eastlondonhistory.com

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)

Listen to Voice attachment

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.