Click here to book for my next City of London tour on Spring Bank Holiday May 4th
Poet Andy Stroman wrote this memoir and poem as a tribute to his late Uncle Barney whose birthday it is today.
There is a quiet cemetery where you may find yourself the only living soul other than the grave diggers. It is East Ham Jewish cemetery. Amongst the graves is one Barnett Cohen, my Uncle Barney. He is the only Barnett Cohen buried there.
The East End is a sparsely populated Jewish area now. Time has crept away, and Barney and I are of a time long gone. Yet behind each gravestone there is a story.
Uncle Barney was born in Whitechapel in the early twenties, to Milka and Herschel Cohen, refugees who escaped the pogroms, the mass slaughter of Jews, in Eastern Europe.
The memory I have of him is as the personification of kindness. A man with a gentle sense of humour who came to visit our house in Milward St where he had grown up himself, a street that was one hundred and fifty years old when I was born, behind the London Hospital. He was born in Villa, now part of Russia, in 1883 and was married in 1900.
I recall he would always eat an orange after every meal to conclude it. When he visited me and my mum, he would bring us so much joy by doing magic tricks, like holding a penny in place in front of an eye. He confided to me about the time he visited London Zoo dressed in his new suit and a chimpanzee humiliated him. The large creature came to greet him at the side of the cage, then spat water all over his suit while the surrounding crowd laughed.
Yet the bravery of his choice to leave the army during the Second World War as a Conscientious Objector because he did not want to kill anyone revealed the moral courage of the man. Even so, he was ridiculed by North London Jews when he moved there from the East End.
It was something I identified with personally, since when my school moved to Essex, me and my friend were humiliated by Mr Piggott, the head teacher, in front of the school assembly when he said, ‘We will not have children in our school, who live in the gutter and play in the gutter, behaving badly in our school.’ Today I recall those words and how the rest of the school turned to look at us. I still remember how the teacher asked ‘Where’s your pen?’ with the reply, ‘I ain’t got one, Sir.’ To which the teacher said, ‘Speak properly, boy’ and the pupil said ‘I haven’t got one, Sir.’ ‘Not “I haven’t got one”‘ insisted the teacher, ‘I have not got one, Sir.’
So what became of Uncle Barney? He had an arranged marriage to a woman called Dolly. Before I was born, he had lived in the same house where I grew up. His brothers were Jack and David and his sisters were Rachel and Rose. They occupied 17 Milward St behind the London Hospital and their mum and dad were Milka (Millie in English) and Hershel (Harris in English).
I got the feeling that Barney lacked confidence. Much like me, he went to a school where University was not an option. The concern of the day was survival and so he went to work in the garment industry, leaving school at the tender age of fourteen to enter the workplace.
When the World War Two broke out, he enlisted into the army. Sensitivity and inferiority left him unable to hurt anyone and full of fear. He told his sergeant that he did not want to be shipped out to fight. Barney did not want to kill anyone. In all my time of knowing him I never heard him say a bad word about anybody. He was put in the guardhouse and then transferred to Wormwood Scrubs Prison where his weight deteriorated to five and a half stone. Millie, his mother, knew she had to act or risk his death.
She had two sisters who were well-off and lived in North London. One of them went with her to a government office and – as we say in the East End – ‘the old brown envelope’ was handed over and Barney was released.
One retired prison officer told me recently, ‘You wouldn’t have liked it in there. The cells were very small and there was only a tiny courtyard. You could have had someone banging on the wall of the next cell and shouting through the night, and be threatened too. The only time we intervened was if one prisoner hit another.’
Uncle Barney had lost a lot by being in prison and developed a habit of scratching his backside. In the workplace he was not an asset and, if he worked alongside his brother Jack, he continually asked him if it was any good the work he was doing.
When I was sixteen, my mum told me Uncle Barney had endured six sessions of Electro-Convulsive Therapy at Long Grove Hospital, the same place Ronnie Kray went to. The hospital was closed in 1992.
Yet it would be unbalanced to leave out the wonderful kindness bestowed on Uncle Barney that he transferred to others. Nor his sense of humour which he brought out in others with his magic tricks.
Such was his aura and persona that, when I was a child, I did not want Barney to leave. Whenever he visited us at 17 Milward St during his lunch hour from Ellis & Goldstein where he worked and was talking to mum, I crept quietly to the front door and locked it by sliding the bolt across. When my mum struggled to open the door, it prompted a laugh from my Uncle Barney. I must have been about eight years old at the time.
At the tender age of fourteen, my mum was chosen to be bridesmaid at his wedding to Dolly. Marriage can be very hard at times and I am sure the legacy of coming from a poor family and having complex mental health problems demanded much understanding from all the family. In my experience, it can be very challenging not only to get help for it, and good help, but having your family understand what you are going through, because unless they have been through it themselves it can be very straining for them and for the patient.
Barney looking dapper at this son’s wedding
BARNEY
I honour you today
Like an FA cup,
Your eyes glazed by kindness
And your lips sealed by honesty.
Kissing the frontiers of your life
I exchange sugar with Alan Sugar,
Tip toe through the darkness of your life
And strangle the people who ridiculed you.
Hours have passed and light bulbs have died.
We could not stop you going into the Army
Or the mental hospitals,
But we never stopped loving you
For the laughter you gave us.
Daily we watched it grow.
Uncle Barney is fourth from the left at the back at my brother Howard’s Barmitzvah party. I am seated on the chair at the bottom left.
You may also like to read about
Andy Stroman, Poet of Stepney
From Andy Stroman’s Album
