Judith Piepe In The East End

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Peter Parker came across the remarkable figure of Judith Piepe (1920-2003) while researching ‘male vice’ in the East End for the second volume of his anthology Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1960-1967

Judith Piepe, 1966

In 1963, Stepney councillor and social worker Edith Ramsay was corresponding with a young priest called Kenneth Leech about her difficulties dealing with immigrants and homosexual men in the borough. He recommended that she get in touch with Judith Piepe, who lived in Dellow House just off Cable St, but had for many years worked with ‘male prostitutes in Soho’.

Judith was a well-known figure, not just for her social work but also because she befriended leading folk singers, including Bert Jansch, Al Stewart, Sandy Denny, Cat Stevens, Peter Bellamy, and Simon & Garfunkel. She took her surname from her second husband, whom she married in England in 1951, but the details of her early life remain unclear, perhaps because it contained a good deal she wanted to forget.

She was born in Silesia (then part of Prussia, now in Poland). Her paternal grandfather was a wealthy Jewish financier, but her father, Fritz Sternberg, became a well-known Marxist economist. She was an only child, and 1926 moved with her father to Berlin, her mother – who may or not have been a French gypsy – having committed suicide three years earlier. When the Nazis came to power, Sternberg fled to Czechoslovakia, presumably leaving his thirteen-year-old daughter behind in someone’s care.

Judith was nevertheless taken hostage by the Gestapo, who imprisoned her for three months and tortured her in an attempt to find her father’s whereabouts. Yet Fritz seems to have taken little interest in his daughter, and after her release, she married briefly, then left Germany on her own, wandering around Europe without home or money for several years until she came to Switzerland where she studied for a doctorate in philology.

Shortly before the outbreak of war, Judith moved to the East End of London and found a job teaching at a girl’s school. She had been brought up an atheist but in 1946 she became a Christian and her faith guided the social work she had taken up. The church of St Anne’s, Soho, became her centre of operations, and it was here in 1967 that Kenneth Leech became an assistant priest and co-founded Centrepoint, the charity for the homeless.

Judith’s work revolved around ‘kids on the loose around Soho with nowhere to go, homosexual boys, kids on drugs’, all of whom she got to know by visiting the places where they congregated. In training she had been warned against becoming too involved with those she was trying to help, but she dismissed this as ‘a poisonous piece of teaching – complete rubbish’. ‘If I sat in an office looking respectable behind a desk they couldn’t come to me when they’re in difficulties,’ she said. ‘But because I spend my nights hanging about the clubs whether they are, they can talk to me. It is easier to help one’s friends than to help strangers. The kids know that I am fond of them – and they’re fond of me.’

Asked how young people recognized her as someone who could help them, she replied that it was a question of her past. ‘When one has been a refugee, knocking around Europe without a valid passport, without the right to stand on the ground where one stands or breathe the air one breathes, one is an outcast,’ she said. ‘When somebody has TB, after it has healed there are scars left which are visible to the x-ray machine. I’m no longer a refugee or an outcast, but the scars are there and outcasts have x-ray eyes.’ Young people, she believed, recognized something in her that made them feel she was one of them.

Recommending Judith to Edith Ramsay because of her counselling of rent boys, Leech had added that ‘her success and knowledge of this type of work is quite remarkable’. Indeed it was. Dismayed that many youths ‘had to prostitute themselves to airforce officers just to get a meal and shelter from the rain for the night’, she provided some of them with temporary accommodation in her spacious flat at 6 Dellow House. Here they might find themselves in the company of the famous folk singers for whom Piepe also provided beds when they were visiting London. It seems likely that it was staying in this mixed household that inspired the nineteen-year-old Al Stewart to write his song ‘Pretty Golden Hair’, which describes how a teenager drifts into homosexual prostitution.

Judith was drawn to folk music because she felt that it addressed the same social problems. She also realised that folk music was a way of reaching young people who would never ordinarily go to church, and she arranged for concerts to be held in the crypt of St Anne’s. ‘These troubadours of the 1960s sing to win your love for the unloved, the despised, the rejected,’ she said; their songs ‘are not particularly pretty, nor are they intended to be. But they are true, and the truth sets us free’.

Her suggestion that these songs ‘arose out of the situation in which I work’ was taken up in a 1966 episode of Meeting Point, BBC television’s series of documentaries on broadly religious themes. An interview with Judith about her work was juxtaposed with performances of such songs as Stewart’s ‘Pretty Golden Hair’ and Bert Jansch’s ‘Needle of Death’, which described heroin addiction.

Also featured was Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Blessed’, the lyrics of which – ‘Blessed are the sat upon, spat upon, ratted on’ – echoed Judith’s beliefs. Paul Simon was a particular favourite, and in 1965 she was instrumental in his recording his first solo album, The Paul Simon Songbook – perhaps through her partner Stephen Delft, a highly regarded maker and repairer of guitars, who was also a talented sound technician frequently employed at Abbey Rd studios. She also wrote the liner notes for the album, and the introduction and notes to the book of the same name.

She claimed that when Simon & Garfunkel became famous and were put up by their record company at a grand London hotel, they still preferred to stay with her in Dellow St. Judith tried her hand at writing lyrics herself, providing the words of ‘The Hungry Child’ a song for Peter Bellamy’s band The Young Tradition that appeared on their 1967 album So Cheerfully Round

She described Simon’s ‘I am a Rock’ as ‘an almost clinical description of isolation’, the kind of isolation from which she hoped to rescue young people. Particularly isolated, she felt, were homosexuals, who were ‘very much a despised and an outcast minority – probably the only minority in this country that are not yet equal before the law’.

That those who administered the law were not always as objective as they should be was demonstrated when two plain-clothes policemen asked her what she was doing in a café much frequented by rent boys. When she explained her mission, one policeman said: ‘Well, I suppose you mean well, but you’re wasting your time with this lot. These queers are nothing but animals and ought to be exterminated.’ She ‘blew up at him’, and after he had departed, ‘very red in the face’, his colleague said to her: ‘I don’t think you’re wasting your time. I think if there were more of you there’d be need for fewer of us.’ This was in 1966, and the law would change the following year.

Meeting Point ends with film of Judith striding though the dark streets in her stylish cloak and thigh-length boots to the accompaniment of Stephen Delft performing ‘Come Down Lord from Your Heaven’, a ‘Soho De Profundis’ they had composed together. The couple would eventually marry in 1981, after which they bade farewell to Soho and the East End and emigrated to New Zealand. Now chiefly remembered for her connections to the world of folk music, Judith Piepe should also be celebrated for her social work, particularly with young rent boys. So many were helped by this remarkable woman.

Dellow House, Cable St where Judith Piepe lived

St Anne’s, Soho, which was Judith Piepe’s centre of operations

Blessed

By Paul Simon

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit
Blessed is the lamb whose blood flows
Blessed are the sat upon, spat upon, ratted on
O Lord, why have you forsaken me?

I got no place to go
I’ve walked around Soho for the last night or so
Ah, but it doesn’t matter, no

Blessed is the land and the kingdom
Blessed is the man whose soul belongs to
Blessed are the meth drinkers, pot sellers, illusion dwellers
O Lord, why have you forsaken me?

My words trickle down
From a wound that I have no intention to heal

Blessed are the stained glass, windowpane glass
Blessed is the church service, makes me nervous
Blessed are the penny rookers, cheap hookers, groovy lookers
O Lord, why have you forsaken me?

You may also like to read this earlier story by Peter Parker

The War on ‘Vice’ in the East End