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Against the world I 135

it was terrible.’ Nearly three-quarters of a century later he would still
occasionally wake up in the morning, shaken by dreams of the air
force; of waiting around, never knowing what was going on, and be-
ing utterly resigned to it, like a character in a work by Franz Kafka or
Samuel Beckett. But there could be no bunking off. He was, for better
or worse, Leading Aircraftsman Lewis and indentured to His Majesty
for seven shillings and tuppence a day until the RAF decided to dis-
pense with him.

Next he transferred to the vast RAF camp at Heaton Park in
Manchester, where David had begun his training a few years earlier.
As was the case in most postings, he slept in a Nissen hut, a long half-
cylinder of prefabricated corrugated steel with a cold concrete floor,
which provided little more protection against the icy winter than a
canvas tent. There were thirty men to a hut, fifteen beds down each
side, the cold scarcely kept at bay by a little woodburning stove in the
middle which might have been adequate had there been anything to
burn. Frequently there was nothing. In one station he and his bedfel-
lows became so desperate for heat that they got extremely dirty scrab-
bling on a nearby slagheap, scavenging for scraps of coal. Once they
went so far as to burn the wooden shelves in the hut.

At least the routines of camp life were steadier than the heat-
ing: rise early, wait in line for the washhouse, then back to the cook-
house with your regulation knife, fork and tin mug.

There would be high points. When Germany finally surren-
dered on VE Day, 8 May 1945, there was no keeping the men on base
and everybody went wild, partying in the streets. ‘Picking up girls and
that sort of thing.’ After the frenzy subsided, a celebratory afterglow
burnt on. ‘There was an Air Force Club in the centre of Manches-
ter. You would go there and have something to eat and socialise a bit
and then walk around. Because the streets were ours again. No more
blackouts. We were safe!’

136 I Against the world

Then images from the concentration camps began to fill news-
papers and cinema screens, exposing the horrors of the Holocaust:
the starving concentration camp survivors, the relics of murder on an
industrial scale. Bernard professed to have felt little surprise at what
they revealed. ‘We knew what was going on to some extent. We just
didn’t know the details.’ As early as August 1942 the Jewish Chronicle
had carried reports of Jews being executed in mobile gas chambers,
and it was his impression that the Allies had a fair understanding of
what was happening but chose not to act.

‘They could have bombed certain rail terminals, things like
that, the railways transporting them. I mean, there was a lot of resis-
tance going on in France, word was coming back, radio operations
and things like that. All the Jews that were shipped from France into
Germany and Poland – word must have come back, what was hap-
pening to them.’
Such knowledge, after all, was what had spurred him and his
brother to volunteer in the first place. ‘All I know is that David and I,
in common I suppose with all Jewish people, we knew that if we lost
the war we would be annihilated.’
For Bernard at least, a greater surprise even than the Holo-
caust came on 26 July 1945. Three weeks earlier, on 5 July, Britain had
held its first general election since Winston Churchill, Bernard and
just about everyone else’s hero, received his mandate to become Prime
Minister in October 1940. The election results, which came after a
punishing delay of three weeks while the results of a postal ballot of
servicemen who were still based overseas reached Britain, declared a
landslide victory for Clement Attlee’s Labour party.
‘I didn’t have the radio so the newspapers, that’s the first we
heard of it. The headlines were absolutely amazing. I was just flab-
bergasted. It had never entered my head that Churchill wouldn’t win.
He was the person that pulled the nation together, and epitomised

Against the world I 137

determination, and made it all work, and got us through. He had this
aura of being infallible. Now, obviously nobody knew outside the gov-
ernment what he was really like. All we had was the public view; the
reality could well have been somewhat different. I gather that he was
a bit chaotic, sometimes.’
Even so, it was incomprehensible to Bernard that anyone
could doubt that their great war leader was the right man to keep
the peace. ‘The idea that he wouldn’t be carrying us through the next
stage had never occurred to me, and a lot of people. Now it is obvious
what it was: it was the hangover of the depression leading up to the
war, and the conditions of industrial Britain were dire, pre-war. Peo-
ple who had experienced that . . . Many working people didn’t want to
go back to what life was like before.’
The thirst for change won out. It could seem odd that Ber-
nard was blindsided by this tide of feeling against the Conservative
Party; after all, his family had suffered so much, absent any help from
a welfare state. But Bernard was a self-employed greengrocer’s son,
not dissimilar to his near contemporary Margaret Roberts, grocer’s
daughter and the future Mrs Thatcher, who would one day be Prime
Minister. Like her, he did not expect the government to make his per-
sonal circumstances better. Self-reliance was both a way of life and
a point of pride with him. What is more, he revered Churchill as an
indefatigable man of purpose, someone who got things done – not
only the pattern of a leader, but a national father figure and the kind
of man he would do his best to become.

*

Germany may have surrendered but Britain immediately faced a new
battle. Supplies were desperately low, rationing was as strict as ever,
half a million homes had been destroyed and four million more were

138 I Against the world

damaged. Worse, when hostilities ended the United States abruptly
terminated the lend-lease policy that had kept the UK going finan-
cially since it ran out of money to fund the war effort in 1941. At a
stroke, most of Europe was declared bankrupt, and so it would remain
until the instigation of the US-funded Marshall Plan bailout in 1948.
The Lewis family’s predicament was little less challenging than
the country’s. Lew had died leaving no will, but after due process of
probate, his few possessions passed to Clara. She also received a mod-
est widow’s pension, and would continue to do so until Godfrey, her
youngest, was fourteen, yet this meagre stipend by no means afforded
her a living wage – indeed, as a matter of hard-hearted policy the
government deliberately set it below the poverty level, claiming that
this would encourage families to support one another and encourage
women to work. Moreover, widows without children below fourteen
received no financial assistance. Clara had of course worked constant-
ly for years, the more so since Lew was overcome by illness, but now
she had extra mouths to feed, attached to fully grown men. Not only
was David home; so too, at long last, were Geoffrey and Godfrey, this
time for good.
At twelve years old, Godfrey still went to school, but when not
at home or at his books he served customers at Old Street. Fifteen-
year-old Geoffrey had not returned to his course at art college since
Lew died and would accompany Clara to Covent Garden and Spital-
fields markets, receiving a similar training to that Bernard received
from Lew in the 1930s. ‘It was a good university,’ he said.
Doing the rounds of the wholesalers, going from stall to stall
to find the best bargain, he learned to check the bottom of boxes of
apples for rotten ones and to investigate stock behind the display to
see what the bulk of it was like, not just the top boxes. Continued
rationing meant that a coupons system still remained in place for the
imported fruit on allocation, and sometimes they would be compelled

Against the world I 139

to queue for hours to buy stock, with not a clue what type or quantity
might await once they reached the front of the line.
David helped when he was able, always rigged out immacu-
lately in full RAF fig, and the wholesalers’ reaction to those unmistak-
able flyers’ wings on David’s jacket came as a revelation to Geoffrey.
‘At Spitalfields, every stand he went to they found extra boxes of ap-
ples, pears – all because of the wings on his uniform.’
When home on leave Bernard also experienced a similar pow-
er, at least initially. ‘My uniform didn’t have wings but my cap had
the white flash that showed I was trainee aircrew and that had a cer-
tain glamour to it. Battle of Britain and all that lark.’ He found that
the effect wore off after a few days when the wholesalers got used
to the sight of him, however, and waiting around at the market gave
him ample time to ponder the misery of inefficient supply chains and
over-regulated commerce.
His Heaton Park vigil finally at an end, he was dispatched
to the mustering station at Eastchurch on the Isle of Sheppey, near

Southend, where he awaited the RAF’s verdict on where to send him

next. ‘The idea was you were being re-mustered. You were no lon-
ger aircrew but you would be, I don’t know, a mechanic or a clerk or
whatever.’ On 17 May 1946 he was called in for an interview. ‘The staff
officer looked at my documents and someone had scrawled across the
papers in thick red crayon, “S.R.O.” This meant “Scheduled Reserved
Occupation”. And he said, “Oh, well you’re free to go. We can’t keep
you.”’
Thanks to his old job designing tools for aircraft production,
he could leave, but on one condition: he had to return to employ-
ment in the same role. His next stop was the Number 100 Personnel
Despatch Centre in Uxbridge to go through the demobilisation rou-
tine, and receive a full set of clothes: felt hat or flat cap, two shirts, a
tie, raincoat and pair of shoes, not forgetting the famous demob suit,

140 I Against the world

either a three-piece pinstriped effort or a jacket and flannel trousers,
although the fit could not necessarily be relied on. Then it was time
to go home.
After a week’s leave he trotted off as instructed to the Labour
Exchange with his papers, exactly as he had after leaving the poly.
‘And they said, “No, we don’t need any more people in aircraft pro-
duction, we’re not making any more airplanes.” So then I was home.’
He was twenty years old, with nothing to do and nobody to tell him
what to do. He was free! It must have been a giddy moment, but also
a disconcerting one.
His first move was to write to Cambridge University, which
had unfurled before him the prospect of such splendour and oppor-
tunity, asking if he could return to complete his engineering degree.
In due course a letter came back. The answer was no: his grades were
not good enough, since they had no record of him passing the rele-
vant mathematics examination. Were it not for that lonely bottle of
gin on Corpus Christi Feast Day he would have sat that examination,
could have re-entered the university and been on course for a glitter-
ing career.
Reflecting upon this moment, seven decades later, Bernard
recalled a short story by W. Somerset Maugham entitled ‘The Verger’:

There’s a chap who’s a verger, digging graves. A new vicar
came along and learned that he couldn’t read or write. So he
said, ‘Well you’ve got to go. I’ve got to have somebody who
can read and write.’ So he got sacked. He eventually set up as
a newsagent and when he signed the lease of his sixth shop
he couldn’t write his name, he put a cross.
The bank manager said to him, ‘Just think where
you’d be if you’d learned to read and write.’
He said, ‘I know where I’d be. I’d be a verger.’

Recounting this simple plot to me upset Bernard, which
shocked him a little. But it is not surprising. ‘What would have hap-

Against the world I 141

pened if Cambridge had said, “Yes, you can come back.” I’d have been
an engineer, wouldn’t I? None of this would have happened.’
At the time the rebuff was devastating. Just as he had been
too ill with mumps to sit the scholarship examination for grammar
school, just as he had been absent, contending with the death of his
father, when his RAF training wing sailed for Canada, just as Lew
had been denied the luck to survive and watch his sons grow up and
succeed – these would be the regrets that drove him onwards through
the trials and triumphs to come, and no amount of success would be
enough to banish the shadows that they cast.
With no job and no map for the future, he abandoned any
thoughts of resuming his correspondence course. ‘When there wasn’t
engineering, there was no point in studying.’ In fact, just because
Cambridge sent him on his way, this did not rule out finding other
routes, had he wanted it; clearly the dream of engineering, never a
passion, had lost its charm. Neither did he contact the Hendon draw-
ing office, despite having rather enjoyed his time as a draughtsman,
which seems odd, especially in light of his father’s never-to-be-for-
gotten admonitions to have a trade. ‘But it never entered my head to
work for anybody else. When you left school the Ministry of Labour
directed you; after the war, I was free to do anything I wanted. And
there was the shop, they needed somebody to run it, so the thing to
do was to stay in it and make some money.’ From now on Bernard did
all the buying while Clara and his brothers stayed in the shop.
For a boy who had found hauling his carcass out of bed at
6 a.m. to row for his college boat not to his liking, committing to the
daybreak wheeler-dealing of the wholesale markets seems quite an
undertaking. But it was a familiar life, and this time he was striking
the deals, with nobody to share that scalding cup of char at the ABC
café.
In the few hours of leisure that were left to him, Bernard
continued to read – mostly novels by the likes of Sinclair Lewis, Dick-

142 I Against the world

ens and C.P. Snow, as well as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes
stories and The Good Soldier Svejk, a masterly satire of military zeal
in the First World War by Czech author Jaroslav Hašek. He also had
the pleasure of his elder brother’s company, although David had many
competing interests. Still serving out his RAF posting in London, Da-
vid also joined the Wembley branch of Young Israel, a group of Jew-
ish youth clubs associated with local synagogues, where he met a girl
called Judy Melzack. With little delay the couple became engaged.
After the sorrows that blighted 1945, Clara was determined
the family should find something to celebrate and somehow she
gathered sufficient resources to hold Godfrey’s Bar Mitzvah, the first
that any Lewis brother would receive. The brothers cleared the furni-
ture out of the front bedroom at Kyverdale Road and invited people
around for the evening. ‘I think it involved tea and biscuits and cake,
maybe sandwiches, probably a little bit of alcoholic drink, but usually
Jewish people drink little.’ So it was not quite a party, according to
Bernard, but far and away the closest they had ever come to a family
knees-up.
This did not mean life had become much easier. Six days a
week, Bernard headed to market to gather the best produce he could
find, although sometimes Clara became impatient with what he
brought back. ‘Other people get pineapple, why can’t we?’ she would
ask. ‘Other people get grapefruit, why don’t we?’

All the food was rationed but you could still get eggs, chick-
ens and things like that on the black market. I dare say my
mother might have been tempted to get some of them but
David and I wouldn’t take the stuff. But with regard to brib-
ing people to get greengrocery we didn’t know anybody to do
it. We had no connections. People wouldn’t take, shall we say,
a financial inducement from us, if they didn’t know us, but
other greengrocers, competitors, they always had stock. They
were in cahoots with the wholesalers.

Against the world I 143

Somehow the family managed to wangle an allocation for con-
fectionery. The only trouble was that it did not come complete with
an invitation to the nearest Cadbury’s or Rowntree’s supplier, and it
proved immensely tricky to lay their hands on any desirable brands. ‘I
remember going to the wholesaler, also in the East End, and you’d get
all these unknown names. You couldn’t get a tin of Roses. For that you
had to be on very good terms with the wholesaler, I assume.’ None-
theless, a nation starved of treats was open to ersatz alternatives and
anything sweet sold well. Bernard dredged up a contact in Holloway
who procured various oddities. ‘You could get dried figs, cut them up,
weigh them and sell them by the pound, and there were fruit bars, a
sort of mashed up, dried stuff wrapped in cellophane.’
The bottom line was that Bernard, like almost everyone in
Britain, was not free to buy what he wanted. Every day presented a
masterclass in the fundamental rule of retail: get what customers want,
preferably before anyone else. Years of accumulated frustrations – at
rationing, lack of choice, the inequities of the supply chain – schooled
him in ingenuity. Conveniently for him, they were also whetting the
market’s appetite, priming Britain for a consumer boom.

There was no ignoring the shabbiness of London and its citi-
zens, with bombsites everywhere, no resources to build anything new,
and scarcely a man or woman in unpatched clothes, which would be
rationed until 15 March 1949. ‘Yeah, I remember wearing the same
clothes for ever, so to speak.’ Personally, Bernard did not much mind
this deprivation. Far from a big spender, he took pride in frugality,
and rather than enjoy the £25 David had given him on going to Cam-
bridge he was pleased to return it in full. ‘Didn’t spend a penny. It
wasn’t spending money, it was a reserve.’ The only passion he allowed
himself outside family and work was cars, and the one element of late
1940s austerity that truly infuriated him therefore was that he could
not acquire a new model. ‘There were waiting lists for years for new

144 I Against the world

ones. Anything that was being made – which was very little, industry
was right on the floor – was going for export, because we needed for-
eign currency.’
Only so much money could be made from selling mashed-up
fruit bars. With the black market closed to them, the Lewises sought
other ways to turn a profit. As Geoffrey recalled, some of their shop’s
custom was rather classy, thanks to visitors passing on their way from
Old Street Underground station to the nearby Moorfields Eye Hospi-
tal. ‘It did have a mixed trade, yes it did,’ said Bernard. ‘There were of-
fices nearby and some executives there, it wasn’t like Holloway, which
was pure working class.’ So when the premises next door to theirs fell
vacant the Lewises snapped up the lease, hoping to capitalise on this
richer clientele by opening a florist.
Every day one brother or other fetched armfuls of blooms
from Covent Garden. ‘You’d buy them in boxes and the wholesaler
would take them out of the box, make an enormous bundle, wrapped
round and round, and you would carry them like that. I remember
bringing them all the way back on the tram from Bloomsbury down
the Kingsway viaduct.’
Although selling flowers was within their skill set, arranging
them was not. A particularly painful commission came from Uncle
Monty’s eldest daughter Irene, better known as Rene, for a bride’s
bouquet when she was planning her wedding.

Bernard chuckled at the memory.

I personally made it. Never made one in my life. First one I
did. Only one I did.
‘What’s there to do for a bride’s wedding bouquet?’
I thought to myself. You get some carnations and you
get some fern and you get bits of wire and make one.
Didn’t practise. I just did it. I saw her, about eight years
ago, and I said to her, ‘How could you have asked me to
make your wedding bouquet?’ I can’t remember what

Against the world I 145

she said but there was mutual recognition that it was
diabolical. You can imagine – there she was, getting married,
and this turns up on the morning, so there’s no way to get
another one.

They also began to sell hothouse Muscat and Belgian black
grapes in smart little cardboard boxes, staying open for five hours on
a Sunday to capture those lucrative hospital visitors. Clara acquired
a safety deposit box at the bank and soon was doing well enough to
tuck away £30 a week.
Little by little, she stashed away enough to buy a car. It was
not the most exciting proposition, since only clapped-out, pre-war
vehicles were available, but when the price of a soot-belching banger
was within their grasp they did not hesitate to grab it. In the late 1940s
petrol continued to be rationed and would remain so until 1950, but
they even managed to secure an allocation of petrol. ‘For what you
might call essential journeys – that meant carrying out our business
as opposed to pleasure. Like going to the market.’ Just one small ob-
stacle remained: having someone in the family capable of driving the
vehicle. Bernard, the Lewises’ resident petrol-head, tackled this prob-
lem in his customary fashion.
‘I bought a book and learned. Then I had a friend, he was in
the air force, and he came round to Kyverdale Road with a Morris
Minor, and I got in and I drove it. I’ve never taken a test in my life.
During the war they abandoned tests. The controls that exist today
weren’t there. You just got on with things. The nation was self-reliant,’
he recalled, evincing incomprehension at what he saw as the harmful
slide into dependency that blighted so many in the twenty-first cen-
tury.
Two hundred pounds later, the family had a sec-
ond-hand, pre-war Vauxhall 12, registration number DPG809.

146 I Against the world

Bernard tenderly recalled its every quirk, as one might the idiosyn-
crasies of a first love:

Flat battery, bald tyres, had to start it by hand with a crank
handle. It might have been ex-army, it had been resprayed
black, not shiny but dull. I couldn’t understand why it
wouldn’t shine up. I bought it from a second-hand car dealer,
didn’t know what I was doing. Then we rented a drive from
a house round the corner, a few minutes away in Cazenove
Road, and parked it there at night, paid them five shillings a
week. Why I didn’t leave it outside our house in the street I
don’t know.

If such a precaution reflects how much the Lewises prized this
possession, it did not mean that Bernard was satisfied. Immediately
he placed the family’s name on the manufacturers’ waiting list for a
new Austin 10. It was a statement of confidence. Better things were to
come, he would make sure of it, and by the time his name topped the
list, he would have the money to pay for the car.
After months bouncing from one RAF station in London to
another, David was sent home on leave and told to await further in-
structions for his next posting. ‘He phoned up I suppose once a week,
twice a week, to check in, and he always got the same reply – they’ll
contact you.’ This went on for about six weeks until David received a
shocking letter, summoning him to a court martial. He was charged
with going absent without leave.
A court martial is a court convened to try a member of the
armed forces for an offence against discipline and the penalties im-
posed could be severe. Some might have been terrified at the pros-
pect. David was simply indignant and, ever the model of self-reliance,
he decided to represent himself.
‘That was David, taking charge of his own court martial, bat-
tling his way through everything,’ said Bernard. ‘He always set out
with determination to have a go, to do it, to conquer it. See if you can
get there. If you don’t try, you’ll never get there, will you?’

Against the world I 147

The trial lasted three weeks. David successfully persuaded the
court to slow proceedings to a snail’s pace in order that he could re-
cord everything in longhand, since he could not write in shorthand
and had nobody to assist him.

‘We were all living at home,’ remembered Bernard, ‘so I would
drop him off at the court martial in the car in the morning when I
was not at the market, then I’d go on to the shop.’ This episode sounds
dramatic, but not as far as the family was concerned. ‘It was all about
nothing. The war was over, he wasn’t missing in battle, he was being a
clerk, waiting for his number to come up to be demobbed.’ Common
sense prevailed at the trial too and the adjudicating panel acquitted
David of all charges, leaving him to begin his next posting with a
clean sheet. The main legacy of this experience was to establish an-
other lifelong habit. When presented with a proposition, David would
write down his thoughts then analyse the pros and cons – a method
that he passed on to Bernard. ‘I remember him saying that if you put
things on paper it helps to clarify the mind, and I find that myself.’

Bernard was still grinding away, helping both in the fruit shop
and the florist. Yet it is clear that the elder Lewis brothers’ ambitions
were hardening and a new business, Lewis Trusts Limited, was regis-
tered at Companies House, doubtless orchestrated by David. He and
Bernard, the co-proprietors, took one share apiece, and launched an-
other enterprise called Expert Exports – or at least, David printed off
some notepaper that is a bold statement of intent. According to the
letterhead, they offered a range of services, operating as export, ship-
ping and air-freight agents, as well as manufacturers’ representatives,
overseas buyers’ agents and consultants on foreign markets. But these
bold intentions were as far as the business ever got, said Bernard.
The pair also began to socialise together, and after years of
being sequestered in male company, first at school then in the RAF,

148 I Against the world

Bernard began to meet girls when David took him along to the
Young Israel youth club in Wembley.
‘It was for the late teens, from about the age of eighteen to
twenty-two. We had a bit of a dance, a film show. The girls did the re-
freshments, the tea and the biscuits and the sandwiches,’ he explained,
before asking, with touching curiosity, ‘Is that how it is now?’
This period of fraternal togetherness proved short-lived. Al-
ready engaged to Judy Melzack, David soon outgrew the club, but
Bernard did not mind terribly, since he had met a girl of his own by
then.
Pretty, small and slender, with soft brown hair, creamy skin
and a slightly disconcerting habit of blinking incessantly, Lorna Spen-
cer was also rather shy, like Bernard. Although he was not particularly
looking for a girlfriend, when people began pairing off at the club, it
seemed natural that they too should step out as a couple.

The post-war elation finally iced over at the end of 1946 when
an unusually harsh winter settled over the country. ‘I remember
standing in Covent Garden market. It was so cold it hurt,’ said Ber-
nard. ‘My whole body ached. You had to swing your arms and slap
them against your sides to keep the circulation going.’ It did not help
that everybody was stuck in the same clothes year round, come sun,
rain or blizzard.

This bitter weather not only held up a mirror to Britain’s bleak
economic situation but also made it significantly worse. As snow
cloaked the land, temperatures fell so low that vegetables froze in the
ground, prompting fears of food shortages. Worse, the country tipped
into an energy crisis, as high rates of absenteeism in the mining in-
dustry, coupled with the Labour government’s reluctance to confront
the National Union of Mineworkers regarding the need to boost pro-
duction, saw coal stocks dwindle, meaning that power stations did
not have enough fuel to meet increasing demand. In response elec-

Against the world I 149

tricity supplies were rationed, starving both homes and industry, and
as the mercury dropped so did the value of the pound, until discon-
tent brought protesters onto the streets. Finally the snow melted in
March 1947, and floodwaters rose instead – a perfect metaphor for
the state of the nation, sinking in debt.
The Lewises struggled on, continuing to squirrel away savings
in Clara’s safety deposit box, looking for opportunities to improve
their lot. But they were not quite finished with the war yet. His hon-
our re-established, David was twenty-one years old, bursting with en-
ergy and itching to get on with his life, but instead of demob papers he
received another posting, one to send shudders through any Jewish
serviceman: to RAF Wunstorf near Hanover in Germany.

When his ship sailed on New Year’s Day 1947 David and hun-
dreds of others lay in their bunks, listening to ice crash against the
hull as it crossed the sea to Hamburg. Their official mission was to
supply aid to the German people, but they possessed precious few
resources with which to do so. Once a proud industrial hub of north
Germany and its second largest city, Hanover had seen nine-tenths of
its centre pulverised by Allied bombing. All that thrived now was the
pullulating black market. With little to do, David felt he was idling
away his days. Some servicemen took to the streets, their favourite
pastime to see whether they could barter their way up from a packet
of chewing gum to a prized Leica camera.

The oldest brother at home, Bernard felt obliged to act the
father – not a role in which he felt entirely comfortable. One occa-
sion stood out both in his memory and Geoffrey’s. They were strolling
along Kingsland High Road after a day at the fruit shop in an awk-
ward silence, as Bernard tried to find the right words. ‘I remember
planning it, thinking that this has got to be done. I don’t remember
discussing it with anybody as to whether I should or I shouldn’t.’ But
somehow he managed to deliver a version of the birds and the bees

150 I Against the world

talk. Geoffrey remembered it as very matter-of-fact, but Bernard
cringed at the memory. Intimate conversation seldom came easily to
him.
After three chilly, futile months in Germany David finally re-
ceived his demob papers. However bored he felt, he gave every out-
ward sign of being a model airman, and in his RAF Service and Re-
lease Book, his commanding officer Squadron Leader Brett wrote: ‘Sgt
Lewis has been on this unit for the last three months, during which
time he has proved himself to be a hard and industrious worker. He is
a most conscientious NCO.’ David’s character was rated ‘V.G.’ – very
good – the highest accolade, and quite an improvement on the raw
recruit whose distaste for regulations had denied him the chance to
be an officer. He returned to the UK to the 101 Personnel Dispersal
Centre in Preston, his war ending officially on 11 April 1947.

The civilian life that awaited David was not glamorous. Still
determined to pursue accountancy, he wanted the highest qualifica-
tion: that of a chartered accountant. But that meant he would have
to pay to be articled to a company, so he compromised and ended
up ‘earning a pittance’ as a clerk at Caldwell & Braham, a firm based
in Westminster. At least this job let him train for the qualification of
incorporated accountant, one rung below chartered.

Looking back, David gave a succinct description of London in
spring 1947: ‘Life is grim, there’s a utilitarian atmosphere, no luxury
or entertainment.’ All day he sat at a desk, filling ledgers with tidy
columns of figures, before returning home to study until midnight
for the correspondence course that would take him up the next rung
of the professional ladder. Anything approaching a social life went
on the back burner. His only distraction was his fiancée Judy, who
resented playing second fiddle to his ambition.
Bernard agreed the city was bleak, although the human side
of the damage was less apparent. ‘You didn’t see many broken men re-

Against the world I 151

turning from the war, compared to the First World War.’ For him and,
he felt, for most people, self-pity was out of the question. ‘Yeah, things
were tough. There were no consumer goods, not much of anything in
particular, and it was quite hard to know how you could pull yourself
into a comfortable life. But on the other hand you all had the oppor-
tunity to build a life. We’d won the war, and you hadn’t been killed.
There was a business to run, get yourself on in the world. Make some
money.’

By now Clara’s safety deposit box was well stuffed and she was
ready for the first major outlay of her life: a home to call her own. 49
Montrose Avenue was a modest new-build, semi-detached house in
Whitton, a suburb of Twickenham, but for Clara it might as well have
been a palace. An added attraction was that it was not far from her
mother Fanny and sister Lily’s place, with sister Betty close by. Betty
had tipped Clara off about the property, which was lucky, because few
houses were to be had at the time, with building materials still hard to
come by.

Clara did not do the deal herself. ‘David and I seemed to take
the lead, put it that way,’ said Bernard. He and David determined that
since they had saved enough they should buy the place outright, leav-
ing no mortgage debt hanging over them. Since the house belonged
to Clara, an experienced businesswoman a good twenty years older
than they were, it might seem peculiar that she left this and all other
critical decisions to her youthful sons. ‘But it just seemed to follow
naturally.’ Clara’s trust in her sons can be seen as a continuation of her
faith in Lew; what is more, she had sound grounds for confidence.
Thanks to his accountancy work, David had experience with profes-
sionals and would not be daunted by estate agents or lawyers. War
and their father’s loss had matured both him and Bernard far beyond
their years. They were the men of the house now.

The eldest Lewis brothers had plenty of traits in common –

152 I Against the world

the foremost application, fierce ambition and drive. ‘David was able,
the same as I, to seize opportunities and create opportunities,’ said
Bernard. ‘If it was a question of buckling down to study, that’s what he
did.’ As David observed, they came from a background that ‘needed
success – we were deprived’. But there were also important differences
between them. Most obviously, David was sociable, unafraid to share
his opinions, and with a knack for converting business contacts into
friends. According to Bernard’s second son, Clive, who would work
closely with his uncle in future years, ‘If you met David he was quietly
self-confident, considered and thoughtful.’
Bernard agreed. ‘He was determined and practical, he always
had his feet on the ground. He had an agreeable personality, with no
sharp corners or rough edges, and many people respected his judge-
ment and consulted him.’
David had honed his talent for friendship as an airman in a
tight-knit bomber crew whose survival hinged in large part on trust,
humour and communication. He emerged from the experience a man
who relished work that brought him into contact with different types
of people. Less a team player than a leader, as Clive said. ‘He liked the
process of doing something around people, and he liked big ideas, big
projects. He would enjoy the process of hotels, of talking with lots of
people, of mixing, of going for dinners – there was something social
that he thrived in. He had many, many friends, and I think that a lot of
them he knew throughout his life, and my father and he were different
in that respect.’
Armed with his grammar school certificate, equivalent to O
levels or GCSEs, David also possessed the means to climb a profes-
sional ladder, although he would be forced to assemble its rungs for
himself, piece by dogged piece. By contrast, Bernard remained a lon-
er, and his education terminated without a qualification as anything
other than a draughtsman. He claimed not to have envied David his

Against the world I 153

educational advantages. But the fact remained that he, unlike David,
had nothing to fall back on. As a result, for Bernard there was only
one way to bridge the gulf between his considerable abilities and the
negligible opportunities available to exercise these talents: to take
risks and forge his own path. ‘Yeah, I had to get on with it and see
what I could do.’

10

The hazardous life of
a small businessman

While their fruit shop flourished, the florist floundered, and after a
year of mangled bouquets David and Bernard decided to surrender
the lease. Geoffrey and Clara made a solid team in the fruit shop,
but Godfrey was about to leave school and the shop could not give
them all an occupation, never mind a living. Bernard still fetched
stock from the wholesalers at dawn, ferrying it back to Old Street in
the wheezing Vauxhall with its back seat laid flat, but there was no
need for him to stay after that. He was ready to go out on his own.
‘Obviously it wasn’t a permanent situation, me being in the shop. I
mean, what’s going to happen if you project further ahead? It’s one
thing just after the war when we had no money. And then you started
to accumulate a little bit of money, so the thing to do is consolidate.
Having consolidated, got a bit of money, not very much I must say, my
mother loaned me £300.’

Determined to buy a lorry, he tracked down an army surplus
Bedford van with a canvas top, no windows and open sides. Now he
had to find something to do with it. He had no game plan. ‘It was
more a question of finding what opportunities were available, choos-
ing the one I thought best, then giving it everything.’ He set his sights
on a modest enough goal. ‘Just to get by, make a living, progress from
one position to the next and see where you could get.’

Buying stock for the fruit shop, he began to pick up extra for
himself. His first idea was to sell to caterers and on the streets:

The hazardous life of a small businessman I 155

Local offices had their own what you might call canteen,
restaurant, and they needed stuff delivered. So I made con-
tact one way or another and phoned them the previous af-
ternoon about what they wanted for the following day, and
I’d drop it off to them at eight o’clock in the morning, then
I would go off. I did various things. I’d go to the High Road
in Kilburn, pull into a side road, let the tailboard of the van
down on chains and then dress out all the produce and sell
to passers-by.

But the canteens brought in too little to justify the work in-
volved. So he looked elsewhere, hawking his wares as his grandfather
Hyman had done, albeit from the back of a lorry rather than a basket
on his arm. ‘I’d go into residential streets and knock at the door. “Do
you want any fruit and vegetables?”’ For a profoundly shy young man
this cannot have been easy. ‘But you forced yourself to do it. If it’s nec-
essary to something, you can do anything. If that’s what is required,
that’s what you do.’

It is interesting to note how often Bernard talked of himself
not as ‘I’, but as ‘you’. Had he said ‘I can do anything’, it would sound
proud, cocksure, but using the second person changes the tone and
pinpoints the self-effacement involved. This verbal habit would always
be Bernard’s way when referring to the actions that he took over the
years for his business: ‘I’ vanished, supplanted by the ‘you’ required
when a necessary course of action was to be followed. It was almost as
if Bernard’s colossal willpower to get the job done, and done well, ren-
dered him a servant, obeying instructions. Agency and choice were
subsumed by his need to succeed, and personal considerations, such
as enjoyment or inclination, were secondary.

He expressed something of this outlook to his daughter, many
years later, when she was complaining about an issue at work. ‘Well
it’s a job,’ he said at last. ‘Who says you’ve got to like it?’ She did not
disagree at the time, but later came to see this view as far too self-de-

156 I The hazardous life of a small businessman

nying, a neutering of passion. And there is something extreme in
Bernard’s commitment and the unshowy civility with which he pros-
ecuted his targets. His attitude would foster an incredibly effective
commercial strategy: pursue the path painted by the figures, the facts,
rather than personal preference.

Cruising around in his van, Bernard quickly saw the virtue
in multiplying the scale of his efforts, and recruited a young helper.
It was another initiative that could have been peeled straight out of
Hyman’s book. ‘I rented the barrow from a place in Shoreditch, for a
day or a week at a time, loaded the barrow into the van with the pro-
duce, came down to Kilburn High Road, stocked the barrow up with
the merchandise and some scales, and sent a chap off with it down
the main street to sell.’ In the meantime, Bernard would park in a side
turning further up the road and sell from the tailboard. None of this
activity was licensed or legal, and it was hard work, six unstinting
days a week, starting at 5 a.m., but despite it all he was not shattered.
On the contrary: ‘I was energised.’

In search of more promising pitches, he began frequenting old
haunts. ‘I’d try different spots to see if it worked and if it worked I’d
go back the next day and so on.’ One day he found himself back on
St Ann’s Road in Harrow, scene of his happiest childhood days, and
noticed a row of shops with empty forecourts in front of them, next to
his old junior school. ‘So I rented a forecourt from a shop and set up a
stall there, and rented a garage to store stock overnight, not far away,
hired another barrow to take goods back and forth, engaged a chap
and put the produce there, and he ran the stall.’ He did not entirely
trust his employee. ‘You couldn’t really trust anybody completely –
but you knew the value of the stock you were putting there, and could
assess its value at the end of the day when you cash up, so I wouldn’t
have lost too much. That lasted the summer.’

When not prowling the suburbs Bernard would either be dis-

The hazardous life of a small businessman I 157

solving into sleep on the sofa at night, or tootling about in his lor-
ry, courting Lorna Spencer. Not that there were many places for the
young and unmarried to go in austerity London. ‘There was the pub
but the Jewish people I knew didn’t go to pubs. It never appealed to go
and drink and get drunk. Nobody from the youth club ever did. Other
than that, nightlife in England didn’t really exist apart from the milk
bars – casual places where you could go and have a drink, not alcohol-
ic. In the evening it was somewhere for a cup of tea.’ The couple’s main
diversions were a Tuesday night trip to the cinema with their friends,
Ronnie Rustin and his girlfriend Lena. ‘Or you’d go somewhere like
the Lyons Corner House on a rare occasion. There were places in the
West End or Soho, we couldn’t afford them, but the average locality
did not have restaurants.’

Bernard and Lorna had a laugh and plenty in common, her
parents and grandparents having ploughed a similar course to the
Taubers and Pokrasses when they emigrated from eastern Europe to
Britain. Unlike Bernard, she was very much the baby of her family,
the youngest of five sisters who ranged from ten to twenty years older.
Although clever she too had no qualifications to show for it, having
also left school at fourteen, but the Spencer sisters were an industri-
ous bunch, always looking out for one another. Her two eldest sisters,
Dinah and Evelyn, had married two brothers, Buller and Derek Levy.
Once upon a time Buller was a handbag manufacturer, then he and

Derek joined forces; by the time Bernard entered the picture they ran
five shops in the suburbs, selling knitting wool and drapery. The driv-
ing force in the business was not the Levys, however, but Dinah, who
saw to it that all three younger sisters, Rene, Lena (not Ronnie Rustin’s
girlfriend) and Lorna, worked in their shops – just as Bernard and
David aimed to take care of their brothers.

Other similarities were more problematic. Like Bernard, Lor-
na was shy, but in stark contrast to his calm way of setting about things,

158 I The hazardous life of a small businessman

she was also, as people put it in those days, rather highly strung. It
made for a slightly awkward mix, and they experienced a few hiccups.

Once we went out for dinner to a Lyons Corner House in the
West End, it must have been a Saturday night. And suddenly
she got up and went to the loo. At least I assumed she went
to the loo but she didn’t come back. She’d just walked out
without any explanation and gone home to her parents in
Wembley.

He had no idea why she left, but neither did he challenge her
after this incident, nor ever refer to it again. ‘I didn’t want to exacer-
bate anything,’ he explained. Looking back, he wondered at his own
naivety. ‘So why didn’t the warning light flash up? Today it would.
But in those days I didn’t know anything about mental illness. I just
accepted it, thought I had probably done something wrong and an-
noyed her.’ His cautious approach to her also reflected the tenor of
the times. Regardless of the upheaval of war, which did so much to
unpick traditional social norms, romantic relations between young
men and women in the late 1940s remained fairly reticent.

There were plenty of other things to bind the couple together.
In spite of their very different temperaments, Lorna and Clara got
along famously – no doubt it helped that Clara had no daughter of
her own. The Spencer family also threw open their home to Bernard,
sometimes allowing him to spend the night on that sofa. ‘It was eas-
ier to get where I needed to be the next morning from there than
from Whitton,’ he explained. Even so, he found the atmosphere in the
Spencer home rather chilly.

Lorna’s father, Herbert, had worked as a hand-iron presser in
a tailoring factory but a number of years earlier he was invalided out
of his trade, leaving the family funds very low. Happiness also seemed
in limited supply. ‘Lorna’s mother was a bit embittered, a bit difficult
with her husband. I think she had a little bit of an unhappy disposi-

The hazardous life of a small businessman I 159

tion.’ Meanwhile Herbert was a pleasant if discreet presence, rising
very early in the morning and going to bed very early too, perhaps to
evade his mirthless spouse. It cannot have been an ideal environment
for a sensitive girl like Lorna to grow up in, virtually as an only child,
with her sisters so much older and getting on with their lives. She
must have been itching to make a home of her own.

Fresh happiness came when the Lewises’ number finally came
up at the car factory and for a princely £444 they acquired a spanking
new Austin 10. There were no car transporters in those days, so it
was the custom that manufacturers would drive each car individually
from factory to dealer. But Bernard, investigating every aspect of the
matter with his usual zeal, discovered that to protect the car’s engine
you had to drive the first 500 to 1,000 miles at no more than thirty
miles an hour to avoid stressing the engine. Not trusting the factory
drivers to take such care, he travelled by train and bus to Longbridge
near Birmingham and picked it up himself. ‘I wanted to nurse that
car. We’d waited a long, long time for it.’ It might have been a slow
road back to London, but he loved every creeping minute of the jour-
ney. ‘Yes. Oh yeah. It was so quiet compared with our old Vauxhall.
Goodness gracious.’

Perhaps he and Lorna were sitting inside this gleaming trophy
when she turned to him and embarked on a life-changing conversa-
tion. ‘One day she said to me, my friend Cathy has got engaged, why
don’t we get engaged?’ On paper this reads like light-hearted tease, yet
by his account her tone was anything but. ‘I think probably relation-
ships at that time were more serious than they are now.’

After thinking it over for a couple of weeks, Bernard agreed.
Their decision made, the couple began saving, depositing £5 a week
in a Post Office account until Bernard could afford a sufficiently spar-
kling ring from a jeweller in either Red Lion Close or Black Lion
Close, off the Whitechapel Road, the diamond centre of the East End.

They married in 1951 when Bernard was 25 and

160 I The hazardous life of a small businessman

Lorna was 20. From start to finish, their courtship would last an em-
inently sensible period of four years. Several decades later, David
would give a pragmatic account of joining forces with his wife. ‘At
that age, all you’ve got to do is put two people of the opposite sexes
together and the chemistry seems to start. Maybe that sounds a bit
too cynical. She was a nice girl, she seemed to like me.’ If sentiment
did not seem to figure highly on the brothers’ list of priorities, this
also reflects that they were both serious young men, doing what seri-
ous men expected to do. Any Jewish person of their generation might
regard marriage, the foundation of family, as the gravest business of
all. It was their job to secure a better future.

At this point, however, David’s romantic life was about to stall.
Applying himself to his studies with fervour, toiling every evening
and most weekends, there was little to spare for anything else, never
mind his fiancée Judy. Towards the end of his life he slightly regret-
ted this intensity, saying that if he could start over again he would
have worked a little less as a young man and played a lot more. But as
Bernard said, ‘It was the only option. If he’d failed his exams . . . Well,
you couldn’t allow yourself to.’ Out of patience, Judy broke off their
engagement.

Contemplating the possibility that soon he might have a fam-
ily of his own to care for, Bernard began dreaming of a more settled
business life. Ideally that meant owning a shop, except he could not
afford one. But one day, trawling about in his van, casing the streets
for new pitches, he found himself cruising along the Holloway Road,
host to his father and mother’s last thriving shop before the ill-starred
move to Harrow. He hit the brakes when he spotted a disused bomb-
site at Nag’s Head, a busy junction named after the pub on the corner
where Holloway Road met Seven Sisters Road. Pulling up, he watched
the people walking by. Working-class women, labourers, office work-
ers. Here, he realised, was an abundant supply of that priceless com-
modity, passing trade. The bombsite had potential.

The hazardous life of a small businessman I 161

On the other side of the road was an estate agents, Drivers
and Norris. Wanting to make a good impression, he called in the next
day in the new Austin 10 hoping that would help. When he walked
through the door he met another piece of luck. ‘Lo and behold, he was
acting as letting agent for the freeholder of the bombsite.’ Better still,
the estate agent was Terence Courtney, a young ex-soldier, and well
disposed to look kindly upon other young ex-servicemen. With little
ado Bernard leased the site for £5 a week, on one condition: there
would be no security of tenure. ‘This meant they could turf me off any
time.’ It sounds a lot for a pile of rubble, but what he was really buying
was footfall. All he needed now was to put up something to stop peo-
ple in their tracks and start them spending.

His first task was to clear the site of debris. That done, he dust-
ed off his drawing skills and designed a shack, about fifteen feet wide,
then he scouted about for building materials. In those days a building
licence was mandatory for any construction costing over £200, but he
managed to get the job done for less by rustling up second-hand tim-
ber and corrugated iron for the roof from various scrapyards. Togeth-
er with a labourer who knew a thing or two about building, he put it
up and fitted it out for trade. The result was not Bauhaus, but it stood
up, it was dry, and secure enough to leave goods inside overnight. Not
exactly a shop, then, but a good start.

The finishing touch was painting a sign above the door. Yet the
name on it was not his. ‘L. Lewis, Fruiterer and Greengrocer’.
This gesture says everything. He would make good on his late father’s
dreams. All that remained was to dress out the fruit and veg and open
for business.

Mindful of the dangers in relying on one shop, naturally Ber-
nard kept up his other enterprises, and hired a chap named Jerry to
help out. He continued making deliveries to Old Street too. But busi-
ness at the Nag’s Head took off. At last he had a good thing going. ‘It
wasn’t exceptional,’ he recalled, downplaying what must surely have

162 I The hazardous life of a small businessman

been a great moment in his life. But still, he conceded, ‘It was a good
pitch, there were people about.’

He plugged away, truffling out fresh opportunities and trying
to create them where he found none. That June he had the notion
to take himself off to Ascot racecourse with a lorry-load of peach-
es, picturing himself doing a roaring trade outside, flogging them to
racegoers. When he got there the glamour entirely passed him by and
he barely noticed the upper-crust gambling fraternity, tricked out in
their finery. ‘I was just concentrating on what I was doing.’ But to no
avail. ‘Nobody was interested, not a soul.’ Perhaps they were worried
about juice staining their frocks. As for the doomed peaches, he tried
to offload them but the majority were left to rot.

Yet this was a minor setback. He was on the up, soon extend-
ing the shack at the rear to enlarge his storeroom so he could carry
more stock. When he heard of another premises, a shop on a proper
lease, available at 330 Holloway Road, nearer Highbury, he snapped
it up.

This was when his accomplishment really hit home. ‘I remem-
ber walking across Holloway Road and thinking, “I’ve got two shops
and I’m twenty-two.”’ Occasionally, he even permitted himself to day-
dream about the future.

One morning I was driving my lorry from the wholesale
market to my shop in Holloway with a load in the back, it was
about 8 a.m., a bright summer morning. I had done a good
morning’s work and had a shop, and it was taking money,
and I had a clear run at the day ahead. I felt good and burst-
ing with energy.
It never entered my head that I would be wealthy.
Goodness gracious, no. I think the idea, the pipe dream, was
to be solvent. If you could aspire to have a prosperous shop –
let alone two – you could have a family. What I wanted that
morning was to be established, with a shop and a car, a small
home. Level with my peers. Equal with them – a small busi-
nessman.

The hazardous life of a small businessman I 163

330 Holloway Road would do all right, although it never per-
formed as well as the shack. ‘I don’t mean it lost money,’ he said, ‘but it
wasn’t a money-making concern, noticeably.’ But it afforded Bernard
a little back office. ‘I had a lady who used to come in once a week to do
some books.’ Even so, financial insecurity gnawed at him. ‘I remem-
ber lying in bed, in Whitton, before I got married, and working out
that I was worth £3,000.’ It was an awful lot for one so young, yet there
was always the worry it could be snatched away – a justifiable fear, he
felt. ‘My main source of income was the Holloway shack and it wasn’t
on a lease, it was on a weekly rent.’

This anxiety would remain a constant. For every gain that he
made, every achievement, his reflex response would be a countervail-
ing fear of loss, the thought of his father never far from his mind. ‘He
couldn’t dream – I mean he had a taste of it, a prosperous shopkeeper
with a car. He would have outdone all his contemporaries, I would
have thought. There he was, aged about thirty and he had made it. It’s
very difficult to come down in the world and he did and became des-
perate with no foreseeable way that he could recover, no capital left to
enable him to start again. But he kept trying.’ Lew did not just provide
inspiration. Bernard burnished his father’s memory like a guardian,
as if to protect himself from complacency.

A desire to be unassailable found its echo in very many oth-
er Jews of his and David’s generation. Germany’s Jews, after all, had
been well integrated into their society, seen as vital to the country’s
prosperity, until at least a decade before their social position was dis-
mantled and their lives destroyed – and all just a few hundred miles
east of Britain. ‘The idea of what happened, in the 1920s you couldn’t
have dreamed it in a thousand years,’ said Bernard. ‘That explains why
every Jew always wanted the State of Israel. Because if anything hap-
pens, they will always take you in. It was essential that it existed.’

Bernard, his friends and family were not the only ones who

164 I The hazardous life of a small businessman

would be gripped by the headlines in 1948, when war broke out in
Palestine as the Jews fought for their own state.

If you’re asking, ‘Were we Zionists?’, I suppose a Zionist is
somebody who wants a national home for Jews. So I can’t
think of a Jewish person, except a very few in an ultra-ortho-
dox sect, that wouldn’t be a Zionist.
Don’t forget, the knowledge of the concentration
camps was only about two years old by then. And at the same
time Oswald Mosley was released from prison and started
again, and he used to hold provocative speaker meetings. A
group of young Jewish people, my friends amongst them,
used to go and disrupt. I didn’t go, I think I was tied up in
business. But my friend Ronnie Rustin joined the 43 Group,
which was a group of young Jewish ex-servicemen, origi-
nally forty-three of them, who would heckle and disrupt the
meetings and there was a famous picture of Ronnie being
marched off by the police for heckling Mosley. Overall by
that time there was very little sympathy for the blackshirts so
Mosley didn’t get very far. But it lasted for two or three years.
Astounding? Perhaps. Well, it’s a free country. You could do
it and there were people who were that way inclined.

As Clive would observe, his father and his peers would al-
ways have a ‘suitcase packed, emotionally’. Deep patriotism towards
the United Kingdom was offset by a deep sense of insecurity. Never
would Bernard rest, never feel entirely safe in success, or confident
that Britain would always provide a safe haven. This translated into
unequivocal support for Israel. As far as he was concerned, this no-
tional homeland also let them be proud as never before. ‘Jewish peo-
ple today seem to have more self-respect, more confidence than when
I was a boy. I think it is because of the existence of Israel. Before it
was established we felt we had to be careful not to attract attention to
ourselves or cause offence. If we were turfed out we had nowhere to
go, but now Israel would take you in.’

The hazardous life of a small businessman I 165

But he and his brothers were of a generation increasingly will-
ing to stand out. Although David had long since ceased attending the
Young Israel youth club, he and Bernard continued to be active in its
circle, which was part of a network of a dozen clubs with members as
far afield as Wembley and Ealing. Soon David became the group’s trea-
surer. The clubs also had a sports day and a speech day, and through
the latter David entered a national speech competition. ‘But although
he was a good speaker, and did well on the evening he didn’t win,’ said
Bernard. Speechifying held no temptation for him, however. ‘I’m no
good at speaking off the cuff. I’m fine in front of people, I’m happy to
speak to a hundred, a thousand, it doesn’t matter, as long as I read. I’ve
got to prepare it and write it. I can’t just stand up and extemporise.’

The most urgent item on the family to-do list now became
Godfrey. When he turned fourteen and duly left school, Clara was au-
tomatically deprived of her state-funded widow’s pension. Although
bright, Godfrey lacked his elder brothers’ studious bent, and perhaps
their motivation. After all, he had experienced a very different child-
hood from theirs, and with no memory of his parents’ fall from fi-
nancial grace, he did not share David and Bernard’s dread of loss.
After much careful deliberation between David, Bernard and Clara,
the boy was dispatched to Pitman’s College to learn bookkeeping and
administration, his course fees co-funded by the three of them. A year
later, his education complete, they were no closer to knowing what to
do with him. So they started to experiment. He must sell something,
they decided. But what?

The first answer was knitting wool, which Bernard managed
to get hold of via a supplier with a warehouse on the Holloway Road,
an introduction gleaned courtesy of his future brother-in-law, Derek
Levy. The plan was for Godfrey to open a stall in Kingston market,
within easy reach of their house in Whitton.

Sadly, although Godfrey had the gift of the gab, he was not

166 I The hazardous life of a small businessman

enthralled by the charms of retail, being similar in that regard to his
big brother. ‘David didn’t like standing around in shops,’ said Godfrey,
‘he visited them.’ (His lack of interest was clear when David was asked
what he had learned about business as a child, sitting at the dinner
table with his parents. ‘What’s there to talk about in running a fruit
shop?’ he replied, bewildered. Put that question to Bernard, however,
and the answer would be ‘A lot.’ Primarily: ‘How can you get it to take
more money?’)

Nobody should have been surprised that trying to flog yarn to
pennywise housewives did not suit the lad. He had already formed an
unconquerable aversion to the fruit and veg trade when he was help-
ing out in the shop on Old Street. It was not so bad during the war,
he said; then the trade consisted largely of undiscriminating ‘men
working in factories [who] would buy fruit for their family on Friday,
whatever they could get’. But the era of post-war austerity brought an
altogether finickier female customer. He quailed visibly to recall it.
‘There would be stacks of apples with little bits of paper in between.
And the wife would want one apple – no, not that one – then take one
from the top, then dispute the cost. That put me off itty-bitty business.’
Alas for Godfrey, knitting wool attracted much the same clientele. To
make matters worse, now he was outdoors, cold and alone. After two
months he jacked in the stall.

David and Bernard decided to apply science to the problem
and arranged for him to sit an aptitude test, something that they had
learned about in the RAF. This yielded the unsurprising conclusion
that Godfrey was good with people, therefore some sociable form of
work would suit him best.

The brothers rustled up a job for him as office boy to Letts
Brothers estate agents, just over Richmond Bridge, who sent him out
on weekly rounds to collect rents from tenants. The hope was that he
would learn the business then be able to start out on his own, which

The hazardous life of a small businessman I 167

made far more sense to Godfrey. ‘Sell a house at £300, the agency
would get £10, I’d get £1. That was real. Not selling thrupenny apples.
I wanted something better, cleaner, more straightforward. That’s what
I wanted,’ he said, adding, after a pause perfectly timed for comic ef-
fect, ‘But I ended up in a shop.’

He could blame the British government for killing his dream.
When it launched compulsory National Service at the end of 1948,
Geoffrey, then eighteen, was called up immediately to join the RAF.
Clara replied to his letters on printed notepaper, poignantly headed
‘L. Lewis, Florist, Fruiterer and Confectioner’, updating him on the
shop takings and home improvements (they were painting the cloak-
room in Cambridge Blue, perhaps a nod to Bernard).

‘We all laughed,’ she wrote, ‘when we read how you are keep-
ing up the Lewis tradition in trying to “skive” (I don’t know whether
I used the correct word).’ But there was only irony in the suggestion
that anyone in the family was slacking off. On the contrary, Godfrey
quit his job at Letts to help Clara at Old Street. Soon he was utterly
marooned in the fruit shop, because his mother too had begun to
hope for better things. When her sister Betty asked her to be a partner
in a dress shop in Surbiton, Clara did not hesitate to say yes.

The deal seemed straightforward enough. Betty took the lease
and supplied stock, and Clara would run the premises, a little corner
shop on the high street with a till in the back and rails of frocks along
either side. Further reason for confidence was that this was not Bet-
ty’s first shopkeeping venture. Her husband Morry, an outdoor maker
manufacturing clothes for wholesalers, had established a sideline sell-
ing what the rag trade calls cabbage.

Put simply, cabbage is surplus clothing. But the question of
who owns it is, at best, debatable. Cabbage comes into being as the
bastard child of a standard manufacturing batch. When a wholesal-
er placed an order with an outdoor maker they would hand over a

168 I The hazardous life of a small businessman

certain amount of cloth to turn into, say, 500 dresses. But herein lay
the outdoor maker’s opportunity. If he encouraged his pattern cutter
to go a little tight on the seams, size down the garments, or lay out
the pattern on the cloth in a more economical way, he could squeeze
some spare cloth to make a few extra dresses – perhaps 520 instead of
500. Those twenty bonus dresses were the cabbage, and as far as the
outdoor maker was concerned, they belonged to him – the sartorial
equivalent of what hungry chefs might call ‘cook’s perks’. Either he
could sell on the dresses elsewhere for cash, or, like Betty and Mor-
ry, he could open his own gown shop – in their case topping up the
cabbage with other garments, coats and dresses that Betty bought in
from wholesalers.

Their first outlet, based in Twickenham, had done rather well,
so they decided to open up elsewhere. Having found a shop in Surbi-
ton, they just needed someone to run it. This is where Clara came in,
and she went all in too, putting in long, lonely days.

If Clara was working hard and Godfrey was fed up in Old
Street, Geoffrey was utterly wretched, loathing his every minute in the
air force. It may have been a mixed comfort when David occasionally
sent him letters, describing how the family were faring. Business was
prospering well enough for them to acquire rugs for the bedrooms at
Montrose Avenue and a television – a present that David and Bernard
bought as a surprise for Clara, which they could all enjoy at the end
of an exhausting day. ‘I remember night after night,’ recalled Bernard,
‘falling asleep in front of the television and getting up to bed at ten
o’clock and then up again at five or six o’clock in the morning.’ But he
was not ready to slack off.

About a year after opening the greengrocery at the Nag’s
Head, someone, probably one of the Levys, suggested that Bernard
could try to secure the bombsite next door to his shack in order for
Lorna’s father Herbert to open his own business selling knitting wool.

The hazardous life of a small businessman I 169

There was only one flaw in this plan: a ribbon man (a small-scale hab-
erdasher) already occupied the site. But after protracted negotiation
Bernard won it. At which point he learned that the plan had changed.
‘It transpired that the shop wasn’t going to be for Herbert, it was going
to be for Derek and Evelyn. So I said, “No. If Herbert’s not doing it, I’ll
do it with you in partnership.”’

It was a plucky move, although reasonable enough, seeing as
he had secured the premises – no small matter at the time, with so
much of the city still mired in rubble. David, with his legal and fi-
nancial knowledge, advised on the partnership agreement. As Ber-
nard said of David’s broader perspective, ‘It makes you a bit more
proactive.’ David was also leading by entrepreneurial example, having
set up his own mail order business in partnership with a friend, Phil
Brackman, who was in optical supplies, which was to do rather well
for a few years after a shaky start.

If the Levys resented Bernard for muscling in, he did not pick
up on it, and they agreed to have him as their partner. David duly
drew up an agreement and each partner put £200 into the business.
With rationing still in force, before the business could start trading
they needed to secure the legal means to sell to customers who had
clothing coupons to spend. They found a man in Ealing who sold
them a defunct company called Gilberts, which although no longer
trading was still entitled to its coupons allocation.

The deal done, once again Bernard put pencil to paper and de-
signed another shack, building it with a labourer. The final touch was
the sign across the front: ‘The Wool Shop’. Lorna stopped working at
another Levy outlet and moved in to manage the new business. It was
such a busy pitch that stock sold well from the start. Encouraged, the
partners swiftly set about opening a second branch in a tiny half-shop
that had become available on nearby Lordship Lane, and they start-
ed to sell lingerie too, as well as the odd blouse. Although a modest

170 I The hazardous life of a small businessman

premises, a single shop split into two by a partition down the middle,
again it worked. Finding new sites proved a challenge, but Derek had
a good contact in the Sainsbury’s estate office who could tip them off,
and in due course they established a third branch on Chiswick High
Road in west London with the same stock mix.

Still just twenty-three years old, Bernard was well on his way.
He now read the newspapers as devotedly as his late father had done,
paying special attention to the business pages, where he followed the
careers of the likes of Jack Cohen, Tesco’s founder, and Charles Clore,
who ended up controlling virtually the whole of the retail and man-
ufacturing footwear industry in the UK. But the paramount titan of
the day was Isaac Wolfson, who acquired company after company
for his monster group, Great Universal Stores (GUS), nursing each
of them to renewed success. ‘They were always in the papers, doing
great things.’

Bernard may have been a minnow by comparison, but he took
his endeavours extremely seriously, running tight systems in all of
his shops. ‘I used to take stock every Saturday night. You would walk
round the stock and you assess it, how much is there, is there a bushel
of this, a sack of that. You know what you started with the previous
week, and you know what you’ve introduced and you know the mon-
ey taken and you can work out a weekly profit.’

Careful monitoring not only helped him to understand the
flows of the business, but also prevented employees from syphoning
off the profits. Indeed, he discovered first hand that anyone could act
as if they were above the law, including law enforcers. Petrol was still
being rationed but now the war was over the point could be stretched
a little. Business errands enjoyed a very broad interpretation, such as
driving your girlfriend home to Wembley. Still, one had to be careful.
People traded tales about danger spots in the city, and a friend of Ber-
nard’s told him about being stopped on a false pretext on The Bishop’s
Avenue in Highgate by a red-haired policeman who let him off for

The hazardous life of a small businessman I 171

a bribe. A few weeks later, driving along the same stretch of road,
Bernard was pulled over by two officers. ‘I don’t remember why they
stopped me, for speeding or on spec. In those days you carried iden-
tity cards. Then I noticed the other policeman walking away, back to
his car – that tipped me off, he didn’t want to watch. So when I pulled
out my card I tucked a ten-shilling note inside and gave it to the red-
haired policeman. And when he gave the card back, it was empty.’

*

After their difficulties with Uncle Monty over the Harringay shop, the
Lewises already recognised that sometimes not even close relations
could be relied on. Even so, it came as a great disappointment when
Clara fell out with Betty over their dress shop.

‘My mother was there every single day,’ said Bernard, a residu-
al ember of indignation lending heat to his words. Sadly, Clara’s efforts
went unrewarded. ‘The shop wasn’t financially successful. It was too
quiet. But there was a certain value in the lease.’ So Betty decided to
sell the lease, at a small profit, and when the money came through she
gave Clara not one penny. Never partners, according to Betty, forget-
ting any verbal understanding, overlooking the long, unpaid days her
sister put into the store. ‘I don’t know how much money we actually
put in, and my mother worked there all the time, and took no money,
no salary. Betty never worked there. Betty supplied the goods. But it
transpired my mother had no legal position. There was no stand-up
row. But a breaking of trust, wasn’t it?’

Clara remained on good terms with her other brothers and
sisters, but seldom saw Betty again. Bernard could not recall if this
episode pre-dated his formation of a partnership with Derek and Ev-
elyn Levy. If it did, it might explain why he asked David to draw up a
formal agreement. As it turned out, it was fortunate that he had. It was
surely inevitable that Bernard would begin to take a closer interest in

172 I The hazardous life of a small businessman

how the Wool Shops were run. He could not recall what piqued his
curiosity. Perhaps it was after they diversified from knitting wool to
take in blouses and lingerie, or perhaps his bloodhound’s nose for de-
tail detected a curious pattern when he studied the sales figures, in an
effort to comprehend this new trade. But as he got to grips with how
the shops operated, he disliked what he saw. Although the knitting
wool was fine, the other stuff that Evelyn was buying was not selling
well. So he investigated further. ‘And I discovered that it wasn’t a pro-
fessional buying operation at all.’

It came down to personality. While Derek was fairly easy-go-
ing, Evelyn was brittle – very brisk and touchy – yet also susceptible
to flattery. ‘She was taken in by the wholesalers, who’d jolly her along,
take her out to lunch, give her a drink, and she’d buy inappropriate
stuff. I wouldn’t say what she bought was rubbish, but there was a
lack of discipline, understanding – a lack of purpose or objectivity in
the merchandise and the quantity, or financial control over what was
spent.’ That is to say, she bought stuff willy-nilly, without pausing to
consider realistically what the shops could sell. ‘Or if it was the right
thing to do, or sorting out what the right stuff was.’

For a young man accustomed to studying anything that re-
motely interested him, this blind approach was utterly bewildering.
‘You know you can’t just buy stuff you like.’ Unlike Bernard, who
would never again, after his fiasco with the Ascot peaches, operate
on the basis of a whim or assumption if there was a market available
to research. ‘You hunt down what you think you should have in. You
know, things don’t fall in your lap, you have to work at it. And I don’t
think she was doing that.’ He had been a lone operator for years; even
so, it reveals a lot about Bernard that he was surprised to discover that
not everybody operates on a rational basis.

The next time Bernard saw Derek he told him that Evelyn’s
buying left something to be desired. ‘It wasn’t a great intensive discus-
sion, and I don’t remember any reaction,’ he said, adding, ‘I was not

The hazardous life of a small businessman I 173

out of order, what I was saying was correct, and I wasn’t heated. It was
just an observation for them to think about and then come back and
be constructive.’

The trouble is, regardless of whether a message is factually
correct, the meaning that it imparts depends on the context and the
mood of the person receiving it. Bernard overlooked the emotional
bottom line: that he was supposed to be a sleeping partner, that Ev-
elyn was prickly, and that he was two decades her junior. Any input
from him other than unqualified admiration would strike her as a
gross insult.

Sure enough, whatever words Derek chose to convey Ber-
nard’s points, his wife’s reaction was swift and far from logical. ‘They
must have had a row – she was a bit of a tyrant, I think – then the next
thing I knew, Derek came to me and said, “Look, we’ve got to split.”’

Now the Wool Shop had caught his interest, Bernard was not
about to bow out. Instead the partners decided to divide up the busi-
ness, a task that fell to an independent accountant. But it was David
who suggested the scheme that they adopted. ‘We would each make
a sealed bid for each shop.’ This proposal placed Bernard at an ad-
vantage, since he had left all his money in the shops, whereas Derek
and Evelyn had drawn cash from the profits. As a result, he had more
equity in the business, so could bid for a greater proportion of its
assets unless Derek put in more money. Bernard ended up the proud
owner of both the Wool Shop in Tottenham, 409a Lordship Lane, and
the original shack at the Nag’s Head. Derek and Evelyn held onto the
Chiswick branch.

How these ructions affected his sensitive fiancée, Bernard did
not know, but after years working for her sisters it cannot have been
easy for Lorna. And from this point on Evelyn and Derek gradually
receded from Bernard’s life. They ended up splitting from Buller and
Dinah Levy, and setting up a new operation in Hounslow. ‘I think it

174 I The hazardous life of a small businessman

was a tally business, where you sell people goods on credit and then
you have collectors on the road, going around and collecting the
money every week or so.’ In due course Evelyn and Derek were to
separate and divorce. Evelyn moved to Spain, where she managed a
tourist shop in one of the new hotels that sprang up to service package
holidaymakers, in yet another manifestation of the consumer boom
that was about to send shockwaves across Europe.

11

A dedicated experimenter in fashion

Bernard now had one and a half Wool Shops and two greengrocers,
all four premises within easy reach of each other. The time had come
to consolidate and grow his business, so that he should never have
to depend too much on one shop. The question was which path to
choose: a tried and trusted enterprise, or an experiment with some-
thing new? Appraising his embryonic empire, he saw that both the
greengrocers and the Wool Shops were in rude financial health; po-
tentially either could have been built into a larger group. But the latter
option appealed more.

In greengrocery you have to get up at five o’clock to go to
market. If you’re ill you still have to go. Every day of the year,
apart from Sundays, Good Friday and Christmas Day. You
can’t take a holiday. With clothing it’s civilised hours, the
sheer physical labour is just so much less. You get up at a
normal time and if it rains one day and there are no custom-
ers about the stock is not going to go bad.

Fashion might be transient, but blouses and knitting wool
do not rot on you overnight. So he resolved to give up greengrocery.
He was not daunted at the prospect of abandoning the trade that he
had known from infancy, one that kept his father and grandfather.
As he would tell the Drapers Record, six decades later, ‘Once you’ve
bought perishable soft fruit then you can buy anything, it’s such a
good training.’

176 I A dedicated experimenter in fashion

Strawberries, raspberries, they have got to be sold
on the day. When you’re in the market at 6 o’clock
in the morning, if it’s going to be a hot day, you’ll
sell more, so you’ve got to make a judgement on
quality, price and quantity. You’re taking that decision every
day – over a season, hundreds of decisions – quickly. Every
afternoon you learn where you’ve got it wrong. You’ve got to
know what’s right for your customer in your locality.

He decided to run both businesses in parallel until he was
absolutely certain that the Wool Shops would succeed. In a modest
statement of intent he set up a new office in the storeroom at the back
of Lordship Lane comprising a table, a shelf, and a couple of card-
board boxes to put bills in. ‘That was where I went to do the accounts,
pay the cheques and control the money. We used to deliver the stuff
daily, bank the money.’
Luckily he was not on his own. In Lorna he had not only a
committed partner but an experienced manager. Clever, conscien-
tious, she was sympathetic to his ferocious work ethic. She not only
understood his customers, she was one: a young woman who enjoyed
clothes herself. Then there was David, his friend and adviser. ‘David
was doing his thing and I was doing my thing. But we would keep in
continual touch.’ And David’s accountancy work, which exposed him
to a variety of companies and financial possibilities, brought a level of
sophistication to the brothers’ thinking that far exceeded their first-
hand business experience.
The next thing to strike Bernard was that the Wool Shop
shack at the Nag’s Head could do with a makeover. He decided that
both shops would try blouses, skirts and nylons, and they would stop
selling lingerie.

It was about fifteen feet wide, probably about twelve feet deep,
made of wood. So there would be sort of the window display
– well, no window exactly, there was no glass, but with tim-

A dedicated experimenter in fashion I 177

ber flaps that folded up to secure the premises at night. So
when the flaps were lowered I displayed the goods on top. I
bought Perspex busts for the blouses, shapes they are called,
and oval shapes for the skirts, and put the garments on them,
pinned on. You’d display some garments and then have the
other blouses and the skirts folded or on hangers, and there
were also legs for the nylons. Then along the back wall were
all the cubicles for the wool. Later on we put a counter in and
reduced the wool, and started taking in more separates. Not
that we carried a lot of stock. But I had a stock room in Lord-
ship Lane and could bring the stuff across daily.

The finishing touch was to refresh personnel, redeploying
Lorna to manage the half-shop on Lordship Lane and hiring another
woman to run the Nag’s Head shack. There was no question of let-
ting any of his fruit and veg employees take on that job. ‘You knew
you couldn’t always completely trust them. It went with the territory.
Greengrocery people were always a bit more rough and ready. Some-
times a bit of fiddling went on. You take that for granted. I mean, if
some staff could palm a coin they would.’ Indeed, one of his favourite
anecdotes was from a friend, a Spitalfields wholesaler who opened a
greengrocer’s. ‘When he took a manager on he told the man, “This is
the wage and the limit of the fiddle is two pounds a week.”’
As far as Bernard was concerned, it was only fair to keep
temptation out of people’s way. As he saw it, the nature of the stock
itself helped to determine employees’ behaviour: if it is easy to steal
then some will find it difficult to resist. ‘In those days some people
had very hard lives. So you’ve got to show staff that you are check-
ing and following and counting. You don’t put temptation into their
way – it’s not fair to be lax and then jump on them. It’s not so difficult
with clothing for people to stay honest, because the stock is countable.
You’re talking about blouses or skirts, and if there’s one skirt less there
should be more money in the till.’

178 I A dedicated experimenter in fashion

Selling clothing and wool was straightforward enough. The
customers popped by, had a look and pointed at what they wanted,
so it was immediately clear to Bernard that the most popular items
should be displayed most prominently. A more ticklish puzzle was to
identify the right merchandise in the first place. In this Bernard had
the advantage of Lorna’s familiarity with customers’ tastes, so initially
he let her take the lead in buying. But once he had determined that
this was the business on which to build his future, gradually he took
over responsibility for seeking and selecting stock.

Recognising that he was a total amateur, he did what seemed
to him, unlike Evelyn Levy, perfectly obvious: he studied his market
and asked basic questions about the trade, regarding every customer,
every sale, as an opportunity to refine his understanding. His magpie’s
eye for detail missed nothing. But his key source of information was
parading right in front of him, in the form of the women on the high
street. ‘There were offices in the area and the Holloway Hospital, the
Royal Northern, just up the road, so there were nurses and people like
that. I suppose the customer profile would have been somewhat dif-
ferent from Lordship Lane, which is very much a local parade – just a
few shops and a small branch of Sainsbury’s, so it would have been a
local trade, probably housewives.’

His timing was fortuitous. Back then, the majority of wom-
en could knit and all were suffering from a long-starved appetite
for clothes, which were still rationed as late as 1949. The most fash-
ion-famished women of all were in their teens and twenties – like the
workers passing along the Nag’s Head, who tended to be unwed, with
money to spend and no children to siphon off their amour-propre. But
fashion was a very different beast in the 1940s from today. ‘There of-
ten wouldn’t have been that much difference between somebody aged
nineteen and somebody aged thirty-nine in what they wore. As there
wasn’t an enormous variety of fashion to choose from.’ This genera-

A dedicated experimenter in fashion I 179

tional breadth in style geared everything to the retailer’s advantage,
making it easy to profit from new trends – provided that you were
sharp enough to identify which stock would hit the spot. ‘It was a
question of watching what sold well, and looking around.’
Competitors’ shops provided another generous source of in-
formation. Bernard would patrol rivals that interested him with the
same glee he had as a boy, casing out rival greengrocers:

You only have to walk the high street, see what the people are
wearing, look at the shop windows to see what they’re dis-
playing. If it’s in the front for one or two weeks, the chances
are it’s good. If it wasn’t, they wouldn’t keep it there. It’s graft
but it’s simple market research, and easy at that; the job is
within your grasp. And once you know what you should have
in the shop then you go and find it.

One might think that yarn would have been the likelier prod-
uct for him to focus on. It comprised two-thirds of the shops’ stock
when he split from Evelyn and Derek and it remained popular with
customers. What is more, although the mismatch between supply and
demand was so great in those days that suppliers of most consumer
goods could afford to be choosy about whom they sold to, by now
Bernard was friendly with his wool wholesaler in Holloway, just a few
hundred yards from the Nag’s Head. By contrast, the separates whole-
salers were in the West End, which was why many relied on travelling
salesmen as intermediaries, making it harder for Bernard to forge
good relationships and strike deals.
On the other hand, selling wool had its tricky aspects. For in-
stance, the shop had to stock knitting patterns, and to lay by extra
balls of yarn while customers saved up enough to buy their next batch.
Otherwise a later batch of ostensibly the same wool might come in a
different shade from the previous batch, ruining a customer’s pull-
over. ‘But this was not a nuisance,’ he said, ‘just how things worked.’

180 I A dedicated experimenter in fashion

Not content to develop his business on the basis of assump-
tions or what seemed easy and obvious, let alone be limited by the
fact that his outlets were called The Wool Shop, Bernard kept an
open mind and decided to let his direction be guided by the simplest
principle: success. ‘You go and buy some blouses and put them in the
window, and if they sell more than the knitting wool, just follow that.’
Soon enough, the message delivered by the numbers in the till rang
loud and clear: greater profits could be found in ladies’ separates, so
long as he had the right stock. After due reflection, he decided to go
for it. Identifying the right clothes to sell came down to logic and
experimentation. As he told the Drapers Record, he adopted a ‘very
single-minded and focused approach to building a business and cre-
ating long-term value . . . I went for what sold best, and the good sell-
ing merchandise drove out the poorer selling merchandise. It wasn’t
sophisticated.’
The greatest challenge he faced was finding a reliable supply
of merchandise. The time had come to make friends in the rag trade,
and learn about stock packages and size ratios. The hunt for blouses
and skirts was on.

*

Lorna continued to buy garments from travelling salesmen for the
shop on Lordship Lane but on Thursday, a half-day, she and Bernard
would lock up the shacks and head off to Oxford Circus, which was
then the centre of the rag trade.
By the twenty-first century, the shops along Oxford Street,
the heart of British fashion retail, were in the hands of operators of
multiples. But in the late 1940s it remained largely a local affair and
many shopkeepers owned just one or two shops. Then there were the
wholesale suppliers and manufacturers whose showrooms dotted the

A dedicated experimenter in fashion I 181

back streets around Great Portland Street, in among the factories run
by outdoor makers like Bernard’s Uncle Morry. Here, serried ranks of
men and women would sit crammed together in large, ill-lit rooms,
bent over their Singer sewing machines, eyes trained on their hands,
feet festooned in thread and fabric scraps, passing cloth under the
needle as fast as they could, working furiously to meet the deadline
for the latest order.
Recalling these early forays into what would become the busi-
ness of his life, Bernard spoke in the present tense, as if transported
back to his younger self. ‘You had to go and find the places, get your-
self in with them, yes, you’ve got to find the stuff that sells and do the
right deals.’
First he and Lorna would browse Oxford Street, checking out
the latest styles, before making their way to the wholesalers’ show-
rooms, which were a very different proposition. ‘Like a shop, yes, with
styles displayed on rails. But they wouldn’t have the whole range that
a shop has. They would specialise in certain things.’ While shoppers
buzzed in the stores, showrooms were much quieter, and Bernard re-
alised that he as much as the garments was on display. If he wanted to
build good relationships – and be seen as a credible enough customer
to deserve a credit line with suppliers – he had better put on a good
show, so he took care to dress the part of a seasoned operator. In 1949
smartness was de rigueur. ‘We wore suits then, you know, a tie – ev-
erybody did. There was no casual dressing.’

Initially his orders were also a model of prudence; often he
bought just six or twelve units in a style. His shops were busiest on a
Saturday, but although he was cautious as to quantity with new de-
signs, he saw to it that he maintained adequate stocks. Before long he
felt ready to leave Lorna minding shop and go out and buy alone.
Not content with selling the stock that was readily available,
he decided to experiment and began treating the Nag’s Head shack

182 I A dedicated experimenter in fashion

as a fashion laboratory. The test was simple but effective: he would
buy a garment from another shop if he thought it might appeal to his
customers, then remove the price tag, replace it with one of his own
marked at a lower price, and see how fast it sold. The idea was not
only to find out what would tickle customers’ fancy, but also to get an
indication of how great a number he might be able to sell if a garment
were priced more affordably.

I remember buying merchandise from other shopkeepers,
working out how much I thought something cost to produce,
then deciding how much I could sell it for if I made it myself.
You know, how much cloth it takes, how much the cloth is,
the cost of buttons and lace, and what the cost of making is. If
you can do it in your head, therefore you can buy something
from somebody in a shop – let’s say nineteen shillings and
elevenpence or whatever it was – and you’d think, ‘If I could
put this out at fourteen and elevenpence would I be selling a
lot more of them?’ Which of course you would, provided it
is a good style. You could occasionally buy a couple, which
would be a better test, because then you can see how well it
will do. If it sells straight away, on the first day, or the first
half-day, you know.

His laboratory allowed him to identify potential winners, to
road-test different price points, and to establish by just how much he
could undercut other shops. He adopted a simple strategy: go for the
highest possible volume at the lowest possible price. An unbeatable
formula; however, putting it into practice would take guile and graft.
With his usual need to drill down to precise fundamentals,
Bernard realised that he must peer behind the wholesalers and grasp
the mechanics of the production process itself: to understand how
garments were manufactured, in order to learn what constituted a
truly fair price. He was about to take an unprecedented step for a
clothing retailer, yet one for which, as far as he, the industry newcom-

A dedicated experimenter in fashion I 183

er, was concerned, the arguments could not have been clearer. He was
going to make garments to sell himself.
The first design was a little white blouse with cap sleeves
trimmed in lace. ‘I wouldn’t have invented it, I must have seen it.’
Very likely it was copied from something in a shop window. Deploy-
ing the draughtmanship that he had honed designing aircraft parts,
he sketched the garment on paper, then set out to familiarise himself
with another facet of his industry: textiles.
‘There were wholesale cloth shops dotted around the East
End. I remember buying one or two rolls of cloth at a time, putting
them in my car and taking it down to Berman’s, an outdoor maker in
the East End. I would give him a sketch of the garment and the cloth
and negotiate the price. The cloth consumption was pretty easy to es-
timate for simple garments, and if it was more complicated he would
do a lay to establish it, cost in the trimmings etc. And that was that.
We had started.’

The outdoor makers were not making huge sums. In fact,
most worked hand to mouth, delivering a finished batch of clothes on
a Thursday, then calling around on Friday morning for their money
in order to pay their people’s wages. So what they liked was regu-
lar work, but generally all were in a tearing hurry to get jobs done,
to clear space for the next batch. ‘The goods were of merchandisable
quality but since then the whole industry of quality control inspection
has evolved and grown up. Merchandise today is made much better.
But we would never have comically badly made things. The stuff had
to be right. You’ve got to be able to sell it.’

When his first batch of home production came back there was
nothing to complain about in terms of quality, with both lace-capped
sleeves present and correct. Bernard christened this item BB1: one B
for blouse, another for Berman, and number 1 because it was the very
first. With that, although he did not know it then, a revolutionary cut,

184 I A dedicated experimenter in fashion

make and trim operation had just been born, and with it, Britain’s
very first vertically integrated fashion business.
Over sixty years later Bernard still vivdly recalled BB3,
with its three-quarter length sleeves, flyaway cuff and collar, made
from two shades of grey alpaca-style fabric, one for the body, an-
other for the sleeves. As with BB1, the idea would have been
borrowed from something he had seen and thought, ‘That would
work for us.’
BB1, 2 and 3 must have been successful enough, because he
kept on going. Most of his home production was done in cheaper,
synthetic textiles. This kept everything affordable, but was innovative
for the day. ‘Man-made fibres were just coming in then. There were
all these new things. Nylon was later called Bri-nylon, British nylon,
and then they invented acrylic fibres and tried branding it, calling it
Acrylon.’ The Wool Shops’ customers liked what they saw, and they
didn’t mind telling their friends about it.

*

Over succeeding months a series of turning points for the family came
in swift succession. First David received an invitation to the birthday
party of a young woman whom he had never met. Ruth Benjamin was
the cousin of a pal at Young Israel. It was a shrewd bit of matchmak-
ing. No sooner had the pair met than they clicked.

Like Lorna, Ruth worked, but on upmarket Dover Street in
Mayfair, in the covetable position of assistant to the society
photographer Marcus Adams, who was a precursor of Cecil
Beaton. Although by this point Adams was in his sixties and
in the twilight of his fame, his portraits were widely celebrat-
ed, the most famous of which being the first official sitting
of the Duchess of York and her daughter Princess Elizabeth,
England’s two future queens, when Elizabeth was a baby.