. We had two shops – he and Ray had the grocery shop, and we had somebody working in the butchers shop. My father went in there occasionally but he didn't go in there every day. Until, I can't remember the exact time. Certainly, until 1950 the shop was going. That was in Mare St as well, the same place. There were two shops in the front, and a big house behind – it was a four storey house.

Ferrero Rocher interval

In the grocery shops – you certainly didn't have the selection that you have today. First of all, my sister Pearl and I, the cereals, the rice, beans, sugar, came in sacks, and our job was, when we came home from school, we weighed it out into half pound paper bags. That was the way we sold it. We didn't have any plastic bags – plastic didn't exist. It was paper bags. The wrapping was newspaper – we used to buy stacks of old newspapers and that's what we wrapped food in.

We didn't use them at home – the biscuits came in tins, square tins, not in packets – so you bought half a pound of biscuits or a pound of biscuits sort of thing and you weighed them out on the scale. We certainly didn't have supermarkets. Tesco was a shop in Golders Green road, set up by, his name was Cohen. She lives round the corner, the old Mrs Cohen. I know which is her house, a nice bungalow in Parson's St, I haven't seen her for a while. We sold, for example cheese, cheese would come as a cheese, and somebody would buy half a pound of cheese, you'd cut off a section of cheese. Butter also came in a round slab, and you had a special knife, or trowel, and you'd cut off a section, put it on the scale. Where did it come from? I can't imagine there was anything that came from abroad, everything was very seasonal. If it was in season you had it, if it wasn't in season...oranges, for example, although I don't think we sold oranges, you wouldn't see oragnes except in the winter where that was the season. The rest of the year, you never saw any oranges. Apples you saw in the autumn, when the apples... Herrings for example we sold, in a big barrel, and customers would take out a herring, or two herrings, and we'd wrap em up.

We didn't have fridges – people went shopping every day. In the butchers shop, we had a cold room, but it had ice in. We had a guy who came along every day, and delivered blocks of ice, which went into a compartment on the side of the cold room, and that sort of lasted for 24 hours, 36 hours. If Yom Tov was, say, Thursday or Friday, people would buy their stuff on Wednesday, leave it in the cold room or leave some of it in the cold room, pick it up on Friday morning to cook for Shabbos, because you couldn't keep things for three days. We would go off to shul and my mother would sit there, the door wouldn't be open, the side door was open, she always complained that she was left to sort out. They wrote their names on the paper and after it had been laying in the cold room for a day or two days, you could hardly read it, and then women would all have arguments - 'I bought a big chicken, this is a small chicken!'

One thing I can tell you is we had electric lights in our house, the house next door didn't have any electric lights, they had gas lighting – in Hackney. We certainly didn't have a time switch, so on Friday night we didn't put the lights on. We had candles on the table, and when the candles finished, we went to bed. We didn't have any central heating – how we managed in the winter – it was a big house, with big rooms, all the rooms were at least this size or bigger, high ceilings. They weren't easy to heat – but I suppose we got used to it, wore heavier clothing.

Housing wasn't expensive. You could get a flat, I know when my brother got married, they had a flat, probably just one bedroom and a living room, and they paid 10 shillings a week, 50 pence a week for a flat. So, our house, and the shops, if it was £5 a week, which is ridiculous. The house was rented – it was very rare for people to buy. After the war, or just before the war certainly, you could buy a house in Golders Green for £500. So if you had £50 deposit, you could buy a house. But £50 was...the average salary in 1939 was probably £3 a week. It took some saving up, it was quite a large proportion of your earnings. Alright, everything was in proportion – food wasn't as expensive as today, and your rent wasn't as expensive as it is today.

In Israel today most people rent. I know my cousins there have lived there for 50 years, they still rent their apartments. Its quite a normal thing – we think its odd.

When they first lived there [in Hackney] all the children were at home, of course. So we had on the ground floor, there was a kitchen, there was a big dining room, and joining it with double doors was a living room. On the first floor there were two bedrooms. On the ground floor at the back there was a toilet – there was no bathroom; we didn't have a bathroom. On the first floor there were two bedrooms, and on the second floor there were another 2 bedrooms. And there was a basement where we had a copper, which was a big metal concrete bowl, with a fire underneath it, where we washed clothes. Also there was a mangle, that you turn to dry the clothes, to squeeze the water out. We had a girl living in, an Irish girl, she had one of the rooms at the top, there was another room at the top. She was an Irish girl, she did the cleaning, of course we had coal fires so she cleaned out the coal fires and laid the coal fire.

One of the rooms in the basement was a coal cellar, on the pavement outside the house, there was a manhole, and the guy who delivered the coal, dropped the coal through the manhole, into our cellar. On of the stories is that you had to watch him, as to how many bags he put in, because he would leave bags there, and come along and say 'I've delivered 5 bags of coal, there's the 5 bags.' But whether he delivered them or not, was questionable! That's one of the side stories. There was another room where we kept the beer, in the basement. We used to drink beer, my father used to drink beer. We weren't wine drinkers – we had wine for Kiddush but that was it. We had a whisky, the tradition is to have whisky after the fish. Beer was the drink. So that was the house.

There were 6 of us living there, originally. That's not 100% true - my elder sister Lily, she must have got married when we were still in the East End. I don't remember – I'm told I was 3 when she got married, because you realise my next brother was 13 years older, and she was the eldest, so there was another 3 before. Maybe 18 years older than me. She moved to Brussels, in Belgium.

Passport of Gpa and his mother

We went to visit – how old was I then? 7, 8? I remember that. Later, I went with my sister Ray, on a visit to Belgium. And they came over to us a couple of times, I remember them coming over to Hackney. When Cynthia was born, Ray and Joe lived in Hackney still, after they were married, in the same house.

The eldest brother, Morry, he died in 1941. He wasn't married, he fell ill, there was nothing...before antibiotics, anything like that. He got pneumonia, or something and there was nothing they could do. I think he was 30.

Uncle Izzie, I remember him getting married, and I remember Ray getting married. I remember Ray quite clearly, because she insisted I had to have a top hat, because I was page boy. She dragged me round all the shops trying to find a top hat that would fit a 10 year old boy. I think there's a picture of me somewhere.

There was nobody else living in Hackney – my grandparents lived in the East End. They moved, he retired and sold the shop, my maternal grandparents. My father's parents I never knew, they died in Warsaw. Maternal grandparents were Dombrovsky. Their children, my mother's siblings, they then changed their surnames to their first names – the oldest one was Lazarus, the next one was Davis, the next one was Denton. His first name was Ralph, but he called himself Denton. He completely anglicised it. Then there was Domb – that's the shortened Dombrovsky. Two of my aunts married Americans, the two eldest – my mother was the eldest, but the two next ones. Lily and Florence – one lived in Chicago and one lived in San Diego. They came over every couple of years, to see their parents. They saved up for two years, to make the trip.

I don't think my grandfather was very happy about it. They certainly weren't shidduchim. They met wherever they met, that's how it was. People did travel, not as frequently as they do today. My two brothers went over to New York in 1938, they had just started in the fashion business here. The fashion business was in its infancy – there was no fashion business prior to that. You went into a shop and you picked out a style and the material, and they gave it to a seamstress to make a dress for you. Ready-made didn't exist, to a great extent. New York was the centre – that's where the fashion business really started. They wanted to go, emigrate and start business there. And they wanted my parents to come with – and my father didn't want to go. So they didn't go. I could have ended up in New York. One thing you can take from that – I'm not saying its something to be proud of or not to be proud of, I'm not judging anyone on it – it's an example of the different attitude, where today certainly, when Anthony said he was going to the States, only for two years, I must admit I wasn't very happy. I never said anything, I wouldn't have stopped him. But as I said, with my brothers my father didn't want to go – so they didn't go. That was the end of it. It's a different attitude, if you like. They wanted to take everybody with. But my father wouldn't leave Warsaw while his father was alive. They left Warsaw the year after my grandfather died – he wouldn't leave his father.

Maurie worked for somebody else as a salesman. I know the guy, he's no longer allive. He worked for somebody else as a salesman, in the fashion business. Fashion business in those days, we didn't supply any shops at all – we supplied wholesalers. The dresses were delivered in boxes, like you buy shirts today. It was only years later – it took, maybe after the war, that we started delivering dresses on hangers. We sold our dresses at 3 shillings and 11 pence, 4 and 6 (22p), 5 and 9, and 6 and 11. But for 6 and 11 we already had embroidery on there, there was probably about 2 shillings of expenses added to it. The cheapest ones were boxed in threes; the more expensive ones were single boxes. This was to the wholesalers, they would go around selling it to high street shops. It was the wholesaler who was the stockist.

The trade was Jewish, to a large extent. Part of it was a result of the fact that a lot of the Jews when they came over to England, their trades had been tailoring. So it was an allied industry, plus the fact that as far as the retail side is concerned, its the same as you have today, or a few years ago, with the Asian immigrants. They went into retail shops, you don't need a lot of expertise, you need a little bit of capital to buy some stock, and if you sell you replace your stock. All you have to do is be prepared to stand behind the counter, perhaps for long hours. The fashion trade was something, when my brothers started, they had no expertise, all they did was, they would buy or take a picture out of a magazine, buy a length of material from a cloth merchant, in the East End, make up a sample, take it round to a wholesaler, try to get a order, if you were a good salesman and you had something different. You got an order for 100 garments, over 3 sizes, perhaps 3 colours, go back to the cloth merchant, buy a few rolls of cloth, give it to your outdoor worker who would make them up, and he would deliver them back to you, you would box them up, which was my job, and delivering them. If you had a flair for fashion, which apparently my brothers did – I never did – I can claim on the factory side, I learnt how to make a pattern and I learnt how to use a machine. Every machine in the factory. But as far as design is concerned, I had no idea at all – but my brothers did. By being able to pick out designs which were attractive – they weren't original, you take something out of a magazine or that's already on show, and you change it slightly, you never make it exactly the same. And if you were a good salesman as well, which apparently they were, then you were in business.

They started in 1936/37. My brother Izzie was working in the shop, my brother Maurie worked for this guy as a salesman. He had the idea of the fashion business. My brother Izzie had no experience at all – he was working in the butcher's shop. He knew how to open chickens! I never walked through the butcher's shop – I always used to walk up the side. He took the opportunity of getting out. As I say, when I came along I was 14, they needed someone they could trust in the warehouse. We didn't have a factory. The factory started after the war, because production became a problem. A lot of the people that we used as manufacturers started selling manufacturing themselves. Rather than make up for us, they said they could do the same job, they could buy the material, go out and get the orders. They didn't need us. So, we had to go back one step and... vertically integrate (Mya)

Only one of my cousins was in the fashion business – one of the Lazarus. In fact two of them – Izzie – in fact he started quite cleverly, at a much higher standard. He didnm't go for the cheapest, highly competitive, he went for a higher standard. He did very well. In my last years, when Izzie had retired, and I was left on my own, I switched over to, started supplying Liberty's, and C&A 6th Sense, which was their top label. Within my own factory I could control the quality – at the cheaper end we had competition from the Greeks at that time. We could no longer compete with them, as far as the actual cost of making was concerned, because they could work, when it was busy they could work 18 hours a day, when it was quiet, they went home. Whereas we had mostly English workers, and they worked normally 8.30-5, and that was it. If you were busy, too bad, and if it was slack, you were afraid of losing them, so we still had to pay them, and we'd make up stock etc.

Some of the cousins were academic, and they went on to university, quite a few of them. I don't know whether it was encouragement from above, why – to say that they were more clever or more academic, its difficult to say. Some of them went into property. We only really kept in touch with my grandparents, my mother's parents', family. The others, there were 3 brothers that came here – the Dombrovskys – one of them changed his name to Daniels, same sort of thing. He did very well, he went into the scrap metal business – he was in that business in the First World War, he already made a lot of money then. I think his sons followed in the same business. The other one was Barnet, I think he was also a butcher – I know very little about him or his family. We did meet them occasionally, on a wedding or something like that, but we didn't have close contact.

One of them happened to contact me a year ago, she was doing a family history and wanted some confirmation of some information, some data that she had. She came to see me and we went through some of that, I corrected her on some things and added a few things to it as far as my side of the family was concerned. I wasn't particularly interested - I think the future is more important than the past. I say that, and I qualify it, because I am interested in history, and I do read history continuously. On the other hand, family history, maybe I'm wrong but somehow it doesn't seem to... When I think back, the history we learnt in school – we learnt the history of the kings and when they were executed, or how long they lived, wars, when they started – we didn't even learn any reason why they started. History was very date-orientated, whereas today when I read history, and I read a book on Shakespeare – Shakespeare in London it was called. It was nothing about Shakespeare at all, it was about the street that he lived in London, and about the different people who lived there, and what went on in the period when he lived. That I find very interesting.

At home we spoke Yiddish – that was our first language. Between parents and children, but also between ourselves. I used to speak Yiddish to my brother in the factory, if we didn't want anyone else to understand. It wasn't just a question of speaking a few words – we could have a conversation. I must admit today I find it difficult – the last person I spoke to in any extended way was Julie's father, Cederbaum. His English wasn't particularly good, he had a smattering, when we were together, Yiddish was our language.

I had a client who I saw occasionally in Stamford Hill, and the kids and the parents, they speak Yiddish. I'm not sure whether it was the right thing to do or not [not to speak Yiddish to the children], none of the kids spoke Yiddish. This is a very distinctive difference between the Jews in that period and the immigrants now, or in the last 20 years. The immigrants wanted to integrate – and the JFS had the same attitude, it taught people to be English. That was the principle, and people wanted. To us it just came naturally, that was our language. I don't think we had any problems when we went to school.

I know my sister, Ray, gave me the name Sidney. My birth certificate has the name Shia Nachum...you can call me Shia Nachum, I don't mind! There was one guy who worked for us when I started working with my brothers, who insisted on calling me Shia Nachum, but he knew me for home, he wasnt one of the family, but he was one of the guys who worked there – didn't bother me... When I first went to school – from then onward, I became Sidney. Until I got my first passport, it had Shia Nachum, known as Sidney. Because when you apply for a passport, you give them your birth certificate. When they renewed it they put Sidney.

[Wedding photos] We went to the studio in Oxford St, and they wanted a deposit, I said 'I don't have any money' you know traditionally, the bridegroom doesn't have any money on him. So, no deposit, no pictures, 'OK let's forget it.' Of course, your mother wasn't very happy so I said I'll give you an IOU. So I wrote out an IOU for, fifty pounds or whatever.