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A FAMILY
BUSINESS

The story of River Island, Chelsea Girl,
Bernard Lewis and his brothers

Catherine
Blyth











A FAMILY
BUSINESS

Catherine Blyth is an author and editor whose books have been pub-
lished all over the world. She has run workshops for clients including
L’Oréal and The School of Life, written for The Times, Daily Telegraph,
Sunday Telegraph, Daily Mail, Evening Standard, Spectator, Elle and
Glamour, and featured on numerous British and international televi-
sion and radio shows.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

On Time
Enjoy Time
The Art of Conversation
The Art of Marriage
Back to Go

A FAMILY
BUSINESS

The story of Chelsea Girl, River Island,
Bernard Lewis and his brothers

Catherine
Blyth

First published in Great Britain in 2020
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Copyright © 2020 Bernard Lewis
The moral right of Catherine Blyth to be identified as the author of

this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other-
wise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and

the above publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library.

Printed and bound by F.J. Blissett and Co. Ltd, London

To Frances Gillam (1914–2002),
Lieutenant Colonel Peter Gillam (1915–1984),

Alison Blyth (1916–1950)
and Michael Blyth (1920–1950),
for all the stories that they could and could not tell. C.B.



‘Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is
production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must
be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as
well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.’

– Thomas A. Edison

‘It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.’

– William Ernest Henley, ‘Invictus’



Contents 1
3
Foreword 13
Introduction 25
1. A man of substance 49
2. Your own boss 61
3. Harrow 70
4. Harringay 79
5. Underground in Old Street 93
6. We were the poorest 112
7. War 132
8. The captain of his ship 154
9. Against the world 175
10. The hazardous life of a small businessman 193
11. A dedicated experimenter in fashion 203
12. A family business 211
13. Saturday girl 220
14. Overreaching 230
15. The great shop hunt 243
16. Cut, make and trim 255
17. All for one and one for all 268
18. Oxford Street 278
19. Growth and retreat
20. Island of success

21. Focus 285
22. Made in Hong Kong 297
23. The mini-dress summer 315
24. Boutique or bust 327
25. Team building 340
26. A professional fashion person 349
27. Rifts 361
28. Rivals 376
29. Lewises, separate 386
30. Motoring 391
31. Flying 401
32. Career girls 415
33. The next big thing 423
34. A bend in the river 432
35. The onward horizon 441
Afterword 459

Acknowledgements 461
Illustration Acknowledgements 462

xi

Foreword

When people started asking me about my life, and my family’s, I kept
running into all the things that I did not know. I was shocked by the
incuriosity of my younger self.
My grandparents had such an adventure coming across from
the Ukraine and Romania, getting here, getting established. And I
never thought to ask them about it. Nothing. And I didn’t ask my
parents. My father was in the army in the First World War. I never
asked him anything about his time as a soldier. I don’t know what he
did, never spoke to him about what his war life was like. This is one of
my regrets. My mother was living in Canning Town in the First World
War. They took shelter from the Zeppelins in the Blackwall Tunnel. I
asked nothing about that.
The only recollection I have of the Manchester side of the
family is one visit to my aunt. I thought her name was Mima, but I
now understand that is the Romanian or Yiddish word for auntie. I
don’t remember any more than that. I never remember my mother or
grandmother speaking about them. I don’t remember any letters. As
for the American relations, I didn’t know we had any until quite re-
cently. There was never a word about any family remaining in eastern
Europe, and I never enquired. But there must have been some, and
they would have been sent to the concentration camps.
It is too late to fill these gaps in my knowledge. This is one
of the reasons why I was motivated to embark on this project. One
satisfaction of my working life is that I have been able to provide my

2 I Foreword

family with a foundation of financial security; they are able to choose
what they want to do with their life, free from financial worries. This
book is for all the future generations, to explain how we came by our
good fortune, and to answer the sort of questions that I wish I had
asked, when I had the chance.

Bernard Lewis, March 2020

Introduction I 3

Introduction

In 1948, Godfrey, the puckish youngest of the four Lewis brothers,
made the first attempt to chronicle his family’s history. Fifteen years
old, armed only with a large sheet of cardboard and his abundant nat-
ural charm, he went to see his maternal grandmother, Fanny Tauber,
in Twickenham, where she lived with his aunt Lily behind a little shop
selling jeans and reels of cotton. He was hoping to winkle out enough
information from his favourite chatterbox of a granny to draw up a
family tree.
Godfrey’s mission was not altogether successful. ‘A lot of the
names were missing,’ he told his nephew Simon Lewis in 2006. ‘But
she knew the occupations. I remember a plumber and I think I re-
member a rabbi. And apparently the Ukrainian side were in the fruit
business.’ As for finding out the stories of his forebears, most of that
remained a blank too.
The time has come to write the story of Godfrey and his elder
brothers, David, Bernard and Geoffrey. There are many twists in the
Lewises’ tale, which embodies the cliché ‘rags to riches’. Business is
the umbilical thread that connects its varied strands, and business
continues to stitch the Lewis family together – although it has also, at
times, divided it.
Perhaps the most dramatic episode in the brothers’ family his-
tory is their grandparents’ flight from the savage anti-Semitism that
prevailed in their home countries – Ukraine in the case of their fa-
ther’s family, Romania in the case of their mother’s. Their escape was
far from unusual for Ashkenazi Jews of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, who fled persecution and murderous pogroms in
eastern Europe in their hundreds of thousands, during what became

4 I Introduction

one of the most sustained mass human migrations in history. Yet for
every soul who headed west it was a unique, desperate step. Fanny
Tauber and her husband David undertook their long, perilous jour-
ney with Godfrey’s mother Clara, still an apple-cheeked two-year-old,
and her baby sister Betty in tow. But if Fanny spoke to Godfrey in
any detail about this ordeal, he neglected to mention it to his nephew
Simon, all those decades later.
Maybe they did not touch on the subject at all. Fanny was an
extraordinarily vivid personality, short, almost as stout as she was tall,
and very funny, apt to talk in wild malapropisms in her homespun
English. So it might have been difficult for such a sunny young man as
Godfrey to imagine quite what an undertaking her escape to Britain
had been, let alone to recognise his kind, ebullient grandmother for
what she and countless other Jewish emigrés of that generation truly
were: heroes and heroines, hell bent on improving their family’s lot,
no matter what. Even if Fanny’s jigsaw-puzzle vocabulary had been
up to the job of describing the trials she and her family went through,
it is also possible that she preferred not to relive them. To survive had
been challenge enough.
Fortunately, the oversight was not entirely lost on Godfrey,

and he was to glean more about it in future years. ‘I vaguely remem-
ber hearing about the exodus much, much later, when I was a mar-
ried man. I remember the oldest one, Uncle Ike [Fanny’s eldest son]
was at my house and [my brother] David was there and they were
talking about how they got out. But all I knew about the Ukraine was

that they were very much the white Russian mob and pro-Hitler. That
fitted in with a story I heard about a mine chute and all the Jewish
people in that town being thrown down it.’
One further tantalising snippet of family folklore reached his
ears. ‘There was a story that they had paid their tickets to go all the
way to America and the boat stopped in England. They were allowed

Introduction I 5

to get off and go and buy a cup of tea or something. And when they
came back they wanted more money [to let them back on]. And so
they finished up in England. Even in those days, people would have
sooner gone to America than England.’ On reflection, Godfrey reck-
oned that this sounded a pretty unlikely story. But in fact, such ticket
scams were not in the least rare at the time, so there may have been
some truth to it.
Regrettably, Godfrey’s cardboard family tree vanished long
ago, and he is no longer alive to help complete the blanks. Numerous
holes will remain in our knowledge of the Lewises and their fore-
bears, the Pokrasses and Podolskis of the Ukraine, and the Taubers
and Wagners of Romania. However, the picture is significantly more
detailed now, thanks to the efforts of Mark Lewis, the son of Godfrey’s
brother Geoffrey. The fruits of his painstaking research into the fam-
ily’s background can be seen on several DVDs, which feature a pre-
sentation by Mark as well as filmed interviews with Godfrey and his
elder brothers. They make for shocking, yet often uplifting viewing.
Ben Lewis, David’s son, has also supplied his take on the origins and
early decades of the family’s clothing business in another work, Fash-
ioning a Future, which captures the wider cultural context in which
the company operated.
In 2014, Bernard Lewis, at the age of eighty-eight and the last
surviving brother, decided to share his recollections of how he and his

brothers surmounted great challenges to achieve extraordinary suc-
cess. The most recent chapters in the Lewis family’s story can finally
be told.
I first met Bernard some years earlier. His eldest son Leon-
ard wanted to commission a book about his late mother, Lorna, and
hoped also to explore the possibility of me writing more broadly about

his family. Before we went ahead he invited me to meet his father and
his brother Clive for lunch at Chelsea House, the headquarters of the

6 I Introduction

Lewis Trust Group and River Island, the family’s clothing business. It
was to be an unforgettable encounter.
Chelsea House is a 1970s office block at Westgate, a small
industrial estate off the roundabout at Hanger Lane in west London.
I was led upstairs to a conference room where Leonard waited with
his aunt Rene, an elderly lady in a burgundy woollen suit. The three
of us chatted amiably over tea and a tray of sandwiches as we leafed
through the old black and white photographs that Rene had brought
along. The most striking were of her sister, Lorna, showing an elegant
young woman with delicate features, lustrous skin and a limpid In-
grid Bergman gaze. In due course Clive arrived, polite in a dark suit,
although he gave off the unmistakable whiff of a man itching to get
on with urgent business elsewhere. Then in came Bernard, small, spry
and very erect, with grey hair and silver-framed spectacles that did
nothing to dull the gimlet glint in his eyes.
He seemed surprised to see Rene, his former sister-in-law,
greeting both her and Leonard warmly. Setting a little Tupperware
box on the table, he sat and began admiring the photographs of his
late wife, remarking how pretty she had been. Then a silence settled
on the room. Finally Bernard glanced at me.
‘Who’s this?’ he asked, opening the Tupperware box.

At which point it dawned on me that he had no idea what

this meeting was about. Haltingly, I explained. I cannot remember
who said what next, but I do recall my face going very red as Bernard
began eating a salad lunch, dispatching it with rhythmic stabs of the
fork. Not a sandwich did he touch. Mesmerised, I found myself won-
dering whether each particle of nutrition in that salad had been cal-

culated to the milligram in order to meet the exacting requirements
of a supercharged octogenarian preparing to climb Everest. With a
few incisive questions he had established precisely what project was
being proposed, dissected the issues that it might throw up, and geld-

Introduction I 7

ed any hope of me writing any sort of book about any member of the
Lewis family in the near or distant future. His son Clive agreed. ‘Let’s
leave her alone,’ he said, meaning his mother.
That afternoon I left Chelsea House thinking that I had never
met anyone as clever as Bernard, or as indifferent to my embarrass-
ment. I also felt a fool, not so much because I had looked forward to
this project that now turned out to be a mirage, but because I had spo-
ken at all. It was clear that I had stumbled into a sensitive family con-
versation, one that should have happened in private. I was extremely
happy to disappear into the Underground station, back to Ladbroke
Grove and a large glass of wine.
It would not have surprised me if I had opened The Times
the following morning to see a photograph of Bernard picnicking on
the Hillary Step whilst picking his way through a spreadsheet, before
dusting himself down and marching smartly to Everest’s summit. That
this was a man in his eighties, at the apex of one of the most successful
yet intensely private businesses in the United Kingdom, staggered me.
Not that it was difficult to believe that such a man should have created
such an entity: having met him, it made perfect sense. The mystery
was, why didn’t everyone know about Bernard Lewis?
And the answer was immediately obvious: because he would
rather that they didn’t.
Several years later, something changed Bernard’s mind. I re-
ceived a curt email from him, inviting me back to Chelsea House to
discuss writing a book. I couldn’t decide what was more amazing:
his use of email (didn’t people like him employ platoons of assistants
for that sort of thing?) or his youthful phrasing. Was I, he wanted to
know, ‘up for it’?
How could I resist?
‘We meet again,’ he said when I arrived, rising to shake my
hand.
I cast my eyes around his capacious corner office, searching

8 I Introduction

for clues to his personality. It was done up in earthy shades, with large
windows offering a less than dazzling view of the company car park,
and a few artworks dotted about, some still wrapped in cellophane,
resting against the wall. A sofa stood at one end of the room, a desk at
the other, and a small table in the centre. The luxuries stopped there.
Yes, his desk was large, affording plenty of space for the neat stacks of
paper serried along it, but it was a far cry from the titanic instrument
of gilded-mahogany intimidation that you might expect a well-sea-
soned tycoon to sit behind. All in all, it seemed the habitat of some-
one who valued practicality and comfort, although the sofa’s pristine
cushions also suggested Bernard did little in the way of lounging.
There was no mistaking the most treasured items in the room: an
enormous number of family photographs on the wall by his desk.

He showed me to the table, ordered tea and coffee, then wast-
ed few words outlining what he would like me to do. Conversation
flowed fairly freely, once he had silenced a noisy air conditioner,
which played havoc with his hearing aid, and I was charmed pretty
much instantly. When someone as focused as Bernard trains the laser
beam of their attention on you, it is irresistible – so long as they do
not use it to cut you to shreds.

I had assumed that he would want me to ghostwrite his mem-
oirs, the most straightforward approach for the type of project he had
in mind. But he dismissed the idea as ‘too artificial’; he did not want
words put in his mouth, just for the truth to be told. His key objec-
tive was to reveal how River Island, the original business of the Lewis
Trust Group (LTG) of companies, which later became Lewis Family
Holdings (LFH), had come into being. He felt slightly uncomfortable
that the project must necessarily focus on him, but he accepted that
this could not be avoided. Not just because his words, his voice, would
be my primary source. The crux of the matter was that while River
Island belonged to the family, and was a product of Bernard and his

Introduction I 9

brothers’ efforts, it was his business above all others’. Over the years,
the ship had been fashioned by many hands, and Bernard no longer
steered it, but his character, his vision and his choices had informed
it from its inception. None of it could be understood properly unless
you grasped the man and what motivated him.
This book is the result of that meeting. It tells the story of Lew
Pokrasse, his wife, Clara Tauber, and their four sons, David, Bernard,
Geoffrey and Godfrey Lewis, whose fates were determined by some of
the greatest obstacles and opportunities of the twentieth century. Lew
and Clara’s boys would emerge from a 1930s childhood of biting pov-
erty into the hazards of the Second World War, and build a company
that would help to reshape retail in Britain and tourism in Israel.
Bernard hesitated to make such claims for their achievements,
his humility a tribute to his character and a testament to the lasting
insecurities that fuelled him. Yet the facts speak for him. In 2020 the
reach of LTG extended to commercial and charitable enterprises that
have changed many more lives than the Lewises’. Their clothing busi-
ness is the wellspring of it all.
Since Bernard contributed the most information, naturally his
point of view dominates the ensuing narrative. His wife Vanessa, his
daughter Caroline Grainge, his sons Leonard, Clive, Sam and Jake,
his sister-in-law Adele Lewis, and his son-in-law Lucian Grainge also
shared valuable insights, as did former employee Stuart Peters.
Thanks to the interviews filmed by Mark and Simon Lew-
is in 2006, the recollections of David, Geoffrey and Godfrey Lewis
also feed into this account. In the interests of capturing the cadences
of their voices, direct quotes are often used. Each brother offered a
unique perspective. Sometimes, being siblings, they disagreed. This
is as it should be. No single person’s memory is wholly reliable, but
the points at which they diverge can be as telling as where they agree.

10 I Introduction

Such differences reveal as much about their contrasting characters as
they do about the contested truth of a situation.

Bernard’s brief to me was simple: ‘Call it as you see it.’ The
truth, as I saw it, should not be sugar coated. He did not have time to
write the book himself, he told me. I suspect that he also wished to
feel free of any responsibility for the judgements made in the follow-
ing pages.

We decided not to delve far into the mistier reaches of the
family background, which is covered both by Mark Lewis’s work in
the DVDs and in Ben Lewis’s book, Fashioning a Future. Where Ber-
nard’s account differed from Ben’s, as it did on numerous occasions,
I dug deeper, asking Bernard to revisit certain questions and com-
paring notes with other parties and evidence where possible. Regard-
ing events in which he participated first hand, I opted to trust his
memory.

Over the course of many interviews his answers were always
precise but never embroidered. If he could not remember something,
he would say so – he would be the last person to fall prey to the com-
pulsion to make up a story to fill an awkward pause in conversation.
At times he felt guilty about the limits of his knowledge, particularly
regarding his parents’ and grandparents’ lives. Yet this, like Godfrey’s
oversight when interviewing Granny Tauber, is not surprising. Such
questions rarely seem urgent or worth asking until the people capable
of supplying the answers to us have passed away, especially if we are
young and go-ahead. And Bernard was an extraordinarily energetic
young man, determined to put as much distance as possible between
his family and their past.
He answered every question that I put to him, except for one
(how much money he possessed). Despite this candour, when he saw
the material on the page, there were things he wanted to leave out,

Introduction I 11

intensely concerned to spare any injury to family feelings. The edits
reflect this sensitivity, and, as a consequence, arguably there are plac-
es where this account paints him in a far less generous light than he
deserves.

Occasionally a memory could produce a tear. This reaction
baffled him, as he did not consider himself a highly emotional person.
But it is not easy to tell the story of your life, particularly when you
do not know how many chapters may lie ahead. His whole existence
had been defined by action, momentum: always seeking the next
opportunity, keeping things moving along. By contrast, this project
required him to look back, delve, analyse. In the search for under-
standing, the act of recollection also became a confrontation: with
feelings and memories that had lain unexamined for decades. It struck
me that perhaps, at some level, he had become a mystery to himself,
and now he wished to change that.

The strength of his emotions underscored the fact that for
Bernard, family and business were inextricable. His desire to keep
growing the business remained undimmed, and his greatest fear was
complacency. Well into his ninety-second year, from a position of
great wealth, he still – irrationally, he knew – felt an irresistible urge
to check his personal worth frequently, almost as a superstition, as if
fearing that were he to relax his vigilance for a moment, all of it might
disappear. I came to understand that he cherished this insecurity and
nurtured it, not just as a business discipline but as a talisman, almost
as if it could serve as a shield against the evils visited on the Jewish
people throughout history.

The family business was Bernard’s lifelong love affair, borne
of an intense desire to protect the people he cared about: his moth-
er, his brothers, his and their wives, children and grandchildren, and
the generations yet to come. But what compounded his motivation
was an impossible longing: to redeem his father, Lew. Bernard would

12 I Introduction

always regret that he had been too young, too poor, to save Lew at a
time when it might have made a difference. Each new store opening,
each triumph, would be shadowed by the sorrow that his father could
not be there to see it. This may be another reason why he was still
working five days a week at the age of ninety-two and still engrossed
in the large, prosperous business he had founded.
Successful as Bernard was, he could also be extremely shy, un-
less talking about business or subjects he felt an affinity with, such as
technology, cars and current affairs. An intense work ethic can itself
be isolating, often creating distance from family. Arguably, in the case
of the Lewis family, working together displaced other, routine forms
of intimacy, although many of the members I spoke to also said that
it was absolutely wonderful to have their shared interest in the com-
pany to bind them together. All the same, it saddened Bernard that he
struggled to communicate at a personal level with some of the people
he loved most. For this reason, I have documented the emotions that
some questions stirred in him, on the basis that if the tears startled
him, they might surprise his family too.
I hope that this account honours his wishes. I tried to guess
what future readers would like to know, and to slake their curiosity
about a world that has already changed beyond recognition. The book
is offered as a message in a bottle for the children of tomorrow. It is
for anyone who wants to believe that, with luck, resolve and very hard
work, anything is possible.

1

A man of substance

The decisive event in the history of the Lewis family is destined to
remain a mystery. But at some point in the early 1920s, somewhere in
the East End of London, a young man named Louis Pokrasse met a
young woman named Clara Tauber.

Both were Jewish, children of immigrants, and small in stat-
ure, although as their son Bernard would say, ‘Everybody was small
in those days.’ But their similarities were balanced by contrasts. While
Louis was trim, with a quiet, measured demeanour that commanded
respect, Clara inclined to plumpness, her love of food matched by the
delight she took in other people, and she was blessed with a captivat-
ing smile and jolly manner that put her equally at ease with friends
and strangers. The eldest of her parents’ six surviving children, she
may have enjoyed a natural authority derived from coming first in the
sibling pecking order, whereas Louis was Hyman and Rivke Pokrasse’s
fourth and youngest child. But any advantage this might have given
her in self-confidence would have been offset by the fact that Clara
was also eight years Louis’s junior.

However the couple’s paths first crossed, it cannot have been
long before the initial attraction deepened in a sense of mutual rec-
ognition. Both the Tauber and Pokrasse families had been Londoners
for years, and although they did not know each other before Louis
and Clara fell in love and were not destined now to become friends,
their backgrounds were very similar, threads in a tale that is all too fa-
miliar to the Jewish community. Both had made the dangerous, costly
trip to England, swept along in the vast tide of migration that flowed
from eastern Europe around the turn of the twentieth century, which

14 I A man of substance

saw Britain’s Jewish population swell fivefold from 60,000 in 1880 to
300,000 by 1914.

Over a century later, asked what had prompted his grandpar-
ents to emigrate, Bernard Lewis could not be sure; nobody had ever
spoken of it. On the other hand, he said, the answer was perfectly
obvious. ‘All the Jewish people came across because of persecution,
wherever they came from. And they were so pleased to be here.’

It was not necessary to believe that the streets of London or
New York were paved with gold to be lured by the freedoms held out
to emancipated Jews in Britain and the United States. Despite the
myriad uncertainties of starting afresh in an unknown land, the com-
bined forces of war, revolution and violence had made emigration an
increasingly logical choice.

First of the two families to arrive were Hyman and Rivke
Pokrasse, who in 1893 fled Zlatopol, a prosperous Ukrainian shtetl,
with their two-year-old son, Marks. That year saw no specific crisis in
the Ukraine, but conditions for the five million Jews in Tsarist Russia
were deteriorating rapidly. In 1890 they had been expelled from the
major cities, Moscow and Kiev, and confined to overcrowded town-
ships within what was called the Pale of Settlement, a narrow strip of
land along the Russo-Polish border. Shut out of society, tyrannised by
pogroms and fear of conscription into the army’s brutal ranks, they
were also barred from numerous trades, depriving most of any rea-
sonable means to improve their circumstances.

No matter how desperate Hyman and Rivke’s situation might

have been in Zlatopol, to get up and out still required considerable
resources. ‘All the people that came across must have had a certain
amount of money: to pay the fare and to get from the depths of the
continent to the North Sea,’ said Bernard. ‘They couldn’t have been
destitute.’ To abandon all that was familiar and take such a one-way
ticket required two further things: courage and deep reserves of hope.

A man of substance I 15

Especially the latter; although Hyman and Rivke would not have
known precisely what lay in store for them, probably they had a fair
idea of the risks, since letters from migrants circulated widely in the
Pale of Settlement, and were often read aloud and pored over in pub-
lic. At the very least they must have realised that however much cash
they managed to squirrel about their persons, by the time that they
reached their final destination they would have been fleeced of pretty
much all of it. Whichever route they took, whether overland through
Europe by train or largely by sea via a Baltic port, they would have
been ripe prey to the unscrupulous ticket agents, corrupt government
officials, and the varicoloured hucksters and scam artists who fed
off this desperate human traffic – from the owners of extortionate
hostelries and bogus city guides to the sinister white slave traders, as
they were known, who picked off the most vulnerable travellers and

pushed them into prostitution. Even if the Pokrasses reached their

journey’s end relatively unscathed, that was just the end of the be-
ginning of their struggle. Henceforth they would be forced to live on
their wits, in an unfamiliar city, in a language that was not their own.

Almost certainly they landed at the east London docks. From
this point the majority of migrants in their position would endeavour
to continue their passage across the Atlantic to the United States; ei-
ther they had arrived in Britain in possession of a transatlantic ticket,
or they were vigorously encouraged to move on by the grants and
other blandishments offered to new arrivals by the Jewish Board of
Guardians, a body that represented Britain’s established community
of Jews and made no effort to mask their dismay at the impoverished,
often unskilled newcomers (as they regarded them). It is impossible
to say whether Hyman and Rivke were tempted to continue on to the
fabled Land of the Free, but they journeyed no further, sinking their
roots in the parish of Spitalfields, only a few miles from where they
had disembarked.

16 I A man of substance

Once home to prosperous Protestant Huguenot weavers and
merchants, who settled there after escaping religious persecution in
France, by the 1890s Spitalfields had declined to become one of Lon-
don’s poorest districts. Decaying merchants’ houses stood cheek by
jowl with synagogues and chevrots (smaller places of worship), and
increasingly the place resembled a ghetto, its crowded lodgings and
teeming streets redolent of dirt, unwashed bodies and overflowing
gutters. In 1886 the Jews’ Temporary Shelter opened at Leman Street
to cope with the influx of new arrivals, and it would not be surprising
if Hyman, Rivke and Marks spent some time there before they found
somewhere more permanent to live.

Casting around for ways to earn a crust, Hyman began trad-
ing as a hawker, peddling his wares on the streets, a basket on his
arm. Almost certainly he sold fruit and veg, easily available from
Spitalfields wholesale fruit and vegetable market, which operated in
a vast covered building between Lamb Street and Paternoster Row. A
humble enough beginning, but evidently Hyman worked hard and
resourcefully, because in time he became the proprietor of three sepa-
rate barrow-lending locations, renting out barrows to the porters who
carted produce around the market between wholesalers and buyers.
Whatever role she played in the family business, his wife Rivke also
kept house immaculately and bore three more children. First to arrive
were twin daughters, Dora and Fanny, in 1895, and their survival is
testament to her exceptional maternal skills. Louis followed two years
later. When Hyman registered his son’s birth in Whitechapel in June
1897, the notary misspelt his surname as ‘Pomkrassie’ on the certifi-
cate.

All four children attended the nearby Jews’ Free School (JFS)
on Bell Lane, which was established in 1732 to provide rudimentary
education for the poorest of the East End’s Jews. Many benefactors
supported the school, notably the Rothschild family (Nathaniel, the

A man of substance I 17

first Lord Rothschild, served as the school’s president throughout the
Pokrasses’ time there). Each child duly left the school at fourteen,
which was then the usual age. Dora and Marks, whom everybody
now called Monty, emerged with Grade I, the lowest possible. Poor
Fanny did not achieve even that. In stark contrast, Louis graduated
with Grade VII, the highest.

Not long after leaving school it seems that Fanny vanished
from the family altogether and entered an institution – it is suspected
that she suffered some form of mental debility. Perhaps this was a
source of shame to her parents and siblings, because if ever her name
was mentioned in succeeding years, it was out of the hearing of her
nephews. Indeed, so comprehensively was she eradicated from the
collective memory that her existence remained unknown to younger
generations for almost a century, until the truth surfaced during re-
search into the family’s history.

Unlike Louis, Clara Tauber was herself an immigrant, born
in 1905 in Ploieşti, Romania, to David and Fanny (née Wagner), who
had married a year earlier. There should have been plenty of reasons
for the family to remain in this boomtown, which was home to the
world’s first oil fields, but so intense was the anti-Semitism that the
future looked as bleak to the Taubers in Romania as it had to the
Pokrasses in Ukraine, twenty years earlier.

Within months of Clara’s birth, her aunt Rose, Fanny’s sis-
ter, and Rose’s husband Louis Rosen left Ploieşti bound for Man-
chester. Their arrival neatly coincided with the 1905 Aliens Act,
Britain’s first ever law designed to restrict immigration, which was
passed in response to growing alarm at the influx of Jewish migrants.
Despite this unwelcoming climate, reports home must have been
encouraging. Undeterred by the new rules, Fanny’s father Joseph
Wagner also concluded that Romania offered no hope and upped
sticks to join the Rosens. (It seems likely that Fanny’s mother, Ediss,

18 I A man of substance

had died by this point.) In the meantime David Tauber struggled to
find work in Ploieşti.

Two years later Joseph Wagner passed away, shortly after the
arrival of Fanny and David Tauber’s second child, another daughter
whom they named Betty. Perhaps Joseph’s death provided the spur
they needed, because within weeks David and Fanny decided to brave
the arduous journey to join the Rosens in Manchester, although Betty
was a babe in arms and Clara still a toddler. Fortunately they all sur-
vived and the Taubers set up their new home at 3 Carnarvon Street in
Cheetham, in the north of the city.

Initially, David plied his trade as a tailor, but he struggled to
establish a decent living. Less than a year after landing in Manchester,
still aged only twenty-four and brimming with hope, he decided to
make another leap into the unknown, heading back to the docks on 5
March 1908 to set sail alone on the SS Baltic, a White Star Line steam-
ship bound for Ellis Island. Another brother-in-law, Lewis Lebovitz,
already living in New York City, had bought his ticket, but although
the Lebovitzes took David into their East Village home, once again
success eluded him. Doubtless missing his wife and little girls, after
four months he called time on his American dream and took another
gruelling transatlantic voyage in steerage back to England.

Back in Manchester, David tried his hand at all sorts of jobs,
including a spell as a glazier. Meanwhile the demands on their pre-
carious income continued to multiply. Fanny gave birth to a third
child, named Joseph in her father’s memory, but he died in infancy.
This loss was swiftly succeeded by another pregnancy, bringing them
a second son, Isaac (known as Ike), who survived. Things cannot have
been going too well because when a cousin of Fanny’s, Ruth Ornstein,
wrote from London, inviting Fanny to join her in a business selling
second-hand clothing, the couple jumped at the chance. By the spring
of 1913 they were based in Stratford in the East End. Unfortunately,

A man of substance I 19

this partnership proved distinctly lopsided, with the greater burden
of work falling upon Fanny, who then fell ill after delivering her fifth
child, Louis. Soon afterwards they dissolved the business in Stratford
and relocated once more, this time to Forest Gate to open their own
shop selling children’s clothes. One suspects that this was primarily
Fanny’s business because once again David was advertising his ser-
vices as a journeyman tailor.

Perhaps it was David’s need for a workshop or perhaps it was
the promise of a better trading position, but a few years later the fami-
ly shifted again, to 99 Victoria Dock Road. A small, soot-stained brick
house consisting of a few cramped rooms above a shop, their new
home was typical of the terraces hastily erected to house dockworkers
in the mid-nineteenth century.

Whatever David and Fanny were looking for, it cannot have
been a quieter life. Parallel with the railway tracks, Victoria Dock
Road was one of the busiest in Canning Town, itself London’s most
congested district and decried by Charles Dickens in 1857 as the woe-
begone ‘child of the Victoria Docks’, so dreadfully overcrowded that
it ‘prevents the steadier class of mechanics from residing in it’. Vitally
for the Taubers, it offered a direct route to Britain’s largest dock, which
was then in its heyday, with hundreds of workers passing back and

forth from dawn to dusk. ‘Number ninety-nine would have been one
of the first shops sailors came across when they stepped off their boats
with money in their pockets,’ said Bernard. But this plum location
came at a price. All day long the family’s nostrils would have stung
with the stench of chemicals and sugar, the air laden with fumes from
Silvertown’s refineries and the vast Tate & Lyle factory. Still, there was
also plenty to distract the eye, as dockworkers and navvies and sailors
of every colour, country and creed streamed by.

Life inside their home would have been little less lively, with
six children and two adults crammed into three small bedrooms, and

20 I A man of substance

a small parlour behind the shop downstairs for recreation. David set
up his Singer sewing machine in the front room beside a long wooden
counter with a brass tape set in its top for measuring and cutting bales
of cloth. Yet the majority of the family’s custom would have been far
less interested in tailoring than the new line in ready-made clothing
bought in by Fanny: denim dungarees, the blue-collar uniform of the
docks.

By this point, Clara lived only five miles away from Louis
Pokrasse, but a city mile counts for a hundred elsewhere, and it is un-
likely they knew each other yet. The Taubers worshipped at the Can-
ning Town Shul; if the Pokrasses practised their religion it would have
been at one of Spitalfields’ many synagogues, although it is doubtful
that they were particularly observant, since it was not a habit that
Louis carried into adulthood. In any case, their fates were about to
be flung in very different directions. The assassination of Archduke
Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, on 28 June
1914 triggered events that led to the outbreak of the First World War.

When Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914
London’s Jewish community was thrown into a quandary. On the
one hand, anti-German sentiment gathered fast and swiftly became
tinged with anti-Semitism. As a result, anyone who spoke Yiddish
(originally a German dialect, smattered with words taken from He-
brew and other languages) or possessed a German-sounding sur-
name became vulnerable to attack, especially in the East End. Perhaps
Hyman and Rivke suffered as a direct result of this xenophobia. Cer-
tainly, at some point, for reasons unknown, their business contract-
ed from three barrow-lending sites to just one based at White’s Row,
around the corner from Spitalfields market, and the family lived in
rooms above the store.

Given the hostile climate, who can wonder if initially few Jews
volunteered to join Britain’s armed forces? And if fear of abuse may

A man of substance I 21

have discouraged many Jewish immigrants from joining the Tommies’
ranks, so too did the prospect of fighting as allies of Tsarist Russia, the
country that they and their families had endured so much pain to
escape. On the other hand, plenty of Jews felt profoundly grateful to
Britain, and Louis Pokrasse was ready to answer his country’s call to
arms. In what capacity he served the British army is unclear, although
his sons did not believe that he saw action in the trenches. There is lit-
tle hope of discovering more, because the Pokrasse surname features
in no military archive – an understandable omission, given that sixty
per cent of soldiers’ service records for that period were destroyed in
a 1940 bombing raid.

Louis spoke little about his wartime experiences. But they
must have left a bitter taste, because he told his children that British
society had an exceedingly short memory when it came to honouring
the contribution of those who had laid down their lives for it. How-
ever much you might be celebrated during the war, he warned, once
peace was declared people soon forgot. ‘All they care about is how
much money you earn.’

There was to be one other unforgettable legacy of his mili-
tary service: chronic respiratory problems. Whether it was caused by
harsh winters passed in arduous conditions, or was the result of attack
by mustard gas, perhaps in the trenches after all, the damage to Louis’s
lungs resulted in bouts of bronchitis that grew increasingly dire with
each succeeding winter.

David Tauber was still in his thirties when hostilities erupted,
but too preoccupied by the battle to keep his family fed and clothed
to volunteer. His continued presence at home can be adduced from
the continued expansion of his brood. Lily arrived in 1915, followed
by Moshe Yunkle (Maurice Jack, or Jackie) in 1917. Yet war can-
not have seemed far away. In January 1917, 99 Victoria Dock Road
would have shaken during the devastating explosion at the nearby

22 I A man of substance

Brunner-Mond munitions factory, which left seventy-three dead and
hundreds injured. How relieved the family must have been when the
Armistice was declared on 11 November 1918. But within weeks di-
saster struck, when David was struck down during the influenza pan-
demic that would eventually claim between 50 and 100 million lives
around the world. He died before the year was out.

So there was Fanny, still a young woman, with a baby, a tod-
dler and four children under fourteen to feed and clothe. Her sister
lived hundreds of miles away in Manchester, and she had neither a
pension nor a functioning welfare state to lend her a helping hand. In
fact, the only official assistance offered to her came in the guise of a
threat, when the local council attempted to take one child into care,
on the grounds that she had insufficient funds to cope. But Fanny
resisted and, by hook or by crook, she managed to keep her children’s
bodies and souls together, all under one roof. As David Lewis, Fanny’s
eldest grandchild, remarked many years later: ‘The longer I’ve lived,
the more admiration I have for Fanny. She was widowed in her early
thirties, her shop was on Victoria Dock Road and when a new road
was carved out later, her business died, but she struggled on. She was
very earthy; a lot of go in her.’ She was, agreed Bernard, ‘the survivor’.

Within months of her father’s death Clara left school at the
standard age of fourteen. No doubt she provided significant support
to Fanny, helping with the business and her brothers and sisters. If she
also had a paid job on top of these duties, any earnings would have
been handed straight to her mother for housekeeping. The idea of the
teenager as a special category of person with their own music or fash-
ion, not to mention spare cash, had yet to be invented. Nonetheless,
young people still had fun. There were picture houses, winter gardens
and other such places to court the opposite sex, and perhaps it was in
one of these that Clara first clapped eyes on Louis.

A man of substance I 23

It is easy to understand what the pair saw in each other. By his
early twenties Louis was already a seasoned independent business-
man. He and his elder brother Monty had been partners together in
a tobacconist’s until the shop burnt down, in somewhat mysterious
circumstances. Taking his share of the insurance money, Louis decid-
ed to go it alone, opening a greengrocer’s shop in Finsbury Park and
building up a steady trade from nothing. To a fatherless teenage girl
living in benign chaos, even with a mother as droll and doting as Fan-
ny at the helm, this young man’s calm self-possession must have been
immensely beguiling, holding out a promise of security. And Clara’s
sunny temperament must have brought a song to Louis’s heart after
the privations of war, not to mention the decline in his own parents’
circumstances.

He was not the only contender for Clara’s heart, and others
appear to have been rather more clamorous. One suitor wrote her
a letter, saying he would commit suicide unless she agreed to marry
him. But if Clara was moved by this appeal, she remained firm: her
heart was set on Louis. Soon, and for ever after, he would be her be-
loved Lew.

Once the courtship was sufficiently advanced for them to
meet their respective families, he may have been taken aback by what
he found at 99 Victoria Dock Road. Fanny, always a flamboyant,
feisty presence, held sway in relaxed style. ‘A rumbustious establish-
ment’ full of young people, as David Lewis described it. Bernard put
it more bluntly: it was ‘a slum, a Dickensian slum’. Both the noise and
the squalor would have been quite alien to what Lew knew from his
home, having been the youngest and last child living with far old-
er parents than Fanny. Although the Pokrasses’ household above the
barrow store was far from luxurious, Rivke kept it pin neat; no knick-
knack was without its designated station or lace doily upon which to
sit. And whatever adventures Hyman and Rivke may have endured

24 I A man of substance

before they reached this place of safety, they were themselves quiet
to the point of tedium – or at least, they were by the time that their
grandsons got to know them. Rivke was ‘gentle, no extrovert’ and Hy-
man ‘very restrained’, according to David – so much so that he could
summon scarcely any memories of his paternal grandfather. He also
believed that Rivke was a semi-intellectual, or at least ‘an educated
lady’, given to reading and writing letters in Yiddish or Hebrew –
quite unlike his maternal grandmother, Fanny, and rather remarkable
for any woman of a generation in which both sexes were often illiter-
ate. This suggests that Rivke may have enjoyed a fairly elevated social
position in her previous life in the Ukraine, possibly wealth too. An
association with a rabbinical family would explain how she came to
be so well educated.

If Lew and Clara felt nervous before introducing their families
to each other, things went smoothly enough and the Taubers quick-
ly came to view Lew as a man of substance, wise in the ways of the
world. The happy pair wed on 5 July 1922 at Philpot Street Synagogue,
the bride a blooming sixteen. If any photos were taken to mark this
joyous occasion, none survived.

Whatever sparked the attraction between this quiet man and
his bubbly wife, the chemistry would last. Many years later, Clara
could not help telling her son that she always ‘thrilled’ to Lew’s touch.
At the time Bernard winced at this rare confidence, but it reinforced
his impression of their mutual devotion. Yet such intimate disclosures
were rare. His parents had little time to dwell on the past. They were
too busy making ends meet.

2

Your own boss

When the newlyweds crossed the threshold of their first home, the flat
above Lew’s greengrocers at 213 Seven Sisters Road in Finsbury Park,
they stepped into a life little quieter than Clara had been accustomed
to on Victoria Dock Road. The shop was just around the corner from
Finsbury Park train station, which served as a conduit for several of
the main rail lines leading north out of London. If the whistles of the
night trains shattered their sleep, the bustle also brought business, a
handy advantage for youngsters embarking not only on married life
but a 24/7 working partnership.

The lovers were together at last, but not alone, because an-
other couple lived there too. ‘My mother talked about a friend called
Adele. I assume they shared the upper part,’ recalled Bernard. Close as
these friends may have been, Bernard could not recall meeting them.
Then again, socialising never featured much in his parents’ day-to-
day lives, and there would be few get togethers with their Tauber and
Pokrasse relations either. No animosity should be read into this ap-
parent distance. Spare time for leisure, never mind the money, was
scant indeed.

If the happy pair craved privacy, they would face quite a wait
to get it. Soon after their wedding Clara learned that she was expect-
ing their first child, but this ended in sorrow when the baby was still-
born, a loss not mentioned to any of the sons who would follow un-
til years later, when their own childhoods were safely behind them.
Within months she fell pregnant once more and on 2 June 1924, after
what must have been an anxious wait, she gave birth at home to a
healthy baby boy whom they named David. Less than two years later,

26 I Your own boss

on 10 February 1926, another boy arrived, also delivered in his par-
ents’ bedroom above the shop. They named him Bernard – after an
ancestor, he thought. ‘A great-grandfather, perhaps my father’s grand-
father in the Ukraine or Russia; I think he was called Baruch. It’s a
Hebrew word for blessed or something like that, he might have been
a rabbi, lived to ninety-two or something.’

As the family grew, so did Lew’s ambitions. In 1928 he sold on
the greengrocer’s lease and they moved into a new home and business
at 618 Holloway Road. ‘Presumably he did it because the shop in Hol-
loway Road was a better position,’ said Bernard. Just under a mile away
from their previous premises, this was a much livelier shopping pitch,
not far from Nag’s Head, a busy junction named after the pub on the
corner where Holloway Road met Seven Sisters Road. Trams squealed
past all day long, their bells singing, alongside motor cars, omnibuses
and the occasional horse-drawn vehicle, and working-class custom-
ers thronged the pavements – precisely the sort of trade that Lew and
Clara knew how to cater for. It has also been speculated that Lew’s
elder brother Monty might have prompted the move, since he had
set up his own fruit shop at 178 Seven Sisters Road, yards from their
original greengrocer’s. To vie for business with your brother might
seem peculiar, given how poor the neighbourhood was. On the other
hand, Monty’s shop may not have presented much of a rival to Lew’s.
In those days London seethed with markets, and numerous butch-
ers, grocers and greengrocers dotted every high street, so the brothers
would not have been in direct competition.

Bernard’s earliest memory was of these busy pavements. Still
a toddler barely out of frills, he was heading up the Holloway Road
towards Archway in order to escort David to his first day at the infant
school beside St John’s Catholic Church. The emotion that stamped
this event so indelibly upon his consciousness was not excitement but
envy of his elder brother.

Your own boss I 27

I wasn’t allowed to go to school, I was too young, but I desper-
ately wanted to go. It was an adventure. I wanted to be grown
up too. And I remember walking on the left-hand side of the
street, passing the small cake shop and there were cakes in
the window and behind them were some ginger snaps with
cream at the end. And I remember looking up and there was
a window in the building on the other side of the road, and in
it I saw the reflection of the sun, the red sun.

A red sun would not have been visible at the beginning or end
of a school day, not in September when term generally starts, unless
David began school later in January. Yet the essentials of this memory
proved accurate eighty-five years later, when Bernard returned to the
neo-gothic building that had housed the school and found it largely
unchanged, except that it was on the point of reopening as a hotel.
‘Around the back where the playground would have been is going to
be a small parking area. But I looked up and there’s the window, the
building just on the corner. I thought, that must be it.’

Momentous as this first walk to school might have been for
the boys, the adult who chaperoned them that day was not either of
their parents but a nanny. Most likely Lew would have been far from
home, out buying stock for the shop at one or other of London’s fruit
and vegetable wholesale markets, and Clara obliged to mind the shop
in his absence. Trusting anyone outside the family to look after the
shop’s takings would have been unconscionable.

Although nanny sounds a grand word, the Pokrasses’ minder
was no Mary Poppins. ‘She was a girl who lived in with us, she slept
in the same room as David and I, and would help to look after us
and with the housework, and I suppose prepare our food. My mother
would have cooked my father’s meal.’

Humble as this may have been, what struck both David and
Bernard most powerfully when they were reminiscing about these
early years was that at this point their parents could afford help at all.

28 I Your own boss

Their shop became reasonably prosperous, recalled Bernard, so much
so that Lew and Clara also hired male assistants and eventually they
even had a Luton van to transport the goods. In an era when cart-
horses still dappled London’s roads with manure as they hauled goods
around for breweries and the likes of Harrods, the iconic Knights-
bridge department store, to possess your own lorry was quite a feat.
It is another mark of Lew’s aspirational character that he made the
investment.

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to conclude from such ap-
purtenances of success that the family were particularly well off. For
them, live-in help was less a luxury than a necessity when there were
tiny children to care for. In fact, in many respects having servants
would have made life less relaxing; after all, their home was just four
rooms set over two floors above the shop, with a downstairs lavatory
in the back yard. If anything, the family’s hard-won veneer of mid-
dle-class prosperity was illusory, Bernard concluded. ‘I am sure my
parents’ car and van were on hire purchase, and the furniture as well.’
As for creature comforts, not one of his childhood residences ever
boasted anything so opulent as a carpet. ‘It was the bare boards.’

In due course Bernard’s wish came true and he followed Da-
vid to the same infant school. He could not recall his own first day
there; the novelty must have worn off, after ferrying his brother back
and forth for the previous couple of years. But one feature at school
seized his imagination. ‘As you went out the door of the classroom,
there was a picture on the left that showed the British Empire. Every-
thing – everything! – was red. Oh, India to Canada to Australia, was
all red and you felt – I’m part of that. How big we are, you know?’

Perhaps this awesome sight seeded the ambition that would
lead him and his brothers to build their own empire. Certainly, from
a young age, Bernard became intrigued by the ways of the world and

Your own boss I 29

what it might take to secure a place in it – an appetite whetted by his
father’s example. Gripped by the twists and turns in politics, and by
instinct a liberal, Lew was not the type to loiter in public houses or
at the dog track – unlike his brother Monty, who loved a bet. ‘My
father’s interests were quite simple: making a living, the family and
current affairs. I don’t remember big conversations about anything,’
said Bernard. ‘He was serious, responsible. He wanted to make his
way.’ Although Lew spoke in English, very occasionally (and mildly)
he swore in Yiddish, according to David.

Clara was the one to chat and draw customers into the shop;
however, as fascinating as she found the people around her, she
did not share Lew’s interest in news or current affairs. She was not,
thought Bernard, particularly well informed. ‘Obviously she contrib-
uted a great deal to the running of the business and the family,’ he
said. But in every matter of importance she placed her faith in Lew.
Theirs was a cosy, old-fashioned marriage.

I don’t remember any arguments between my parents. He
was the person of decisions, the man of the house. Both the
Taubers and Pokrasses would come to him for advice. He al-
ways had sort of an air about him, and was always treated
with the utmost respect. He seemed to be a cut above every-
body else. You can imagine: authority – whether it was banks
or insurance companies – could be intimidating, and he was
the one who seemed to know how the world worked. He was
the one who started on his own. Most people took a job as a
tailor or a clothing machinist. He was the success of the fam-
ily, always the businessman, and perhaps set the tone for us.

An intense sense of duty, of devotion to family, the guid-
ing light of Lew’s life, would be the lodestar for his boys. ‘My
father’s legacy was total family,’ said their youngest son Godfrey.

30 I Your own boss

‘Things were family as far as it was possible. I always remember Moth-
er saying, “My boys, my boys.”

*

David and Bernard arrived less than two years apart, however, there
were to be no more babies for the Pokrasses for a while yet. Possibly
Clara had other pregnancies that did not reach term, or perhaps, con-
sumed by the shop and two little ones, she and Lew decided to take a
break and count their blessings. But their luck came good again on 13
December 1930. ‘I was in bed with our father,’ said Bernard, ‘when I
heard my mother cry out. That was the moment Geoffrey was born.’

To loaf around under the covers with Lew must have been an
uncommon treat. If the first lesson that Clara and Lew taught their
sons was the importance of family, the second was the value of hard
work. Day-to-day life for a greengrocer in 1930s Britain was arduous
and unrelenting. Typically, Lew’s working day began before dawn.

Six mornings a week my father would get up early and go to
the wholesale market. My mother was in the shop all of the
time.
She would open it at about eight o’clock I suppose,
and it would close about eight o’clock at night. It was a five-
and-a-half-day week. Not open on Sundays and there would
also be an early closing, at one o’clock, either Wednesday or
Thursday.

Taking any meaningful break from this cycle was inconceiv-
able, since such responsibilities could not be delegated. ‘You couldn’t
trust anybody to do your buying and you couldn’t trust anybody to
take the cash register and run it for you.’ Neither was shutting up shop
temporarily – during a crisis, for instance – an option: fail to maintain
a regular flow of cash, customers and fresh stock and your clientele
would drift elsewhere, never to return. ‘So there were no holidays – I

Your own boss I 31

mean, you couldn’t leave the shop. Can’t close it – the stock would go
stale and unsaleable. Never, no.’

You might imagine that there were plenty of aunts and uncles
and cousins dotted about east London who could have lent a hand, but
their capacity as a support system was strictly limited. ‘There could
be help with children in an emergency perhaps, but as for help with
your business, there was no spare time, spare anything. And transport
wasn’t easy. People didn’t move around. There was the fare money to
start with. It was virtually a hand-to-mouth existence for everybody.’

In other words, Lew and Clara could never fall ill, never
pause, or do anything remotely spontaneous. To anyone accustomed
to twenty-first-century notions of leisure, this way of life sounds ter-
ribly limiting. But at the age of ninety, now a man able to holiday
whenever and wherever he pleased, Bernard vehemently disagreed:

No, it’s great. You’re your own boss. It’s fine as long as you can
pay the rent and you’ve got food on the table and, yes, some
clothes. And when you talk clothes, I mean, as a boy I would
wear the same clothes every single day. The idea of having a
change of clothes never occurred to you. You only really had
the clothes you stood up in. I would take David’s hand-me-
downs – until I overtook him when I was about ten – but
outgrowing shoes was always a problem. The standards today
. . . Everything is different.
When you’ve got a successful shop or a business that
you own and run, it’s like being in charge of your own uni-
verse: you take all your own decisions, you run your own life,
there’s nobody over you. It’s freedom, wonderful freedom.
Your future is in your own hands.

His delight in hard work started early. Given little scope to
lounge with his parents, he found other ways to be at his father’s side.
Forget playing football or messing about with his brothers: his favou-
rite Saturday treat was to rise before daybreak and get into the Luton
van, admiring London’s deserted streets as Lew drove them to the
wholesale markets. ‘We went to Covent Garden some weeks, some-

32 I Your own boss

times Spitalfields. I suppose the differences were in the wholesalers.
Covent Garden was a bit bigger. On the other hand, Spitalfields was a
bit closer.’ The treat cut both ways. ‘I think I was useful to him, I used
to help load the lorry, but obviously it was voluntary, so it must have
been that I liked going; I was interested, I liked watching what was
going on. I have no recollection of my brother David going, I don’t
know why.’

Fresh produce had been sold in Covent Garden’s once fashion-
able square since the tail end of Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth,
after stallholders set up shop on its southern side in 1654, although
the area soon became a magnet for the city’s brothels. The heyday of
the fruit and vegetable market began in earnest in 1830 with the erec-
tion of Charles Fowler’s glorious neo-classical covered hall. By the
1930s, Covent Garden was a thriving distribution hub, belching out
displaced rural aromas in the polluted heart of the city. ‘It’s changed
a lot; now there is no market, of course. But back then, if you’ve seen
the film, My Fair Lady, that’s what it was like.’

We’d be up at five and get there about six and we’d go around
the wholesalers and then we’d buy.
People knew each other – you were there every day.
There were people that you would do more business with,
people you’d be reasonably friendly with, and other peo-
ple that you’d seldom buy from. Most wholesalers were not
Jewish. They had connections with the farmers, they’re your
bridge to the countryside, making arrangements with the
farmer to sell his produce.

The markets were pretty rough. ‘It wasn’t a genteel sort of at-
mosphere – plenty of swearing.’ In other words, it was no place for
children, and the boy absolutely loved it.

Eight decades later Bernard could close his eyes and summon
up the smell of the produce, the dank loam clinging to vegetables dug
from the earth the day before, and the sweet fruits of orchard, bush

Your own boss I 33

and vine, and still hear the muttered exchanges between wholesalers
and traders striking their bargains. ‘If you’re going to work in a mar-
ket, operate as a trader, you’ve got to be street smart. You had to keep
your eyes on everything all the time.’ Purchasing was an art in itself.
What the child took on board, watching Lew do his rounds, making
deals, was less the skills of the souk than the finer points of valuation.

It wasn’t so much haggling. You could make an offer, but re-
ally it was a question of different wholesalers offering differ-
ent qualities at different prices, and the price moved up and
down during the morning with demand. It would fluctuate
continuously. There would be gluts and shortages, and each
wholesaler would be better or worse for you at different com-
modities.
The buying process basically is to ascertain the price
of the commodity on that day, because it can change totally
from day to day. So the job was walking the market, sussing
out what’s going on, how much of a particular commodity
was in the market that day and pricing stock with different
wholesalers, and within ten, fifteen minutes of arriving at
Covent Garden you could get an idea of the market rate.
You can’t do everything, see everyone – you’ve got to
get the job done. And obviously you have a list, knowledge
of what you need more of. For instance, you don’t necessar-
ily buy potatoes every day but in the summer you’ll need to
buy soft fruit daily – strawberries, raspberries; in those days
there was no refrigeration. So one of the skills would be to
gauge the daily demand, and predict the weather, from five,
six o’clock in the morning. Because if it was going to be a hot
day you would sell more strawberries than if it was cold. And
you’d also need to gauge how many you would sell at a certain
price. Because there’s all different qualities you can buy. So
you have to know your shop and your customer, know what
price works and to what quantity.

Cost versus quality would be their key consideration, because
Clara and Lew’s customers were above all else ‘very price sensitive’.

Despite the market’s rough edges, customs and unwritten

34 I Your own boss

rules codified much of what went on. Nevertheless, there could be
sharp practice too, and not exclusively between men. Bernard wit-
nessed two painful incidents that would haunt him for decades.

I remember in Covent Garden an enormous row. There was a
woman sitting there in the street and a man shouting at her.
What had happened was he had bought some boxes of pears
off her at a very, very cheap price and it turned out they were all
rotten. All of them had to be thrown away. Now you’re sup-
posed to inspect the produce and satisfy yourself before you
commit. And if it’s very cheap there’s something wrong. But
this man had dumped all his money in and she wouldn’t give
it back. You could see he was absolutely desperate. That could
have been his last money and he was finished. If it was a man
they’d have had a fight. But nobody could make her give it
back, and he couldn’t touch her because she was a woman. So
she was just sitting there implacably, not looking at him. And
he was swearing and shouting and there was quite a crowd. I
saw something very similar in Spitalfields once, too. A man
bought from a wholesaler and the stuff turned out to be rub-
bish. They wouldn’t give his money back. He was finished,
sunk. Left with nothing but a bus fare home I imagine.

Lew would always have street smarts and never be gulled, tak-
en for a fool, or get into this sort of scrape. Indeed, he was so utterly
single-minded that Bernard could recall only one occasion when he
saw his father take part in something approaching a non-business
conversation at the market. ‘At Spitalfields once, he was sort of speak-
ing in a friendly manner to a wholesaler. He wasn’t just conducting
business.’ Such camaraderie must have been rare, thought Bernard,
‘because it stayed in my mind’.

After ordering stock, father and son would head off for a cup
of tea at the ABC café. It was always scalding, but Lew could drink it
straight off. ‘I couldn’t keep up,’ said Bernard ruefully – and you sense
that he tried very hard. Then it was time to take the goods and leave.