The Grocers: What made an education at the 'Jewish Eton' so special? - The Jewish Chronicle

"You know," my grandmother said, "one day you'll go to the Grocers". She said it when I was five years old, as I was being fitted for my first school cap, and she was speaking with a glint of admiration and ambition in her eyes. My grandmother and I had a very strong relationship. To say we loved each other would be an understatement. And yet, even to a young child wearing his first, red, school cap, her enthusiasm seemed to be a bit overdone.

"Uncle Jack went there," she said by way of explanation. "So did Uncle Nat". I supposed, too, all those years ago that my mother had been to the grocers many times - I had seen it with my own eyes - and so had my father and everyone else I knew. Grandma's ambition appeared to be a bit weird. I imagined everybody I knew, not just revered uncles, waiting to be served at the cheese counter. But then I was told I would have to be specially clever to go to this grocer and they would get me to sit down at a desk and answer some questions.

Gradually, the penny dropped. She was not talking about going into Apatoffs, the grocers a few doors away in Stoke Newington High Street, the one that specialised in pickled cucumbers dug from a barrel. She was talking about The Grocers. And The Grocers were two words not to be pronounced lightly. It was a school. A funny name for a school. But, as I learned several years later, it was no ordinary school.

In the history of Britain in the first half of the 20th century, it deserves a special spot all of its own. In the history of Anglo-Jewry, it needs a chapter, perhaps with its pages printed on vellum and then dusted with gold leaf. Its roster of old boys, includes at least one Nobel prize winner, scientists, politicians, actors, painters - a list of names that I have written about for years, sadly, mostly in the form of obituaries that included the fact that their schooling was in what I called "that nursery of Britain's intellectual Jewish community".

Perhaps it was more, the Jewish Eton. Except that from 1944 onwards, education there was free and, even when it wasn't, parents living in the Hackney area of London had only to find perhaps £6 a year for the privilege – and it was a privilege - to send their sons there.

'Parents would badger the head to give their children more work'

The Grocers, before it was turned into a comprehensive – and, ultimately, an academy with the sort of problems that never assailed the old school until it was rescued by one of the great educationalists of the day - was officially known as the Hackney Downs School. The words "formerly known as the Grocers Company School" were added to it on legal documents. To the Jewish community of the district, it was always just "The Grocers".

Looking back on it now, I denied my grandmother the opportunity to kvell about her grandson the Grocers boy. My schooldays were spent at a grammar school 30 miles away. My parents had gone to Luton with the outbreak of the Second World War and I used to think that Luton Grammar School in its art deco building, surrounded by verdant playing fields, was a pretty good place to be. But, even then, I knew that it wasn't like The Grocers.

Uncle Jack, who became a successful businessman, told me that. My great-uncle Nat, the man in the family upon whom everyone else looked with awe, said much the same thing.

In many ways, Nat Mindel was a typical Grocers boy. An immigrant from what was then the Lithuanian shtetl of Dunilovich, he won a scholarship to the school six months after arriving in Britain unable to speak a word of the language, left to go to London University, achieved a commission in the Army, followed by a career in the colonial service - a senior post in the mandatory government of Palestine; he was Deputy Commissioner for Migration - and then in the fledgling Israeli government.

To us, that seemed fantastic. But then you should realise that the golden book of the school established by one of the oldest City guilds, the Grocers Company, in 1876, also included old boys with names like Harold Pinter; Efraim Halevy, who was Head of Mossad; Maurice Freedman, professor of anthropology at Oxford University; Steven Berkoff, actor and playwright; Sir Stanley Burnton, a Lord Justice of Appeal; Frank Cass, publisher; Lord Clinton Davis, sometime government minister; John Bloom, the 1960s "washing machine tycoon"; Professor Cyril Domb, physicist; Sir Ben Lockspeiser, civil servant and scientist; Leon Kossoff, painter; Lord Levy, former head of Labour Party fundraising; Lord Peston, economist (and father of the BBC's Robert Peston); and Professor John Yudkin, eminent nutritionist. Add to the list an assortment of university vice-chancellors, journalists and members of any other profession my grandmother would have wanted me to join and you have an alumni that was probably incomparable with that of any other grammar school.

The JC columnist and historian Geoffrey Alderman, who wrote the official history of the school, says that he owed his career to having gone to this place, a neo-Gothic structure set in a garden with its own gymnasium and swimming pool.

(The boys, incidentally, had to swim naked. They were banned from wearing trunks because the school thought that could adversely affect the processed water in the pool. There were rumours of boys being interfered with by masters but nothing more than rumours. It was a different age.)

Yet it wasn't the building or its facilities that made the school. "You could have constructed a leading university out of not just the old boys but also the masters," says Alderman. Most of the teaching staff were Oxbridge graduates and at least one headmaster was at both Oxford and Cambridge.

The quality of the teachers - all appointed by the headmasters - was exceptional. "Many could have become university professors," adds Alderman. Indeed, at least one of them did just that. "To be able to put being there on your CV was an accolade in itself."

The Grocers was never a Jewish school. That is, it was not intended to be. But, in the 1930s, 90 per cent of the 600 boys there were Jewish and, in the 1950s, 60 per cent were. And they had their own classes for one particular subject. Teachers - all of whom seemingly were pretty terrible - were supplied by the London Board of Jewish Religious Education for faith studies, but the sixth form were tutored by Dr Bernard Homa, who not only was a doctor and a leading mohel, but also a well-known educationalist.

On the High Holy-days, the school was closed. "Non-Jewish boys used to ask the dates for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur so that they could plan their days out," remembered Alderman whose memory strayed to one of the great school stories.

Harold Pinter wrote that the great influence in his youth was his English master, Joseph Brierly. That had nothing to do with his religious approach. But he took a considerable interest in how Judaism was being practised by his pupils. Apparently, Brierly was annoyed that not all Jewish boys were observing the Yomim Noraim as they should - as if ignoring the fact that the school was closed anyway, they were taking time off from lessons under false pretences. "So he would stand outside Clapton Synagogue on the first day of Rosh Hashanah and outside Shacklewell Lane (the Stoke Newington United Synagogue) on the second day, armed with a notebook. In his raincoat and cloth cap, he noted the names of boys from the school who actually went into the shul". He also asked the boys he was listing to tell him if any other Jewish students were inside. The headmaster wasn't exactly keen on this extra-mural activity and asked Brierly to stop the practice. In Alderman's words, he was "carpeted".

The influence of the Jewish boys on other students was profound. In 1945, the electorate in Luton sent an old Grocers boy named William Warbey to the House of Commons (he later sat for Broxtowe and then for Ashfield). Warbey, who was not Jewish, was one of the very few Labour MPs who opposed the Attlee Government's policy on Palestine and made a number of powerful speeches condemning the then Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin. Had he perhaps been influenced by his Zionist Jewish schoolmates?

On the other hand, Sir Michael Caine, who was at Grocers between 1944 and 1945 when the school was evacuated to Kings Lynn - not a lot of people know that - hasn't noticeably shown any effects of having been surrounded by so many Jews at school, although Hollywood has probably compensated for that.

But the school with so much to be proud of also had a little bit of a dark side. "There was a certain amount of antisemitism," recalls Alderman. "One master used to see me eating my sandwiches," he told me "and he always used to say, 'what have you got for lunch today? Kosher food?'" If that was the worst that could be levelled against the school it wasn't too terrible. I found it much harder in Luton.

It wasn't all books, study and scholastic achievement at Grocers, however. The school had an impressive athletics record - Alderman himself, no doubt to the surprise of many who know him, was in the school's rugby first XV - and its teams frequently brought an athletics shield back to Hackney.

If there was a shield for chutzpah, certain of the boys might have walked away with that, too. Alderman was a prefect who on one occasion was called into the headmaster's study - "not an unusual occurrence,'' for what you might consider to be his perfectly reasonable decision to add a name to the list of people due to suffer a detention for arriving late to school. The problem was that this extra name was that of a master. The head wasn't impressed - but still saw him his errant student get an exhibition to Oxford. As he said, ''Those who wanted to reach the heights of intellectual achievement were given every opportunity to do so."

It was an era when Jewish parents wanted that above all. Mothers of Grocers boys would bombard the headmasters demanding their sons be given extra work. They decided that their offspring were not being pressed sufficiently hard to ensure that their ambitions were realised.

Not every boy was expected to be a genius. But Alderman says that the sense of ambition was still paramount. "Parents who sent their boys to the Grocers wouldn't have wanted them to follow themselves into a tailoring sweat-shop."

My grandmother certainly would have echoed that.