eastlondonhistory.com

Today Vidal Sassoon lives a life of luxury and glamour. Elegantly dressed, with a permanent Californian tan and transatlantic accent he seems a million miles from the Whitechapel of the 1930s.

Yet that was where he began. And a childhood of poverty, and of witnessing anti-semitism at first hand, moulded a far more complex and colourful figure than the glossy pictures would suggest.

Sassoon was born into a struggling East End family in 1928. Poor to start with, things were to get much worse for the Sassoons when his father abandoned them, leaving the five-year-old Vidal in a Jewish orphanage for the next six years.

His mother remarried when he was 11 and reclaimed her son, but the experience of poverty had left deep scars. Sassoon enjoyed school but the family couldn’t afford to keep him there earning no money. His mother was determined he should learn a trade and – after a dream that he should become a hairdresser – marched him off to a barber’s shop round the corner from the family home in Whitechapel and had him put to work.

The 14-year-old Vidal was mortified. “I wanted to be a footballer!” he remembered over half a century later. Instead, he reluctantly set out on the career that was to support his family and then make him a household name.

He worked hard at the basics of his trade, but could already see that he was going to have to leave the East End to get on. But applying for jobs in the late forties, he found that the doors of the plush West End salons were closed to him. It was his cockney accent that was the problem.

“In those days you couldn’t get hired in the more fashionable West End with an Artful Dodger accent like mine,” he laughed. And just as he had worked tirelessly on his cutting technique, Vidal set to training his voice. He would sit for hours in West End theatres, listening and swallowing the plummy vowels of actors such as Edith Evans, Trevor Howard and Cecil Parker.

But if he was burying his East End accent he wasn’t ignoring his past. His Whitechapel childhood may have been scarred by poverty and desertion but there was an even greater threat. Sassoon and his friends had watched as the Blackshirts marched down Brick Lane in the 1930s, but he did far more than just observe.

“My mother was very active in political, anti-Fascist movements,” he remembered. “So I met some extraordinary people.” Citing the “passion I felt about these issues” and inspired by his Zionist mother, Sassoon put his burgeoning career on one side in 1948 to go and fight in Israel’s War of Independence, following the partitioning of Palestine.

It was an extraordinary contrast. From fighting for his life and for that of the new country, Sassoon was back in the West End in the early fifties, and his career went into overdrive.

He teamed up with Mary Quant in 1957, the beginning of his association with the most glamorous designers, models and actresses of the day. Famously, with Quant’s bobbed hair, he turned the fashion designer herself into a fashion item. Soon even aristocracy were queuing to have their hair done by the cockney crimper. “When we opened the big salon in Bond Street, people came from all walks of life,” he recalled. “I remember the Duchess of Bedford and her secretary sitting on the stairs because there wasn’t any room!”

Certain people and places define the Swinging London of the 1960s – the Beatles, Twiggy, David Bailey … and Vidal Sassoon. Now into his 30s, Sassoon found himself cutting Catherine Deneuve’s hair while Roman Polanski shot a movie upstairs on the salon’s balcony. Polanski was to call on Sassoon again, to create the elfin look for Mia Farrow in horror flick Rosemary’s Baby. Such was his fame by now and such the notoriety of the production, that Vidal found himself creating the hairstyle in front of a hundred press photographers.

By the 1980s Sassoon’s interests had turned full circle. Putting down his scissors he set up the Vidal Sassoon International Centre for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA), which publishes books and funds research into the phenomenon. The Californian millionaire had moved a long way from those East End roots, but not forgotten them.

Every so often in history a technological hotspot emerges – helping to drive industry and technology onward and upward. In the mid-1700s that clutch of enterprising Lancastrians John Kay, James Hargreaves and Samuel Compton were revolutionising weaving with the flying shuttle, the spinning jenny and the mule. In the 1970s it was the turn of the geeks of the US West Coast, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak et al – as they invented personal computing and kick-started the information age.

But who would have thought that the Lea Valley, running down Tower Hamlets’ eastern boundary, was the birthplace of Britain’s own post-industrial revolution? As the title of Dr Jim Lewis’s first book suggested, it was ‘Britain’s best kept secret’. Now, in a fascinating sequel*, Dr Lewis reveals more of the developments that turned the Lea into the UK’s technological crucible.

In fact, Lewis argues, the likes of Gates wouldn’t ever have been able to make their billions from the PC were it not for a much earlier invention in the Lea Valley. In 1904 Professor Ambrose Fleming developed the diode valve. The invention not only paved the way for today’s multimedia electronics industry – it also created the platform for space travel, computers, email and the internet.

Firstly though, the diode valve gave birth to the modern wireless. So radio has its roots in the Lea Valley, and Britain’s first radio valve factory was established there in 1916, with the first television tube factory following in 1936.

But the technological developments in the Lea Valley were as diverse as they were numerous. The monorail may still seem a futuristic mode of transport, but it was developed here by Henry Robinson Palmer as long ago as 1821. This ingenious method of hanging heavy goods from the sides of a rail carriage to lower the centre of gravity meant that great weights could be smoothly shifted. The invention went into use at the Royal Victualling Yard at Deptford in 1824, with the frictionless action meaning four men could easily shift 5cwt loads of provisions from warehouse to ship.

And another welcome innovation on board ship was that of IPA (India Pale Ale). Dreamed up by George Hodgson at his Bow Brewery, it was the first beer that could be transported to the hot climes of the Empire without tainting – giving East End sailors some relief and British soldiers a welcome taste of home.

The geography of the Lea Valley reads like a Who’s Who of British industry in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Johnson Matthey, Hawker Siddeley, Reuters, Lotus Engineering, Tesco, Keith Blackman, BOC and Matchbox Cars were just a few of the innovators who built their businesses here. Petrol was not only manufactured, it also received its name here, and the British Army’s rifle of choice was, for decades, the Lee Enfield. That reliable weapon was of course manufactured in the Lea Valley.

George Peabody grew up on the other side of the world from the East End. And as he left school at 11, going to work to help support his seven siblings, it was unlikely that he learned much about London in the classroom either.
But the grinding poverty of the East End was to strike a chord with this extraordinary figure – and to set in chain a huge charitable venture that bears his name to this day.

US war with Britain 1812

Peabody was born in Danvers, Massachusetts in 1795, and had already been a working ‘man’ for seven years when he signed up as a volunteer in the United States’ war with Britain in 1812. While serving, he showed the first signs of the financial acumen that was to make his fortune, raising the financial backing to found the dry goods firm of Peabody, Riggs and Co.
In 1816, Peabody moved to Baltimore and the thriving business soon established branches in Philadelphia and New York. Seeking still wider business opportunities, Peabody travelled to England in 1827 to negotiate the sale of American cotton in Lancashire. In 1837, the year Queen Victoria ascended the throne, he made his home in London.

Great Exhibition 1851

In 1851, Britain staged The Great Exhibition of the World of Industry of All Nations in London. But despite the brave new world promised by the scientific and technical marvels on show in the spectacular Crystal Palace, England was in social turmoil.
London was paying a terrible price for the uncontrolled industrialization and sprawling urban growth. The homeless and destitute were increasingly seen on East End streets, while Charles Dickens scourged the heartless industrialists in works including Hard Times.
The East End has a couple of remnants of those days – one of Lord Shaftesbury’s Ragged Schools and Burdett Road, named after benefactor Angela Burdett-Coutts.

Shaftesbury and Peabody

It was Shaftesbury who was the catalyst when the shaken Peabody asked what he could do to alleviate the suffering of his fellow Londoners. “Low-rent housing,” was the politician’s reply, and Peabody stumped up the at-the- time astonishing figure of $2.5 million. The trustees’ brief was to use the cash to benefit Londoners, who had to be poor, have moral character and be a good member of society.

First Peabody Buildings

And so the first of dozens of Peabody Buildings was raised in the East End. The buildings at 135-153 Commercial Road were for the housing of 40 low-income families, with shops, laundries and baths – undreamed-of luxuries at the time. The buildings still stand but, in a sign of the times, they are now privately owned.
In an 1831 letter to his nephew, David Peabody, George gave some clues to the reasons for his philanthropy: “Deprived as I was of the opportunity of obtaining anything more than the most common education, I am well qualified to estimate its value by the disadvantages I labour under in the society in which my business and situation in life frequently throws me,
and willingly would I now give 20 times the expense attending a good education could I possess it.
“But it is now too late for me to learn and I can only do to those that come under my care, as I could have wished circumstances had permitted others to have done by me.”
Nobody knows for sure how much the benevolent millionaire gave away, but there are recorded donations of more than $8 million, most of it in his own lifetime.
George Peabody died in London on November 4, 1869. At the request of the Dean of Westminster and with the approval of Queen Victoria, he was given a temporary burial in Westminster Abbey. His will said he should be buried in the town of his birth, Danvers, and the prime minster, William Gladstone, arranged for Peabody’s remains to be returned to America on the Monarch, the newest and largest ship in Her Majesty’s Navy.

Peabody gets freedom of City of London

Peabody was honoured on both sides of the Atlantic for his generosity. He was one of only two Americans ever to have been awarded the Freedom of the City of London (the other was General Dwight D Eisenhower.) A statute to George Peabody still stands in the heart of London’s financial district. In the United States, he was awarded the Congressional Medal in 1867. Commercial Road may have gone but, throughout London, the Peabody Trust provides affordable housing for 26,000 people.

With thanks to Elizabeth Schaaf, archivist of the Peabody Institute.

Depending on your point of view, the gentrification of the Isle of Dogs is a vital shot in the arm for a decaying chunk of post-industrial Docklands, or an insensitive example of the way money comes first in the 21st
century – riding roughshod over a solid and established working class community.
But the yuppie homes of the 1980s weren’t the first attempt to entice the middle classes onto the Island. One hundred and fifty years ago, an ambitious builder and entrepreneur was trying to transform the Isle of Dogs into the Belgravia of east London.
Transforming London
William Cubitt was born in Dilham, Norfolk in 1785, with brother Thomas following three years later. They weren’t a pair born to greatness – their father was a poor miller, and William did well, in 1800, to secure an apprenticeship to a cabinet maker and joiner. Thomas had an equally mundane, if secure, trade mapped out, as a ship’s carpenter.
Yet the two of them were to play a huge role in transforming London from the still small city of Stuart England into the vast metropolis it is today.
Although Thomas was the younger, he had the more dramatic career. He had moved from carpentry to engineering and then started building in around 1815.
The 1820s were very productive for Thomas. Working with the Marquis of Westminster, who owned vast tracts of useless bogland to the south-west of the City of Westminster, he began designing, laying out and building streets, squares and whole districts.
His genius lay in forming the first true building firm, employing a wide range of
specialised craftsmen and architects (including another brother, Lewis) on his staff in order to enable the company to provide a one-stop shop.
His extraordinary energy produced the new suburbs of Belgravia, Pimlico, Barnsbury and much of Bloomsbury. Elsewhere, he built Brighton’s huge Kemp Town development, and worked with Prince Albert on Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.
Waste not want not
Belgrave Square was Thomas’ piece de resistance. Ironic, then, that this ‘future residence of the highest class of the fashionable world’ was built on waste from the East End! The energetic Thomas was building St Katharine Dock at the same time, and used the spoil carved out of the river bed to make the posh square’s foundations.
William was equally innovative. In 1807 he had, in a nod to his roots, patented what became the standard design for windmill sails. Then, in 1812, he turned his hand to engineering, specialising particularly in waterways and canals. He built railways and, like his brother, he was to work with the Prince Consort – in his case as consultant engineer on the Crystal Palace. And with a keen utilitarian sense that prisoners should be productive too, he invented that brutal mainstay of the Victorian penal system, the prison treadmill.

But if he had emulated
his brother’s inventiveness, William hadn’t accumulated the same wealth. William decided he too would capitalise on the middle class demand for villa
homes by developing an unexploited patch of the capital.
Back in the 17th century, Christopher Wren had admired the southern tip of the Isle of Dogs, though more for its views than its hinterland. He declared it the best spot from which to view the spectacular Greenwich Hospital.
Thomas decided the river views would make it the ideal focus of a villa community. There was only one problem – the resolutely plebeian community. And, ironically, they were outsiders too.
Social reformer Beatrice Webb wrote about the locals at the time. “They are for the most part countrymen imported some years back to break a combination of corn porters” [shipped in to break a strike, in other words].
Stubborn
Even then, she wrote that the Islanders were individuals, different: “Cut off by their
residence from the social
influences of the East End, they have retained many traits of provincial life.”
Most important, they were stubborn. They were not to be moved. The middle classes, meanwhile, sniffed the prevailing winds and proved resis-
tant to Thomas’ marketing attempts. The pragmatic entrepreneur instituted Plan B and built timber wharves, sawmills, cement factories, brickfields, roads and a church… and
terraces of artisans cottages.
Thomas died in 1861 as
Lord Mayor of London, but his work was completed in the 1880s. Sadly, most was swept away by World War II.
But just 40 years later, the architects would move in again, and Cubitt Town would attempt to go upwardly mobile once more.

These days, keeping your fruit, veg and meat fresh is easy – you just pop it in the fridge or freezer.
As a result, the time-honoured culinary arts of bottling, curing, pickling and salting are performed mainly as a treat for the tastebuds, rather than from hygienic – or economic – necessity.
Go back 400 years though, and things were very different. Keeping the abundant spring and autumn harvests fresh to see people through the long, cold months of winter was a matter of life and death, and throwing food away was a costly luxury.
It was to these problems that wealthy Bethnal Green landowner Sir Hugh Platt turned his considerable intellect in the late 1500s.
The son of a successful Hertfordshire brewer, Hugh was also a bright lad, and studied at Cambridge University before coming down to London to study law at Lincoln’s Inn.
Blessed with an inventive and eccentric streak, Hugh never came to the bar. Instead, he bought a fine country house, Bishops Hall in Bethnal Green, and set about his studies of the cultivation of new and unusual plant varieties.
It was the time of Elizabeth I and England’s emergence as a naval and imperial power. Adventurers such as Sir Francis Drake were coming back from the new colonies with exotic crops such as tobacco and potatoes and Sir Hugh eagerly set about raising these from his East End soil. He also made wine grown from his own vineyards.
But if the new foods the Navy was bringing back were a source of excitement to Sir Hugh, the problem of keeping that same Navy fed sparked his scientific imagination to life.
The problem was that ships had never before sailed so far from land, fresh food and clean water. Scurvy and rotten grub were an intractable problem.
In the course of his experiments, Hugh discovered that keeping freshly picked fruit in a vacuum would prolong its life – and so was born the bottling of fruit. He also found that boiling beef in brine would stop the process of decay.

One of his recipes read as follows: “To preserve cowcumbers all the yeere: Take a gallon of faire water and a bottle of verjuice, and a pint of bay salt, and a handful of greene fennel or Dill; boile it a little, and when it is cold put it into a barrel, and then put your cowcumbers into that pickle, and you shall keep all the yeere.”
Drake’s saviour
Sir Francis Drake, busy with the fitting out of his ship, the Defiance, broke off from his work at Wapping to see Sir Hugh’s work at Bethnal Green.
The adventurer was so impressed that he took quantities of Platt’s salted meats and bottled fruits on his voyage. He also took Sir Hugh’s advice on keeping water fresh – though the addition of powdered brimstone, or sulphur – might not be swallowed quite so easily by today’s sailors.
Platt also addressed the health problems that the new foodstuffs were causing. Rich Londoners of the late 1500s were already developing smoker’s coughs and rotten teeth from eating too much sugar – Queen Elizabeth’s teeth were black from advanced decay according to contemporary reports.
Common remedies included rubbing ashes of rosemary or powdered alabaster over the teeth. More drastically, a barber would scrape the teeth, then apply aqua fortis (nitric acid) to bleach them white.
Sir Hugh, who had now also produced his beauty book, Delights for Ladies (1602), warned that after a few of these treatments “a lady may be forced to borrow a ranke of teeth to eate her dinner, unless her gums do help her the better”. The book became a 17th century best-seller.
He was also ahead of his time in developing an early turkish bath. In his “delicate stove to sweat in”, a gentlewoman could “sit or stand in the steam for two hours or more, her head helde above the tubbe”.
Sir Hugh’s authority and knowledge was growing. He drew up plans for English agriculture, advocating crop rotation and the use of artificial fertilisers.
For his pains, he was knighted in 1605, by James I, for his services as an inventor.

THE East End has play-ed its part in the history of rock and roll.
From the Small Faces and Helen Shapiro, to enigmatic Fleetwood Mac guitar virtuoso Peter Green, The The main man Matt Johnson and bass guitar guru Jah Wobble, cockney talent has spanned five decades of pop music.
But of all the larger than life figures emanating from Tower Hamlets none was larger, or more infamous, than the manager who made Led Zeppelin the biggest band on the planet – Peter Grant.
Born into a broken – and painfully poor – Bethnal Green home on 5 April 1935, Grant had to provide for himself from an early age.
He left school at 14 to work in a sheet metal factory, swiftly moving on to become a runner for the newspapers on Fleet Street. It was the start of a series of colourful jobs.
After National Service in the Army, Grant returned to the East End, turning his enormous 250lb bulk to his advantage by fighting as a professional wrestler and appearing in a film as a double for king-size actor Robert Morley.
It was the late 50s and dance halls were giving way to rock and roll. Grant began arranging concerts for visiting rockers such as Gene Vincent, the Everly Brothers and Chuck Berry, and honed his organisational skills as one of Britain’s first real tour managers.
Until now, the bookers had sat in their London offices while the bands hiked up and down the A1 in tatty old vans. Grant broke the mould by travelling with them, making sure they arrived on time, arranging their itineraries and, vitally, ensuring they got paid.
Native talent
As the 1960s drew on, native talent was supplanting the American bands and Grant was superbly placed to manage the up-and-coming talent. Working with top producer Mickie Most, Grant took the Animals to America, then came home to manage the Yardbirds and the New Vaudeville Band.
By the late 60s, the hard-nosed cockney had the knowledge and contacts to create the first supergroup. Led Zeppelin started off as an unsuccessful spin-off, the tired dregs of the New Yardbirds. That they became as big as they did was as much down to Grant as to their own musical excellence.

Grant’s power and menace became legendary. At a time when most bands were managed by ex-public schoolboys like the Stones’ Andrew Oldham or the Yardbirds’ Simon Napier-Bell, he brought a streetwise style honed in his tough teenage years in Bethnal Green.
That style consisted of, first and last, looking after his lads. In an era when promoters
took 90 per cent of the gate giving 10 per cent to the band, Grant reversed the odds, making Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page and John Bonham – and himself – rich in the process.
Bootleggers were his pet hate. He was often seen prowling outside gigs in the early seventies with a baseball bat,
confiscating and destroying
the wares of hapless merchandisers outside.
His friend, Mark St John, manager of the Pretty Things, reckoned Grant changed the playing field for groups.
Verbal violence
“He would intimidate the living hell out of people, but only if necessary,” said St John.
“He went in for verbal violence, an explosion of sheer power that stopped just short of physical aggression. That did the trick.”
Grant’s heart went out of the business when his pal John Bonham, the band’s giant drummer, died in 1980.
He decided it was time to retire, but for the boy who had been born into East End poverty, things had certainly changed.
The man who was part manager, part accountant, part fixer, part father and part minder to Led Zeppelin retreated to his Sussex estate to look after his two children and his collection of classic cars.
He died of a heart attack on November 21, 1995.

TALK about British comedy and there is a name that stands head and shoulders above the competition. The Carry On series ran for 30 years – from the gentle post-War approach of Carry On Sergeant to the ironic alternative comedy of Carry On Columbus.
The films are celebrated in a new exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image on London’s South Bank.*
And for East Enders, the films have a special resonance – Bernard Bresslaw and Barbara Windsor are just two locals who went on to star in the series, and they have been celebrated in East End History in the past. But the Cockney connection goes far deeper – for the man who penned those first few Carry Ons was a Tower Hamlets boy.
Norman Hudis was born in Stepney in 1923. He always had a sharp mind and a gift for words and, on leaving school, he landed a job as a local newspaper reporter, working on the Hampstead and Highgate Express.
War came, and Norman served with the RAF in the Middle East, turning his hand to writing for Air Force News. And like so many of the entertainers who came to dominate British comedy in the ’50s – such as Tony Hancock, Eric Sykes and the Goons – he sharpened his comedy pen writing for the concert parties and camp concerts organised as a tonic for the troops.
It was tougher in Civvy Street however. Back in London after the War, Norman decided to throw in journalism and try his hand as a playwright. He was certainly prolific, but not successful. However one of his works, Here is the News, got good reviews.
These caught the eye of the producers at Pinewood. At the time, south-east England had a thriving film industry, at Pinewood, Ealing and Shepperton, and the money men were always on the lookout for young talent to turn out the features needed to fill Britain’s bustling cinemas.
It was production line stuff – many of the films were destined to be ‘B’ features to the big American movies. But after two years at Shepperton, and with not one film produced, Norman was fed up, and decided to go freelance.

His years of apprenticeship paid off, and he was soon churning out successful scripts. The quality was sometimes iffy, not surprising as at one point Norman was working on three scripts at once!
Fortune took a lucky turn when he bumped into Peter Rogers in 1957. Rogers was already an established producer on the UK film scene, he went on to make more than 100 movies, and he was working on a biopic of the rock and roll singer Tommy Steele. Norman was offered the job of scripting Rock Around the World.
The film was a hit, and Norman was immediately drafted in to pen a swift follow-up, after all, no-one knew how long the singing ex-seaman’s chart career would last! But The Duke Wore Jeans was another success for the pair, this time with director Gerald Thomas on board.
Rogers and Thomas were working together on a production of RF Delderfield’s novel The Bull Boys, and called in the reliable Hudis to rewrite the book for the screen. Dumping the original title as too flat, they selected one of the final lines from the film as a name. And “Carry on Sergeant” was a massive hit.
Norman went on to pen five more Carry Ons. Carry On Nurse was the top-grossing UK film of 1959. Teacher, Constable, Regardless and Cruising followed, one a year, each charting the battles of a crew of bunglers who come through against all the odds.
But by 1962, the team felt the formula was wearing thin. Hudis was replaced by Talbot Rothwell, who took the films in a bawdier and more farcical direction.
The Stepney writer took off for pastures newer and more lucrative. Throughout the ’60s he worked on TV and film in California, eventually moving there full time in the seventies. Episodes of CHiPs, The Wild Wild West, Marcus Welby MD, The Man From Uncle and Buck Rogers are just a few to have flowed from his typewriter.
But of all his writing, the Carry Ons remain closest to his heart. Back in London recently for the 40 Years of Carry On celebrations, he remarked that it was his core of irreverent, risque East End humour that made those comedies. Best of all, 40 years on, people are still laughing!

When Lord Grade died just before Christmas, it was more than just the passing of a larger than life figure on the UK entertainment scene.
It marked the demise of the last great impresario to make the leap from music hall to TV and films.
And Lew was also the last great link with the old Jewish East End – the East End of working class lads who transformed themselves through hard work and an eye for the chance into the great entrepreneurs of post-War London.
Louis Winogradsky was born in the Ukrainian town of Tokmak on Christmas Day 1906, to parents Olga and Isaac. But in 1912, along with thousands of other Jewish families, the family fled the pogroms in the Tsar’s empire to a new life in the East End.
It was an uncertain existence. Within the first months, Isaac had lost all the capital he had brought with him. The Winogradsky boys, however, were adapting to London life a little better.
Louis and little brothers Leslie and Bernard (later the theatrical impresario Lord Del- font) excelled at the Rochelle Street School in Shoreditch, and Louis was soon coming top of the class in maths.
But showbiz seemed to be in the blood and, while Isaac was making a fresh start managing a cinema in Soho’s Brewer Street (Paul Raymond’s Revue Bar today), young Lou was skipping Saturday morning synagogue to go to the pictures.
He didn’t find his niche straight away. First he decided to put his maths nous to use as an accountant, then at 15 became an agent for a rag trade firm. The budding entrepreneur soon set up his own firm with his dad, turning out clothes 24-hours a day.
Fred’s favourite
But his energy wasn’t confined to work. He loved to go dancing at the East Ham Palais. And in 1926, “Louis Grad” was crowned World Solo Charleston Champion at the Albert Hall. The judge? No less than Fred Astaire.
Lew was hooked and sold up the firm to become a professional dancer, “the man with the musical feet”.

By now he was “Lew Grade”, after his name was misspelt on a bill, but by the 1930s knee problems – and the fact that the Charleston had had its day – prompted him to move into management.
He first worked for the agent Joe Collins, Joan and Jackie’s dad. Then, after returning from a wartime stint in the Army, set up with his brother Leslie. As a minnow in a hard business, Lou had to fight for his share, and he went over to the States to snatch up-and-coming acts, bringing Lena Horne, Johnny Ray and Jack Benny to London.
The biggest agent in Britain now moved into fledgling commercial TV. The Midlands franchise (ATV, now Central) was a flop at first. But Lou knew what sold, and Crossroads, Emergency Ward 10, General Hospital and the Muppets made the station one of the giants, along with Granada and Thames.
Titanic flop
Films beckoned too with successes like the Pink Panther series and On Golden Pond. And Lew got there nearly 20 years before James Cameron and Leonardo Di Caprio. Unfortunately though, his 1980 production Raise The Titanic was such a flop that he remarked that “it would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic!”
Joking apart, the financial disaster nearly sunk Grade’s company ACC, and it signalled the beginning of the end of his one-man operation.
But even when he’d loosened the reins at ACC, Lew just couldn’t stop working – finding new talent and setting up deals well into his nineties. Even the energetic Grade couldn’t finish one of his projects though – he had bought 450 of Barbara Cartland’s books with the aim of making films of them.
One of the big men of the entertainment industry, he’ll always be remembered for his chutzpah and big cigar.
Louis Winogradsky died Baron Grade of Elstree, just days short of his 92nd birthday, which would have fallen on Christmas Day.

Christmas is a time of tradition and indulgence. A stuffed goose has given way to the turkey and Christmas pudding is a popular choice instead of plum duff.
But one thing remains – Yuletide is a time of feasting, and dining on delicacies we never really eat for the rest of the year.
The centrepiece of any Christmas is the cake, with its rich casing of marzipan. And the soft yellow paste had been a rare luxury in Europe for centuries before it caught on here.
How it did so is a remarkable story for marzipan owes its popularity in England, and its very name, to a poor girl from Stepney who fled the East End to seek fame and fortune.
Eliza Marchpane was born in 1760 and, like thousands of other girls born in Stepney that year, faced a miserable life of drudgery, poverty, marriage – if she was lucky – followed by a huge brood of children.
Then, if she were lucky, her almost-certain early demise would be a peaceful and painless one.
Of course one way to scrape a living was to follow the tradition of countless other cockney girls of the time, and become a prostitute, working the inns of Wapping and Radcliffe.
That was the path Eliza took. But, looking around her at the women who had been plying the same trade for a dozen years or more, she realised she would soon be old before her time and her value would fade.

Passage to Paris
She decided to move upmarket. Saving her money, she bought a passage onboard a ship to the continent. In Paris she purchased one set of fine clothes and adopted the title ‘Marquesa de Marchpane’.
In England, her accent marked her out as a guttersnipe. To unaccustomed ears in the salons and boudoirs of Europe, she sounded strange and exotic.
The beautiful Eliza moved around the courts of Europe, becoming a famed courtesan, with a string of aristocratic lovers swelling her fortune.
In the 1790s she came to Vienna, where she seduced the young musical genius Mozart, composer of the Marriage of Figaro and the Magic Flute. And it was in Vienna, the most fashionable city in Europe at the time, that she first tasted little delicacies, fashioned from almond paste.
Eliza was back in London at the turn of the 19th century, but she certainly wasn’t going to revisit her Stepney roots. ‘The Marquesa de Marchpane’ was rich and established and now had a suitably ‘foreign’ accent by way of disguise.
She set up home in the affluent West End, where she would give dinner parties and soirees. The exotic and beautiful Continental courtesan was a huge hit and her parties boasted many dishes and delicacies imported from Europe – among them the little sweets and fruits made from ‘marchpane’, or marzipan as it become known.
Marzipan became a delicacy – sugar and almonds were still relatively expensive and made it the province of the rich.
By the time Eliza died in Brighton in 1830, she had been the lover of the dandified and promiscuous Prince Regent, the future George IV, and marzipan was fast becoming an integral part of Christmas.
And when Charles Dickens penned his descriptions of ‘traditional’ English Yule feasts 20 years later, the marzipan-clad Christmas cake was a firm – and cheap – popular favourite.
Eliza had fulfiled her aim, to escape poverty and an early death, to find riches. But with all her rich imagination, she could never have dreamed of her legacy to our Christmas a century later.

If you wake up on a Monday morning cursing your job and moaning about your boss, spare a thought for the East Enders of Victorian times – and thank your lucky stars you don’t have to scrape a living as a tosher, a mudlark, a scavenger or a riverman.
The Tower Hamlets of the 1800s was a byword for poverty and degradation, inspiring words and actions from some of the greatest world figures of the day.
William Booth was spurred by his work among the poor in the area to set up the Salvation Army, Karl Marx was inspired by his observations on the causes and solutions of poverty in east London to pen the Communist Manifesto. And itinerant Californian novelist Jack London was driven to write his best-selling novel about Docklands life after staying in Wapping. The title – People of the Abyss – says it all.
Between the day work on the docks and piecework in the sweatshops making garments, matches and the like, a whole raft of occupations grew up seeking to make some profit from the detritus of society.
The recent TV adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend paints a picture of the people who made a living from the Thames but the reality was, if anything, even worse.
Mudlarks were mostly children who prowled exposed Thames mudflats at low tide looking for bounty that had been dropped or washed into the river. Coins and jewellery were the greatest prize, but even items of clothing or driftwood were worth collecting. Clothes could be cleaned up and sold on to the rag-and-bone men, or totters, driftwood could be dried and sold on as firewood.
But if the mudlarks had a messy and dangerous job – many were swept away by the tides or became marooned in the soft mud – the rivermen chose an even nastier way to scrape a living.

In those days, bodies floating down the Thames were not an uncommon sight. London was a more dangerous and violent place than it is now and it was not uncommon for cutpurses to murder their victims and toss them into the river. The bodies of sailors were often washed up, who had died after drunken fights in the docks or after falling over the side of the hundreds of ships moving up and down the waterway.
Rivermen would operate from the banks in flat-bottomed boats, hauling the corpses from the water with long boating hooks, rifling through their pockets, then tossing back the raided bodies.
A load of rubbish
And scavengers, as their name suggests, would rummage through the rubbish tips and markets of the East End searching for coins, rags and old pieces of rope which could be sold on for a pittance.
Meanwhile, many of the rag-and-bone men, the forerunners of Steptoe and Son, grew rich. The rags could be sold on to rope and garment makers, the bones to pet-food or fertiliser manufacturers who would grind them down for bone meal.
But the worst job of all was probably that of the tosher. Much of the bounty that ended up in the river was washed down there through the sewers.
The toshers decided to cut out the middle man and it was a common sight in 19th Century Wapping for whole families to whip off a manhole cover and go down into the sewers, where they would find rich pickings.
Reek of the sewers
Unsurprisingly, the toshers were not popular with the neighbours. Many became rich, but carried a constant reek of the sewers. The word tosher was also used to describe the thieves who stripped valuable copper from the hulls of ships moored along the Thames.
One unexpected side-effect of the sewer work was that they built up a strong tolerance to typhus and the other diseases that swept the ghettos.
The word “tosh” for rubbish entered the language, though toshing – and the other dirty jobs of the era – have long since gone.