Spitalfields Life

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Betty

If you walked through the Petticoat Lane Market in the nineteen-twenties, you would frequently have seen Betty Levy with all her sisters playing hopscotch or skipping games in the street. You could easily have distinguished Betty because she was the baby with the mop of curls, and everyone knew Betty’s mother Hannah – famous as the best fish fryer in the Lane.

But maybe you do not remember, because maybe it is just too long ago for you? Yet that was certainly not the case for Betty herself. At ninety-two years of age, she remembered her childhood as if it were yesterday and given any opportunity she delighted to break into the same songs she sang then, accompanied by the ingenious lyrics she composed herself.

Betty left Petticoat Lane in 1954 but occasionally when speaking of the Lane, she said “And I’m still here,” and you realised it was a statement which transcended immediate reality, because while Petticoat Lane has changed almost beyond recognition, Betty still carried a world and a society and an ethos that incarnated the Petticoat Lane she knew, the place she always counted as home.

“I was born here, in Rosetta Place off Frying Pan Alley and my mother Hannah before me. My grandparents, Mark and Phoebe Harris, lived in Rosetta Place too and if we went in their flat, they always gave us something to eat.

My family have been here for generations, I always understood they were of Dutch descent. My father, Isaac, worked in Smithfield Market, he sold sweets to the porters and we never starved, so he must have made a living. They called him ‘Kosher’ and he sold the sweets from a basket round his neck. He got them from a small warehouse in Commercial St run by Mr Sam. If we were well behaved, he gave us one.

I went to the Jews Free School in Frying Pan Alley, it was a good school with good teachers and they treated us well. My grandmother sometimes gave me a plate of roast potatoes and told me to go and give them to the children in the park, and she left fried fish on the window sill for people to take. Nobody starved in the East End.

When I left school at fourteen, I went to work making dresses in Middlesex St, we were taught how to do it at school and I moved from one factory to another to better myself. I made all my family’s clothes, my children and grandchildren, and their bride’s dresses. If you spend your life doing something, you get a talent for it – I got to be as good as anyone at it. And  I miss it now, I wouldn’t mind doing it again, part-time.

I was only seven years married when my husband Danny died aged thirty-nine, I think he had a heart attack. I met him at a dance at the Hammersmith Palais. We met dancing, we were both good dancers, not fabulous but pretty good. We were married at the Beaumont St Synagogue and we lived with my family at first. Then we found a house in Milward St, Whitechapel, round the back of the London Hospital. Although I was one of a large family, I only had two children – a boy and a girl, Irene and Stephen. After Danny died, my family offered to support me, but I wanted to be independent. If you’ve got to do it, you do it. I worked making dresses and I kept us, because I didn’t want anyone else to bring up my children.

I love the East End, there’s something in the East End that’s nowhere else. It is my home.”

Four of Betty’s sisters in Rosetta Place c. 1925

“We played among the doorsteps, for hours and hours
We never had gardens, so we couldn’t grow flowers.

Some kids they never had shoes, ’cause their dads were on the booze
But, we all lived together the Christians, the Jews

And the Jewish Free School was in dear old Frying Pan Alley.

Now there is not any doorsteps, they’ve knocked them all down,
They built a tower block where we played around.

The kids don’t play now like we used to,
On everybody’s doorsteps, in the East End of town.”

Betty’s new lyrics to the melody of  ‘On Mother Kelly’s Doorstep’

The Levy Sisters. Sally, Phoebe, Lily, Carrie, Jennie,  Becky and Betty (in front).

The Mitchell Family, neighbours in Rosetta Place. Betty Mitchell standing with Betty Clasper and little RayRay in front and Anita Mitchell, Barnie Mitchell,  Siddy  Segal and little Jo in line along the wall.

Some of the Levy grandchildren on the steps of St. Botolph’s Church Bishopsgate c. 1945. Alan, Diana, Bobby, Roy, Richard, Sallyann and little David.

Betty’s grandparents, Mark & Phoebe Harris, Spitalfields, c. 1920

Betty’s mother, Hannah Levy, daughter of Mark & Phoebe Harris, and famous as the best fish fryer in Petticoat Lane.

Betty’s father, Isaac in his ARP uniform.

Hannah Levy and friends in Frying Pan Alley around 1940.

Betty as a Land Army Girl in WWII, based at Sawbridgeworth in Hertfordshire.

Three Bettys (Levy, Cohen and Hyams) and three American airman at Westcliff-on-Sea c. 1945

At the centre (in a headscarf) is Betty with family and friends at the Coronation 0f Queen Elizabeth II. They slept out in Piccadilly to be sure of getting a prime position.

Betty sings at her ninetieth birthday party at Beaumont St Synagogue

Betty dances with her daughter Irene at the party.

You may also like to read these other stories of Petticoat Lane

 

The Wax Sellers of Wentworth St

Henry Jones, Dairyman

Pamela Freedmam, The Princess Alice

The Dioramas of Petticoat Lane

Laurie Allen of Petticoat Lane

Fred the Chestnut Seller

Rochelle Cole, Poulterer

Saeed Malik, Shoeseller

Tickets are available for my tour of Spitalfields THIS SATURDAY 1st OCTOBER

Click here to book for THE GENTLE AUTHOR’S TOUR OF SPITALFIELDS

Sue Hadley returned recently for an afternoon to revisit some of her childhood haunts and I had the privilege of accompanying her.

“From the age of three, I grew up here in James Hammett House on the Dorset Estate in Bethnal Green. It was a good old Labour council and each of the buildings was named after one of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Architecturally they are quite special, designed by the Tecton partnership. I used to slide all the way down the handrail of the spiral staircase, which is similar to the one they did for the penguin pool at the Zoo. We lived at the top of the building, on the tenth floor, and we were the very first residents to move in in 1957. But I stayed up at the top, I was not allowed to come down and play for many years – which was a disappointment. Once I was old enough to be allowed down, then the whole of the estate was my playground. Mum was a machinist working from home and Dad was a leaded light maker working in the Kingsland Rd.”

Sue on the balcony at James Hammett House

“This is Jones Dairy where I used to come with my Mum to do our shopping – cornflakes and tins. It was a proper traditional grocer with a man behind the counter in a white coat, Mr Evans. If you asked for a packet of cornflakes, he would get out his stick and stretch up to the shelf for it. My Mum was uncomfortable shopping here because she did not like people to know what she was buying.”

“At four years old, I started nursery school here at Columbia Rd School. I could see it from my house and I used to walk to school once I was old enough. It was a good school and I had a good education. The East End was being elevated then and we were lucky to have some excellent teachers. It was quite disciplined and I got told off once for being late for morning assembly. I got in with two children who said, ‘Shall we go to the sweetshop and buy sweets instead?’ So I spent my sixpence pocket money on sweets and then I went to school and I got told off. I was placed in front of everyone in the hall and my wrist was slapped several times as punishment. I wasn’t too riotous, I think I was quite academic. English and Art were my best subjects. I still have one long-standing friend, Carol, who I met here. My parents were completely thrilled when I got a place at Central Foundation School and  I left at twelve.”

“Round the corner from us was a bomb site known as ‘the black buildings.’ Subsequently, I found out it was the Columbia Rd Market founded by Angela Burdett Coutts. It was an open bomb site and the most dangerous of places to play. We used to dare each other to go in because it was so creepy. There were dead cats and boys threw things at you. It was a place of mayhem but it was fun.”

“When I was eight years old, my sister who was twelve years older than me, got married here at Shoreditch Church. My Mum made the bridesmaid dresses but my sister splashed out on a proper bridal dress from Stoke Newington. It must have been quite a stretch because my sister paid for most of her own wedding. She still has all the original receipts! I remember thinking how boring the service was, it just seemed to go on for ever and ever. They went on honeymoon to Canvey Island. It was a successful marriage, they were married almost sixty years until she lost her husband last year.”

Sue stands central as bridesmaid at the wedding of her sister Barbara to Ron

“When I was a kid, the most exciting thing to do on a Sunday was to come here to Sclater St with my Dad. He would buy sensible things like boxes of broken biscuits and tins with no labels on, he was quite a cheapskate. Afterwards, I would drag him down here to the shops with birds in cages. There was donkey for sale here once and people brought their puppies to sell. It was all a bit dodgy which was why they shut it down eventually. However, for me it was the most exciting thing because I could play with the puppies and kittens although I never got to own one. We always had a budgie at home, it was always called ‘Jackie’ because we had a succession of them. We didn’t keep it in the cage, our bird was free the fly around the flat. Some escaped.”

“Central Foundation School For Girls was prestigious and I had the best education, with the broadest range of subjects. It was the time of the equal rights movement and our teachers were quite right on. The hall was where we did sports and I remember playing volley-ball and smashing one of the lights. I did fencing and my teacher was in the Olympic team, she did well.

I was completely daft because I got engaged at fifteen when I was still at school. Although the world was moving on, in the East End we never quite got it. My parents’ aspiration for me was that I should not work in a factory, so I worked in an office. I left school and went to work at Central Electricity Board in Newgate St as a copy typist. It was clean, it was a step up. I also got married and moved to Gravesend, but it all fell apart after two years because I hated being away from London. I felt like a fish out of water and I came back. When I walk these streets, I feel like I belong.

Ten years ago, I became a Blue Badge Guide. I have always been interested in history, so I did an Open University degree at forty. I have Huguenot ancestry and am descended from Sarah Marchant who was buried in Christ Church, Spitalfields, in the eighteenth century.

It all came good for me in the end because I have so much knowledge in my head and it really helps me doing my guiding. I love it.”

Sue in the fencing team at Central Foundation School for Girls

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The Return of Norah Pam

The Return of Doris Kurta