Bread, Brotherhood and the Ballot Box, The Life

Bread, Brotherhood and the Ballot Box:
The life and times of Solomon Lever (1895 – 1959), union
leader and Mayor of Hackney
Journey of a great-nephew’s research into the life of the late Solomon Lever
The story and images brought together on this website sets out the great-nephew’s
research into the public and personal life of the late Solomon Lever (1895 - 1959), whose
life was tragically cut short in his early sixties.
“Uncle Solly” – as he was known in my family – was a Jewish immigrant to London who
rose to political and community leadership in the first half of the 20th century. He
became general secretary of one of the smallest trades unions and had his plenary
addresses at the Trades Union Congress (TUC) broadcast to the nation. He also became
Mayor of Hackney.
1
I grew up knowing of his prominent role through my father (Charles Lever), who told me
his memories of going to the cinema as a child with Grandpa Manny and seeing “Uncle
Solly” on the newsreels denouncing the re-armament of Germany from the TUC podium.
Years later, studying for my Master’s degree in a dusty corner of a social science library
in Oxford, I found a berth next to the TUC annals. After five months, I had an epiphany
and looked up my surname in the index. Hey presto, two of his Congress speeches were
found in minutes and photocopied for my family.
Further inspiration came from stumbling across the wonderful, mayoral portraits on the
four corridors surrounding the old council chamber in Hackney Town Hall. The Jewish,
black and Asian, and male and female, faces surely form the most diverse line up of
mayors in Britain. And there among them is “Uncle Solly”, captured in oils.
This article was originally written as an essay for Birkbeck College’s Extra-Mural
Certificate in the History of London (2008). Following further research, I wrote ‘Bread,
Brotherhood and the Ballot Box’ as two articles in issues 15 and 16 of The Cable (2011).
This is the superb journal of the Jewish East End Celebration Society
There is more research that could be done, for example if I could track down the archives
of The Worker’s Circle and the committee papers of Hackney Council, as well as delving
into papers held in bodies such as Toynbee Hall and the Whitechapel Gallery.
Meanwhile, this puts what I have found out so far into the broader social, cultural and
political currents of the Jewish East End, as well as in the context of national politics and
international events from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries.
You can download and read as a full paper, or follow the story chapter-by-chapter. The
last chapter lists all the references, which are cited in brackets in each chapter.
In the spirit of web publishing, any corrections or new information will be gratefully
received, and acknowledged and incorporated on this website.
My particular thanks are due to the following:
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My late father, Charles Lever, to which this research is dedicated
My aunt, Greta Gitlin, who provided important corrections and encouragement, as did
my cousin, Gerald Lever, via airmail from Melbourne
Martin Jacobs, my cousin, for the postings he made on JewishGen KehilaLinks
Andy James, my friend and intrepid genealogist who tracked down Census data
Jennifer Rockliff in the Information Service at the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and
Christine Coates, Librarian of the TUC Collections (in London Metropolitan
University) for helping me find online union related material.
David Walker of the Jewish East End Celebration Society (JEECS), who greatly
improved the articles when editing for publication in The Cable, and who forwarded
me most of the scanned images previously used.
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Finally, special thanks to my brother, Dave Shirman, for building this website.
Jason Lever,
Brighton, England
November 2013.
Chapter 1 - Introducing Solomon Lever and his life trajectory: ‘Take one Jew
and immediately you have an opposition party’ (ref: Kops).
This quotation is through the lens of one of the Jewish East End’s foremost, second
generation writers, Bernard Kops. It is a pithy observation of its population’s political
temperament, at the “ballot box” and on the streets, in the closing decades of the
nineteenth and through to the first quarter of the twentieth centuries.
Describing the Jewish East End, a recent correspondent to The Cable magazine set out
that although ‘in the main a land of impecunious people, it was rich in culture, rife with
activity and pervasive of deep friendship and mutual aid’ (ref: Tarmon).
These aspects of ‘mutual aid’ and ‘rife with activity’ resonate well with the ‘Bread’,
‘Brotherhood’ and “Ballot Box’ themes of the life of this author’s great-uncle, Solomon
Lever.
As well, the importance of ‘culture’ to first and second generation Jewish immigrants
harked back to the “Yiddishism” of their homelands. As the ties of religion became more
relaxed, it supported, too, a more secular and intellectual advancement of mind – as
individuals – and economic and social progression – as a political movement and
community.
The latter qualities are what mostly concern us here as we consider the life trajectory of a
Jewish immigrant to the East End of London in occupational (‘Bread’), mutual support
(‘Brotherhood’) and political (‘Ballot Box’) terms – and his contribution to Jewish and
non-Jewish East End life.
How typical was Solomon Lever, with his high achieving communal and political
leadership roles?
Chapter 2 - The Jewish East End: First port of call of the Lever family
The term “East End” came into regular usage at the time of the great wave of Jewish
immigration into this central-eastern area of the capital city from the 1880s. References
can be found as early as 1861, such as in Henry Mayhew’s “London” (ref: Kalman).
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In William Booth’s magisterial “Life and Labour of the People of London” studies of the
1880s, the boroughs of Bethnal Green, Stepney, Poplar and Shoreditch were the East
End.
By the time of its updating forty years later, Hackney and Stoke Newington, and also
East and West Ham, Barking, Leyton, Walthamstow and Tottenham, were included in
this wider definition in the “New Survey of London Life and Labour” (ref: Lipman).
A Toynbee Hall survey by its trustees in 1899 showed a central core of about threequarters of a mile in which nearly all streets had at least 50% – and about a quarter of
them 95% or more – Jewish residents (ref: Lipman). A decade earlier, Booth/Llewelyn
Smith survey research had found that Bethnal Green, Stepney and Poplar were three of
the five poorest areas of inner working-class London in 1889 (ref: Weightman &
Humphries).
The exact boundaries of the Jewish East End have been contended, especially given
Jewish out-migration into the metropolitan London areas of Dalston, Stoke Newington,
Hackney, Clapton and Stamford Hill in the first third of the twentieth century, before
subsequent moves into suburban London either side of the Second World War.
Chapter 3 - A family history of Solomon Lever: Arriving in the East End as a
small boy.
(Note: not unusually at the time, there are inconsistencies of spelling of the pre-Lever
surname, Levitsky, Levetsky and Lavatsky.)
The first, main population shift of Jews from the original East End in a north-easterly
direction was the case with “Uncle Solly”, who lived at 49 Victoria Park, Hackney,
London E9.
Solomon’s family originated in the village of Narifka (or Narewka) near the town of
Byelstok (Bialystok), which had various names owing to changing borders over the
centuries. It had been in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, then the Kingdom of
Prussia, part of the Russian Empire, within the Soviet Union and now it is in Poland. At
the end of the nineteenth century, 42,000 of its 66,000 population was Jewish.
In the wake of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, a series of laws expelled many
Jewish communities in Russia. An ever-growing list of economic prohibitions also bore
down heavily on Jews. Brutal pogroms took place at the turn of the century, with the
result that some 100,000 Russian and Polish Jews emigrated to Britain between 18811905 (Ref: Brook) – and, among them, was Solomon following the piecemeal emigration
of his family. The Białystok pogrom occurred between 14–16 June 1906, with between
81 and 88 people killed and about 80 people wounded
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bia%C5%82ystok_pogrom)
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His uncle, Henry, was the first member of the Lever family to arrive in England. He later
took the pioneer Zionist route to Palestine in the 1920s. Solomon’s father, Nachman
(Nathan) came to England in about 1899. One of Nathan’s sisters, Elena (Esther)
followed the course of two of her older brothers in emigrating to London in 1901 aged
16. She later emigrated to Australia. There were twelve siblings in all.
Solomon’s grandparents, Yossel (Joseph) and Sara (Sarah) Levitsky emigrated to
England in 1908 with the help of Esther, bringing their youngest child, Jenny. Jenny
Clive went on to become a pioneering businesswoman in launderettes.
The grandparents made “aliyah” in 1913, leaving London for Palestine. Joseph died on
20 January 1916 during the siege of Jerusalem and Sarah on 12 June 1919. Genealogical
research takes back the ancestry of Sara Levitsky (née Varon) four generations via her
father, Abraham Tzvi Varon (ref: Jacobs).
English Census records chronicles a Nathan Levetsky as a boarder in Bethnal Green
South aged 28 in 1901, adding to the 95,425 Russian and Poles recorded in that census,
which meant Russian and Polish Jews (ref: Fishman, 1979).
Nathan’s sons – Solomon (b. 1895), Harris (Harry) (b. 1897) and Morris (Moishe) (b.
1901) – joined their father either side of his re-marriage after the death of his first wife,
Leah. There is a marriage record for Nathan Lavetsky and Rachel Rosenbloom in 1905 in
the St George in the East district of the East End.
In the 1911 Census, Nathan’s sons Solomon, Harris and Morris are recorded as
naturalised Russians and Nathan, Solomon and Harris give their occupations as cabinet
makers of bedroom suites. Solomon’s step-sister, Fanny (b. 1907) and step-brothers,
Hyman (Hymie) (b. 1909) and Emanuel (Manny) (b. 1910) – the author’s grandfather –
are also recorded. Joseph (Joe) (b. 1919), the youngest step-brother who was not on this
Census list, soon came along to make up the whole family.
On Manny’s birth certificate, less than a year earlier, the family is recorded as living at 28
North Place, Mile End; by the Census date, they are living a stone’s throw away from the
famous Columbia Road flower market in Bethnal Green (at 107 Virginia Road).
A Deed of Poll, dated 20 August 1923, which is in the family shows the official changing
of the family surname from ‘Lavatsky’ to ‘Lever’. Nathan and his ‘heirs and issues’,
were living then at 70 Morning Lane, Mare Street, and he was now a ‘grocer and
provision dealer’.
Harry became a very anglicised, women’s clothing representative across England, while
“Mad Moishe” disappeared from the family fold and was last seen heading towards – and
never returning from – Dagenham. Harry’s claim to fame was that his wife ran off with
an Indian maharajah, an event that made the newspapers.
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But Solomon’s high profile in the Jewish and wider community evolved through ‘Bread,
Brotherhood and the Ballot Box’.
Chapter 4 - A Jewish East End education for Solomon: A JFS boy
Most Jewish children had to be accommodated in schools run by the local school boards
or by Christian denominations, often in a hostile climate (ref: Brook; Osborne). Yet,
Solomon was among approximately 6,000 Jewish pupils educated in six Jewish schools,
in his case the Jews’ Free School (JFS). This was before JFS followed its Jewish families
out of the East End to north-west London, first to Camden and later to Kingsbury.
Solomon’s schooling probably ended at 14, though with English not the main language at
home, he may have taken advantage of the Russo-Jewish Committee’s free adult classes
in English. These were described by the Daily Chronicle in 1908 as ‘ghetto evening
schools, the schools where the adult Russian and German Jews… clutch at their last hope
of knowledge’ (ref: Black G).
What is certain is that he was essentially self-taught through his teens and twenties while
he took up the family trade of cabinet-making. This probably included the “University of
the Ghetto”, as the reading room of the Whitechapel Public Library and Free Art Gallery
(1892) was known, because of the way Jewish working people spent time there educating
themselves.
The Library even employed Yiddish speaking assistants in the early 1900s (ref: Nurse),
though during the decade before its closure in 2005, its shelves ‘groaned with titles in
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Bengali, Urdu, Gujarati and Somali’ (ref: Hall), displacing the preponderance of the
Yiddish volumes of Solomon’s time.
Chapter 5 - Joining East End cultural and communal associations:
Involvement in Toynbee Hall and The Workers’ Circle
Between 1870 and 1914, secularisation and assimilation in the Jewish East End meant the
synagogue gradually lost the undisputed place it had occupied in the Russian Pale of
Settlement as ‘the hub of communal and cultural life’ (ref: Gartner).
The great novelist, Israel Zangwill, in “Children of the Ghetto” (1892), could still
describe the East End synagogue as ‘their salon and their lecture hall. It supplied them
not only with their religion, but their art and letters, their politics and their public
amusements’.
However, by the 1930s, ‘many of the religious traditions and observances which the
immigrants had brought with them had lapsed’ (ref: Fishman, 1979). Instead, a
significant minority – including Solomon – were finding space to pursue educational,
political and cultural activities through institutions such as Toynbee Hall and the
Workers’ Circle.
Settlements like Toynbee Hall were established with substantial Jewish immigrant
participation in their educational and cultural activities (ref: Gartner). James Mallon CH
was a long-serving Warden (1919 to 1954) and he headed the Council of Citizens of East
London which united a number of anti-fascist groups (ref: Sokoloff). Solomon Lever was
likely to have been involved in various activities at Toynbee Hall, which founded the
Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1901. Solomon later became a Trustee of the Galley.
Pre-emigration, one prominent response of eastern European Jews to ‘increasing
securalisation and modernisation [was] Yiddishism, the ethnic and cultural programmes
of the Marxist Jewish Bund’ – in full, the General Jewish Labour Alliance in Russia,
Poland and Lithuania! (ref: Srebnik). Hence the founding in London’s East End of the
Workers’ Circle (Der Arbeitering) – and often referred to just as “The Circle” – in Alie
Street by Jewish immigrant workmen. It was different to other mutual aid organisations
in being a workers’ organisation – as it described itself, ‘an order of workers for workers,
and for progressive thought’ (Ref: Rocker).
By 1921 there were over 1,000 members, and nearly 3,000 by 1935. Charles Poulsen, in
“Scenes from a Stepney Youth”, described it as a ‘social and educational centre [plus
friendly society]… [for] tailors, pressers, machinists, cabinetmakers – all the gamut of
local trades’ (ref: Poulsen). An interviewee in “Our East End” recalls that each room in
the big house ‘was a different union or different organisation’ (ref: Dudgeon).
Active Workers’ Circle members including Solomon Lever are cited among the
participants in the opening of a folk house on Adler Street in 1943 by the Association of
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Jewish Writers and Journalists (ref: Srebnik). Solomon was in Branch One and on the
central Management Committee.
Chapter 6 - Solomon as a cabinet maker: The family and a Jewish trade
In the early and mid-Victorian periods, Jews were closely associated with street trades
such as selling sponges and spectacles, and as proprietors of “swag-shops”, which sold a
wide array of goods including braces, garters, rubies and time-pieces (ref: Mayhew).
Yet Jewish immigrants in the last quarter of the 19th century tended to continue in
familiar artisan trades from the “old country”, such as tailoring. Orthodox Jewish
observance prevented employment on a Saturday at a time when the six-day working
week was the norm. Hence the attraction for many of having a Jewish employer. This
was compounded by anti-alien prejudice of mainstay East End industries such as in the
docks.
This helps explain the pattern of occupations recorded at the Poor Jews’ Temporary
Shelter: 29 per cent made garments, 23 per cent were in trade and commerce, 9 per cent
made boots and shoes and 7 per cent described themselves as carpenters (1895-96 to
1907-08). Among the many remaining trades was baking (ref: Gartner).
Many arrived with cabinet-making skills in every field of domestic furniture, from
general carpenters to specialist woodturners, carvers and marquetry workers (ref: Black
G). Jerry White records that cabinet making was the third highest employment type in the
Jewish residential population of the Rothschild Buildings in 1900 (ref: White, 2003).
The growth of a middle class and of more prosperous artisans in the Victorian period
created a demand for cheaper furniture. This was the main market for the East End
furniture trade, centred on Curtain Road but soon spreading out along Bethnal Green
Road and Hackney Road (ref: Kirkham).
While some picked up their first knowledge of timber and tools in cabinet making classes
at school, in Solomon’s case his father had been an apprentice to the craftsman who laid a
new floor of St. Petersburg Cathedral.
Solomon followed this trade in the specific area of bedroom suites with his father and
brother after he left school.
Chapter 7 – From cabinet maker to trade union general secretary: The battle
to establish Jewish unions
When Solomon entered the world of work in the late 1910s, overcrowding and chronic
poverty were increasing in the East End. Cut-throat competition in cabinet making made
it a precarious living, with long hours and low wages.
8
Jewish immigrants arrived into a system in which “native” tailors and shoe-makers, in
particular, had already begun to toil within ‘the full rigours of the sweating system’.
Sweatshop conditions of 13-hour working days were fuelled by starvation wages. This
also applied ‘to a lesser extent in cabinet-making and baking’ (ref: Jones).
Distinctly Jewish unions began to form in some sectors, for example the short-lived
Hebrew Cabinet Makers Union. With the majority of cabinet making workshops run by a
master with maybe four to eight men under him, it was not a trade conducive to
collectivism (ref: Gartner; White).
In 1892, only about 1,200 of some 30,000 immigrant Jewish workers were members of
Jewish trades unions in London (ref: Alderman). Jewish unions ‘rose and fell rapidly,
often vanishing without a trace’ in the first decade of the twentieth century (ref:
Bermant). With fairly rapid assimilation into the English working-classes, the need for
separate Jewish unions was questioned.
According to Rudolf Rocker, the Jewish trade unions took steps to build contacts with the
general trades union movement in the country, becoming active in major disputes and
strikes. Yet, they tried to ‘provide for the cultural needs of the Jewish workers’ (Ref:
Rocker).
There was greater stability in smaller trades such as baking (ref: Gartner). Some time
between 1903 and 1909 the London Jewish Bakers Union was formed, evolving from
meetings of refugee bakers held in the Jewish pub in Black Lion Yard and other East End
pubs. It affiliated to the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in 1920 (ref: Marsh & Smethurst).
Solomon Lever, one time cabinet maker, was to be its general secretary for over half its
60-year history.
Chapter 8 – Rise of the London Jewish Bakers Union: Jewish baking in the
East End and their American counterparts
In his “Jewish Landlords, Jewish Tenants”, Jerry White argues that ‘class divisions
fractured East End Jewry’ during a period of local union and political radicalism at the
turn of the century. He cites masters being assaulted by striking bakery workers. During
the 1912 tailors’ strike, the London Jewish Bakers Union, and the cigarette makers,
provided free supplies! (ref: White, 1981; Fishman, 1981).
Each of the London Jewish Bakers Union’s loaves of rye and cholla breads came to
display a little label proudly inscribed “Baked by Union Labour” – interestingly not
Jewish Union Labour.
This came about through a small strike called by the union to improve the working
conditions of its member bakers. They called for a trade union label on the bread so that
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the public could see that it originated in a bakery that observed trade union conditions.
After a few weeks, they won this concession after the Jewish women of the East End
refused to take any loaves offered in bakers’ shops or grocery stores that had no such
label! (ref: Rocker).
Echoing their London counterparts, a small square or circle of paper pasted on their
baked goods were designed by the New York City Local 31’s Journeymen Bakers’ and
Confectioners’ International to show customers that they were made by union members
(ref: Balinska).
The banner of the London Jewish Bakers Union has pride of place in the foyer of The
Jewish Museum in Camden Town, London, NW1.
As well as ‘Buy Bread with the Union Label’, it proclaims ‘Unity is Strength’, ‘Strong
Loyalty – Right and Truth’ and ‘Workers of the World Unite’.
The United Ladies’ Tailoring Trade Union (of Jewish workers) similarly had the slogan
of ‘For a Socialist Commonwealth, Toiling Tailors True Together’ (ref: Freedland).
Chapter 9 – Dealing with the challenges of a declining baking industry:
Tougher market conditions from the 1920s
10
Household consumption of bread had fallen steadily as families became smaller and
alternative foods cheaper. The “New Survey of London Life and Labour” (1933) by the
London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) concluded that the ‘small
Jewish section of the industry’ had particular difficulties. The Jewish baker had longer
hours, including unpopular night work, which contributed to labour shortages.
Slipping from their dry economic analysis, these LSE researchers described how the
characteristic cholla was a ‘peculiarly good quality bread baked in special
patterns…[which] demands a higher degree of skill than the ordinary English loaf’and a
longer baking time.
At the same time, assimilation and population spread across London added to the decline
of the Jewish baking industry. In 1933 there were just 50 Jewish master bakers (members
of the Jewish Master Bakers Protection Society) and about 90 skilled operatives
(organised in the London Jewish Bakers Union). The Union is described as ‘a union
small but powerful in the sense that nearly every Jewish baker belongs to it’ (ref: LSE).
Forty years earlier, in the 1890s, the London Jewish Master Bakers Protection Society
acted to defend themselves in the courts against the terms of the 17th century Bread Act.
This legislation prohibited baking on Sundays. The Society won the case on the grounds
that later Factory and Workshop Acts allowed Jews who did not work on a Saturday
some limited Sunday working rights (ref: Black E).
The socialist credentials of the London Jewish Bakers Union was illustrated by the
unique system of “jobbing” (or called the “credential system”). As a response to the
economic depression, instead of paying unemployment benefit like other unions, it
required each member to stay away from work at regular intervals (such as a day a
month) with his place taken by an unemployed member at the same, regular rates (ref:
LSE).
In an American parallel, part of the resolution of the 1909 bakers’ strike in New York on
the Lower East Side was that bosses allowed their workers to give one night’s work to
unemployed bakers (ref: Balinska).
Chapter 10 – Solomon’s journey to Jewish trade unionism: a socialist path
In his shift from cabinet maker to trades union leader in baking (and later political
leadership), he epitomised Henry Mayhew’s characterisation that ‘the artisans are almost
to a man red-hot politicians’ (‘London Labour and the London Poor’, vol III, 1861) (ref:
Mayhew).
Solomon’s shift from cabinet making to union officialdom may also have been related to
the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. The relative youthfulness of the Jewish
population meant that some 14 per cent of British Jews served in the armed forces
compared with 11.5 per cent of the British population generally.
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Solomon was not conscripted into active service though. In common with many East End
furniture makers, his skills were used in aircraft manufacture – as wood was the basic
material for aircraft of the time – serving in the Royal Flying Corps (ref: Black G;
Kirkham).
We have already seen in earlier sections on the origins of the London Jewish Bakers
Union some of the challenges to the development of trades unionism among
predominantly Jewish trades, particularly tailoring and baking.
Solomon Lever’s path in unionism – and later as a prominent Labour Party councillor and
Mayor of Hackney – was likely influenced by socialists providing the early leadership of
Jewish trade unionism. The 19th century Jewish immigrants brought with them the
socialism of the Pale of Settlement and can be said to have more or less introduced trades
unionism – and Zionism – to British Jewry (ref: Alderman, 1983).
A Hebrew Socialist Union was formed in 1876, which ‘acted first as an educative force
to train future political leaders, and secondly as an economic force to bring about Trade
Union consciousness’. Eight years later came a Society of Jewish Socialists, which
spawned an International Workers’ Educational Club (Fishman, 1981; Alderman, 1983).
Yet, by the onset of the First World War there could be little point in ‘speaking of a
Jewish socialist movement in England independent of Jewish trade unionism’ (Gartner).
For Jewish immigrants, socialism was largely taken up in Britain ‘through an industrial
[ie trade union] rather than an ideological [ie revolutionary] medium’ (Alderman, 1983).
Chapter 11 – Interlude of anarchism’s appeal to East End Jews: its role in
unionising Jewish tailors, bakers and cabinet-makers
Anarchism had a short but significant influence on Jewish political and trades union life,
and anarchists played a notable part in the struggle to unionise Jewish trades (ref:
Fishman, 1981) including two of those relevant to Solomon Lever.
This occurred during the transition between Jewish support for socialism and the
municipal reformism of the pre-Second World War Labour Party that was taken up by
Solomon Lever.
For one of its leading thinkers and activists of the time, ‘the fact is that all the Jewish
trade unions in the East End, without exception, were started by the initiative of the
Jewish anarchists... out of the[ir] ceaseless educational work’ (Ref: Rocker). This is
supported by others, in that ‘the small band of Jewish social-democrats and anarchists in
England found that they were in demand… as trade-union managers’ (ref: Alderman,
1983).
12
Anarchists were involved in the 1906 tailors’ strike, for example, which resulted in the
working day being reduced to ten and a half hours. In the wake of the 1912 strike, shorter
hours, improved sanitary conditions and union recognition were won with mutual
anarchist and union support (ref: Glinert).
Anarchists founded the Jubilee Club, in Jubilee Street, hosting lectures on art and music
by Jewish intellectuals and pauper scholars, translating Tolstoy and Chekhov into
Yiddish and organising tours of of the British Museum.
Mass meetings of the Federation of Jewish Anarchists took place in the Great Assembly
Hall in Mile End and in the Wonderland in Whitechapel, attended by thousands of
people. The strapline of its Journal, the Arbeter Fraint, set out that it was ‘the organ of
the Federation of Yiddish-Speaking Anarchist Groups of Great Britain and Paris’ ((Ref:
Rocker). Its Jewish roots were also reflected in its motto, at the top of the front page, by
Hillel: “If I am not for myself, who will be? And if not now, when?” (Ref: Rocker)
Nevertheless, the heyday of anarchism was brief in the radical currents of East End
political life. It stood square against traditional Jewish identity, by rejecting all forms of
authority – whether the state, the church/synagogue or the family. Unsuprisingly, this
limited its popular appeal amongst Jewish East Enders.
In his 1956 autobiographical account in of his days as a leading protagonist of anarchism
in the East End, Rudolf Rocker argues that ‘the libertarian movement among Jewish
workers in Britain not because its forces were spent.... fell a victim of the First World
War, when it had reached its peak’ (Ref: Rocker). In the second year of the war (1915),
the printing press of the Arbeter Fraint was closed by the government.
Soon a different left-wing ideology took hold – communism. A significant number of
East End Jews joined the Communist Party, attracted by the Russian Revolution. At the
same time, many also joined trades unions.
In Bill Fishman’s political eulogy, by the 1920s anarchists were ‘already an
anachronism, shadowy ghosts of another era’– and, post-war, never recovered its
adherents faced with ‘the triple pull of Zionism, Orthodoxy and Communism’ (Fishman,
1979).
Chapter 12 – Solomon Lever finds his home in the Labour Party: the cause of
municipal socialism
While many Jewish East End socialists became Communists in the 1920s and 1930s,
many also found their way into the Labour party and to the cause of municipal socialism.
One was Solomon Lever, staunch in his Labour party allegiance as a union leader from
the late 1920s and Hackney councillor from 1945, a period when Labour was struggling
to establish a firm East End support base in areas with significant Jewish populations.
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Labour’s difficulty in attracting Jewish East-Enders has been attributed to the persistence
of casual labour and workshop production, which meant the “factory effect” that
propelled people toward voting Labour was missing. This was also a time when ‘many
socialists flirted with, or joined, the Communist Party of Great Britain’ in the 1920s and
1930s (Beech & Hickson).
A convincing case is also made, notably by Marc Brodie in ‘The Politics of the Poor: The
East End of London 1885-1914’, that the ‘“personal” element…[was the] major
overriding influence on the politics of the working class in the East End’, including on
Jewish political allegiances (Brodie).
This “personal” element can be demonstrated by looking at Jewish voting patterns in East
End constituencies from the mid-19th century.
Chapter 13 – The Liberal and Conservative parties: their traditional claims
to Jewish votes
Anglo-Jewry had long-standing Liberal leanings following that party’s championing of
Jewish political emancipation in the 1840s and 1850s (ref: Brodie). This compared
favourably to ‘the strength of Conservative hostility to emancipation’ (ref: Alderman,
1983). Five Jews were adopted as candidates to be Members of Parliament (MPs) in the
1840s and all Jewish MPs of this period were Liberals.
Nevertheless, East End Jews’ political allegiances continued to fluctuate between the two
main parties well into the twentieth century. The one overwhelmingly Jewish ward in
Stepney constituency in the 1900s was regarded as ‘a “hotbed of Toryism”’ and the free
trade position of the Liberals also limited Jewish support (ref: Brodie). Cabinet-makers
were told by their masters to vote Conservative because if they voted Liberal the market
would be flooded with cheap furniture from abroad (ref: Samuel). Yet, ‘the Conservatives
failed to win a Jewish following in the East End’ (ref: Srebnik).
‘The endurance of Liberal loyalties among, at least, working-class London Jews’ owed
much to Whitechapel’s Liberal MP at the end of the 19th century, Sir Samuel Montagu,
Yiddish-speaking doyen of the Anglo–Jewish establishment. His legacy of good works
included founding the Federation of Synagogues, which catered for the poor immigrant
community of the East End – including the Lever family – by unifying a plethora of tiny
“shtiebel” communities, based on Central and Eastern European home towns (ref:
Alderman, 1983).
Half a century after Liberal Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, introduced a Jewish
Disabilities Bill in 1848, Liberal Party Jewish support still held up. This was aided by the
restrictive measures of the Aliens Act (1905) brought in by the Conservative government
(ref: Srebnik).
14
The Liberals won a landslide election in 1906 and Herbert Samuel – a member of a
distinguished Anglo-Jewish political family, who had campaigned against the measure in
opposition – became one of the Ministers administering the new law limiting the numbers
of East European Jews entering the country. However, the Liberals may have gained
some credit when, following the 1905 (abortive) Russian Revolution, the Home Secretary
instructed Immigration Boards to give immigrants seeking asylum on religious or
political grounds “the benefit of the doubt” (Glover).
Yet, for someone of Solomon Lever’s generation and background, the established
institutions of Anglo-Jewry and their Liberal leanings likely held little sway. Sir Samuel
died in 1911, and by the time Solomon Lever was making his way in the world as a
cabinet maker in the 1920s the influence of the old Anglo-Jewish establishment had
declined.
Chapter 14 – The Labour Party consolidates its Jewish votes: Solomon enters
union leadership
Labour’s entry into the coalition government in 1915 made the party more mainstream.
The extended franchise in 1918 brought it more working-class (including Jewish) voters
and growing post-war economic and social pressures helped create demands for social
reform, all in the Labour Party’s favour (ref: Alderman 1983; Weightman and
Humphries).
During the First World War, socialists had already gained appeal by opposing the
government’s “conscription or deportation” policy, which had led to anti-Jewish riots in
London and Leeds.
By the mid-1930s, Labour was the normal political home of the mass of working-class
Jews as well as many middle-class Jews. Increasing prosperity in the clothing and the
boot and shoe trades created the population shift of Jews from the East End to Hackney,
Stamford Hill, Walthamstow, Bow and Leyton, yet many remained Labour supporters
(ref: Alderman 1983 and 1981).
By the end of the 1920s, Solomon Lever was grappling with the finances of the London
Jewish Bakers Union. Michael Pruth (or Prooth), general secretary, had been deported to
Russia after riding a white horse in a demonstration during the general strike in 1926. His
successor, L. Brenner, was convicted of misappropriating funds. H. Wilson was jailed for
forgery.
From 1929, under Solomon Lever’s stewardship, ‘the administration of the union as a
whole was put in order’ and he remained at its helm for three decades (ref: Wayne).
Chapter 15 – The appeal of East End councils’ social reform: influencing
Solomon to remain within the Labour fold
15
Labour came to dominate many east London councils. The 1919 London County Council
(LCC) elections brought strong Labour gains in Hackney, Bethnal Green and Poplar on
the back of pledges to improve welfare services and living standards. This included
introducing free school milk, abolished fifty years later for the over-sevens by a
Conservative Education Secretary, the late Lady (Margaret) Thatcher.
When Solomon Lever was growing up an East End housing crisis saw rents rise sharply.
Despite the LCC, but not the boroughs, undertaking some slum clearance, consolidation
prevailed at its headquarters at County Hall and working-class, Jewish councillors like
Solomon Lever demanded action on housing, inadequate air raid precautions and
countering fascism (ref: Weightman and Humphries).
There were some high-profile successes, notably what became known as “Poplarism”
under the leadership of George Lansbury in Poplar Council. The pioneering provision of
services included baths, free libraries and paying its employees (of both sexes) a
minimum wage. From 1932, Mile End Municipal Baths offered a first-class swimming
pool, first and second-class slipper baths and Turkish and Russian baths (ref: Weightman
and Humphries; Taylor).
Chapter 16 – The rise and fall of communist support among Jews: the effect
of the Second World War
In spite of social reform by the LCC and municipal socialism by East End boroughs,
there was still a constituency for the Communist Party of Great Britain among Jewish
voters. This was not least because of 15 to 20 per cent unemployment in Stepney and
Poplar in the 1930s. This enabled Stepney Communist Party ‘to win over sections and
organisations within the Jewish community’ (ref: Weightman and Humphries; Srebnik).
The party’s anti-fascist credentials added to its support, and it remained attractive to
Jewish East-Enders through to the Second World War. As the late Emanuel Litvinoff
recorded in ‘Journey Through a Small Planet’, he drifted into communism when he was
about eleven and attended pioneer meetings where he was told that there was no antiSemitism in the Soviet Union and that ‘after the Revolution there would be no Jews left,
only workers’ (ref: Litvinoff).
In relation to fighting fascism in the East End, some argue that the Association of Jewish
Friendly Societies was as active as the Communist Party in the grassroots fight against
the British Union of Fascists, and it was the dockers – and not the Communist Party –
who had voluntarily taken on the task of defending Cable Street in 1936.
For others, while the Labour Party advised opponents of Mosley and his Blackshirts to
stay at home, it was the Communist Party that adopted a policy of direct opposition (ref:
Jewish East End 1840-1930).
16
The London Jewish Bakers Union was notable among the organisations affiliated to the
Jewish People’s Council Against Fascism and Anti-Semitism. At a major fundraising
bazaar in December 1927, Jewish bakers provided food for the 3,360 people attracted
over eight evenings (ref: Rosenberg).
The Communist Party remained attractive to Jewish East-Enders right up until the start of
World War Two, still being seen as a force for ‘self-defence’ by its willingness ‘to fight
Fascism and anti-Semitism’. Indeed, the Communist candidate in Mile End, Phil Piratin,
was elected in the 1945 general election on a wave of post-war euphoria, with the help, it
is estimated, of ‘old-fashioned latkes-and-strudel Jewish campaigning’ gaining at least
2,500 Jewish votes, about half his total (ref: Freedland; Alderman 1981, 1983).
Yet it lost significant Jewish support when their leader, Issie Panner, pronounced during
the War that Zionism conflicted with the rich, revolutionary tradition of Jewish history
admired by Marx and Lenin. At the same time, revelations were emerging about the
persecution of Russian Jews (ref: Srebnik).
Chapter 17 – Surging Labourism after the war: Solomon’s election as a
Hackney councillor
17
Meanwhile, within the Labour movement, Solomon Lever pursued a path between the
centre ground of Herbert Morrison and Hugh Dalton (nationally) and radical innovation
(locally).
At the time of taking up the reins as general secretary of the London Jewish Bakers
Union, he would have seen four Jewish Labour MPs returned in the 1935 general
election. In 1945, most of the 34 Jewish Labour candidates were elected, whereas all five
Jewish Conservative and 16 Jewish Liberal candidates lost (ref: Alderman 1983).
East End constituencies with large Jewish populations, including Bethnal Green and
Stepney, returned Labour MPs and in Hackney, Solomon Lever was elected a Labour
councillor.
He served on a wide range of committees from 1945 to 1956. He was chairman of the
Civil Defence committee and vice-chairman of Public Libraries, and was elected Mayor
of Hackney by his peers in 1951/52.
Chapter 18 – The Labour Party’s support for Zionism: Poale Zion cements
Solomon Lever’s affiliation
Solomon Lever had strong Zionist affinities – his grandfather and uncle had both gone to
Palestine – and he was critical of the Labour Government elected in 1945 because after
its early backing for Zionism before the Second World War, the Labour party’s approach
had changed.
The precise degree to which Solomon’s Labour loyalties were challenged by the antifascist credentials of the Communist party is not known. What is likely is that Poale
Zion’s strong support for Labour had helped attract him to the party in the first place. In
turn, Bevin’s policies as Foreign Secretary called into question his full support to the
newly elected Labour Government after 1945.
Poale Zion was a movement of Marxist Zionist Jewish workers circles founded in Russia
in 1901. It had branches in London in 1903/04 and Leeds in 1905. The aim was to
popularise Zionism within unions and among Labour politicians, saying in the 1918
general election that not only did the Labour Party ‘stand for labour under good
conditions… [but also] redemption of our own National Home, Palestine’ (ref: Alderman
1983).
Anthony Asquith, Liberal party leader, further lost Jewish support in 1922 by arguing in a
speech in Paisley for Britain’s withdrawal from its obligations in Palestine as part of a
wider foreign policy of retrenchment. This backtracked on the Balfour Declaration, the
first significant declaration by a world power in favour of a Jewish “national home” in
Palestine which was made under the auspices of the Lloyd George Coalition, with the
prominent leadership of the Liberals.
18
At the same time, half of the Jews returned to Parliament in the inter-war 1918, 1922 and
1923 elections were Conservatives. Nevertheless many of these Members were out-andout anti-Zionists and feared that supporting a Jewish national home would bring their
loyalty to Britain into question.
In opposition to the National Government of the 1920s, the Labour Party ‘found it easy to
support the ideal of the National Home’. Labour and Trades Union Congress (TUC)
conferences in the 1920s regularly supported the idea of a Jewish National Home
influenced by Poale Zion. Labour’s leader, Ramsay MacDonald, visited Palestine in 1922
and reiterated this policy (ref: Jenner and Taylor; Alderman 1983).
Chapter 19 – Short-lived Labour-Zionist honeymoon: Testing Solomon
Lever’s party loyalty
The Liberal Party’s eclipse as a national political force by the mid-1920s aided ‘new
Jewish voters, gravitat[ing] towards Labour’ (ref: Alderman 1983).
Zionist support for Labour reached its apogee when a 1939 Conservative Government
White Paper abandoned the Balfour Declaration and supported Palestine becoming an
independent state within ten years, but with Jews in a minority. Its terms restricted Jewish
purchase of Arab land and property and put a restriction on Jewish immigration to ensure
that Jews would make up no more than one-third of the total population.
Opposition to this White Paper became Labour policy, and as late as the 1940 Labour
Party conference motions were carried backing unlimited Jewish immigration to
Palestine.
However, this changed after the Second World War. Once in power and forming a
majority government, the Labour Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, announced in
November 1945 that the Government stood by the White Paper. This followed the
wartime Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, stating at the end of the War that Jewish
refugees should now be returned to Europe, ‘lest they become an explosive element in the
country’ (ref: Srebnik).
Only six out of those 34 Jewish Labour MPs expressed opposition to Bevin’s policy. This
was followed by the 1946 party conference’s rejection of a proposal to outlaw antiSemitism, giving more cause for a rift between Anglo-Jewry and Labour (ref: Alderman
1983).
Some Jewish Labour Party supporters felt that that ‘Zionism was exploited by the Labour
Party in the mid-twentieth century in order to win the allegiance of Jewish voters’, and
had now served its purpose (ref: Alderman 1983).
This policy reversal on Zionism may have reinforced Solomon Lever’s resolve to resist
regular overtures to him to stand as a Labour parliamentary candidate. As a Labour
19
councillor and local community leader, he could progress the municipal socialist path
while retaining the independence to criticise those government policies on issues of
profound belief and conscience.
This thesis will be argued by examining his four main speeches made at Trades Union
Congress (TUC) conferences between 1938 and 1958.
Chapter 20 – Solomon Lever’s 1947 broadcast speech from the TUC podium:
broadside against fascism’s resurgence in Britain
Solomon’s unhappiness with major aspects of Labour policies on anti-fascism and on
Palestine/Israel came to the fore in speeches broadcast from the TUC podium.
Prominent trade unionists had previously gone public with their concerns at the hesitancy
of the Labour Party’s anti-fascist policies. In 1938, the Jewish Bakers Union delegate,
Solomon Lever, tabled a resolution at the TUC congress in Blackpool, stating that:
‘This Congress condemns the introduction of anti-Semitism into British politics
and strongly resents attempts by a Fascist organisation to introduce it into the
Trade Union movement. This Congress pledges to fight this evil...’
(Jewish Chronicle, 02.09.38)
Post-war, he raised continuing concerns about a resurgence of fascism. The activities of
Blackshirts – and counter-actions by the 43 Group – in Mare Street, Kingsland Road and
Ridley Road Market in Hackney and Dalston were very close to his home and work life.
Interestingly, as this author now lives in Brighton, weekly meetings of fascists in the
guise of the British League of Ex-Servicemen and Women were held on Saturday
afternoons at The Level, which served as an authorised speakers’ corner. Morris
Beckman devotes a chapter of The 43 Group to describing the “Great Rally Disaster” in
June 1948.
A local branch of the 43 Group of largely Jewish ex-serviceman, dedicated to direct
action against fascist activity, successfully took up the cudgels against several hundred
Union Movement (Blackshirt) rallyists. Organisers of the 43 Group had prior warning of
the British Union of Fascists’ plans for a recruitment drive on The Level. On their arrival,
the fascists were met by a hail of bricks and fighting went on all afternoon assisted by
‘elderly retired Jewish gentlemen, seemingly rejuvenated by Brighton air, wading into the
fascists with their walking sticks and umbrellas’ (Ref: Beckman, Bance).
As London Jewish Bakers Union delegate for over 20 TUC congresses, Solomon Lever’s
newsreel appearances gave him as much political and public exposure as a maverick
backbench MP. My late father, Charles, recalled being taken to the cinema as a child and
seeing his Uncle Solly appear on the newsreel, speaking at the TUC in Southport on
September 4, 1947 about the return of Blackshirt activities.
20
Mr. S Lever, London Jewish Bakers, set out evidence of the return of Blackshirt activities
(TUC History Online, 1):
‘It is clear that the General Council has not realised the gravity with which trade
union branches in East London regard this menace [of Fascist Activities]. An
organisation calling itself the British League of Ex-Service Men, but which is
really the old British Union of Fascists, is operating just as it did before the war...
They march through the Jewish quarter of London, shouting “Heil Hitler” and
“Heil Mosley”!’
He eloquently linked the manifestation of anti-Semitism with underlying Fascism to
strike the strongest chord with his predominantly non-Jewish and union audience:
‘If this were only a question of attacking the Jews, well, it would not matter very
much. They have taken it for the past two thousand years, and they can take it to
the extent of six million dead in Hitler’s concentration camps, and a few more
insults would not make a very great deal of difference; but this is not the object of
the Fascists, because their aim is the revival of Fascism, and they use antiSemitism as a smoke-screen behind which they work... for the cashing in on the
discontent of a section of the people’.
While seeking stronger condemnation from the TUC General Council, the main target of
this speech is the Labour Government:
‘A delegation comprising the Mayor and various other personalities in a district
in East London has waited upon the Home Secretary [James Chuter Ede], without
very much result, and in the meantime Fascism in East London marches on... like
old times, you know, when Mosley and his Blackshirts marched through London
before the war’.
Before he was out of time and wanting to re-state that the threat posed was to the
‘preservation of freedom and tolerance and democracy in this country’, he carefully
relates these anti-Semitic, fascist activities to the fighting in Palestine for the Jewish
State:
‘The Fascists started this campaign a long time before these events in that
unhappy land and let me say that every Jewish trade unionist and every Socialist
condemns those troubles in Palestine more than I can say’.
Solomon Lever was taking pains to ensure that his union brethren could support him on
the issue of Fascist resurgence whilst recognising that public sympathy with the Zionist
cause was being greatly tested by the high-profile deaths of British soldiers during the
struggle for independence.
21
According to Morris Beckman, there was ‘an overwhelming demand from rank and file
for Congress to urge the government to take immediate steps to stamp out fascist activity
in Britain’. Delegates rebelled against the leadership who wanted them to leave the issue
to the General Council.
Two days later, the lead editorial of the Daily Herald referred to the ‘deep uneasiness felt
by the TUC this week [about the growth of fascist activities in London and other cities
that] should convince the government that a way must be found to prohibit anti-Semitic
provocations’ (Ref: Beckman). Yet neither union pressure and some press support nor the
43 Group counter-actions persuaded Atlee’s Labour government to make incitement to
racial hatred illegal.
The full speech can be read at TUC History Online
(Second from left receiving congratulations after his speech, The Daily Herald, 4
September 1947)
22
Chapter 21 – Solomon Lever’s 1948 speech from the TUC podium: Making
the case for the government to recognise the State of Israel
It was, of course, not his status as a Labour councillor but the truly democratic outcome
of TUC rules that allowed him as general secretary of one of the very smallest, affiliated
trade unions to have similar speaking rights at Congress than his “brother” representing
say some half a million miners.
During his long tenure, he had faced a constant challenge of maintaining member
numbers in the London Jewish Bakers Union. The Union had affiliated to the TUC with
200 members in 1920, but its membership had fallen to 40 paying members by the start
of World War Two. This lifted to 70 members by 1945 and rose steadily to over 100 by
1950 (ref: Marsh & Smethurst).
The following extracts of his speech at the TUC annual conference on 10 September
1948 illustrate his heightened concern at the Labour Government’s lack of recognition of
the State of Israel. He had agreed to withdraw his Union’s resolution on Palestine in
return for being permitted to make a statement on the General Council’s report on this
topic (TUC History Online, 2):
‘The sole purpose of our resolution was to remind Congress and the Labour
Movement generally of the many promises which were made to the Jewish people
to help them establish a home in Palestine’.
His approach was to convey near incredulity that such a great country as Britain could be
‘guilty of such bad faith’:
‘Since the days of Cromwell, Britain had the goodwill of every Jew in every
corner of the world... Was not Britain one of the first nations to grant complete
freedom and emancipation to the Jews?’
‘What a tragedy it is, therefore, that to-day, when Jews need Britain’s helping
hand more than they have ever done in their whole history, they find that Britain
is almost alone among the great powers which has not yet recognised the State of
Israel. Jews throughout the world can hardly believe that it is Britain who is
guilty of such bad faith [after the Balfour Declaration]’.
He then raises the stakes by giving many examples of how the Labour Party has
conducted a deplorable volte face, referring to all the conference and TUC resolutions in
favour of ‘building Palestine as the Jewish National Home’:
‘This state of affairs is all the more deplorable because Britain to-day has a
Labour Government in power...
He quotes Clement Attlee before he became Prime Minister, a man he very likely knew,
via Toynbee Hall where Attlee was a resident and one time secretary:
23
‘... There was a strong case for [a Jewish National Home] before the war. There
is an irresistable case now [in 1944], after the unspeakable atrocities of the cold
and calculated German Nazi plan to kill all Jews in Europe’.
He then goads the Government’s position of breaking its promises for its “friends”:
‘Is it for Egypt, who could not afford even one soldier to defend herself against
Hitler. But who can now send an army against Israel...? Or perhaps it is for Iraq,
which had a pro-Axis revolt and stabbed Britain in the back in 1941.... Or is it for
the Mufti [of Jerusalem], the ally and collaborator of Hitler, who had to flee to
Egypt to escape the vengeance of the Allies?’
He brings the speech to a close calling for Britain to give ‘unqualified recognition to the
State of Israel’:
‘For twenty centuries the Jews have been a people without a country...[and] lived
as strangers in countries that did not want them, and have been tortured, killed
and persecuted on a scale without parallel in the history of men... [culminating]
when they died in their millions to satisfy the unholy causes of Fascism.
‘I ask you, comrades, is it not time that the world said to the Jewish people, “You
have had enough of this persecution. You have had enough of slaughter. Here is
your ancient homeland. Go there and live in peace”?’
The full speech can be read at TUC History Online:
Chapter 22 – Solomon Lever’s 1954 speech from the TUC podium: Speaking
out against the rearmament of Germany
In 1954, the London Jewish Bakers Union supported a composite motion (which was
lost) that ‘This Congress expresses its opposition to the rearmament of either Eastern or
Western Germany...’ (TUC History Online, 4).
They were in the company of other unions – from the National Union of Furniture Trade
Operatives to the Scottish Painters Society – in moving motions. Solomon Lever’s
particular motion stated that:
‘Congress views with concern the decision of the Government to rearm the
Germans. Congress is of the opinion that it would be in the best interests of peace
if both East and West Germany remained disarmed for the time being’.
(TUC History Online, 5).
Starting his speech, he ensures for the Congress audience that the wider victims of the
Nazis are remembered too (TUC History Online, 6):
24
‘I want the Germans disarmed because twice in our lifetime have we seen what a
menace an armed Germany can be to Europe to the world and to humanity in
general... Prominent Germans are fleeing to the east.... as a protest against the
rising strength of the Nazis.
‘This small union which I represent, one of the smallest affiliated to Congress,
and the only remaining Jewish trade union in the world outside of Israel, feels
that it owes a duty to 6 million Jewish dead...[and] the many thousand socialists
and trade unionists in the occupied territories which these same Germans
tortured and put to death.’
He makes clear his view of the continuity of both German ‘kultur’ and actual personages
in making his argument extraordinarily candidly and powerfully:
‘Have the people who committed these crimes changed? Most of them are still
alive and they hold responsible positions. It is our view that a disarmed and
subdued Germany can be an asset to the world...
‘A rearmed and cocky Germany with “Deutschland uber alles” as its slogan,
would not think twice again exterminating millions of people to gain its ends....
men have been known to murder each other, but even savages have spared the
children. Not so the Germans’.
The full speech can be read at TUC History Online:
His speech has impact at the highest levels. Later in the day, the TUC general secretary,
Sir Vincent Tewson said, ‘When our friend from the Jewish Bakers spoke this morning
this hall was stilled and our minds went back to debates which we have had here
previously [in 1935]’ (TUC History Online, 7).
Five years later, when J.R. Shanley (National Union of Furniture Trade Operatives)
spoke in debate on the same issue, he said (TUC History Online, 8):
‘I want to remind Congress of the last time we discussed the rearmament of
Germany. This Congress went as quiet as I ever heard it go in the 24 years I have
been coming here... I cannot reproduce the quiet tones of appeal of Solomon
Lever; I can only remind you of his words’.
Chapter 23 – Solomon Lever’s final TUC speech in 1958: Peace in the Middle
East
The Labour government finally officially recognised Israel in 1950, a year in which its
parliamentary majority was slashed from 145 to just 5 seats in the general election.
25
Solomon moved a motion on ‘The Middle East’ in 1958 to relax tensions in the region for
the cause of world peace – with ‘an international guarantee for existing frontiers...’,
including those of Israel, and to ‘transform the existing armistice agreements between the
Arab States and Israel into a peace treaty...’ He presented this as Labour Party policy.
He referred back to speaking in conference debate in 1956, when he made the case for
nascent Arab, nationalist states to take their cue from Israel: ‘as a method of government,
then there is no finer example they can take from Israel’.
Two years later, he refers to propaganda directed against Israel (TUC History Online, 3):
‘Such a torrent of hate has rarely been heard, even from the Nazis in their heydey.
‘Under a democratic government, the Israelis have transformed the desert into
fertile lands... without the immense revenues the Arabs are getting from oil. [He
contrasts this with Nasser’s ambition] to put an Egyptian dictatorship over the
whole of the Middle East.
‘The region needs technical aid... irrigation, tractors and educational facilities
far more than it needs arms. There is no reason at all why the Arab states should
not utilise to the full their rich natural resources. Israel has shown the world what
people can do when they are imbued with the idea of social reconstruction’.
He concludes by making the links between Israel’s developmental success tand its
socialist and unionist credentials, mindful of his audience:
‘What has Israel had in return? – a tiny bit of a vast territory, a tiny bit not much
bigger than an English county... It must surely be a source of satisfaction to all of
us that in a tiny corner of that vast territory known as “the Middle East”, in
Israel, there exists and thrives a strong and virile Labour and Trade Union
Movement, based on the same ideals as this Congress as ours’.
The full speech can be read at TUC History Online:
Chapter 24 – His Worshipful The Mayor and Mayoress of Hackney 1951/2:
Solomon and Annie Lever
(This chapter is based on his correspondence file accessed in Hackney Archives.)
Solomon Lever was elected by his fellow councillors Mayor of the Metropolitan Borough
of Hackney for a term of one year in 1951/2. This traditional, largely ceremonial role in
municipal government is usually filled by a councillor who has undertaken more onerous
duties by serving on key committees of the council.
26
One letter of congratulations was received from A.G. Tomkins OBE, the general
secretary of the National Union of Furniture Trade Operatives. Solomon Lever’s reply,
dated 12 June 1951, said that ‘...I think I will cherish this one more than any
[congratulations], because it is from the General Secretary of my Trade Union, a Trade
Union on which all my activities in public matters began and where I have received my
apprenticeship’.
From the active citizenry of the borough, Mayor Lever was sought at an events of the
Dalston and District Aquaria Society. While members of this group presumably studied
and collected tropical fish, on the consumption front, he was also invited and gave a
speech at the North West London Herring Week at the LEB Showrooms.
(Left to right: Mayoress of Hackney (Annie), Lord Mayor of London, Lady Mayoress of
London and Mayor of Hackney (Solomon))
As President of the Disabled Soldiers and Sailors (Hackney) Foundation, he was sent
their annual report; similarly, the annual report of the Toynbee [Hall] International
Motorcyclists Association was posted to Solomon Lever, its Vice-President.
Rather grand appeared his invitation to an art exhibition at ‘Windsor Castle’. The clue
was in the speech marks, for this was Windsor Castle on the Lower Clapton Road,
Hackney, E5, not the residency of King George and family.
The north of England successfully beckoned the Mayor of Hackney to Leeds, for a
Special Chanukah Neshef and Dinner held by the Leeds Poale Zion Workers Circle (Div
27
5). It helped to have some connections, as Mayor Lever had long-standing involvement in
Poale Zion and The Workers Circle.
Similarly, he was minded to attend the annual dinner and ball of the Jews’ Free School
(JFS) Association at the Savoy Hotel in February 1952 – that he was recently found to
have been an alumnus was highlighted in the invitation.
Chapter 25 – Family connections in the Mayor’s Parlour: Wife, daughter and
brother play their part
(This chapter is based on his correspondence file accessed in Hackney Archives.)
Family did not miss the opportunity to prevail upon the Mayor’s time. A certain J. Lever
wrote to S. Lever, to seek the latter’s participation for an event of the Hackney
Associated Clubs (Boys’ and Girls’) in December 1951. The formal invitation was from
the Organising Secretary, his brother Joe!
The Mayor also wrote to his wife, Annie, via Miss Gresham (the Mayor’s Secretary) to
seek the Mayoress’s agreement to assume the customary role as Honorary Patron of the
Hackney Branch of the Royal Artillery Association.
His daughter, Isabel, did not miss out on opportunities during the Mayoral year. She
accompanied her father to a Garden Party at Buckingham Palace of Their Majesties
(King George, Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mother, Mary). Isabel also entertained the
Mayoress of Southwark and a few friends to afternoon tea in the Mayor’s Parlour,
presumably on a day when her father was out judging herring displays.
Finally, one letter from the Mayor on file was to a certain Mr B Mee, Manager of Arsenal
Football Club in April 1952. Being ‘an ardent supporter of the Arsenal since my school
days’, he wondered if Mr Mee ‘could kindly spare a couple of tickets for the Mayoress
and myself to see Arsenal play in the Cup Final at Wembley’. These were not “freebies”
as a cheque of 10/6 was paid for each ticket upon receipt.
A fair share of tea and sandwiches were recorded in the lists of sundry expenditure
incurred in the Mayor’s Parlour, along with bouquets, gratuities to drivers of charabancs
and three-quarters of a yard of black ribbon for the rosette on the Mayor’s Chain.
Reflecting the times, there was also an entry of 6 boxes of Swan matches and a bill for
scotch, other spirits, cordials and gallons of bitter and ale.
Chapter 26 – Important social issues raised with the Mayor: From housing to
“Uncle Joe”
(This chapter is based on his correspondence file accessed in Hackney Archives.)
28
Some of the correspondence does relate to serious social issues raised by Hackney
residents. Housing problems were most frequently cited, an issue of long concern for
Solomon Lever throughout his life and political career, and crime and playground topics
also featured in correspondence from local residents.
(At this visit to a factory, Solomon is third from the left.)
He was asked to open a new facility offering free chest x-rays for fourteen year olds and
above at St Mary’s Hospital, Plaistow. This was a Mass X-Ray Survey, part preventative
medicine and part epidemiological research, but clearly extra promotion was needed for
ensuring take up, as well as encouraging messages in posters such as ‘there is no need to
strip to the waist’).
He was unable to meet a delegation from the International Women’s Day Committee,
heralding from Manchester. Some contemporary resonances may be found with their
main cause that ‘the whole of our children’s schooling is now threatened by the education
cuts’, because of budgets diverted to ‘arms for the boys in Korea, waiting for the
armistice that never seems to come’.
On the international front, he also declined an invitation to a social and dance of the
British Soviet Friendship Society – Hackney Branch, celebrating its 34th anniversary on 9
October 1951. He missed out on hearing from a member of the Quaker Peace Mission to
Moscow, newly returned presumably with a slide show and messages of fraternity from
“Uncle Joe” (not his brother, but Mr Stalin).
29
Chapter 27 – The adbuction of Solomon Lever: Enticement by bogus
policemen
As reported on the front page of The Daily Express on 20 July 1959, ‘The telephone at
AMHerst 5319 rang yesterday. The call lured a man to his death – the second London
telephone murder in a week’.
Solomon Lever’s phone rang at just after one o’clock in the morning of Sunday, July 19
1959. The caller identified himself as a detective and told Solomon that a fire had broken
out next to an office he was responsible for and that if he wanted to save documents and
valuables he would have to hurry.
Solomon was acting general secretary of The Workers’ Circle Friendly Society and
secretary of the Pietrokow Provident and Investment Society. Their offices at Circle
House, No 13 Sylvester Path, were shared with the London Jewish Bakers Union. The
building, behind the Hackney Empire, was described by the press as ‘a tall thin house...
[that] used to be a day nursery... [and now was] full of little offices’.
The Workers’ Circle Friendly Society had been formed in 1910 as The Workers Circle
Relief Society. Members paid a small weekly subscription and could obtain small loans.
In 1959, it had 1,478 members. This was down from a peak of about 3,000, and £32,153
in assets (Jewish Chronicle, 24.07.59).
According to his caller, the chair factory next to Circle House was ablaze. A police car
was on its way to his home at 49 Victoria Park, Hackney, to take him there (less than a
mile away). Solomon was aware that the funds in the office safe were due to be
distributed to club members taking their summer holidays.
Just seven minutes later, the door bell rang and a tall, dark man was anxious to whisk
Solomon to his offices, brushing aside his wife, Annie’s, offer to come along too. She
said later to the police that she had asked her husband if he had checked the
“policeman’s” credentials, but he had said there was no time as he hurried out to the
waiting car with a suitcase to move the money and papers. That was the last time she saw
him alive.
According to the Jewish Chronicle (24.07.59), the bogus detectives said:
‘A police car would be called to take him there to remove any money to a place of
safety. Mr Lever dressed and waited. A detective called and Mr Lever went to the
waiting car. After binding and gagging him and leaving him in the car the thieves
went to the office using Mr Lever’s keys to enter the building.
30
They robbed the safe which contained envelopes made out to individual members
of the loan club, and left the premises only a few minutes before the policeman on
the beat came along the street.’
While they missed some other money in the safe, they still took £7,869 of club funds
(which it transpired could have been much more but much of it had very recently been
paid out) and also Solomon Lever.
Chapter 28 – Discovery of Solomon’s body: A mistaken hit-and-run victim
Two hours later, Solomon Lever’s body was found in Epping Forest by a designer, Mr
Bernard Bertschlinger of Hampstead. On his way home from visiting his brother in
Bishops Stortford, he saw a ‘bundle of something’ lying across the gutter and when he
returned to have a closer look, he realised that it was a body and so phoned the police.
A Mr and Mrs Mayland later reported at the August inquest that they were on the way
home from a dog show and a man on the pavement in Rangers-road, Chingford (near
Epping Forest in outer, north east London) signalled for them to stop but they thought he
was a drunkard and drove on.
Meanwhile, Annie Lever had telephoned the savings club and got no reply, and when she
went around to the office she saw no sign of any fire. Returning home and still finding no
sign of her husband, she telephoned the police who gained entry to the office with the
cleaner’s set of keys. They saw the safe door was unlocked and the money missing.
Solomon Lever’s body was found two hours later and Annie Lever identified Solomon’s
body at 3.30am.
Initially, he was mistaken as a hit-and-run road accident victim, but an examining doctor
pointed to the gag marks on Solomon’s mouth and identified weals on his wrists.
Chapter 29 – Inquest: The investigation into Solomon’s death
The cause of death was heart disease or coronary thrombosis. As reported by the Jewish
Chronicle (21.08.59) Dr Alan Grant, pathologist, told the inquest that although it was:
‘a natural death... physical hurt, emotional disturbance or mental anguish would
be the very worst possible thing having regard to the state of Mr Lever’s heart at
the time. It would, he added, be dangerous and liable to cause death.’
Summing up, the Walthamstow coroner, Dr H.H. Kensole, referred to the Homicide Act
(1957), and set out that:
‘The Law two years ago changed what might well have been a murder into a
possible manslaughter. For it is manslaughter if, without any intention of killing,
31
a person nevertheless kills another during the course of unlawful conduct which
causes, or even might cause, the infliction of physical harm’.
The jury was directed to decide whether the person or persons stealing the money had
used actual physical harm, or the threat of it, and had in so doing precipitated the heart
attack which killed Solomon Lever.
After a short retirement, the jury returned a verdict of manslaughter by person or persons
unknown.
No-one was ever charged.
Chapter 30 – The death of Solomon Lever: Family and public reaction
In the words of his aunt, Esther Lash (nee Levy), in an unpublished memoir she wrote in
1962 in Australia:
‘He was only sixty-five years of age, and had planned to go to Canada to visit his
daughter, Lily [his other daughter, Isabel, was also living in Canada], and
grandchildren. His daughter had married a Canadian officer in London during
the war, but poor Solly Lever never lived to see them. His wife, as a widow, had a
nervous breakdown, poor Annie Lever. This news gave us all a terrible shock, as
he was a good man’ (ref: Lash)
In the national and local press reports, he was referred to as ‘a friendly little man born in
Poland’ and ‘known to Jews in London’s East End as “Uncle Sol”’. A member of the
friendly society was quoted as saying ‘it would be difficult to replace such a lovable and
generous man’.
A famous reporter, George Gale (later editor of The Spectator) described Solomon Lever
as ‘a man whom the limelight caught twice’ on page 4 of the Daily Express (ref: Hackney
Archives).
Writing on the day of his death in the Daily Express, he was referring back to Solomon’s
speech in 1954 at the TUC described in an earlier section. Mr Gale remembered the
occasion well, when the issue of German rearmament was ‘convulsing the Labour Party
even more than the hydrogen bomb does today [in 1959]’. ‘A small, grey man climbed to
the rostrum of the Trades Union Congress and made a speech’, a simple speech and one
spoken very quietly. He observed that ‘if there were any votes not yet committed but were
ready that day to be swayed it was Solomon Lever who swayed them’.
George Gale concluded by saying that was ‘just one more death, one more act of lunacy
– or panic, or greed. This time it was a good man, a quiet man, a man whose life was
given to service’.
32
Chapter 31 – Solomon’s funeral and obituary: An appreciation
His Jewish Chronicle obituary stated that:
‘This kindly, unassuming former Mayor of Hackney was a well-loved figure not
only in the Jewish social and trade union circles in which he moved but also in
the wider sphere of local politics...
‘At the 1947 [TUC] Congress at Southport he was cheered by delegates for a
brilliant speech denouncing the fascist activities of the British League of exServicemen. At Brighton in 1954 he spoke eloquently against the rearmament of
Germany’.
Online records of ITN, which provided the main national news bulletins for the
commercial ITV network, lists 25 feet of footage (40 seconds) of his funeral in Hackney,
including the ‘coffin out of synagogue’, ‘mourners on synagogue steps’ and hearse
moving with ‘both sides of street lined with crowds’.
The Jewish Chronicle estimated crowds of 2,000 people, including local MPs, Mayors
and Councillors and trade union members.
Four years after his death, Lever Court was named after him – a block of 14 maisonettes
built for £46,500 on a former bombed site in Valentine Road, a stone’s throw from
Hackney Town Hall where his portrait hangs outside the old council chamber.
33
34
His widow, Mrs A (Annie) Lever was invited to name the dwellings in memory of
Solomon Lever. The fine, blue marble plaque remains in situ, after nearly fifty years.
Chapter 32 – The death knell of the London Jewish Bakers Union: The
remaining crumbs
The London Jewish Bakers Union outlived its general secretary, Solomon Lever, but his
tragic death in 1959 ‘almost certainly contributed to the eventual collapse of the union by
removing a key figure’ (ref: Wayne).
An undated newspaper article by Peter Whaley, entitled, ‘57 bakers throw in the sponge’,
states that ‘The trade union that just never stopped growing SMALLER and smaller is
about to disappear altogether. It is the London Jewish Bakers Union, which has shrunk to
only 57 ageing members since refugees from Czarist Russia set it up in the 1890s’ (ref:
Hackney Archives).
35
A Daily Worker reporter pointed out that 57 members was even fewer than the Wool
Shear Workers (64) or the Spring Trapmakers’ Society (90), and ‘truly a handful’
compared with the Warpdressers and Twisters (142) from the world of northern mills
and textiles (ref: Hackney Archives).
The same reporter went on to say that a ballot was to take place on ‘whether the few
crumbs [pun intended!] that remain of ...[the] union should not be kneaded into the
Amalgamated Union of Operative Bakers, Confectioners and Allied Workers’.
As late as 1964, it was still participating in national, Food Trades conferences with
unions such as the Scottish Union of Bakers and Allied Workers and the Transport and
General Workers Union (ref: TUC History Online, 9).
It finally ceased to function in 1966 and was formally dissolved in 1970 (ref: Wayne
cited in Marsh & Smethurst).
Chapter 33 – An appaisal: Solomon Lever’s life of political and community
leadership
How typical was Solomon Lever of first generation, Jewish immigrants, who ‘largely
assumed control in the 1930s and 1940s’ of communal and political leadership positions
in Jewish and wider society (ref: Gartner)?
He began his long association with the Labour movement at 16 when he joined the
Independent Cabinet Makers’ Association trade union. Around the time of his move into
local politics, Solomon and Annie took in a Kindertransport brother (Freddy) and sister
(Trudi), alongside their daughters, Lily (Lilian) and Isabel. (Their parents survived the
Holocaust and the reunited family went to live in Israel.)
For some East End Jews, the decline of religious observance was mirrored by attraction
to a rival “faith” of ‘the extreme left and militant atheism’ (ref: Bermant). But this did not
apply to Solomon Lever, who eschewed the Communist Party and kept up his Judaism as
a member of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and serving on Hackney Synagogue’s
management board.
He was also a Justice of the Peace (JP), a member of the Trades Advisory Council, and a
member of the LCC Divisional Tuberculosis Care Committee.
Staunchly Labour, Solomon Lever rejected overtures to stand for Parliament, preferring
the independence not to have to always “toe the party line”. He may have identified with
the judgement of Bertha Sokoloff, that ‘for good or ill, the Labour Party, warts and all, is
the political party of the British Left’ (ref: Sokoloff).
36
East End historian Bill Fishman summed up the East End Jewish immigrant’s
contribution to the host community as being formed of ‘a sense of social justice, derived
from their own suffering [from pogroms], which they translated into political action…
many joined the labour movement and rendered pioneer and selfless service to their
cause’ (ref: Fishman, 1981).
That aptly describes my great-uncle, “Uncle Solly”.
37
Chapter 34 – Bibliography
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39
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40
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