Simon Pettet’s Tiles
Anyone who has ever visited Dennis Severs’ House in Folgate St will recognise this spectacular chimneypiece in the bedroom with its idiosyncratic pediment designed to emulate the facade of Christ Church. The fireplace itself is lined with an exquisite array of Delft tiles which you may have admired, but very few know that these tiles were made by craftsman Simon Pettet in 1985, when he was twenty years old and living in the house with Dennis Severs. Simon was a gifted ceramicist who mastered the technique of tile-making with such expertise that he could create new Delft tiles in an authentic manner, which were almost indistinguishable from those manufactured in the seventeenth century.
In his tiles for this fireplace, Simon made a leap of the imagination, creating a satirical gallery of familiar Spitalfields personalities from the nineteen-eighties. Today his splendid fireplace of tiles exists as a portrait of the neighbourhood at that time, though so discreetly done that, unless someone pointed it out to you, it is unlikely you would ever notice amongst all the overwhelming detail of Dennis Severs’ house.
Simon Pettet died of AIDS in 1993, eight years after completing the fireplace and just before his twenty-eighth birthday, and today his ceramics, especially this fireplace in Dennis Severs’ house, comprise a poignant memorial of a short but productive life. Simon’s death imparts an additional resonance to the humour of his work now, which is touching in the skill he expended to conceal his ingenious achievement. As with so much in these beautiful old buildings, we admire the workmanship without ever knowing the names of the craftsmen who were responsible, and Simon aspired to this worthy tradition of anonymous artisans in Spitalfields.
When I squatted down to peer into the fireplace, I could not help smiling to recognise Gilbert & George on the very first tile I saw – Simon had created instantly recognisable likenesses that also recalled Tenniel’s illustrations of Tweedledum & Tweedledee. Most importantly, the spontaneity, colour, texture and sense of line were all exactly as you would expect of Delft tiles. Taking my camera and tripod in hand, I spent a couple of hours with my head in the fireplace before emerging sooty and triumphant with this selection of photographs.
When I finished photographing all the tiles, I noticed one placed at the top right-hand side that was almost entirely hidden from the viewer by the wooden surround on the front of the fireplace. It was completely covered in soot too. After I used a kitchen scourer to remove the grime, I discovered this most-discreetly placed tile was a portrait of Simon himself at work, making tiles. The modesty of the man was such that only someone who climbed into the fireplace, as I did, would ever find Simon’s own signature tile.
Gilbert & George
Raphael Samuel, Historian of the East End
Riccardo Cinelli, Artist
Jim Howett, Carpenter whom Dennis Severs considered to be the fly on the wall in Spitalfields
Ben Langlands & Nikki Bell, Artists who made extra money as housepainters
Simon de Courcy Wheeler, Photographer
Julian Humphreys who renovated his bathroom regularly – “Tomorrow is another day”
Scotsman, Paul Duncan, worked for the Spitalfields Trust
Douglas Blain, Director of the Spitalfields Trust, who was devoted to Hawksmoor
The person in this illustration of a famous event in Folgate St cannot be named for legal reasons
Keith & Jane Bowler of Wilkes St
Her Majesty the Cat, known as ‘Madge,’ watching ‘Come Dancing’
Marianna Kennedy & Ian Harper who were both students at the Slade
Phyllis & her son Rodney Archer
Anna Skrine, Secretary of the Spitalfields Trust
Simon Pettet, Designer & Craftman (1965-93)
Dennis Severs House, 18 Folgate St, Spitalfields, E1 6BX
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Philip Pittack, Rag Merchant
“Even though my parents didn’t have a lot, they always made sure we were properly turned out”
There are very few who can say – as Philip Pittack can – that they are a third generation rag merchant. In fact, Philip’s grandfather Mendell was a weaver in Poland before he came to this country, which means the family involvement with textiles might go back even further through preceding generations.
Although the work of a rag merchant may seem arcane now, it was the praecursor of recycling. Today, with characteristic panache, Philip has found an ingenious way to embody the past and present of his profession. He has carved a cosy niche for himself – working with Martin White, a cloth merchant of equal pedigree, at Crescent Trading – selling high quality remnants, ends of runs and surplus fabric, to fashion students, young designers and film and theatre costumiers.
Few can match Philip encyclopaedic knowledge of cloth, its qualities and manufacture, yet he is generous with his inheritance – delighting in passing on his textile wisdom, acquired over generations, to young people starting in the industry.
“My grandfather Mendell came over from Poland more than a hundred years ago, before the First World War. ‘Ptack’ means ‘little bird’ in Polish but, when he arrived at the Port of London as an immigrant, it got written incorrectly down as Pittack, and that was what it became. He lived in Stamford Hill and had a warehouse at 102/104 Mare St. He went around the textile factories in the East End, collecting the waste which got shredded up and made back into cloth, but he was a lazy bugger who liked whisky and women. My grandmother, she was a tough nut, she worked at the Cally selling rags. It was a free-for-all, and she barged her way in and always made sure she got a good pitch.
My father David, he went to school in Mile End and went into the family business as a kid. He learnt the rag business with his brother Joe. They were tough guys brought up the hard way. When Mosley and his cronies came around, they were in the front row – you didn’t argue with them. They moved into buying surplus rolls of cloth as well as rags and opened a shop too. He did that until he died in February 1977, aged sixty-six. He smoked Churchman’s No 1 like a chimney. He was big fellow with hands like bunches of bananas but he wasted away to a twig.
I used to have a Saturday job, when I was ten years old, to get my pocket money, at a shop selling electrical goods and records, Bardens. I went out with the guys installing televisions and fridges. Eventually, they offered me a job at fourteen years old and were training me to be TV engineer. But, one day, my dad bought a large pile of remnants which took three days to sort and he said, ‘You’re not going to work tomorrow, you’re going to come and help me schlep!’ I lost my job at Bardens and that’s how I started as a rag merchant at fourteen and a half.
After three days of carrying sacks of rags, my father said to me, ‘This is what you are going to do, and you are also a rag sorter.” And that’s what I did, night and bloody day. And if I did anything wrong, my grandfather would come up and thump me on the head. You had either wools, cottons or rayons in those days. There were over a hundred grades of rags, both in quality and material, and I could tell you hundreds of names of different grades of rags but they wouldn’t mean anything to you.
Then eventually, when I was eighteen, my father said, ‘Here’s a hundred pounds, go out and buy rags, and if you don’t buy any and I don’t sell any, then you don’t earn anything.’ There were hundreds of clothing factories in the East End in those days and you had to go cold-calling to buy the textile waste. There used to be twenty other chaps doing the same thing, so it was very competitive. You climbed under the sewing tables and filled up sacks, then weighed them on a hand-held butchers’ scale with a hook on one end. If they were looking, they got the correct weigh. But the art of the exercise was balancing the sack on your toe while you were weighing it and you could get several pounds off like that. My father taught me how to do it. You’d say, ‘Do you want the correct weight or the correct price?’ and if they said, ‘The correct price,’ then you cut down the weight. They’d have to have paid the dustman to take it away, if we didn’t, but they got greedy.
Over several years, I built up my own round and went round in the truck. But then, my uncle got caught stealing off my dad. By that time, we had a shop in Barnet, so my father turned round – he’d had enough of my uncle thieving – and he said, ‘Give him the shop.’ We had to give up that side of the business. After my father got sick, and I got married and became a parent, he took a back seat. It was very hard work, packing up three or four tons of rags into sacks. Each sack weighed between fifty and one hundred and fifty pounds, and I used to carry them on my back. I can’t believe I used to do it now!
We carried with the business until I walked away. I’d had enough of my brother, I found he was doing things behind my back with the money. I signed away all the merchandise and suppliers to him in June 1978. I had nothing, they cut off my gas and electricity, and I had my kids at private school. I borrowed five hundred pounds from my sister-in-law to do a little deal. It was the first deal I did on my own. I bought all this cloth for a gentleman who operated twenty-four hours a day out of Great Titchfield St, but when I got there I discovered he already had a warehouse full of the same stuff and I was stuck with a rented van containing five hundred pounds worth of it.
I was almost crying as I was sitting in the truck, waiting for the light to change, until this guy who I knew through business walked up and said, ‘Why don’t you sell it to me?’ I opened up the truck to show him and he said, ‘We’ll buy that.’ But he had a reputation for not paying, so I said, ‘I’ve got to have the money now. As long as you can give me the five hundred pounds, I can come have the rest tomorrow.’ I went and paid back my sister-in-law, and the next day I came back and he gave me the rest. It all came out in the wash! I made four hundred pounds on the deal, and I was jumping up and down on the pavement. Then I went off, and paid the gas and electricity bills and everything else.
I built up my own round with my own people and, eventually, I went to Prouts and bought my own truck. I knew which one I wanted and ex-wife loaned me the money. I went out and filled it up with diesel and it was only me – I’d arrived as a rag merchant.”
At a family wedding, 1946. Philip is three years old. On the left is Barnet Smulevich, Philip’s grandfather. Mendell Pittack, Philip’s other grandfather stands on the right. Philip’a parents, Tilley & David stand behind him and his elder brother Stanley and their cousin, Rosalind Ferguson.
Philip holds his mother’s hand at Cailley St Clapton, shortly after the war, surrounded by other family members.
Riding Muffin the Mule on the beach at Cliftonville, aged six in 1949
Philip with his parents, David and Tilley
Aged fourteen
Bar mitvah, 1956
David Pittack sorting rags at his warehouse in Mare St in the sixties
Skylarking after hours at the Copper Grill in Wigmore St in the sixties
Philip on bongos, enjoying high jinks with pals in Mallorca
In a silver mohair suit, at a Waste Trades Dinner at the Connaught Rooms in Great Queen St
Posing with a pal’s Mustang at Great Fosters country house hotel
passport photo, seventies
Best man at a wedding in the seventies
In the eighties
Martin White & Philip Pittack, Winter 2010
Crescent Trading, Quaker Court/Pindoria Mews, Quaker St, E1 6SN. Open Sunday-Friday.
You may like to read my earlier stories about Crescent Trading
The Return of Crescent Trading
Old East End Letterheads & Receipts
It is my delight to publish this selection of local examples from Philip Mernick‘s astonishing ephemera collection of East End letterheads and receipts. Many are remarkable for the beauty of their typographic design as well as revealing the wide range of industry and commerce.
The oldest slop shop in Wapping sold clothing for the slave trade. Click here to read about slave clothing
This advertisement was printed on a one million mark bank note from the German reich, giving it novelty value and also making a bold political statement to customers
All letterheads and receipts courtesy of Philip Mernick
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Ron McCormick’s Spitalfields
Ron McCormick took these splendid pictures when he lived in Princelet St in the seventies
Knifegrinder, Spitalfields
Fishman’s tobacconist & sweet shop, Flower & Dean St, Spitalfields
Entrance to Chevrah Shass Synagogue, Old Montague St
Clock seller, Sclater St
Dressed up for the Sunday market, Cheshire St
Maurice, Gents’ Hairdresser, Buxton St
Gunthorpe St
Club Row
Steps down to Black Lion Yard, Old Montague St
Old Castle St, Synagogue
Sunday market, Cheshire St
Corner of Gun St & Artillery Lane
Shopkeeper, Old Montague St
Inter-generational conflict on Princelet St
Goldstein’s Kosher Butcher & Poulterer, Old Montague St
Great Eastern Buildings, Quaker St
Convenience Store, Artillery Lane
Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor, Brune St
Alf’s Fish Bar, Brick Lane
Waiting for the night shelter to open, Christ Church Spitalfields
Resting, Spitalfields Market Barrows, Commercial St
Great Eastern Buildings, Quaker St
Rough sleeper, Spitalfields
Mother and her new-born baby in a one bedroom flat, Spitalfields
Photographs copyright © Ron McCormick
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A Brief History of The Bishopsgate Goodsyard
As RECLAIM OUR GOODSYARD put forward a community proposal for public housing to challenge the corporate development upon the Bishopsgate Goodsyard, I trace the story of this controversial site.
Mesolithic tranchet adze discovered at Bishopsgate Goodsyard
Bishopsgate Goodsyard c.1910
There are many continuities that run through time in Spitalfields, yet most disturbing is the history of brutal change which has been wreaked upon our neighbourhood over centuries.
The Hospital of the Priory of St Mary – from which the name Spitalfields is derived – was established in the eleventh century as a refuge for the homeless, conveniently one mile north from the City of London which sought to expel vagabonds and beggars. Then Henry VIII destroyed this Priory in the sixteenth century and seized the ‘Spital fields which he turned over to usage as his Artillery Ground.
In the eighteen-thirties, the Eastern Counties Railway, cut across the north of Spitalfields to construct Bishopsgate Station on Shoreditch High St, pushing families from their homes to seek new accommodation in the surrounding streets. The overcrowded area to the north became known as the Nichol, notorious for criminality. While to the south, in the courtyards beyond Quaker St, old houses built when the silk industry thrived in Spitalfields were rented out at one family per room. Clusters of black streets on Charles Booth’s Descriptive Map of London Poverty vividly illustrate the social consequences of this drastic redevelopment.
The situation was exacerbated in Spitalfields when the City of London objected to traffic from the London Docks congesting their streets and hundreds more homes were demolished when Commercial St was cut through to carry goods directly to the terminus in Shoreditch High St. Finally, in the eighteen-seventies when the railway was extended south to Liverpool St, an entire residential neighbourhood area to the west of Spitalfields was also obliterated.
It was only at the very end of the nineteenth century, when the Boundary Estate was constructed as Britain’s first social housing, that any attempt was made to ameliorate the human damage of this unbridled series of large-scale developments. Upon the cusp of the next imminent wave of violent change, in which a monster development threatens to put the Boundary Estate into permanent shadow, it is sobering to contemplate the earlier history of the area that is now known as the Bishopsgate Goodsyard.
The paradox of redevelopment is that it confronts us with our past, when excavations for new buildings uncover evidence of history – such as the Bishop’s Sq development that resurrected thousands of plague victims in Spitalfields. In Shoreditch, exploratory work for a forty storey tower uncovered the Shakespearian theatre where Henry V was first performed and, at the Bishopsgate Goodsyard, preparatory demolition drew attention to John Braithwaite’s elegant viaduct constructed in the eighteen-thirties. In both cases, the outcome is an unholy yoking of conservation and shopping, with Shakespeare’s theatre due to become a heritage feature in a mall and the Braithwaite’s arches set to provide retail units for brands, and both serving as undercrofts to gargantuan towers.
Recent excavations by Museum of London Archaeology Service discovered more than seventy pieces of Mesolithic struck flint, mostly to the west of the Bishopsgate Goodsyard site, suggesting early human occupation towards the banks of the River Walbrook. Ermine St, the Roman road north from the City of London followed the line of Bishopsgate and Shoreditch High St, and burials of this era have been uncovered upon either side of the roadway, just as along the Appian Way in Rome. While a medieval settlement grew up along Shoreditch High St and around Holywell Priory, the land further to the east lay open until the mid-seventeenth century. Yet prior to this, the brick quarries that gave the name to Brick Lane existed there as early as the fourteenth century.
Between 1652 and 1682, the Bishopsgate Goodsyard site was quickly built over a with a mixture of dwellings and small trades as the city expanded. The brick quarries that created the materials for development were eventually filled in with debris from the Fire of London, as streets were laid out and prosperous middle class suburban dwellings were constructed – coinciding with the rise of the lucrative silk industry locally. Discovery of delft tiles, marbles, wine bottles and clay pipes testify to the domestic life of the residents of this newly-built neighbourhood, while analysis of cesspits tells us they ate duck, chicken, mutton, herring, plaice, flounder and cod. Evidence of small-scale industry reveals the presence of sugar processing, glass and iron working, pottery, distillation and the textile trade.
Thus a whole world grew up with streets and yards, taverns, shops, warehouses and workshops – one that was wiped away nearly two centuries later. Today, it is too easy to look at the empty site of the former Bishopsgate Goodsyard and assume that there was never anything before the railway came through. Yet, as we contemplate the next wave of redevelopment, we should do well to contemplate the society that once flourished in this place and how the previous development erased it, that we may draw lessons from the long-term destructive outcomes of these great impositions upon Spitalfields.
Saxon antler and bone comb discovered at Holywell
Excavation of a brick quarry at the Bishopsgate Goods Yard, close to Brick Lane
On Faithorne & Newcourt’s map of 1658, the site of the Bishopsgate Goodsyard is open fields
By Morgan’s map of 1682, suburban development has filled the site
Pipe bowl depicting Admiral Vernon, who introduced the daily ration of grog to the navy
Pipe bowl depicting Don Blas de Leso, Portuguese governor of Panama kneeling in surrender to Admiral Vernon
Eighteenth century marbles from the Goodsyard
Eighteenth century tin-glazed tile made in London
Mid-seventeenth century Dutch tin-glazed tiles from Bishopsgate Goodsyard, showing a mounted military figure and a man with a cockerel
Eighteenth century tin-glazed tile made in London
Eighteenth century Dutch tile of crucifixion scene
Witch box – animal bones in a wooden box concealed in an eighteenth-century fireplace upon the Bishopsgate Goodsyard site
Unusual post-medieval bone crucifix with sun above, discovered at Bishopsgate Goodsyard, possibly the work of a Napoleonic prisoner of war
Copper plate inscribed ‘Thos Juchau Shoreditch’ – Juchau was a celebrated bare-knuckle boxer born in 1739, said to have been the ‘hero of a hundred fights,’ who became British champion until defeated by William ‘the dyer’ Darts of Spitalfields in the first ever outdoor heavyweight boxing match in 1777. He died in Bateman’s Row in 1806.
Bishopsgate Station, photograph courtesy of National Rail Museum
Charles Booth’s Descriptive Map of London Poverty 1889 courtesy of LSE Library
“The Arches – a long street under a railway which carried the mainline to Liverpool St Station and ran from Commercial St to Club Row … there the pros would practise to mouth-organ acompaniment, night after night, until they had copied the Yanks most intricate steps.” Bud Flanagan, My Crazy Life 1961
Archaeological photographs copyright © MOLA
‘Tracks Through Time, Archaeology and History from the London Overground East London Line’ is available from Museum of London Shop
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The Lost Breweries Of Whitechapel
Within living memory, Whitechapel was home to the Albion and the Blue Anchor Brewery, two of the largest breweries in the country, premises for Watney Mann and Charringtons respectively. Photographer Philip Cunningham‘s grandfather worked at The Albion brewery and it became his melancholy duty to record both breweries in the eighties at the point of their demise. (Accompanying text also by Philip Cunningham.)
The Albion Brewery in the nineteenth century
My grandfather was a train driver until the day he was discovered to be colour blind, when he was sacked on the spot. He then became a drayman and – apart from two world wars – spent the rest of his working life at the Albion Brewery in Whitechapel. He was one of the first draymen to drive a motorised vehicle, a skill which saved his life in WWI.
The brewery started trading in 1808 and although by 1819 it was under the control of Blake & Mann, by 1826 it was in the exclusive ownership of James Mann. In 1846, Crossman and Paulin became partners to form Mann, Crossman & Paulin Ltd. The brewery was re-built in 1863, becoming the most advanced brewery of that time, producing 250,000 barrels a year.
Stables were built on the east side of Cambridge Heath Rd with a nosebag room containing in excess of one hundred and fifty nosebags, each filled by a metal tube from the store above. The former Whitechapel workhouse in Whitechapel Rd was used for the bottling plant, but when this proved to be too small it was moved to a site on Raven Row, two hundred yards south.
In 1958, the company merged with Watney Combe & Reid to become Watney Mann Ltd. In 1978, a spokesperson for Grand Metropolitan the corporate owner who acquired Watney declared, ‘The bottling plant has a very strong future as a distribution and bottling centre for the GLC area and parts of Southern England.’ Yet the plant was closed in 1980 with a loss of two hundred jobs after the building was declared unsafe and too costly to repair. Keg filling transferred to Mortlake, the bottling plant became a distribution centre and the brewery was shut down in 1979. The buildings on the Whitechapel Rd were converted to flats and the rest of the site is now occupied by Sainsbury’s.
Gates of the Blue Anchor Brewery
In 1757, John Charrington moved his brewing business from Bethnal Green to the Mile End Rd. This was the Blue Anchor Brewery, and John Charrington’s brother Harry lived next to the brewery in Malplaquet House from about 1790 until his death in 1833.
The brewery was built on Charrington Park, extending for sixteen acres behind the malt stores. Some land was sold off for building and a section was given to St. Peter’s Church, while the remainder was used for cooperages and for stables housing one hundred horses and a blacksmith’s forge. There were also coppersmiths, tinsmiths, gasfitters, millwrights, hoopers, engineers, and carpenters with a timber store and saw pit. The hop store was a spacious darkened chamber one hundred feet long, filled from floor to ceiling with hops, and the odour was overpowering.
The Blue Anchor brewery became the second largest in London producing 20,252 barrels of beer a year. In the nineteenth century, steam engines were installed which ran until 1927, when they were replaced by electric power. During the Second World War, half the lorry fleet was commandeered for the army.
Yet in 1967, the company merged with Bass to become Charrington Bass and later Bass Ltd – the largest brewing company in the country. The last brew at Charringtons was in 1975 and distribution was then moved to Canning Town. A new administration block was built at a cost of three and a half million, only to be demolished for a retail park.
Photographs copyright © Philip Cunningham
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Manny Silverman, Tailor
Manny Silverman, aged nine in 1941
Manny Silverman has a lucky ticket. It is a bus ticket numbered 9999, punched with a single hole to indicate the destination as Brick Lane and it dates from Manny’s childhood, growing up in Bacon St in the nineteen forties. Until this day, Manny keeps the ticket as a talisman, and, “I’ve been very lucky,” Manny assured me several times while he was telling me his story. Yet while it is apparent that Manny has enjoyed good fortune in his life, it soon became clear there were other forces than simply good luck at work in shaping Manny’s destiny.
Diminutive of build with delicate hands, weary eyes, and a gracious deferential style, Manny wears his history lightly. Fastidiously groomed and neatly dressed, he picked me up from the station at East Finchley in his two seater open-topped Mercedes. At home, Manny produced photocopies of his birth certificate, his indenture papers as an apprentice, his medal for performing King John, his letter offering a directorship of Moss Bros and – of course – his lucky bus ticket. Speaking of the ups and downs of his life, Manny was neither apologetic nor swanky, instead his tone was that of wonder at how it has all turned out.
“I was born in Mother Levy’s Nursing Home in Whitechapel in January 1932. My parents had only come from Lithuania a few months before, so I arrived just in time. My father Abraham was a tailor and my mother was Altke, known as Ettie, and I had a younger sister, Lilli. At first, we lived in Myrdle St, and then we moved to Bacon St where I spent my childhood. We shared two rooms, the four of us, and in the winter the pipes froze and when the spring came they burst. We had no running water and the toilet was in the yard. Each week, we used to go the Hare St (now Cheshire St) public baths and pay one penny to have a wash.
When I saw those baths, years later from first class carriage of a train coming into Liverpool St Station, I thought, ‘You’ve been lucky somewhere along the line.’ If you are the child of first generation immigrants, the first thing they want you to have is a trade that you can carry, because if you can sew or cut hair then you always have the opportunity to make money at your finger tips. And I thought, ‘Here I am, after all this time, still doing the same thing, even if they don’t ask me to sew a suit anymore.’
I only spoke Yiddish when I went to school in Wood Close at the age of four, and my schooling was limited because I was evacuated several times during the war. At twelve, I overcame the shyness that is still with me, braved the blackout, and made my way along to join the Cambridge & Bethnal Green Boys Club in Chance St. My first experience was seeing Maxie Lea and I made lifelong relationships there, not necessarily friends, but when we meet up it is as if time has stood stood still. I was never athletic but really good at drama and when we entered the London Federation of Boys’ Clubs contest, all the members came along to support us. At seventeen, I won a medal for playing King John and I’ve still got the script. I also got a good crit for my performance as Cassius, I always played heavies.
After I left school in 1946, at the age of fourteen, I was overseen by the Jewish Board of Guardians. My father had been ill for a while and they were helpful to me when he died. Harry Moss, Chairman and Managing Director of Moss Bros, was one of the patrons of the Boys Club. (They started as Moses Brothers but decided that ‘Moss Bros’ sounded better than ‘Moses Bros.’) He said to me, ‘Look, you can join us in our workshop in Covent Garden.’ In those days, Moss Bros still did bespoke tailoring and they had six cutters.
At twenty-one, I got itchy feet and left on good terms, on the understanding I could come back. And then, when Monty Moss who produced our plays at the Boys’ Club got engaged, I dropped in to wish him congratulations and he said, ‘You’re not working?’ He took me into Harry Moss’ office, and I told them I didn’t want to be a tailor anymore, so Harry said, ‘Start work as a porter in the secondhand department.’ The business had begun in the 1850s with Old Moses, who bought unredeemed pledges of suits and sold them in Kings Cross and Covent Garden, wheeling a barrow between both places. In the secondhand hand department, I recorded what I thought the suits were worth alongside what they had been bought for and in no time, Harry Moss said, ‘Will you do a bit of buying for me?’ I saw a lot of opportunities for the company that no-one else could see.
In the following years, I was made production director, deputy managing director, chief executive, and unemployed – replaced by a member of the Moss family. After forty years with the company, I found myself in my mid-fifties, out of work with a young family and a large mortgage. Some friends of mine asked me to join them and in 1987 we bought Norman Hartnell, the Royal Couturier, which was in administration, with a view to relaunch it. We made worldwide news and employed Marc Bohan from Dior as designer on the principle that if he brought 10% of his clientele with him, we would have a success. But we ran out of cash and that was the end of that. Since 1985, I have been working as an expert witness in the fields of criminal negligence and insurance claims. I say to people, ‘I will never tell you what you want to hear, but – whatever I advise you to do – I will always explain.’ This is how I operate.
I left the East End when I moved to East Finchley in 1969. I always admired the scarlet geraniums outside this house and when it came on the market I was lucky enough to be able to buy it. I try to go back to the East End, with my son who is in his forties, once a year. He says, ‘Dad, I already know where you went to school.’ But I do like to go back, I’m an unashamed romantic, when it comes to the past. It’s not just to look at where I came from, it’s part of who I am. You can’t not be what you are, and I was a cockney.”
Manny Silverman’s lucky bus ticket to Brick Lane.
Manny at his Bar Mitzvah in 1945.
Manny learns tailoring at fourteen years old.
Manny won a medal for playing the lead in Shakespeare’s “King John” at seventeen.
Manny in the swinging sixties.
Manny was Chief Executive of Moss Bros from 1980 to 1987.
Manny bought Royal Couturier Norman Hartnell in 1987
Manny (Emmanuel) Silverman
Read my other Cambridge & Bethnal Green Boys Club Stories
Maxie Lea MBE, Football Referee
At the Cambridge & Bethnal Green Boys Club 86th Annual Reunion
