Rowing Against the Tide - A career in sport and politics (2 page)

Sometime in those late 1930s, I had my first intimation of the sport of rowing. At the age of about six or seven, the Boat Race was getting its usual publicity. Any connection with North or the East End of London with our great Universities could not have been more remote, yet there were peddlers with their trays of light and dark blue ribbons, and everyone it seemed had to make their choice. My elder brother pulled rank and claimed Cambridge’s colours, and imperiously told me I must therefore support Oxford. I don’t think it really registered with me, but I duly wore a dark blue ribbon. As it turned out, I’ve continued to shout for the Dark Blues and just as well, since our youngest, Joel, made it to Oriel.

At that time too, I developed an interest in football, and as my father took me to Highbury for the first time at either six or seven years of age, I’ve followed the fortunes of the Gunners ever since. In fact, just as I suppose is the case in Glasgow, if you lived in that area of London, you chose either Arsenal or Spurs, or left town! More than seventy years on, I still get the wobbles until the football results are declared, and my day is complete when the Gunners have won, and joyous if the opponents are either Spurs or Chelsea. I went to Nottingham at the age of twenty, and joined the local Nottingham and Union Rowing Club. There were three rowing clubs adjacent to the Nottingham Forest ground, and just some ten or fifteen minutes into the second half, they used to open the gates on the riverside, and we would walk in for free to see the last thirty or so minutes of the game. Try as I could, I just could not work up any enthusiasm for Forest, for those childhood visits to Highbury had made me a “Gooner” for life.

I recall trying on gas masks in either ‘38 or ‘39, when the clouds of war were gathering, and the coaches that gathered at our school, Princess May Road, when we were supposed to be evacuated. As it happened when my brother and I had our labels tied on, my mother changed her mind and stated we would all stay together, and no official was going to shift her. The gas mask training came in handy many years later when in Israel with a small Parliamentary delegation led by the now Lord Greville Janner, during the first Gulf War.

In the late thirties we holidayed in Hove, staying with a couple of elderly ladies who owned a flat over a garage in Norton Place, close to the Hove Town Hall. Strangely my Parliamentary colleague Sir Ivan Lawrence QC, some four years my junior, lived just around the corner but this only came to light when reading his autobiography.

We were in Hove that September ’39 where my brother and I used to delight in helping a guy called Hatton set out his beach huts. The police came down to the beach to tell us that War had been declared and we had to leave the beach at once. My brother Michael had wandered off towards Worthing, and my Mother was not going to leave that beach, Hitler or no Hitler, until he was found. The copper had met his match, and we returned to the flat only once Michael had been found. Dad decided we should stay put until things became clearer, and he travelled down each weekend after closing up the factory, which by that time he had become manager. Just before the phony War ended, we returned to London to stay with my grandmother in Grafton Street, just off the Mile End Road, and just in time for the first daylight raids on London. We’d built an Anderson shelter in her back garden, and Michael wielding a trenching shovel, broke my nose for its second time, leaving a deep cut between the eyes shedding blood making the damage look much worse than it was. I was rushed off to hospital, leaving my mother asking why the boy’s mother had not come forward. Nobody had the nerve to tell her it was me. The night the docklands was hit and some sugar barges and warehouses caught fire, the flames could be seen for miles. That was when our family and neighbours came to the full realisation of what was to come in this war with Nazi Germany.

We had thought that the primary school I had attended in Brighton was a good school, but when back in the East End, I was sent to the Jewish Free School and found myself two years behind my age group. What I did not know at the time, was that I was mildly dyslectic and was just assumed as being slow, and maybe a bit thick, but what would now have been classed as one with special needs. We enjoyed collecting shrapnel and the bits of coloured marble from the wreck of a bombed building on the Mile End Road, but when the bombing became too intense, we climbed on the back of a sand lorry going to West London where we thought we would be safer ! My Aunt and Uncle Diana and Jack Davis, the latter being a director of Simpsons the tailoring manufacturers, lived on Emlyn Rd in Stamford Brook on the border between Hammersmith and Chiswick, and we slept on the floor for a few nights until dad found a house to rent in the adjoining Palgrave Road, and we stayed there throughout the blitz. The first Doodle Bug and the V2 landed in Chiswick not far from us, so any idea that it was safer, was distinctly marginal.

Dad had been in the Royal Flying Corps in WW1, cheating on his age to enable him to sign up. He flew the two man bombers, which had small bombs on hooks under the wings supposedly operated by a wire. If it didn’t work you crawled out, detached it and flung it over the side. This we found out very much later, for like many from that terrible war, Dad just didn’t want to talk about it, and from the films we’ve seen, I can quite understand.

I went to the Askew Road Primary in Shepherds Bush, and must have made some progress, for I passed the eleven plus, much to the astonishment of my family from whom I collected the princely sum of five pounds as a prize. My father had won a scholarship way back before WW1, but it was financially impossible for the family to let him take it up, and he was determined that his sons would not face that same disappointment.

When Russia came into the War, if you shopped at the Co-Op, which we rarely did, you could pass your dividend to aid for “Uncle Joe”. If you weren’t a Co-Op member, you could use a special number for the same purpose. The Co-Op organised an evening for us kids, with soft drinks and cake, which in the circumstances was great. However a few weeks later when they sought to repeat the exercise, we were treated to a political lecture, and that put an end to any lingering doubts I may have had. The idea of being brainwashed at nine years of age appalled me.

At the height of the blitz my father knocked up bunk beds under the stairs for my brother and me, which was known to be the safest place in a house. However it wasn’t too long before we took the common view that if our names were on it, that would be it, and went back upstairs to bed. One night when the bombing had been very heavy, and a fair number had fallen nearby, my brother with his arm around me looked out in horror at a blaze just hidden behind the homes opposite. It turned out that a small shop kept by two elderly ladies had received a direct hit, killing both, and it now forms part of the land occupied by Queen Charlotte’s Hospital on the Goldhawk Road.

At the time, many had been encouraged to install a steel Morrison Shelter in the home for families to sleep under, but we used instead a large, very robust, wooden table for use during the daylight doodle-bug raids. On one occasion when the engine stopped my mother was standing in the kitchen door on the opposite corner to the table under which Michael and I sheltered. As the engine note died, we shouted to mum who jumped from the kitchen door in one bound to under the table, and we were more incredulous of the length of the leap, than the crash of the plane barely fifty yards away to rear of our garden. We were sure it would have been a world record standing jump! Our windows had been blown out, and as the dust settled there was a knock on the front door and a white faced postman, asked if he could come in and sit down for a moment. He said that he had looked up when the doodle bug’s engine had stopped, and thought it was going to spear him through, but somehow it lifted over our house and landed just behind us destroying houses on Emlyn Road where my aunt and uncle had lived.

There are countless stories of how civilians coped during those years of the Blitz, and dad who by then was too old to sign up, became an ARP warden and used to stand up against a single brick wall at the end of road. One night he heard a crash just behind him, for an incendiary bomb had landed on the top of the wall and fallen on the other side. It was a narrow escape by the width of a brick, and without thinking told my mother. It had been a very stressful week with the blitz, and she became hysterical. Dad had to slap her to bring her round, and she had a quiet sob in his arms as she recovered her composure. He’d done the right thing, and it was the first and only time he ever raised his hands to her. There had been a block of flats in Hammersmith that had received a direct hit, and during the rescue an old man was heard laughing and was found still in bed when he was rescued. His laughter was because he had been sleeping on the top floor, and was still in bed when found at ground level.

All of my generation will have stories of the war and its ending, but I will certainly never forget the joy and relief at the broadcast that the war in Europe was over. My father and I promptly went up to the West End of London and to the Marble Arch, where the scenes of jubilation were fantastic. The flat concrete roofed air-raid shelters provided ideal stages for dancing and public displays, and I recall servicemen stripped to the waist, cavorting around on top of one of these shelters close to the Arch. Where the food and booze had come from for those festivities was a secret I never discovered. One of those secrets was the appearance of chicken on restaurant and café menus. Today chicken is the most plentiful and cheapest of meats, back then it was a rare delicacy, but there it was at the announcement of peace in Europe mysteriously available to the celebrating crowd.

Like youngsters of my age, my pocket money had to be earned, and I delivered papers for a small newsagent, Nixons, on the Stamford Brook Rd. Latymer’s headmaster did not approve of this kind of work before school, so I hid my school cap until the round was finished. He tried once more to raise the image of the school, by requesting that from the Fifth Form upwards, we should wear straw boaters. Too many pupils lived in Shepherds Bush, and after a few had their boaters trashed by the local lads, the scheme was scrapped.

At the War’s end and still a slow reader, I absorbed the headlines, and I recall my bewilderment when seeing the headlines in 1945 – LABOUR LANDSLIDE. Winston Churchill by then was my idol, and even today I can listen to recordings of his speeches and experience the same emotion that they generated all those years ago. I just could not understand why he had been rejected, but looking back many years later I realised that many recalled how the “land fit for heroes” had not been fulfilled back in 1919, and the only alternative to the recognised Conservative establishment, was the Labour Party under Clement Attlee.

**********

Chapter 2

School Days

Those who had passed the eleven plus, had a few months at the nearby Secondary Modern School whilst waiting for the results of the entrance exams to the “Grammars” in West London. There were three, St Pauls, already a member of the elite group, Latymer Upper who’s governors chose, rightly as it turned out, to become a direct grant school outside the control of the LCC, and St Clement Danes who chose to join the general run of LCC schools. I was lucky to win a place at Latymer and within five years, Latymer was challenging St Pauls, whilst St Clement Danes had sunk into obscurity. That cemented what had been a growing conviction that whilst we might not have been of the “traditional conservative class”, theirs was the right way, and however well meaning the Socialist/Labour movement was, their philosophy in practice simply did not work. Certainly the opportunity to go to a great school that my parents could never have afforded, was the one thing the then labour Government under Clement Attlee did not scrap, and it was left to Harold Wilson to shamefully abolish that Direct Grant System that gave me and thousands of working class children, the chance to aim for the sky. That help for working class youngsters was not regained until the Assisted Places Scheme was reintroduced, only to be scrapped again by the second Wilson/Callaghan Government. To me it smacked of a philosophy of “if everyone can’t have something, nobody can”. That too entrenched my belief in the politics of the centre-right.

My time at Latymer was a reasonably happy one, for though my dyslecsia meant I started in the C stream of a four stream intake, we had exams each year, and by the time I reached the Upper Fifth, I had made the A stream, so perhaps my poor spelling had not set me back too far. That limitation was nearly my undoing, for matriculation at that time demanded five good credits, of which one was a modern language. If my spelling in English left much to be desired, you should have seen my French. However lady luck shone on me, for having on advice, written a letter to an imaginary boy in France, I had it checked for spelling. Low and behold that was one of the options in the exam.

I did not take a particular interest in active politics, perhaps because my classmate was Peter Walker, later to become the MP for Worcester, subsequently a senior cabinet member, and then a life peer, for he seemed to know so much, that I just felt it would be beyond me. We jokingly used to feel that in any debate, Peter would quote chapter and verse, on what someone had said in the House on such and such a date, and that left the rest of us floundering. He and I had the same birthday, but he did not stay for the sixth form declaring that he needed to earn some money so that he could afford to enter Parliament. He wagered ten shillings with me that he would make it in ten years. Eleven years later when he won the by-election for Worcester, I wrote reminding him of the bet, and was duly invited to the Commons for lunch.