One winter’s day in 1973, Clive Murphy — Liverpool born, Irish bred, a sometime solicitor, marketing man and primary school teacher — found himself sitting in an East End café, and marvelling at the non-stop performance of one of his fellow diners.
‘The noisiest, most provocative talker in Georgiana’s … that was Alex Hartog. One night I approached his table, dared suggest he use my tape recorder to make a book*. That he agreed without a moment’s hesitation surprised me. But then Alex Hartog was a very surprising person,’ Clive remembers.
Over the next years, Murphy was to reinvent himself cast as a latterday Mayhew, recording the thoughts, memories and outpourings of ordinary East Enders such as Alex, and publishing them as the Ordinary Lives series. He had already put to paper the story of Beatrice Ali, a former street character and Salvation Army hosteller in Good Deeds of a Good Woman.
In Alex, he found his most garrulous character yet. The torrent of words was unstaunchable, as Hartog painted a vivid picture of a childhood and adult years in the Jewish East End, a poor yet rich life revolving around the synagogue, Petticoat Lane market and most of all the family.
Most poignant of all, despite his dreams of making it big as a singer, Alex never made it out of Whitechapel. In 1973 he was living in one room at 46 Cavell Street (just a stone’s throw from where he had been born, just off Petticoat Lane) and working as a tailor’s under presser in New Road. Apart from a brief, eventful and unhappy spell in the army, Alex’s whole life had been spent on a single page of the A-Z.
But if it was a geographically limited existence it wasn’t lacking in colour or characters. Alex’s redoubtable mother had been born in Lithuania, but found herself widowed when her husband failed to return from the Japanese-Russian War in 1905. Left with an infant son, Jacob, she worked her way across Europe as a cook ‘with the instinct of all persecuted people to keep moving till they find somewhere peaceful where they’re not spat at’.
Like so many others, she fetched up in Whitechapel, wresting a hard-won living from a stall on Petticoat Lane (first pins and elastic, then fruit and veg) and disposing of a series of husbands she considered too feckless as she determinedly provided for a growing brood of kids. For Alex and his beloved sister Betty, the area was a wonderland, and they would roam the streets between end of school and going home time.
“The Lane was a carnival.” There was a man who sold ointments to cure corns. Another man sold what he claimed was [the aphrodisiac] extract of Spanish Fly (‘don’t give it to minors’), and a rather sad troupe of five World War I veterans, one with a barrel organ, the rest performing ballet and tap in women’s dresses. And of course there was Prince Monolulu, wearing a feather headdress and selling tips with his catchphrase ‘I’ve got a horse.’
Education was at the Jewish Free School in Bell Lane. “It wasn’t the kids or teachers who impressed me most, it was the building. I could sense it — a big, warm friendly mother with the right vibrations.” But Alex got accustomed to disappointment early. A bright boy, he was recommended for a scholarship to Davenant School by his teacher, but it was then withdrawn because of his stammer. For Alex it was to be the Central School and then a succession of jobs in the tailoring shops of the East End.
The call-up, and service in the Pioneer Corps didn’t affect his twin loves of singing and boxing. The former saw the talented tenor appearing in ENSA productions, while the latter helped Alex deal summarily with the anti-Semitic comments he received from certain of his fellow squaddies.
At 25, Alex was back in Civvy Street and walking in the West End when he saw an old face, a fortune teller from the old Petticoat Lane days. Seeing the mind reader and his girl assistant, Alex decides to chance his luck. Picturing his dream of singing success, he quietly asks her whether his ambition will be realised. ‘No’, she replies. ‘And that came true.’
In years Alex was to reflect ruefully on another Lane fortune teller, an old Jamaican woman who would predict the future using a complex system involving a canary pecking at pre-printed slips of paper. This unreliable method predicted that Alex (who died a childless bachelor) would marry three times and father seven kids. ‘I want my money back,’ he ruefully reflected.
The increasingly melancholy story sees Alex working for a succession of garment shops as an under presser, waiting with quiet desperation for the break into the big time that never comes, and reflecting with bitterness on those who took the chances he missed. But, as Alex muses, ‘there’s a satisfaction that goes beyond fame and money. I didn’t to millions on TV and radio but I did sing at the Troxy and the Poplar Civic. In showbusiness you’ve got to have someone to direct you.’ A wistful Alex muses on a lifetime ‘waiting on the sidelines, wanting to go on, but never being called’. Alex Hartog died shortly after Born to Sing was published.
Born to Sing (Ordinary Lives No 2), edited by Clive Murphy, is stocked by Eastside Bookshop, 178 Whitechapel Road, or from Brick Lane Books, 132 Brick Lane.