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Simon Blumenfeld … an obituary

Thursday, November 4th, 2010



When Sidney Vauncez died in April this year, he ceded his place in the Guinness Book of Records … as the world’s oldest working journalist on a nationally available weekly paper. At the age of 97 he was still penning his regular piece for theatrical journal The Stage. He had had a long and varied career. Novelist, journalist and playwright, he was also a keen documenter of the Jewish East End. His own history though was a little more mysterious, and it was a mystique Sidney positively encouraged.

Vauncez was a nom de plume for a start. Simon Blumenfeld was his real name, as Jewish as you can get, though Simon embraced the culture and not the faith: a confirmed Marxist, he was no fan of religion. He was deliberately vague about his roots, though his son Eric was to dig out what little he could of the family tree, revealing that his father’s family (then called Composiore rather than Blumenfeld) had come from Sicily, where they grew olives until a volcanic eruption destroyed the business. Simon’s grandfather had been a sailor, possibly a pirate, while Simon’s father was born in Turkey. His mother came from Odessa in the Ukraine. Certainly, during a brief stop in Bavaria, en route to London, the Composiores were practising Catholics. Towards the end of the 19th century they came to London and settled in the East End.

The young Simon was born here on 25 November 1907, and his early years were formed by the radicalism of the Jewish East End. He became a Communist and soaked up the works of Israel Zangwill, becoming determined to make it as a writer. He was a friend of East End boxer Jack Berg (once sparring with him). Largely self-educated he became involved in organising volunteers for the Spanish Civil War and against Mosley.


During the 20s and 30s, Blumenfeld produced plays and novels. His first The Iron Garden, set in the East End, was published in America in 1932. It came out in Britain in 1935, re-entitled Jew Boy, and was reissued in the 1980s. A 1937 novel, Phineas Kahn, was reissued in 1988, with an introduction by Steven Berkoff.

But during the 1930s, Simon realised that journalism was more likely to pay the bills. He became a correspondent for a French news agency, simultaneously hacking out cowboy novels (a hugely popular genre at the time) under the soubriquet Huck Messer. From the Yiddish for ‘carving knife’ it was only one of Simon’s colourful pen names. Literary friends at the time included Aldous Huxley, who had penned the dystopian fantasy Brave New World in 1932.

His political beliefs didn’t stop Blumenfeld signing up at the outbreak of World War II – he considered the Nazis a far greater evil. A curious posting saw the talented writer assigned to the Royal Army Ordnance Corps in the Midlands, where he became an authority on German ammunition. The Army got it right second time around, transferring Simon to the script-writing crew of Stars In Battledress, an army talent show. His station was now the rather more glamorous Grosvenor Square, where he began rubbing shoulders with future stars such as Charlie Chester. It was Blumenfeld’s entrée to the world of showbiz.

Simon began writing for titles including Band Wagon, and here he adopted the alias Sidney Vauncez. From the Yiddish for ‘moustache’, it reflected the luxuriant handlebar job he had now cultivated. He founded the Weekly Sporting Review with army pal Isidore Green, the paper combining their twin loves of showbiz and boxing. But a libel suit from the managers of Tommy Steele sunk the title.

Blumenfeld became light entertainment editor of the Stage in the early 1960s, a pivotal time for the business. Rock and roll and TV light entertainment had all but killed off variety (the successor to the music halls). But the astute writer realised traditional talent was flowing into the club scene, largely based in the north but soon to cover the whole country.

He had an extraordinary breadth of showbiz friends and acquaintances: Paul Robeson, Mistinguette, the Beatles and Barbara Windsor to name but a few.
Legendary East End villain Jack ‘Spot’ Comer asked Simon to ghost his autobiography … his wife then dissuading him.

In 1987 he penned a play for the Edinburgh Fringe, The Battle of Cable Street – a modern look at the East End, which drew on his own past. A video produced a few years ago, East Endings, took Simon and friends back to their East End beginnings. Released to mark the 80th birthday of Simon’s pal, the artist and illustrator Harry Blacker (aka the cartoonist Nero), the film was set in Bloom’s in Whitechapel and featured a diverse cast of East Enders, including Barnet Litvinoff. Bill Fishman, Anna Tzelniker and Simon/Sidney himself.

· Simon Blumenfeld, journalist and author, born November 25 1907; died April 3 2005


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Bloom’s Restaurant

Thursday, November 4th, 2010



For many, Bloom’s Restaurant was symbolic of the Jewish East End. When The Whitechapel eaterie went, in 1996, it was a sad sign of how the Jewish population of Tower Hamlets had declined and dispersed. For others, Bloom’s was simply a good place to eat, an experience sharpened by some of the most spectacularly rude service in London.

The man responsible for rise of Bloom’s was Sidney Bloom, who died last summer, aged 82. In 1952 he established the East End establishment which became ‘Britain’s most famous kosher restaurant’ (as it said above the door).

The original Bloom’s had been established by Sidney’s father, Morris, a Lithuanian immigrant who arrived in London in 1912. He set up the first restaurant in Brick Lane in 1920. During the early 1930s, the restaurant moved to the corner of Old Montague Street and, in 1952, to Whitechapel High Street.

The 1950s East End was still the centre of London’s Jewish community, and the reopened Bloom’s was an instant success with both local people and celebrities. Everybody would queue for their lockshen or gefilte fish – even Charlie Chaplin. The great London comic was a friend of Bloom, but when the restaurateur invited him to jump the queue, the modest Chaplin declined and waited his turn.

Other celebs were less accommodating. Frank Sinatra ordered a special delivery from Bloom’s to his suite at the Savoy. Sidney obliged, putting the meal on silver plates. The food was enjoyed, but the plates were never seen again, to the understandable horror of the parsimonious Bloom. This, after all, was a man who insisted that his waiters buy each meal from the kitchen, the staff then earning commission on what they sold.


This unique system of payment produced Bloom’s famous quality of service, politely described as ‘informal’. With the waiters on piecework, it was unsurprising that they would bully customers into eating quickly.

“From the welcome, ‘Sit there and wait till I’m ready,’ to the final slamming down of the bill, the customer was the enemy,” remembered journalist Simon Jenkins in an Evening Standard piece in 1966.

Yet the food was so good that customers would tolerate the rudeness. The noise of people waiting and dining was ‘immense. You could stand up and sing an operatic aria without attracting much attention,’ recalled writer John Sandilands in 1978.

The core clientele were now the grandchildren of those Yiddish speaking immigrants who, like Morris Bloom, had travelled from Eastern Europe, from Germany, Slovenia and Lithuania. Among their number were celebrities, like boxer Max Baer, musician Ronnie Scott, actor Steven Berkoff and film producer David Conroy. When Cliff Richard visited Bloom’s to dine during the early sixties, the crowd outside grew so large that the restaurant’s front window was broken. Bloom’s was not only a local favourite; it was a fashionable place to eat.

But the heyday was brief. From the 1960s onwards, Whitechapel’s Jewish population declined as people made their money and moved out to the suburbs of Golders Green and Ilford. An astute Sidney Bloom followed, and in 1965 opened a branch of Bloom’s at Golders Green. The walls were decked with East End scenes and the new branch was an instant hit.

The Whitechapel restaurant was in terminal decline however. In the early nineties the restaurant racked up a half million pound loss, and by 1996 the restaurant was in the newspapers for all the wrong reasons.

The food had to be kosher, of course, prepared according to Hebrew ordinances, and cooked by Jews. The slaughter of animals for meat had to be done in a certain way, accompanied by a prayer. Foods were then examined by a Rabbi to make sure that they conformed with the Jewish religion. But in January 1996, managing director Michael Bloom, Sidney’s son, had his food licence withdrawn by the Chief Rabbi after an attempted breach of these strict Jewish dietary laws.

The license was swiftly renewed under Sidney’s name, but it was a brief respite. A month later Bloom’s of Whitechapel closed its doors. East Enders nostalgic for salt beef, meatballs, gefilte fish and pickled herrings now have to travel to the thriving Golders Green branch to stock up.


Posted in East End food and restaurants, Jewish East End | 1 Comment »

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