Rowing Against the Tide
by
Martin M. Brandon-Bravo
To my wife Sally and my two sons Paul and Joel who at home ran what they called the Department of Realism
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Published by Bretwalda Books
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First Published 2013
Copyright © Martin Brandon Bravo 2013
Martin Brandon Bravo asserts his rights to be recognised as the author of this work.
ISBN 978-1-909698-16-1
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Contents
Prologue
Chapter One Early Days
Chapter Two School Days
Chapter Three National Service
Chapter Four Earning a Living
Chapter Five Rowing Days
Chapter Six A Holme Pierrepont Story
Chapter Seven A Caversham Story
Chapter Eight Life in Politics
Chapter Nine The Closing Years
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Prologue
Growing up in North London and the East End might not auger well for a successful and satisfying career, but whether by good luck or good fortune, I’ve had by any yardstick, an interesting life. Writing now at the age of eighty, I’m looking back in the knowledge that I cannot expect to be around for many more years. Three major cancer operations in 2010 was quite a wakeup call, particularly to someone who apart from breaking his nose three times, had hardly ever been ill.
So putting pen to paper, or rather tapping away on a lap-top, I look back on my childhood in Stoke Newington and Hammersmith, National Service in the Royal Artillery, thirty years in the manufacturing textile industry with overlapping forty years in Local and National Politics, plus a lifetime involved in the sport of Rowing.
Through forty eight of those years I’ve had the love and support of my wife Sally, the joy of two great sons, Paul and Joel, and the pleasure of wonderful grandchildren. I readily acknowledge that without Sally’s support I doubt I would have made it to the House of Commons, and would not have had so successful a career in my sport which culminated in being elected President of the Amateur Rowing Association, now rebranded as British Rowing. In every aspect of my career, Sally has been there, prodding and encouraging me, and I owe her more thanks than I could ever repay.
Over those years, business, sport, and politics, have given me the chance to see the world, making friends and acquaintances across the globe, though sadly with many it’s now only an exchange of Christmas Cards.
It was all topped off by the award in December 2001 of the OBE, for services to my sport, and nothing whatever to do with my life in politics. Retiring from Local Government in 2009, both the County and City of Nottinghamshire granted me the honour of Aldermanship, a more than satisfying way to end and put my feet up.
Martin B-B
Yours truly
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Chapter 1
The Early Days
Number 68 Belgrade Road Stoke Newington, North London, was a typical soundly built, comfortable, terraced house, but not perhaps the most auspicious of starting places for what turned out, fortuitously for me, to have been a varied and interesting life. I was born at No 3 but we moved to No 68 within weeks of my birth. I had an older brother Michael, and would have had an even older brother, who was always referred to as poor Harry boy, who died at the age of three with peritonitis. My mother and father were married in the first purpose built Synagogue in England, Bevis Marks, in St Mary le Bow near the Baltic exchange. At around 1650 Cromwell had in practical terms allowed us back into England after a four hundred year exclusion, but it was King Charles II who granted the newly approved return of the Jewish community to build that first synagogue. It’s a record I cannot definitely confirm, but it is believed my family donated seven and sixpence to the fundraising at that time. The land was leased in 1698 and the Synagogue completed in 1703. Today it stands just as if time has stood still, and is a fascinating place to visit, with its wooden benches and chandeliers lit with real candles !
When we arrived in England has not been truly established, but as our name implies, we may have been kicked out from Spain in the expulsions of the late 1400s, and then from Portugal no later than 1595. The Brandon bit may have been Brandao in Spain, with both spellings found in Portugal, for always when we have holidayed there and presented our credit card, we have been greeted by – “ah so your Portuguese?”, followed by my “no, we left a few hundred years ago, and its too long a story” ! I’ve often said to enquiring friends that we may have been illegal immigrants before then, but don’t tell the Home Office.
We were not an overly practicing Jewish family, for strict orthodoxy has never appealed, appearing to reject an ever changing world, in a way that Reform or Progressive Judaism has not done. Orthodoxy drew a line in the 1500s, and whilst Reform Judaism revised and then drew the line in the late 1800s, the Liberal and Progressive arm embraces new discoveries and adapts its ways more in keeping with the rabbinic oral traditions of biblical times. Never the less, my mother, Phoebe, kept a reasonable kosher home, and only broke from that tradition when the then Chief Rabbi gave dispensation as a result of the shortages that the war and rationing brought in. But as time has gone by, I have become ever more sceptical, noting that more people have died in the name of the Lord than for any other reason. I suppose I’m an agnostic, as indeed I find most, even practicing members, of my faith are, for its true that 10 Jews in a discussion will have 100 different views on every subject.
My father, Alf, who was eleven years old before he found his name was really Isaac, was a master cabinet maker, and most of the furniture in our home was built by him. The French polish had a depth of gloss that no furniture cream was ever allowed, or found necessary. It was a working class family, and so far as I knew they always voted Labour, as indeed most immigrant or minority communities did back then. In fact our end of London had the only Communist MP, and oddly enough when we were later effectively bombed out of the East End, we ended up in Hammersmith with the only other English Communist member D.N.Pritt MP
Just around the corner from Belgrave Rd was a small synagogue on Walford Rd, but somehow I never felt comfortable in what I found was an oppressive atmosphere. Our family being of Sephardic origin never spoke a word of Yiddish which perhaps added to my feeling of not quite belonging. Even so, our best non family friends were the Gees, whose name I discovered later was originally Gonski, so clearly of Central European origin. They were a great family of three unmarried but sublimely happy spinsters, and two brothers, one a fishmonger on Stamford Hill, and the other the purser on the Empress of Britain. The sisters’ great interest and activity covered, cards – mostly bridge – horse racing, and buying and selling shares. The latter activity bore little reference to the advice in financial papers, for they would only buy shares valued in pence ( old money ) and could therefore get a lot of shares for their modest outlay. When Butlins Holiday Camps took a knock when an overseas project did not work out, their shares crashed to around a dozen pence, and they bought, for them, quite a holding. I laughed and said that’s no way to invest, but when those shares rose first to two and sixpence, I jo
ined in for the ride, and as I recall we bailed out at over a pound a share. I never questioned my “aunts” investment policy again.
In those war years, and shortly after, when rationing was still in place, there were a few amusing anomalies, and one involving those “aunties”. They always took my brother and me out for a treat on a date close to our birthdays, Michael’s in February, and mine in March, and probably close to the war end, we were treated to supper in the West End at a restaurant called Iso’s. At that time restaurants were only allowed to charge a maximum of five shillings (25 pence in today’s money) per person, to meet rationing rules. However at this restaurant when you arrived you were asked, “How many are you?” We were five, but one of the sisters would say seven or eight, and the meal and the bill set accordingly. As ever there are always ways round the best of intentions in rules and regulations.
Some years later whilst umpiring at the Docklands Regatta in East London, I found myself chatting away with a distinguished Steward of the Royal Regatta, Fred Smallbone, who it turned out, had as a young boy, delivered fresh fish on his bicycle for my “uncle” Ernie Gee, whose shop was on Stamford Hill. Much to the consternation and puzzlement of two officials from London Rowing Club, our conversation rattled on about those old days, with my accent becoming more and more like Ken Livingstone by the minute.
Those seven years leading up to the second World War, were happy ones, for whilst we had nothing special, the only toys I recall were a three wheel bike, which at the age of about three I crashed into a garden wall and broke my nose for the first time of three. The other was a wondrous spinning top for a Christmas present – we celebrated everything – which I found at the bottom of my parents bed one Christmas morning.
I do recall the street party at the coronation of King George V1, and suffered the indignity of being dressed as some sort of clown. I remember too the Walls ice-cream vendor on his three wheeled bicycle coming round each week, and of course the coal merchant and his giant shire horse. Apparently there was a bit of a fallout with some neighbours, when my father first took a week’s holiday with the family to Margate. Back then most could not afford such a holiday, and took objection to a family of Jews who could! One of those neighbours must have called my mother a f****** Jew, and she got a thumping from mums handbag, and mum was bound over to keep the peace by the local magistrate.
Sometime in those late 1930s, I had my first intimation of the sport of rowing. At the age of about six or seven, the Boat Race was getting its usual publicity. Any connection with North or the East End of London with our great Universities could not have been more remote, yet there were peddlers with their trays of light and dark blue ribbons, and everyone it seemed had to make their choice. My elder brother pulled rank and claimed Cambridge’s colours, and imperiously told me I must therefore support Oxford. I don’t think it really registered with me, but I duly wore a dark blue ribbon. As it turned out, I’ve continued to shout for the Dark Blues and just as well, since our youngest, Joel, made it to Oriel.
At that time too, I developed an interest in football, and as my father took me to Highbury for the first time at either six or seven years of age, I’ve followed the fortunes of the Gunners ever since. In fact, just as I suppose is the case in Glasgow, if you lived in that area of London, you chose either Arsenal or Spurs, or left town! More than seventy years on, I still get the wobbles until the football results are declared, and my day is complete when the Gunners have won, and joyous if the opponents are either Spurs or Chelsea. I went to Nottingham at the age of twenty, and joined the local Nottingham and Union Rowing Club. There were three rowing clubs adjacent to the Nottingham Forest ground, and just some ten or fifteen minutes into the second half, they used to open the gates on the riverside, and we would walk in for free to see the last thirty or so minutes of the game. Try as I could, I just could not work up any enthusiasm for Forest, for those childhood visits to Highbury had made me a “Gooner” for life.
I recall trying on gas masks in either ‘38 or ‘39, when the clouds of war were gathering, and the coaches that gathered at our school, Princess May Road, when we were supposed to be evacuated. As it happened when my brother and I had our labels tied on, my mother changed her mind and stated we would all stay together, and no official was going to shift her. The gas mask training came in handy many years later when in Israel with a small Parliamentary delegation led by the now Lord Greville Janner, during the first Gulf War.
In the late thirties we holidayed in Hove, staying with a couple of elderly ladies who owned a flat over a garage in Norton Place, close to the Hove Town Hall. Strangely my Parliamentary colleague Sir Ivan Lawrence QC, some four years my junior, lived just around the corner but this only came to light when reading his autobiography.
We were in Hove that September ’39 where my brother and I used to delight in helping a guy called Hatton set out his beach huts. The police came down to the beach to tell us that War had been declared and we had to leave the beach at once. My brother Michael had wandered off towards Worthing, and my Mother was not going to leave that beach, Hitler or no Hitler, until he was found. The copper had met his match, and we returned to the flat only once Michael had been found. Dad decided we should stay put until things became clearer, and he travelled down each weekend after closing up the factory, which by that time he had become manager. Just before the phony War ended, we returned to London to stay with my grandmother in Grafton Street, just off the Mile End Road, and just in time for the first daylight raids on London. We’d built an Anderson shelter in her back garden, and Michael wielding a trenching shovel, broke my nose for its second time, leaving a deep cut between the eyes shedding blood making the damage look much worse than it was. I was rushed off to hospital, leaving my mother asking why the boy’s mother had not come forward. Nobody had the nerve to tell her it was me. The night the docklands was hit and some sugar barges and warehouses caught fire, the flames could be seen for miles. That was when our family and neighbours came to the full realisation of what was to come in this war with Nazi Germany.
We had thought that the primary school I had attended in Brighton was a good school, but when back in the East End, I was sent to the Jewish Free School and found myself two years behind my age group. What I did not know at the time, was that I was mildly dyslectic and was just assumed as being slow, and maybe a bit thick, but what would now have been classed as one with special needs. We enjoyed collecting shrapnel and the bits of coloured marble from the wreck of a bombed building on the Mile End Road, but when the bombing became too intense, we climbed on the back of a sand lorry going to West London where we thought we would be safer ! My Aunt and Uncle Diana and Jack Davis, the latter being a director of Simpsons the tailoring manufacturers, lived on Emlyn Rd in Stamford Brook on the border between Hammersmith and Chiswick, and we slept on the floor for a few nights until dad found a house to rent in the adjoining Palgrave Road, and we stayed there throughout the blitz. The first Doodle Bug and the V2 landed in Chiswick not far from us, so any idea that it was safer, was distinctly marginal.
Dad had been in the Royal Flying Corps in WW1, cheating on his age to enable him to sign up. He flew the two man bombers, which had small bombs on hooks under the wings supposedly operated by a wire. If it didn’t work you crawled out, detached it and flung it over the side. This we found out very much later, for like many from that terrible war, Dad just didn’t want to talk about it, and from the films we’ve seen, I can quite understand.
I went to the Askew Road Primary in Shepherds Bush, and must have made some progress, for I passed the eleven plus, much to the astonishment of my family from whom I collected the princely sum of five pounds as a prize. My father had won a scholarship way back before WW1, but it was financially impossible for the family to let him take it up, and he was determined that his sons would not face that same disappointment.
When Russia came into the War, if you shopped at the Co-Op, which we rarely did, you could pass your dividend to a
id for “Uncle Joe”. If you weren’t a Co-Op member, you could use a special number for the same purpose. The Co-Op organised an evening for us kids, with soft drinks and cake, which in the circumstances was great. However a few weeks later when they sought to repeat the exercise, we were treated to a political lecture, and that put an end to any lingering doubts I may have had. The idea of being brainwashed at nine years of age appalled me.
At the height of the blitz my father knocked up bunk beds under the stairs for my brother and me, which was known to be the safest place in a house. However it wasn’t too long before we took the common view that if our names were on it, that would be it, and went back upstairs to bed. One night when the bombing had been very heavy, and a fair number had fallen nearby, my brother with his arm around me looked out in horror at a blaze just hidden behind the homes opposite. It turned out that a small shop kept by two elderly ladies had received a direct hit, killing both, and it now forms part of the land occupied by Queen Charlotte’s Hospital on the Goldhawk Road.
At the time, many had been encouraged to install a steel Morrison Shelter in the home for families to sleep under, but we used instead a large, very robust, wooden table for use during the daylight doodle-bug raids. On one occasion when the engine stopped my mother was standing in the kitchen door on the opposite corner to the table under which Michael and I sheltered. As the engine note died, we shouted to mum who jumped from the kitchen door in one bound to under the table, and we were more incredulous of the length of the leap, than the crash of the plane barely fifty yards away to rear of our garden. We were sure it would have been a world record standing jump! Our windows had been blown out, and as the dust settled there was a knock on the front door and a white faced postman, asked if he could come in and sit down for a moment. He said that he had looked up when the doodle bug’s engine had stopped, and thought it was going to spear him through, but somehow it lifted over our house and landed just behind us destroying houses on Emlyn Road where my aunt and uncle had lived.
Rowing Against the Tide - A career in sport and politics Page 1