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The expert costumiers of screen and shop

Angel family in seventh heaven

October 19, 2015 07:24
Dressed for success: Tim Angel has helped to ensure that Angel’s has remained the country's premier costumier not just for films and TV but also fancy dress

By

David Robson,

David Robson

4 min read

If Rabbi Julia Neuberger and her colleagues looked particularly comfortable at prayer during the recent High Holidays, it was thanks to angelic intervention. Not, as you may or may not think, angels from heaven, but Angels of Hendon.

She complained to Tim Angel about how hot and heavy her yomtov robes were and his people made new ones, lighter and more comfortable. Cladding the clergy is hardly a daunting prospect for them. Angels have dressed popes and archbishops, druids and swamis. And multitudinous though the turnout for Kol Nidrei at Upper Berkeley Street may be, it hardly vies with the Jedi hordes who follow Obi-Wan Kenobi, whom Angels also robed.

He was from a galaxy far, far away. The relationship between Angels, the great theatrical costumier family, and the West London Synagogue is much closer. The Angels are congregants, both the synagogue and the firm are celebrating their 175th anniversary this year, and the great-great-great grandfather of 66-year-old Tim, the company's current chairman, was one of the first employees of the newly-formed synagogue.

Daniel Angel, a penniless young tailor from Frankfurt, arrived in London in 1813 and attempted to eke out a living in the then slums of Covent Garden. In 1840, the year the synagogue was started by a group of families who broke away from Bevis Marks, he took a job as ground-keeper of their cemetery in Balls Pond Road, Islington. The terms of the job dictated that he lived on site, must be there from sunset onwards and take no other employment. The rest of the family stayed in Covent Garden where Daniel's son Morris opened a little shop – Morris Angel & Son. Was his father supplying him with clothes from the families of the affluent interred in the Balls Pond Road? Dead men tell no tales.