Going With The Flow

By Irving Daniel Stone

This biography recounts the life story of Irving Stone.

Irving comes from a traditional North London Jewish family who have been in the United Kingdom since 1905, when his grandparents on both sides arrived fleeing persecution during the Tsarist period of history. Despite any vicissitudes, Irving has always tried to be a p

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ellis Editions
• Release date: Mar 23, 2024
• ISBN: 9781919611464

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

All four of my grandparents came to England between 1905 and 1907, fleeing the Tzar’s persecution in Russia, Poland and the Ukraine.

My father’s parents, Abraham (Kopul) and Deborah Stam, came from Poland in 1907, after they were married there. Kopul came from a town called Sowalki. A distant cousin in Michigan, Evan Wolfson whose passion is genealogy, has created a fantastic family tree and it seems that the Stams lived in Sowalki at least since the end of the 17th century.

My grandmother, Deborah, came from a place called Korchin where her family were apple farmers. She remembered her father loading his cart with apples from the orchard before travelling to town to sell them. We have a photograph of what I believe were her two brothers in military uniform; they were called up by the Tzar’s army and never seen again.

She had two sisters, Freida and Yetta, who came to England as well, although I am not sure when. Freida came with her three children, Annie, Lewis and Joe. She was expecting her husband Phillip to be there to greet them when they arrived in London but, reading between the lines, she seems to have been a difficult woman and, in fact, Phillip had moved back to Poland. He married somebody else (bigamously), with whom he had a family. They all perished in Treblinka concentration camp.

Freida subsequently ‘married’ an itinerant salesman, who was very religious, with whom she had two more children, Barney and Deborah.

When abandoned by Phillip, Freida was in desperate financial straits. She was notorious among the neighbouring tenants of the flats where she lived in the East End for stealing milk from neighbours’ doorsteps. Lewis, as my father’s cousin, was a great friend to him, although he seems to have been constantly in trouble with the authorities. He was killed during the war by a V2 rocket while travelling on a bus.

His sister Annie married a good friend of his, who was not Jewish, called Tom Lynch. Freida went berserk when she heard that they were going to be married - but their union was successful. They eventually moved to Canada, where they went into the catering business, which went well for them. Tom took up flying lessons at the local flying club, as did their children Michael and Tamara. Michael was in the Canadian Navy before joining the Canadian Air Force, and subsequently became a long-haul captain with a major Canadian airline. When he retired he became an instructor for airline pilots. He and his lovely wife Robin have a small guest house on one of Vancouver’s islands, and we stayed with them in about 2018.

Tamara had a senior position in the Canadian Film Board.

She died recently.

I know little about Deborah’s other sister, Yetta. She married and had two children, Pat and Donald. Pat’s son, Brian Sandler, is an affluent businessman living in Essex.

Kopul and Deborah came to England with Kopul’s older sister Anna, who eventually emigrated to Detroit, being Evan’s great grandmother.

They were given the ticket to come here by a kind uncle who lived in England, Samuel Lipchitz, a dealer in Jewish religious books. Sam’s family subsequently changed their name to Lipton, and his son Gerald and daughter Rita had a successful company called Chinacraft, selling fine crockery. Gerald, a noted philanthropist, was associated with the Nightingale Home for Aged Jews in South London. His son, Sir Stuart Lipton, is a well known figure in the property industry. Stuart’s sister Jackie is married to Lord Justice John Dyson, who was previously the Master of the Rolls. He is a charming man and I have had an interesting correspondence with him after reading his autobiography.

My maternal grandfather, Samuel (Shmuel) Spivack came from a little shtetl called Bershenkovitz near Vitebsk in Russia. His father, Tanchum Yitzhak, who had married his mother Yocheved when she was only fifteen, had already passed away when the family left for the United States. Tanchum Yitzah was what is euphemistically called a ‘scholar’ in Orthodox circles, which in reality meant he spent every day in synagogue studying the Talmud. When he came home, he would find his young wife playing with her dolls.

Yocheved and her five daughters, with the family samovar, had already succeeded in reaching the United States when Shmuel embarked on the SS Philadelphia with the aim of joining them in 1905. On that ship, he met my grandmother Betsy, who was fleeing Kiev. I know very little of her family, save that she had a brother called Eddie, who visited my grandparents in the 1950s. Betsy was turned back at Ellis Island, and Shmuel, clearly a romantic twenty-year old, decided to go with her wherever she went next! They married in Liverpool and moved to the East End of London.

My grandmother Betsy was the only one who ever spoke about the bad times. She told of Russian and Cossack soldiers raping the girls and throwing babies in the air and catching them on the points of their swords. I recently underwent a DNA test which said that I am 95% Jewish. I am convinced that the other 5% is the result of a Russian or Cossack rape more likely the former as that would explain my fair hair and blue eyes! I find it hard to be sympathetic to the plight of the Cossacks who were murdered by Stalin. My apologies to Count Nicholas Tolstoy!

As for the Tsar, who was undoubtedly an anti-Semite and whose secret police, as well as the Russian Orthodox Church, were behind many of the pogroms, my grandmother would never mention him without ceremoniously spitting.

Personally, I believe that in July 1918 Nicholas II of Russia was in the exact right place at the exact right time, and got what he deserved.

I recently found a Home Office Aliens Card which belonged to Kopul required at the time to record an immigrant’s compulsory visits to a British police station. That may seem harsh now, but at least they were allowed to settle in this country as compared to those unfortunate Jews in the 1930s who were denied asylum by most European countries, including Britain, but with the honourable exception of Denmark and Holland.

My paternal grandparents Kopul and Deborah were very poor, although that did not prevent them from having five children, my dear father Harry being the third.

In his early years in Poland, Kopul had gone to jail as an anarchist and was a Communist until the end of his life. He was an avid reader of left-wing literature and the Daily Worker. He was a quiet and unemotional man not prone to showing affection (at least towards me). I remember his copious grey hair and blue eyes, which, my father inherited from him. Kopul worked as a tailor until he retired.

Deborah was a wonderfully affectionate and tactile grandmother (and a pretty lady too), who died in her sixties when I was aged twelve, but I still remember her lovely smile and affectionate ways. Sadly, she was a terrible cook!

After their marriage my mother’s parents, Shmuel and Betsy, moved to a tiny property near Brick Lane in the East End of London, and had thirteen children including my mother Mollie, who was number seven. Betsy went through fourteen pregnancies, and by the time she was in her sixties was completely worn out. Shmuel found it hard to earn a living. There was no social security system in those days. He started his commercial life selling bits of wood off a barrow. He graduated to making ammunition boxes in the First World War, and was later successful in manufacturing bedroom furniture, employing several of his sons in the business - they became known as the ‘feuding and fighting Spivacks’… which may go some way to explain the eventual demise of the firm Spivack Brothers Limited.

In contrast to Kopul, Shmuel hated communists. There was a reason for this. Shmuel and Betsy had a lodger in their tiny dwelling in the East End. He was a carpenter (and a Communist). One day, he asked Shmuel to lend him money to retrieve his tools from the pawn shop. Shmuel was reluctant because the only money he and Betsy had was their savings for the baby clothes for their first child, my uncle Irving.

The carpenter cried out ‘As God is my witness, I will pay you back!’ Shmuel, believing that as a communist this man must be an idealist, agreed, reluctantly, to lend him the money - which was of course never repaid.

I remember Shmuel and Betsy very well, and when Shmuel died in 1959 I cried like a baby.

Betsy (in contrast to poor Deborah) was a fantastic cook - though sometimes in the early days of her marriage there was no money for food. She was too proud to let any of the neighbours know so she would pretend to be chopping up meat and vegetables in the kitchen.

As a little boy I used to love playing with the saucepans in the large kitchen of the house in Hove where my mother’s parents lived. One day I was playing with a large box of matches, and it somehow fell into a saucepan containing chicken soup which was waiting to be heated up. I was too frightened to say anything. The next day at lunchtime my grandmother was serving it to everyone around the dining room table when the sulphurous matches were discovered! I quickly confessed, expecting to be punished but, as is the way when you are a little Jewish prince, instead I received lots of ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’.

Shmuel was a small man with fierce and piercing brown eyes. He had a truly terrifying glare, and I was quite frightened of him as a little boy. His glare was inherited by my mother and two of her brothers, David and Mark, as well as my older daughter Ingrid. Ingrid’s mother Valerie has often expressed her terror of Ingrid’s laser-like glare, which, happily, is seldom deployed!

Shmuel was a harsh disciplinarian, certainly with his older sons, as I will recount later.

I didn’t need to worry about The Glare, as I was clearly one of Shmuel’s favourites and I never experienced anything more frightening than a playful swish of the table napkin when we were having lunch. I vividly remember the moment he kissed me immediately after I had finished performing my Bar Mitzvah in the synagogue. The sensation of his moustache on my cheek wasn’t too pleasant because it felt like steel wool!

Shmuel’s five sisters Anna, Esther, Fanny, Mollie and Eva, as well as their descendants, proved to be almost as fecund as him and today there are so many of them all over the United States that they have a family blog, ‘Spimail’.

For many years my father’s family thought Kopul’s mother Chaya, his brother Sam, Sam’s wife and their four daughters had been murdered in the Holocaust.

Sam had been a commissar in a Russian town called Mogilev just over the border from his hometown of Sowalki. He was in charge of a collective farm, and before the Second World War he had correspondence with his niece, my father’s sister Billie (in Yiddish). My cousin Helen has managed to find some letters from Sam to her mother Billie and I am eagerly looking forward to receiving these and having them translated.

This came to an end when war was declared and Poland was invaded by the Germans in 1939. Kopul would often weep when looking at his brother Sam’s photograph, thinking that he was dead. However, through Evan’s genealogical research, I later discovered that Sam, being an important member of the Communist Party of Russia, had been evacuated with his wife and three daughters to Siberia. Sadly, one of his daughters was killed travelling between Minsk and Sowalki. After the war Sam and his family went back to Mogilev, and in 1947 Sam was imprisoned as part of one of Joseph Stalin’s purges aimed at Jews.

Sam was released in 1952 and died some years later without having contacted his family in England - therefore, sadly, Kopul never knew his brother had survived the war.

Sam’s grandson Alex emigrated to the USA in 1987 and lives in Florida where he has a car repair shop. More on that side of the family and the Second World War later.

I had previously understood that my great grandmother (Sam and Kopul’s mother), Chaya, had also been evacuated to Siberia. However, I now know that Chaya is inscribed at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem as a victim of persecution, and I can only assume that she was murdered by the Germans.

Neither of my grandfathers went to fight in the First World War but I think they were not unusual in the immigrant Jewish community, as opposed to the established Anglo Jews who were anxious to express their patriotism by going to fight. It should be remembered however that my grandfather’s generation were treated as aliens and had to report to a police station on a regular basis. By contrast, in the Second World War, no less than eight of my uncles and aunts, as well as my father, were all doing their bit for King and Country.

CHAPTER TWO 

My uncles, aunts, and first cousins on my father’s side.

My father had three sisters - Anne, Billie and Ronnie; Anne and Billie were older and Ronnie was younger. He also had a younger brother Bernard, who was Kopul’s favourite.

Anne, although somewhat simple, was a very talented milliner, working for a posh company in the West End for many years. I remember being a pageboy at her first wedding to another simple person called Morrie. I don’t know too much about her except that she was married several times and had a happy and uncomplicated attitude to life. This was a trait she shared with Billie, who was certainly not simple and had a lovely disposition. I don’t think I ever saw her without a smile on her face. As a young girl she was very attractive and possibly a little naughty, because she was certainly flirtatious, almost to the end of her one hundred and seven years. A large part of her life was far from easy but that never diminished her sunny attitude.

In the 1930s she married Dave Richman, who came from a Polish family in the east end of London.

I remember her telling me how in 1940 during one of the air raids on London she was running for the shelter with my two cousins Jeanette and Helen who were very little. German bombers were flying overhead dropping bombs. By the time she reached the shelter she had vowed to leave London, which she did the next day. With the two girls and her sister Anne she boarded a train for Preston in Lancashire. Her sister Ronnie was working as a seamstress in Blackpool. Her husband Dave joined them later. He was serving in the Pioneer Corps but ended up working as an incredibly popular cook at the barracks.

A permanent home was found within a few weeks in the shape of a shop with a flat above and a large basement below. I remember that shop very well because I used to play games with my two cousins - doctors and nurses et cetera. Our imaginations ran riot and there was no end to the wonderful scenarios which we dreamed up. It was here that I developed my love of cars. I would stand outside the shop for hours at a time spotting the different makes going past. I really looked forward to my visits to Preston throughout my childhood.

Jeanette has told me the story of how one day during the war Winston Churchill was driven by in an open car - he was in a dark blue one-piece baby suit with a zip up the middle, and had his trademark cigar in his mouth. She and Billie stuck their heads out of an upper window - Billie with her hair in curlers and a scarf over her head! She shouted cooee! The great man looked up and gave them both a ‘V for victory’ sign.

After the war, once Dave was demobbed, he joined Billie on her stall in Preston Market selling ladies lingerie. The stall was exposed to the elements and life was hard for both of them, having to get up very early every day to go and work at the market. Eventually they bought a little shop in the centre of Preston, which they called ‘Boutique Helene’, with Billie and Jeanette selling ladies haute couture clothes. They had very good taste in fashion and would periodically go to London to buy stock from various fashion houses. They were the only shop within the wider area of Preston selling fashion and they were very successful. Dave continued to work on the market until the end of his life. He was a popular personality, well respected and liked by all.

Ronnie moved back to London after the war where she worked, as before, as a seamstress. Much to the despair of her parents and siblings she formed a lifelong relationship with a solicitor’s clerk Frank Clarke. They were always desperately poor but as far as I remember Ronnie was a happy lady who didn’t need material possessions. She chose the way she wanted to live and she enjoyed it. Frank and Ronnie eventually went to live in Bournemouth where Ronnie would have a daily swim when the weather was warm enough. In her later years she worked as a waitress. She was a staunch member of the Conservative Party and on one famous occasion when the Tory party conference was held in Bournemouth she rushed up the steps of the conference hall to plant a kiss on Maggie Thatcher’s cheek and said I think you’re wonderful - much to the Iron Lady’s apparent embarrassment.

My father’s younger brother, Uncle Bernie, was a lovely man with the broadest and friendliest smile. He was an actor but to make ends meet he dealt in antique silver in Bermondsey and Portobello markets. He was a kindly and uncomplicated man, left-wing in his political views, but that never came between us. In his early acting years he was a member of the Unity Theatre where he got to know and was friendly with some personalities who became very famous such as Alfie Bass, Bernard Breslaw and Lionel Bart.

He married Rose, who also acted, and they had a very good marriage. They worked both on the stage and at the markets. She had a small part in a film ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, and he did some television advertising and had a good part in a series called ‘The Invisible Man’. They both appeared in a Lionel Bart musical, ‘Blitz’.

Sadly, Rose died suddenly in her early fifties and Bernie passed away from cancer just a few years later.

My uncles, aunts and first cousins on my mother’s side.

My mother had nine brothers and three sisters.

Her oldest brother Irving was born Isaac, or rather Issy, his Hebrew name being Tanchum Yitzhak, after Shmuel’s father who died before the exodus from Russia. Irving had travelled to America in the 1920s and changed his name after coming across it in that country. By all accounts he was an outstanding young man and had taken charge of the furniture business, Spivack Brothers Limited. He was well known and respected in the trade. In the winter of 1934 he decided to accompany a delivery to an important customer in Glasgow called Goldberg’s Department Store. The driver of the lorry fell asleep at the wheel and they crashed. Irving suffered an injury to his leg and gangrene set in. The leg was amputated in an attempt to save his life, but unfortunately this failed, and he died from the infection. Shmuel and Betsy were heartbroken.

Shmuel spent the night weeping next to his son’s body and by all accounts tried to throw himself into the grave at the funeral. Irving left a widow, Millicent and a baby daughter, my cousin Lydia. After Irving’s death Millicent went on to marry five more times. She turned out to be a very strange woman and manipulated and interfered in Lydia’s life. I remember Lydia as a beautiful young woman. She looked very much like my mother. She was engaged to a clever young solicitor called Laurie Doffman, but largely because of her mother’s constant interference the marriage never took place. Instead Millicent introduced Lydia to an awful man, Harvey Wolfson who married her and then proceeded to abuse her to such an extent that he triggered her schizophrenia and she spent most of her life in mental institutions. If I met him today I think I might kill him but hopefully he is where he belongs - six feet under.

Lydia died at the age of about sixty, a mere shadow of the lovely lady she could otherwise have become.

After Irving’s death the business collapsed, partly because of the great depression but also because there were too many brothers working in it, enjoying salaries and expenses the business could not afford. It was a great tragedy. The large factory in Lea Bridge Road was sold to a well-known furniture manufacturer called Harris Lebus. Shmuel and Betsy’s house was repossessed by Barclays Bank.

Shmuel’s second oldest son was Hymie. In stark contrast to Irving, Hymie was dour and taciturn. By all accounts he disliked his father and adored his mother.

Hymie was a paradox. On the one hand he was a left-wing pseudo intellectual (a member of the Fabian Society), and on the other hand he was for a while a professional boxer. In the early 1960s he stood, unsuccessfully, as a Labour candidate for Kensington and Chelsea. He took part in the Battle of Cable Street against Oswald Mosley’s fascist thugs. He was always tough and aggressive, even in old age. He had a shop in the city selling second-hand office furniture and equipment. One day he was held up, but refused to hand over the takings. He told the thieves to F off! and was accordingly beaten up.

As a boxer he fought as a middleweight against Archie Sexton, who later became British Empire middleweight champion (and was the father of Dave Sexton, Chelsea and Manchester United manager). My uncle went the distance with Archie and made it through all twelve rounds - though he did take a lot of punishment (according to his brother David, who watched the fight) in the process.

At the outbreak of the Second World War he sent his wife Rose and son Donald to America where she proceeded to drink heavily and to lead a promiscuous life as well as being a thoroughly bad mother. I don’t remember very much about my uncle because our meetings were rare, although he always seemed to be talking about the General Strike of 1926. He lived in a town house in Islington with his second wife who was exceedingly plain and the sister of a far left Scottish Labour MP, John Lee. They had two children, Elizabeth and Simon.

Shmuel and Betsy’s third son was David who was a great character. Having eight brothers, he eventually changed his name to Sinclair to avoid confusion.

A tall, good looking man with a booming voice, he was popular with the ladies. My mother told me how she used to stand on a chair to brush his coat before he went out and he would give her a sixpence. He was usually good with money and even as a little boy he managed to save up £5 and had a £5 note which in those days was an impressive large white piece of paper. One evening my grandparents were entertaining friends who were astonished that little David had saved up £5 and asked to see the note. He reluctantly produced it for inspection, only for my grandfather to pocket it! I assume that this must have been one of those times when my grandfather was hard up. David would often complain even when he was an old man, l never got the £5 back!

My grandparents used to buy the children a new outfit every Passover. My grandmother would take them to a shop on the Whitechapel Road for this purpose. One year when sailor suits were all the rage for young boys and girls Betsy bought one for David, but he refused to wear it. That’s for a girl to wear he exclaimed. When Betsy arrived home she told Shmuel, who beat David. They put that sailor suit on my dead body David would say into his old age.

One day, years later, the family went to the wedding of some friend’s offspring. As is often the way in Jewish families, my grandparents had some friends who had a daughter, and they thought it would be nice to match her with David. Dance with Mr so-and-so’s daughter, Shmuel commanded. David’s reply to my grandfather was Dance with her yourself, this isn’t the sailor suit!

David became a successful businessman manufacturing furniture and investing in property. He was also a very honourable man - there was the time in the early 1950s when his furniture business went bust. Subsequently he made sure that every creditor received every penny they were owed.

He was less successful with his first marriage to a woman named Irene, who was unfaithful while he was serving as a sergeant in the RAF. Sadly he lost contact with their two daughters Carol and Linda after the divorce. Carol, Linda and their mother, for some reason, became Catholics. Many years later I met Linda in Paris, where she was working as an Au Pair. She confessed how shocked she had been at the age of sixteen to learn she was born Jewish.

David subsequently married another Irene, a dark haired beauty with whom he had two children, my cousins John and Jill. John is an interesting character. He went to my school, Clifton College, where he stood out as an actor, putting on productions that were considered daring at the time, covering such subjects as homosexuality. He took a drama degree at Bristol University, and became an actor, appearing in the nude in a production of ‘Hair’ at The Roundhouse in Chalk Farm. There he met Richard O’Brian, who wrote ‘The Rocky Horror Show’, in which John still has a financial interest. I remember John as a devastatingly handsome young man, looking like a cross between Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Kevin Kline.

I was particularly jealous one day when, standing with John at the bar of a club called Mortons in Berkeley Square a beautiful American girl came up to me and said Will you tell your friend that I think he is very handsome and I would like to go to bed with him?I relayed this message to John, and off they went! Subsequently, John started a recording studio, called Sarm in Osborne Street in the East End of London, with my cousin Gary Lyons, the business being financed by John’s father, my uncle David Sinclair. Gary was very talented, musicaly and the studio was successful. Gary and John produced an album with a band called Foreigner which was an hit and I believe that the royalties come in regularly to this day. After Foreignerartistes such as Elton John and Queen began to use the studio for their recordings. Gary was instrumental in the production of "A night at