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Pre War East End memories from Aldgate
Pump to all stops East, by Dr Cyril Sherer, now in his 80's and living in
Israel
I lived in the East End from the
time of my birth in 1921 till the outbreak of war in 1939. Presciently,
because our home was later destroyed in the blitz in 1941, my parents had
moved from New Rd in 1939 to live with friends in Queensdown Rd, Hackney,
which coincidentally was where I was born, closing the circle so to speak
I never lived there again, and
apart from a few visits to my maternal grandparents in Redchurch Street,
Shoreditch in 1940 I have virtually never been back. I left England in
1946 to serve in the New Zealand Army Medical Corps in Japan. I lived in
New Zealand where I was in Medical practice from 1948 till my Aliyah in
1961 and have been back to the East End as it now is, once or twice on my
infrequent visits to London. In my mind, however I go there often
Nevertheless my years there
shaped me for better or for worse for the rest of my life. For the former
I am grateful. As for the latter, I am still working on it more than 80
years later!
The Jewish East End was a
transplant from Eastern Europe, probably identical with Warsaw, New York's
Lower East side, or the Marais in Paris. As a transplant it naturally
induced antibodies. Anti-Semitism was powerful.
There were streets like Plumbers Row which as children we were told to
avoid. I don't suppose I ever went there though I knew where it was.
Gentiles lived there. We lived in a ghetto without
walls. The world began (and ended) at the Aldgate Pump. The community of
around 200,000 had it's own institutions and it's own way of life, it's
own dialect
The two worlds were different,
and we were different from the outside. The great thing about the East End
was it's social structure. In modern terms it would be known as a
meritocracy. You succeeded by your own efforts or you didn't succeed at
all. There were no class distinctions. There might have been minor
differences between the (few) Sephardim and the majority Ashkenazim, but
this was no cause for communal friction. Perhaps some good-natured
kidding, but no more than that. We were a collective group and we knew it. This was nothing like the class
distinction of British society outside, vertical in structure, each class
separated from the one below by a non-porous membrane
Few East-Enders broke out of the
framework. You needed a special force, like a rocket breaking through the
stratosphere to get into orbit. The ways out were few. Musicians- mostly
jazz-musicians, boxers, criminals, the occasional politician like Phil
Piratin. Writers, poets, painters, the specially talented. A mathematician
like Selig Brodetsky; a physiologist like Samson Wright who was so
brilliant that his hospital couldn't in all decency overlook him for the
Professorship which he achieved when he was about 25, a year after he
produced his major text-book. Jacob Bronowsky. Vidal Sassoon. And hundreds
of doctors, lawyers, accountants and the like. The majority though didn't
dream of careers. Career? Who knew what the word meant? Most people were
lucky to have a job
I almost forgot to mention my
cousin Morris "Two-Gun" Cohen. As a boy he was sent to Borstal as a petty
criminal. He finished up as an aide-de-camp to Dr Sun Yat Sen, and finally
a General in the Chinese Nationalist Army. Volumes have been written about
him
So much has been written about
the lively characters who lived there, most of it true. I remember the
"mad artist" with rolled-up umbrella, sun-tanned face, open-necked shirt
in rain or in (rare) sunshine. The old man who played the same
cracked 78 rpm Yiddish record on an ancient gramophone perched on an
equally ancient pram. He played and re-played "Gei tzum ausland" a
thousand times a day. Reputedly he wasn't even Jewish, despite his beard.
His head was sunk in his chest, as though he and his clothes were cast
from one mold. One might easily have thought there was no true human being
inside the clothing. He never moved. No-one knew where he came from or
where he went when he trudged to, pushing his old pram. There was Pugachow the
wine-merchant and his three retarded children. He had a limp so bad that
he dragged one of his legs almost on the ground as he walked. In 1934 they
took a few old men as extras on the film "Jew Suss" starring Conrad Veidt
(incidentally not Jewish). When the director saw Pugachow on the set he
told him to walk more naturally, "don't exaggerate". I remember Phil the Fiddler
(Phil Bernstein) leading the orchestra at the Grand Palais: he used his
bow to swipe at kids swinging on the brass railing of the orchestra pit.
And Hymie Landau's cafeteria opposite the theatre. I once heard a Yiddish
actor come in to order a "cup coffee mit a piss chiz cake—a centre piss!".
(You got more cheese that way). Sussman (with his lisp, Thuthman) the
impresario. Started life as a printer
My friend Alfie Goldfarb, my
business partner. Alfie would go round to the schmatte manufacturers to
buy up remnants of material. We rented a barrow for sixpence a day which
we pushed over Tower Bridge to the markets where we'd sell them to old
women who made kid's pants out of them. I was the sales guy. Till my Dad
saw me pushing the barrow one morning. "My son is not going to push no
barrer" he said. And that was the end of my business career. Dad had
bourgois pretensions. He was also the reason I became
a doctor. I really wanted to work in the theatre, but my Dad had cast
himself in the role of "the father of the doctor" and I was only a stage
prop to his ambitions. Nowadays I am glad he did. In his own picturesque
way he said "actors don't eat three times a day" and he was probably
right. I guess I didn't want it enough to run away from home
How could one sum up life in the
East End? Dirty and warm. Colourful in a figurative sense and gray in the
literal. But always kinetic. When I think of life there it is always in
motion, never a series of stills. A moving mental screen, not a picture
album of separate pages. People moving, arguing, shouting, expressing
their souls in Yiddish, their body posture demanding compromise-- a sort
of cork-screw twist starting at the shoulder. People were alive. Perhaps vital would be a better
word. We were far removed from nature. Trees and birds were not our
companions, more likely bed-bugs, if you will forgive me
The following are some
impressions. Others have written more in detail. I would like to focus in
on one set of memories only, schooldays. I am told that I was an
impossible child. They couldn't control me at home. I was a fidget. They
called it "St Vitus' Dance. In those days giving a disease a name was
sufficient. It concealed ignorance, especially if in Latin. When I was
three and half my mother convinced the elementary teachers in Myrdle
Street school to take me on. Normal starting age was five. One of my first
memories is sitting in a sand-box playing with what seemed to be a large
doll's house, while we kids sang "Oh dear what can the matter be".
Altercations with one of my teachers later on, one Godfrey Cherns which
culminated in his throwing a book at me, cutting my chin, brought my
otherwise gentle mother to do battle with Mr Cherns. He had wounded HER
CYRIL
 So
at the age of eight I was transferred to Settle Street. I was horribly
precocious and after a couple of years when a school report came through
saying "Cyril is sitting on his laurels" my mom marched off to see the
headmaster Mr Lewis whom I remember as an old man with a fringe of white
hair looking as though he wore a table-cloth on his head. She asked him if
she should send me to a private school (where would the money have come
from?). Mr Lewis looked at her and said "Mrs Sherer, there is no need. I
am putting Cyril UP FOR A SCHOLARSHIP. This boy can grow up to be Lord
Chief Justice of England if he wants ". Well, I didn't want. Moreover I
have what is now known as Attention Deficit Disorder which has plagued me
all my life, especially in Medical School. It is treatable now, but not
then. The school, incidentally was
opposite my cheder, on the corner of Fordham and Settle Street. I studied
(sic) amongst twenty or thirty other noisy little boys and one girl, Edna
Weinglass, whose Dad kept the pub on the corner of Fieldgate Street and
Plumbers Row. Chumash and siddur were beaten
into us by one Joe Cohen (known to one and all as "Bandy" Cohen). He was
built like a Kurd. His technique of teaching involved liberal use of a
cane with which he kept time on our backs while we chanted Hebrew numbers
with increasing higher decibels. I visited the building a few
years back. It was by then the "Greater Asia Textile Company" the mezuzah
was still on the door. Now it has reverted to become the 'Sassover shul
I was duly entered for the
entrance exam for Davenant Foundation School. Aged ten, I came out top,
because it was based only on general knowledge and I read the papers
avidly. Thus started my academic career. The school had been founded in
1680 by the Reverend Ralph Davenant, as part of his foundation for the
forty or so children of his Parish. Whitechapel was then a village
separate from the City of London. By the time the massive
immigration of Jews from Europe into the East End had occurred two hundred
years later, the school had become almost exclusively Jewish. There were
two token non-Jews in my time and one hundred and ninety-nine Jewish boys. The school building was a fine
old Edwardian orange-stone structure of pleasing, symmetrical design. It
is now a Pakistani youth centre. It had a fine hall where we sang
sanitized hymns every morning. Good rousing tunes. The teachers were
called "Masters" which says it all. The Head was "The Headmaster". There
was virtually no connection between us. It was open warfare from day one.
The school was a copy of a British Public school. It was divided into
four houses, as though we were resident which thank God we weren't. There
was some caning, not too much. I think the beak, one "Gobby" Evans would
have liked more but probably didn't want to take on too many yiddisher
mamas. The only time in my whole 8
years there we ever had any social contact with a teacher was when the
only Jewish staff member "Shimmy" Rosen, the physics teacher, took a bunch
of us to the local Lyons Corner House for cream buns. Otherwise gornisht.
There was no such thing as a school counsellor. Psychologist? Don't make
me laugh
Yet I came out of there with a
life-long love of English literature, Milton and Shakespeare; a working
knowledge of French (extended by far too many sessions at Studio One in
Tottenham Court Rd where I did what I call my post-graduate studies
watching French movies), and a smattering of Chemistry. Oh, we also
learned Latin. I acquired a hatred of
discipline and organizational structures which later on in life must have
influenced me into practicing medicine outside all known frameworks
I said at the start that I am
still working through some problems in my upbringing. I hope they are a
minority in my personality structure. I think that most of the techniques
for dealing with people, (nowadays known as "social skills) which I
learned in the East End of London have been amongst the most valuable
lessons of life I could have possibly have had. I was taught much in school, but
not how to think. This must surely have come from my life in the East End
Even though it's all gone I have
a mental refuge which it's one hell of a lot of fun to return to in my
mind. I come out of it with a very good feeling, as though I am at home
amongst friends......Except there's no-one there...
"Our
revels now are ended. These our actors
As I foretold you, were all
spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin
air…
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on,
And our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
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