eastlondonhistory.com

The story of Issy Smith is straight out of the ‘Boys’ Own’ adventures of the 1920s, though any writer of the day might have thought twice about constructing such an over the top tale. An 11-year-old boy who stowed away across Europe, to become a boy soldier, champion boxer and footballer, and went on to win the highest military honours from a trio of European nations - Issy’s tale was too remarkable to be true.

Most boys enrolling for their first day at Berner Street School in Whitechapel could be forgiven for feeling a little nervous. But when Ishroulch Shmeilowitz rolled up at the school gate in 1901 he had already come a long way. East End Jews had travelled from Poland, Germany and Russia to settle in Whitechapel, but the young Ishroulch’s journey surely unique. He had been born in Alexandria to Moses and Eva Shmeilowitz, French Jews of Polish extraction who were working in the Egyptian city for the French Consulate. Who knows what motivated the boy to stow away aboard a ship sailing out of the port for London, but a few weeks later he landed at Wapping. And days after that he was a pupil at Berner Street (now Henriques Street) just south of the Commercial Road.

In one way, Issy could be at home, though in a completely new country. Whitechapel and Stepney had become a huge Jewish ghetto, where Yiddish was the language of choice, so the youngster was hardly cast adrift in an alien culture. He left school just a year or two later and found work as a delivery boy around the East End, but by age 14 he had enlisted in the army, becoming a private in the Manchester Regiment (later amalgamated into The King’s Regiment and subsequently the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment).

The recruiting sergeant didn’t struggle for long with ‘Ishroulch Shmeilowitz’ before simply enlisting the new boy as plain ‘Issy Smith’. But whatever they called him, Issy was a credit to his regiment, serving in India and South Africa, becoming a keen footballer and becoming the British Army’s Middleweight boxing champion. While in India he won his first decoration, the Delhi Durbar Medal.

Discharged from the Army in 1912, Issy emigrated to Australia but was called up again at the outbreak of war in August 1914. The Manchesters suffered badly in World War I’s trench warfare. They lost hundreds of men in the battles of Neuve Chapelle and Givenchy, were depleted further at Ypres, and Smith would be gassed on the Western Front. It was in 1915 that Issy would commit the act of extraordinary heroism that would see him as the first living Jewish recipient of a Victoria Cross.

The London Gazette of 20 August 1915 takes up the tale:

“No. 168 Acting Corporal Issy Smith, 1st Battalion, The Manchester Regiment. For most conspicuous bravery on 26th April, 1915, near Ypres, when he left his Company on his own initiative and went well forward towards the enemy’s position to assist a severely wounded man, whom he carried a distance of 250 yards into safety, whilst exposed the whole time to heavy machine-gun and rifle fire. Subsequently Corporal Smith displayed great gallantry, when the casualties were very heavy, in voluntarily assisting to bring in many more wounded men throughout the day, and attending to them with the greatest devotion to duty regardless of personal risk.”

In September that year, Issy was invited back to Berner Street School to receive a gold watch from former classmates. It was just one leg of a tour, as the hero was used as the spearhead of a recruitment drive, travelling the length and breadth of the country. It wasn’t always a happy experience. Anti-semitism never ran far below the surface, and on one occasion in Yorkshire, a restaurant proprietor refused to serve Issy. Come to think of it, the writers of those ‘Boys Own’ adventures probably wouldn’t have made a boy called Ishroulch Shmeilowitz their hero either. Most people had more sense. Back in the East End Issy unveiled the Hackney War Memorial in 1921, and we was welcomed to a Buckingham Palace Garden Party for holders of the VC.

The 1920s were harder on the returning hero. He suffered ill health, partly as a result of his being gassed, and wasn’t always able to work. He was forced to pawn his medals for £20 (the Chief Rabbi led a campaign to buy them back, and Smith was presented with them anew). After a brief career as an actor, Issy emigrated to Australia in 1925 with wife Elsie, who bore him two children, Olive and Maurice. Issy would die in Melbourne of a coronary thrombosis, aged just 50, in September 1940, and was buried with full military honours. In 1990, his Victoria Cross would be sold again … though for £30,000 this time.

The themes, language and characters of ‘Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be’ were a disturbing blast of the new for London’s theatreland when the play moved up west from Stratford. So it comes as a shock to realise that the irreverent musical is 50 years old this month.

So much about the play was novel. This exuberant and sentimental piece by Lionel Bart and Frank Norman may not seem to share much with the ‘kitchen sink dramas’, and the ‘angry’ writers such as John Osborne, Harold Pinter, Arnold Wesker. But it too played its part in sweeping away the dead wood from the West End. The Shaftsbury Avenue of the 1950s seemed filled with plays that reflected polite Edwardian London rather than a city where Teddy Boys were slashing cinema seats. In the work of Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan, the working classes were represented by minor comedy characters - in Bart and Norman’s play, the working classes (teds and all) took centre stage.

With the background of the two, how could it be any different. The play had been written by Norman, who had followed a troubled road to the East End. He had been abandoned by his mum and dad as a boy, turned out by his adoptive parents, and shunted around a succession of children’s homes before drifting into crime and a three-year prison sentence in his early twenties. Released from jail in 1957 he began writing. First his prison memoir, ‘Bang to Rights’ was a surprise hit. Soon afterwards, Joan Littlewood, who was reinventing theatre out at Stratford East, picked up the draft of ‘Fings’. She handed it to collaborator Lionel Bart and the experimental theatre company had a hit on its hands.

Bart meanwhile was East End to the core. Lionel Begleiter had been born in Stepney, the son of a Jewish tailor. He was a talented painter and a natural musician but seemd to lack the discipline to stick at anything. In the late forties he was expelled from St Martin’s School of Art for ‘mischievousness’. That mischief found an outlet a few years later, first in a string of hits for Tommy Steele, Cliff Richard and Anthony Newley, then in a run of musicals that drew heavily on his cockney roots.

Bart took the language of the East End and cranked it to within an inch of parody. And in ‘Fings’ he had great material to start with. Jeffrey Bernard, no mean hand with a comic phrase himself, wrote that Norman was “a ‘natural’ writer of considerable wit, powers of sardonic observation and with a razor sharp ear for dialogue particularly as spoken in the underworld”. As any writer knows, there is a wealth of craft and a deal of sweat in appearing ‘natural’. Frank’s renditions of cockney speak is real like the New York slang of Damon Runyon’s New Yorkers is real - colourful, exaggerated and humourous, catching the spirit of the language better than any dry transcription could.

And when Bart got hold of Norman’s play ‘Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’be’ (it was always dubbed ‘a play with music’ rather than a musical) the great Brooklyn writer might have recognised many of the character types - if he could have understood the words that is. Bart, released from the restrictions of turning out two and a half minute pop songs for Cliff Richard, Tommy Steele and Anthony Newley, went totally to town. He knew he was good. For years he had been writing songs for amateur revues at the left-wing Unity Theatre (a theatre club that had grown from the Workers’ Theatre Movement, itself born in the politics of the 1930s’ East End). But he had also won three Ivor Novello awards for his pop numbers in 1957, another four in ‘58 and two in 1960. By the time he got to work on ‘Fings’ Bart was at the top of his game and oozing confidence.

So Lionel took Norman’s motley crew of spivs, hookers, gamblers, teds and bent coppers and matched his cracking tunes to lyrics that had some among the West End audiences laughing … but others scratching their heads. The references to ‘our local Palais’, trips to Southend and ‘Teds in drainpipe trousers’ were one thing. But the use of rhyming slang and thieves cant (similar to gay ‘polari’, this back slang was only intelligible to those in the know) mystified many in the stalls. The producers thoughtfully produced translations of many of the words in the programme. A few years later, another product of Stratford East, ‘Sparrers Can’t Sing’ would also baffle non-cockneys.

Give it a few years and everybody would expect regional accents and slang in their films, plays, musicals and pop songs. Bart, who probably thought he was, at 29, at the start of a brilliant career, was sadly closer to its end. ‘Oliver!’ followed just a year after ‘Fings’ but the sixties saw a a couple of hits followed by some expensive flops. Norman wrote more autobiography, a string of moderately successful novels, before enjoying an Indian Summer with his three late ‘Soho caper’ novels, featuring Soho private eye Ed Nelson.

* Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’be debuted at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in February 1959.
* Frank Norman died in December 1980 of Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
* Lionel Bart died in 1999 of cancer.

Whitechapel painter David Bomberg has been described as ‘the most audacious’ of the young group of East End artists, all born in the 1890s, who became dubbed ‘The Whitechapel Boys’. His refusal to be bracketed as a painter led to conflict, most strikingly when one major patron turned a commissioned work down … forcing a furious Bomberg to go back and have another go. And it also saw him undertake an extraordinary artistic journey, from his early cubist compositions to his later expressionist landscapes.

David Gershen Bomberg was the seventh of eleven children, born on 5 December 1890 to a family of Polish Jews in Birmingham. His father, a leatherworker, moved the family to Whitechapel when David was five years old. A talented artist, he left school to study at the City & Guilds of London Art School in Kennington, then returned to Birmingham to train as a lithographer.

It was a solid trade but not one for the young Bomberg. He raised the money to study painting at the Westminster School of Art, with help from the Jewish Education Aid Society and John Singer Sargent. The latter was the most successful English portrait painter of the time, and a geneous patron to other artists. At Westminster, Bomberg came under the tutelage of Walter Sickert. The great British painter would later, improbably, be collared as a suspect in the Whitechapel Murders, but in 1908 he was better known as a major figure in English Art, an impressionist who used London scenes and people as his material. This emphasis on the ‘gross material facts’ of London life made a big impact on Bomberg.

The young painter was now absorbing the work of Cezanne and the Post-Impressionists, whose number included Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec. As the movement mutated into Fauvism and Cubism, with new stars such as Matisse, Derain, Braque and Picasso, Bomberg began studies at the Slade School of Art. It was an astonishingly creative period, with professor of art Henry Tonks (’the most renowned and formidable teacher of his generation’) teaching Mark Gertler, Isaac Rosenberg, Gwen John, Ben Nicholson, Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer among others. There was a host of East Enders in there, and Bomberg won the Tonks prize in 1911 for his drawing of Whitechapel artist and poet Rosenberg.

But he was swiftly moving away from conventionally figurative and representational art. A 1912 London exhibition of work by the Italian Futurists opened his eyes to the abstractions of Severini and Picabia. In 1913 he travelled to France as a guest of the sculptor Jacob Epstein, and met Picasso, Derain and Modigliani.

The pace of change of European and English art in the early 20th century was furious, and it is a confusion of movements and schisms. Leaving the Slade in 1913, Bomberg first hooked up with the Omega Workshops of the Bloombsbury Group (whose members included Virginia Woolf, EM Forster, Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes, as well as painters Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant). There was a falling-out and Bomberg went on to exhibit with Sickert’s Camden Town Group in 1913. His fascination with the shapes and dynamics of the machine age saw him aligned with Wyndham Lewis’s shortlived Vorticists, but soon struck out on his own, with solo shows.

But despite a successful exhibition at the Chenil Gallery in Chelsea, money was a constant problem. Like fellow student Rosenberg, he appears to have enlisted in the army as much for a solid wage as any patriotic imperative. In 1915 he signed up for the Royal Engineers, transferring in 1916 to the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. In the same year he married his first wife and was sent to the Western Front. The mechanised slaughter of the trenches, which took the life of his own brother, killed Bomberg’s faith in the machine age.

He emerged from the service in 1918 a changed artist and with a commission from the Canadian War Memorials Fund. Bomberg was warned to ’steer clear of Cubism and Futurism’ but the resultant work was far too avant garde for the taste of the committee. They rejected the first version of ‘Sappers at Work: A Canadian Tunnelling Company’ as a ‘futurist abortion’. A furious Bomberg was mollified by his wife and persuaded to try again. Now the uniforms were literally correct and the board were happy. But in the new painting Bomberg totes a heavy beam, a metaphorical nod to the pressures of working to patrons’ demands.

The financial burden, at least, lifted with peacetime, and Bomberg travelled widely, visiting Palestine (1923-27), Spain (1934-35), Morocco (1930), Greece (1930) and Russia (1933). He increasingly worked in landscapes and portraits. From 1945, he combined his painting with teaching, and influencing a new generation of young London painters His pupils at Borough Polytechnic, by the Elephant and Castle, included Jewish emigres Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach.

Much of Bomberg’s work is in the Tate Collection (to which, many thanks for the images used here), at its various galleries around England. You can see Ju-Jitsu, currently hung in the Cubism, Futurism and Vorticism exhibition, ‘States of Flux’ on Room 2, Level 5 of Tate Modern on the South Bank.
(Room 2)

* Bomberg’s name is remembered in David Bomberg House, on Borough High Street, between London Bridge and the Elephant and Castle. A hall of residence for students at London South Bank University, it marks his stint as a teacher at the insitution in its days as the Borough Polytechnic.

pictures:
Vision of Ezekiel, (the Tate Gallery)
In the Hold 1913-14 (Tate Gallery)
The Mud Bath, 1914 (Tate Gallery)
Tregor and Tregoff, Cornwall 1947 (Tate Gallery)
Sappers at Work: A Canadian Tunnelling Company, first version (Tate Gallery)
Sappers at Work: A Canadian Tunnelling Company, final version (National Gallery of Canada)

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When the battered body of Leon Beron was discovered on Clapham Common on New Year’s Day 1911, it was to set in motion the most notorious murder trial of the day.
And it was to provide a day in court for some of the
East End’s most colourful characters… and least reliable witnesses.
The case also dragged in the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, allegations of spying and sinister implications with the recent Sidney Street siege and the Houndsditch Murders.
Slum landlord
Beron wasn’t universally loved – as a slum landlord he was unlikely to be. He owned nine decaying houses in Russell Court, Stepney, which provided him with 10 shillings (50p) a week, enough to pay his own two shillings rent on 133 Jubilee Street, Stepney, and provide the one and sixpence a day for his meals
at the Warsaw Kosher Restaurant at 32 Osborn Street, Whitechapel.
It was at the Warsaw that Beron began to be seen in the company of Steinie Morrison, in December 1910. Morrison was another Russian Jew, who had arrived in England in 1898. Where he arrived from wasn’t certain – he claimed to be Australian and also used the pseudonyms Alexander Petro-pavloff, Morris Stein and Moses Tagger. What was certain was that he was a professional thief, who had already served five sentences for burglary.
Prompt arrest
Beron was found in gorse bushes on the Common, his head staved in by a blunt instrument, his legs neatly crossed, his wallet emptied, and a curious ‘S’ mark carved into each cheek. They were, observed the police surgeon, “like the f holes on a violin”.
It took the police just seven days to pick up Morrison, arresting him as he tucked into his breakfast at Cohen’s Restaurant, in Fieldgate Street.
They had quickly discovered that he had been working at Lavender Hill, so might know the Common well. They also discovered that on the morning of New Year’s Day, Morrison, using yet another pseudonym of Banman, had lodged a revolver and 45 bullets at the left luggage office of St Mary’s Railway Station, in Whitechapel.
They also discovered that he had moved in with a Lambeth prostitute, Florrie Dellow,
on January 1 – after telling his Newark Street landlady that he was off to Paris.
All very suspicious, but also all circumstantial evidence.

The defence and prosecution witnesses were as unreliable as each other. Beron’s brother Solomon attempted to physically attack defence counsel Edward Abinger when he implied he might have had something to do with Leon’s death.
Unreliable evidence
Meanwhile, 16-year-old Janie Brodski backed Morrison’s alibi – that he had spent the night at the Shoreditch Empire watching Harry Champion and Harry Lauder. She claimed that she and her sister had paid on the door for seats in the stalls at a shilling each.
Unfortunately, the theatre manager confirmed that the seat prices had been raised to 1s 6d (71/2p) for the night, and had all been sold out days in advance.
Add in the unreliable and conflicting evidence of a number of cab drivers placing Morrison at the murder scene (by now his photo and offers of a reward had appeared in the newspapers) and it is difficult to see how any court could reasonably convict him.
Abinger attempted to cloud the waters further. He implied that Beron was a police informant who had been assassinated for grassing on the anarchists responsible for the Houndsditch Murders and the Sidney Street siege. The ‘S’ marks stood for the Polish word ‘spiccan’ or spy, he suggested.
The policeman in charge, DI Wensley, scoffed at the theory, and the jury took 35 minutes to find Morrison guilty of murder. The judge had no option but to pass the death sentence, saying: “May the Lord have mercy on your soul.”
“I decline such mercy!” shouted Morrison. “I do not believe there is a God.”
The Court of Appeal upheld the conviction but the Home Secretary was not so sure. Churchill commuted Morrison’s sentence to life.
Ironically, it was a decision the prisoner himself would not accept. He repeatedly appealed to be put to death and, on January 24, 1921, weakened by a series of hunger strikes, he died in Parkhurst Prison.

When Henny Youngman died on February 24, 1998, at the age of 91 in Manhattan, New York, the world of comedy lost the last of a generation.
Henny was known as the ‘King of the One Liners’ in a career spanning 70 years.
But although he was in a
tradition of the wisecracking Jewish comics who worked New York’s ‘Borscht Belt’ – along with Milton Berle, Jack Benny and Sid Caesar – and seemed as New York as the Empire State and Staten Island, Henny was born Henry Youngman, a Whitechapel lad.
Henny’s parents, like so many thousands of others, had come to the East End from Eastern Europe in the latter years of the 19th century.
Bound for the USA
But they soon found that Whitechapel was lacking in fortune for poor immigrants and, in September 1906, when young Henny was just six months old, they boarded a ship to emigrate to New York, and new opportunities.
Henny’s dad had artistic ambitions for his boy but not as a comedian – he wanted him to become a violin virtuoso. But as one of his fellow comedians quipped in the 1930s: “Henny’s the only guy who, when he opens his violin case, the audience hopes he’s got a machine gun in there.”
Henny worked nights as leader of a band called the Swanee Syncopaters, and it was then, during the late 1920s, that comedy first started to creep into his act. During the band’s performances, Young-man often fooled around with the crowd.
Lucky break
As luck would have it, the regular comedian didn’t show one night and the club owner asked Youngman to fill in. He was a success, leading to more work as a comedian – although Henny admitted that his wife often supported him in the first two decades of show business.
In fact, his wife, Sadie, who died in 1987 aged 82, was the butt of his most famous one-liner: “Take my wife… please!” The quip was actually an off-the-cuff remark before a
radio show, but stuck to Henny, and was the inspiration for the title of his 1973 biography, Take My Life, Please!

In fact, while he was attempting to make his living as a musician, his real professional career was taking place during the day – as a printer in a five-and-dime store.
“But I didn’t have any confidence in a business that was run by a guy like me,” he joked.
“However, if things went sour in comedy, I could always get a job printing… or I could be out of two jobs at once!”
It was the day job that led to the first break in his career. Among his jobs were writing and printing comedy cards, a series of one-line gags that were sold in his store.
Milton Berle – a few years younger than Youngman and already a top comedian – discovered Youngman when he was enticed into the store by a sign for the cards and took an immediate liking to the ‘naturally funny guy’.
A life-long friendship began, although the two often traded barbs: “He once said he was the king of one-liners,” Berle wrote in his 1974 autobiography, “but I told him that was because he couldn’t remember two.”
Youngman would respond: “Milton, is your family happy? Or do you go home at night?”
Youngman’s big break came in 1937 when he appeared on the popular Kate Smith radio show. He was a big hit, staying with the show for two years, leaving eventually to pursue a career in the movies. But except for mostly cameo roles, film stardom never materialized.
His one-line style lent itself better to the club than the screen, so Youngman headed back on the road, averaging nearly 200 dates a year for the next 40 years.
Laugh-In regular
His career was revived in the late 1960s as a regular on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, a TV show that was perfect for his style because it was nothing but one-line gags. “Oh, that Henny Youngman!” soon became a national catchphrase.
He died, rich and successful, in Mount Sinai Hospital, Manhattan, at the end of a journey that had taken him all around the world – via Whitechapel.