IN PARTNERSHIP WITH

AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH FASHION

Lily Silberberg

Interviewed by Linda Sandino

C1046/02

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NATIONAL LIFE STORIES

INTERVIEW SUMMARY SHEET

Ref. No.: C1046/02/01-12 Playback No.: F12758-60; F12810-12; F12835-37; F12961-63

Collection title: An Oral History of British Fashion

Interviewee’s surname: Silberberg Title: Miss

Interviewee’s forenames: Lily Sex: Female

Occupation: Pattern cutter, Educator Date of birth: 02.09.1929

Mother’s occupation: Buttonhole outworker Father’s occupation: Journeyman tailor

Date(s) of recording: 21.02.2003; 27.02.2003; 06.03.2003; 21.03.2003

Location of interview: Interviewee’s home

Name of interviewer: Linda Sandino

Type of recorder: Marantz CP430

Total no. of tapes: 12 Type of tape: D60

Mono or stereo: Stereo Speed: n/a

Noise reduction: Dolby B Original or copy: original

Additional material:

Copyright/Clearance: full

Interviewer’s comments: Interruptions from Ray (sister) with tea. Other comments/asides refer to the cat.

Lily Silberberg C1046/02/01 F12758A Page 1

[F12758 Side A]

Lily Silberberg. Do you want the spelling for Silberberg?

No, I think we’ve…

OK, fair enough. Where I was born. The actual address is 87 Great Titchfield Street, London W1. I must admit that, I must add to that rather, that, it was Flat 5, later on we moved to Flat 3, so we didn’t move very far out of the district. Same address. And, date of birth, 2nd of September 1929; time of birth, it was reckoned about 1.30 p.m. Now I, I was told that, because the flat that I was born in was situated over a printing works, and when the manager of the factory heard that my mother was in labour, he stopped the actual rollers in the printing works to give my mother a little bit of quiet, and I believe it was my father that went down to thank him and told him that there was a girl, and the rollers started up again. And that was supposed to have been round about two o’clock in the afternoon. So Mum always reckoned that it was 1.30. There you are, I can’t pinpoint it any more. (laughs)

Do you know why you were, why you were called Lily?

After my mother’s father. If I’d been a boy, my name would have been Louis. He never had what you would call a Christian name; it was a Jewish name, Leibish, which is partly biblical, and in English it would have been translated to Louis, even though, I don’t think there’s any Louises in the Bible, the Old Testament anyhow. And, the only way was to bring it up to Lily. So that is, that is the only thing that... But it was always said, it was always, Mum always said that I was named after my grandfather.

And what was your mother’s name?

Esther.

And your father’s?

Lily Silberberg C1046/02/01 F12758A Page 2

Isidor. My father had two names, again in Hebrew, Mosh Yisroel, which means Moses Israel. He was born twenty-three years after his sister. His parents had three daughters in pretty quick succession, then there was a lapse of twenty-three years. Again, in inverted commas, because, nothing was ever written down, it was only passed on verbally. And, his sister, the one, this immediate sister to him was twenty- three years, reckoned to be twenty-three years older than he was, and because he was a miracle child, and a boy, they gave him the two holiest of names, Mosh Yisroel, Moses Israel. How’s that?

And do you know where he as born?

Yes. It is in Poland, now it is in Poland, because Poland only became Poland, as we know it in today’s geographical situation, in 1921. Prior to that, it would have been possibly part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But the small city that he was born in is called Kielce, k-i-e-l-c-e with a, something-or-other over the e, Kielce. And, he was not exactly what you would call born in the city, he was born outside the city, because there was such a thing called ‘outside the pale’, and Jews were outside the pale. So consequently there wasn’t births, deaths and marriages, as we know it today. So to try and go back to that history would be virtually impossible.

Did he talk about his parents?

He spoke lovingly about his parents, but we were too ignorant to listen. When he would try to tell us about some of his adventures, we would as it were imitate playing a cello, la la la... You understand what I mean? ‘Oh, Dad’s giving us the sob story again.’ But, thinking back on it, what a wonderful, wonderful piece of history that would have been.

Do you...can you remember anything?

[pause] I can remember that he spoke very often about poverty, hunger, education. There was no education outside the Jewish community, and that education was locked to the synagogue. Now because my father was born a miracle child, and given these two very very holy names, he was dedicated to the synagogue. Now he then went to Lily Silberberg C1046/02/01 F12758A Page 3

rabbinical school at about the age of six, to be tutored to become a rabbi, which would have been the greatest joy in my grandparents’ life, very much like you find now in a Catholic household in Ireland. If there is an outstanding child, that child very very often in Catholic Ireland is dedicated to the Church. He didn’t have any say in it. But he came out from there I believe at the age of twelve or thirteen. [whispering] A communist. (laughs) That was his way of rebelling. And in consequence, the actual household, the household that he was the patriarch of, we are secular Jews, we are not religious Jews.

So when did he leave Poland?

He left Poland I believe when he was about seventeen or eighteen. Don’t think he was any older than that. In the meantime, his sisters, who had married, had children older than he was, to the extent that he, he particularly loved one nephew, Alex, and they were as brothers. But Alex always gave him the courtesy of not calling him Isidor, but calling him Uncle. But he loved that lad. And I should think that there was virtually no difference in their age, which is very nice indeed. And it’s little bits and pieces like that that is, is nice. But, about my grand...you’re interested in my grandparents, are you? The name Silberberg, the spelling of it, s-i-l-b, Silb, is anglocised[sic]. In Poland it would have been z-y-l-b-e-r-b-e-r-g, Zylber, which somewhere in the dim past must have meant that there was a worker of silver. So silver as a metal must have come into the family somewhere. And, Zylberberg, hill of silver, mount silver, that is a way you can turn the words, the names round. My grandfather if I remember correctly, he was a baker. But again it would have been for the immediate community, it would not have gone into town. If it would have gone into town, it would have been tucked away somewhere virtually on the outskirts, but those that were inside the pale and those that were outside the pale. And as I said, there was no births deaths or marriages. To the extent that one of my aunts, we always laugh about this, she had a son, three years later she had a daughter, and at that time they wanted to have a census or something like that, but they had to go into the, into the nearest village to register them, and she registered them as twins. So I doubt that you can get anything more basic than that. (laughing) There is no photograph of my grandfather on my father’s side. We have a photograph of my grandmother. Now her maiden name, Ichkopovitz. They’re very very musical. Ichkopovitz. Her Lily Silberberg C1046/02/01 F12758A Page 4

Christian...her first name was Rachel. I’m thinking... Oh yes, my grandfather’s name was Samuel, and my grandmother’s name was Rachel. And, as I say, it was just a matter of trying to make ends meet. One thing I must say, and I loath myself for saying it, but the depiction is very very colourful, and to a certain extent doesn’t bring in the, the pain of it, Fiddler on the Roof. I loath myself for bringing that up as a, as a parallel to it, but the nearest that I can remember of my parents explaining what life was like was Fiddler on the Roof.

And why do you loath yourself for bringing...?

It’s a musical, it’s been trivialised. The original story of it.

I didn’t know it came from an original.

Oh yes. And it’s by Sholom Aleichem, and it is, the Yiddish title of it, because it was written in Yiddish, Tevye the Milkhiker, which means Tevye the Milkman. And that is... I went to see the, the show, Topol was in the show, he played the actual main character. He played it wonderfully, and I could see in my own mind’s eye, that was my grandfather, struggling to make a living, struggling to keep the family together, but being bombarded in every direction, sometimes from within and sometimes from without. The strifes that come up in a family, and you have to, you have to deal with them, not to mention the pressures from the outside. Because, in those days, and indeed it went on till quite recently, till 1945, pogroms, have you ever heard the word ‘pogrom’? Well it was an organised slaughtering, and invariably it was Jews. So consequently you always had to have, you had to count the amount of people that were in your home to make sure that the doors were closed, and even then they could always torch it, and burn who was ever inside it. So, life was difficult. That’s my father’s side of the family. Are you interested in my mother’s side of the family? My mother’s name was Esther, again, no known date of birth. So, she never knew how old she was. But it was reckoned out that she must have been born at the time of... The Jewish calendar contains a festival called Purim. Have you ever heard of Purim? It was when Ahasuerus took unto himself a Jewish maiden by the name of Esther, and also his grand vizier, whose name was Haman, who was a Jew, put doubts into the mind of Ahasuerus to kill the Jews, but Esther, who was a Jewish maiden, organised Lily Silberberg C1046/02/01 F12758A Page 5

some sort of rebellion against him. So instead of him being the one who persecuted, on the contrary, he was the one who was condemned. So... And, she reckoned that her name was Esther because she was born at that time of the year when there was that festival. What year, what date, never registered. She was one... This is where my sister and I we differ in our memories of what Mum told us. I remember that Mum said the only memory that she has of her...she had of her mother, that there was herself and five children laid out on the floor with a candle at the head of each one. It was, it was...they were all dead. They were wrapped up in readiness for burial, because they had all died of the cholera within a matter of hours of each other. So consequently, it would have been as it were a communal burial, next to each other, because with the Jews, they don’t bury on top of each other, they bury singly. So, that is the only... She, she had no memory of what her mother was like, no memory at all, but her aunt said that I was the living image of her mother. Now her mother, I said that my grandfather on my mother’s side was Louis and I’m named after him; his wife which was my mother’s mother, her name was Frieda [pronounced long i], Frieda [pronounced long e], which in English really means ‘joyful’. So that was not biblical, but it was, Freida [long i], ‘to be joyful’. And, her maiden name was Latkovich. And that is all that I know of my grandparents. Oh yes, my grandfather was a tailor. I’ve got a lovely photograph of him upstairs, and, it is a blow-up of a photograph where he’s all lined up with other people, and there is a pin stuck into the front of his coat. Again, a character straight out of Fiddler on the Roof. But I would, you know, I shudder when I think that he could have been made into a figure of fun almost, in a musical. Don’t think that I am hypersensitive, but, I do feel little bits and pieces like that. Because the original story of Tevye the Milkhiker, it would make you weep, the trials and tribulations. And, my grandfather was known to be one who was very very fond of the drink. We have heard that life was so difficult for him, having lost a wife, a young wife, and so many children, my mother was the only survivor of that, of that marriage, that it drove him to drink. And, the local lads who used to come into the village, again they were outside the pale, would come into the village and sort of ply him with vodka and things like that. And he would dance and he would cavort for them in his drunken state, which is...it is very very sad indeed. But, one survives. And, I think it was about a year or so, it couldn’t have been less than a year, because mourning does go on in our religion for a year, he took a second wife, and there was a new family was produced very very quickly. And at the tender age I believe of five Lily Silberberg C1046/02/01 F12758A Page 6

my mother was, not exactly sold as a serf, but was given to another family purely for, for food and shelter. And she in turn had to look after some of the children at the ripe old age of maybe five or six. But she survived, she survived. And I believe it was at the age of twelve, her mother’s sister, also her name was Esther, brought her over to England. So she became the skivvy of the family, of the aunt who brought her over here.

And where did she come from?

Mother? Oh, it’s hardly even noticeable on the, on the map. Again, prior to 1921 it was the Hungarian...Austro-Hungarian Empire, and... The sound of the place is delightful, Rawa-Mazowiecka. Rawa is a river, and Mazowiecka was the town. So... I think that that’s how it works out. I actually looked it up on a very old map, and it was there. I don’t know, there’s been so many boundaries, so many changes in boundaries, that, some of the things can still be found on the maps, some, some have been completely and utterly obliterated.

But is it more in Hungary?

No, no, no, in Poland, in Poland. Yes, in Poland. Even though neither of my parents spoke Polish as a language, because Yiddish was the language. And... Because they had to keep very much to themselves, Yiddish was the language. If there was going to be any education, it would be in the Jewish community; it would never have gone over into the Christian community, because, even such marvellous places, like Krakow, where they did allow Jews to be educated, it was done on very very strict quota. Now anything like that is completely and utterly abhorrent to us, to think of that now. I, I really am in wonderment how people could have survived these situations. Of course now everybody thinks that, ‘Oh it’s mine by right.’ It wasn’t then. You couldn’t even say that your life was ‘mine by right,’ because there was still such a thing as serfdom, and, the Russians, the Russians were very very instrumental in keeping people down. And, it was the Jews that were kept down. So it’s all part and parcel of life’s rich, rich history, isn’t it?

Lily Silberberg C1046/02/01 F12758A Page 7

So, did your mother... Well what was your reaction when your mother talked to you about her past?

Again, exactly the same, we had... ‘Oh not again Mum, please, not again.’ If we left anything on a plate after a meal, it was dinned into us that there are children in Poland starving, and they would have made, what you are leaving on that plate, they would have made a meal of it that would have lasted them a week. So consequently, we were eating for all the starving children. [laughs] Now, we laugh at it now, but, our, our... I’m not quite sure how to put this. I don’t know whether it’s in our minds, or if it’s in our chromosomes, or if it’s in our genes, our genetic make-up, but to be wasteful is one of the worst things, it is, it’s...it’s a sin to be wasteful. But on the other hand, not to borrow, and not to lend. You could give a thing away, but don’t lend it, because if you lend it, you might want it back and it may not come back, so therefore you could break a relationship with a person. By all means give it to them, give it to them with a willing, with a willing heart. So, it’s a very very nice philosophy. I don’t know whether that would sort of survive in today’s...

Was this something your mother taught you, or your father?

Both. Both. Both talked to us about that. Because they really knew what it was to be without, and they were determined that their kids would not be without. Now, it wasn’t wants. Wants were the last thing that we were allowed. ‘Mum I want this, Mum I want that.’ ‘Oh shut up.’ What you do need, is a pair of shoes. ‘Mum, can I have this toy?’ ‘No you can’t.’ [door opening] Oh, I.....

[break in recording]

Yes yes yes yes. Yes, Mother’s name before she married, Faijgenbaum. I think that the English translation of that would have been fig tree, because, a fajg is a fig, so therefore Faijgenbaum would be, in my way of translating, fig tree. And, again the spelling is rather peculiar, f-a-i-j-g-e-n-b-a-u-m. As somebody once said, ‘Oh the name is Faijgenbaum [pronouncing j], whereas the j is, is a silent j. So where that came from, haven’t the remotest idea. Unless, it might have been a fruiterer Lily Silberberg C1046/02/01 F12758A Page 8

somewhere along the line, specialising in figs. Highly unlikely, but... [laughs] Who knows? Who knows? Who knows?

Do you know how your father came to England?

Yes. As I said, he was the baby of the family. And when he came out from what could be called a seminary, and he came out completely irreligious, but he was apprenticed, his father apprenticed him, in his own bakery. And, I think that Father must have been quite a well-built lad, and, if my memory serves me right, again you see, this is a little bit foggy, I believe that he was asked to carry a sack of flour from one place to another. He put it up on his back, and the sack must have been open, because the contents of the sack, the flour, all spilled out in front of him. And I think that that might have triggered a heart palpitation, which meant then that, you know, was bakery too, too strenuous for him? Because it’s a very very manual task. We don’t sort of seem to think about it, but in the old days, everything was done by hand, mixing and, and carting, everything was done by hand. And it might have been a bit too strenuous for him. But what became of him after that, I don’t quite know, unless of course he, he was apprenticed to a tailor, which might have been a little bit more of a, a gentle type of work, or at least not so strenuous. And in the meantime, his eldest sister had come to England, and had settled, had married, and was raising a family, and she brought him over to England, I think for the princely sum of something like five guineas.

[End of F12758 Side A] [F12758 Side B]

Yes, his elder sister brought him over to England, because as I said, he was the apple of everybody’s eye. And, he settled England, but, what he did, I don’t know. How he made a living, I don’t know. But again, I wish I, I wish he was here to tell us the story of how he went back to Russia to fight in the revolution. We always made very very light of it, because we, we gave him the honorary title of being one of Kerensky’s fusililers. [laughs] Now Kerensky was a revolutionary, but he was a different type of revolutionary to what you would call the Lenin and Trotskyists. They were all fighting amongst themselves for supremacy. There must have been a Lily Silberberg C1046/02/01 F12758B Page 9

dreadful amount of turmoil. And I believe that Dad was in the Kerensky faction. And, this all came about because, there was, what can one put it? That your family is still there in Poland and Russia and they are fighting for existence, and this is the way that they will be emancipated as it were, that there will be no, no separation between this set of people and that set of people: everybody will become one. Which is of course the, the communist way of thinking. And a lot of Jewish youth went back to Russia to find themselves caught up in this. So when I say he went back to the Revolution, he was caught up in the Revolution, and he said that, he was with some, some young men, that they went into a restaurant or a café, and there was no food, and some of the other boyos came in, but they were, had rifles, and they said to the owner of the café, ‘Put bread on the table,’ and miraculously, bread appeared. So obviously there was hoarding going on. But they had to be forced to literally, to sell the bread. Well this was contrary to, to everything that was communism. Because communism in those days, it was of the Marxist way of thinking. From each according to his ability; to each according to their needs. Which is a Marxist... So there, everything was in such turmoil. And my father, who was quite a meek person, was caught up in all this. And I have a suspicion that he was, he was in St Petersburg for a time. But again, out would come the cello, and we would mime playing the cello when he was trying to tell us what must have been the most marvellous history possible.

So have you any idea how old he might have been when he went back to fight in the Revolution?

Oh I should think, in his twenties. He died in 1952, aged fifty-eight. So he couldn’t have been much more than a youth.

And did he ever talk to you about his experiences in the seminary, and why that had turned him into a communist?

Well when one says ‘communist’, I don’t think that he knew what the, what the meaning of communism was. But, he wasn’t revolted by religion, he was revolted by the people who ran religion. He would argue with a cleric, with a rabbi, it was dreadful, to the extent that he would literally wipe the floor, verbally, with a cleric. Lily Silberberg C1046/02/01 F12758B Page 10

When my father was desperately ill, laying in the Middlesex Hospital, it was round about the time of Passover, and, the, the rabbi, who was the minister for the Middlesex Hospital, went up to see him, and he said, ‘How are you?’ and everything like that, and my father answered very civilly. And after a few minutes he said, ‘Right,’ he said, ‘I see that everything’s all right with you, I’m going now.’ And my father says, ‘Not before I tell you what I think of you. First of all, why aren’t you wearing a hat? You are a rabbi, and your head should be covered at all times because you are in the presence of the Almighty. Did you ask if my wife and children have got enough to eat over Passover?’ And, he recounted this to us, and he was laughing his head off at the same time. He was having his revenge. [laughs] So... And I’m afraid that that’s, that’s come down to us as well. Very naughty isn’t it? You say... (laughing) That’s why I say that we, we are what we are, because that is our race. But we are secular, we have no dietary laws here, albeit that we are now vegetarians, but, even when we weren’t.

When did you become vegetarian?

Oh, ten, fifteen years back. No, no not as long as that. I was there a good ten years ago. Good ten years ago.

And why did you become vegetarian?

[pause] The exploitation of animals, just became a little bit too much to... That was our way of rebelling against it. And, we thought, right, that’s enough.

Was it something in particular that prompted you?

To a very great extent it was the shipment abroad of live horses, the treatment of animals in abattoirs. They became commodities, and to some extent their treatment was very very much of the fascist treatment of the Jews. Now I’m sorry to keep on harping back to the fact of Judaism, but one has to sort of get certain parallels. We’re not hypersensitive about it, but, it’s the way it struck us. Up till then I was an avid fisherman, female fisherman, and the thing that I loved most of all was going down to Southend with my fishing rod, spending a wonderful day at the end of the pier, never Lily Silberberg C1046/02/01 F12758B Page 11

catching anything, but nevertheless, there I was, fishing. And, it suddenly struck me, you know, fish have got to be in the sea. It’s not for me to, to pull them out. So, something snaps in the brain, and, you take it from there onwards as it were.

When did you start fishing?

Oh, must have been about, ’48/49, at the end of Bournemouth Pier. As I say, I never caught anything. But, the mind just relaxes, and goes along.

Did somebody teach you to fish?

No, no no no no no. No, no no no. I couldn’t bear to thread the worm on, but there was always somebody there that would gladly do it for me, usually a twelve-year- old...[laughs]...who gloried in the fact of putting the hook...(laughs) And it was for me to go dangle it over the end, over the edge rather, and, see what came up, which invariably was nothing. Didn’t, didn’t put me off, not in the slightest, didn’t put me off, not at all.

So, can you...do you know how your parents met?

No. No. Haven’t the remotest idea.

So how did they come to be living in Great Titchfield Street?

Oh, now this is most interesting. Port of London, which is east London, all immigration came through the Port of London. I believe that they’ve still got archives of names of people, where they came from, but you have to be somebody who is doing very particular research. I should think it’s all been microfiched now, or they might have even been destroyed when London docks was bombed so, so heavily during the war. I, I don’t know. I think Ray once tried to do some research there. But you can only get so far but no further. Now wherever you found docks like that, you would find a twilight zone. Now the twilight zone was when people would come in from abroad; if they had no family to go to, now my father had his sister, my mother had her aunt, who were instrumental in bringing them into England, but those Lily Silberberg C1046/02/01 F12758B Page 12

that had no, nobody to go to, they would go through a certain society known as the Shelter, which is...the Shelter is still there I believe. It is in Leman Street E1, just behind Aldgate. That if anybody wanted to kip for a few nights before they got themselves settled. It wasn’t, it wasn’t like Immigration today, they come over on the Tuesday, they’re drawing benefit on the Wednesday, that was not so in those days. You came to England on your own peril, at your own peril, and you just had to make do with what there was going. So consequently, people coming via the Port of London Authority, and as it were dispersed from there. That’s why it was known as a twilight zone. Some people settled there, hence the fact that there was almost a ghetto community of Jews in east London. That was the first place where they settled. And, Dad went to his sister, as I say. Mum went to her aunt that was in Nelson Street, off of Commercial Road, whereas Dad went to his sister that was in Whitechapel. So they were both in the same sort of district, but, they didn’t know one from the other. And, how do they get to the West End? My father’s sister moved to Soho. In the meantime, my mother had left working for her aunt, for some reason or other, never got to the bottom of it, never really wanted to know, and went to live with another set of cousins from her father’s side. Now how they were cousins, I don’t know, but these cousins as well had the family name of Faijgenbaum, which was by that time anglocised[sic] to Finberg. That’s coming up in the world you see. At least it was spellable. And, I believe that they were in Lisson Grove. I can’t remember, I can’t remember. How my parents met, I don’t know. But they lived in Soho, where Ray was born, Berwick Street, Broadwick Street, something like that, I’m not quite sure. And, in the meantime, my aunt, my father’s sister, crossed over Oxford Street to this side of the West End. When I say this side, Oxford Street was a demarcation, there was the Soho side, and there was what was known as the ‘other side’ Oxford Street, which was the West End, where I was born. So although it was all W1, Oxford Street was the demarcation line, and each one of them referred to the other side as ‘the other side Oxford Street’. So, when we went to Soho, we were going the other side Oxford Street, and when the Sohonians were coming over, they were going to the other side Oxford Street. Oxford Street was the demarcation line. And they crossed over, and my aunt lived in three rooms at the corner of Great Titchfield Street and Riding House Street, W1. My parents lived in Soho with Ray, and my brother, and my brother as well. And, when she vacated those three rooms to move into the flat of Flat 5, 87 Great Titchfield Street, my parents took the three rooms. Is that sort of...? It’s what Lily Silberberg C1046/02/01 F12758B Page 13

goes around, comes around as it were. And they lived there for a few years. And then my aunt vacated the flat, Flat 5, 87 Great Titchfield Street, and my parents moved into it. So they moved from 100 Great Titchfield Street to 87 Great Titchfield Street. But this time it was a flat, with a door, and a bathroom/toilet combined. And that was the, the absolute, because it was the only, the only block of flats to actually have a separate bathroom. Other than that, the other flats in Great Titchfield Street had a bath in the kitchen that was covered by a board and used as a table. So other self-contained flats, and this was a self-contained flat, with a bathroom. That’s really hitting the high point. And I think that the rentage was 3s.6d. a week.

But where was your brother born? Is he the eldest?

He’s the eldest, yes. [pause] He... Ray is four years my senior, and Freddy is eleven years my senior. So, you know, it, it’s happenings that, I don’t know how it all comes together, I’ve never bothered to... There are some things that one looks into, some things that, best left alone. Best left alone. They must have struggled like, like anything. My sister was born in... My brother was born in Middlesex Hospital, Ray was born in Queen Charlotte’s, and I was born at home. So, I can honestly say that W1 is, is me. But we were gypsies, we moved from Flat 5 to Flat 3, and that was in 1941. And as somebody who came to visit us said, ‘Oh, looks as though you’ve just dropped through the ceiling.’ (laughing)

Do you know why you moved?

Yes. Yes. It was during the war. Ray, my sister, contracted diphtheria. It was a very very bad time, it was during the time of bombing, we were living in the shelters. Dreadful, dreadful time. And I developed a sore throat, and, a membrane that closed up the back of my throat, so that, it was literally choking me. But I continued to, to breathe somewhat. And, somebody in the shelter was whisked out of the shelter with diphtheria. And, we as youngsters, we were tested, and it was found out that I had a sore throat, and I was the carrier. And, I was able to hold it down, but Ray succumbed to it, and consequently had to spend three and a half, four months in a fever hospital. This is in the height of the bombing, really in the height of the bombing, and it was a most wicked winter imaginable. It was one of the longest Lily Silberberg C1046/02/01 F12758B Page 14

winters I think that’s been recorded. And, because they thought that it might have left her with a heart defect, and it was a matter of less stairs to climb. The flat was vacant downstairs because the people had moved away somewhere, to another city, to the extent that you could have got flats in the West End, literally the pick of flats, because so many people had moved away. And my parents took it upon themselves to move down two flights to make it easier for Ray. The flat was slightly slightly larger, which didn’t really make any difference to us, but it would be less, less stairs for her to climb. In a way it was a good thing. But, that is what made them move from one to the other.

What did your father do?

He was a tailor. Excellent tailor. And, his dexterity with the needle was fantastic. And the reason why I know that he was a baker at one time is, at times he used to... If Mother was doing any baking, he would sort of go over and say, ‘Out the way Esther,’ and he would take a piece of dough, and he would roll it out into long sausages as it were, and he used to make us shriek with laughter, but we could never make him do it more than once. He said, ‘Once a joke, is enough.’ And he used to take all five of these long strips and he used to paste them together with his thumb at the top, put one hand in his pocket, and whistle whilst he made the most wonderful plait. Which is a traditional Jewish loaf known as a challah. Have you ever heard of that? It is the bread that is made for the Sabbath. And he could do it with one hand. And he said that he could have actually used both hands, he was ambidextrous where that was concerned. Because, they had to work awfully fast, bread having yeast in it, before it blew itself up again. So, he was most dextrous in doing that. But his needlework, not embroidery or anything like that, but the making of a suit, those suits could easily find their way, could easily be in museums now because they were built to last. But he was a journeyman tailor, he was never his own boss. And on my birth certificate, Father’s occupation, ‘journeyman tailor’.

Can you tell me, or describe to me sort of how that worked?

He, he just worked for somebody.

Lily Silberberg C1046/02/01 F12758B Page 15

The same person?

Same person, who was, what they called the master tailor. He would have a room with a couple of benches, an oven where the iron could be put into, sometimes gas fired, sometimes coal fired. Because they used to work with irons that were fifteen pounds in weight. Fifteen pounds in weight. And, they used to move those irons around fantastically. Because the garments weren’t just made, they were built. So, the actual inside of the, of the garment was more important than the outside of the garment. Because it was the inside of the garment that made the garment. The outside of it was purely the cladding, all the pad stitching, all the intricacies of, of laying layers of horsehair and canvas, shrinking, the stretching, all had to be done by, all by hand, with the aid of an iron. So you fashioned the garment as it were. It wasn’t just cut, nothing was really cut; it all had to be crafted. I went to an exhibition not very long ago, within the past twelve years, not very...I’ve been retired now nearly ten years, and everything is like yesterday, where, if my father were to see some of the machinery, he would not believe it, because there was a piece of pre-cut fabric being put around a certain shape, somebody just pulled down a lever, and when the, when the top part of the shaping was released, out came a collar. Now the shaping of that collar in my father’s day would have been the result of something like eight hours’ work. And this is the way, this is the difference between the old way of doing it and the modern way of doing it. But some of the garments that my father put needle to, I would not be at all surprised are now in museums. And it wasn’t just him, there was a complete and utter army of these journeymen tailors. A lot of it was cottage industry inasmuch, it was in a house that if there was a spare room, that’s where it would be; if not, it was done at the kitchen table. He would work from seven o’clock in the morning till seven o’clock at night. He worked five and a half...from Monday to Friday; he then did half a day on the Sunday. Because, the person who he worked for was only in the next block in Great Titchfield Street, a swine of a man who reduced my father to tears on many many occasions. Very very abusive. But work was very scarce. Unemployment would have been a stain on his character. To be unemployed was to be a social pariah.

[End of F12758 Side B] [F12759 Side A] Lily Silberberg C1046/02/02 F12759A Page 16

My father earned, for this amount of time, now, from seven till seven, that’s a twelve- hour day, with a half hour for lunch, which, he was able to come home for lunch because, working just in the next block. That’s eleven and a half hours per day, five and a half days per week, that was, how many...

I’m not going to add...

Five elevens are fifty-five. He must have done a good sixty hours a week, and I believe that his wage was thirty-five shillings. Now what’s thirty-five shillings in...? That’s £1.75, £1.75. But it was a different life, a different life. And consequently, our wants did not exist. The needs existed. And the one thing that both of my parents were adamant about, that their kids would have an education, that their children would have an education. So consequently, the fact, ‘Mum, I don’t feel too well this morning,’ ‘Get up, wash yourself, go to school.’ Simple as that. No messing about. And the only one in the, in the family who was a scholar, was Ray. She could read and write. (laughs)

Do you mean she, she...she did her homework?

There was no homework, there was no homework. But she was the only one who went through to, was it secondary school? Buckingham Gate, Buckingham Gate Secondary School, where you wore a uniform, and you had to be able to read and write to get into, into that school. And that was in, they were evacuated in 1939, that was in 1938. In 1938. Well she was born 1925, so 1930... How old could she have been? Twelve? Twelve.

Twelve, thirteen, mm.

Twelve, that’s it, yes. Yes. Well she’s four years my senior. And, I couldn’t read or write till I was ten, ten/eleven. And... But, she, she took to reading and writing. So consequently, if there was any letters to be written, Ray wrote the letters; if there was anywhere to go where you had to have somebody who could explain things, they could speak to Ray and then Ray could explain it. (laughs) It’s interesting. Because Lily Silberberg C1046/02/02 F12759A Page 17 you find exactly the same thing now amongst the Asian and immigrant population, that the older generation, not that my parents ever achieved the status of being the older generation, Dad having died at, he was, he was fifty-eight, and that was in 1952, he was fifty-eight, and Mum was sixty-five. So you could never really say that they were the older generation. They never lived that long. And both of them spoke lovely English. Mum never wrote or read, Mum couldn’t either write nor read. And what’s more, she was dyslexic in three languages. How’s that? Isn’t that lovely? Dyslexic in three languages. That was English, Yiddish and, she could, she could if she really pushed herself, speak some Polish. But dyslexic in all three languages. Whereas Father could write in English to some extent, but if he ever had to do anything where...he would sit and he would practice and practice and practice until he had got the words... [mic sound] Oopsy. Got the words exactly right. And it was a very florid sort of writing. But his Yiddish, his Yiddish script, they said was worthy of a scribe, it was that, was that fluid. And, he had a library of, I would say getting on for 500 books, and when he died, it was a dreadful, dreadful thing that we do, we did. After Mum died, which was eight years after Dad, almost with indecent haste, we parted up with his library. It was to a Jewish old age home, we thought that maybe the people there... But by that time I should think that there wasn’t very much use for, for Jewish... I wish we had them now, I would have housed them lovingly, because amongst them was an encyclopaedia, the Yearbook Encyclopaedia Britannica, because Father was a little bit of a scholar. If you would have given him a computer, he would have done research on it. But the only way that he could do any research was via books.

What was he interested in, what would he have researched?

Everything. Everything. My father as I say was, was, was known as, as a very liberal-minded person, very liberal-minded, and he numbered amongst his friends who I was told visited the flat, Flat 5, 87 Great Titchfield Street, was Chaim Weizmann, who was the father of modern Israel. Now again, not a religious person, but a Zionist, who had been through the same background as my father, as a Polish Jew, Polish Russian, Russian Polish, and said that the Jews must have a homeland. And my father was a Zionist who never got as far as Israel. Never got as far as Israel.

Lily Silberberg C1046/02/02 F12759A Page 18

Do you know why?

[pause] Timidity? He was naturalised British in ’48, 1948 I believe, post-war. Mum was naturalised British ’49. And we always wanted to take Mum over to Paris to see her brother who lived in Paris, brother from the second issue of my grandfather, and she said no, she would never leave Great Britain. She adored Great Britain, she was thankful to Great Britain, but she was petrified that once she was out of the country, they wouldn’t let her back in. She couldn’t get rid of this fear. We used to say to her, ‘Mum, you are British, you have every right, as your kids who were born British have every right.’ She says, ‘No, I can’t take the chance.’ Now you understand what fear does to you. It stops you doing things. She would have loved to have gone to see her brother. Her brother used to come to England, but she would love to have gone to see him. And no she couldn’t take the chance, she was too frightened. I don’t know.

So do you think that that in a way might have been the reason why your father didn’t think about going to Israel?

No, no. No. Some of his friends went and settled. There was a great deal of strife, there always has been strife, between the Jew and the Arab, always has been. Even though, God help us, we are one, one people. The Jew and the Arab are both Semites, and it is really the one people, but one lot of Abraham’s children settled one side of the river, and the other lot settled the other side, and they were hurling abuse at each other. (laughs) I, I don’t know. People are daredevils now, but in those days... I can’t really tell you why Linda. I would love to. I’ve often thought of it, you know, why didn’t he? But...

And was it his health maybe, do you think?

Could have been, could have been. Could have been. It just, it just didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. Life would have been tough over there, but that didn’t mean anything. He even went... Certain societies were coming up all over the place there, for the welfare of people in various different places, people that were still in Poland, people that were still there in Russia. There must have been still a great deal of them, because, God knows, the...the Nazis killed six millions of them, so there must have Lily Silberberg C1046/02/02 F12759A Page 19 still been quite a number of them living there, on the Continent. There were certain organisations that you could buy a piece of land in Israel, and plant orange trees. And this was in a district around about Haifa, which is a port, it is the Mediterranean? Yes it is, it’s the Mediterranean, at least I think so. Anyhow, he bought a strip of land, which could have only been a matter of a few pounds, and they planted orange trees, and, because there was a great deal of strife in that area, they were always being sniped at, they had to sell the land. But Father refused to take the money from the selling of the land. As I say, it couldn’t have been more than just a very few pounds. But some of them got together, and they pooled the money, and they had a building erected as a school for the local children. That epitomises my father exactly. Do you see what I mean? Don’t borrow, don’t lend. Give. But don’t borrow, don’t lend. And, as I say, what goes around comes around. And, again for education, for children. I don’t even think it even crossed his mind that it should just be for Jewish children; it could have been for Arab children as well. Because nothing... A child was a child, and as I say, the way that you could better yourself, you... There is a word in Yiddish and I cannot get the full meaning of it in English, to become a mensch. Have you ever heard that word, mensch? There is no real parallel in English. To become a person. And the way that you did that was via education. Do you hear very much of that going on these days? Not a great deal. Yes, you do amongst the immigrant population. But, education was the, was the way in which you could do it. But Ray was the only one that could read or write. My brother was apprenticed to a barber, which you had to then pay, for the apprenticeship, and you were literally the lackey of the, of the, the person whose apprenticeship you were under. Ray went to Pitman’s for shorthand typing. Unfortunately that was interrupted by the, by the illness that she had. And I went to Barrett Street Trade School for three years, which has now grown up and become the London College of Fashion.

How old were you when you went there?

To Barrett Street? Thirteen, thirteen and a half. Very old person. I think I was thirteen because I left at sixteen. Thirteen or...thirteen and a half or... It was in 1942. I would have to get my mind settled, you know, straightened out, where that’s concerned, really work it out. Because the entry was in September, and I must have Lily Silberberg C1046/02/02 F12759A Page 20 just turned, thirteen or so when I went to Barrett Street. Can’t quite remember. Can’t quite remember. I should do but I can’t quite remember.

Was your father involved...sort of involved with the Communist Party in England?

No, he was a socialist, socialist. In this very room here, no more than a couple of months ago, we had Stephen Twigg, do you know Stephen Twigg?

The MP?

The MP. Stephen Twigg, well his party, his managers, put through a note through the door, ‘Stephen Twigg will be visiting this area. If you wish to have a consultation with him, please put this flier in the window and he will do his best to call.’ So of course up went the...(laughs) We even polished the window and put...(laughs)...put it in the window. And this very very nice young man arrived. Splendid young man, delightful. And I must say that I was a little bit quiet, but my sister blistered him. Because to us, this, this Labour Party is not socialism. It is career politicians. Because we go back to when to be a socialist was, from each to each, from each according to his ability; to each according to his needs. And consequently, the Labour Party was the Labour Party, not career politicians. And we threatened him, that as socialists, not members of the Labour Party, but socialists, Old Labour, that is now laughed, Old Labour, the Labour Party of Manny Shinwell, of Ian Mikardo, of Tom Driberg, these were the people who led us. And, the memory that I cherish, cherish like mad, I never want to lose that memory, was sitting on my father’s shoulder at, I’m sure it was the corner where Edgware Road meets Oxford Street, at Marble Arch, seeing the Jarrow marchers. Now what year was that? Was that ’35, 1935?

I don’t know, I’m not exactly sure.

’34? I could look that up. But I remember, I remember my father picking me up. And there was this column of men. Now that to me is a memory of socialism. The other memory of socialism was on May the 1st, and it had to be May the 1st, not the first Monday in May, but May the 1st, again being taken up near Marble Arch, to watch the May Day march, with the banners, with the streamers, with the, with the Lily Silberberg C1046/02/02 F12759A Page 21

brass bands. Now that to me is socialism. It was, my father was one for the union. Holidays with pay were unheard of. Sickness benefit was unheard of, well wasn’t known. You daren’t be sick, you daren’t have a holiday. But my father belonged to a society that again I can’t find the history of it, even though I was a member of it, it was known as the Workers’ Circle. Have you ever heard of that?

No, I haven’t. I’ll, I’ll do some digging.

I would be most obliged. I can even tell you where their headquarters were. It started in Leeds, that I do know, Branch Number 1 started in Leeds. Branch Number 2 was in the East End, Ayley Street, London E1. I’ve still got the badge, Father’s badge that he used to wear. He was so proud of it. The Workers’ Circle. Again, from each to each.

And were all the people who worked with him at the tailor’s...

It was predominantly tailors. They had a mutual aid society. Now, people who could possibly afford it used to put a shilling a week into it, that if anybody was on hard times, they could borrow £1 or £2 from the mutual aid society. They would pay it back. But again, from each, if they could give, to each if they needed it. And it is something quite beautiful. I don’t think that you find anything like that now; again, you might have done at one time with the co-ops, but this was definitely a social, a social club with the agenda of helping everybody. And they used to have their... Branch 2, I beg your pardon, I must backtrack. It started in Leeds, that was Branch 1. Branch 2 was in the West End of London. But the headquarters of the Workers’ Circle by that time had come from Leeds to Ayley Street, E1, off of Whitechapel. Now my father was very very proud indeed to be a member of the Workers’ Circle, and we were literally brought up with the Workers’ Circle. It was there. And when we became teenagers, they opened up a branch for the children of the founder members, which, Ray and I were children of a founder member, and that was known as Branch 14. We were frowned upon somewhat by the older members, because we were known as being very very radical. Can you imagine Ray and I being radical? (laughs)

Lily Silberberg C1046/02/02 F12759A Page 22

Well what did you?

There was a communist element, most certainly there was a communist element. And communism in those days thrived on turmoil. If I said this was black, how do you know it’s black? Would a worker say it’s black? Would a worker know that that is, that that is black? What do you mean by black? Are you having a dig at somebody, saying that that’s...? You understand what I mean? And consequently, this...it became a thing of turmoil, and eventually tore itself apart. I’m pulling myself apart here. [checking mic]

No, you’re still...

No I’m not, I’m still there. It tore itself apart. I’m very very proud to have been a member of the Workers’ Circle. It was very very union-minded. And I am very proud as well to have been made a member of the tailors... Now let me just... The Amalgamated Tailors’...Tailors’ Union. Ray could probably tell you. I think I was about five years old, I was made an honorary member. That is not...that...that I’m sure, I’m sure. It was one of those little things that Dad did, you know, it was a sort of, little joke. And I think that it was something like a shilling a year. But, I have always been very very staunch where the union is concerned.

So when did you stop being...or did you stop being a member of the Workers’ Circle?

The Workers’ Circle? When... The Workers’ Circle outlived its use. They reinstated the Workers’ Circle with Branch 14 with us youngsters in the hope that as we grew up and we married, we would have children and we would then, you know, guide them in this. It never happened. It never happened. And in consequence, the thing just petered out. Great pity. Because I have loving memories of my father being a member of the Workers’ Circle.

So...

Because there was a need for it then. By the time we became part of it, there was no longer the need for it. Lily Silberberg C1046/02/02 F12759A Page 23

But why was that?

It was post-war. It was times of, of plenty of work. People had a lot of things to do. What did happen is that, a lot of young men met a lot of young women, and you know, so, it became a social club. It was no longer a place for meeting, because you had the union...because we were unified through need. The needs had gone. It was no longer a thing of need. It was a, a social club.

[End of F12759 Side A] [F12759 Side B]

Could you describe what your, what the flat was like in Great Titchfield Street?

Yes, yes yes. My sister, whenever she feels unhappy about anything, she takes solace in remembering the flat. So to her there must have been some wonderful, wonderful memories there. We were very very loath to, to move from that flat. I was born there, she went there as a very very young child. What was it? I could show you a photograph of it. It would turn your toes up to see it. Whoa. Right. You want me to describe the flat? Let me describe the building. I have never been able to find out who the architect was, but it must have at one time been built as a mansion flat. There was specifically a kitchen where there was a sink. Other people lived in places, in parts of houses where there was a scullery, with an outside tap, and the scullery had a sink in it, but you had to lug the water from the tap outside the building into the sink. Well this was all laid on. So the kitchen, let me tell you about the kitchen. Something that people would give their eye teeth for now, there was a built-in oven. Now, that oven was fired by a coal fire, and there was an oven alongside it that, you could open up and put your baking into there. And you could lift up a ring of metal on top of the fire and you could boil your kettle on there. And that was put into something that resembled like, an alcove that was a fireplace. That in its turn would heat the boiler in the kitchen, it was a great big tank suspended from the wall, that in turn serviced the bath. Now it wasn’t like today, that if you didn’t bath twice a day, you wondered what was going on, if you bathed once a week, but you had a jolly good hose-down in between times. So consequently in the winter there was always a Lily Silberberg C1046/02/02 F12759B Page 24

lot of hot water, because that was part of the heating system. In the summer, I think that the, that the grate was fired up once a week, so that serviced the, the bath. The kitchen was quite large, inasmuch that that was the centre of the home. There was a shallow sink, a gas stove, a black gas stove, which was religiously blackened every week, and so was the, the oven. You could see your face in it. Now, come hell or high water, that had to be, there was a certain stuff called Zebo, my mother had something like a scrubbing brush, and she would polish that up, it shone, it glistened. But, the black gas stove went in 1937 and a new gas stove was bought, an Alpine New World, it was pink and turquoise, and the other people in the flats came up to look at it, because it was revolutionary. A new gas stove. And it couldn’t be fitted on the 12th of May, because it was the Coronation of the 13th of May, and nobody worked on the 13th of May because it was George VI’s coronation. So it stood outside on the landing. It was wrapped up in corrugated paper, in corrugated card. Now that is, that is a lasting memory. I can see them lugging it up the stairs, and, ‘Sorry Mrs, can’t fix it. We’ll be back day after tomorrow and we’ll fix it.’ And it was, it was fixed on the 14th. And that, I only know that because of the Coronation. And I think I’ve got my facts right. So, right, you can now see the kitchen. A large kitchen table, the chairs round it. A sink. Another little table that had only had three legs, so it had to be propped up in a corner, otherwise it would have fallen over. Bentwood chairs. So that’s the kitchen. Bathroom/toilet combined, that was that. Then there was a small L-shaped room that was a bedroom, yes that was a bedroom. Two iron bedsteads in there. Then there was my parents’ bedroom. There was a dining room that had a divan in it which was my divan when I grew up, when I was a bit older, that was my divan, my, my room, my...I slept on the divan in there, that’s right. And then there was the lounge that contained this furniture.

This table?

This table, that, everything that you see here. Now they were not bought until 19...1937, ’36/30... 1936. Prior to that, there was no furniture to speak of. Yes, there was a kitchen, but the rest of the room was reasonably empty. And it was my mother’s, to some extent boast, but on the other hand shame, that I was born on a bed that was done up with string, because it was in a state of collapse. And she was determined, now with Dad bringing home 37s.6d. per week, she still had the tenacity Lily Silberberg C1046/02/02 F12759B Page 25 to literally save penny upon penny upon penny to be able to have this furniture. And that really did set the street humming when this furniture was delivered. And that I believe was in 1935. [pause] ’34. 1934. And I believe that everything that you see here, that cabinet, these two armchairs, this settee, four chairs, and a table, I think that that was about £40. And it was made by a craftsman. You could see, well the mere fact that it’s lasted, that it was made by a craftsman.

Do you know where she got it from?

Yes, oh yes, yes. His name...we’ve still got the receipt. His name was Harry Gilbert, and he was in Shoreditch, EC1. Very very near the Curtain Road centre of the London College of Fashion, which was the heart of the furniture making industry. And they were craftspeople. We have been offered heaven knows what for this furniture. We would not part with it. Now you see the armchairs and this settee? This has been re-covered, this is the third time it’s been re-covered, and the cost of recovering it has been horrific, and the people who did the re-covering, especially this time, they said, ‘Well you could buy yourself a new suite for two-thirds of the amount.’ And we said, ‘No, this is the original.’ And no way is this ever going to be parted with. Be time enough when we shuffle off this mortal coil, then it can be dealt with, but not a minute before. So, do possessions possess us, or do we possess possessions? I don’t know. I don’t know. Don’t know.

What was it covered with when you first had it?

Hyacinth blue fabric that was wool and....no, it was linen and silk. Hyacinth blue. And when we moved out of the flat in 1964 the firm came to take away the suite and delivered it here with a different covering, which was a blue velvet, which we never really liked all that much, but we lived with it, and then fifteen years ago we had this put on. And this we’re now determined will see us out. That’s the end of it. But you see, these people, these people like my parents, they had standards. Where those standards came from, heaven alone knows. Because where they were born and where they were brought up, your bed would have been a sack of straw, you ate what was available. My mother recounted once a story that, it was when she was, she must have been about ten, she was starving. I mean she went to work for this family as a Lily Silberberg C1046/02/02 F12759B Page 26

skivvy and to look after the other kids. And these people, they had a couple of hens, and she was starving hungry, and she pinched an egg from underneath one of the chickens. And she, she made it her business to light a fire and boil some water and put the egg in. When she cracked the egg open, there was a chick inside. [pause] Can...can you imagine the horror that went through her? But that is what starvation... That is needs, that is not wants, that is needs, where you would employ a kid like that to live off the scraps of what was left from the table, and if there were no scraps, then the kid went, the skivvy went without.

Did your mother work?

Yes, a little bit. [sounds of LS moving]

Are you all right?

Inasmuch that, she was a buttonhole hand. This was in the time when buttonholes were made by... Again, I could show you a machine-made buttonhole that you would swear that it was made by hand; the only thing is that you would have to have a handmade buttonhole and compare it to it, but the formation of the stitch would be identical to a handmade buttonhole; the only thing is that a handmade buttonhole would not be as regular. But in those days there was no such thing as that. So consequently, it was a cottage industry, Mum sat at the kitchen table, and banged out buttonholes. Princely, princely sum of a ha’penny for a buttonhole for the sleeve, a ha’penny, half a penny, not a new half penny, but an old half penny when there were twelve pennies to the shilling, the shilling now being a fivepenny piece. (laughs) And, a penny for a buttonhole, a full-size buttonhole. But the buttonhole had to be prepared in such a way that it would take, she had a bodkin that, when she’d finished work on it, she had to put a bar tack in a certain place, and then she had to, to literally dress the buttonhole so that it laid properly on the garment. Unheard of now, unheard of.

And was this for men’s clothing?

For men’s, yes. Yes. Yes. Lily Silberberg C1046/02/02 F12759B Page 27

And, did these come through your father’s...?

No, no, no, no. No. No. It was where certain jobs were farmed out, and they were armed out at the lowest possible rate. When I say, literally the lowest, it was the dregs of the rate. And people like my mum used to sit there, very often till the early hours of the morning. Because what they used to do is that, when they had finished with that garment, they used to then give it to my mother. My mother would then literally work on it after they’d given it to her, late at night, and then the following morning it was for us to take it to the presser. The presser would then press it off, and deliver it back to the tailor, who would then, who was not a master tailor, he would then deliver it to the, Savile Row, or to the City, the City, it depends where he, where he had HIS intake of work from.

So, at what stage would the buttonhole be made?

Various different stages. Sometimes they would prepare the cuff, so therefore, the inside sleeve would not be sewn up, it was only the outside sleeve, with the cuff repaired. And they were marked, and then it was for Mum to do them. Sometimes a forepart. Well in actual fact it would be the left forepart, because it was menswear. And that was all marked out. So therefore, it was bits and pieces; it wasn’t always a full garment. If it was the full garment, then it was for Mum to make sure that that garment then went to the tailor’s – to the, to the pressers. And who were the carriers of these pieces? Ray and myself.

And would they come one at a time, or...?

Yes, yes, yes. So therefore, Mum was a housewife during the day, she was a buttonhole hand till the early hours of the morning. Because it was when the tailors packed up, that her work would begin. And, under gaslight. So it wasn’t, it wasn’t an easy life. It was not an easy life. And, you were what you what you made yourself. And consequently, my parents saw education as being a way to, to get out of that way of life. They did not want their children to inherit what they had had to put up with. Because as I say, to be unemployed, you were a social pariah. Consequently, there Lily Silberberg C1046/02/02 F12759B Page 28

was virtually no, what is the word? What is the word? You lived strictly within the law, because, you were so respectful of the law. You had been welcomed into this country, you had been given salvation by this country, so therefore you never never ever abused the law. Now, one reads of cases these days, it makes you wonder, it makes you wonder. So, the police were always respected; never feared, never ever feared, respected. And it was dinned into us that if ever we are molested, if ever we needed help, and our parents were not available, get to the nearest policeman. And it’s then that the policemen used to patrol all day and all night. So it wasn’t somebody in a panda car, there were police patrolling the streets. And the only way that they could communicate with another policeman was not through a walkie-talkie but through a whistle. So we were brought up to respect the police, not to fear them.

You mentioned your father’s library. Did you ever go with him to get books, or...?

No, no. Again I was too busy being a kid. The thing that he would have loved at least one of us to do, and that would be to read Hebrew, because the Script is Hebrew; even though the language is Yiddish, Yiddish is a different language to Hebrew. You’ll find Hebrew in Yiddish, but you won’t find Yiddish in Hebrew. Yiddish is the lingua franca of the Central European Jew.

And is that what you spoke at home?

We spoke that at home, yes. A child being verbal blotting paper. I didn’t speak English as English, and I went to school at four years, four and a half years old. The usual intake was at five, but I started to play up, I wanted to go to school, so Mum says, ‘Right, you want to go to school? Put your coat on, we’re going to go to school.’ And I was marched round to the local school.

Where was that?

Upper Marylebone Street school. Do you know the West End at all? Upper Marylebone Street then became New Cavendish Street, so therefore New Cavendish Street was where... The, the big building now that belongs to Westminster University, that used to be the Regent Street Polytechnic, now stands on the site of the Upper Lily Silberberg C1046/02/02 F12759B Page 29

Marylebone Street school, that then became the New Cavendish Street. And again, what goes round, comes around, because when Barrett Street was bombed, they didn’t just close shop, tuition had to continue, so they were granted certain rooms and certain redundant buildings to start up tuition again, and one of those buildings, which was by that time redundant, was Upper Marylebone Street school, which was New Cavendish Street, which became the Cavendish annexe. Small world? So I literally finished off my, my time at Barrett Street, back again where I was in the infants school right until 1940...1940. Where was I? Where was I?

Well I was asking you about your father’s library, and you said that he would...

Oh yes, yes, yes yes yes. That was, that was... He always shook his head, you know, in great wonderment. There you’ve got a library, you have the history of, of your people. When I say, I don’t say this, what is the word? My mind’s gone blank. There was so much to know about, and I rejected it. I rejected it. And he used to call me an ignoramus. He said, ‘What is the use of speaking a language when you can’t read it and you can’t write it? It then becomes sterile,’ he said, ‘it’s of no earthly use to you. If you want to know language, you’ve got to be able to read it, and you’ve got to be able to write it, apart from speak it.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.’ Can’t turn the clock back. Linda, once a time has gone, it has gone.

Was it...was the same true of Ray and Freddy?

Oh yes. Oh yes. Oh yes. I was the only one who had any tuition in Hebrew, because I went to a church school, and every Wednesday morning they had the, the... I’ll tell you what school it was, Marylebone Central, situated in Marylebone Road, do you know it at all? It’s got six beautiful gilt, gilded angels. But it’s, it’s the big church in Marylebone Road, very close to Madame Tussaud, on the opposite side, a bit further up towards Great Portland Street. And because the clergy came in on a Wednesday to take Bible studies, I wasn’t asked, did I want to, or didn’t I want to, but they engaged a reverend gentleman who came in to teach the Jewish children. Now the only reason why I landed up at a church school is because it was wartime and all other schools were bombed. But that is a different story, I dare say we might come to that another time. So consequently, there was this elderly Jewish gentleman, who was a reverend Lily Silberberg C1046/02/02 F12759B Page 30

gentleman, who, we literally tore him to pieces, gave him a nervous breakdown, poor old bloke, the Reverend Goodman, and he actually taught us the alphabet, but never in lower case letters, but in capitals. So, at a push, when push comes to shove, I can sort of, if you give me enough time, I can sort of discern one letter from another, but if you gave them in a whole, no. And my father said, you know, ‘You’ve got the opening.’ He said, ‘I will teach you.’ No way. Didn’t want to know. Didn’t want to know. And he had, he had books that he cherished, he absolutely adored them. Now, again I must state.....

[End of F12759 Side B] [F12760 Side A]

.....bought. There was a shop in Osborn Street, just off of Whitechapel, called Mazzin, where they had all these books. America has still got a great demand for Yiddish books, because Yiddish is spoken as a language. It’s now coming back again into Great Britain, there are schools now that teach it. And I think the most wonderful things I ever saw, it’s at Oxford Univer...either Oxford or Cambridge, I can’t quite remember, but there is a young man who has made a study of the Yiddish language, he’s a Christian lad. And I would love to go and hear him lecture, but he, he has just concentrated on the Yiddish language because it is a dying language. At one time it was dead, but America resurrected it, and it is now coming back again. And I saw him on the television speaking, and it was a most fluent Yiddish imaginable. But it was quite uncanny to watch him, because he never used his hands. When one, you know, one gesticulates and one, you know, it’s, it’s all over the place. But he just sat there very calmly, and he never once used his hands, and his Yiddish was just pouring out of him, which was beautiful. But, coming back now to this last book that Dad bought. It was a book of short stories by the authoress Katie Brown, and she, she just... I don’t know, have you ever heard of the Yiddish author Bashevis Singer? Well she had the same sort of fluidity of writing. It wasn’t necessarily of a story, it could have been a philosophy, a part of, something that was relevant. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be a story as a story; it can be a thought. And she wrote this book, it could have been thoughts, it could have been short stories, could have been experiences, don’t know. And Dad bought this book, and he, he was desperately ill, but he made the journey to the East End, and he bought the book by Kate Brown. Lily Silberberg C1046/02/03 F12760A Page 31

And he used to sit there and he used to read it, and he used to read out passages to us. And you know, we used to listen, yes yes, no no, we had other things to do. And that book as well went with the rest of them. Now we come back now to fifteen years ago, I will say, this is fifteen years ago. I walked the dogs in the park, and we had a whole, I think we had six dogs in those days. The place was known as St Francis, St Francis Abode for Dogs. (laughs) Any dog that needed a home, ship it into the two old girls, they’ll see to it. So anyhow, I’m walking with the dogs, and if you have a dog, or dogs, you meet people in the park, that if you didn’t have a dog or dogs, you wouldn’t even speak to anybody. But dogs bring you into contact, some of them fight, some of them love each other, you know. Anyhow, I’m walking round the park, and this woman who I speak, used to walk round, lovely lady, we’re talking talking talking. I knew her name to be Mrs Brown, but I never called her Mrs Brown, what was her name? I think her name was Linda. I think her name was Linda. Oh, Linda Brown, Linda Brown lived round the corner here. And on occasion when she wasn’t walking the dog, her husband used to walk the dog, his name was Sam, his name was Sam Brown. And one day we’re speaking, I’m speaking to Linda, and we’re talking about a story, she says, ‘Oh yes,’ she says,’ my mother-in-law was, was the greatest storyteller possible.’ I said, ‘Oh yes?’ She said, ‘Oh yes, she published several books.’ I said, ‘Oh there’s nice,’ you know. And I said, ‘What was your mother-in- law...?’ ‘Katie.’ I said, ‘Your mother was Katie...your mother-in-law was Katie Brown?’ She said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘So your husband Sam is the son of Katie Brown?’ She said, ‘Yes.’ Well of course next time I saw him in the park... And he would do the proofreading for her, and he also made it his business to translate it into English. There were a few stories of hers published in English, but the majority was in the Yiddish. The next time I saw Sam, you know, I said, ‘That was the last book that my dad bought.’ Oh he was delighted, you know, and everything. And, and we used to walk round the park shrieking with laughter, and, he went round the park, and Sam suddenly collapsed, died of a heart attack. So another, another link had been broken. And again, you know, I think to myself, well if only I could have had more, more time just to talk to him. Why didn’t I invite him round here, to come and have a cup of coffee with us? When it’s gone, it’s gone Linda. You can’t shovel it up and bring it... And his wife knew very very little about... I think if anything, Katie might have been a bit of a busybody in their marriage. (laughs) And apart from which, Linda Lily Silberberg C1046/02/03 F12760A Page 32

had her own, her own social life. So, again, you know... But his library was his pride and joy. His library was his pride and joy.

Can I ask you a bit about, a bit more about his work?

Yes, surely.

Did he work for the same person?

The same person, he worked for him for I think it was, from before I was born to 1943.

And was his employer always a tyrant?

A tyrant. Socially, they were like brothers.

What do you mean, sorry?

Whenever there was a rejoicing in his family, my father was taken in as part of the rejoicing. And then when it came Monday morning again he was back, his old tyrannical self. It was like a Jekyll and Hyde. Again, this is, this is a, this is a memory that is, it’s a not very nice memory, because we used to say to him, ‘Well why do you put up with it Dad, why don’t you leave?’ Well there was no other work. My father had responsibilities on his shoulders.

Do you know how his employer felt about the Workers’ Circle?

He was a member.

He was one as well?

He was... I’m sure that he was a member of the Workers’ Circle. But he was what you would call a fringe member, he was never one that was dedicated like my father Lily Silberberg C1046/02/03 F12760A Page 33

was. You know, like a fringe... I believe he was. I can’t quite, I can’t quite make that one out.

And the, the clothes that your father was making, who would they be for?

Savile Row. Savile Row didn’t have any workmen other than the cutters and the fitters. Now there was, there was a palatial showroom. It wasn’t where you could go in and try one on and walk out with it. It was made for you. And Savile Row was the actual hub of the bespoke industry. Now there was another branch of the industry that was in the City. That would have been somewhere, Leadenhall Street and all round there. Now, Savile Row dealt with the cream of society, whereas a City firm would have dealt with judges and barristers and people like that. And, these places used to take the measurements, and sort out the fabric. There was a cutter in the back room that would lay out the fabric, take the measurements, draft out the garment. There was no such thing as patterns in those days, they used to draft it straight onto the cloth and cut, and mark it all out, that was then made up into a bundle, and then that bundle was shipped over to the tailor. Now the remarkable part about it is that there was usually a jacket, a waistcoat, and two pairs of trousers. That was a full, a full suitage. So the jacket went to one tailor, the waistcoat went to another tailor, and the trousers went to another tailor. And if you were a trouser maker, you didn’t make waistcoats, and if you were a waistcoat maker, you didn’t make jackets. Does that sound funny to you? And that’s the way it was you see. So, all of these things were all farmed out. And then, the jackets were then made up to what they call a first baste, which meant that the, the interlinings were put in, certain parts of it, pad stitching and all that, and, the shell of the garment was made, the sleeves were, what we would call tacked in, they were basted in, and to see that the hang was right and everything, and then it would be taken back for a first fitting. And it would then be sent back, and this time the pockets would be all marked on, because they actually had a shell that they could try on a person, and actually mark on where the pockets were. And, it went back, and then the tailors could get to work on it, working via the alterations and everything. And then would you believe it, they never did their own machining, but there was a journeyman machiner that would go into a workroom for a few hours per week, so consequently he had a round of machining. There was a machine in the room where bits and pieces could be machined, but the actual machining of the garment was done Lily Silberberg C1046/02/03 F12760A Page 34

by a machine [inaudible] putting in the pockets. And these pockets were put in, not as though they’d been put in by somebody, but as if the pockets had grown. That was the standard of work, especially for the, for the Savile Row tailors. And again, these people couldn’t read or write, wouldn’t know how to use a tape measure. So, you know, they were all craftsmen in their own right. None of them had had what you call a day’s tuition in a technical school. They literally were taught at the elbow of somebody else doing it. And once a pocket goes into a garment, it’s got to be perfect, because you can’t have it re-cut. And some of the padding... The most famous garment that passed through my mother’s hands, no, one of the most famous garments, was a evening coat for Sir Malcolm Sargent. And you know that when he conducted the orchestra... A frock coat, tails, he always... That’s why they called him Flash Harry, because he always looked so absolutely immaculate. And, the coat was made, and then there had to be two buttonholes put into the coat, one buttonhole in the lapel, because he always wore a flower, and I think the other one was just above the slit in the tail where there was a button and buttonhole, which was like a focal point. If I remember correctly. And I remember Mum saying to me, ‘If you want to see a nice bit of stitching, look at this.’ And inside the jacket, inside the top part of it, it was all padded, and it was padded in a zigzag, diamond pattern. Heavily quilted, because he must have been a little sparrow of a man, and this gave him a bit of shape, exactly. So it was him inside a pre-shaped garment. And the wonderful part about his garments, even when he was flailing his arms around all over the place, the coat never moved. The coat never moved, it was that well constructed. And that was done by a journeyman machiner. Nothing was ever marked out. All that he was given was that piece of, piece of, an area of lining, with the padding on it, with the basting stitch all the way round to show that he could work within the confines of that. And he would just sit down by the treadle machine and work it out, literally by eye. How’s that? That’s craftsmanship.

So would the, the sort of client’s name be, be stitched into the, into the garment in some way?

The garment... There was always an in-breast pocket. The out-breast pocket was the one that’s on the top, and there would be another in-breast pocket inside. Now if you Lily Silberberg C1046/02/03 F12760A Page 35 turned that over, you would find the actual firm’s label, and the actual name of the person put in in beautiful script onto the, the silk label, and that was sewed inside.

So that all the pieces could be matched up when they came back together again presumably. How... How did, how did...

Oh, oh I beg your pardon. When the cutter cut the actual pieces, he would bundle them up, and then a docket would be put on top, and the docket had all the measurements and the date. And that would be bundled up, and it would be sent to the, to the tailor. Then it would be sent back as what they call a first fitting, which was like a shell. That was then ripped to pieces and re-jigged to fit the actual person. And then it would go back to the tailor, then the pockets would be put in. Some of the stitching would be done, and then it would be sent back for a second fitting, and if that second fitting was OK, it was what they call a straightforward finisher. So, you had, you had the, the pocket baste, you had a forward and the straightforward finisher. And the straightforward finisher was that, it was sent back, it was then completed, including the pressing, sent back to the firm, the customer would come in, try it on. If there was any discrepancy, that discrepancy would be marked, and sent back to the tailor; the tailor would then do the alteration, and then send it back, and that was it. Then he could get paid for it.

So each tailor had the specialist who did the trousers, the jacket, the waistcoat?

Every, every what they call, the actual tailoring shops. Not the workshops, they didn’t have workshops, they had tailoring shops.

And what was your father’s speciality?

Right the way through. But he never put the pockets in, because that was, that was the machinest’s job. The machiner. Now those machiners working on a treadle machine, not electric, gas lighting, and it was a treadle, nine out of ten of them had severe hernias because of the treadling. Now you see, occupational hazard. My father had a hernia, because of lugging those irons about. And, there was always a stench of perspiration and boiling cloth in those, in those workshops. Lily Silberberg C1046/02/03 F12760A Page 36

The boiling from the presses?

From the pressing. Now you went like this for pressing. You obviously know about Hoffman pressing.

Is that what they are? (laughs) You bring them down?

No, well forget that. Forget that. This was, as I say, you had the iron, you put the iron either into the coals, or into... When gas, when you had a gas-fired one, you put it into a slot that heated the whole iron. You then had to have fabric, they had to make, out of maybe a dozen thicknesses of fabric, stitched round and round and round, which they could then pick up the iron with, because, there was no interruption in heat conduction, the heat would heat the, that as well. And what they used to do, take it out, swing it up, spit on it, and if it settled, it was ready to use. And then a damp cloth was put over the fabric, and then they could press. Craftsmanship. And I went to this exhibition where there was a pre-shaped form, and they put a piece of fabric in, pulled down a lever that brought down a cup that was over this pre-shaped form, picked up the lever, up went the cup, and there was the, the collar sitting there. Not a bit of pad stitching in it, not a bit of horsehair, horsehair linen, horsehair and linen canvas, was all glued together. But there you are you see.

And was it mostly men who worked in these tailors?

Yes. Yes. Hopefully, I can get a photograph. Unfortunately you won’t be able to see it on the tape. But I would like you to see a certain photograph. My very good friend Martin Shoben has got the photograph. It comes from a book called The Needle is Threaded by Margaret Hamilton[sic - Stewart]. I do believe her name is Margaret Hamilton[sic - Stewart], but I know that the name of the book is The Needle is Threaded. Where she gives the history of the garment industry, and the necessity for the unions to bind together, because there was so much exploitation, it was pathetic. As the, as the master tailors were being exploited by the firms, they in their turn exploited the people who worked for them. And it’s the most wonderful book. Unfortunately I haven’t got a copy of it. But in it there are photographs, that I look at Lily Silberberg C1046/02/03 F12760A Page 37 these photographs, and my mind goes straight back to Great Titchfield Street, as if I was there. There is one photograph of this person, it is, it’s a human being. Didn’t know whether it was male or female. Didn’t know where it lived, where it dosed down, where it kipped. Did it ever eat? Did it earn anything? We don’t know. It was just an object. And they were the ones that used to carry the bundles from the big shops to the tailors, round and about Great Titchfield Street, Cleveland Street, Clipstone Street, all round there, Gosfield Street, Great Portland, that is where all the tailors lived. But we didn’t know who it was or what it was. But it used to collect and deliver, if it was male or female, we didn’t know. But that is what this glamorous industry... And it was, you know, so much so, tailors used to vie with each other. I worked for G.B. Johnson, which, you had to be an excellent tailor to work for G.B. Johnson. So consequently they even had that little tiny whisker of pride, that they were fit to work for certain, for certain tailors, albeit for less than subsistence. Is that the right word, subsistence? Yes. Let alone keep a family going. But they still had pride in their work. So, you know... Do you want the light on Linda love?

Shall I put it on.....

[break in recording]

Again, the reason that I remember G.B. Johnson, there was a husband and wife living in Hanson Street, which runs parallel to Great Titchfield Street, he was a darling old man, he was stone deaf and he was always laughing. And his wife, Mrs Harris, she had the most bowed legs I have ever come across. Poor darling, must have had rickets as a child. Again, from, from Poland or Russia; neither of them could spell their names or, you know. It was parallel family to us. And, her pride, her pride and joy, was to tell other people her husband worked for ‘Jibby Johnson’. ‘Jibby Johnson’ was the master, wonderful person, of Savile Row, and you had to be good to work for them. We must fast forward. I’m speaking to a colleague at the college, Francis Redican, lovely, lovely man, as well excellent tailor, and I was recounting the story of Mr and Mrs Harris and how she absolutely crowed about the fact that her husband worked for ‘Jibby Johnson’. And he said, ‘So did I.’ I said, ‘I beg your pardon?’ He said, ‘G.B. Johnson,’ he said, ‘one of the finest firms in Savile Row.’ I said, ‘So his name wasn’t Jibby...?’ ‘G.B. Johnson.’ And to that moment, I always thought his Lily Silberberg C1046/02/03 F12760A Page 38

name was Jibby Johnson. (laughs) Well of course we used to shriek with... (laughing) Jibby Johnson. And it was the firm of G.B. Johnson, which was the finest of the fine. I can’t give you any other names, again, you know... But I must say, that that name does, does stand out, but it was an excellent firm. But as I say, there was a differential in Savile Row and a City firm, because the City firm dealt with the, the law and people like that, which was pretty upper crust, but the Savile Row were royalty, some, and bang on, bang on. And the most important garment that my mother ever made buttonholes for was a garment that was made by Harrods for the late Queen Mary, the Queen’s grandmother, and it was in silk, velvet, and it had half- inch buttonholes. It was like a blouse, it was buttoned-up down the back. It must have been magnificent. And it was, they needed buttonholes being made for it in a hurry, and there was nobody in the workroom of Harrods that could do it, and somehow or other, it got passed along, word of mouth. And this half a back bodice was brought up in white tissue paper by a liveried.....

[End of F12760 Side A] [F12760 Side B]

We went, and he sat in...in...in the car, whilst my mother made the buttonholes, and then, he came up to collect them. And I think that, again Mum got about a ha’penny a buttonhole. Well, it was money, it was money. Now that garment finished off being very very renown, because, Madame Tussaud had a waxworks of Queen Mary, and what garment is she wearing? That one. How’s that for fame? Now if I don’t go to the loo loo, I shall be in trouble. No no...

I’d better unhook you, sorry.

I thought for one beautiful moment you were going to attack me.

(laughs) Sorry.

[end of session]

[End of F12760 Side B] Lily Silberberg C1046/02/04 F12810A Page 39

[F12810 Side A]

.....the way, Lily, l-i-l-y, I must thank you for the, for the card that you sent. Delightful, I shall treasure that. Thank you thank you thank you. I knew Goalan, I knew Barbara Goalan. Poor darling died of Alzheimer’s not very long ago. It’s dreadful to think of somebody as vibrant as that.

You were going to tell me about the community in Great Titchfield Street.

Yes, yes. Great Titchfield Street, a very long street, starting at Oxford Street, nearly at Oxford Circus. There is Oxford Circus, there’s Great Portland Street, and then there’s Great Titchfield Street. So it runs from Oxford Street right the way along to near enough Great Portland Street station, not quite as far as Great Portland Street station, but within a block of Great Portland Street station. So it is, I would say that it is easily three-quarters of a mile. And it was in three, three areas. You had the industrial area, which had a great deal of the garment industry in it; then you had the living part of it, which was blocks of flats and houses; and then you had what was known as the rough end, where there were, how can I put it? Rougher people living. I don’t wish this to sound discriminatory, but they were not exactly what you would call people with employment. It was houses where you could, where you could rent a couple of rooms, and it was people who came and who went. So consequently, now in my mind’s eye, I see it in three distinct sections.

And which was at which end?

The industrial end was Oxford Street, with a beautiful, beautiful shop, Waring & Gillow, on the corner of Great Titchfield Street and Oxford Street. So, from there to what would now be Mortimer Street, that was the industrial end. From Mortimer Street to I would say New Cavendish Street, that used to be Upper Marylebone Street, that was where it was the people who had employment, who, who were very very employable, if there was work there for their employment. And then from Great...from Upper Marylebone Street, that later became New Cavendish Street, to Greenwell Street, which was the end of Great Titchfield Street, that was what you would call the rougher end. Now, as I say, I don’t wish to sound discriminatory, but Lily Silberberg C1046/02/04 F12810A Page 40

this is how I, I see it now, as I saw it as a child. If ever we disappeared over New Cavendish Street, ‘Oh you’re going up the rough end. We don’t like you playing up the rough end.’ And again, because it was like, would conurbations be the right word?

I think conurbation means something larger, something...

We were one large area, but with all these little districts. There were streets that were known as, as rough districts; there were streets that were known as genteel streets. ‘Oh, that person comes... Oh they must be a nice person.’ Great Portland Street was very very much a demarcation line, because anybody who lived the other side of Great Portland Street, the houses were nicer, albeit the people that we knew were possibly the porters, the children of the porters, or the, the housekeepers of those houses. And then of course you had Portland Place, which is where the diplomats were. So, although it was one large district, one huge district, it was all these little facets amongst it. But Great Titchfield Street, one of my first memories, horses, hundreds of horses. There is an area of Great Titchfield Street called Market Place. Have you ever heard of Market Place? There is a building on Market Place, built on Market Place, that is known as Kent House. Kent House was built in 1936/37/38, but if you took Kent House away, you could actually see that there was a square area where the original Titchfield Street Market stood, consequently its name was Market Place. The market later on moved up to the next block from us, which was known as Great Titchfield Street Market. Fruit and veg, butchers’ shops, an oil shop, a fishmonger, and as I said, about six or seven or even more fruit and vegetables. And I remember before the war, before there was electric, they had no gas, but they used to light flares. It was a bundle of rags at the end of a wooden pole that was dipped into kerosene, set fire to, and then propped up, and that was the illumination when, in the winter when it was dark, so they could continue trading. They used to pack up the stalls round about eight o’clock at night. And the vegetables that weren’t sold during the day were just tipped out onto the pavements. And then it was like, another set of people would come out, to pick amongst the vegetables, because they could not afford to buy the vegetables. They were known as spec pickers. And amongst them would be nuns, because as well they were very very short of funds, and, they would come with sacks, and all the vegetation that was just tipped out. And then after that would Lily Silberberg C1046/02/04 F12810A Page 41

come the, the dustmen to pick up what was, whatever was left over. And then at night, because the amount of horses, there were no cars, this is going back to maybe 1931/30...which is still in my memory, everything was horse-drawn. And at the corner of Great Tichfield Street, down towards Market Place, there was a certain business that was known as Carter Patterson, and they were the ones where, if you wanted something delivered, you would take your parcel in there, and they would then, by horse and cart, they would deliver it for you. So consequently, the industrial part of Great Titchfield Street was given over to horse-drawn cartage, because the collection and delivery of everything was done by carthorse. And twice a year there would be the, the horse show in the Inner Circle of Regent’s Park, where at Easter there was the heavy horse parade, and at Whitsun there was the lighter horse parade. Now one of the first memories that I have of a horse is being picked up, put astride a carthorse, and the carter leading the horse up the street with my mother shouting, ‘Bring her back in one piece,’ something like that, you know, ‘Bring he back, when you come back.’ So all of these memories, that is Great Titchfield Street, that will always be Great Titchfield Street to me. Not the later years, but that to me was Great Titchfield Street. And, at about nine or ten o’clock at night, because of all this horse activity, there would be a water van... That’s the wrong word. It was like a huge contraption that squelched out water, fanned out water, and also had rollers. So that’s how the streets were cleared. And that would be round about nine, ten o’clock at night. So the streets were clear for the next day. So that is Great Titchfield Street to me. And I shall always love it like that. The lamplighter coming round, and lighting with a taper. And then the lampposts were, there was a switch inside, so he would open up a door, and he would switch over so that the, the light came on. People with barrel organs. A man who had a piano on a push trolley, and would play the piano. We would give pennies. There was, the Salvation Army had a building, had a, it wasn’t a depot, you can’t call it a depot, they had their offices, officers’ offices, three doors away from where I lived. So if we were 87, they must have been... 87, they must have been about 92, 93, Great Titchfield Street. And on a Sunday, every Sunday regularly, the band would come and play in Great Titchfield Street. They’d come marching along, four abreast, playing as they went. And then they would form a circle, there’d be prayers, there’d be readings, there’d be hymns. And then they formed up again formation and marched to the next one. So it was a very very busy street, very busy street. And, it was home. Lily Silberberg C1046/02/04 F12810A Page 42

Were there other Jewish families living in Great Titchifled Street?

All sorts, all sorts. The one thing that there was there, there was a wonderful, wonderful sense of community. There was always somebody looking out of a window. So consequently, the children could play till late at night, because if anybody dared interfere with any of those children, I think there would have been murder committed. And that was not just Great Titchfield Street, that was communities all over. There were Greeks, there were Italians, there was an influx of Spaniards from the Spanish Civil War. One I remember very very well, and I remember his name, his name was Albert Paulus[ph], and he couldn’t have been more than six or seven, he didn’t have a tooth in his head, they had all been blasted out. He’d been in a bombing. And he didn’t have a tooth in his head. And what’s more, they were, I believe they were his second teeth, so consequently... But he laughed his head off; for all I know he might have been a bit simple, but he was a lovely child. And, there was a Greek family that I played with there, with their three daughters, and they were something to do with the Greek, the Greek Embassy in, in Portland Place. I don’t know, for all I know he might have been a chauffeur, or they might have been the maids and, workmen working there. But they had a flat in Great Titchfield Street, as I say. One’s name was Ivdochia and the other one was Ivdichia. And they went back to Greece in January or February of 1939, and, I don’t think that they survived the war. Especially with English connections. Because, Greece was one of the first places, I believe, that got... It was dreadful, it was dreadful. Looking back on it as an adult, you realise the people who pass through your life that have probably died because of war, and now looking, looking to what’s going to go on quite soon, can’t even bear to think about it. But that is not for the benefit of the tape as it were.

So, were you...how did you become aware of the war do you think? Did your parents talk about it, or...? The beginning I mean.

The war, war was declared on September the 3rd. I was ten years old on September the 2nd. The day that the war... I sound a bit like Rob Wilton, ‘The day war broke out...’ I remember my mother sitting on one of these chairs, one of these four chairs, sobbing her heart out, saying that she had just managed to achieve a bit of a home, Lily Silberberg C1046/02/04 F12810A Page 43

and there was Chamberlain saying that as from eleven o’clock we are in a state of war. Now, before that, we were made very very much aware of war. They were digging trenches in Hyde Park. Why they were digging trenches in Hyde Park, I’ve yet to know. Sandbags made themselves visible in front of various different doors, which we now know must have been very important buildings. Soldiers were in Regent’s Park. And, we had to go to a certain school which was All Souls School, just behind the Middlesex Hospital, to be rigged up for gas masks. And this must have been in the August. And I remember going into this, into this big hall, and there was a woman sitting on a high stool, literally knee deep in gas masks. And as you passed her by, she obviously had them in three, three parcels, ‘Oh a child, there you are, try that on.’ And you tried it on. Breathe out, and if it bubbled at the side, it fitted. ‘Yes, that’s all right.’ And then you were given a plain cardboard box with a piece of string, into which the, the gas mask fitted, and you were rigged out for that. And then if you wanted to volunteer, you could go through a gas room, which was nothing else really but a truck, and six of us were put in there at a time, adults and children, you put on your gas mask, and, they filled it with some sort of gas, couldn’t have been lethal for God’s sake, couldn’t have been lethal. But it then gauged if anything went in. In my particular case, nothing, it seemed to be perfectly all right, but other people came out coughing, spluttering, and with red eyes. So if the gas mask ever fitted, I do not know. And in the street as well, what appeared were what they call gas tables, which was a short pole onto which was hammered a sheet of ply, like a table, and it was painted yellow, or... No it was painted grey. That if in the event of any mustard gas, that grey paint would have turned yellow. Well looking back on it now, you would have been dead before you realised that that, that grey had turned yellow. And the only thing that that ever succeeded in doing was giving several people a nasty jolt, because in the blackout you couldn’t see where they were, and if you blundered into them, you knew that there was a gas table there. (laughs) Another thing that we were told we had to do was, that was blackout. We had to hang up heavy cloth in the window. But, that was only, as I say, about two or three weeks beforehand, almost like a practice run. And then I believe that there was a period of appeasement, and then war was declared, and then we were in for it. War was declared at eleven; by half-past eleven we were in the shelters, because the air... Oh yes, another thing. The air raid. They made us familiar with what the air-raid warning, the siren, would sound like, which was a wailing, [makes siren sound] like Lily Silberberg C1046/02/04 F12810A Page 44 that, and the all-clear was just a one note. So we knew then that we could come out of the shelters. But as I say, at about half-past eleven the warning went off, and we knew that we had a basement to go to in the next building, and we all went out of the building, went out from where we lived, into that building there. And maybe half an hour later the all-clear went. And we knew then that we were at war. But what I do remember very very distinctly, that on the Thursday or the Friday you could go into a shop and it was full of meat and vegetables and everything, it was a land of plenty; on the Monday morning, there wasn’t a thing to be bought. Rationing had indeed started. So where there was peace and plenty, there was war and austerity. And that’s where the saying, ‘under the counter’, because everything had been taken off the counters and shoved under the counters. The sweet shop, Allcroft[ph], along the street, chocolate from floor to ceiling virtually; when you went in there, there wasn’t a, a milk drop to be seen anywhere. (laughs) Coming back to Great Titchfield Street, it must have been a fairly important street, because in our area of the street, which as I say was the living area, there were butchers’ shops and, and cafés and things like that, but there was a David Gregg, a Home and Colonial, and a Lipton’s, all three major provisions merchants. So it shows what a very great community that there was there, that there was indeed the three, three major grocery shops of that time. And, they all virtually sold the same thing.

Did you...did your mother use one over another, or...?

Oh yes, all three of them. All three of them. Most certainly, all three of them.

[break in recording – door opening]

Mhm.

There was the man with the piano on the, on the barrow, he must have been a concert pianist at one time. But I do remember the, the singing, coal miners in the gutters, singing, not just in Great Titchfield Street but up and down Oxford Street, you would find maybe a gaggle of three or four of them in single file in the gutter. Because the, the mining industry was virtually non-existent then, and they came to, to England Lily Silberberg C1046/02/04 F12810A Page 45

from Wales to, to literally starve. I remember a Scotsman playing the bagpipes, and I was petrified of him, petrified of him.

Why?

Because of the noise of the bagpipes. It was like a wailing sound. I couldn’t get any melody out from it. And there was the, on a Sunday morning somebody would come round with a barrow, a man with red hair and glasses, and his street cry was, ‘Whelks and shrimps all fresh; fine warning pre-say.’ Now what that meant, I don’t... Ray and I, we sit, and we, we even tried to work it out syllable by syllable. It makes no sense to us whatsoever. Lavender was sold. There was people who would sell sort of sweetmeats, but we were never allowed to buy from them. Other people did, and it didn’t, it didn’t harm them, but we were never allowed to. Because, it just, you know... Looking back on it now, it isn’t that, I don’t think that it was because of hygiene; I think if anything Mum couldn’t afford the, the ha’penny or the penny. What else was there? The milkman who came round, two to three times a day, pushing a cart with churns of milk on it, and Mum used to go downstairs with a jug, and he would pour a measure of milk into the, into the jug. And I remember his name was Mr Stone, he was a Welshman. Where the milk came from, I don’t know, if it was pasteurised, I couldn’t tell you. And he would... Mum would make him a cup of tea on a Friday afternoon, and he would tally up his books, sitting there having a cup of tea. So that must have been the afternoon round of milk. Now that’s a far cry from having your bottles delivered, or indeed going to the supermarket. And I remember the milk very very clearly. It went sour very readily, but there was a good layer of cream, sour cream on the top, and Mum used to pour any milk that was left over at the end of the day into cups, cover them with a damp cloth, put them on a windowsill, and that milk would then turn sour, and would be relished with boiled potatoes. Sour milk and boiled potatoes. And I can still remember the taste of it, it was lovely. Milk doesn’t go sour now, it goes from fresh to bad. But in those days, it went to milk that was just slightly sour, and then set into a jelly. And that was one of the stable meals, staple meals rather, that we had in the household.

Can you remember any other foods or meals that you had?

Lily Silberberg C1046/02/04 F12810A Page 46

Oh yes, oh yes, yes yes. Oh, meat as meat didn’t really come into it, but looking back on it, we had a great deal of offal, offal that, people today wouldn’t really know what to do with it. Liver was very very available. Lungs, pipes and spleen were made into a stew. Now that must sound dreadful to, to a present-day person, that you wouldn’t even give it to the dog these days. But it was one of the most tastiest meals imaginable. And a few years ago with young friends of ours, we actually ordered from a butcher, when we were still eating meat, we ordered from a butcher, a set of lungs, pipes and spleen, and we made...and a heart, an ox heart, which we noticed was imported from Botswana, and we made them the biggest stew-up you have ever come across. We made it in a most traditional way possible, with carrots, onions, parsnips. And they passed the plate two or three times, they thought it was delicious. But they would never have thought of making it for themselves. But the strange part about it is that we had to order the ingredients, and the butcher actually had to get them from the market for us as a special order, which was so available to us as children.

So did your mother teach you to cook?

[End of F12810 Side A] [F12810 Side B]

In answer to that question Linda, not really. We were taught at Mother’s elbow. Now Mother never had any scales, she wouldn’t know what half a pound was. As she mixed, she tasted, and as she tasted she adjusted. And that’s the way it worked. Mother had been dead about, less than a year, and we found ourselves, Ray and I, in Soho, outside a wet fish shop, that, on the slab there was carp. And one of Mum’s favourite dishes, and she made it to perfection, was carp. We went in and we bought a carp, and I knew exactly what to do, I had seen her do it so often. And we got it home, and I cleaned it, and I prepared it, and I started cooking. Doing exactly what I thought she had done. And I declared it cooked. It was inedible. I had left out something, I don’t know what it was, but, we just could not eat it. Now what it was, I don’t know, but I, I had prepared it, and done it exactly as she... But there was something lacking. And I don’t know if it was the way I put the ingredients together, or if it was the quantities, but it was no good whatsoever. And to this day I have not cooked a carp. Remarkable, because nothing was ever written down, nothing was Lily Silberberg C1046/02/04 F12810B Page 47

ever written down. Now everything is so carefully weighed and measured, and anyhow, if you want anything, you just go and buy it as it is. Not in those days.

And were you doing any sewing then, when you were a child?

The first piece of sewing that I did, and I was told about this because I haven’t really any recollection of it, was that, I made a buttonhole in a feather, in a feather quilt. And of course there were feathers all over the place. And I do believe that I received a spanking for it. Well having watched my mother, I think I might have had measles or something like that and out of boredom I took the scissors, cut a hole in a quilt. It was a feather bed actually. Cut a hole in it, and then proceeded to try to, to sew round it. Well it doesn’t take very long for feathers to disappear – feathers to escape rather, from, from anything that is compact. So there was feathers all over the place, and I got a hiding for it. There was my first recollection. The other, there was a family that lived in the block of buildings, in the building that we lived in, the family name was Citron. Father Citron was a tailor, had his own room, and, I think I could have been about four years old, I did a bit of machining for him. I don’t doubt for one minute that he had to unpick it and do it again. But I had used a treadle machine. I had to do it standing up because I was too short to, to sit on a stool and do it. But it, it caused a laugh. I took to knitting readily, very very readily, and I took to crochet very readily.

And how did you learn those?

Mum. No, my aunt, my aunt did knitting. She was from Poland, and it’s a different form of knitting to what we know it, inasmuch, we use the two needles, and we use one hand to loop round. In, the way they do it on the Continent, the wool is wound round the index finger of the left hand, and the right hand just guides the needle into the loop, snatches some of the yarn that is round the finger, and you pull it off. That is a Continental method.

And is that how you knit?

No. No, no, no. I can knit like that. I can also knit the Greek way, where the yarn is passed round the back of the neck, and then it is the thumb that flicks the, the yarn Lily Silberberg C1046/02/04 F12810B Page 48

over the needle. So... But no, I mainly use the two-hand method. Crochet, my mother could crochet, and, she taught me how to, how to do it. And once you get an interest in something, you can practice on it. So I, I don’t know whether I was an adventurous sort of child. But, any other handicrafts, no, no, not really, not really.

You were telling me that you could remember the first film that you saw.

Oh, yes, the first film. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

The Disney cartoon?

The Disney cartoon. It was the first full-length film. He’d made shorts before, but the first time I went into a cinema, I was out with Mum on a Sunday, Sunday evening, and we... It was lovely to walk down Regent Street, because Regent Street was really a gracious thoroughfare. The shops were magnificent. And we used to walk down one pavement to Piccadilly Circus, cross over the road at Swan and Edgar, and come up again back to Oxford. Because, Oxford Street, Regent Street, were our, were our high streets virtually, not that we ever bought anything there, but it was lovely to do window shopping. And Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs were showing at the New Gallery, Regent Street. And we passed by, I remember, I had my mother’s hand, I was walking like this, so you can imagine how small I was. It was 1936 I believe. I believe it was 1936. I can’t honestly remember. And we passed by, and we stopped to look at all the stills that were outside. In those days there was always stills and posters. And, the doorman was there, and I, I remember saying to Mum, ‘Can we go inside to see the...?’ And she said, ‘No,’ she said, ‘No, we can’t.’ And the doorman said, ‘Hang on just...’ I remember this distinctly, the doorman said, ‘Hang on just a minute.’ And he disappeared into a blackness. Now, where he went, I don’t know. But then out came what I can now remember must have been an usherette, and she said, ‘There won’t be anybody about now, come in.’ And we stood at the back of the cinema, and we looked at it. And it was just maybe the last ten, fifteen minutes of it. And of course, I was awestruck. Awestruck. And I think that it showed there for the best part of a year, and during that year we actually went and saw it. Mum took Ray and I. And we queued up round the back, and it must have been to go up in the gods, because I don’t think it was more than about sevenpence or eightpence per seat. And Lily Silberberg C1046/02/04 F12810B Page 49

that was the first film that I saw, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. A lovely memory.

What about your brother, he...?

Well, he was, he was... He belonged to the Boys’ Club. He was sort of, a man on his own as it were. And he had his circle of friends, his friends always used to congregate up in our place, there was always a rough and tumble, being the youngest one was always picked up and sort of thrown around as it were. And also being a dumpling of a child. And always being tickled; of course I would squeal probably like a little pig. But, so, it was happy, it was happy. Most of the rooms didn’t have furniture in them. So consequently, you could, you could sort of, run from one room to another. It wasn’t until we got the furniture, then we were, you know, play in the corridor, but not in any of the rooms. So, very very nice, very nice indeed.

Can you remember what sort of clothes you wore as a child?

Yes. Yes. I wore what Ray had grown out of. We had to, because of economics. Ray very often wore things that had been passed on to her from cousins, where my mother went to work when she first came over to England. But, I digress slightly. Ray was a child that, you could dress her early in the morning, and you could undress her in the evening, and not a blemish on the garments. Not a blemish on the garments. She would sit and read a book, because I think I told you on one of the other tapes, she was the only one that could read and write in the family. And consequently she wasn’t a child of the streets. And whatever was left over from Ray, I could go into as if it had never been worn. But it was a very very bad day in my parents’ life when I outgrew Ray, because there was nothing left over from me that could be passed on to her. So every... You could put me in something at nine o’clock in the morning; by ten past nine it had wilted. But, different character, different character entirely. Coming back to these parcels of clothing that used to be given to us from time to time by these cousins. Silk stockings with one ladder in them. So, Ray’s formative years were, stockings with one ladder in them. Never stockings bought particularly for her, but stockings with one ladder. And, it was all the rage then to have bright tan stockings, so she was, bright tan stockings, pure silk with one Lily Silberberg C1046/02/04 F12810B Page 50 ladder in them. (laughs) The only thing that Mum distinctly refused to let us have that was passed down, that was shoes. Anything else didn’t matter. Shoes most certainly not. And when we outgrew anything, whatever was salvageable, was laundered, packed up, and taken into our local school, in my particular case Upper Marylebone Street, to be passed round to children, to families of children, that could not afford it. So even we had something to pass on to others who were in even worse dire straits than we were. Toys. I never remember my parents ever buying us toys. But, Mum had a friend, a very very dear friend, who absolutely adored Ray and I; although she had children of her own, she adored Ray and I, and every Christmas we were bought toys. And, toys, some of them were educational, inasmuch there might be a book with maps in it. She bought us a lovely tea service, china tea service, and a little dresser to hang the cups up on. Dolls. Being the clumsy person, well clumsy kid that I was, those dolls were china dolls, and quite frequently the heads went. And of course if the head went, the body went with it. But I can’t remember my parents ever buying us toys. And if we were seen to be tiring of a toy, provided it survived that long, it was then given to the Middlesex Hospital children’s ward. A certain workman that was doing some paper hanging in our place, in the flat, he made us a dolls’ house. And looking back on it now, it must have been lovely. But again, we tired of it. And by that time, we had left the infants at the school, we were going up, we had become juniors as it were, and that, that dolls’ house was given to the infants section of the school. So nothing was ever left idle as it were. If it had another use to it, it was passed on. And I think that that is something that might be a little bit lacking. Things are more prone to be thrown away these days. And even charity shops are a little bit picky with what they, what they, what they take now. But still, that’s the way it goes. That is the way it goes. Can you turn the.....

[break in recording]

Can you remember buying your shoes?

Yes. Dolcis.

And where were they?

Lily Silberberg C1046/02/04 F12810B Page 51

Oxford Street. And I can tell you exactly where they are, where they were. It was the block between Berners Street, coming up towards Great Titchfield Street. It was a very very nice Dolcis, and invariably the shoes that we were bought were patent leather ankle straps. Now that might sound quite frivolous, is that the right word? Yes. Because those shoes were only for best. And our, the main shoes that we wore were plimsolls from Marks & Spencer. Not the Marks & Spencer as we know it now, but a small shop, a small store, in Brewer Street in Soho. Sixpence a pair.

And what colour were they?

Black. Black plimsolls.

Can you remember anything else about this Marks & Spencer?

Oh yes. Wooden floors, a flight of wooden stairs to go down into the, the lower department. All of our vests and knickers and liberty bodices were bought at Marks & Spencer, those that weren’t passed down as it were; socks, Marks & Spencer. And the trade mark of Marks & Spencer in those days was St Margaret. Dad’s underwear came from Marks & Spencer. And it was a little two-fronted shop that sold mainly, as I say, underwear, men, women and children. And downstairs was other bits and pieces, and plimsolls.

Would your mother take you and Ray shopping, would you always go with her, or...?

Yes, and the main shopping was done in Berwick Street market. Again I remember the flares being lit, because there was no other way of illuminating the streets. And it would be at dusk, and in, in the evening. I now know why we used to go there at that time. Although there was a market in Great Titchfield Street, we used to go the other side to do what you call big shopping, and of course to go to Marks & Spencer if we needed anything, is because possibly they were jobbing the stuff out slightly cheaper. Which is, I don’t think that they ever did that in Great Titchfield Street market. There’s no shame in that, it was a large family, and it had to be catered for, and it could only be catered by what was coming in. And, as I said the other day, we were never ones to borrow; you never borrowed, you did without but you didn’t borrow. Lily Silberberg C1046/02/04 F12810B Page 52

So... Then of course everything that could be used, was used. We had a very very staple diet, nothing fancy. A chicken was boiled once a week, that was over the Saturday and Sunday, and if there was a bit left over for stew on Monday, all well and good. And, a lot of vegetables were used. And, meat as was known, you know, a slab of steak or anything like that, no, no. I can’t remember. The only thing that was ever used for stewing purposes was shin of beef, that was used, and again, very little of that, and a mass of vegetables. So there was nothing, no fancy flavours put in. Salt and pepper. And the rest of it came from the goodness of what was being used. And a great deal of garlic, a lot of garlic. So... You didn’t buy mince meat as already prepared, you had your own grinder at home; you washed the meat, you put it into a grinder, and out came meat like that. A lot of eggs were used, but eggs were, you could get very very good eggs I believe at sixpence a dozen.

What did you drink?

Tea. Tea. No fancy colas or anything like that. It would have to be an extremely hot day for Dad to purchase a half pint bottle of beer and a large bottle of lemonade to make shandy. Dad never went into a pub. And the only thing, at the off-licence area at the pub at the corner street, half a pint of, half a pint of Guinness, I think he used to buy, or we used to buy Guinness. But other than that, Father was one of the most abstemious people imaginable. Didn’t smoke, didn’t drink. He stopped smoking, I think when he was about thirty. Never ever drank. And never, never bet. But was a card sharp. Oh yes, he could... Never ever bet for money. Coming back to the Workers’ Circle, they had, I think it was three nights a week, three evenings a week where you could go and you could play cards with people. Money was never exchanged. There was, somebody was boiling a kettle and they’d make a pot of tea. It was a social meeting place. And Dad used to work from half-past seven to half-past seven at night, seven...half-past seven in the morning till the same time at night, and he used to come home, eat something, have a shave, and he’d go there for an hour or so, just to play cards with the boys. And he always used to bet, always used to play for chocolate, and that was chocolate that was being sold in the, in this, this club house. And he would bring us home maybe a dozen bars of chocolate.

So he was very good. Lily Silberberg C1046/02/04 F12810B Page 53

Very...oh, he was a card sharp. He was a card sharp. And we used to complain, ‘Dad, don’t bring us home any more...’ what was it? ‘Fry’s. We don’t like Fry’s.’ Fry’s chocolate. It had a very sweet centre to it. But we did like Turkish delight. So he used to bring us home, he used to pick out the Turkish delight for us. And it...the pleasures were so simple, so very very simple. There was no radio. And he used to go there for maybe an hour three times a week, just to play cards with the boys. And other than that, sometimes a friend would come up and he would play chess with them. We’ve still got his chess set, and his dominoes set.

And did you play with him?

He tried to teach us chess, but that... We had other things to do. Draughts, I could just about stagger through a game of draughts, but he would wipe the, he’d wipe the whole board within a matter of minutes. And as I say, we have got his, his chequerboard, it’s made out of cardboard. It’s a loving thing. And, we’ve got his wooden set of dominoes and chess. I’ve got dominoes, yes we’ve got dominoes as well, but I could never quite get the hang of that. Friends used to come round just a matter of a few years ago, and they could play dominoes and they tried to get us to; couldn’t get the hang of it, couldn’t get the hang of it. No no no no no.

[End of F12810 Side B] [F12811 Side A]

Tell me how you came to go to the Barrett Street Trade School.

Yes. I did mention to you in private that there was a woman who was very very instrumental in our lives, her name was Lily Montagu. Looking back on it now, I realise that they must have been philanthropists. They were people of standing, they were people of great establishment here in Great Britain. They were people of great forethought for the community. They didn’t just do it for the Jewish population, because they were Jews themselves. They were very very anglicised, and they were what would be known now as Liberal Jews. I should think that there must have been a great deal of intermarriage in their family, because parallel families of the same type Lily Silberberg C1046/02/05 F12811A Page 54

and era, if that’s the right word, were the Montefiores, the Rothschilds. This family Montagu were, they were a baronetcy of the Swaythlings, Baron Swaythling. And, this family were very much for people that couldn’t help themselves, they would help everybody. And nobody was ever ever turned away. If they couldn’t help them, they would put you on to a society that hopefully could, or if not, then those people would pass you on. But nobody ever went away without being taken note of. Wonderful people, as I can remember them. And they had in the family, the women of the family, there was Miss Lily, and her sister, Miss Miriam. Miss Lily was the one who inherited the title of Honourable, because I don’t think that there were any male. I think a male would have taken on the baronetcy. But she was the Honourable Lily Montagu. And her sister, I don’t think her sister was Honourable. And there was a cousin who was Edith Lewis. I have photographs of them, but I can’t put my hands on them. And I look at these three ladies, they literally dedicated their lives to others. And they opened up an organisation, it was called the West End Settlement for Girls. And my mother was one of the members. And, the Honourable Lily Montagu was a witness at my parents’ wedding at Marylebone Registry Office. Now the mere fact that my parents were not married in relationship to the religious rights, she was... That is...that is how liberal-minded she was. And also, she was an ordained rabbi of the Liberal branch of the synagogue, where any service that was taken, was taken in English and not in Hebrew. So consequently, all the congregation could understand it. The only time that there was a Hebrew, a Hebrew prayer said, was at the end of a meeting, and that was just to bring back a certain, a certain feeling. But once that was over, there was no religiosity in it whatsoever. So, how did I get to Barrett Street? We used to go to the, to the Girls’ Club, Ray and I, and my brother was a member of the Girls’ Club, the boys’ section of the Girls’ Club, where he met his future wife. And he was an active member of the operatic society, and of the drama society. Because these operas and dramas would be put on on a Sunday evening, and that was our outing, going with Mum to this building in Alfred Place, just off of the Tottenham Court Road, very near to Goodge Street. I can see the building now, with two flights of stairs going up. Miss Lily and Miss Miriam would always be sitting, to greet the people as if they were guests who had come to see the play or the opera. I think one paid something in the, something like twopence, and you found your own place. And you settled down and you watched the play, or you listened to the, to the opera. The opera was invariably Gilbert and Sullivan. So Gilbert and Sullivan has got a very, Lily Silberberg C1046/02/05 F12811A Page 55

very dear place in my heart. My brother playing the part of a policeman in the, oh, what is it? Trial By Jury, playing the part of a policeman. He was a pirate in The Pirates of Penzance. And he was a villager in Cloche de Corneville, which, I’m not quite sure, was that Gilbert and Sullivan? I’m not quite sure. But nevertheless, he was an active member. And he also appeared in several plays. So he thoroughly enjoyed himself there. And as I say, he met his future wife there. But we, we were never active members like that. But, Ray... No, my brother was apprenticed to a barber, so he had to serve a five-year apprenticeship to a barber, which, my mother had to borrow the money, and had to pay it back at something like 1s.6d. a week, 1s.6d. would be, one shilling five p, sixpence, two and a half p, seven and a half p per week. And I’ve still got the book.

Where did she borrow the money from?

It was from the Board of Guardians, situated in Liverpool Street, very near Liverpool Street. And it was the Board of Guardians for Jewish Immigrants. And she went there, and she borrowed the money, and she paid it back. And when she paid back the whole lot, a letter arrived to say that she had paid something in the order of three shillings more than what she should have done, and please accept this postal order in lieu of the three shillings that you had overpaid.

Why...why was it her responsibility to borrow the money, rather than your father?

Dad was the worker. It was Mum that did the domestic bits, and, education, although Father was the greatest instigator of it. You know, it was always, ‘Esther, see to them.’ I don’t know whether things go on like that in the world today, but, definitely, it was a patriarchal household, but it was run by the matriarch. And you know, what Mum said, went. But it had to be worked round in such a way that it was Dad who was, you know, he was the one who, who thought of it. It, it... It was a very good way of thinking, but it was for Mum to find ways and means. Definitely, Mum was the stronger character, and Dad knew it. So anyhow, the money was, was found. Freddy was apprenticed to the barber. There was also evening classes going on for hairdressing and barbering at the Regent Street Polytechnic, which he went to. He learnt to marcel wave there, and he used to come home and he used to practice on us, Lily Silberberg C1046/02/05 F12811A Page 56 and the smell of singeing hair was dreadful. (laughs) But never mind. So right. He was catered for. Ray went to Pitman’s, because as I say, she was the only one who could read and write. So she was as it were, for the reading and writing part of it, shorthand typing, which she excelled at. I don’t know whether this will be of any interest to anybody listening to the tape. My mum spoke English without an accent; although she couldn’t read it, she couldn’t write it, she spoke English impeccably. But would get her words muddled up. And, we heard it, we heard it, but we, we didn’t interrupt her, we just let her carry on. She was speaking to somebody and she wanted to impress them. Oh, I, I...I’ve jumped a little tiny bit. Ray eventually went to work for a solicitor with great, great hopes of her going into the law. So, she worked for a solicitor. And, now we can go back to Mum impressing this other woman about her three children. ‘Yes, my son, he’s a hairdresser. My youngest daughter, she goes to college to be a dress designer. But my pride and joy is my eldest daughter, she solicits for a living.’ (laughs) That’s lovely isn’t it. And, and this woman was, you know, equally unaware of... (laughing) Equally unaware that, you know...

So how did you know what it meant?

Well, we were quite adult by that time. We were quite adult. But... She was impressing this woman. And... This woman actually took it that my sister worked for a solicitor, and you know, we, we didn’t stop it in the slightest, no way. Malaprop. That is a genuine Mrs Malaprop isn’t it. So anyhow, coming back to me. So, Ray was dealt with, she went to Pitman’s. But, the fees were quite reasonable, and it was a short course of something like, eighteen months, an intense course, really intense. And, unfortunately part of the way through she went into hospital with diphtheria. And, then had to make up the time when she came out of hospital. And this was all during the war time, so bombs were dropping, but that doesn’t matter, if you went to school, you went to school. And as for myself, it was in 1942, Mum said, ‘Come on, we’ve got to find out what’s good for you,’ that means me. And I was always interested in drawing round the margins of a paper, or, or taking, even drawing on the walls from time to time, dresses. Dresses, dresses, dresses. Didn’t know the workings of a dress, didn’t dress particularly well myself, always looked a scruff. But, Mum felt, the garment industry was for my Lily. So where better to go and take Lily Silberberg C1046/02/05 F12811A Page 57

counsel but to go and see one of the Miss Montagus about education for the third and last one? So we went to see Miss Montagu, and Miss Montagu said, ‘Ah, I will put you in touch with my cousin Miss Lewis, who deals with people wanting to go into education.’ So we went along and we saw Miss Lewis, in the same building, might have just been two or three rooms up the corridor.

The building near Goodge Street, in Alfred...?

In Alfred Place. And, there was this woman, very bony-faced lady. But the gentility just oozed from her. The gentility, the understanding. And, Miss Lewis said, ‘Well, the only school that will deal with somebody who wants to go into the garment industry, in this side of London,’ because there was another school in the borough, which is Lambeth somewhere, they, they did a course of dressmaking there, she said, ‘The only one that is somewhere around here would be Barrett Street.’ Never even heard of it. Hadn’t heard of it, not in the slightest. So, Miss Lewis said that she would write a letter of introduction to the principal of Barrett Street, introducing me to her, and if Miss Cox, who was the principal, had a vacancy, or she wanted to interview me, she said, ‘by all means she will let you know by post.’ And this is how gently it was done, that Miss Lewis wrote a personal letter to Ethel Cox at Barrett Street, saying that there was somebody called Lily Silberberg who would like to take a part in a course at Barrett Street Trade School, and if she could possibly interview me with the idea of me going there as a pupil. And in due course a letter arrived, Ray read it, to say that I had been granted an interview. That would my mother take me there for an interview. And I think it was in 1942 and a bit, 1941 and a bit? I can’t remember. Can’t quite remember for the life of me. I think that I was thirteen at the time, I think I was thirteen at the time. At the appointed time, we went along to Barrett Street. And, very nice, imposing building. And, there was other people sitting there, other kids sitting there with their, with their parents. And we inched our way along, and eventually became our, our turn. And we went in there. And there was this office with a rather daunting looking lady sitting behind the desk. We were ushered in by her secretary. And, this lady said, ‘I am Miss Cox, the Principal,’ and shook hands with my mother, and said, ‘This must be Lily.’ ‘Yes, this is my daughter Lily.’ ‘And would you please sit down,’ and we were made very comfortable. And Miss Cox started to speak to my mother. And they had a very nice conversation, I Lily Silberberg C1046/02/05 F12811A Page 58 was very busy looking around, you know, to see. Didn’t even have the wit or wisdom to take note of what I was looking at, or indeed what they were discussing. And then Miss Cox turned round to me and said to me, ‘Your mother tells me that you are very interested in drawing.’ And my mother butted in and said, ‘Yes, she’s very interested.’ And Miss Cox said, ‘I am speaking to Lily. Would you mind...’ You know, putting my mother beautifully in her place, but in no way ever offending. And this is an art of dealing with people. And she asked me various different questions. And, would I be interested to take on a course there? And went on to describe, that I could take a two-year course, and what the two-year course would be, which would be drawing, embroidery, dressmaking, manufacturing by machine, English, French, geography. In other words, it was further education. Not higher education, but further education. Because, you could leave school then at the age of fourteen. No... 1944 Act. You could leave school at thirteen then, and go out to work. But this would then be termed as further education, but not higher education necessarily. Or, I could take on a third year, go into the seniors, where it would be more to do with the industry, more of the same, but more intensified. And Mum said immediately, ‘Three years. Three years.’ So Miss Cox said, ‘Well, let’s see how she gets on for two years.’ And also, via the Girls’ Club and Miss Lewis, there had been an arrangement that my fees...not my fees, they were not fees, but the transference, because it was education, the money could go to Barrett Street. And my mother I found out later on had to top it up with something like £1.4s. per year, to top up the money. And that was for certain, certain things that could not be provided by general education. And, in due course, in the September, I went there. Now it was supposed to be a full uniform. Hat... How did it work? Yes. Yes. It was a navy blue skirt, two shirts, a pullover, a blazer, a hat with a hat band with the college crest on it, and whenever we did trade subjects, we had to wear white coats.

And what would a trade subject be?

Dressmaking, pattern cutting. Whenever it was... That’s what, they’re called trade.

Practical course.

Lily Silberberg C1046/02/05 F12811A Page 59

Practical. It’s what they called trade subjects. Other than that, everything else was general education. But a certain amount of time was set aside for trade subjects. So, I have still got somewhere a timetable with the five-day timetable on it, and certain areas are just marked in with ‘trade’. Now that trade could be dressmaking, which was couture dressmaking, or manufacture, which was more using of the machines, and pattern cutting, which was manipulating of block patterns. Other than that, the rest of the week was taken up with embroidery, design, and as I said, English, French, geography, all other subjects that would have been a continuum of general education. So it was part and part, I think it was, two-fifths were trade and the rest of it was the other subjects. And it was during the war. I went to... Yes. You could not buy uniforms to fit me, I was much too large. I was too large for an average thirteen-year- old. So my father made me a skirt, a navy blue skirt. I remember going to C&A and buying a hat that didn’t fit me, was a felt hat. In due course the ribbon was put round it with the college crest, the school crest on it. And I was... They couldn’t furnish me with any blouses, so eventually blouses were made for me. It was all very very accommodating, it was lovely. The first three or four weeks I was wretched.

Why?

Don’t know. Didn’t click. Didn’t click. Partially, it was all girls, and you were taught by women. Secondly, I had been bombed out of eleven schools. I had never been evacuated, and I had been bombed out of eleven schools, and in consequence was rather undisciplined. And here they were very very disciplined. And I just could not take the regimentation of it. It just didn’t, it didn’t click. So for several weeks I was wretched. But nevertheless, these things happened. And I told my mum I’m not very happy. She said, ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you haven’t given it a chance yet. At least give it a chance. You’ve still got to find your way round the building.’ Remember it was only, remember it was only one building and a couple of annexes. She says, ‘You haven’t even found out who is who in the place. You’re still blundering around the place.’ Very very wise words. Now Barrett Street as a school had been evacuated to Maidenhead, and the pupils were just starting to dribble back, and also the members of staff.

Even though it was wartime? Lily Silberberg C1046/02/05 F12811A Page 60

It was wartime, this was all wartime. This was me going to school during the day, and going to, into shelters at night. And coming out of the shelters at seven o’clock in the morning, carrying, carrying your, your mattress, your pillow, your blanket, going home, getting washed, dressed, and then going to school. Because the bombing was definitely during the night. But there was the occasional air raid during the day. But during the night, if the sirens went or not, you still went down to the shelter, because you knew, invariably there would be a warning, albeit that there wasn’t always bombing. But nevertheless, we went to school, I wasn’t very happy. But Barrett Street was starting to come back together, inasmuch that the youngsters were coming back from Maidenhead, with it the members of staff, and the members of staff were more of a mixture when they started to come back. And for trade, I was given, I was put into the class run by somebody called Miss Wright, who was an owlish-looking lady. Looking back at her now, she couldn’t have been more than thirty-five years old, but in those days, to me she looked like an old spinster. But, she had such gentility of manner, she would show me how to do things that I could pick up very very easily, and bit by bit I started to warm to the place, bit by bit my work progressed.

What sort of things did she show you?

Fly running. Now you’ve never seen fly running have you?

No.

Now fly running was something that was done in the Victorian times, when they had a lot of gathering. Now we know gathering now, that either you put it under the machine and you push it up as you go along, or you put in, you put the tension of the machine down to loose and to a very very large stitch, and you put in several lines parallel, and then you take a thread and you can pull it up, and there is your machine, your mechanically made, gathering.

[End of F12811 Side A] [F12811 Side B] Lily Silberberg C1046/02/05 F12811B Page 61

You kept the, you kept the fabric still, and you passed the needle through the fabric. Now, I can’t describe it for the benefit of the tape, but, I didn’t know it then, but it was the most archaic way of doing anything, but, once you got the know-how of it... In other words, what they were doing, they were putting dexterity into your fingers. They were concentrating you on a job of work. They put in an element of boredom into it, because let’s face it, a lot of life’s tasks are boring, but you’ve got to work through them. Of course, I didn’t, I didn’t understand anything of that, but nevertheless, I could fly, run with the best of them. Then we had to do pin tucks; then we had to do drawn threads. And whatever I picked up, I stuck with it until I had, not exactly perfected it, but I had mastered it. And everything that we did, we had to tack it into a book, the book was made out of sheets of paper, because that during the war time, you couldn’t buy a book, so you had to make the book. A sheet of paper was given you, you had to cut it up into so many sections, and then you sewed it all together. And then you sewed your samplers into the book. Where the machine was concerned, I had been brought up, as I said, with the old lad that lived downstairs, and at least I could recognise a machine when I saw it, but this time I didn’t have to stand to use it, I could actually sit to use it. And again, there was a certain skill, a dexterity that was necessary, a understanding, coordination of eye, mind, hand and foot, had to bring that all together. And again my work was of a reasonable standard. And so... Oh yes, my embroidery, that I didn’t like. I was determined never to do any embroidery, so why should I be doing embroidery? So consequently it didn’t really interest me. But what I didn’t know then, what I didn’t know then, and again this is to my, oh, I don’t know, the stupidity of myself, I was being taught by one of the most famous people in the art of surface decoration. Her name was Miss Hall, a very very gaunt-looking woman, that whatever she touched, it was as though she was doing the most miraculous things. Now why did I not take note of what that woman had to show me? What is there stubborn in the brain that, that, I just would not take it on board? But nevertheless, the little bit that did rub off on me, I treasure now. And I could have had the whole thing shown to me. She urged me, she said, ‘But,’ she said, ‘I’ve been told by other people that are teaching you that you are very good at it,’ you know. But I, it was a certain stubbornness in me. It wasn’t my dislike of the person, because I absolutely adored her, I thought she was marvellous. It was just the subject, stubbornness towards the subject. Lily Silberberg C1046/02/05 F12811B Page 62

Did embroidery seem old-fashioned?

Old-fashioned. It was not going to be part of my future. Little did I know. Little did I know, that afterwards, I would have to mix amongst people asking them to show me certain things that would have give... These people would have given their eye teeth to have been taught by Miss Hall. Anyhow, I was very good at everything that I did. My dressmaking was par excellence, it was one of the best. And so I spent a wonderful, wonderful two years at Barrett Street doing my junior’s and intermediate, and passed everything that I had to do with flying colours.

Can you remember any of the dresses that you make?

Yes. Several. Miss Wright said, ‘Lily, you will make a dress for me,’ that’s for herself. And it was in aubergine wool. Now it wasn’t just a matter of making a pattern and cutting it out. One had to go through a very very long process before one got to the actual cutting of the garment. And it was a matter of making the pattern. Now it wasn’t a matter of making the pattern in two dimension, it was in three dimension, which was modelling, where you take a piece of calico that has got similar qualities to the actual fabric that you’re going to use, heavyweight for thick fabric, medium weight for finer, very fine, et cetera et cetera, till you went through all the grades of calico, till you arrived at the one that you wanted. A stand was then padded to take on all the shape and stance and figuration of the person who you’re going to make it for. And you would then use the calico to make a three-dimensional pattern, mark it all up. If it was a symmetrical garment, you only made half, but you needed the whole garment for trying on, to the client. So you transferred it to the other side, trace tacked it all through, and there you had a pattern which you then proceeded to sew up by hand, including the sleeve, and everything was exactly where it was. And then the client tried it on. In this particular case, it was Miss Wright, because the garment was for her. And then another member of staff would come in and do the fitting. The fitting was marked in red. The garment had a levelling.

What does that mean?

Lily Silberberg C1046/02/05 F12811B Page 63

For the hem, so that the hem was parallel to the floor, irrespective of what the stance of the person was. It was always levelled from the floor upwards, so the hem was always parallel to the floor. And, once that was OK’d, it was for me then to take everything apart, to smooth out this fabric pattern. The fabric was then presented to me. If it needed shrinking, I had to do the shrinking, under supervision. And then the pattern was actually laid out. The reason why you shrink the fabric before you cut it is that if you cut the piece, and then during the manufacture of that garment you happen to, to use a hot iron with steam, that piece of fabric would then shrink, and not being in keeping with the rest of the garment. And consequently, you could even distort the whole garment in the, in the pressing, because it would shrink in areas. So it was always best, if the garment was of wool, to shrink the fabric first by laying it out on an ironing board, laying down a damp cloth, and then diligently pressing it so the actual fabric shrunk. Then you knew it wouldn’t move during manufacture. Now that is a lesson that has to be learnt. And that was a piece of experience I shall never forget. Anyhow, the fabric was then duly laid out, the pattern laid onto it, the pieces cut with a goodly goodly margin all the way round it, and then trace tacked, and then re-tacked into an actual garment; again a fitting, brought back to me to make the alterations, because the fabric was different to the actual calico pattern. So you can imagine that with the toing and froing, backwards and forwards, one would have to have a love affair with the garment that one is making, and consequently a garment would take best part of a year to make. Not to mention that all the seams on the inside had to be over-sewn by hand; every buttonhole made by hand, and I excelled at buttonholes, let’s face it. I had the, I had the master craftsperson of buttonholes as my tutor. And everything was in keeping. Now those garments were made in the most professional couture method of make. Those garments were made to, well, to last a lifetime.

And what style would you say they were?

Very very simple. The skirt usually had two box pleats in the front, and an inverted pleat at the back, with side seams. So therefore, the silhouette was straight. And the bodice part of it, simple round neck, maybe three or four buttons down the front. Darts, not really, darts weren’t being worn, but the amount of fullness was put in at the waist where it met the skirt. I remember in this particular case, because she didn’t Lily Silberberg C1046/02/05 F12811B Page 64

have all that much fabric, it was a short sleeve with a cuff on it, and it had a belt, which I had to make as well. It’s a different belt.

From the fabric?

From the fabric. It’s a different belt, she showed me how to make a belt. And, there was a lot of stitching on it.

Decorative stitching?

Decorative stitching. And that was done by a machine, foot-space stitching. And every row had to be absolutely parallel to the next one, or it had to be undone, and do it again. Undo it, and do it again. And that... Although that was the actual garment, I should think in certain places it must have been like a postage stamp, that, you know, that the piece could easily come away from the next part, because it had been stitched and re-stitched so often. So, but nevertheless, I passed with flying colours.

How did it do up?

There was, hooks and eye at the side, on the, on the left-hand side there were hooks and eyes, because zips were at a premium during the war. And each hook had to be covered with buttonhole stitch so that you didn’t see any metal, and the actual hook was applied round the eyes of the hook with buttonhole stitch. And on the other side we didn’t use a metal bar, but it was actually a bullion stitch, which is, which, you make a bar by putting the needle, winding the thread round the needle, and then delicately bending it over. It, it comes out like a bar. What would you call... You call it a bar tack now. And that was one of the last things that you would do in the garment, in order to finish off the garment. The hem, the placket. It wasn’t called...it was called a placket, at the side, that opening. We now call it a zip opening; it was a placket in those days. And the last thing to be sewn on when you pressed off the garment, and you took out all the, all the tackings and everything, the last thing when you had the garment laid out on the table in front of you, pressed and everything, you could then mark the buttons and sew on the buttons.

Lily Silberberg C1046/02/05 F12811B Page 65

And, did the garments become more complicated throughout the years that you were there?

Once you’ve made a couture garment, you can tackle any garment that there is. Our samplers, we had to have knowledge of use of lace, use of satin, use of wool, cotton, linen. Please note, I do not say anything that is man-made. There was no man-made. Everything was natural. And once you had been put through your paces in the making of a simple garment like I made for Miss Wright, you could then, using the same method of preparation, tackle most things that came to you. Provided that they were, not going mad, you know, flamboyant. But in those days, nothing was flamboyant, it was during the war.

Yes, because where did, where did people get their fabrics from?

Well, in the case of many of these schoolteachers, they always put away a little bit of fabric. And, and when it came to it, then the garment had to be made, had to be, the garment had to be cut in accordance with the cloth. So it could have been a winter weight of garment, but with a short sleeve, because the cloth wasn’t there. Remembering that school teachers before the war were very very frugal people, a cut above others, but they, they would know a nice piece of fabric when they saw it. And they would buy it, and they would put it into tissue paper and put it into a drawer to be used in due course.

When you say there was no use of manmade fabrics, was that because they weren’t available, or because the teachers didn’t think that they were appropriate?

The, the only manmade fabric before the war, to my recognition, not recognition, recollection, beg your pardon, is rayon. And even that was a natural fibre, inasmuch it was made of wood. It was cellulose. Now I think that cellulose has got its bases in wood. But nylon wasn’t known. Even parachutes were made out of pure silk. So, everything that one, everything that one did... Nylon had not even been invented. But as, as life progressed, what do they say, that necessity is the mother of invention, that by some reason or other, and I’m sure it must have been as a by-product, there was nylon. Now nylon even today is, is in crystal form I believe, and it has to go through Lily Silberberg C1046/02/05 F12811B Page 66

various different stages before it can be made into a thread, or spun as it were. But prior to that, everything was natural. Yes, you, you could glaze cotton to make it look like silk; it could be shiny like satin but it was still cotton. But rayon was about the only thing that was, you could say man-made, but out of a natural, a natural product. But we were taught to the highest standards, so rayon didn’t really come into it. The first time we were aware of nylon as nylon was the stockings, and that was introduced into Great Britain with the American forces. But nylon as something that you wore, didn’t really come into it. A little while ago somebody handed me a piece of fabric, and I handled it, I said, ‘Oh I haven’t handled fabric like this for years.’ Beautiful piece of silk, beautiful. And they blinked at me, and I said, ‘It’s lovely.’ I said, ‘It’ll make up beautifully.’ Hundred per cent nylon. I’ve also been caught out where wool is concerned. ‘Oh, feel that, oh it’s lovely. Lamb...what it is, it’s lamb’s wool isn’t it?’ And they said, ‘No.’ A hundred per cent manmade. It wouldn’t wear like lamb’s wool, but it handled like lamb’s wool, but it wasn’t. So, you know...

And when you made a garment, the style was something that Miss Wright chose?

Oh yes. Oh yes. When we were in the art department doing drawing, we drew what the teachers told us to draw, because amongst all of what we were being taught, some of us were bored out of our tiny skulls, but looking back on it, they gave us great discipline in, in drawing the body first and then clothing the body. I now realise that if you draw the body first, and then clothe it, you will know exactly where everything has got to go where proportion is concerned, that your proportions will be much better than if you just do it haphazardly, to the extent, when I was working with students at the London College of Fashion, they were students from the design department. Now this is nothing against the design department, but things had become slick in the, in the workings of some members of staff. And consequently, students would bring me down garments that they wanted to make, but the head was non-existent, the neck was something like a drainpipe, shoulders were so huge that no shoulders could possibly... The whole thing was so distorted that you could not read a proportion from what was being drawn there. And I used to say to them, ‘This is lovely for fashion plate, but this is not what we would call a workroom sketch, which is a blueprint. So you can be in London, you can send your sketch to Hong Kong, and the person in Hong Kong Lily Silberberg C1046/02/05 F12811B Page 67

could make that garment to your proportions, because you have identified where things are on the body.’ Now, I was probably wrong to some extent.

Why?

You ask why. Things have moved forward to such a pace. If you ask me to draw something, I will draw it without the use of the body underneath it, but I can guarantee you, as far as I possibly can, that what I have drawn can go on to a garment, in the proportions that are correct body-wise. And let’s face it, it is the body that wears the garment. It’s the outside of the human being that fits the inside of a garment. Now the only time when you really do throw that away is when you’re doing fashion plate. But a fashion plate is almost unworkable when it comes into the practical field. And that is where I felt very very sorry to have to say to the student, ‘Now I’m afraid we’ve got to sit down for ten minutes and demystify this, because there’s certain parts on the body that have got to be catered for.’ A student would bring down a, a drawing where there was no sign of suppression, suppression being darts. Darts give shape to the garment. And this was in the days before micro fibre where you can make a garment without a dart, but the garment is distorted, but that is the, that is the image, that is the image that you want, that the garment is slightly distorted, that the garment flattens parts of the body, rucks up in other parts of the body. You’re forever tugging at it to keep it down. But that is the image. You just have to put on the, the television and watch Miss Dynamite wearing some of the most impossible wearing things, wearable things, imaginable. But we were taught strictly, the garment goes onto the body, the outside of you fits the inside of that garment, and fit was the major area to watch. And we were not just taught in two-dimension, we were taught in three-dimension. So not only did you get the height, not only did you get the girth, you also got the depth. And this is now why when you go to a museum, and you see garments, pre-war, I’ve seen students standing there, ‘Ooh! Aaah! Aaaah! Ooooh! Why can’t we make garments like that?’ [pause] You can’t do it because there is no place for it, in some areas of the industry. And garments have got to have a certain built-in, what would be the word, obsolescence. You’ve got to build in obsolescence somewhere in a garment, because the industry is going along so fast, that it’s got to keep up with itself, otherwise it will destroy itself. But you see, having been taught haute couture, the highest of couture imaginable, the, the Queen’s Lily Silberberg C1046/02/05 F12811B Page 68

Coronation robe was made to those standards, the standards that I was taught, when I left Barrett Street, which by this time was Barrett Street Trade School, Barrett Street Technical School, they hadn’t quite reached college status, but it had come from a trade school to a technical school when I left, but couture was still the hub of it. Even on the machines in production, you still had to have the highest of standards. And I left Barrett Street Technical School with those standards. What hadn’t been taken into account unfortunately, there had been a war, there had been a revolution, a revolution in the garment industry.

Why, what sort of revolution?

Uniforms. Standardisation. The mere fact that the working for a pattern in the three- dimension didn’t really have a place; it was mostly two-dimensional pattern-making from a block pattern, which although I excelled at, was still not what you would call in my forefront. The forefront to me was more the three-dimension, the drape, the utilisation of fabric, the time spent on it. And I came out into a world where the first thing that was yelled at me in a factory, ‘Put a sock into it Lil. Time is money.’ So, can you imagine a bit of confusion? And whereas I had excelled at school, I had to take my place with the menials in a factory, where the noise, the clatter, the smell, the shouting, the yelling, where I was not allowed to sit down, I had to be on my feet the whole time.

What factory was this?

It was a factory in a building called Middlesex House in Cleveland Street. It was a whole floor. It was run by three sisters. Now as I tell you this, I am boiling inside myself, because I came away, I spent ten weeks there, and they destroyed me. They destroyed me for two reasons. They laughed at me because I had a technical education. And there I was, confused, ill-equipped to deal with people, ill-equipped to stand on my feet from 8.30 in the morning to 5.30 in the afternoon, ill-equipped to hold the shears in my hand the whole time. Well of course, I beg your pardon, minus half an hour for lunch.

[End of F12811 Side B] Lily Silberberg C1046/02/06 F12812A Page 69

[F12812 Side A]

.....you will find that there are certain areas on my big knuckles where the actual lines are no longer existent. We can all look at our knuckles, you can see it there on my left hand, that there are knuckles, there are lines over the knuckles, but on the right hand there are no lines, they have all virtually been fused together. If you look at my thumb, you will find that that is very very pronounced, the big knuckle is very very pronounced, and then there is a dip. That is where my hands were in the shears from 8,30 in the morning till 5.30 at night, well in the evening, with half an hour for lunch. Being shouted at, ‘What do you think you are doing there? I didn’t tell you to do that; do this.’ That was one sister. Another sister coming up, ‘What are you doing that for? Can’t you take simple instruction? I didn’t tell you to do that.’ And I would say, ‘Well...’ She, ‘Don’t give me any argument.’ This was in front of a whole floor, the machines banging away. And people, I could feel, grinning behind me. And on more than one occasion I heard a remark, ‘Spent three years at technical school, didn’t she?’ Now, I was not tender, I’m not...I’m not a tender sort of person, having lived through the war, having seen things, having been responsible for things, having been buried under a building, I was not a shrinking violet. But there is only a certain amount that people can take, however tough you are. But working with these three witches, I had not been prepared that there were people like that in the world.

And how did you get the work there?

Through somebody who knew somebody. So consequently, I must have interviewed fairly well, otherwise I wouldn’t have got the job. And then on a certain day I appeared with my shears, and it was whiz bang, straight... No explanation was ever give to you, why you were doing a certain thing; you were just told, ‘Do it, and get on with it.’

And was it mostly cutting patterns?

No. Fabric. What they would do is that they would lay up fabric, that is lay up plys of fabric, to maybe fifty deep, and then they would lay the pattern on, and instead of cutting out directly to the pattern, there were certain areas that would be cut with a Lily Silberberg C1046/02/06 F12812A Page 70

margin all the way round. I would then take over these great slabs of shapes, and then I would take one from one, one from the other, pair it together, lay it flat on the table. Take the piece of pattern, lay it on, pounce it round with white chalk, white powdered chalk. Lift up the pattern, and then cut it round. So consequently everything then was paired. And you are doing this all day, every day.

And what sort of garments were they?

They, very nice garments, I could even sketch them for you now. That is how imprinted they are. I can even tell you that for the first time I discovered a colour, and that colour was pistachio. I hadn’t the remotest idea that a pistachio was a nut, nor indeed that it had the most wonderful, wonderful green colour about it. So you see, the imprint has indeed gone deep. And, this bullying, this shouting, this noise, this sniping. My hand by this time was festering, but there was no let-up. And I could not take on board what I had been taught, to what I am doing. Why had I gone through three years of excelling at everything that I had done, to land up like this? This was not what the garment industry was. And then, I realised that I was itching, and I was scratching, and I was tearing at myself. And then, Mum said to me, ‘You’ve got a nervous rash. You’ve got to get out of there.’

Were they making...did they design their own garments?

Yes, yes. Now it was a type of firm, they were manufacturers. And what they would do, their designer, who you never ever saw, the designer was in an ivory tower somewhere, you never saw them, they would do a design, the pattern cutters would make the pattern, a garment was cut, and then they would take that cut, that finished garment, it was made by a sample machinist, and that garment was then taken out and sold. Orders were taken on the garment, fabric was bought, was obtained, and then they would bring it back and that is where it was made. And then they were dispatched back again to the shops. And they were extremely good accounts. Bourne & Hollingsworth, where they, they had the garment. Gallery La Fayette, Dickens & Jones, John Lewis. It was, it was very good stuff.

Can you remember the name of the company? Lily Silberberg C1046/02/06 F12812A Page 71

Yes. Do you want me to mention it?

If you don’t mind.

I don’t mind it at all. It was Anne Green & Gross, three sisters. Anne Green was the married one, and the other two...yes, had their, had their maiden names, even though they were both married women. And I remember one of them had a son, Walter, and he used to come up to the factory from time to time, and he would sort of stand at the end of my table, or rather my piece of table that I was allowed, because space in anywhere like that is literally at a premium, and he would make faces at me. And I just ignored him, get on with it. And after ten weeks, I don’t even think it was, don’t even think it was twelve weeks, ten weeks possibly... [pause] Oh sorry, no, I thought you were disconnected. No, I beg your pardon. I went into the office, and I said, that was it. By the way, the wage was £3 a week.

And do you know how much one of the dresses cost?

I don’t think it could have been more than £4. £4 in those days was a pretty good garment. Pretty good garment. But what, what I was saying is, education, it had nothing really to do with the education that I had received. It was a different world. And it was that that made me, not explode but implode. I went into myself. And that is a very very bitter few weeks that I went through. But nevertheless, I went in there, and, I remember, I said, ‘I’m leaving, I’m leaving at the end of this week.’ This was on a Monday morning, and I said, ‘I’m going on Friday.’ Because you had to give a week’s notice. I think that, the worker had to give a week’s notice, but the boss could sack immediately, provided it was before eleven o’clock on a Monday morning. If it was after eleven, I believe they had to put a stamp onto your employment cards. Yes, I was earning the princely sum of £3, off from which came income tax; off from which came national insurance. But I didn’t have any fare money because it was within walking distance of where I lived, so that was a saving. And I remember, she sat at her desk, this was the senior one, the Anne Green herself, she sat at her desk, she was putting on some make-up, hideous woman, and she was putting on her make- up. And she looked at me and she says to me, ‘Oh you can’t take it, can you?’ I Lily Silberberg C1046/02/06 F12812A Page 72

didn’t even answer her. I just wanted out. And I lived through the rest of that week. She didn’t give me the sack, although I was making mistakes left right and centre, she never gave me the sack. I was a willing worker. And consequently I worked through the, through the week, picked up my shears, put them in my, in my carrier bag, and I went home. Jobless. Now, round the corner from where I lived, at the corner of Wells Street and, I can’t quite remember, at the corner of Wells Street...I can’t remember the name of...Mortimer Street, there was a shop, and the window was full of employment, where to go, for pressers, for machiners, for special machinists, for cutters, for everything like that. And the first port of call was to go round, just round the corner, to have a look in the window. Now I’d left my work on the Friday, had a miserable weekend, because I didn’t know what the Monday was going to come up with. Hadn’t thought about going round there to have a look. But on Monday morning, early Monday morning, I went round there, and I looked. And there was a notice in the window. Every time somebody got a job and was satisfactory, then they would take the note out of the window, and another one would go in. So all the manufacturers in the West End put their cards in there. It was advertising. Very crude way of doing it, thinking about it now, but it was effective. And, I looked at there, and I saw that there was, for Sellier Gowns, a cutter, a junior cutter. So I thought, nothing ventured, nothing gained. So I noted down the address, which was nothing else but a hop skip and a jump from where I was actually standing, looking in this shop window. I didn’t even go home and discuss it with Mum, but I went to the address. And went through this great big archway, into what could only be described as a huge courtyard. And off from the courtyard was running staircases, and, iron staircases, up to the various different floors. So obviously, there must have been manufacturing going on all over the place. And I sorted out the address, because everyone, every staircase had a number on it, sorted out this staircase, and in fear and trepidation, because of all the filth that was everywhere, I made my way up the stairs, it was dark, it was dank, it was smelly, and I came to this door. I rang the bell. No answer. I could hear a din coming out from in there. So I rang louder, longer rather than louder. And somebody yelled from the other side, ‘Come in.’ And I went in. As I opened up the door, the stench was overwhelming, the noise was horrific, and I had to climb over several dustbins to get to the person who had yelled at me to come in. And that was the first time that I saw Beattie Ackerman.

Lily Silberberg C1046/02/06 F12812A Page 73

I don’t know who Beattie Ackerman is.

Beattie Ackerman. If ever they said to me, if ever they asked me to create an award for somebody, I’m afraid I would have to name it the Beattie Ackerman Award. She’s long lost, she’s gone now. And there was this imposing woman, rather a stout lady, wearing a white coat, amongst all this din, amongst all this filth, me climbing over the, the dustbins, she said to me, ‘What do you want?’ I said, ‘I’ve come in because of the advert that you’ve got...’ What was it called? I’ve forgotten now what that, that shop was called. ‘Oh yes, yes yes. What’s your experience?’ I said, ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ve done a bit of cutting.’ ‘Have you done any laying up?’ ‘No, never done any laying up. But I’ve seen laying up being done.’ ‘Right, right, yes. You look a healthy girl.’

Did you mention that you’d been to Barrett Street?

Yes, I said I’d been to Barrett Street, and I, I had been taught pattern cutting. She says, ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘yes, all right, all right, all right,’ she said, ‘yes, you look a healthy girl.’ She said, ‘Can you start now?’ I said, ‘Well I haven’t got my shears with me.’ She says, ‘Well, where do you live?’ I said, ‘Great Titchfield Street.’ ‘Go home and get them.’

Why did you have to have your own shears?

You had your own shears, it was a mark of your self-esteem. My father’s friend had died about a month before I left Barrett Street, and my father purchased his shears from his widow for me. Now I put my hand into those shears, and those shears were mine. And, even to this day, I will not put a hand into a pair of shears if they don’t fit properly. Because, let’s face it, you have to be oblivious, it becomes part of you, even though those shears did form all of this, eventually my hand. The shears didn’t alter; my hand altered. That was a proving thing that I had to go through, to get my hand to fit into those shears, which were later on stolen by the way. Never mind, never mind. I went home and I got the shears. And Beattie Ackerman said to me, ‘Right, this is what you do.’ She took the pattern, flung it onto a piece of fabric, manoeuvred it round. And I’m thinking to myself, she’s not doing this properly, she’s not doing this Lily Silberberg C1046/02/06 F12812A Page 74

the way I was taught. But she said, ‘Yes, you wedge this in here, and if it doesn’t quite fit there, you push it up a bit, and you move it round a bit, and, right, you’ve got the length of fabric that you need for that.’ So, you reserve a piece of table space for that, you make a mark there, you make a mark there,’ she says, ‘and this is the way you lay up.’ And she took a roll of fabric, but she didn’t even stagger under the weight of it. I tried picking it up, and I had to sort of roll it along the floor. No, she picked it up, flung it down. Wound off, literally, metres upon metres of it, so that most of it was unwound, and she laid it on the table, put three irons on it to hold it down, marched it down, cut it off; put another three irons, marched it up again. Picked up the three irons, laid it down. And there she was, going up and down, and it was growing beautifully. She said, ‘Do you understand what I’m doing?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you’re laying up fabric, one on top of the other.’ ‘That’s right. Make sure your front edge is straight. Don’t let it run under or anything like that.’ And she was talking to me.

So she was making, sort of piling the fabric on top, right.

Piling fabric, one on top of the other. And when you do that, you have to have what is known as a leading edge, that is the edge that is in front of you. And that edge must be so straight, that if you took a penny piece, in those days it was big pennies, and you laid it up, there was no gaps, the lay hadn’t fallen over or fallen towards you, it was absolutely, as if it was growing out from the table. But here was this woman, talking to me, not talking at me, not shouting at me. A little bit brusque. She says to me, ‘Can I leave you on our own now?’ I said, ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ll try.’ She said, ‘Go on, off you go.’ She left me to it. And I’m laying up for all I’m worth. She comes over, runs her hands over the top of it she says, ‘It’s full of varicose veins. You’re pulling your top fabric too tight.’ Picked up the whole lot, flung it on the floor and said, ‘Start again.’ Not a word of, ‘You silly idiot,’ not a word of, ‘This isn’t not how I told you how to do it.’ And so that lay finished up on the floor twice more. Not a word of, ‘You’re taking up time,’ or anything like that. And the third or fourth time when I put it back onto the table, she came along, she ran her hand, she says, ‘Beautiful, beautiful.’ And it’s then that she took the pattern, she marked it all up on the table, and then proceeded to chop her way through it with a cutting knife. I hadn’t even seen a cutting knife in action. And I stood there in wonderment. She said, Lily Silberberg C1046/02/06 F12812A Page 75

‘You’ve never seen this before?’ I said, ‘To be perfectly honest, not really.’ She said, ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you’ll be doing this soon.’ Have you ever seen a cutting knife? It’s like an instrument of torture, that you could cut your fingers off in a matter of moments. In this particular case, it was a straight blade; you can get them round blades and straight blades. It was a straight blade that goes up and down in a sawing action, but it goes up and down something like seventy, eighty times per second. So you don’t even see the blade going up and down. And this is fixed into a machine that’s got a great bulbous engine on the top of it, and then you have to guide it through the fabric, and that’s how you cut, bulk, that is bulk cutting. But remember that I am going back to 1946, and that machine was revolutionary then. They don’t use machines like that now.

What was, can you remember what that first garment was that you cut?

Oh I don’t know what it looked like. I hadn’t the remotest idea what it looked like. And as regards the pattern pieces, I couldn’t really tell you what the pattern pieces were like, because they were cut to all intents and purposes freehand. There was hardly a notch, or a balance mark, neither for balance nor for indication of width of seam allowance. Nevertheless, I didn’t ask any questions. I, I went home that night literally on tiptoe, I had been told that I had done something properly. And, and the itching stopped. And I looked forward to the next day. And the next day I was standing out there on the landing, I was the first one to arrive; the machinists eventually arrived. Nobody ever spoke...nobody spoke to me, because they didn’t know who I was. But bit by bit I was accepted into the, into the family as it were. And, and I was laying up like a good’n. But I still was not allowed to use the knife.

How many other people worked in the workshop?

There must have been twenty-four machinists, twenty-four machinists sitting front to front, face to face, so that means to say that there was a bank of twelve, twelve in front and twelve there, with a well in between, so therefore the machinists were opposite each other, and they were talking the whole time. So you heard the zzzz of the machine, and a swear word, and the noise was something horrible. There were three finishers, three finishers, there was Eadie and Maudie. Not Prothero. Eadie and Lily Silberberg C1046/02/06 F12812A Page 76

Maudie. One looked like a glamour puss, and the other one was the most staid spinster I have ever come across, and they were sisters, and they were both finishers. And another, another young girl that also did finishing. Finishing meant that you were the one, that they sewed on the buttons, that they tidied up the garments, that they actually put them on to hangers and made them presentable.

Did they do the hems?

The hems were done by a special machinist on the bench. Because there were twelve machines front, twelve machines back; there was two overlockers, a hemmer, and a pinking machine. So, altogether there was, twenty-four machinists, and I think about four special machinists.

What would a pinking machine be for?

Where you didn’t neaten a seam, you could then pink it, and that stopped it fraying, or if it did fray, it only frayed a certain amount. Because an over-edge machine, that is an actual machine where you pass it through, and it actually stitches a something-or- other with five threads or three threads or even two threads, and that locks the edge. And as I say, the special machinists. And some of the machinists had juniors sitting with them, literally learning at Nellie’s elbow. Now what these juniors did, that if the garment, as in those days the garments did have, either a tie belt or ties that went into the side seam and did up round the back, the actual machinist would machine all of those ties, and then give them to the junior to turn through. So, you had machinists, special machinists, and then you had the finishers, three of them, who tidied up the garments and finished off the garment. Then you had the presser, there were three pressers there. There was Ackerman, who made the patterns, and up till then had been laying up and doing everything. And then there was myself. The proprietor of the place, very good-looking woman if you looked at her from a distance, but not very long, this Mrs Sellier, would swan in about midday, and then disappear round about three o’clock. She swanned in round about midday, because she had been occupied during the night.

Partying? Lily Silberberg C1046/02/06 F12812A Page 77

And, swanned off round about three o’clock to get ready for the occupation during the night. We sit here, we nod at each other very understanding. (laughing) And it was there that I learnt to smoke. They initiated me into smoking. And boy, I became a champion smoker. It was a relaxed atmosphere. You worked because you wanted to work. The language, you will not find it in any glossary anywhere. The work went on apace, and you knew that you were home. When Ackerman interviewed me, she said to me, ‘How much do you want a week?’ I said, ‘Well I’ve just been earning £3.’ ‘Well, we’ll start you off on £3.’ At the end of the year, I was earning £3.5s. Didn’t ask for it, didn’t ask for it at all. And the happiness that I... I blossomed. It still had very little or nothing to do with what I had been taught at Barrett Street, but, what I had been taught at Barrett Street gave me certain disciplines to work at what I was... There was a relationship. And I blossomed. And, and it was lovely, it was lovely. And I once saw Ackerman cutting a pattern. Now what they did is that, they made a sample, they would go to a certain firm, let’s say they went to Gosschalk’s, and, Gosschalk said, ‘Yes, well we’ve got a certain fabric,’ and they’d give them a length of fabric, four yards. And Ackerman would bring it back to the factory, and proceed to create a garment.

So she was like the designer as well?

She was everything. She was everything. And, she would proceed to create this garment.

[End of F12812 Side A] [F12812 Side B]

It’s a lovely episode. And I used to stand and I used to watch her, and I used to say to her, ‘Ackerman, what are you doing?’ She said, ‘Cutting a pattern.’ I said, ‘Where’s your block pattern?’ Well I can’t repeat what she said to me about a block pattern. And she says, ‘Lil, there are three things in life that you’ve got to get over. You’ve got to get over and understand it in the garment industry.’ I’m not going to use the language, I shall whistle to... She says, ‘If it [whistle] looks right, and it [whistle] fits right, it is [whistle] right.’ Now those three things have been what has taken me Lily Silberberg C1046/02/06 F12812B Page 78

through my working life, not only in the industry, but in teaching. And I have instilled in every student that I’ve had the privilege of teaching, I’ve instilled those three things. ‘If it looks right, if it fits right, it is right. And you are the one that will know what that fit is, as a designer. And if you want to create something that looks outlandish to somebody else, if it looks right in your eyes, if it fits right in your eyes, it is right. But remember, possibly only in your eyes.’ And that was Ackerman. Anyhow, I worked there. One little episode I must tell you. She actually let me use the cutting knife, and I was proud as punch to use that cutting knife. Now, one day she said to me, she said, ‘Lil,’ she says, ‘you’ve never made a pattern for me, have you?’ I said, ‘No.’ She says, ‘Well,’ she says, ‘I haven’t got time to do it now myself.’ And she threw down a garment, she bundled it up, threw it at me, and she said to me, ‘Make me a pattern for that Lil.’ And I had a block pattern at home, went home, got the block pattern, and I made a pattern that was par excellence.

A block pattern...?

A block pattern is a basic pattern. You don’t use a stand. Everything that you need is within this template. The neck is there, the armhole, the shoulders, sides, [inaudible], the suppression, meaning the shape. And as it happens, that block pattern that I brought from home fitted in with that beautifully. So I didn’t have to do much alteration or anything. And I made a pattern. So she says, ‘Right,’ she says, ‘it looks a very good pattern.’ She said, ‘Get a costing. Lay it up. Here’s a docket,’ docket meaning, how many in red, how many in blue, how many in green et cetera. She says, ‘Lay that, cut it.’ Which I did. Bundled it all up, four in a bundle. Put it on the shelf. Then the girls came up for work, and she was handing it out. Because the pattern was so, and I’m going to say it myself, so perfect, because there was balance marks, a balance mark indicating where one piece locks onto another, because there were nips to indicate the width of seam allowance, because there were nips top and bottom to indicate where the tucks went, the girls were literally eating the work. They were on piecework, which meant payment by result. They were eating the work. And before two days was up, work that was supposed to have lasted them a week, they had gone through it, two and a half, three days. And Ackerman said to me, ‘Lil, what have you done? We’re going to lose our workforce. You’ve done it that they can just, go through it.’ Well you can imagine, I was their, their absolute saviour, they Lily Silberberg C1046/02/06 F12812B Page 79

had full books. And then she explained to me, she said, ‘This workforce, if we lose them and they go somewhere else, where are we going to get more workers?’ So next time I laid up that pattern to cut another batch, as I marked it in for cutting, she came over she says, ‘Miss out that nip, miss out that nip, miss out that nip. No, don’t want that in there, throw that out.’ In other words, she was putting up stumbling blocks for the machinists to slow them down. That was an education. That was an education. And of course that did slow down the work a bit. And in consequence, I was well and truly entrenched. And I got the job of being a pattern cutter up there. But, on the understanding that Ackerman could come over and block out certain bits and pieces, that the machinists would not have it all the way. I remember it was on a Monday morning, I’d been there two and a half years or so, I think I was earning the princely sum of something like £4 a week. Because money didn’t come into it. And it was quite sufficient for Mum and Dad to see that I was settled, I was learning, I was happy, I had come into my own. Ackerman came over to me, and she said to me, ‘Lil,’ she says, ‘I’ve got something to say to you.’ I said, ‘What is it?’ you know. ‘Have I done anything wrong?’ She says, ‘No, no no,’ she says, ‘I’m giving you the sack.’ She says, ‘I’ve got to get rid of you before eleven o’clock this morning,’ she says, ‘so I don’t have to put the stamp on your, on your card.’ I said, ‘What have I done wrong?’ She says, ‘Nothing.’ She says, ‘Whilst you remain here,’ she said, ‘you’ll be earning £4.’ She says, ‘Get out there,’ she says, ‘get a job, start earning money.’ Now, the sincerity of that woman was something. I said, ‘But I, I don’t want to leave.’ I said, ‘I haven’t done anything wrong, I’m perfectly...’ She said, ‘No,’ she said, ‘I cannot possibly see how you will be earning any more than four quid per week from now till doomsday.’ She says, ‘You’ve served your apprenticeship here.’ She says, ‘You are a person on your own,’ she said, ‘you can work without instruction.’ She says, ‘Now go out and widen your horizons.’ Now that was, that was somebody, that person is indelible in my memory. She says, ‘You go out,’ she says, ‘you earn yourself a living now.’ Well you can imagine, I protested, I wept.

How long had you been there by then?

About two and a half years. I’d reached the princely sum of maybe, was it £4? Don’t think so. Don’t think so. I was as happy as happy can be. Now although Ackerman didn’t own the place, it belonged to the other piece, very often there was a shortfall in Lily Silberberg C1046/02/06 F12812B Page 80 wages. Couldn’t find the wages bill. Because sometimes the people who they worked for were a little bit slow in coming forward with their cheques, so consequently, the money had to be found. And what Ackerman used to do is to take off her rings from her fingers, ‘Pop ’em round to Uncle Joe.. And Uncle Joe was a big jewellery shop in Oxford Street called Attenborough. And I would go into the area where there were the three brass balls. ‘Oh hello dear, are you here again?’ ‘Yes.’ Put them in. And then when the cheques came through, she would give me cash, go round to Uncle’s, get them out again. And I remember that there were four rings, a three-stone ring and three solitaires, and they very often used to make up the lack of money, until the manufacturers, until the, the people who, whose garment you were making for them, coughed up their money.

So, so Sellier Gowns didn’t sell in the way that the other...

No. No. No. No. No. No.

So they, they were primarily manufacturing for other...

Manufacturers of other people’s fabrics. They didn’t really design, inasmuch that... Yes they did, yes, Ackerman designed, inasmuch as I said, you go down to Gosschalk, and they would give her, you know, ‘We’ve got fifty rolls of this in, see what you can make of it.’

And Gosschalk[ph] was a fabric company?

No, they, they were an outlet. You could almost call them like a cash and carry, like there is now. They would have loads and loads and loads of rails, and people from the stores would come in and say, ‘Right, we’ll have 100 of these, and fifty of those,’ and it was there, immediately for them. Sometimes they used to go in there and they wouldn’t take anything; other times they would clear rails of it. So, there were various different levels of manufacturing, various different levels. Anyhow, as I say, I spent a very very happy two and a half years there, very happy indeed. And, because I was not one for rushing around in the evening, and, you know, going mad and all that, I joined evening classes, back again at Barrett Street. Barrett Street in the Lily Silberberg C1046/02/06 F12812B Page 81

meantime had been bombed, that was number twelve on my list, and they had taken premises in Marylebone Lane. And I was, I was doing pattern cutting and modelling and things like that. When I say modelling, three-dimensional pattern cutting, because, I’d been taught that at Barrett Street, and also watching Ackerman applying it to the stand, and then taking the pattern off and what she’d applied to the stand. So, I joined that class. And on the evening, the Monday evening, that was one of the evening classes, I went, I was very very dejected, and there was a woman in the class, her name was Lulu Brown, a fanatic at playing tennis. And she said to me, ‘You’re a bit down in the doldrums Lil, what’s the matter?’ I said, ‘I was given the push this morning. I was told to go out and get a proper job.’ She says, ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘I’ll give you a job.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, you’ll give me a job?’ She says, ‘Well,’ she says, ‘I work for a very large firm.’ She says... Well it didn’t turn out to be a very large firm, it was a reasonably large firm. She says, ‘And I’m the secretary there.’ She says, ‘I know your work. Your work that you’re doing would fit them very very nicely.’ I said, ‘Well where’s the job?’ She says, ‘In Old Street, that’s where their factory premises are.’ She worked in the showrooms in Regent Street. She says, ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘I’ll have a word with Debbie Goodman.’ And, she said, ‘And, here’s the telephone number. Phone me up in a couple of days and I’ll tell you, one thing or another.’ So a couple of days, I was actually unemployed for two days, much to my chagrin, you know. Hateful. But, seeing as I hadn’t been on holiday or been anywhere, Mum said, you know, ‘You have a couple of days, you could do with a couple of days at home.’ Which was to me dreadful, dreadful. Anyhow, I phoned up Lulu Brown, and she said, ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘now make your way to Old Street,’ between such-and-such a time, ‘Debbie Goodman will be there, she’ll interview you.’ And so I said, ‘Oh thank you very much.’ And phoned up, made the appointment, and next day I went there.

How did you get there, by tube or...?

From Great Titchfield Street?

Mm.

Lily Silberberg C1046/02/06 F12812B Page 82

I took a number 25 bus to Holborn; went round the corner and then took the trolleybus to Old Street.

Can you remember what you were wearing?

Nothing out of the ordinary. It was spring. Don’t think I dolled myself up in any way. Because let’s face it, working, working at Sellier’s, I described to you the filth, the stench. The camaraderie was marvellous. And they let me work all hours that I wanted to. I did use to work Saturday morning. Very very often Saturdays was, if you wanted to do a bit of overtime, you could go. By this time I was they keyholder, because living very very close to where the actual factory was, I was registered with the police, and I was the keyholder, so I was the first one in and the last one out. I could work on my own, she always said to me, she said, ‘If you’ve got a couple of hours, and you’ve got nothing to do,’ she says, ‘you can always come in, got plenty to do here.’ And I would get overtime at double time, which was a great help. And, I made friends with a mouse. There were hot water pipes all the way round. The place wreaked of mice. Evidence of mice all over the place. And there was this little mouse sitting there on the hot water pipe, and I used to take off a piece of sandwich, prop it up there, and the little mouse picked it up and ran away with it. It used to come back time and time and time again for it. An apple core, piece of chocolate, anything like that. Anyhow, I, I went to Old Street, had an interview. And she said to me, ‘What wage would you, are you asking?’ And I took a deep breath, I said, ‘£6.’ She said, ‘Done.’ I could lay up, I can make a marker. You mention it, I could do it. I could supervise machinists. I could even sit down at a machine and machine myself. But I could not have done any of that without the background knowledge, somewhere or other, of what Barrett Street had given me. Admittedly, it was a stony, stony path, but I could still get there. Anyhow...

And, could I just ask you, was pattern cutting, when you were at Barrett Street, did you know you wanted to work as a pattern cutter?

Wanted to be a designer. Wanted to be a designer. I didn’t have very much aptitude for designing, but, I knew when I was looking at something that was good design, what was saleable design, what was manufacturable design, because very often design Lily Silberberg C1046/02/06 F12812B Page 83 could be design that couldn’t be made, couldn’t be manufactured, let alone couldn’t be worn. And consequently, unless you bring all those elements together, yes you can make the most fantastic garment, but if you’re working within a certain price bracket, and that garment doesn’t fit into that, it would be cheaper to go and burn five pound notes than try and manufacture it. So anyhow, I started off work there. And again, I fitted exactly so, exactly so.

But this was a bigger...

Much bigger concern. Hygienic. Machines downstairs, cutting room upstairs, offices in another place. Plenty of argument, plenty of argy-bargy. But that didn’t matter, it was good-natured argy-bargy. And, the boss’s son, who was a ne’er-do-well, there’s only one month between us. His mother, Debbie Goodman, looked upon me like a surrogate daughter, and looked at him, and recognised that he was a ne’er-do-well, that he would never do well, and what’s more, had no intention of doing well, not whilst his mum worked. And believe me, she worked. She was a worker of... But never what you would call... I must equate everything with that first job that I had, where these people were poisonous. They were destructive. These other people had become constructive in my way of thinking. And I once said to Martin, I said, ‘Martin,’ I said, ‘you know, I don’t have to have this job.’ I said, ‘I can teach you, I can train you up, and you can take this job.’ He said, ‘Why should I?’ he said, ‘when...’ he said, ‘when we’ve...we’ve got a mutt like you to do it.’ He said, ‘Why do it yourself when you can employ somebody else to do it?’ Which is something that those kids that we saw on television yesterday, that is the attitude. Now, by this time, the drug of the garment industry had taken me over. I was literally being taken along by the garment industry. It was everything to me, everything. And, I tried to on occasion explain this to students, and they used to look at me, you know, a bit weak in the head, ‘What’s missing in her life?’ Nothing was missing in mine. I partook of everything that there was to partake of in life. But the garment industry, and even today, although I’ve been out of teaching for several years, I still have got connections with the garment industry. There is a very famous wedding gown manufacturer who will not start a range without first of all coming to consult me. And we actually sit in this room, she brings rolls of fabric, she brings her stand, she brings her assistant. She brings a camera. And we all work together to create her range of wedding gowns. Lily Silberberg C1046/02/06 F12812B Page 84

And she has got the same drug in her as I had in me. I see the way she works, and I, I see exactly what happened to me. There is a love affair, and that love affair, that love affair is to the exclusion of everything else. That’s the garment industry. The garment industry is abusive, it destroys, it corrupts, but to love it is to, is to live it. But I digress. So, I was there. I lost my, my father died whilst I was there. I made friends that were long, lifelong friends. I have a friend who was a Polish refugee, that was her first job. We are as sisters, Dorothy and I, we laugh together, we cry together, she’s a sister to Ray, she’s a sister to me. She was widowed, we were the first ones there. There is, there is no, there is no, how can I say? There’s no difference between us. She adored my mother, having lost her parents in the concentration camps, having lost all of her family in the concentration... She adopted my mother as her mother, she wept with us, she laughed with... This is what you do when you are in a place where you’re happy. Anyhow...

What... Can I just ask you, what sort of garments were they producing?

All sorts. All sorts. It can be from C&A, do you remember C&A? They, they closed down about a year or so ago, they just sold up here in Great Britain. Which were literally cutthroat. Now if you worked for C&A, you worked purely to do a turnover, but with very very little profit. Your profit margin might be something like twelve per cent. Where, to reckon, if you wanted a profit margin, you had to work on something like thirty-three and a third per cent. But you really whittled down everything. But your turnover was vast. So you had to come to terms. Big production, small profit, but vast turnover. It kept the wheels going. And, that was one end of it. The other end of it was Harrods. So, you see, the spectrum was very, very big between the two of them. But we took on all sorts. Now if you work for Harrods, your turnover is minute, but your profit margin can be quite large. Because to them, you get an ordinary simple little garment, and in those days, and I’m going back an awful lot of years, could be £200. We even did children’s wear. Now, I had, I had a friend who had a little girl, and there were bits of fabric on the floor, little strips, the strips could not have been more than three inches wide, and the strips were of a waffle cotton, navy blue background with a white spot, and then there was white background with a navy blue spot. And I took these little strips, and a machinist sewed them all up together, I gathered them round the top, round the waist. And then Lily Silberberg C1046/02/06 F12812B Page 85

I took a few inches of fabric from an end of a roll and I cut a little bodice, again using the navy blue and the white as a striped thing. And, the machinist just sewed it up in her lunch hour. And Debbie Goodman passed me by and she says to me, ‘What have you got there Lil?’ I said, ‘I’ve just made a little garment for Janice.’ She said, ‘Let’s have a look.’ She picked this... ‘Can I borrow it for a little...?’ I said, ‘By all means.’ Rush it up to C&A, came back with an order. Waving an order, three, four hundred of them. We’ve gone into children’s wear. Out from nowhere. Bits of, bits of fabric laying on the floor.

So was that your first, your first design that went into manufacture?

No. Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no. No no no no no. Bit by bit, Debbie Goodman saw that I had an eye. And that eye was created by taking a collar from one, a bodice from another, a front skirt from one, a back skirt from another. And this is the beauty of working from a block pattern. It is standardised. And you would be surprised, the way you can work out a whole range of garments if you’ve got an eye to know that that collar will go with that skirt. And before very long, there was a nice rail of garments, which were farmed out to C&A, to various other people. And the orders were coming in very nicely. And before very long, my wages went from £6 a week to £7 to £8 to £9 to £12. And, they took over a factory in Ireland, manufacturing knitwear. And, Debbie Goodman said to me, ‘You are the designer.’ I said, ‘Well I know nothing about knitwear whatsoever.’ She said, ‘But,’ she says, ‘this weekend you’re coming with me by plane to Belfast, and by the time you get back you’ll know all about knitwear.’

[End of F12812 Side B] [F12835 Side A]

.....your name.

Lily Silberberg.

Lovely.

Lily Silberberg C1046/02/07 F12835A Page 86

You’ve got a good level on there now?

Yes I have.

Good, lovely. Lovely lovely.

So you were telling me about going to the knitwear factory in Ireland.

Yes.

With Debbie Goodman.

Yes. It was a matter of learning very very fast how the industry works round jersey knitwear. Up till then I had been mainly concerned with woven fabric. The knitted fabric is a different approach. Not entirely different, but it is. You, you have to think of fabric that is not stable, it not only stretches in the length, it stretches in the width. And you have to take all this on board. And I was presented with the subject of jersey knitwear, not exactly out of the blue, but I was told, we’re going to Ireland, we’re taking over a knitwear factory, not only for the production of garments, but also the production of the fabric. And I knew little about it, but I was also told, ‘You are going to learn awfully quickly.’ I had never flown. This was in 1950, ’51, something like that. No, I beg your pardon. I do beg your pardon. It was in 1953. I went to work for the Goodmans in 1951, and this must have been 1953. Because the Coronation had already happened, and the Coronation, if I remember correctly, was June the 2nd 1953. The King died the 6th of February 1952, and that was a year later. If my memory serves me correctly. I had never flown. I didn’t know what was going to greet me the other end, but I was eager to learn. And, I remember saying to Mum, ‘I’m going to fly over to Ireland.’ ‘Don’t you dare fly, it’s unsafe to fly. Flying is not natural. Flying is for birds, not for human beings.’ Anyhow, the appointed day came, and I, I said to Mum and Ray, ‘Well, ta-ta, I will speak to you when we get to the airport.’ And, I was determined not to speak to them when I got to the airport; when I got to the other side, then I would phone them. So, we took off. It was a most basic aircraft. It was propeller-driven, and it was a Dakota, which was an ex-Air Force machine. We sat on hard seats. The only refreshment that we received was a boiled Lily Silberberg C1046/02/07 F12835A Page 87 sweet just before takeoff, which was supposed to help us with the popping in the ears. [pause] She’s going to, she’s going to inspect your coat, if it’s all right with you. I beg your pardon tape. Anyhow, got to the other side. And, what is now known as Aldergrove Airport, just outside Belfast, was then known as Nutts Corner, and consisted of one airstrip and a Nissen hut. There were, there was all of four people working there. You got off the aircraft, you walked through the Nissen hut, and you came out the other side, where you were connected by whoever was coming to see to you, or you got on a bus and went into Belfast. In our particular case, we were met by somebody known, whose name was Walter Weininger. He was Austrian. He had some know-how about jersey and the knitting of jersey, and the manufacturing into garments of jersey. The British Government, the, the whole feel of it was, to get Northern Ireland on its feet commercially. Prior to that there had been virtually no industry there, to speak of. In the air there was this great warlike feeling between Catholic and Protestant. The Catholics were saying that the Protestants were taking jobs away from them. There was, there was great unemployment, and anything to solve the unemployment, the British Government were pouring literally millions of pounds into the economy of Northern Ireland. It was a different world to what we know it now. Great amount of strife. A very small example. The factory that Walter Weininger owned was in the Catholic part of Belfast, and consequently everybody employed there was to all intents and purposes Catholic. Weininger himself was accepted because he was a Jew. I was taken to the bosom of the factory because I was Jewish. There was only one Protestant girl worked there, and she was the sample machinist. But they made her all right, because there was her machine, and I shall never forget this, if you could just imagine, a machine separated from everybody else’s, but festooned all the way round it, above it, alongside it, there were rosaries, holy pictures. I believe that there was a missal on one side and a Testament on the other side. And there she was, I think her name was Molly. Molly had to work in amongst all this, otherwise she would have been completely and utterly rejected. This is the amount of hatred, and one has to actually have lived through it. I believe things are a little bit better now. But this was before anything had really boiled up. Now, Belfast is predominantly Protestant. And you could walk down a street, and there stencilled onto the walls, every five or six feet, ‘God Is Love’. And it was obviously done with a stencil, because, everything, each, each one of these was identical to the other, so there must have been somebody with a bucket of white paint and a stencil Lily Silberberg C1046/02/07 F12835A Page 88

going round the city, ‘God Is Love’. That did really sink into my, into my feeling about the place. But as regards the welcoming that I received, it was overwhelming. It was wonderful. I was taken to their bosoms and literally, I became part of them. That’s the only way I can describe it, that was the warmth of it. But it was purely because of who I was. Had I have been, had it have been known that I was a Protestant, I don’t think that the welcome would have been that warm. There was a joke going round that, because of the fighting between Protestant and Catholic, they captured somebody, and they said to him, ‘Are you a Catholic or a Protestant?’ and he said, ‘I’m a Jew.’ And they said, ‘Yes, we know that, but are you a Catholic Jew or are you a Protestant Jew?’ (laughs) And that sort of sums it up. Now, back to the actual factory. On the ground floor when you went in, that was where the knitting machines were. And they had somebody over from Switzerland who was working these machines, because the Swiss were extremely advanced with their knitting machines, and they’d actually imported, at great expense, again the British Government, pouring in the money, to import this person from Switzerland to work all these machines, to employ people to work the machines. And then, when it came off from the machines it had to then go away to another part of Northern Ireland, Ballymena, to be dyed, dressed, stretched, and then brought back to the factory as workable fabric. Because when it’s, when the fabric came off from the machines, you would hardly give it a second look, because it was in the grey, what they call the grey. Everything was knitted in one colour, like an off-white. It was cheaper to, to knit in yarn that was off-white and then have it piece dyed, rather than to buy in the actual yarn as yarn dyed. But when it came off from the machines, albeit piece dyed, in the grey or in the colour, it was not possible to cut it, it had to go away through, to go through a finishing process. And when it came back to the factory, it was lovely, it was on rolls, the width had been stabilised. If there was any repairs necessary in the actual fabric, it was well noted on the edge of the fabric, and it was ready to use. And, my job was to design towards jersey, something I had not really given very much thought to. I don’t think that a week had elapsed between me being told that I was going to Ireland and me standing there in the actual factory. So I had to have my wits about me, to see...

Sorry. What sort of yarn was it?

Lily Silberberg C1046/02/07 F12835A Page 89

In the main, wool, either wool or a mixture of wool. But they were also testing out knitting in two types of yarn. Inasmuch, a striped fabric, they would do so many inches in one yarn, so many inches in another yarn. And then, when it passed through the dyeing vat, one yarn would accept the dye, and the other yarn would reject it. So consequently, you had striped fabric. Now this was quite revolutionary, and I believe now is standard practice. Of course, this is going back to the 1950s, which is well over half a century later. What was going on there in Ireland in those days was in its infancy, it wasn’t even, it wasn’t even in its infancy, it was still in its gestation. And I’m awfully happy to have been part of it, because that stood me in such stead, a little bit later on when I went into teaching, I could actually, through personal experience, talk to students, and actually tell them how certain things were done, albeit that by that time it had become rather sophisticated. Whereas it was so crude to begin, in the beginning, it had become very very sophisticated. And it happened very very quickly. Once these ideas took hold, people were in there to develop them. And the ones who developed it at the most were the Japanese. Because they just take, take an idea, and they run with it, and they did marvellous things where textiles were concerned. But that was my launching into jersey, which of course is the knitted, not the woven, it is knitted, and it’s got a different character. And I was obliged to make patterns. And I think that the gods must have been with me, because whatever I did, was OK. Admittedly, they did have somebody there who could take my ideas, and what I turned out, crudely, as a designer very very often does, turns out something that to all intents and purposes would be very very expensive to manufacture, but this person, as a technologist, could take it over and work it out literally so it could be produced by the hundred dozen; everything was numbered by dozens. Later on, I found how to do that as well. And it was most interesting, most interesting indeed. So what would take, might take maybe four hours to make one sample, by the time it passed... if the, if the design was successful and it went through to the technologist, four hours to make one garment in its sample stage, proving and proving and proving so that it did really get to where it had to go, as regards price and costing, by the time it came through the mind of the, through the ability of the technologist, the garment may very well have been worked down to something, twenty minutes manufacture. And the admiration that I felt for these people, who could work it down to that extent, and I felt, I’ve got to have some of this. This is not just me looking to see what is what; I want to be part of it. And, we were there for about two to three years. Although I Lily Silberberg C1046/02/07 F12835A Page 90

was there the first time for maybe a week or ten days, I lived every mo... I was there at the factory at maybe seven o’clock in the morning, and I did not leave that factory until I felt that things were ready for the next morning. The corporate hospitality was really something. The British Government were paying for every... I cannot help but go back to this. And people were making money hand over fist. I think I used the saying last week, on another tape, it was a licence to print money. And so it was. Northern Ireland was really raking in money that, they became as it were a little bit confused over it. It was also the time when the carpet factory... Now, again my... I’m sorry about this, but my brain has gone a little bit weak. There was a certain carpet manufacturer, I can’t recall his name, it’ll come back to me in a few minutes, his was the first time that carpets were manufactured with a foam underlay. And I remember he used to fly on the same aircraft as we did, and he always had a violin case with him. Always, always carried a violin case. And, this man was about five foot one inches tall. What was his name? Oh I shall remember. I’m getting annoyed with myself now. He was about five foot one. And we would be flying along very nicely, and as we went over the Isle of Man, I always noticed that he picked himself up and disappeared into the loo with his violin case. And he came out some ten minutes later with a fresh shirt, obviously combed his hair, washed his face, and resumed his seat. So obviously, again there was no violin in that case, it was a change of clothing. And I couldn’t help it, and I said, well why doesn’t he carry a cello case, in which case he doesn’t have to go into the loo, he could just get into the cello case. (laughs) That was not greeted, being very funny. I thought it was very funny, but that, that is me. The amount of activity that was going on in Ireland, and with it there was a ferment brewing, because it was widely felt amongst the Catholics that the prize places were going to the Protestants, and that the Catholics were getting the thin end of everything, that there was still poverty amongst the Protestant – amongst the Catholics, and the Protestants were doing so very very well. I don’t know whether there was an element of truth in it. I didn’t want to get involved in the political feel of it. I saw some sights there. One Saturday night, and again this is an indelible memory, that on a Saturday night, if the bonfires were burning in a street, you didn’t go near those streets. And we had been to a certain road house for dinner, and as we were coming back through Belfast, we had to go through Belfast to get out the other side, where they had their estate, and when I say the Weiningers had an estate, I do really mean that. They kept horses, they kept dogs. It really was fantastic, their way Lily Silberberg C1046/02/07 F12835A Page 91 of living. And, we’re going through this area, and to right and left of us, on the side streets, the, the bonfires were burning, which meant, this is a no-go street. I believe they still do it now, that they light bonfires. Not for any particular reason, other than to tell you to keep out. And, because it was predominantly Protestant, not English Protestant but Irish Protestant, all pubs and places of amusement are closed right through Sunday. Nothing opened. You may just as well be going down a street and not even see a person in the street, that’s what it was like then. And we were going along, as I say, in a very large, high-powered car, and suddenly out from nowhere, this apparition lurched up, flung itself onto the bonnet of the car, and to all intents and purposes, it had no head. It must have...well, I presume it was a man. There must have been such a fight that he had the top of his head caved in. Well with the speed of the car, he just got thrown off. And I said to Walter, I said, ‘Aren’t you going to stop?’ He said, ‘No,’ he said, ‘you do not look right or left. You just carry on going.’ Well, it shocked me, it really did shock me. But that’s what it was like then. I sincerely hope that things have changed now. I, as I say, I was there for quite a while, living amongst these people, having nothing else but courtesy and consideration. I was taken to their bosoms. I had entrance into their homes, which very very, many of their homes were back-to-back little houses, which I believe now has all been torn down, and estates. But again, you get the Catholic estates and you get the Protestant estates. The police were very very noticeable on the streets, what they call the Garda, and they were all armed. So I don’t think that they were shy about using their arms. And, it was after that, and I think I was there for about two, two and a half years, on and off, I was really hurt to think that a country could go in on itself the way... And it’s going on now, it is going on now, and it’s so sad, so much wonderful things to be, to be done in that country. No, they don’t...they...they just seem to shrug it off. Which is very sad indeed. But that was a marvellous episode in my life, if you take away the political feel. And unfortunately I couldn’t help but notice, even though I would not discuss it, and if anybody tried to raise the subject with me, I did not want to know. I was there to do one thing, and that was industry. Where the industry went to, who was feeding the industry, I knew, but I was not going to let on that I was aware that a great deal of money was being squandered, a very great deal of money was being squandered. We also used to go over to Dublin. A train ran between Dublin and Belfast, it was called the Enterprise, and I think it would run two days a week there and back. And, I spoke to a very very nice young woman, very very nice Lily Silberberg C1046/02/07 F12835A Page 92

young woman, she was from Dublin, and she was going to Belfast. And I said to her, you know, I said, ‘What has Belfast got for you? You live in Dublin.’ That’s right, we were on our way back from... Dublin is the most beautiful city imaginable. It is, it is, how can I say? It is a gracious city, very very Georgian, wide thoroughfares, clean. The Liffey runs through it and there are lovely lovely bridges. It is quaint in some places; it is very modern in others. They were rebuilding quite a good bit of it whilst I was there. But one could not help but notice the dire poverty literally living side by side with untold wealth. That, children with no shoes, skinny little kids rather, rather dirty, no shoes, had to move away from a curb stone so that a Cadillac that was so wide could pass through. And again, maybe, maybe I’m a little bit too sensitive to these things, but I would notice anything like that. And it hurt. And I saw, I saw two little ones, I can only say, little one, I should think the youngest one was about three and a half and the older one was maybe five, sitting on a curb, and they had speckled banana and an apple and an orange that had seen better days. They were selling it. And I said to Debbie Goodman, I said, ‘I’ll give them a half a crown.’ She says, ‘Don’t you dare.’ She said, ‘Don’t you dare. You will have every urchin in Belfast chasing you.’ She says, ‘If you see something like that,’ she says, ‘you look the other way.’ I said, ‘Well how can you?’ I said, ‘This is breaking my heart.’ And I was told, ‘No, don’t you...don’t even let it affect you. This is Ireland. This is Dublin.’ But, I still feel sorry that as I passed by, I didn’t just drop a half a crown. So, you know... I’m also told that this is very much like it is in India now. A friend of mine went to India, and I said, ‘How...’ Knowing what I, what I saw in Belfast, ‘How can you bear to look at that poverty?’ He said, ‘That is what makes India, India.’ This is part of the tapestry of India. This was obviously part of the tapestry of southern Ireland. But you didn’t see any of that in Northern Ireland.

[End of F12835 Side A] [F12835 Side B]

So that was my memory of southern Ireland. The richest of the rich sharing the same pavement as the poorest of the poor. I also witnessed once in Dublin, and it must have been a high day and a holy day, that they brought a saint out from a church, and one could not help it, but as the, as the statue was being brought up the street, you automatically sank to your knees, because if you didn’t, you would get lynched. So Lily Silberberg C1046/02/07 F12835B Page 93

irrespective who you were or what you were, that is what you did. And this is the strength of certain parts. Ireland is a minute part of the world, minute, but the feeling is very very strong. On the other hand, when you come to Northern Ireland, the conflict that is there is again sad, because there is enough industry over there now, the British Government saw to it that there was enough industry, there were the shipyards Rank, Rank had the shipyards, he had the flower mills, and also this big carpet factory, what was his name? I can’t... I shall think of his name. A little tiny man. But still, he did for Northern Ireland, he did wonders for it. And his was the first, as I say, carpeting. It wasn’t, it was all man-made, and it was a certain process, and everybody could afford to have carpet in their homes, and this, one can thank him for that. And it was all Irish produced. When we took over the factory in Ireland, this knitwear factory, there was very very little production going on. There was some, but it had not been worked out to what you would call any finesse, that it could be mass- produced. And by the time we left it was up and running. And, the going rate for the machinists was half a crown per dozen, twelve and a half pence per dozen garments. Now that might sound absolutely peculiar, but, the people who were on the production end of it, the actual machinists, had never earned so much money, because everything was provided, there was no need for them to think. If anything we could skill them up on the machines, and then virtually deskill them, a wicked thing to do. To skill them meant that we started them off very slow. You do a line, stop. You do another line, stop. Another line... But what they weren’t aware of is that the interval between each process was getting shorter and shorter and shorter. So consequently the first line that they did might have been, point so many seconds; by the time that they had finished, they might be doing ten or twelve in that same, but they had no idea, they did not feel the speeding-up. And this is what is known as skilling and then de-skilling, that it becomes almost a process. Well it does become a process.

And how many, how many garments would they be able to do in a day then?

[pause] They were not given bundles of garments; on the contrary, each machine, we worked out, if we had a table between each machine, rather than each machine locked onto the next one, but if we had a space and a table locked in between, instead of giving them bundles, we could actually give them great slabs as they came off from the cutting tables, we may then very well give them something like 250 as a slab. So, Lily Silberberg C1046/02/07 F12835B Page 94

that, that machinist had 250 garments. And that 250 garments may very well last her, oh, maybe about four hours. Because if you make one, it can take you x amount of time; but once you become skilled and de-skilled, then you do almost as an automatic process. The only time the girl got up from the machine was either to go to the loo or to, to break for tea, coffee et cetera. And they were so happy to work in that way. And whilst they were highly skilled and then de-skilled, they could then talk to each other, because by that time the work flowed. And the accuracy was quite remarkable, because we built in about half a percent for inaccuracy, because, in case fatigue set in and concentration could have wandered, we, we actually put into the cutting and the making a certain degree of inaccuracy, a margin for inaccuracy. And we had it worked out to the very very enth degree. And those people had never earned as they, as they were earning there. Now, of course, when one is working with a mind that, this is going to sound dreadful, and I do hope any future listener to me will forgive me for this, but a human being, human behaviour, when a person feels that they have earned sufficient to get them through the week, and they have done that in maybe three days, then they may very well have a long weekend. I’m not going to say they didn’t work hard, they worked extremely hard. So therefore, if they had done the amount of work necessary to, to fulfil their wage, or their, their books, everybody kept books so that they knew exactly how many... So the cutter who dolled out the work knew that, that Phyllis or whoever it was had that amount of work; then they in their turn put it in their book, and also they had to put a certain ticket in, so that if anything did have to go back to a machinist, there was a ticket with their, with their number on it. So everything was sort of worked out literally, that there were no loopholes. And then as I say, if they had worked sufficiently to earn in three days, they didn’t bother to turn up for the other two days. Well a factory can’t, can’t work like that; it’s got to be going five days a week, because that is the capacity of the orders. So we set up something that was known as doing a quota, and then everything other than, outside the quota, would be bonus. So you got the piece rate, plus an amount of money over and above, and that again was an incentive to keep them there. Now, is this treating people like battery hens? I hope the world doesn’t judge me for being part of that sort of psychology, but this is the way commerce works. It isn’t as though we were asking them to work for nothing; on the contrary, they had never earned so well as what they were then. But as things go, this one had something to say to somebody else in the management, and, the tie-up between London and Belfast was broken. The carpet Lily Silberberg C1046/02/07 F12835B Page 95 person was Cyril Lord, a name I think that is very much forgotten now, but wherever you see foam-backed carpets and carpets that can be just laid down by anybody, any lay person, it doesn’t have to be a carpet fitter, that was his, his invention, and it all started off in Belfast. And I believe again that Japanese technology took that over as well. So I had the most marvellous time working in jersey wear. I learned so much, and I, I was told that I had to learn quickly, and golly gosh did I learn quickly. But it kept with me the whole time. And the thing is to hold your nerve, get all the experience that you possibly can in theory and then put that experience into practice. And this is something that youngsters don’t particularly want to do these days, and it’s got to be there and then. The times that I’ve said to students, ‘Realise one thing, that your ability is probably greater than mine,’ and they would look at me all goggle- eyed. ‘How can our ability be greater...?’ I said, ‘Yes. I dare say that your ideas are more powerful than mine, but I’ve got one thing that you haven’t got, and that’s experience. And experience can only come from actually being in the practical field.’ But I digress, I digress.

Can you just tell me, or expand a bit more on what you meant by the link between Belfast and London being broken?

We were going over to Belfast once a fortnight, possibly staying there for three days. By this time Belfast was running on its own. Now, we had taken over what you would call green labour. When I say green labour, not Irish green; it is unskilled labour. And to some extent that was the best labour force that we could have taken on, because it wasn’t coloured by anything else. It was fresh. And, we turned the place round. And, eventually the Belfast, it started to run on its own and we became obsolete to it. So I don’t know whether the management paid them out. Of course I was only an agent of the management. I was not part of the management. I’ve never as it were been up there with the, with the big boys; I’ve always been the brain that enables the big boys to do what they have to do. And, bit by bit we became surplus to requirement. I have no doubt whatsoever that the management here in London was paid out quite handsomely, and it was going on its own. And the last I knew of it is that it was working for Marks & Spencer, and was doing great guns.

But still owned by Mr Weininger? Lily Silberberg C1046/02/07 F12835B Page 96

Yes. Yes.

Can you remember the, the name of the machines at all, the knitting machines, what make they were?

I should do. I know that they were Swiss. Great monsters of machines, some of them were flat machines as it were, where, it was called warp knitting, where the cam went backwards and forwards. And you could liken that to a present-day knitting machine that is driven, it’s a cam that goes backwards and forwards, and it is a process of so many latch needles, and as the cam goes across, so with it goes the thread, the yarn. And the material just grows. There were the other machines that were the circular knitting, that had something like 20,000 needles in it, something like that. And it was done on a punch-card system, and the whole thing as it were revolved, the, the threads, the yarn on its copse stood still, but the central part of the machine went round and round and round, so consequently the latch needles were taking all these different colours of yarn through. And it was called a jacquard, jacq...it’s coming back to me now. Jacquard. Because you could actually knit floral fabric. Now that could not be piece-dyed, that had to be yarn-dyed.

And what width was the fabric?

In the circle it would have been thirty inches. On the open, after it had been finished, and shrunk, it has to be shrunk, it came up about fifty-four inches, because it has to be stabilised, and they have to do a certain amount of shrinking, otherwise it would be unstable for the use of what we needed it for. And the reason that they sent it up to Ballymena is because the water that filtered down through the Glens of Antrim and through the, through the mountains, was very very soft. And it was very good to use in the dressing of fabric. I never ever went to Ballymena; I would have loved to have gone there, to have seen the way they actually finished the cloth. But it was knitted in the round, and then taken off it, I mean it looked like rags, and it was bundled up, taken over to Bally...well the vans used to come and collect it, take it over to Ballymena, and it would come back on rolls, ready to use. And it was delightful.

Lily Silberberg C1046/02/07 F12835B Page 97

Can you describe some of your designs?

Very very simple. Mainly T-shape, inasmuch it was not a set-in sleeve, it was a grown on sleeve. Again, in the main, wrists and bottoms of garments were of rib knitting. You could introduce various different embroideries down the front, which meant that after it was cut, it then had to go out for embroidery; it then had to come back, re-aligned with the rest of the garment, and then it could go to the machinist. So all this had to be organised. It wasn’t as though it was a revolutionary design; it was a link in the chain to what we know jersey wear to be now. It was in its infancy. And consequently most things were very very straightforward. I introduced something that was known as a tulip neckline, where, instead of the, the, the rib round the neck just stood up like a polo, what we would now know as a polo neck, I worked it in such a way that it crossed itself over and then could be laid back. So that you had like a roll collar round the neck. And there’s a little bit of intricate cutting that, I didn’t think actually that the cutters in the factory could work anything, but they did it magnificently. We honed it down, we literally, we polished it until almost nothing could go wrong with it. There was a few hiccups with the first 100 that went through, but after that it was sweet sailing. And remember that, they would, the shops would order literally by the thousand dozen. So it wasn’t as though you had to change your designs very frequently. You could adapt your designs so that you could ring the changes. Sloppy Joes were all the rage in those days, so I devised one that was longer than any...it was more bulky, more, more shapeless, but more with-it than anything else, it had a shorter sleeve. And certain, certain logos could be put onto it. But again, every time it needed a new, another process, there was a hold-up in the work. So again, if we had anything like that to do, we would cut those first whilst there was still manufacturing going in the machines, cut those first, because we knew that there might be a week or two delay by the time it went out to the embroidery and came back. So we had to get everything organised; it wasn’t just a matter of, you know, cutting as we went, everything had to be worked out, timescale. And there again, it was very very much, time is money. Now it’s a thing that in my dotage now I feel a little bit, not very nice in myself, to equate time with money, but that’s the way industry works. And you...if you haven’t got that on board, you don’t go into industry. If you haven’t got that on board, it would be cheaper to burn five pound notes. And all of these things, it’s all part of life’s rich pattern. So, these garments in Lily Silberberg C1046/02/07 F12835B Page 98 the main cut as a T shape ribs at the neck, at the wrist, at the, at the bottom of the garment; buttons, double-breasted, single-breasted, lower necklines. But everything had to come into a format.

So how did you decide about colours?

I don’t think that I had anything to do with colours. The people who had to do with colours were the ones who were working on the actual manufacturer of the cloth, they were the ones that fed us. Now, I don’t know whether we were a subsidiary of the cloth manufacturers, or if the cloth manufacturers were an adjunct of the garment manufacturers. It all sort of merged into one. But there must be a beginning, a lead- in, and a lead-out. That’s the wrong word to use, led-out, isn’t it? An entrance and an exit. And the yarn that was coming in and the way of dyeing and the way of, the way of, of us receiving the fabric, and the colour, the colouring of it, was down to the manufacturing of the fabric. We just manufactured into wearable garments the actual fabric that they produced. And of course a market had to be found for it. So the whole thing became one, one very nice continuum.

Did you think about the market?

Had to. Had to. That was where I... I’ve always been interested in what’s going on in somebody else’s manufacturing. Being reasonably well known in the trade, I wasn’t exactly welcomed into somebody else’s factory. I was headhunted on a number of occasions, but I was having a whale of a time, I was a person in my own right, I was in the bosom of a family who I felt secure with, even though they, they turned out to be rotters in the long run, but nevertheless, again this is all part and, part and parcel of life. But there was nothing to stop me going round the stores, looking to see what was on the rail, looking to see what was what, how things are done. And once you get this into your mind to see how things are done, it’s an open book. An open book. There is one thing that I would never allow myself to do, and that is to buy a garment, unpick it, take a pattern from it, sew it up again, and take it back to the shop...(laughs)...and say it doesn’t fit. I would never never allow that. I know people were doing that, but I would not do that.

Lily Silberberg C1046/02/07 F12835B Page 99

What sort of shops did you go to?

What, to, to...to look at other...?

To see...mm.

All sorts of shops. If I was passing by Harrods, I would pop in there to Harrods. It wasn’t, it wasn’t the garment, it was what went into the garment. What was the brains working that garment? What could I pick up from that garment? Window shopping. If I saw something that was very intricately cut, I always had a little notebook and a piece of pencil with me. Not to actually draw the garment that was in the window, but to draw the pattern pieces of what went into that garment. And this is where, and this is a boast and I don’t care who I’m boasting it to, I had, well I have, a three- dimensional aspect of everything. When I say everything, I can even look at a two- dimensional picture and see it in three dimension. And my sibling, Ray, she can see virtually nothing in three dimension, virtually nothing. And, consequently I could look at a garment in a window, and not see it as a garment but see it as a succession of pattern pieces, and that was more memorable to me of what that garment looked like than to actually sketch the garment. Strange, sort of an inverted way of looking at things.

What about magazines, did they, were they of any interest?

Not really. Magazines very very rarely ever give you a full picture of the garment. They will lead you up blind alleys, they will confuse you. A student... Again, I must, I must come off from what you have just asked me. A student came over to me with a picture torn out from a magazine, she said, ‘I’d like to make this.’ I said, ‘It’s unmakeable.’ She says, ‘But I like it.’ I said, ‘It’s unmakeable.’ She said, ‘What do you mean, it’s unmakeable?’ I said, ‘What you can’t see is the back of the garment, the way that garment has been snatched in at the back, the way it’s been rucked up. Look at the way she stands, one hip up, one hip down, one shoulder raised, the other one back.’ I said, ‘Are you willing to walk about like that?’ I said, ‘If you’re willing to walk about like that, and have all sorts of ball clips and weights pulling in the back of the garment,’ I said, ‘I will show you how to make that garment.’ She looked at Lily Silberberg C1046/02/07 F12835B Page 100 me and she just nodded, shook her head, as if to say, ‘The old girl’s flipped.’ You see what I mean? So therefore, what you see in magazines, and the more shiny the magazine, the more, I’m not going to say untruthfulness, no that is not being right; the more, what is the.....

[End of F12835 Side B] [F12836 Side A]

.....very very often what you see in a magazine. And, this is artists’ licence. It...it draws the eye. And if you try to be a slave to what it’s, what it’s showing, as I say, it is almost unwearable, in many many many many cases, in the majority of cases. But you look at it, you flick through, you get ideas, you can drink in ideas, you can drink in a silhouette, a line.

And you mentioned last week that you had met Barbara Goalen.

Oh yes. Oh a sweetie. Gently spoken, laughed her head off. A very ordinary person, not very good-looking, but photogenic. Photogenic. Every garment that she put on she looked as though she’d been poured into it. You could put her into a flour sack and stand her on a rusty staircase at the back of a derelict building and she would look up and those eyes. And she... There was an aura round her, there was an aura round her. But so there was with many many of the, of the, the fashion models. These, these were, not your Kate Mosses, not your, your, what’s her name, all these little ones that come and go, they are sort of, as it were clothes hangers; whereas these ones of many many years ago were people in their own right, and they, they had an aura round them, and it was lovely, it was lovely. And many many of them were wonderful for photography, because they were so photogenic.

How did you meet them?

Oh, we then had a tie-up, after we had got back from, from there, from Ireland, still working for Debbie Goodman, whose brother had what they called a wholesale couture house called Ricky Michael’s. And, things were not so good in the garment industry. The garment industry is a dreadful industry. It will make you rich, and Lily Silberberg C1046/02/08 F12836A Page 101

make you very poor. It’s like having the seven fat years and seven lean years. Seven fat years where you can do no wrong, everything bowls along virtually on its own momentum, and then there will be an upheaval of some sort where garments are the last thing on people’s minds; other things come first. Might be a remote war somewhere. And garments, the garment industry is invariably the first one to take the knock. We’re feeling it now, in 2003, we are feeling it now. We started to feel it at Christmas, the Christmas trade was not as good as it should have been. And people didn’t buy for Christmas, but they bought post-Christmas, during the sales. And there had to be genuine sales, not just sales where the shops go and buy up everything that is obsolete from the manufacturers. This is actual, hundred per cent stock that was left over from a very bad pre-Christmas trading period. So, it was a time when things were not going so well. But for some reason or other, Debbie Goodman’s brother, who was doing wholesale couture, which were rarefied garments, it was almost like the beginning of the Arab trade. You’ve never heard of the Arab trade? Oh, well the Arab trade has affected the garment industry quite a lot.

Do you mean the oil industry? Do you mean the oil industry?

No. No... Well, it is, they have their wealth because of the oil industry. Whereas the woman in an Arab family was somebody who was a second-class citizen and family, because there was so much money, they suddenly started to buy clothing. Now this is something that was quite unheard of. But they would come to England and spend money. And many big couture houses, English couture houses, relied to a very great extent on Arab women. And, again, it was the man of the family who said, ‘Yes you could,’ or ‘No you can’t.’ And quite suddenly, jewellery and fashion, especially the upper echelons of fashion, became the most prized thing in an Arab family imaginable. Now, these women wearing these garments could not parade them in front of other men. For her husband, yes; but for other men, strictly no. No way. But, she would meet up with her other friends who were of the same social strata, and they would all show off their latest Paris and London fashions amongst themselves.

When do you think this, this started, this phenomena?

Lily Silberberg C1046/02/08 F12836A Page 102

Late Fifties. Late Fifties. Yes, it was late Fifties. [pause] I know of one ex-student of mine, a lovely lovely Welsh girl, lovely, it was a pleasure to have her as a student, and when she left the college she went strictly into lingerie, because, at the London College of Fashion I am proud to say, it was not a specialist course, it was a generic course, and consequently by the time, especially a student that had an open mind, they could go out into children’s wear, light clothing, heavier clothing, light heavy clothing, soft tailoring, they could apply themselves to various things. And Margaret, her name, Margaret, Margaret Jones, and had the most lilting Welsh accent, oh it was lovely, she decided that she would like to go into lingerie. And she worked a little bit in the, in the garment industry, and then veered over towards lingerie, and got herself employment in a firm known as Kayser Bondor, which I don’t think is in existence any more, I believe that it was taken over by Marks & Spencer, but that’s another story. She went to work there I believe for maybe a year or so, to get a good experience. And then she saw an advert for a Swiss firm that was known as... My mind’s gone to jelly again. Tutambanken, dealing with the finest lace and fabrics that Switzerland can manufacture. Now Switzerland, this tiny tiny landlocked country, is capable not only of cuckoo clocks, manufacturing of cuckoo...but of the finest fabrics. Now even if they don’t manufacture it in Switzerland, it is the brains that are there. Hence, I’m sure that there was, this Swiss engineer that worked in Belfast. But anyhow, she, she was contact...she contacted them, and she was taken on. She was taken on for one reason and one reason only: there was a certain Arab princess, and that Arab princess had to have 365 day lingerie and night lingerie. She never ever wore the same outfit again. Now that is something, is it not? And they gave the whole thing, part and parcel, over to Margaret. It is something that they could not not accept, but on the other hand, it could have been a millstone round their necks. And Margaret was engaged. 365, that had to be bra, knickers of some sort, and slip, that was the day. Night, negligee and sleepwear. And that was Margaret’s work. She had her own little workforce, because she could never have done it all herself, so she had her own little workforce. And that kept this Arab princess very very happy. I often wonder, where did those garments go to after she had worn it? And her, her husband was a sheikh of the highest, probably royal blood. A little bit obscene maybe, but, who am I to say otherwise?

You were telling me about how you met Barbara Goalen and... Lily Silberberg C1046/02/08 F12836A Page 103

Oh, so, so I worked, I worked for... There was a tie-up between brother and sister. They were at loggerheads continually, quite embarrassing actually. But from time to time I would go up to Davies Street, and invariably in one of the showrooms, or waiting for photography, was a nice name, a good name, and there was Barbara Goalen once. Very, very simple. Annie Cox, very simple. And we got talking. And, and easy to get on with. I believe that Barbara Goalen died a little while ago. And I read in her obituary that the latter part of her life, Alzheimer’s. It’s so sad. She was, she was a reasonable age, a reasonable age. But to have, to have finished off like that. She had married very early, and it was the early part, the early to middle part of the war, and her husband was a fighter pilot, and he died. And I believe she had one child. But although, although these women were splashed around all over the place, you know, every other photograph that you pick up, Vogue of that period, there they are. Didn’t affect them, not in the slightest. Never any histrionics. ‘Barbara, put your head back a bit,’ Barbara put her head... And every movement was like liquid. And it wasn’t like they photograph now, click click click click click. It was much slower. So they, they knew how to hold a pose. A very very famous model, Jo Grey, was the head of the modelling department at the London College of Fashion, and an easier person, I don’t think there’s ever been an easier member of staff to get on with as Jo Grey. And she used to organise all the fashion shows and everything for them. But she was the genuine article as well. So all these little ones that are going on now, will they be remembered in future? I don’t know. But people like Annie Cox, Jo Grey, and above all Goalen, will be remembered for centuries.

I was going to ask you whether you remembered the New Look coming to, to London.

Oh, yes. Oh yes. Oh yes. Oh, during the war, fabric was rationed, rationed inasmuch that you had to have coupons. The Board of Trade, was it the Board of Trade? it later on became the Board of Trade anyhow, issued you with books of clothing coupons. I was a very very large child, very large indeed, but I was given a child’s ration book. And Mum complained bitterly, it fell on deaf ears, that an eleven-year-old of my dimensions, to be given a child’s ration book for clothing, was absolutely ridiculous. But, no. It went by age, and not by how many stone you weighed. (laughs) Anyhow, we come on to now rationing where clothing is concerned, and necessity being the Lily Silberberg C1046/02/08 F12836A Page 104

mother of invention, one cut the garment in accordance with the amount of cloth. There was also Utility. Now Utility meant that the garment was cut out of such-and- such a length of fabric, the fabric was of such-and-such a quality, had to be made to a certain standard which very very often was a high standard, and, you bought it and paid your coupons, in exchange for coupons and money, so that you were literally rationed. And as I say, necessity is the mother of invention. If you have a short amount of fabric, you made your garments shorter, as simple as that. And you see this very very clearly in the fashions of Paris during the war, and we didn’t know about these fashions till after the war, because when Paris was liberated, we then saw what the French person was wearing, and it wasn’t all that different to what we were wearing over here in England. Again, fabric was short, so consequently, for the first time in many many many many years, the knees were exposed. I’m not going to say the garment went above the knee, but went to the knee, and if the person sat down, the knee was exposed. Coupled with the fact that in France they were wearing the most wonderful shoes made out of canvas with wedge heels and curved soles. And I always wanted a pair of those. They, they were virtually clogs, but they had such, something about them. And I always wanted a pair of those, but unfortunately I could never meet a soldier that would bring me back a pair. And I was, I was, something that was missing in my life. But anyhow, garments were cut very much shorter. And in consequence, fashion was worked around it. The military look was in, soldiers with their square shoulders, consequently a pad was put in the shoulder to give you a square effect. But the bodice was cut quite, quite soft, in a blouson effect, but if you looked at the soldier and the airman, he wore a battledress blouse that was soft and then went into a, into a belt. And that was called a... Yes, it was, it was the, it was the uniform. It wasn’t the dress uniform, it was the uniform of soldiers, everyday soldiers. It wasn’t in the Navy, but it was in the Army and the Air Force. Epaulets became the order of the day, because soldiers, sailors and airmen have epaulets. And, the gas mask that we were obliged to carry, but very very few people ever did, that even became a fashion accessory, because, you could actually buy bags that were gas mask cases, so you didn’t have to walk about with the square cardboard box. There were some that were padded, and there were some that were initialled, and embroidered, and you could even buy a metal cylinder into which... Everything that made it look like it wasn’t. And of course with an epaulet, you just undid the button, you put it over your shoulder, did up the button, and it became as it were ‘a look’. Lily Silberberg C1046/02/08 F12836A Page 105

And, after the war, because there was this being deprived of fabric, fashion had only one way to go, that what was going up and up and up with the lack of fabric, we were suddenly in a world of peace and plenty, and of course, the hems plunged. And with it came a silhouette that had not been seen since, I would say, late Victorian, where the waist was nipped in, where the hips were exaggerated, where the shoulders were exaggerated, where the sleeves were cut slim, and the skirts were full at the hem. So that the actual garment was cut to maybe four inches above the ankle bone, and rather thick heeled, clompy shoes were worn with it. So have you got the silhouette? The heads were small, because the hats were small. The neck was quite long and elegant. The actual neck line was cut quite high, and usually with four or five buttons going down to the waist. The sleeve was either set in or a soft shoulder which meant that it was a grown on sleeve. If it’s a set-in sleeve, the shoulder is hard; if it is a grown on sleeve, the shoulder is cut as it were like a cup, the shoulder pad is cut like a cup, and that sits on the shoulder, so therefore, the line is very soft. The waist nipped in to almost strangulation point. The bosom, well-defined, because corsetry, they brought in a corset known as the waspy, where a woman could be pulled in very well round the waist, but the body being like a tube of toothpaste, if you pull it in round the middle, it’ll go up and it’ll go down as it were. So the bosom was very well-defined, the waist extremely well-defined. And then in came something known as a peplum, which was like, how can I...how can I... It was an addition, either grown onto the bodice in panels, or cut through at the waist and added on, of a fluted, a fluted circular area. And then under this was worn a full skirt as I say cut to maybe, three, four, five inches above the ankle. So it went from one extreme, to the military-looking, from the military-looking, to something that was soft and feminine.

What was people’s reaction to the New Look?

[pause] We were in England a very phlegmatic race of people. I don’t know whether I’m using the right word. We accepted a great deal. We had lived through four and a half years of death and destruction, hardly turning a hair. We could walk amongst the dead and literally say, ‘Oh, that’s Peter.’ He came home for the weekend, from evacuation, and there he was dead. Because a bomb fell on the house where he lived. We could see buildings destroyed in the twinkling of an eye, not turn a hair. The buildings at the corner of Great Titchfield Street and New Cavendish Street was hit by Lily Silberberg C1046/02/08 F12836A Page 106

a land mine, and consequently, something like a third of an acre of buildings were flattened. And, it was burning for well over a week. And every evening Mum would brew up a huge pot of tea, and mix in it sugar and milk so it was all in one big teapot, and we took it down to the firemen, who were pumping water twenty-four hours, non- stop, and this was going on for well over a week, getting into two weeks. And we used to put... We were not alone in doing this, everybody who could possibly put a mind to it were doing this, because the fire service were the ones that were not in any of the forces, but they were a force on their own. And, I remember saying to one of them, ‘Anybody alive?’ He said, ‘I don’t think so love,’ he said, ‘if they were alive,’ he says, ‘we’ve drowned ’em by now.’ And he meant it. And he meant it. So therefore, what was fashion, having come through what we came through, what was fashion, we accepted it. It was ha-ha, he-he. Because, it was only about two years after the end of war that the New Look came in. It was Dior. And, would you believe it that deprivation was more immediately post-war than what it was during the war. Does that make, does that make sense to you?

I’d read somewhere that, that some women had been disgusted by this extravagant use of fabric.

Oh, well, well. [pause] You will always find people that, you know, would say no to anything. Would say no to anything. We took it, because by that time I was in the, I was in the industry, and we took it as a matter of course. The wonderful part about it is that we did find a little bit of a way round it.

[End of F12836 Side A] [F12836 Side B]

If we had a garment that was still reasonably serviceable, and the bodice was OK, and we could sort of nip it in and, and tighten it up some, a bit here and a bit there, and we could sort of, make it look a little bit more with-it, a little bit more modish, funny word, but used in the industry. We would take the skirt, and we would cut the skirt up into about four strips, not going down the skirt but round the skirt. And we would put in pieces, so therefore it was stripes going round. And then with the colour or the tone that we put in, we would then smarten up the, the bodice a bit, so it would all as Lily Silberberg C1046/02/08 F12836B Page 107

it were tie up together. So we were brought into line as it were. We started to get a little bit with-it, but we didn’t get properly with-it until it was the time for jitterbugging and all that sort of carry-on. Then we went, then we knew we had arrived. And irrespective if it suited you or if it didn’t suit you, if you were, if you had any youthful feeling inside yourself, you wore petticoats. (laughs) We must have looked the most pathetic bunch of individuals. And that, that was an influence that came over from America. So you had like, a jersey, ‘sloppy joe’ top, and this is going back to before I went to Ireland, you had like a ‘sloppy joe’, university with, with Harvard or whatever it was, that was sort of the beginning of the feeling of jersey wear in Great Britain. And you, you had a sort of a circular cut floral skirt, and then you stuffed yourself up full of petticoats on the underneath, short white socks, plimsolls, and you were ready to go and do jitterbugging. And as I say, we must have looked prize packets.

Where did you go jitterbugging?

Oh. Mainly at home actually. Because, it was, it was quite remarkable, because we had been indoors all the time, curtains drawn, curtains are still drawn to this very day. Before the war, nobody would ever think of closing curtains. Lights were on, no curtains visible. But after the war, it has hung on, closed curtains. And, there had been nothing to have maybe seven or eight or nine boys and girls up, on went the, on went the, the records, and we were jitterbugging like mad up and down the corridor, up and down the passage in the flat. Mum very often shouting, ‘Shut up will you, you’re giving me a headache.’ (laughs) Dad saying, ‘When is it going to stop? When is it going to...’ (laughing) It was a different life, a different life.

I was going to ask you about...

No sex and promiscuity.

I wasn’t going to ask you...

Boys and girls... No, boys and girls. It was those that went to dance halls, that’s where you got promiscuity and all that sort of thing. But with us, there was enough Lily Silberberg C1046/02/08 F12836B Page 108 boys and girls in the surroundings, and it wasn’t just up in our place, we went somewhere else as well. It was very lively, very lively. Kids kept their child...not childhood, their youthfulness, longer than now. But, it was all as it were, there was always the reserve that we hadn’t had for so many years, that we were not going to as it were go mad and use every resource that there was. And also, as I said, that England was in a far worse state, because the cream of everything from America, from Russia and from France, England, Russia, America and France, was being poured into Germany as a method of wooing them. So we were still in a state of ‘make do and mend’. Whereas, whereas Japan and Germany, by that time the war was over in Japan as well, they were getting the cream of most of it. And because we really didn’t... Whatever we had, we were happy to have, we were delighted to have. We’d come through the war, and what could be better than having come through the war? Were we simple? I don’t know, were we simple? Were we easily pleased? I don’t know. I don’t know. The men were coming home from the forces. There was work, but not as much work as there should have been. The winter of, immediately after the war, 1946 I believe, it was the fiercest winter I think that Great Britain had gone through for many many many years. And of course, we had, because things were so difficult... When was the Queen married? Do you remember? ’48? Can’t remember when the Queen was married.

No, I can’t. But I think it probably...

’40...’47/48.

Probably ’40...

Do you know, we were being rationed for electricity and gas and coal, that we could only have the...we could only have lighting between seven in the morning and nine; between twelve and two; and then again at night between, I think seven and nine. And that also coincided with heating, and with gas for cooking. And industry suffered. I was with Sellier’s at that time, and the machinists, we were starting at six o’clock in the morning, so the machinists were there at six o’clock in the morning, in readiness to put the power on, so they could do three two-hour shifts. And they sat there from early morning till late night, so that we were allowed to put the power on, Lily Silberberg C1046/02/08 F12836B Page 109

and do the work, to get a little bit of production out. I don’t think there’s very much documented about that, is there?

What did they do when the electricity went off?

They just sat there. We sang. Some of them took knitting in with them. But that, we had to work in about two-hour, two-hour blocks. It was all right for me because I could go home, living just round the corner. But that was not the point. Great Britain was in a worse state after the war, immediately after the war, than what it was during the war. But things got straightened out.

You know the whole ‘make do and mend’ thing.

Yes.

Could you tell me a bit about your experience of that?

Mm. Some of it goes on today in families that still cannot bring themselves to throw something away. That’s my story. If a sheet wore out in the middle, then you just ripped it up the middle and turned, turned the sheets round the other way. Admittedly you had a seam up the middle of your sheet, but that didn’t matter to us. I remember my mum wore a coat, it was a nice piece of wool, I think it was a bought coat, because Dad very very rarely ever made anything for us, very rarely. But Mum wore and wore and wore this coat, she loved it. And it wore out. And, Mum was going to pass it on, and Dad said, ‘No. Give it to me.’ He religiously unpicked every stitch in it and turned it inside out, so the wrong side of the fabric was on the outside. And he re-stitched that coat. It was a basic coat, I’m not going to say there was anything fancy in it. He even reversed the pockets, so that the pockets could go in in the reverse way round. And, she wore that coat for another couple of years. Not a thread or anything like that was ever thrown away, because you just could not get threads. In the shelters, to keep Mum occupied, because she had to have something to do with her hands, otherwise she felt that she wasn’t pulling her weight, she used to crochet. And, you could buy for a coupon or two a skein of yarn. And every now and again she would buy a skein of yarn, and she would crochet away for all she was worth. And Lily Silberberg C1046/02/08 F12836B Page 110

when she’d finished, she undid the whole lot and crocheted it again. (laughs) We would knit, we would take old garments and we would unpick them, and we would, especially knitted garments, and, we’d unravel them, and because the yarn was crimped, having been knitted, we’d take two chairs and put them back-to-back, and we’d wind the yarn round and round and round them, and we made them back again into skeins, and then we used to lay them into warm water to take the crimp out. And when it was dry, very often you would find skeins of yarn hanging from various different places, then we would put it into balls again and re-knit it. Nothing was wasted. Places like, as a matter of fact there was one in Great Titchfield Street, just two doors up from where we lived, invisible menders, that, if you tore a garment, you’d send it, take it into there, and they would pull threads from various different margins of the garment, and they would actually re-weave a piece of fabric over where you had the tear. Or if you had a cigarette burn. And, there was, you could even take your stockings in there with a ladder in it, and they would, with something that looked like a latch, a latch needle, knit up the loop and fasten it off, and you paid for it and you had your stockings. But nothing, nothing was wasted. Because if you wasted it, you didn’t have it.

And do you think this affected you as a designer?

Oh yes. Very very disciplined. Very disciplined. When there was, when there was plenty... A small example, a very small example. I was not only, the designs, but also, I made the patterns. I, I became as it were somebody who could see it right the way through. The only thing I could not do, and that is do machining. I am the rottenest machinist you have ever come across. So consequently, I always had to have a sample machinist, who was my other half; where I, where I couldn’t take my ability, my sample machinist picked it up and carried it forward. I would actually cut the sample. And I would make it my business that in the cutting of that sample, to give the person who took the garment over leeway to do certain things. Small example. If you have got a facing for a buttoned-up garment, so the facing came back, and it wasn’t a grown on facing, it was a pieced-on facing, that meant to say that, there was a seam round the outer edge, I would definitely take note of where the lapel or revere folded back. And anywhere between just below that point and where it exited itself, either at the hem or at the waist, that could be cut through and joined. So Lily Silberberg C1046/02/08 F12836B Page 111

you didn’t have to have one continual piece, that could actually be cut in two pieces, if it were more economical to the cost of it. If an under-collar was not all in one with a top collar, or the under-collar was not influencing the design of the top collar, I would think nothing of cutting my under-collar in two pieces, so that one piece could come up there, the other piece could come a bit further down, or could be wedged in between. And all of these things are in my mental, not only my mental make-up... Maybe I have a reverence too much for economy. And people say, ‘Well you know, so what?’ But it’s there, it’s part and parcel of my discipline. But as regards make- do, everything was made-do.

And was this...

Including cooking. Including food. Including food. Nothing was thrown away. If a chicken was cooked for Saturday and Sunday, if there was a carcass left over, that was a barley soup for Monday, and it was all good food. It isn’t as though you could pop down to Sainsbury’s and get a trolley-full of the stuff. That was there. We, we will not eat pre-prepared food if there is a possibility of making it from fresh, at least then we know what’s gone into it. Whereas you pick up something that’s monosodium glutamate left right and centre, and people are wondering why they, why they’re flaking out with what looks like heart attacks. But, you know, this... The word that I’m looking for, it goes into your psyche, is that the right word? It becomes part and parcel of you. Now it’s not a sob story, but there is so much wastage going on, so much wastage going on, that it’s very sad.

Was it something that was taught at, also at, at Barrett Street?

Oh yes. Oh yes. Oh yes. The only thing with Barrett Street, yes, economy of cloth was taught, yes yes yes, but not economy of make. The make was of a couture standard, and, I...I have taken treasured facets of that. When I make a wedding dress, I have never made a wedding dress for money. Every wedding dress that I have made has been as a wedding present, because I make it to such a high couture standard that nobody could possibly afford a wedding dress of that standard. There are certain things that I do, in the rankest of manufacture, still has got its original element in, the way I pick up a piece of fabric, the way I approach one piece of fabric to another, the Lily Silberberg C1046/02/08 F12836B Page 112

way I handle a piece of fabric, all of this is the appreciation of the disciplines I was, I was made to be aware. Take nothing for granted, take nothing for granted. Now this is something possibly that is a little bit weakening that everybody takes so much for granted. And, I’ve always liked a garment that has been well made, that, everything compatible with itself. And, my standards have slipped somewhat, inasmuch that, I would not dream of over-sewing a raw seam. I have a zigzag attachment on my machine. (laughs) But there are certain garments that, if I made, like in a wedding dress, there are certain garments, certain parts of the garment where it is more easier for me to just whip an edge, than to put it through the zigzag. Albeit I may very well be dropping a lining down inside it, so you would not see the inside of the garment at all.

What do you mean by whip an edge?

Over-sewing.

By hand?

By hand, yes. A very short, very short piece of it, where it may be very well necessary for me to, to put a sleeve in, before neatening a seam. So therefore, to try to get that seam under the machine with the whole garment attached to it. And I’d just thread a needle and whip the edge, over-sew the edge. I know it’s done. Whereas maybe with long seams may very well have been put through the zigzag. But that is me, that is me. So, everything, everything I have taken on board, nothing, no, no tuition is ever wasted. At the time you may think that it is wasted. But somehow or other, it has, it’s in there somewhere. It’s like with a computer, it’s in there somewhere. It’s in there somewhere.

What sort of machine do you have, what sort of sewing machine?

Me? The most basic of basic machines. I’ve got three machines. One is a Singer, that is a table model, that only does straight stitching. Another machine that I have is a very elderly Bernina, that does I think eight different types of scalloping and this and that and something else, and all that I ever use is a straight stitch and the zigzag. I Lily Silberberg C1046/02/08 F12836B Page 113

use zigzag when it comes to fabric that’s got a little bit of stretch in it, and I don’t want to, to break the stitch in wear. So that, that I use just as that. And I have a third one that used to be a hand-driven one with a handle. But I was given a reconditioned motor, and a mechanic kindly removed the handle and fixed a motor onto it, so what was designed to be a hand one is now a mechanised one. But fancy, fancy stuff, none, nil. Nil. Haven’t got time for all that fancy things. And, as a practical person, suits me fine. Suits me fine. But, complicated machinery, no, no, it’s not in my sphere.

So have you always, on the one hand made one-off sort of clothes, like wedding dresses, as well as designing for industry?

The wedding gowns are purely as I say, my gift to the bride or bridegroom. And I design those gowns strictly to the person who is going to wear them. So, that part of the design does not come into it. I, I think I told you last time, or, said to you personally, I still have got a tie-up with the industry in a very very loose way. An ex- student of mine, delightful young woman, Caroline Parkes, who has, she is one of the four largest manufacturers of wedding gowns in Great Britain, and she, she does a lot of work with Japan and the Continent and America. She will very very often, before she starts a collection, she will come here with her assistant, and we will have a whale of a time. She might even be coming here this weekend, I don’t know. She will bring a roll of fabric with her. And we will just, I will go through what she has done, give my advice to it. Because I’m seeing it with a fresh eye. And I was the one who taught her in many many ways, so I know her handwriting. It’s not my handwriting, because a lot of time has, has elapsed in between time. But, I know her handwriting so well that I can advise. And I also know her, her ability to manufacture. So knowing all of this, although I have not been to her, her workrooms for years, I know exactly what’s going on. I know exactly what’s going on. And she has no hesitation to consult with me at all. So, my design, my design is, not avant-garde. I’ve never been one to do a Mary Quant, but I have taken Mary Quant’s ideas. And where Mary Quant might have been a one-off, I have taken the flavour of Mary Quant and maybe made it a couple of thousand off. So, she has her niche, she is a link in the chain. If you talk about Mary Quant, you must think about a line, a certain flavour, that is nobody else’s, it’s her. But I have taken her, and I have presented it to the run-of-the- Lily Silberberg C1046/02/08 F12836B Page 114 mill person. Does that answer? So I, I am the person through which the line was interpreted. I am the line.....

[End of F12836 Side B] [F12837 Side A]

Eventually you would look at an original Mary Quant, and then look at the high street adaptation of Mary Quant, and what was in real leather in Mary Quant was Rexine by the time it got to the, to the high street. But there were certain little bits and pieces, and I’m sorry to say little bits and pieces, because we could not indulge ourselves, it was very very specialised garments.

And was this when you were still with Goodman’s?

No, Mary Quant... I was appointed lecturer in 1964. Courrèges and Mary Quant were running literally side-by-side for youthful fashion. And, they were indeed almost feeding off of each other. Courrèges did remarkable things. Boots that were backless and toeless, in white leather. By the time they hit the high street in England, they were still backless and toeless, they were still quite high up the shin, but they weren’t leather, they were, they were imitation leather.

Is that was Rexine was?

That’s, Rexine, yes, yes. Op art, which, Mary Quant was a great exponent of Op art, circles, colours, garments that were in segments, lines, black lines running down the garment, black lines running across the garment, some of the, the areas in different colours. It was a revolution, it was lovely. It was wonderful. And running alongside that, with all these influences, was Carnaby Street.

Had you been to Carnaby Street when you were a child?

Carnaby Street was a red light street. It runs parallel with Regent Street. It is between Regent Street and the depths of Soho. Every second little, little room had a lady operating from it. The police would patrol in twos and threes. It could almost be Lily Silberberg C1046/02/09 F12837A Page 115 termed, in Hogarth’s times, as ‘the stews’. And Carnaby Street was not exactly what you would call a place that you walked down for amusement, you had to walk down it to get from A to B. But at the top of Carnaby Street there is Berwick Street, and from Berwick Street you’d then go into the market, Berwick Street, what is that, that...bit... No. A line that runs, a street that runs across. Then you go into Berwick Street Market, Berwick Street itself, which then runs parallel to Carnaby Street. It had little or nothing to do with the garment industry, but suddenly, for no apparent reason whatsoever, Carnaby Street became Carnaby Street. Can’t tell you how, can’t tell you why, but it did. It did.

So what happened, how did you leave Goodman’s, what happened in between?

Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. I was there, I should think... I went to work there, let us say in 1950, and I left there in 1960. Wonderful adventures, wonderful adventures. But, I was getting a little bit fed up with being left to my own devices as it were, because of the amount of fires that broke out. Is this all right for the tape?

You can close this tape if you want to.

What, when I’ve finished?

Yes.

There were one too many fires for my liking. By this time we were on our third set of premises. We had by this time left Old Street, we had left Davies Street in Mayfair, and we were on to very very lovely premises in Oxford Street.

Whereabouts?

[pause] It is between Poland Street... Think of Poland Street, going up towards Oxford Circus. It was in that first block. So it was very very close to Marks & Spencer, the Pantheon Marks & Spencer as we know it now.

And were you still living in Great Titchfield Street? Lily Silberberg C1046/02/09 F12837A Page 116

In Great Titchfield Street.

Perfect.

No, I’ve never really liked rolling out of bed, going into work. I’ve always liked to have a little bit of a journey in between. You collect yourself, you meet other people, you see what’s going on in the world. And it’s all food for thought, especially if you happen to be... Are you cold, would you like me to put on the, the heater for you?

No, I’m fine thank you.

Are you sure?

Are you cold?

Not at all, not at all. So I always like to collect my wits as it were. And... But living down there, living literally within hailing distance. So we finished up there, doing a very very nice class of garment, very very nice class of garment. Now, my father died in 1952, and, Mum, was hale and hearty and everything was lovely. And one...you know, Mum used to say, ‘I don’t feel all that good.’ She said, ‘It’ll be better tomorrow. Have a good night’s sleep.’ And, she developed a back ache. And, it soon made itself evident that Mum was not well. She wouldn’t go to see a doctor. But we forced her to go and see a doctor. And, he was a diagnostician, a dia...he diagnosed things, rather than treating it, he diagnosed it, and then could put you on to somebody who could deal with it. Diagnostic. And he discovered that she had sugar diabetes. In those days it was not a pleasant thing. But nevertheless, he said, ‘You won’t need insulin. Diet would do it.’ And, he transferred her back to the panel doctor, who gave certain tablets that she had to analyse her own urine et cetera et cetera. And he put her onto a diet, and the Middlesex Hospital took over with a dietician. He referred her to the dietician and everything. She wasn’t getting any better. Wasn’t getting any better. And one day she went round to the Middlesex Hospital and she asked to see a doctor. And the backache wasn’t just a common or garden backache; it appears that she was riddled with cancer. And she herself knew Lily Silberberg C1046/02/09 F12837A Page 117

it, because we’d, we’d nursed Dad through it, so she could under...she, she knew what the, what the symptoms were. And, the backache was caused because, the kidneys, she had it in all the soft parts, all the soft tissue. Anyhow, she was at home. And, the pain was kept under control to a certain extent. I was working still with Debbie Goodman. And I received a letter once, out of the blue almost, from a firm called Norman Linton, to say that, he has heard of me by repute. If I have a little while in hand, he would be delighted to meet me face to face. I found out that he, his secretary knew a friend of mine, and that’s how he got to hear about me. So, I phoned him up, I said, ‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘I’d love to meet you as well,’ I said, ‘you have one of the largest outsize,’ that is garments dealing with large women, one of the largest outlets for it, manufacturing. I said, ‘I’d love to meet you. As a large lady, I’d love to meet you.’ So he said, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m only round the corner in Dean Street.’ So, I went up to see him. He was overjoyed to see me, made a great fuss of me, and he said, ‘I want you to look at some of my garments.’ In other words, he wanted me as an appraisal, to do an appraisal. And I looked at them, I said, ‘They’re very nice indeed.’ I said, ‘As a large lady,’ I said, ‘I would not be averse to wearing any of them,’ lying through my teeth. I said, ‘The manufacturing of them is pretty fair.’ He said, ‘Well what can I do to, to improve it?’ I said, ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m very much of the idea, if it ain’t broken, don’t try to fix it.’ I said, ‘You’re doing very nicely. You’ve obviously got an excellent team round you. Leave it alone.’ He said, ‘I hear that you’re a wizard at pattern cutting.’ He said, ‘I’d love you to come up and do a pattern for me.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m in full employment.’ I said, ‘I don’t want to be traitorous to the person who I’m employed by.’ I said, ‘My mother isn’t very well,’ I said, ‘and all my time is very much taken up.’ He said, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if ever you do find yourself,’ he said, ‘maybe with a couple of hours on a Saturday morning,’ he said, ‘I’m moving to,’ where was it, Edgware Road. He said, ‘I’ll pay for a taxi,’ he said, ‘you can get a taxi,’ he says, ‘come round to Edgware Road.’ He said, ‘Do a bit of a pattern,’ he said. ‘I’d just like to see what a real pattern looks like.’ Buttering me up as you’ve never come across anything like it. I was flattered mind you, but, you know, tongue in cheek. Anyhow, I said to Mum, I said, ‘You know, he’s a very nice person.’ She said, my mum said to me, she said, ‘Are you happy where you are?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ She said, ‘You don’t want to take on clean water until you’ve dispensed with the dirty water.’ This was her way of saying to me, you know, ‘Watch it. Don’t just go going headstrong into something that you don’t know about. Do a little bit Lily Silberberg C1046/02/09 F12837A Page 118

more research.’ But a few Saturdays later, Mum felt quite well, and I phoned up and I said, you know, ‘Is the firm open...?’ ‘Yes yes. Get a taxi.’ And I went round there, and I did a couple of hours. And in that couple of hours I turned out a pattern to end all patterns. And, I left it all with instructions and everything. And, that was to be given to the sample machinist of the firm. I wasn’t to be around. And I went home, thought no more about it.

Did you get paid there?

No. Didn’t dream of it. I’m not...I’m...I’m not one that is money-minded like that. So, anyhow, what was it, about five weeks later, Mum passed away. And I received a very nice letter from the firm of Norman Linton, Mr Linton himself, saying that, how sorry he was to hear of my bereavement. And, if I did ever think of changing my place of occupation, would I give him first refusal? Now, in that time, Oxford Street had burnt down, and by this time I was hacked off with it. Enough. And I was then, this was about two weeks before Mum died, and I was really fed up with it. Because, I was told that the new premises would not be ready for about five or six weeks, and although I’d be put on a retainer... I wasn’t one to just walk about enjoying my time off. I had to be occupied. And I thought to myself, blow this for a lark. You’ve had it. Thank, thank you very much, it’s been ten, eleven years. Enough is enough. Somebody’s offering me employment, through repute. You haven’t got any full-time employment to offer me. Mum is desperately ill, I’m not going back there. And I told Mum, I said, ‘I’m never going back there.’ ‘Oh well, please yourself, you know, but remember, you don’t throw away one water before you...’ So, I said, ‘No I’m not going back.’ Anyhow, the upshot of it was, Mum passed away. And I received, as I say, this letter of condolence. And he stated in no uncertain terms that if I am looking for employment, can he have first refusal? And I said to Ray, you know, I said, ‘This is such a blow.’ Mum died on the 1st of March. A few days ago we celebrated the forty-third anniversary. I said, ‘You know,’ I said, ‘I’m fed up with it. I’m not going back there.’ And I phoned him up and I said, ‘I’d like to take up your offer.’ So he said, ‘Well come along for interview,’ he said, ‘so I can introduce you to the design and to the workforce, to everybody.’ And, that was on the 4th of February. And I started work on the 6th... The 4th of March rather. On the 6th of March, the following Monday, I started working for Norman Linton. And I was with them for four years. I Lily Silberberg C1046/02/09 F12837A Page 119

had the time of my life. In the meantime, I had been offered an evening class position at Barrett Street, which happened in the most peculiar way. It may be of interest to some people. I was an evening class student doing modelling. Modelling is three- dimensional pattern-making. You put the calico straight onto the stand, so you are visualising what you are doing. You have not got the medium of a flat pattern, or block pattern, between you and the actual design; you create direct from the design onto the, onto the three-dimension of the stand. It is a, it’s the nearest thing to sculpture, with the end result of a flat pattern. Because what you do is, you mark it up and you render it down. So much so, I wrote a book on it with a co-author, Martin Shoben, that’s in the British Library. We had to send six copies to the British Library. So anyhow, I kept up my studies of modelling. And because I was so cocksure that I could get into Barrett Street, into the modelling course, whereas other students were breaking their necks to get there on the first day of enrolment, Lily with her retinue, because I had a great following, would turn up an hour and a half before the actual closing of the last day of enrolment, that is how assured I was that the doors would open, and let me and my mates through.

Who were your mates?

Etty Gontarski[ph], Illo Summerfield, and various others. All from the industry, all from the industry. Because, we were as it were very tightly... We were welded together, we were welded together. All different characters but we were all welded together. The industry welded us. We all worked in various different places, but when we got together, I should think that the brainpower, there were four of us altogether, Thelma Childs was another one, the brainpower that we had between the four of us, we could have moved mountains, but we didn’t realise it in those days. We were having a good time. So anyhow, I rolled up with my retinue. And Miss Rushdon who was head of department, she was head of department, I bowled in. I said, ‘Hello Miss Rushdon,’ I said, ‘well we’ve arrived. Four places please.’ Five places. Thelma Childs. ‘Five places please.’ Four places... I can’t remember which. So she says, ‘No,’ she says, ‘no, the books are closed. Modelling is full up. You have had it.’ I said, ‘I beg your pardon?’ I said, ‘I beg your pardon?’ I said, ‘We have arrived, and we wish to have...’ And of course there was a lot of banter going on. Lily Silberberg C1046/02/09 F12837A Page 120

Miss Rushdon had been head of department of Light Clothing, and a most wonderful lady, most wonderful, wonderful person.

Could we just stop a minute, because I think your necklace is probably...

Is it?

[break in recording]

Olive Rushdon, ‘No you can’t get in, you can’t get in.’ But I noticed that there was a twinkle in her eye. She said, ‘I will accept the other ones,’ she said, ‘but you,’ she said, ‘I can’t accept you.’ But there was that wonderful twinkling in the eye. And I said, ‘What’s it all about?’ She says, ‘You are going to teach here. We can’t accept you as a student, but we would like you to come and do, to take an evening class.’ Now I swear to you, it was as simple as that. It was as simple as that.

How did you feel?

Stunned. Stunned.

Had you ever thought about teaching?

It had crossed my mind. But, teaching was for the educated. Remember, I had little or no education. My formative years, I was ten when the war broke out, I didn’t go to school for near enough a year, because everything was evacuated in London. I was one of the few, very very few youngsters that was not evacuated. So consequently there was no tuition going on, what there was, round the corner in Bolsolver Street, attached to the church in, opposite Great Portland Street station, there were two elderly ladies, I can even tell you what their names were, Miss Freer and Miss Alnutt, from Trinity Church, they saw that there was a few kids in the street, and they let it be known that they were doing Bible studies. So it was obviously under the auspices of the Church. And Mum said, ‘You must go. You must go. It will be an anchor for you.’ And, you know, learn what’s going on. And I’ll tell you what was going on. I learnt about the Chain Bible. Did you know there was such a thing as a Chain Bible? Lily Silberberg C1046/02/09 F12837A Page 121

I learnt when the first English Bible was printed, because prior to that it was in Latin. And because the Bible became so very very popular, it was printed in English, and had to be chained to the lectern in case it was stolen. Hence, it was called the Chained Bible. I learnt how to sing For Those in Peril on the Sea, with Miss Freer or Miss Alnutt playing the piano. But it kept us amused with an educational edge to it. And then, after about a year the evacuees started to come back to London, because it’s what was called the Phoney War, there wasn’t any bombing going on, so consequently... And then after the first year, schools started to open up, and I was bombed out of about eleven schools, one after another. So I didn’t have very much education. So consequently, teaching was something for the educated. But Barrett Street did give me a foundation of learning. But I never really thought about taking that learning and giving it to others, other than the fact that I had a succession of juniors working with me. But it was purely for and on behalf of the industry. Language a little bit ripe, but that is the language of industry. A little bit terse in the manner. And, very, very warm, which is something that I never really felt all that much coming from a teacher to a pupil. And I, how can I possibly overcome this? Plus the fact, I had the most wicked temper ima... It was an industrial temper.

[End of F12837 Side A] [F12837 Side B]

God! Industrial temper. I was born with a bad temper. But in industry I not only had a bad temper, I also had a very very short fuse. Very short fuse. Which did not necessarily mean that I was intimidating. It meant that, I could blow up, I was volatile. Now this did not come into teaching, this is something that was part of me. It was probably in my chromosomes, I don’t know. That was part of me, that was my character. And I very very often heard people say, ‘Don’t start with her, because you never quite know where it’s going to finish.’ But I would never do anything spiteful to anybody. But obviously something had been recognised in me. And do you remember I mentioned somebody called Miss Wright, who taught me modelling? Miss Wright was my evening class teacher. And I remember distinctly her saying to me on a few occasions, ‘Oh look, that student over there is a little bit of trouble. Go on Lily, go over and show ’em what’s what.’ And I didn’t even question it, I would go over, and I’d say, ‘What are you trying to, trying to achieve?’ And they would Lily Silberberg C1046/02/09 F12837B Page 122

show me the sketch. And it became as it were, the, the evening class became like a club. We laughed together, we joked together. If anybody was upset we would try and help them. And it was a lovely, lovely atmosphere. But I didn’t realise that I was being watched, and to some extent being schooled to do teaching. So consequently, when Olive Rushdon said, ‘No you can’t come in as a student, but we’ve got a class formed for you as a teacher,’ it was a blow, because I didn’t...I honestly didn’t know that that was going on. The other ones that I was with, they were jigging up and down as if it was, as if it was a wedding. But they were not enrolled in my class. Provision had been made in Miss Wright’s class for them. So I had to have a new set of people. Now, Miss Wright, a very very gentle sort of person, very... A lovely person. My life seems to be surrounded by lovely people. But, I do not exaggerate when I say, if a person’s a horror, I say they’re a horror, but if they’re lovely, I treasure their memory. And, she volunteered to be in the classroom with me for the first three lessons, to make sure that I filled out the register properly, to make sure that I could run the class properly. The classes started at 6.30, and by seven, 7.30, she would disappear out of the class. Bye bye, everything’s going smoothly. She would leave it to me. So it wasn’t as though I was just dumped into it; it was a matter of easing me into it. And, by the third evening she said, ‘You’re on your own.’ Ain’t looked back since. And I had the pleasure of doing that with a student of mine. Bharat Solanki, he is Indian, but I looked at him as a student working, I could learn things from him. And I also took on board the way he adapted himself with the people round him, and his attitude. If you gave him something to do, his attitude was, ‘No problem.’ And he did it. And he did it to a very very high standard indeed. One day I said to him, ‘You know Bharat,’ I said, ‘I see in you a bit of a teacher.’ I said, ‘You’ve, you did a three-year course, your coursework was exemplary. You have been in the industry now for three years, so that has rounded you off as a person.’ I said, ‘I see that there is something of a teacher in you, and, would you like to do some evening class work?’ And he said he’d never given it a thought. I said, ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I will put your name forward.’ He said, he said, ‘But,’ he said, ‘I can’t do teaching unless you’re in the class with me.’ I said, ‘All right then, I’ll be in the class with you.’ Suits me. So a class was formed, and I introduced myself, ‘My name is Lily Silberberg, I am your teacher. This is Mr Solanki, he is my assistant, and we are between us going to take you through.’ And I laid down the course of work, and how it was to be handled, and everything that went into it and what the outcome would be, because it was City & Guild. Lily Silberberg C1046/02/09 F12837B Page 123

And what was the course?

Light Clothing, Pattern Construction. And I also laid down the fact that they had to do 110 hours on the register, otherwise they would not qualify for sitting City & Guilds. And, I knew that Bharat had been right the way through the City & Guild, right the way through to Advanced, so I knew he was familiar with it. And, set down the first scheme of work. I said, ‘Now,’ I said, ‘you see the scheme of work, I have illustrated it to you, I have demonstrated it to you. Question and answer. I know you’re capable of doing it.’ They weren’t first-years, they were second-years by the way. I said, ‘Now this is where we’re going to work it.’ I said, ‘In this class there’s twenty-two students,’ and the room was big enough to take twenty-two. And it was not a class where there was machinery; it was pure, metre sticks, pencils, tape measures, paper et cetera. I said, ‘Now what’s going to happen,’ I said, ‘is that Mr Solanki will take that side of the class, I will take this side of the class, and then at a certain point we will cross over, and then we will take it, that’s the way we’ll circulate through it.’ Bharat was beaming, lovely. Second week, full head count, again, I did the demonstration. You take that side, I take that side, we’ll do it again. Third evening, took the register. I said, ‘Now, Mr Solanki is in charge. Mr Solanki, this is your group. Good night all.’ And I left. And he looked at me. And I had to do it that way. He phoned me up that evening, he said, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ I said, ‘No I had to do it to you.’ He never ever forgave me for it, but he never stopped thanking me for it. Never stopped thanking me for it. But he never did become a full-time teacher. He became pretty powerful in the evening class circuit, but he never became a full-time teacher. Which is a great pity for education.

What made you decide to become a full-time teacher?

[pause] Mum had passed away. During Mum’s illness, from where I lived to the annexe of Barrett Street, which was Bolsolver Street near Great Portland Street station, Mum used to say to me, ‘Don’t sit at home; go and do the evening class. Your students are waiting for you. Don’t let them down. Ray’s at home, and if Ray needs you, all she has to do is just run round the corner to Bolsover Street and bring you home.’ I used to protest, ‘No I don’t want to,’ you know. ‘No, you must go. Lily Silberberg C1046/02/09 F12837B Page 124

You must go.’ So... Because Ray was going to... I was at home, the place had burnt down, I was at home the whole time, but Ray used to go to the office, and then she used to bring home work and do it in the evenings.

Is this at the solicitor’s?

At the solicitor, at the solicitor, yes. She had her own cases. And so she used to bring it home. And she had her typewriter at home, so any letters that had to be... So that Mum was being seen to all the time. And, I used to go to Bolsolver Street to take the class. This might sound wicked, and I’m not happy to say it, but when the class started, and I got into the swing of it, if somebody would have come through the door and said, ‘You are needed at home,’ I would have said, ‘Why? What’s wrong?’ I was in another world. It was as though I was outside myself. Don’t think that happens to many people these days, unfortunately. But, I felt bad about it. When the class was over and I went home, I felt very bad that I had managed to escape, but I had done. And Mum, Mum passed away, and it was, it was very very sad. And then I went to work for Norman Linton. And my evening classes continued through that time. And then one day Miss Wright left me a note via the office. We had moved to Oxford Circus, John Princes Street, by that time. She left me a note in the office to be delivered to me. Because we had to go into the office to sign in, and there was a note from Miss Wright. ‘Dear Lily, I have decided to retire, and I would like to put you forward as a candidate for the position.’ Went home and I discussed it with Ray. And Ray said, ‘And why not? And why not? If you get the job, pigs will fly round Oxford Circus.’ Because the, the, the running for those jobs was very great, very great. Now here I was, on the crest of a wave in industry, doing the best work that I had ever done anywhere; fulfilled, fantastic; earning a jolly, jolly good wage; teaching evening classes twice a week, which was bringing in even more; and everything was all right in my world. And suddenly to be given the opportunity to put down one side and pick up another strand. But I sort of conjured up in my mind, what would Mum have said about it? And she would have said, ‘Go for it.’ The first payment that I got from evening classes, it came in on a grey slip of card, posted to your personal, to your home address, Mum was in the Middlesex Hospital, and it was for doing three evening classes at the princely sum of 7s.6d. per session. So, the cheque that was being paid into the bank, because they only sent you the, the slip telling you that the Lily Silberberg C1046/02/09 F12837B Page 125 money was in the bank, was for what, for 22s.6d. And evening classes were three hours, three-hour sessions, 6.30-9.30. So I had done nine hours’ work for 22s.6d. How much is that in English now? £1...£1.10...

£1.10p.

£1.11.

Eleven.

£1.11p. Nine hours’ work for £1.11p.

So how did that compare with what you were getting at Norman Linton?

Oh it was a fraction. It was a fraction. But you don’t do necessarily things for money. You do it for the, for the absolute joy of it. It’s there, it’s...it becomes food and drink to you. And I remember taking up this advice slip, I said, ‘There you are Mum, that’s my first payment from teaching.’ And she looked at it, she couldn’t, couldn’t read or write, so she didn’t know... But she recognised £1.2s. and something. And she called over the sister of the ward, she said, ‘There you are, I told you my daughter was a teacher.’ Because at the head of it was, ‘London County Council’. It wasn’t Inner London Education. ‘London County Council’. ‘Told you my daughter was a teacher.’ So, I went for the interview with the head of department, and I said to him, ‘What chances do you think that I have?’ I said, ‘Because I don’t want to bolster myself up with the thought that this could be.’ I said, ‘I’m literally, I’m powerful in what I’m doing. What are my prospects?’ He says, ‘With your reputation,’ he says, ‘very good indeed.’ He says, ‘You’re home-grown, we know your work, we know how you handle people, it’s filtered through to us. And you would be an asset.’ And so I said, ‘Well what is the, what is the process from now onwards?’ He said, ‘Look at the, look in the Times Educational Supplement,’ he said, ‘you’ll see the job advertised. You’ll be obliged to apply for the job, because it’s open competition.’ He said, ‘I cannot guarantee that you will get the job,’ he said, ‘because we do not know who the applicants are. There may be people that will, just knock you out the way, they are so good.’ He said, ‘But,’ he said, ‘nothing ventured, Lily Silberberg C1046/02/09 F12837B Page 126

nothing gained.’ Well I did exactly that, when the advert came up I applied for a form, filled it out, sent it in, heard nothing. And, I heard about six weeks later, that would I make myself available for a practical test to be held at John Princes Street. So... And would I please bring with me some garments that I had modelled. So... Because I had about ten days in between, I put some very nice toiles on a stand, made them up for couture, and I took with, two garments that I had made, apart from which, what I was wearing. And I presented myself at the hall. And there was, oh, at least eighteen, twenty other people. And I was given a sketch, allocated a stand, several metres of calico, and at the word ‘Go,’ ‘Start modelling ladies.’ So I didn’t take any notice of anybody else. They were strangers to me, I’d never seen them before. And I modelled what was on the piece of paper. Then I looked at the piece of paper, looked at the toile, didn’t like it, so I pulled it all to pieces, tore it straight off the stand, started again. And the second attempt was far superior to the first attempt. Now I didn’t realise it, but that had been noticed. That had been noted. Whereas the others, you know, all putting it straight onto the stand, looking on occasion at the sketch. But no, I... Although it was as near on the sketch the first time round, I still was not satisfied with it. And I remember pulling out all the pins, throwing the fabric away, starting right from scratch. And within a matter of maybe fifteen minutes, there it was, front, back, sides, sleeve, the whole thing, including a draped cowl. And there were various different people coming round with clipboards, making notes and everything. And there was one short, dumpy woman, who was hovering round me as if she was a bluebottle round a, round a...no, a bee round a honey pot, I’m going to put it that way. I was going to be crude, but... And, she never said anything to me, but she was sort of, one minute she was behind me, and the next minute she was at the side of me, she was looking, and she went round, had a look at others. And, she said to me, ‘Have you brought any, any examples with you?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘in that bag over there,’ I said. ‘I haven’t brought them out because, I didn’t know whether I should.’ She said, ‘Do you mind if I take that bag and...?’ I said, ‘By all means,’ I said, you know. And I took it that she was one of the invigilators, but who she was, I didn’t know. And then at a certain point they called time, and by that time I had finished. And by that time she had brought back the bag. And, I didn’t realise it, but I had been amongst some of the brainiest people in the garment industry, who have long since gone from, from the industry, but this woman who was beetling round me, Lily Silberberg C1046/02/09 F12837B Page 127

a name that you probably don’t know, Leonora Curry. Have you ever heard of that name?

No I haven’t I’m afraid. Tell me about her.

She was a technologist. No, she was a technician. She was a designer par excellence. There was a couture house called Michael of Dover Street, or was it Davies Street? Somewhere in... Between the wars it had dressed royalty, and she was the pulse that was Michael’s. And she was the technical adviser to the London College of Fashion. Now I’m not going to say that she was with me the whole time watching, she went round to others, but invariably, she was, you know... [to pet?] Get out the way Mrs. So she said to me, ‘Well Miss Silberberg,’ she said, ‘I’ve watched you.’ I said, ‘Before we go any further,’ I said, ‘who have I the pleasure of speaking to?’ She said, ‘Leonora Curry.’ And of course you could have flattened me. So, anyhow, I said, ‘Well, Miss Curry,’ you know, I said, ‘how do you do, how do you do?’ Three of us were chosen to go forward to meet the committee, which was the next day. And I went in front of the committee, was treated with the utmost respect and courtesy. Gave as good as I got. One of the questions were, ‘Are you coming into education as a bolthole to get out of industry?’ I said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘I have looked up the, the hours that I will be expected to work, and,’ I said, ‘it looks fantastic on paper,’ I said, ‘but having been an evening class instructor for a certain amount of years, I understand the paperwork involved, I understand the fact that I will have something like sixty to seventy students passing through my tuition per week, so therefore I have to cater for that amount of brains, plus reserving a little bit for myself. And although the hours I’ll be obliged to work will be twenty-three hours per week, I do realise that that is indeed the equivalent of a forty-eight-hour week in industry. I do know that the hour, that the holidays are long,’ I said, ‘but with the amount of, the burden of work,’ I said, ‘I shall probably be ready for that, for that holiday.’ And, I said, ‘I’m on the crest of a wave in industry,’ I said, ‘but I feel that I would like to be a teacher, that there is more to be offered to the industry.’ And, I got the job. Now I’m sitting here looking at you, you’re looking at me, and I can’t see you and you can’t see me.

[end of session]

Lily Silberberg C1046/02/09 F12837B Page 128

[End of F12837 Side B] [F12961 Side A]

Lily Silberberg, spelt with one l in Lily, l-i-l-y. How’s that for level?

Lovely, thank you. You were telling me about some of the people that you met when you were working in the garment trade.

Mm.

And I wondered whether you could sort of tell me about one of them.

Yes. Yes, yes. A delightful memory that is really bound up in some part-time work that I took on. It was between fires, and I found myself at a loose end. And I was window shopping in Oxford Street, I think it was a spring day, I was doing window, window shopping in Oxford Street, and on the way back I happened to turn round the corner of John Princes Street near Oxford Circus, and as I’m walking along there I passed a firm that was called Simone et Filles. And, I just idly looked at it, and there, bottom left-hand corner, was nothing more than a, like a postcard, that said, ‘Experienced stock cutter required.’ Well I didn’t have anything else to do, so I thought, well I’ll pop in there and see what’s what. It’s not their business that I shall be going back to full-time occupation very soon. So, you know, it’ll give me something to do, and I might pick up an idea here or there. Because it was a couture house. Now the mere fact that they said stock cutter, that meant to me that it wasn’t for the individual person, it was probably for very very pucker firms that sold the individual garment. And I went in there, and very nice showroom, little gilt chairs, a lot of velvet, mirrors, very nice indeed. And I was greeted by what, sort of a granite- faced old harridan. And she said to me, ‘What do you want?’ And I said, ‘Well I’ve come to see about the job that you’ve got advertised in your window.’ ‘What can you do?’ I said, ‘Well I can do stock cutting.’ ‘Singles?’ I said, ‘That’s all right, yes, I will cut individuals.’ ‘How many years have you been in the trade?’ and I told her, I’ve forgotten how many years. Probably put on a few more. And, she said, ‘When can you start?’ ‘I can start this afternoon.’ ‘All right then.’ She said, ‘Where do you live?’ and I said, ‘Great Titchfield Street, round the corner.’ Went home and I got my Lily Silberberg C1046/02/10 F12961A Page 129

scissors, my shears. And in the afternoon I turned up. And what was lovely on the surface in the showroom, it was like going down into the bowels of the earth where the work took place. But nevertheless, I was greeted by a very very nice young man, he must have been a young man, mature young man. And, he said, ‘I’ll show you what to do.’ His name was Fred. And, he said, ‘Here’s the pattern,’ he said, ‘here’s the fabric, and you lay it down, you mark it out.’ He said, ‘Make sure you get all the nips and all the balance marks in and everything.’ I said, ‘Yes, fine, fine, fine.’ He said, ‘When you’ve laid it out,’ he said, ‘let me have a look,’ he said, ‘before you do any marking.’ So I laid in the pattern. And, he said, ‘No,’ he said, ‘we’ll take a bit off from here,’ he says, ‘we’ll make that a little bit narrower, and we’ll overlap a little bit here, and make this a bit shorter.’ So the length of fabric that was laid out was of one length, but the way I was putting in the actual pieces of pattern, there might have been anything up to about, oh, twenty inches less. I said, ‘Oh,’ I said, you know, ‘Fred...’ He said, he said, ‘You do it that way,’ he said, you know, he said, ‘put it in a bit further.’ I said, ‘Fair enough.’ Let’s face it, I was just brand new on the job as it were. And, he said, ‘Mark it in as I’ve laid it.’ I marked it in. He said, ‘Take note of how I’ve done it, because,’ he said, ‘there’ll be another one.’ I said, ‘Right, fair enough then.’ Marked it all in, cut it out. And he said, ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you go, you do it quickly,’ he says, ‘you do it very efficiently.’ Because it seemed that every garment was cut individually. It wasn’t as though they took on half a dozen orders and laid them up and cut them out en masse; each garment was individual.

And each garment in a different fabric?

No, same fabric, but could be a different colour. I remember the first one was brown, it was brown port. It was bronze, woven, bronze one way and black the other, so it had a very very nice dark bronze, copperish effect. Very nice indeed. And, the piece that was left over was neatly folded and put under Fred’s table. Next one to come up, same again. Started that. He said, ‘No Lil,’ he said, ‘you take this piece out, that piece out, that piece out,’ he said, ‘push it up a bit,’ he said. And then he said, ‘I want these smaller pieces cut out from the piece that you had in the morning.’ I said, ‘Right enough.’ Well this time there wasn’t sort of, twenty inches, there might have been about thirty-five, forty inches left over. And, I cut the small pieces out from the piece that was left over from the morning, and then cut the rest of it out from the big Lily Silberberg C1046/02/10 F12961A Page 130 bit. And of course then a third one came up, and the next thing I knew, I had yardage. It wasn’t just inchage, it was... (laughs) It was yardage that was being put under the table. And so I worked till 5.30. And, Fred said, ‘Yes, you’re working very very well.’ He said, ‘We start at half-past eight in the morning.’ He said, ‘And, we have three-quarters of an hour for lunch. Go and get yourself a cup of tea twice a day, once morning, one afternoon.’ He said, ‘We work through to half-past five, six o’clock,’ he said, ‘and,’ he said, ‘you like the job?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ Still didn’t tell him that this was just an interim thing. Anyhow, next morning bright and early I was there, and, same thing happened, this time I think I went from bronze to blue. And the same thing happened, there were three or four of them. And, different designs, but nevertheless, I knew exactly, that you folded in a piece, you overlapped a piece. And I was getting on fine. And it was about mid morning. The door flew wide open, and there framed in the doorway was what could only be described as a half boiled hulk. When I say a half boiled, he had a raw look about him, almost like a boiled shrimp. He was huge. He had a voice like a foghorn. And, he must have stood well over six foot, six foot four, six foot six. He was built, oh he must have weighed seventeen, eighteen stone. But well proportioned. It was all muscle, it wasn’t, wasn’t anything else but muscle. Like you find a huge rugby player, that’s what he was like. And, coupled with this voice I got...he was quite intimidating. And out came this voice, ‘’Allo Fred.’ And Fred says, ‘’Allo Stan. This is Lil.’ And he said to me, ‘’Allo Lil.’ And I said to Fred, ‘Who is he?’ ‘He’s the designer.’ And his name was Stan Palmer. Right the way through life you meet various different people, some people make an impression, some people don’t make an impression, you can’t even remember them. Some people you remember them but you dislike remembering them. But I remember Stan with a certain love, as a human being. He was just an all-round, smashing person. You gave me a lovely simile the other week. He was indeed camp. And you said, camp as a line of...as a row of tents. He was as camp as a, as a very long row of tents. But he was wonderful, and I don’t say this condescendingly or patronisingly. He...if the world was made out of Stan Palmers, what a wonderful world this would have been. And we got on like a house on fire. And I was privileged to watch him work. On occasion, he would bring a stand down into where... Because he felt lonely upstairs, so he’d come downstairs, and he says, ‘There’s nobody up there, the old girl’s gone away. I’ll bring the stand down and we’ll...’ And, he would take a piece of fabric and with one pin he would put the fabric onto the stand and just suspend that Lily Silberberg C1046/02/10 F12961A Page 131 piece of fabric with one pin, let it flow, and then pick up the character of the cloth with that one pin holding the cloth. And he would work with the cloth. And I thought, this man is magic. This man is magic. Every now and again we’d get a blast of language where a pin stuck in. His hands were so huge, I’ve got large hands, but we once held hands, and my hand disappeared into his hand. And I said, ‘Have you been doing this all your life Stan? You know, were you born into this?’ He said, he came from Wapping, his father was a stevedore, and he had been a stevedore, and the only way that you could become a stevedore in those days, if it was in the family, the job literally went father son, father son. But he felt that there was more to it. And what’s more, he hadn’t had any tuition; he was a natural. And by sheer dint of personality, he’d gone through into the garment industry. There was nothing precious about him. He was one hundred per cent human being. And his work was divine. And I thought, this, it’s a privilege me being in the company of this man. And then when he’d worked with it, when he’d worked with the fabric, he would mark it up, unpin it, lay it onto paper, mark round. True all the lines together, see that all the runs went beau... It, it was, it was wonderful just watching him. Now, I had the privilege of working there for, what was it, three weeks, three weeks, and then I got the phone call, ‘Right, we’re setting up again. When can you come and join us?’ Well I didn’t even give it two thoughts, I thought, right, I’ll go in there tomorrow morning, and I told the old girl, ‘I’m off.’

And who was she?

And I’ll go. She was the actual proprietor, she was Mrs Simons of the Simone et Filles. Woman must have been, oh, well mind you, I was so young then, everybody looked old who was over forty. She must have been a woman in her seventies. Must have been... Yes, because her two daughters were with her, and they, they were both family, family women, so she must have been seventies, getting on for eighties if not over. And, that’s right, she kept on shouting down the stairs to Fred, ‘Is the new girl covering?’ And he used to shout out, ‘Yeah.’ And I thought, what...you know, what is this all about? So I said, ‘Fred,’ I said, ‘what does she keep shouting, “Is the new girl covering?”’ They were paying me something like six quid a week, something like that. And she was asking, was I doing sufficient work to cover my £6 a week? Now you know, this...(laughs)...this is just not on. But nevertheless, it was, it was Lily Silberberg C1046/02/10 F12961A Page 132

interesting, to be as it were in this milieu. This was something I had never been through before. It was a world almost of couture, these garments that I was cutting, and they were being passed through to the machinists, not that we ever saw a machinist, we were a separate room completely. These garments, in those days, it must have been, ’52, ’53, these garments were being sold for about £80 to £100 a piece. So they were really upper, upper, upper crust. And, as I say, the people that I met there, it was lovely. And watching Stan work, that was an inspiration to me, that there was more to life than just as it were humdrum way of approach. And as I’d been there for a few weeks, I’d got the call, ‘Your job’s waiting for you, come on, come on home’ as it were, I went into the showroom where I knew the old girl was, and I said, ‘Right,’ I said, ‘I can now tell you,’ I said, ‘I only took this job...’ This is how honest I was, and how naïve. I said, ‘I only took on this job temporarily because the...we were moving premises, and I wanted something to do.’ I said, ‘So consequently, I’m leaving.’ And the old girl said, ‘Oh no you’re not.’ I said, ‘Oh yes I am. You can’t keep me here.’ She said, ‘In that case,’ she says, ‘we will withhold your week’s money.’ Which was completely and utterly against the law. Now, to be in the law, she should have given me my money and then sued me for it. But she bypassed everything. She withheld my week’s money. Now in actual fact, in hindsight, I can see what I got from that, being there those few, very few days: I gained more than any wage packet could ever possibly have given me. But in those days, when one is dependent literally from week to week to week, to be suddenly deprived of just a very few pounds, when a few pounds meant a lot, that was really hurtful. Mum wanted to go round there and bash her up, and I said, ‘No you don’t.’ My sister wanted to sue her, because there was such a thing in law that was known as the Truck Act, that meant that you could withhold a person’s money. No, you couldn’t withhold it, you had to give it them, and then sue it back from them. But as I said, she bypassed everything, shortcut everything. And consequently, I started the following Monday. This was on a Friday afternoon by the way. I went, I started my new job. And although argy-bargy went on, they stuck to their guns, and eventually it all petered out. But I kept friends with Stan, I kept friends with him. He, he quite soon left there, and went to work for an even bigger firm, can’t quite remember the name of it, but they were synonymous with the best of garments, they were two sisters. I can’t for the life of me remember their name. They were situated in Cavendish Square. I might a little bit later on remember the names of them. And, Lily Silberberg C1046/02/10 F12961A Page 133

they, they literally poached him from the other place. But as regards working with a colourful character, a character that was so talented, one usually thinks of people who are designers, who are so delicate, and so, so precise. He was everything else except delicacy and precision. He was just wonderful. And the way he dressed. I remember, it turned very very hot during that time I was there, and one day he appeared at the door and he says, ‘I’m going out. I’ll be back soon.’ And I noticed that he had a towel under his, a rolled-up towel. He’d gone swimming, to cool himself down he’d gone up to Marshall Street baths and he’d done half an hour’s swimming, and then went back. He was one of those that would go swimming in the, in the Serpentine, 365 days in the year. Was he a vegetarian? Yes he was a vegetarian. He was everything that was... In those days, you had to be of a certain, a certain type. You, you...you knew your place, and you were in that place. He was everywhere. And the way he dressed... I took something from him, because he used to say, ‘It’s not how you dress Lil, it’s what you do Lil, that’s what causes the impression.’ And, I have known people that have dressed so precisely, so immaculately, and that’s all been a façade. Because what’s been underneath has been rubbish. Whereas you wouldn’t give Stan, except for his height and his build, and his carry-on, you wouldn’t give him a thought that he was capable of such, such wonders.

What did he wear?

What did he wear? Jeans were just coming in, and he wore very very tight jeans. And a floral shirt, open to the waist, partially tucked in, partially not tucked in. And if he got hot, which it very very, very very often became over-heated, off came the shirt, and I think on one or two occasions off came the trousers as well. (laughs) He didn’t care, he didn’t care. Life was for living. And he, he was a one-off, in those days he was a one-off.

Was he the first gay person that you had met in the garment industry?

Yes. [pause] I’m going through. Yes. The only other gay one that I, that I had met was in the very very first job. I’m not going to mention his name, because his name is like poison on my tongue. Sorry to sound hateful, but there are some people that you cannot even bear. And he...but he was, he was a viperous person, a vicious. When Lily Silberberg C1046/02/10 F12961A Page 134

they talk about vicious little what’s-its, he was a vicious little what’s-it. But again, I never knew that there was such a thing as a crossover. It, it didn’t struck...it didn’t come into my, it didn’t come into, into my, my field as it were. These things didn’t... It’s only of recent years when it’s been in your face as it were. It’s now so much in your face, that if you want to know or not, they, they come forward and they tell you. And as a student once said to me, he said, ‘You do know that I am gay?’ I said, ‘You do know that I am Jewish?’ He said, ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ I said, ‘Exactly the same parallel as you telling me that you’re gay.’ I said, ‘We are both exotic.’ Well you know, I don’t know whether that answers what, what you... These things don’t matter to me, but if a person shoves it in my face, I can do nothing else but take note of it. Very very small... Sorry if I’m going off on a tangent. If I’m going off on a tangent, please pull me back Linda. This happened about five years before I retired. I was travelling from one building to another, and I was on the Underground. And we stopped at Oxford Circus, and I with a crowd of people was trying to get out. And there was somebody trying to get in as we were trying to get out. And my face, my eyes drew level with his lapel, and on the lapel there was a large, a large pin, a large badge, and it said, ‘Glad to be Gay’. It was a large pink badge, ‘Glad to be Gay’. Fair enough. I got back again into college, and out of devilment I tore off a piece of pattern card, and wrote on it, in very thick pen, ‘Happy to be Hetero’. And with a safety pin, put it on myself, stuck it on my jumper, and I went down to have a cup of coffee. And of course people see a note stuck to you, they go over, and they read it. And they said, ‘“Happy to be...”?’ I said, ‘Yes, if that chap is glad to be gay, I am happy to be hetero.’ I was lambasted, in all directions, that I was picking on a minority grouping. And I was told, ‘Take that off, it’s not funny.’ (laughs) So I took it...

By colleagues, told to take...?

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yes. And that is, that was the way the atmosphere was going. And the people that told me to do it, they, they were in no way gay. But they told me, ‘Watch it Lil, take it off. That is not funny. You’re picking on a minority grouping. You wouldn’t like it.’ So I took it off. But I did have my five minutes of... (laughs) But, no, I was not aware in those days, I was not aware, not in the slightest.

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Is it about this time that you went to the Festival of Britain?

Must have been. Must have been. Must have been. Yes, the Festival of Britain, happy times. Happy happy happy times. The last big occasion in London that had been a big public occasion, that we as, as citizens of London could have gone to, that was the Olympics. The Olympics came to London, it was held at Wembley Stadium I do believe. It was the first Olympics post-war. When I think of the opening ceremony, in comparison to what the opening ceremony was like in Sydney, Australia, what happened at the London Olympics was positively cringe-worthy in comparison. Because, the opening ceremony was with the, the Olympiads coming in. The flame that came from Athens, from Mount Olympus, was brought into the stadium. He was a smashing youngster dressed completely in white. He was lovely. He did the circuit of the, of the arena, and then ran up the stairs, plunged it in, and there was the, the flame. The King, poor darling, who couldn’t string three words together without stuttering, it was, it was, it was painful to hear him, he declared it open. And then they let the doves go. And all round the, well best part of round the arena, there were these crates of doves, and they let them go. And the doves flew out, and just did a circuit of the arena, and then of course headed home, because they were, they must have had the homing instinct. And that was the beginning, that was the opening. Now when you, when you see the, these four-hour extravaganzas, it is, it is quite remarkable. But we as people, we could go, even though I never went, because sport was not in my, in my background, we weren’t exactly sporting people, and, but I remember seeing... Because we lived at Oxford Circus, and Oxford Circus and Piccadilly was as it were the hub of the universe, well our universe any...it was definitely the hub of the Empire, we saw the athletes in their, in their uniforms. And they were very very well turned out. I remember seeing one from India, navy blue blazer, white trousers, and a navy blue and white turban. And he looked fantastic. And he had the, on his blazer he had the five rings of the, five Olympic rings. And it was lovely, it was a lovely atmosphere. But now, coming back now to the Festival of Britain. That was within my scope.

[End of F12961 Side A] [F12961 Side B]

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The Festival of Britain, we didn’t really understand what it was about. The Olympics must have been held on a shoestring, because part of London was still derelict. There were still great big areas of, bombed-out areas; rebuilding had not started. There was post-war drab. I can’t explain what post-war drab is like. We must have been a rather shabby-looking lot, because, everything, everything had to be used right up to the very very...until, until it could not be used any more. There wasn’t all that many things in the shops. Information wasn’t readily available. Although we say that we won the war, we didn’t win the peace. Does that make sense? It is the countries that started the war, like Germany, and Japan, they won the peace. Because all the goodies were being pumped into them, to revitalise them. So there was America, there was Russia, there was France, there was Great Britain, literally bolstering up the enemy, the people who had done all this destruction to us, they were the ones that were being nursed into, into re-life. They were the ones that were being rebuilt. We weren’t being rebuilt. But thank God the, the war was over, and to a certain extent we didn’t care. The mere fact that the war was over. But there is definitely a, it’s a truism, we won the war, but they won the peace. But nevertheless, Festival of Britain. Now, that was at Waterloo. There were acres and acres and acres of scrubland, of bomb damage. It was wasteland, it was absolutely, the pits. Dumping ground for everything that was, that was useless. And that was adjacent to Waterloo station, it was on the south bank of the Thames, it was a rubbish dump. And the idea was that they were going to refurbish the whole place. Very much the same that they did with the Dome, they took an area of the depth of wastage, and they made it flourish. And that was the feeling about this Festival of Britain. And, of course the crowning glory was the Festival Hall. Now alongside the Festival Hall there was a cinema that was... Everything by the way except the Festival Hall was temporary, and this cinema, which was known as the...the...oh it’s gone out of my head now. But they showed all the old films that you could not see anywhere else. And they would very often change the programme three times a day, because they were specialist films, so you could go there in the morning at eleven o’clock and see one film, go back at two and see another film, go back at six and see another film. But all these films are absolute treasures.

Can you remember any of the names of any films that you saw?

Lily Silberberg C1046/02/10 F12961B Page 137

I went, I went on a Sunday. I was very interested in anthropology, and there were three films on this Sunday that were talking about religion and anthropology. It sounds a queer mixture. But one of the films that I remember, it showed how voodoo had a very very strong basis in Catholicism. That was also bound up with ritual, of pre-Christian, and it was absolutely...I can remember this film very very well, very well indeed. Can’t remember the other two films. But the wonderful... Let’s get back to this cinema. This cinema was revolutionary. We now go into a cinema, or lat least up till then we went into a cinema, and we were used to looking down at the screen. Whereas this was the reverse way round, we looked up to the screen. So consequently, even if the person in front of us had a tall head, we could see over them, because the screen was, was at such an angle. So this was revolutionary in itself. I can’t...I’ll have to ask my sister what the name of it, of this cinema was. It’s all been rebuilt. And we, we almost immediately took out subscriptions, which meant to say then that we could go possibly all day to these films, and it wouldn’t cost us more than a few pence because we’d taken out a yearly subscription. That was there. And as I say, the Festival Hall, that was beautiful. From these acres of scrubland, they put paving over the whole thing. And there was a dome, a rather flat dome that was known as the Dome of Discovery, that, the dome of, the Millennium Dome, was a little bit more domed than that. This was more saucer shaped rather than dome shaped. Marvellously created. Because remember that all that we had been used to was buildings that had been torn apart. There were no skyscrapers. The tallest building in London in those days was the University College building off of Gower Street, do you know it? And that...

Senate House.

And that’s only got about, forty floors to it. But that was the tallest building in London. And... I’ve forgotten now what I was going to say. Oh yes, there was the dome. There were various different other pavilions. There was the Pavilion of Industry; there was the Shot Tower; there was the Skylon. There was a beautiful model, for some reason or other, but beautifully scaled model of the Crystal Palace, remarkable. (laughs) There were various little exhibitions all the way round. And, they brought in statues, one statue that was Jacob Epstein’s Adam. I’ve got a photo...had a photograph standing next to him. I’ve often said to people, you know, Lily Silberberg C1046/02/10 F12961B Page 138

‘Which one was Adam?’ (laughs) Looking at it, it was quite revolutionary. Some people even called it grotesque, but there was a certain something about Epstein’s work. The world was not ready for him yet. The world was not ready to accept him yet. There was also another one I think that was Mother and Child, it was like a great swollen woman. She had not given birth yet, but nevertheless it was Mother and Child. And I believe that was in grey granite. But people would look at it and say, ‘Uch!’ and walk past it. But you had to look at it, it really was... But, that was me. A very very nice exhibit of railway trains, the actual engines, not the carriages but the engines, I think there were three of them, made by a very good family friend called Charles Durrant. He, he made them.

How did you know him?

He worked with my sister in the same office, and he became a family friend. And, he was always short of bits of cloth to polish things with, and, because I was working in the garment industry, I was able to get some cuttings from the floor, and used to stuff...and I used to give them to him. And he was always very very glad of them, that he could carry on doing some polishing. Because his work was, was unique, absolutely unique. Don’t know whether he’s still alive. If he is still alive, he must be an elderly man now. But, those engines were absolutely splendid.

What size were these engines?

I think that they must have been, eighth scale. And to have been accepted by the Festival of Britain as an exhibit, which only had the highest of artistry, they were good, they were very good. And beautifully painted, everything was done by hand. But he was a craftsman in his own way; even though he was a solicitor’s clerk in real life, he was an artist in his own time. In the Dome of Discovery, which was very very interesting indeed, there were things like Mr Bright’s kidney. You look at me very perplexed. There is such a thing as Bright’s disease, and Bright’s disease affects the kidneys. And there in a bottle was Mr Bright’s original kidney in formaldehyde...(laughing)...that was the original kidney from which they took the name of Bright’s disease. So I have seen Mr Bright’s kidney. There were various other things that didn’t really interest me, because, I wasn’t, I wasn’t of that brain. Lily Silberberg C1046/02/10 F12961B Page 139

Had I have been, had I mixed amongst people who possibly had more academic brains, I would have had more... But I remember going to visit it, and walking round the various photographs, pictures, working models. There was one very very lovely model... Yes it was in the Dome of Discovery. There was a marvellous cartoonist in those days, his name was Rowland Emett. He used to draw the most fantastic gadgets, how to make a cup of tea, and there you had to draw, there was a gadget that drew the water from the well; the water then got put along a conveyor belt, and the conveyor belt was driven by somebody on a bicycle. This elderly, decrepit, old man with glasses at the end of his nose, and possibly a drip at the end of his nose, pedalling away for all he was worth, to work this wheel that then brought the water down, and the water was then deposited into a pan, and then the pan was picked up by this equally decrepit old woman who also had her glasses at the end of her nose, with her, with a bun at the back, and a pinafore, and she would then pick up the pan and put it into the kettle. And the kettle was then picked up by somebody else, and put on the gas. And there was a cylinder underneath a table somewhere with somebody equally decrepit. And all these things going on in a cartoon, that it could take you maybe three or four hours to take in. It was the most inventive cartoons imaginable, and this was all Rowland Emett. And he, they brought one of his cartoons to life, inasmuch that there was a working model of one of Emett’s cartoons, which was, how to boil an egg. And it started off with the straining chicken. (laughs) It was...it was all done, it was a performance. And again, there was this, this old man on the treadmill to conduct the egg down the... (laughs) And it was a series of getting the egg from the chicken. It was fantastic. And it was a working model. Now that did really get me, I stood there and I watched that for hours, shrieking with laughter. Because there was... It was just lovely to watch it. I can’t remember much more about the Dome of Discovery, to be perfectly honest with you. But then let’s go to the Pavilion of Industry. Now that, that to me, I spent days and days and days there. Pilkington were making the biggest pane of glass, and you could actually see the glass, the molten glass, what they put in. Of course, it was, it was a thing that had to be repeated day after day after day, so what happened to this great huge sheet of glass, when I say a sheet, a huge sheet of glass, it was the biggest sheet of glass ever produced, and I do believe it was Pilkington’s. They must have smashed it and put it all back again into the kilns to re-molten. But you actually saw the, the molten glass being poured, and then it was being rolled. And you could stand there and you could watch the whole Lily Silberberg C1046/02/10 F12961B Page 140

process. There was the biggest carpet, I believe it was a Wilton carpet, or an Axminster, I can’t remember which, the biggest carpet being produced, and there they had the carpet making machinery. I didn’t stop to watch that very much, because the amount of dust that it threw up, I didn’t realise the amount of dust that that threw up. But it was fantastic to watch. Little do we know that a carpet like in the room that we’re sitting in now, that when that comes off from the loom, it doesn’t look anything like that. It’s all lumps and, lumps and bumps. And then it’s got to be sheered. And this... It must have been a mammoth task, fitting up all of these things. But nevertheless, we could stand and we could actually watch all this industry in progress. There was another part that was devoted to jewellery, and I didn’t know that it was the jeweller that was there. And again, he must have been working on the same piece day in and day out, that when they set a diamond into a brooch, that it isn’t just pressed in, there is a piece cut out from the precious metal, and then, little prongs put on and then it’s set in. And all of this, one could take these things for granted. It wasn’t until you got an exhibition like this, that you could actually stand and watch it. Huntley & Palmer had biscuit-making machines, where you could see this, they were making wafers on the day that I was there, and they were mixing it all up in this big pot, and then they were pouring it out onto these tables, and it was going into the machine, and as one went in to bake, and as one went in the other came out. And then a guillotine came down, and cut up all these wafers. And that’s where the mechanism stopped, because then it was people picking all these things up by hand and putting them..(laughs)...putting them into their various different areas in the boxes. But nevertheless, one was able to see the industry. But there was no clothing industry there. Clothing industry was not there in the slightest. Not to my recollection. I’m sure I would have seen it. There was a theatre, was it the theatre that was adjacent to the Dome of Discovery? Could very well be. Where it showed husky dogs. They were just about getting into the North Pole. Because of the war, they had actually flown over the North Pole as a shortcut to America. And because of that, they had to have various different stations in the North... South Pole hadn’t really been opened up as it is now, and they had to have husky dogs. And people living there. And they brought over this team of husky dogs. And it was false snow, it wasn’t real snow. And, the dogs pulled the sleds through the false snow, and unfortunately there was something in the, in the actual, in this false snow that affected the pads on their little feet, so they had to make them little boots. Which I believe now they are doing in the Lily Silberberg C1046/02/10 F12961B Page 141

North and South Pole, because there is something in the, in the snow, in the ice, that is affecting the, the animals’ pads. Whereas at one time I don’t think that they would have even bothered with it. A dog would have been expendable. But it’s, it’s not so now. So, all those things were there. The Skylon, which was like an elongated oval that lit up at night, standing up, like a, an...a pencil that had been sharpened at both ends, and it lit up at night. So that was like a landmark, that was like a beacon. The Shot Tower, which I believe is still standing, went back to pre-Napoleonic times when they needed a lot of shot for the armies. So, at the bottom of the tower there was water; at the top of the tower there was molten lead; and they would let go little tiny drops of it, so that as it fell from the top of the tower towards the water, it would become cylindrical, it would become round. And by the time it hit the water, it had already formed, slightly cooled, and then it would be properly cooled at the bottom, and that was, that was called the Shot Tower. That was very interesting. (laughs) The Crystal Palace, which was a very nice little pavilion sort of thing, that had the Crystal Palace shape, but not much else. And one walked through it. Very nice indeed. Wasn’t as though there was any plant life or any exhibitions in there; you just walked through it, and, oh yes, this is what the Crystal Palace in miniature must have been. There was one fountain. The place had several fountains. A lot of water, a lot of water. But there was one fountain that was a column, and I believe that that fountain still stands, I believe, I think it’s still there. It was formed out of things that looked like coalscuttles. The water was drawn up through the middle of it; it went into the first coalscuttle which then overturned into the second, into the third, into the fourth, and there was the most wonderful sound of gushing water. I believe as well that that was so synchronised that you could actually tell the time by it, by working out how many seconds it took from one to fill up, to counterbalance into the next one. And all of these things are memorable because we had never seen these things before.

Was it crowded?

It was very very well attended, very well attended. There was a lot of fun to be had there, inasmuch that everybody spoke to each other. You could be standing there looking at a certain exhibit, ‘Have you seen that? Have you seen...?’ People spoke to each other. It was a lovely atmosphere. It didn’t take very long before things started to weather and fall apart, because it wasn’t supposed to last. The only thing that was Lily Silberberg C1046/02/10 F12961B Page 142

supposed to last was indeed the Royal Festival Hall. Now, I went to the Royal Festival Hall to a concert whilst it was still the Festival of Britain. That was revolutionary in its own right. There had never been a hall like it. We were used to halls that were the Albert Hall, which was an arena; the Queen’s Hall, which was the small edition of the Albert Hall, which was just round the corner from us, just by the BBC. I will come back to that, because we were actually underneath the Queen’s Hall when it was bombed, but I shall come back to that at a later date. So, we were used to that sort of concert hall. This was square. This was beautifully angled. You couldn’t see where the balcony was, because it was as if it was...it wasn’t a thing apart from the rest of it; it was a part of it. And all the boxes looked like, like they’d taken drawers from a cabinet and pulled them out. And the acoustics were fantastic. And what is more, the actual front rows, the very very front rows, there was no...there was no barrier between where the, where the audience sat and where the orchestra or performers were. It wasn’t raised. Yes, it was angled, but it was like one sweep. And, the audience could also sit behind the performers as well. So the orchestra, let’s just say, the orchestra was part of the people, not set apart from the people. The atmosphere was lovely. And I have sat in every one of those boxes in the meantime, except the royal box. And I, I have been delighted every time I’ve gone. I, I look at the place with fresh eyes every time I go. The last time I was there was for a convocation, a very dear friend of mine was receiving her diploma. She was a member, she is a member of the London College of Fashion, in the hairdressing department, her name is Suzie Illes Zeidman. I am proud to mention her name. And she received her B.Ed. Honours. And I was proud to be in the audience of the Festival Hall, the Royal Festival Hall. And of course, the actual hall itself is only part of the whole complex, that what goes on outside the hall is equally as important as what went on inside the hall. So this was revolutionary in itself. The lighting, the acoustics, the actual layout was, wow!

Can I ask you how you heard about the Festival of Britain? Were there advertisements?

Oh it was on the radio. It was on the radio. And everywhere you looked, there was the emblem which was a four, four-pointed star, with the head of Britannia facing to the right in profile. Everywhere you went, there was that emblem. Lily Silberberg C1046/02/10 F12961B Page 143

On posters and...?

On posters, on everything. And we actually became excited about it, very excited about it. Because as I said, there was so much drabness going on, especially in the... Everything had come to a grinding halt. People were tired, very very tired, and suddenly there was this jewel, and we were going to make the most of it. And of course, there was the most memorable, apart from the Royal Festival Hall, the big piazza that they had tarmacked on a Sunday evening, there was the Retreat and Tattoo of the Royal Scots Guards in full Highland.....

[End of F12961 Side B] [F12962 Side A]

As a child, certain sounds become as it were ingrained in the conscience, in the conscious mind, and one of them was the sound of bagpipes. It would absolutely throw me into a frenzy of fear. And the reason that I remember bagpipes, that, there was virtually no work on the Clyde.

I remember you talking about this.

And there were, these poor souls had walked from Scotland, carrying their bagpipes, and there they were, shuffling up and down Oxford Street in the gutter, playing their bagpipes. But the sound of it, it was, it was, to me as a child it was a screech. And they were known as Scotchylanders. In our family, ‘Oh it’s nothing, it’s only the Scotchylanders, behave yourself Lily.’ You know. But, to me, the sound of the bagpipe was, was horrific. But nevertheless, there were other sounds in the meantime that overtook that. And consequently, the mind as it grows up, you can accept these sounds. But we were at the Festival Hall, we were at the Festival of Britain, I believe on this Sunday, and we were there till quite late in the evening, when they cleared the piazza, everybody was pushed back, and, all the lights went out, but there were certain searchlights concentrated. And it, it was, it was an area of space, must have been about, oh, I...about two acres of it. Maybe that’s an exaggeration. But to me it seemed like two acres of it. And these lights went on, and from the four corners, Lily Silberberg C1046/02/11 F12962A Page 144

before you actually saw what was coming in, you could hear the pipes and drums. And the scale of these pipes and drums, and the uniforms. And they came in from the four corners. And they proceeded to march and counter-march with the, with the drum majors, and they were wearing the full rig-out. And I have never been captivated, because I’d never seen that before, it was splendid. The colour, the sound, the precision. Breathtaking. And they marched, they counter-marched. It was wonderful. And that lasted for about an hour. But it only took place once a week and that I believe was on a Sunday night, and I made it my business to be there on most Sunday nights, because I could not get enough of it. Those plaids, the colours, the, the...the busbies with the plumes. It was true ceremonial. Now we had not seen ceremonial. We had seen navy blue, Air Force blue and khaki. And here they were, in the full ceremonial, a thing that you could only really see at coronation, and at times, at times... But this, this, it was wonderful. And if I have a lasting memory of the Festival of Britain, that was it. That was it. And it was romantic. Just smashing, just beautiful. Lovely. We could do with more of that now.

I was going to ask you, you talked about sort of, moving into teaching.

Yes.

And, you had mentioned earlier on how your father was sort of involved in the Workers’ Circle and the union.

Yes. Yes.

And I wondered whether you had carried on being interested and involved in union activity when you were teaching.

I must say that I was quite unique. This is not me praising myself. It might sound a bit naïve right now. We were always brought up that the union was our friend. Under no circumstances use it as a hammer to get your own way, that is not what the union is about. Union is a friend, and as friends will protect each other. So that is what the union is all about. I had been a member of the Amalgamated Garment Workers Union, but the, the need for a union wasn’t really there, but I kept up my subs. And... Lily Silberberg C1046/02/11 F12962A Page 145

Do you mean it wasn’t there...there was no need of one for you personally?

In the garment industry, people were earning a good living, a very good living. A machinist, and I’m going back now to, to 1947, 1947, a machinist doing piecework, a machinist doing piecework could earn anything up to £15 a week, which was a lot of money in those days. Mind you, she had to work for it, and if her work was no good, then she would be given back the work. They had to be a certain standard. Because as well we were working Utility, Utility garments which had to be made to a certain standard, and if those garments weren’t made to a standard they weren’t accepted. And if it had the Utility ticket in it, which was the CC41, or was it 1441, that was the, that was the seal of approval. So...

Sorry. I don’t think you mentioned, or you didn’t tell the...when you were making clothes for Utility. Was that at Anne Gross?

Anne Green and Gross, yes. No, no, they were not making Utility; they were making upper, upper class sort of garments. Through the machine, but it was not Utility, not to my recollection. On the other hand, I didn’t have anything to do with the production side of it, so I didn’t see the tickets that went into it. So I cannot possibly say yea or nay. But Utility had to be of a certain amount of fabric, of a certain quality of fabric, of a certain quality of make, within a price range. Now if you got all those four things right, you had a jolly good garment, even though in some cases, because it was peace time, there were certain things lacking, because you had, you had the restrictions on it. So if any of the garments came through that did not meet all these requirements, the garment was then slung back again, sorry to use that word, was put back, taken back to the machinist, or operator, and they had to put it right. Because everything else had been adhered to; it was the manufacturing area of it that had not been accomplished.

Do you want to turn it off?

Yes, if you would do.

Lily Silberberg C1046/02/11 F12962A Page 146

[break in recording]

.....was prosperity. Because, things were getting going, there was money to be earned, provided that you put your shoulder as it were to the proverbial wheel, there was money to be earned. The men were coming back from the forces, but there wasn’t unemployment. The unemployment came a bit later on.

So when was that do you think?

There was unemployment when the men couldn’t settle themselves. And the, the women were very very reluctant to relinquish their place as wage-earners and become housewives, to allow the men to go into industry. So consequently, there was a little bit of what you would call up-and-down feeling about it.

Were machinists usually women though?

Machinists were usually women, in the garment industry. Well in the light clothing. In the heavy clothing, it was men, it was men. So, a machinist could earn good money, much the same way as women ammunition workers earned, I think that they were earning anything up to £20 a week. Now that was a king’s ransom. They worked, and how they worked. Music Whilst[sic] You Work was really a psychological thing. It would come on three times a day, that was between eight and nine; it would then come on I believe, eleven till twelve. Was it on three times a, three times a day or three...or four times a day? But, however many it was, the first one was to give you a pace, so that you picked up a pace of work. That, that was the pace of the music. So there it was, blaring, and automatically you actually set work to that pace.

Did you do it in the garment industry?

All over. All over. It was an industrial ruse. And the music swung along and you were singing to it, and you were working to it. And then, round about mid-morning, when things might have become a little bit slower, on it came again, and you were working to it yet again. Then you had lunch. You were allowed to slow down a little Lily Silberberg C1046/02/11 F12962A Page 147 bit after lunch, because you were replete, and also there might have been a little bit of a concert gong on whilst you were having lunch, if you worked in a huge factory. And then again, when things started to become a little bit lower, on came the music again, and off you went. Much the same as with a martial band, you will find soldiers very often being quite raggedy, but once that band starts playing, you get the beat, they stiffen the shoulder, and off they start, marching. Much the same, same sort of ruse.

What about... Sorry to get back to the union question.

Yes, yes, yes.

When you were teaching, did you then leave the Allied Garment trade union?

Yes, yes, yes. There wasn’t really any need for it. And apart from which, the Amalgamated Garment Workers Union had by that time dropped off to virtually nil. Much the same as the Jewish Bakers Union, that at one time that was quite a strong... They actually closed up the office when there was only three members. And I think they amalgamated them to somebody else. These things have their needs, and then as the struggle is satisfied, as the struggle diminishes, so the needs diminish and consequently things move on. And I went into teaching in the September. I knew that there was the NUT. And before the first two weeks was up, nobody had approached me, so I sought out the union representative, and I asked, ‘Can I please have membership forms, because I wish to become a member of the NUT.’ And I remember he looked at me, he said, ‘You are asking me?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ And, again all I can describe is that his eyes were wide open, and he was blinking, swallowing very hard. He said, ‘We usually have to chase all new members of the teaching staff.’ He said, ‘And you’re actually asking?’ I said, ‘Yes. I want to become a member of the union.’ Well, you know, I was promptly given a set of forms which I duly filled in. And, the subs were taken out from my monthly pay, because I could pay direct through. And, that was it. And, then they wanted volunteers to go... No, they, they wanted people for new elections, that was I believe a little while later, and they asked me if I wanted to be nominated, and I said, ‘Why not? Why not?’ And I was a union Lily Silberberg C1046/02/11 F12962A Page 148 rep for...I was there altogether twenty-nine years, for a good twenty years, including health and safety. I was a health and safety representative, through the union.

And, Margaret Nicholson was telling me about a visit that you both made to the Houses of Parliament.

Yes. Yes. Yes. I’m sure it was through the union, I’m positive now it was through the union, that, there was going to be a dinner held for union representatives at the Houses of Parliament, including the conducted tour. And there was two, two tickets allocated per, per further and higher education. We had to pay for them. And that would be held on a Friday night, at the Houses of Parliament. There would be sherry first, and then dinner would be served. And then we would be given a conducted tour of the two chambers. And Margaret Nicholson and I were invited to represent and we said yes, gladly. I do believe that we paid, and, off we went. Margaret, the most handsomest of ladies, impeccably dressed in black velvet, with a splendid neckpiece of her own creation.

And what colour was that?

Silver. If I remember correctly, silver. Which complemented beautifully her black velvet two-piece that she wore. And she... It puts me to shame how I looked, but nevertheless, nevertheless.

What did you wear?

I think I wore a floral crimplene dress, something like that I never... I am a disciple of Stan Palmer.

In what way?

The way he dressed. I do not get dressed up for any functions. (laughs) You have to accept me as I am. But on the other hand, having said that, that is the way Margaret usually dressed. She was always dressed in that framework. And whereas I went exactly as I was dressed, in my framework. And we arrived at the Houses of Lily Silberberg C1046/02/11 F12962A Page 149

Parliament, swept through in Margaret’s car, saluted by the officer on the gate, and we went through. And then we were escorted as it were through various different lobbies until we arrived where they were sipping. And, everything was lovely, lovely lovely lovely. I’m not quite sure whether we went to the two chambers first. Can’t remember. Did we go to the two chambers first? I can’t...I can’t remember, but it doesn’t really matter. The two chambers are magnificent places. What you see on television does not do credit to what you actually see. I must say that the, the House of Lords has got a certain gaudiness about it, that, again has to be seen to be believed. I had the pleasure of sitting on the Woolsack, and it took two hefty people, two hefty men to get me up, it is that comfortable. When you sit on it, you really do sink down into it. We saw the two thrones. We were explained that the monarch’s throne is three inches higher than the other throne. So our Queen, our present Queen, sits just a very few inches higher than her Consort. (laughs) And we were pointed out various different things. It was lovely. There must have been 200 people there, and, the evening was splendid. But then let’s get back now to the meal. We went, either we went from the meal to there, or there to the meal, can’t remember. We went through, and the service was lovely. We were addressed by an MP who was really our host, who had been a member of the teachers’ union, and then had become a Member of Parliament. So of course, there was this oneness amongst us all, everybody there was a union representative from teaching of various different, different types, types of discipline that is. We are going through the meal, and we’re eating, and we’re laughing, we’re laughing with the two men opposite, who thought we were ‘loovley’. And they were two north country lads. And we thought that, you know, that, we would talk about the state of the union. But no, these two did not want to know abut the state of the union. They wanted to know about the scandal that was going on in our college.

What scandal was that?

I don’t think... I think I would have to... Because the people that were concerned with it. But it just goes to show, that this little tiny pebble that had been dropped into this ocean, that it had, the information had percolated out, to these two boys who I believe were from Liverpool. Because one gave me a wink and said, ‘There’s been goings-on in your college, haven’t there?’ Now there we were, in the heart of the Lily Silberberg C1046/02/11 F12962A Page 150

West End, and you couldn’t get any more... Oxford Circus, John Princes Street, Oxford Circus, W1. And there were these two boys, I can’t call them more than boys because they were, two young lads, telling us what was going on in our college. Several things that we weren’t even aware of ourselves, we were so close to it. So it, it...

And they were from the fashion department?

No. No they were engineers. But it was union business, that was the one thing that, that got the whole lot of us together, is the fact that we were in the union. And this, this...had we have let it go through, we even convened three meetings during our summer holidays to stop this precedent from going through. And had this, had this have gone through, then it would have set a precedent, which again would have had reverberations right the way through the teaching profession. But we at the London College of Fashion said, ‘No, they shall not pass,’ and they didn’t.

Was this sort of, in the mid-Eighties did you say?

It was... No, this... I started teaching in 1964, and this must have been 1970. 1970, ’72. Because the amalgamation of both colleges had already happened, that is the Shoreditch College of Technology and the London College of Fashion. Had it taken...? Do I see in the line of faces Mrs Glasswell? [pause] I cannot for the life of me tell you. I cannot for the life of me tell you.

How do you think your life changed when you moved from working for industry to becoming a teacher?

Nearly went mad. Three things you must remember when you are teaching. You have to forget any temperament that you had whilst you were in industry. In industry, I was a force to be reckoned with, because nobody would cross me, because of my temper. And my temper was usually right. I could detect things a lot earlier than some of the other people. And I could, I could see what was going on. And this is on the production side of it. Person to person, I was the loveliest person imaginable, the greatest...whatever was going on, Lil was always incorporated in it, whatever I was Lily Silberberg C1046/02/11 F12962A Page 151

going I would incorporate everybody else into it. When I left industry, when I was working with Norman Linton, and I left industry, my leaving party went on for a month. And the very very last moment that I, I left them, I left them on the Friday evening, on the Friday afternoon there had been a phone call from Ray to say there was a house in Lakenheath that she had just seen in the local paper, she says, ‘Can you stop what you are doing now and get to Lakenheath, outside number 97?’ I said, ‘I can’t, it’s impossible.’ She said, ‘Pack up whatever you’re doing,’ she says, ‘there’s a house on sale that may very well be what we’re looking for.’ Because we’d looked at two other houses in Lakenheath. I got to Oakwood station about seven o’clock in the evening, ever so slightly squiffy, and with the largest bouquet of flowers you have ever seen. That was my very last parting shot from Norman Linton. And they had formed a line so that as I left, they all clapped. It was, it was, it was wonderful, it was wonderful. Surprised they didn’t dress me up, like we used to dress up brides, you know, with balloons and everything, confetti and, you mention it. But, no, I left with this huge bouquet. And I got to Lakenheath with the, with the bouquet and everything. And Ray was outside. And I looked at the house. Horrible little place. But we knocked at the door, she opened the door, and I said, ‘Yes, this is it.’ We’re sitting in it now. So that was the very very last day. Anyhow.

Why did you move, why did you move from...?

The middle of the West End...

Yes.

...to here? Oh, it’s, it’s because we were conned. We were conned by a junior in the office in the estate agent, and to make a very very long painful story very short, he threatened us by putting up the rent. Because the, the, the lease had passed from Dad to Mum, it could only be passed the once. When Mum died, this junior took it upon himself to negotiate with us, with the threat that he was going to put up the rent something by about eight or nine times. But in actual fact, what he wanted us to do was to pass him over money, so that he would negotiate on our...he had, he had no, no brief to do that. So much so, when Ray went round to the, to the estate agent to hand back the keys, the chap who was, like the director of the office, he said, ‘You have Lily Silberberg C1046/02/11 F12962A Page 152

been connected with number 87 Great Titchfield Street,’ he said, ‘the name goes back to about 1927.’ So Ray said, ‘Yes, that’s right.’ He said, ‘Well why are you leaving us now?’ So Ray said, ‘Because the rent is going to go up.’ He said, ‘What rent rise?’ We’d already bought here. He said, ‘What rent rise?’ So she says, ‘Well Mr Biss says that our rent is going...’ He said, ‘That young man?’ He said, ‘That young man was given his marching orders.’ He said, ‘You were not alone, there were other people.’ He, he wanted money. If we would have said to him, ‘Right, well here’s £100, would you negotiate on our behalf?’ He said, ‘With your record of paying rent,’ he said, he said, ‘You’ve never.....’

[End of F12962 Side A] [F12962 Side B]

He said, ‘You would have been...’ He said, ‘With your reputation,’ he said, ‘of course you would have been given another lease.’ So this young man, as I say, if we would have given him, if we would have shoved him some money... He was getting, he was getting a very nice little rake-off. But nevertheless, he did us a favour. Otherwise we would never ever have moved. And now, looking back on it, maybe he did us a favour. Yes, what tied us to the place was the memories, the fact that we could go from room to room and we could touch where my parents had touched. This was the room that I was, that I had...this is the room that I had, this is the room Mum died, this is the room Dad died. You know, all of these things, eventually, the surroundings would have embraced us and kept us warm. A feeling that we will never have for this place. But nevertheless, maybe he did us a favour.

So what made you look in this area?

Ray worked with a woman who lived in Arnos Grove, and this woman at Arnos Grove had great feelings that she would like to live in Oakwood. And she said to Ray once, she said, ‘Oh, Oakwood’s a very nice area.’ Now we had never heard of Oakwood. We’ve heard of Southgate from time to time. Cockfosters, we knew was in the heart of the country. But Oakwood, we had never heard of. And then, she said, ‘Oh I know somebody who’s moving out of Lakenheath.’ And she put us in touch with the estate agent, very nice indeed. We went to look at the house, I fell madly in Lily Silberberg C1046/02/11 F12962B Page 153

love with it. Number 15, right up the other end. I fell madly in love with it. Then the surveyors went in to look at it, and one surveyor, who had a very nice thumbnail, went over to a piece of woodwork, went like that, and his thumb, not just his nail but his thumb disappeared into...(laughs)...into the woodwork. He said, ‘You don’t touch this place.’ Of course I was, I was bitterly disappointed. But in the meantime, we had looked at Lakenheath, and Lakenheath is what we liked. That if we were going to go anywhere, it was going to be Lakenheath and it was going to be Oakwood. Hence, on the very last day of my, of my being in industry, I arrived here with a sheaf of flowers, like a prima donna coming off stage, and...(laughs)...this was it. We had looked at various other houses in the district, but we didn’t like them. We always came back to Lakenheath. 15 was no go, and number 97, as I say, I didn’t like the look of the outside of it. It didn’t look like what it looks like now. But, we have worked it round, and that was in 1964. And, we made an offer for it. The surveyor came in, and the only thing that he could find that was wrong with it is that one of the latches on the windows wasn’t functioning properly. And I think there was something like, whereas the surveyor’s report for the one at number 15 went into six pages of closely typed script, here I think it was about twelve lines on a piece of paper. So fair enough, that’s how we got here. So, that was my last day in industry, and, that was the last day that I could really let rip my temper. Because that is a no-no in, in the, in teaching. Secondly, the pace, one had to gear down, not to a walking pace, but to a crawling pace. And you... It’s very very difficult to do. Very difficult to do. When you have been in a trade that required you to be so urgent, so very very urgent, where you know that time is money, in education that does not come into it. And third, and by no means least, you have to have a piece of brain for every student that passes through your hands, through your classrooms. And, you could have anything up to seventy students passing through your classrooms in a week. So consequently, you had to have at least seventy-one segments of brain, reserving one piece for yourself. And what’s more, you had to have responsibility for those seventy people whilst they were in your charge, that should one of them suddenly throw up, one of them pass out, one of them go into spontaneous labour, you were in charge of all of that. And that is something that you aren’t quite aware of until you are in the classroom. Admittedly, when I was an evening class teacher, I was aware that the pace would be much slower, but when you’re in evening classes, you are working with people from industry. So you are only as it were partially removed from where you had been all Lily Silberberg C1046/02/11 F12962B Page 154

day. But when you go into the classroom, it is a completely different way of thinking. Your language register must be tempered. You have to use a language register that is fitting for what you are teaching to those who are learning. You have to be obliged to love everybody, to repeat over and over and over again. You are obliged to work at the pace of the slowest one in the class. And all these things you have to take on board. And no amount of teacher training can ever give you this. So consequently, how was I going to cope? Big question. And the only way I could cope was by going back into industry during my summer holidays. And Norman Linton welcomed me with open arms. Because when I left, there was a vacuum. And I went back to work for him, it just goes to show how pleased I was to at least get this out of myself, I went back to work for the princely sum of £1 per hour. And I couldn’t care less. It was my safety valve. Now I know for a fact that a lot of people in further and higher education go into education as a bolthole from industry. I’m afraid the boot was on the other foot. I was going back into industry as a bolthole from education. (laughing) Now that sounds funny. And that’s the way it was.

And how long, for how long did you carry on working for Norman Linton in the holidays? Because that must have been quite tiring, eventually.

No.

No?

No. No. I... Oh how long ago was it? It must have been in about ’75/76, ’75/76. But I never lost touch with the people who worked there. And two evening class students, Zehir and David, Zehir is from Kenya of Pakistani stock, an Ismaili Muslim, David, who is from Mauritius, who is of Hindu stock, they were my evening class students, Zehir kept on saying to me, he always called me Teach, he never ever called me Miss Silberberg or Lily, Teach, he came into my class and he was learning beautifully. Really, sometimes you can stand back and you can sort of pride yourself that you have got somebody of that calibre in your class. And he kept on saying to me, ‘Teach, how am I doing?’ I said, ‘You’re doing fine Zehir.’ He said, ‘Am I ready to go into the industry?’ Because he was not in the industry, he was in a facet of the industry, he was with a pleating company, so he understood fabric, he Lily Silberberg C1046/02/11 F12962B Page 155

understood how to handle fabric, the usages of fabric. He knew how to actually arrange himself where pattern cutting was concerned, but not in the actual trade. And he was doing three evening classes a week, after a full day’s work, three evening classes a week, one of which was mine, another evening class was manufacture, the third evening class was production management. His reading and writing wasn’t all that good, but he was managing, he was all right. Any written exam that I gave them, they could stagger through it, possibly not to distinction or credit, but as a pass level. And he kept on saying to me, ‘How am I doing Teach?’ ‘You’re doing OK Zehir, it’ll be all right.’ And he did something once so beautiful, I said, ‘Zehir,’ I said, ‘are you ready for a change of work?’ He says, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Right,’ I said, ‘I’m going to put you forward to the firm of Norman Linton.’ I said, ‘I’ll phone them up, I’ll ask them if they want a bit talent, and if I ever phone them up and say, “Do you want a bit of talent?” they rely on me to give them a good piece of talent.’ I said, ‘I can see that you’ve got it.’ I said, ‘You’re ready now for a change of career?’ He said, ‘If you think I’m all right.’ I said, ‘Yes, I think you’re OK.’ And I phoned up, I spoke to the old man himself. I said, ‘I’ve got a very nice piece of talent coming up. Any place for him in the firm?’ He said, ‘If you say he’s all right, he’s all right with us.’ I said, ‘Right, I’m going to send him along for interview.’ He went along for interview. He was interviewed by the designer. And, the designer said yes, they’d like him on board as part of a team in the pattern cutting. And I remember on the Sunday night he phoned me, he says, ‘Teach,’ he said, ‘am I doing the right thing?’ I said, ‘Zehir, only Allah and time will know if it’s the right thing.’ He, he was taking a cut in salary because he was at the top of his league in the pleating, and here he was going in right at the very bottom rung. So whereas he was earning I think £36 per week in the pleating place, he was going in at £17. I said, ‘Well,’ I said, you know, ‘only time and Allah can tell us if you’re doing the right thing.’ He phoned me up after the first, the first day. He said, ‘Everybody loves me.’ I said, ‘Because you’re a very likeable youngster.’ I said, ‘How do you find the work?’ He said, ‘It’s all right, it’s all right.’ At the end of the month, he started at £17 per week, at the end of the month his money was put up to £50 per week. I said, ‘Right, you’ve served your apprenticeship.’ I said, ‘Your feet are well and truly under the table.’ I said, ‘How do you get on with everybody?’ He said, ‘They’re the most wonderful people I’ve ever met.’ I said, ‘Right, you know, you know what you’ve got to do, keep with it.’ At the end of three months I think his money went up to about £70 a week. He had become Lily Silberberg C1046/02/11 F12962B Page 156

a key worker there. Now I’m very very proud about that. And what is more, his mate, his very good friend David, from Mauritius, it was on Zehir’s say-so that David went to work there. And between the two of them, they became the pattern cutting department. Pattern cutting and grading, that was their speciality.

And what’s grading?

Grading is the science and study of sizing, and the, the distributional increasing and decreasing of measurement, to get you either larger or smaller. But it’s got to be proportional. It’s the proportional distribution of measurement. And they became absolutely the kingpins of that business. And, they were there for, I think it was seven years, six, seven years. They... It was me who said to them, ‘Don’t get too comfortable. The world is bigger than Norman Linton. You have possibly reached your peak at what you are doing there, it’s about time you moved on. ‘No we’re not going to move on, we’re happy.’ I said, ‘Happiness is one thing. But the world is bigger than Norman Linton.’ And I encouraged them to leave. And they went to work for a very big firm, in the same building that I started off with in Anne Green and Gross, Middlesex House, Cleveland Street. They went to work there, and in due course Zehir was offered a man...was a directorship. But it was only a directorship as it were on paper. But, he had the opportunity to travel. Because he took over production. David was still more in the pattern cutting; Zehir took over production, because production wasn’t in England, production was being done in Hong Kong, in Cyprus, in Pakistan, in all various different places, because it is, it is cheaper sometimes to do your cutting here in England, put it into containers, ship it out to wherever you want it shipped out, and then to bring it back on hangers as actual physical garments, in the same containers that you shipped it out in. That is the way commerce is done these days. So Zehir had the roving commission of going round the world, and he saw some wonderful places. And he said to me, ‘You were right Teach, you were right.’ Anyhow, Zehir was there for quite a number of years with David, and then the firm sold up and left. You know, the, the owners went into retirement. Things were a little bit sticky in the industry, because our industry is always going, peaks and troughs, literally within a couple of hours there’s peaks and troughs in our industry. And, it was turning into a little bit of a trough. And the owners were coming up to retirement. The lease had expired, they didn’t want to Lily Silberberg C1046/02/11 F12962B Page 157 renew the lease, so they just sold up. Leaving of course David and Zehir out on a limb. Zehir, again found himself an extremely good job, with his reputation, and his experience, working with a very very big firm. The only trouble is, it’s in Luton, and he lives in, Hendon I believe. So he’s got a big journey. In the meantime, married, father of two children. David married, father of two children. And I look at these two boys, and they are my inheritance, aren’t they?

Mm.

And I, I look at a third, a third youngster, as well I schooled, and when David and Zehir, and this third one, Sid, who is from Barbados, come together, they...I have never seen it, they all three kiss each other. They are as it were, a trio. And the wonderful part about it is, that not only are they a trio, having gone through me out into the world, Bharat Solanki, who was also a student of mine, and became a teacher, they were part of his student membership as well. So I taught Bharat, Bharat taught them, we all taught each other. Because not only did I teach them, they taught me as well. So it wasn’t all outgoing, but it was also incoming as well. And I...this...this is the miracle of teaching. It’s not just a nine-to-five job. It’s not fourteen weeks a year holiday. And I remember the snide remarks that I used to get, ‘Oh your lot get fourteen weeks a year holiday.’ I said, ‘Yes, but would you be prepared to work a seventy-hour week, which is what teaching asks you to do?’ Doesn’t require you. Yes, you can scout through it, but even if you don’t take a sheet of paper home to mark, you’re carrying it in your mind, it’s with you the whole time. Everything that you do, you’re not doing it on your own behalf, you’re doing it on somebody else’s behalf. No teacher training college can ever give you that. It’s when you go in front of a class, that’s when you learn.

Because you did go on to do...

Oh yes.

Could you tell me about that? Was that in...

Yes, yes. Lily Silberberg C1046/02/11 F12962B Page 158

...in ’80...well the mid-Eighties.

Mid-Eighties, yes. No, it was mid-Seventies. It was 1975. I’m sitting in the canteen and there’s a certain senior member of staff sitting next to me. I had no conversation with her, and she had no conversation with me. We found it very difficult to converse. But out of something to day, and I’d been teaching eleven years, and it was virtually my pride and joy that I had never been to teacher training college, you know, I’d got there without being tampered with by the likes of ‘them’. I had got there on merit, not because I had a piece of paper. But out of nothing better to say, I said to her, ‘Isn’t it about time I went to Garnett College?’ And I swear to you, no sooner were those words out of my mouth, I regretted it. So she looked up and she said, ‘Oh, we’ll see.’ I don’t think that two weeks were up, when in my pigeonhole there was an envelope with a set of application forms for Garnett College, as an in-service member of staff. Garnett College is for teachers, for further and higher education. The majority of people who go there are pre-service, it is a way in. If you do go to Garnett College as an in-service person, it is because you are trying to get promotion. Now I was already an L2, which means that I was going up the ladder, so therefore for me to go to Garnett and to get promotion was useless. But nevertheless, it was for one day per week over three years, and for that it would be the Certificate in Education, Cert.Ed. I had a whale of a time. Had a whale of a time. Enjoyed every second of it. Argued as you have never heard anybody argue the way I did. Made friends for life. That was in 1975/76/77, those were the three years. I still keep in touch with three of them, three chaps. There were thirty people on the course, four women and twenty- six men. And, they were, most of them were engineers, I was the only one who was in the clothing. But one of my tutors... [coughing] Excuse me, shouting onto... [coughing] Sorry about that. One of my tutors was an ex-colleague in the London College of Fashion. Now prior to that, she was also an ex-student of Barrett Street at the time that I was there. So I was as it were somebody who was not exactly welcomed in her circle, because I knew possibly a little bit too much. It doesn’t always pay to have what you would call people who have seen your past life. It’s very nice to be a bit enigmatic, is it not? I’m not going to mention her name, because again it sticks in my throat if I mention her name. She is one of those that will probably take these tapes out you know. I have no doubt. But, speak the truth and Lily Silberberg C1046/02/11 F12962B Page 159

shame the devil. So she had been the same time as me at Barrett Street, even though she was a year higher than me; she was an established member of staff at the London College of Fashion when I went into it; and she was my tutor at Garnett. I must say, that as a tutor she was punitive. I know that she broke the spirit of several, several pre-service people, but I, I knew too much about her. And, she was very very painstaking, very pains... Very very sincere, I must say this, she was very very sincere as a person, and she used to vet my essays, questioning every second word. She knew perfectly what I...perfectly well. But, in doing so, she was rounding me off. Maybe I was in need of that. I didn’t like it, it hurt, I resented it, but I swallowed hard and I took it. She was not going to break me. Once for an essay she gave me five. I said, ‘I notice that you’ve only given me fifty per cent.’ She said, ‘Yes, fifty per cent of it was right.’ I said, ‘Now point out to me the fifty per cent that was wrong.’ She was hard put to it. But she said, ‘Well,’ she says, ‘you know, getting five from me is very good.’ I said, ‘Well maybe I would like that to go to somebody else to be marked.’ She said, ‘My mark would still stand.’ And I said, ‘Fair enough. Fair enough.’ But, she was doing her work, as she had to do her work, as she saw fit. But nevertheless, that three years was wonderful character forming. My second stint at... By the way, I passed, I passed. And, she, she took the, the gilt off the gingerbread actually. She was doing, what they call an observation of another youngster, who she would come in to persecute, and as she came to the staff room she said, ‘Oh Lily,’ she says, ‘well done, you’ve passed.’ Now that was before the envelope had come through my, my letterbox. And I was looking forward with fear and trepidation of opening up that envelope, to find out what was what, and she had broken the spell. But nevertheless, I had to be grateful to her, had to be grateful. And as it happens, when I came home, Ray saw that it was from Garnett College, had opened it, saw what the result was, and she had stuck the, the form onto the big mirror, so when I came in, I would see it straight away. She didn’t know that she had come in and spoilt the whole thing, but you know, she was so happy for me.

[End of F12962 Side B] [F12963 Side A]

A memory that spans just over a year, just over a year. The London College of Fashion was a great leader in bringing the industry into depressed areas of London. Lily Silberberg C1046/02/12 F12963A Page 160

We were very very strong in the youth training schemes; we were very strong in part- time day release; very strong in evening classes. Those three areas dealt with City & Guild, which was very very low level, because by now they are thinking about getting degrees in the clothing industry, and consequently, these low levels of work, they could very very well have done without them, because, the recruiting was vast, the members of staff had to be found to deal with this, a great deal of organisation, but there was money being pumped in to support these people that the college was getting, and consequently, for that alone, these courses were quite welcomed. One of the areas of work that we were amalgamated to, or rather took over, was a certain settlement in Tower Hamlets, and Tower Hamlets at that time, I don’t know whether it still is, I couldn’t tell you, was as near on an offshoot of Bengal, Bangladesh, but a certain area in Bengladesh called Sylhet. Very very rural, extremely cheap – not cheap, no, beg your pardon, beg your pardon, please cancel out that word. Extremely poor, to the point of poverty. Devoutly Muslim. And, where you get all these three together, the woman is a second-class citizen in many many cases, at least it was then. Rural, poor, devout. Emigration in the air. And they were coming over to England. Some settled in the north, Bradford, and where London was concerned, in the main it was Tower Hamlets. And Tower Hamlets was primarily Sylhet, this area in Bangladesh. And the London College of Fashion wanted to put in to the area work for women, that the woman would be able to be a wage-earner. I worked with a very very lovely lady called Rita Smith, who was the coordinator of these low level groups. She in herself is a, an artisan in her own right, a privilege to work with her. But she was as it were the person in charge of doing the put and take. I loved this low level of work, because, although some of these people couldn’t sign their names, and if they did sign their names they couldn’t read it back, making it very very much like my mum was. And if only my mother would have been given an education as we were offering these women, my mother could have been the Chancellor of the Exchequer, she could have been the first woman Prime Minister, had she have been given the opportunity of education, as we were offering these women. And what we were offering was the means by which, if they could get the industry revived, they would be in the forefront of the industry, because they were having technical education. So, they consulted me, working in this low level of work, would I like to go and teach one day a week in Hanbury Street, Tower Hamlets, the Bangladesh ladies. I said, ‘And why not?’ Because it brought me very very much, in my mind’s eye, these women Lily Silberberg C1046/02/12 F12963A Page 161

that were coming over from Poland, unable to read and write, who were made skivvies, my mother was in the forefront. So I am going to hold back from these women, who were as it were parallel to what my mum was? I thought, no, I’m going to give these women the best. What I’ve got, they can have. Anyhow, cut a very long story short, they had to work with people known as outreach workers. Now first of all, in that sort of, again I must use the word, milieu? Maybe that’s wrong.

Sector?

Sector. For the woman to leave the house without the man was a no-no. For the woman to leave the house at all was a little bit suspect, but they usually went to the mosque, the mosque together, and she would sit upstairs behind the screen, or sit at the...as long as she was screened from the others. The woman’s place was in the home. She reared children, she kept the man happy. And this was very very provincial. And when you get to places like Dacca, that is a different way of thinking. Women were, were being educated, and in high places. But when you came to a rural place, like Sylhet, it was almost mediaeval. So, certain outreach workers, who were from the same community, but had been, I’m going to use the word emancipated, it’s quite wrong, but had already come out of that way of thinking, had gone round to all these women and said there was a certain course being held for dressmaking, for clothing manufacture, at this address in Hanbury Street; you will be granted, inasmuch you will be given a small amount of money, because there is a grant going with it; women will be taught by women; men will be taught by men; there will be no mixing of men and women in the class; there will be a crèche available for women who have got young children, with a nanny who will run the crèche. And, the men were against it, but the women got round the men, and consequently they were coming away with lists of women who had enrolled. This whole enterprise was run by a woman called Ethne Nightingale, and she was brilliant, brilliant lady. Very much of the Miss Montagu, the Lady Montagu, the Honourable Lily Montagu way of thinking, that women must be given a chance. And she was the right person for the job, in my eye anyhow. And, I went down there for a visit, I was introduced to all the office staff, to other people who were doing coordination, and I was taken round the rooms, and I was asked, well, you know, ‘Is this right?’ ‘Yes, you’ve got a lovely cutting table here, you’ve got lovely machinery here.’ Rita was in and out, Rita Smith Lily Silberberg C1046/02/12 F12963A Page 162

was in and out of the place the whole time. We got the place polished, fixed up, rigged up, lovely, smashing. Day for arrival of the ladies came. I was there at half- past eight, classes were to start at half-past nine. Oh by the way, these women couldn’t speak English. And they could understand precious little English. So I was to teach via an interpreter. Splendid woman called Helen...Hena Choudhury. Now if I can remember names, that means that these people were of importance to me, and Hena Choudhury was from Dacca, smoked like a chimney, which was frowned upon, but she had indeed come out of the cocoon. Her husband was a doctor. She was a Doctor of Philosophy. Her two daughters, also from Dacca University, were in the law. And they all lived in England, doing their own practising, doing what they had to do. And I met the other interpreters. And, this was half-past eight in the morning. And so we sat, and we made a cup of tea. Nine o’clock, nobody. Ten o’clock, nobody. Half-past ten, nobody. I said, ‘What’s going on?’ So Hena said, ‘I thought this would go on. The men are blocking the women.’ So Ethne said, ‘What do we do? Do we send out the outreach workers again?’ I said, ‘I suggest that you do,’ I said, ‘because this is a golden opportunity, and if they don’t turn up today, I have a feeling that you won’t be open tomorrow. And there’s been enough love and concern put into it, they’re not going to stand for it to go through it again.’ And by the way, the downstairs of this building, a tall, narrow building in Hanbury Street, that, I should think that Jack the Ripper must have walked past there many many times, the downstairs of it was like the social centre for where people who are in trouble could go and get advice. There was always somebody on duty there, to sort out somebody, housing, benefits and things like that. Because these people are very very shy, they don’t like asking. So anyhow, the outreach workers went out. By that time it’s lunchtime. Half-past two, there’s a clatter going on, somebody comes in, pushing a pram. She was the first student. Had a flaming row with her husband and she was off. He didn’t want her to go. She went. A few minutes later, another gaggle of women, holding babies. Then another gaggle of women. And by the time the day was over, there might have been about ten. So, I had the pleasure of showing this ten round. ‘Too late to do anything, but I can tell you what you are going to do. You are going to do pattern cutting.’ This is all through me, from me, through Hena, to them. Now these women had never ever worn a structured garment. They all wore the sari, except for the odd one or two that wore the shalwar kameez, which is not cut by a pattern, it is cut by eye. And here I am, with a certain format known as a block Lily Silberberg C1046/02/12 F12963A Page 163 pattern, and I am going to, via an interpreter, to teach them the concepts of flat pattern cutting. Can you imagine? Talk about going up a hill that is one in five. (laughs) Have to have crampons on to get up that hill. These few women went back and told the others. The following week, I’m back again in the same room, eight o’clock. By nine o’clock there are several, several people there. And we’re all sitting round a table, and I introduce...Hena is there, full class of people. Rita Smith was there, the head of department, Bill Bohm, I believe he was there. And this was the first class. I was going to teach them in the morning, and then Rita, because it was the first day, would teach them in the afternoon machining. And then what would happen is that they would then box and cox. Anyhow, as the day progressed, more and more people were coming in. The word had got round. And the women deposited their babies and their toddlers in the crèche, and came up to the classrooms. And I showed them round, and I showed them what was what, and this is a block pattern. And on certain areas, this is the neck, this is the neck, and they all repeated, ‘Neck. Shoulder. Armhole.’ And ‘Bustapoint.’ I pointed to the apex, ‘Bustapoint.’ Bustpoint. This was a new world to them. And so it went on. And I started to notice certain things. They accepted me in the classroom, but they did not accept me socially. Wasn’t worried, I wasn’t there to be with them socially. When lunchtime was there, came round, I would take my packet of sandwiches, and go and sit in the crèche where they were all there with their babies, sit there in the crèche, me on my little chair. Went over and made a cup of tea for myself. They were all jabbering amongst themselves, they didn’t understand a word. And they completely ignored me, not even a nod or a wink or anything like that. They had things to talk about, they were maligning people I should think, and criticising people. I didn’t understand their language; I was there to teach them. And I munched away at my sandwiches, and when the appointed time came, picked myself up, went upstairs, and they followed me. I knew I was accepted when something happened. I’m sitting there munching my sandwiches, and the young woman who was nursing a very young baby, suddenly looked up, as if... [gabbling sound] Picked up the baby, gave it to me, and disappeared out of the class. And I’m holding an infant in my arms. I had been accepted. I knew then I was home. But that took a good three or four weeks. I wasn’t going to jump in front of them and fawn on them; I wasn’t going to present myself as this, that and something else. I had to wait for them to come to me. And that baby, having been plonked into my arms, I was home. And it’s then that I knew I could get things done. Now, we always started Lily Silberberg C1046/02/12 F12963A Page 164 the morning, everybody who came in had to be greeted, ‘Salaam alaikum’, ‘Wa alaikum as salaam’. I insisted on that. We start the say that way, we finish the day that way. So that was my ground rule. We started work, once I got the concepts of this that and something else, and the cloth, and putting the cloth onto the stand, and doing a little bit of modelling and a little bit of pattern cutting and this and that, and then, you could mark it all up, and put it onto a fresh piece of cloth, and cut it out, and this was the real thing for the pattern, the concept had hit. At least the process had hit. Then I noticed amongst some of them, that they were becoming a little bit anxious, because, they could hear the children crying downstairs. So I said to Ethne, ‘Their first thoughts are for the babies.’ I said, ‘Now these people do not know the disciplines of a classroom. This is probably the first time, and possible the only time that they will ever be in a classroom. We’ve got to stretch the bounds a little bit.’ I said, ‘Any way that you can get some high chairs?’ So I think that she got... That’s right, we borrowed the high chairs from the crèche, brought the high chairs up, plonked the babies in the high chairs. The little ones who wanted to sleep got under the table where there was some fabric, and the mothers could bring them a blanket and make them comfortable. There was a couple of toddlers who were a little bit boisterous; doesn’t matter, let them run up and down the middle of a table, they’re not interfering with us. Their concentration was on me, mine was on them; they knew the children were safe. We knew then, from that moment onwards, we could swing. Now can you imagine that happening in any other...? There was no machinery there, so Rita couldn’t do that in her classroom, because there was machinery. I had no machinery. I had a few metre sticks, a pencil, a rubber, a small ruler, a bit of paper. So consequently, the children couldn’t hurt themselves. I didn’t mind, I was in my element, you know, having al these babies out there and everything, it was gorgeous. And those women were willing to learn. And so it went on, from strength to strength. I used to buy the paper every morning I went there, and, I would sit there reading, and one woman would come over and she says to me, ‘Teach me.’ So I would go through the words in the paper, and she would follow with her finger. And you’d be surprised how quickly they picked up, from the written word. It was there, it was there just waiting to be harvested. It was there. And, the feeling that one gets, it, it was splendid. Beautiful. Delightful. One day I’m teaching, it’s going along beautifully. Oh, I did a dreadful thing, I encouraged them to smoke. (laughing) Because, Hena was a smoker, I was a smoker, Ethne was a smoker. I said, ‘Can I smoke?’ She said, Lily Silberberg C1046/02/12 F12963A Page 165

‘Do what you like. As long as they’re learning, do what you like.’ So of course out came the packet of fags. ‘Help yourself girls.’ And several of them, smoking. In a place that was more like a tinder box, it could have gone up in flames at any moment. But the enjoyment was there, the willingness was there. The women wanted to... Children were safe. And we’re bowling along beautifully. One day I’m working, working, working, and we’re having the time of our lives, and I was aware that behind me somewhere there was a stranger. And I finished off what I was doing, and I turned round, there was a man. I had a feeling that there was a stranger, because some of the women took, from their sari, and covered their heads, and in front of their face. And as I turned round, there was a man. I said, ‘Can I help you?’ He said, ‘No, carry on, carry on.’ I said, ‘Can I help you?’ He said, ‘My wife is in the group, I want to see what is going...’ I said, ‘No. If you want to see me, you make an appointment through Miss Nightingale. If you want to see what’s happening in the class, you will be invited to come up into the class, and I will explain to you what’s going on. In the meantime, please, go out of this class, you are an uninvited person, and I will not have you in the class.’ Of course, these women, God knows what sort of a culture clash I had caused in their homes. Now I swear to you, I did it with the best of intentions, but you know, I... I hate to think what sort of a culture clash did I cause. Because, one can, one can actually disrupt a whole family by doing it this way. Anyhow, he never turned up again. But what did turn up were hoards of visitors. This school, which was an offshoot of the London College of Fashion in Hanbury Street, was causing, how can I put it? A stir of interest in education, that, we didn’t even think it was possible to get such interest, that people were coming... The MEPs, which were funding this sort of enterprise, came up to see us, and, and one, one MEP, he was a delightful man, a young man, he said to me, ‘Lily,’ he said, ‘have you got a message for me to take back to the committee?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘I will use a Confucian saying,’ I said, ‘it’s a hackneyed saying: If you give a man a fish, you will feed him for one day. If you teach that man to fish, you’ll feed him for life.’ I said, ‘Consequently, I am teaching these people to fish. They must become independent. They must not be dependent on hand-outs, or being shoved around. Being shoved around by their men folk, by the older relatives. They are here in England. They’re not in Sylhet, they’re here in England, and if it’s not for them, it is for the children that are in the crèche, otherwise it will perpetuate itself into the next generation.’ I said, ‘So please, go back and tell them that we are teaching these people to fish, Lily Silberberg C1046/02/12 F12963A Page 166 therefore they can be fed for life.’ He thanked me, he embraced me. We shook hands. And he said, ‘Thank you for that.’ Never heard from him, or saw him again. (laughs) So if I frightened him off, I do not know. The amount of people that we had visiting us, it was phenomenal. Now I also had to get it into these people that they were students, and they were students of a larger picture than what they were in Hanbury Street. That they were bona fide members of the student core of the London College of Fashion. So I said to my head of department, ‘I would like to invite these ladies, it’ll take a little bit of organisation, because we’ve got to get a coach to get them from Hanbury Street to Oxford Circus, that I can give them a tour of the London College of Fashion, that they are a member of the student...’ what would be the word?

Body?

Body. Of the London College of Fashion. And who knows, maybe some of them may one day come here as students. My head of department was on tiptoe about it; Eric Wade, who was principal of the college, wonderful. I spoke to all the other heads of departments, I said, because I’m not just going to show them the clothing, I want to show them the whole lot. Margaret by that time had been, had retired, but Anthea, Anthea was there,. And the hairdressing department, the millinery department, every department, I said, ‘I want them to feel that this is their parent house, and they are welcome here.’ And for that, they’ve got to... Would you like to turn on the light if you...?

I’ll just.....

[End of F12963 Side A] [F12963 Side B]

So anyhow, I arranged for a certain day, I believe it was a Thursday, I can’t remember, but, I reserved the committee room, which was a very very lovely room in the London College of Fashion, beautifully furnished, and I arranged for there to be coffee, and biscuits displayed, because I said to the organisers who were gong to shepherd them to the college that I wanted them there by ten o’clock, that their itinerary would be, coffee and biscuits, introduction to the staff, and then several staff Lily Silberberg C1046/02/12 F12963B Page 167

would take various different groups round the college, each group would have their own interpreters. Even by this time there was English being spoken, not very much of it but English was being spoken. And I arranged for this to be for about ten o’clock, that they would arrive at ten. At half-past ten they’re still not there. So I sent the coffee back for re-warming. Eleven o’clock, I said, ‘No, they’re not going to arrive.’ About ten past eleven, I hear this noise downstairs, the coach has arrived, they were there. Several of them had been travel sick on the way. (laughs) They had flown all the way from Bangladesh to London and survived, but from Hanbury Street to Oxford Circus, they...(laughs)...they hadn’t... And consequently, you know, they had to be seen to. Anyhow, we got them in. Coffee was re-served, members of staff present. I had the privilege of introducing, ‘This is Eric Wade, my principal, your principal,’ and he shook hands with every one of them. They were awe-inspired. And then I noticed something that they had done me credit: each one of them had on a sari that must have been their wedding saris. I have never seen saris like it. I have got eight saris, but none of them match up. They had done the full thing. And somebody said, ‘That’s a beautiful sari.’ They gave us a little twirl with their saris, showing off their saris. And then they were put into their own little categories, each with an interpreter, and off we went on a tour of the college. They were delighted. We then went to the hairdressing department. And a young girl, doesn’t have her hair cut, she wears it as a long plait, and Jackie Jacobs who was in the hairdressing department felt one of the girls’ hair. Now, Asian hair is the best hair that you can ever get, it is strong, it is long, it...it behaves itself beautifully. And Jackie asked, through the interpreter, would this girl mind having her hair done? Of course the girl was delighted. And Jackie sat her down, and we all looked in. And she made the girl’s hair into four distinct sections. She then proceeded to put a plait in each section, weaving in the hair as she went along. So at the end of it, she was left with four plaits on the head. She then took the four, what was remaining from the four plaits, and then made a combined four plait to go the rest of the length of the hair. It was a work of art. And the girls had never...they had never seen anything like it before. Well, they saw the embroidery, they saw the design department, hairdresser, our department, millinery. They were awestruck. And, at a certain time, I think it might have been about three o’clock in the afternoon, we said, ‘Right, let’s now go back to Hanbury Street.’ And we all clambered on board the, the bus, and we went home, we went back to, to Hanbury Street. We thanked everybody, everybody came down to, to say goodbye to Lily Silberberg C1046/02/12 F12963B Page 168

us. And, on the way back, in the bus, Rita wasn’t with us, she came by car, that’s right, Rita...they composed... There was a certain song that they sing collectively, it’s like, how can you say? It’s like a canon, one starts it, the next one... And it goes, it’s sort of a rolling thing. And they can put things into it. And they started off this thing. And I came into it, my name was mentioned, and the London College of Fashion was mentioned. And the, the young man who was with us, he said, ‘They’re singing it for you.’ And that was delightful, that was delightful. And one of them said that they thought, when they said that we were going to Oxford Street, they thought it was Oxford University. And it was really lovely. And so it went on for a year. And I was then taken away from there, and taken back to teach another area of work. Because by this time it had been established, and they could run it on part-timers. And my farewell party was something, it was really something. And I, I’ve got the book, I’ve got the book upstairs. They bought me the book, The Streets of East London by Willy, Willy...Willy Fishman, Professor Fishman, and they all signed a card. And that card lives with that book, and always will live with that book. And I used to get reports back from them. And the last time I saw them en masse was at a union march when we were marching on behalf of the students for better conditions and more grants. And Hanbury Street was marching in their own right, under their own banner. So that is Hanbury Street, a happy time, a happy time, a time very very well worth remembering. Because it was fruitful. The outcome is not so good, not so good.

In what way?

It was mooted that we were imposing too much Western principles, and what we were teaching them was not in sympathy with their national background.

And who, who proposed that?

A little bit of politics got in.

From, from the college end?

No. No, outside influences. That we were getting a little bit too, too strident.

Lily Silberberg C1046/02/12 F12963B Page 169

Did it come from their husbands?

I don’t know. I don’t know. By this time, I had done, in all sincerity, and I cannot say... I have never been so sincere as I was with them in my teaching. Because it gave me something, what teaching was supposed to be about, coupled with the fact that I kept thinking, if only my mum could have been given an opportunity like this, what would she have finished up as? She would have been... With her brain power, as indeed I saw with some of these women, they had brain power, but never been allowed to use it. And I gave it every single little bit that I had. But, no, didn’t quite work out. And, they asked me, did I know anybody who could do the tailoring department for men only, it had to be a man, for men only, who could take over the tailoring department evening classes? I said, ‘Yes, Bharat Solanki.’ And he phoned me up, he said, ‘What have you, what...what have you given me to do this time?’ I said, ‘You will go in there, and you will teach,’ I said, ‘and what’s more..’ And he being a Hindu, and he was going into a Muslim... But they loved him, they loved him. It is respect, respect. When I was working in Old Street, I used Old Street Underground. I would go down to the platform, and I would go to where the back of the train was, because that would be easier for me to exit from the train, go through the tunnel, up the escalators, onto the Piccadilly Line, home. So consequently, I was always in the back of the train where there was a guard. This is going back just a few years, I was still teaching. It might have been the last two years of my teaching. And, I’m standing there, holding on for dear life, because the train was swaying. And there was somebody with a dog. And I was sort of, looking downwards, and talking to the dog, when a booming voice coming from the, from the guard on the train, and these were his words, which are indelibly etched on my mind: ‘Will one of you men get up and let that old woman sit down.’ And I thought to myself, how very nice of that, that guard. And of course these young men jumped up. And I’m looking round for the old woman. It was me. It was me. Now, that guard, blunt as he was, was paying me respect. Now admittedly, in those days I was not as bent as I am now. The reason why I was hunched up is because I was talking to the dog. He wasn’t to know that, because there was quite a few people around, but this booming voice, ‘Will one of you men get up and let that old woman sit down.’ Now this to me was really an act, a lovely act. Of course I had to say to the gentleman, ‘Thank you very much indeed but I’m getting out at the next station.’ And with that, they all plonked themselves down, Lily Silberberg C1046/02/12 F12963B Page 170

looking very embarrassed, and up went the papers, and they’re reading again. But that, that guard was doing something for my benefit, in his own way. And that is what I would like to see, people doing something for somebody else. Because there is not enough of that. Admittedly, now that I’m bent over almost double and I walk with a stick, one stick indoors, two sticks outdoors, because at least here indoors, if I do start to slew sideways, I can grab hold of a wall and go down gently. If I’m out there in the street, I haven’t got a wall to grab hold of. But people come over to me, they take me across the road on the rare occasions that I have to cross a road, they pick up things and carry them for me. This is nice. But do I have to be bent over double? Do I have to be disabled, to make me respected? No. And this, this is something that, that I find a little bit lacking in the world today, a little bit lacking. Do I, do I have to reach the age of my seventy-fourth year to, to be bent, to...to the point of being a registered disabled person, to get respect from people? No, it should be an automatic thing.

But are you saying that it wasn’t there before?

It slid. It slid.

And when do you think it started sliding, was that a sort of, general cultural thing?

It slid when materialism... I’ve got it, you haven’t.

And do you think that was in the Eighties?

Eighties. I have got it, you haven’t. That makes me better than you. That hurts. Mind you, I did a dreadful thing once. I was looking my usual shabby self, and anybody who knows me, knows me to be a little bit, you know, off the wall where my dressing is concerned. It was at London Bridge, London Bridge station. I bought a ticket in the ticket hall, and then to go to get the train there’s very heavy plate-glass doors that you have to sort of push against to go out, it’s, obviously it’s a safety thing. And, I bought my ticket. And there were two old women dressed up to the nines, fur coats, you mention it, they had it. Upper-crust, most certainly upper-crust. And, being a nice person, I was on the outside, that’s right, I kept the door open for them, Lily Silberberg C1046/02/12 F12963B Page 171

for them to go in. And as they went in, they didn’t say thank you, but they looked me up and down as though to say, ‘Scum.’ So I let the door go on ’em. And believe me, they’re heavy plate glass. I didn’t stop to see...(laughs)...to see what damage I had caused. But I let the door go on them. Now, you know, I will respect a person because they are a person; I will respect every creeping, crawling thing, because they are a living creature. People call me peculiar, I am peculiar, I don’t care. Couldn’t care less. We had a little rabbit here once, and, she was enjoying life, and I was telling a colleague, you know, ‘She clings onto life.’ And this colleague said to me, ‘Is she worth saving?’ I said, ‘She’s breathing, she’s eating, she’s worth saving.’ Is she worth saving? I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong.

Do you think you learnt this from your parents?

Yes. Yes. Yes. My mother adopted a German prisoner of war. Now would you believe that? My mother adopted a German prisoner of war. He was sixteen years old when he was captured. He came from a family of butchers. You couldn’t get... Because all the men were in the Army. The butcher’s shop in Great Titchfield Street, Bruschweiler, a German, he was a pork butcher, we had our ration books with him, so it goes to show how kosher our household was. They couldn’t get anybody to work. It was heavy work. So they applied to the War Office for a prisoner of war. Now the prisoner of war wore his army uniform, but every part of it, something had been cut out, and a foreign patch had been put in. So consequently, if he escaped, he had no other clothing, if he escaped, he couldn’t alter his uniform to get it too look, you know, anything else but other than what it was. And Fred, Fred Schmidt was about seventeen or eighteen years old, and he was, he was sent from the prisoner of war camp, he obviously had a high reputation of being a good person, a good boy, he wasn’t rebelling or anything, he was quiet and, and diligent, and he was sent to work for the Bruschweilers. And, when he turned up in Great Titchfield Street to work in the butcher’s, he was very very shy, and old man Bruschweiler sort of kept him in the background a bit, but there were times when the boy had to come out onto the street. He was spat on, he was punched, he was kicked. And my mother defended him. And she said, ‘If one of your sons was in the same situation as this boy, would you like to know that he’s being treated in the same way?’ Now here is a woman, very strong character, defending a German prisoner of war who I have no doubt was a member of Lily Silberberg C1046/02/12 F12963B Page 172

the Hitler Youth, because, I’m not going to, I’m not going to make any excuses, that was the life. And he, he... My mother was ostracised for having done that. And he remained with the Bruschweilers till after the war, became a naturalised English citizen, married an English girl. He went to my mother’s funeral, wept like a baby, laid flowers on her coffin, which was a no-no, but he didn’t know, and he bought flowers and he laid it on my mother’s coffin. And...

Why, sorry, why was that a...?

Jews aren’t allowed to have flowers on their coffins. And, it’s an ordinary deal coffin, and, it’s covered with a black cloth. And, in consequence, this is something that, it took character to do that. Now that is, that is the, the lifestyle that I was brought up in. Is it wrong? I don’t know. So you’re asking me, who am I? I am me. No pretension. I’ve...I have...I’m going to write that book, the, you know what, that I have been obliged to term as colleague, because I have seen so much pretension. In the garment industry you find a great deal of it. Hollow people, the hollowest of people. But on the other hand, in the garment industry you find the most wonderful, solid people. And you find the same thing in teaching. Teaching does attract a certain type of person that makes them better than anybody else. Now we were always brought up to respect certain elements of people. Doctors, you always called a doctor Sir. The police, you called them Sir. Although my father never agreed with it, when you came in front of a reverent person, you called them Sir. And teachers, most certainly, it was Sir or Ma’am; you never ever addressed them by Miss this or Miss that, and Mr that, it was always Sir, ‘Sir, Sir, Sir.’ Now, many many of our very close friends are doctors; I wouldn’t give them house room. The police, I haven’t got very much confidence in them. (laughs) Especially watching The Bill. (laughs) My favourite programme. The clergy, I was taught by the clergy, I went to a Catholic school, that was during the war, and the only reason why I was allowed into a Catholic school is because, there were no other schools to go to, so consequently they had to allow kids of other religions. But by choice, I would not have been allowed in them. But, I did come out with my Immaculate Conception medal; I did come out knowing the Hail Mary; and I, I know about Catholicism, and I can converse about Catholicism, and I, I’m very interested in it, very interested in it. And, last but not Lily Silberberg C1046/02/12 F12963B Page 173

least, teacher. I’ve seen the obverse of that coin as well. What have I got left? Who have I got left?

Well one of the things that you were saying is that you would like to dedicate these recordings.

Well, a dedication, yes, it is to a man, no known date of birth, no known date of death, didn’t even know how old he was when he died, and that is my grandfather, Leibisch Faijgenbaum. Had he have had an education, I don’t doubt for one moment he would have been a person in his own right, but was always outside the pale, so consequently, no, never had the benefits of education. All I can say is, my grandfather, we both share the same occupation, he was in the clothing industry, inasmuch he was a tailor, I’m in the clothing industry. But I must say, Leibisch Faijgenbaum, I salute you. The blood that ran in your veins runs in my veins. And that’s all I can say.

Lily, thank you.

[End of F12963 Side B]

[End of Interview]