Rosa. Ros Collins
the East End, and Nathan Chwall, aka Nukhim Zevelev Khvul, aka Nukim Seidelowitz Kwul aged twenty-eight, AWOL from the army of Tsar Alexander III, arrived at London docks in 1890: no money, no English language skills and just a piece of paper with an address. Three years later Nathan was married to Eva Green, his landlord’s daughter. They lived in a tenement building thoughtfully provided by philanthropists for the ‘deserving poor’. Soon Sadie, the eldest child, was born, the first of nine.
For ten years the Chwalls live a precarious life in Rothschild’s Buildings, a tenement in Flower and Dean Street, on the second floor. Sadie used to talk about how they played in the courtyard and her mother would send down a basket on a rope with food. They didn’t have much furniture, mostly orange boxes. Sadie went to the Jews’ Free School. On Rosh Hashanah the boys all got new boots and the girls a new frock.
During this time Nathan abandoned them temporarily to try his luck in Philadelphia, where he had heard the streets were ‘paved with gold’. The family were desperate. Sadie was sent to beg for food from the Jewish soup kitchen and burned with the shame of it.
Eventually Nathan returned, despondent, and resumed work in sweat shops making men’s caps. There were three more children, two boys and a girl.
‘You two hold hands and look out for horse manure when we cross the street,’ Sadie told Will and Gus, ‘and keep close to the pram.’ She was nine years old, and in her good dress and pinafore she was taking the two boys and baby Rosie to the great London Hospital to get an opinion about their persistent coughs. Eva, her mother, was pregnant – again – and was poorly. Nathan, her father, still couldn’t speak English. There was only Sadie; that’s how it would always be until she escaped with Solly.
‘Who’s in charge here?’ asked the doctor. He came from the Cotswolds, and yearned for the rolling green hills and fresh air of Oxfordshire. The job at ‘the London’ would be a great learning experience, but it was breaking his heart.
The migrants were a shock to this young man with blue eyes and a thatch of yellow hair. He could hardly believe there were so many desperate Jewish tailors fleeing Eastern Europe. They arrived penniless and the sweatshops worked them to exhaustion; he saw them when they had accidents with the hot mangles and flat irons, mostly burns and scalds from the steam, and they smelled of pickled herring. He treated wharf labourers from the Isle of Dogs and the East India Dock who suffered terrible damage to their backs; they were so poor and in such pain, they begged him for opium so that they could keep working to put bread on the table. The little match-girls from the Bryant and May factory, who became ill and disfigured with ‘Phossy Jaw’ from the phosphorus, had upset him the most, until the company stopped using it; he’d wanted to scoop them all up and take them to the country, away from the poisonous fumes.
He wondered how much longer he could bear the grime, the poverty and the growing unrest. He was not much for politics, but trade unions made sense to him, suffragettes made sense too; he even thought of going along to Hoxton Church to the Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party to hear what those Russians, Lenin and Trotsky, had to say.
‘Who’s in charge of these children?’
‘I am,’ replied nine-year-old Sadie.
‘Tell your parents to get them out of London or they will die from the pollution – take them to the country.’
And so Nathan, Eva and the children moved to Cardiff around 1903 and Sadie acquired a soft Welsh speaking voice – ‘ladylike’ was how people described her. The Chwalls become the Samuel, or sometimes Samuels, family, depending on who was registering a birth, death or marriage, and how good their English was. By the time she was thirty-nine, Eva had nine children and there were probably several miscarriages.
Married beneath her, Sadie had once muttered to Rosa, who now looks with overwhelming pity at a photograph of her grandmother’s worn face. She can’t – in truth, doesn’t – believe that Eva loved Nathan. She’ll never know for sure, and the gravestone in the old Cardiff cemetery with its stilted language keeps secrets:
Here lies Yocheved daughter of Reb DovidIn loving memory of Eva SamuelWho passed from earthly life26th June 1934Mourned by her husband NATHAN,daughters, sons, brother and relativesA woman of worth. May her work praise her.
I made caps in the workshop and took them to the market. Father couldn’t speak English. I put brown paper inside my shoes to keep my feet warm.
Mother went blind so I had to help. My youngest sister was half my age and I had to take her with me whenever I wanted to go out with my friends. My brothers weren’t expected to help.
Father gave me a basket of eggs to take to London for Aunt Annie. I stayed with her and she prepared me for my wedding.
‘You’re twelve now so you don’t need to go to school any longer,’ said Nathan – in Yiddish.
‘But I’m good at school, I want to stay, I want to learn!’ cried Sadie – in English.
‘Your mother can’t see well any more, she needs you. And I want you to help in the workroom and to come with me to the market and sell the caps,’ said Nathan.
‘There’s a new law that says I can stay until I’m fourteen. Please, Father, let me!’
‘That’s enough! You’re my daughter and I can do whatever I like.’
But he couldn’t. A letter from the ‘authorities’ demanded that Nathan send his daughter back to school for a further two years, and Sadie almost fainted with joy as she re-entered the playground at Wood Street School across the River Taff in Temperance Town.
Kneeling at the ‘hope chest’, Sadie wanted to show her daughter something very special and, with great care, took out some certificates from a brown envelope: Needlework I and II, English and Home Nursing, earned at Wood Street Girls Evening School, all dated March 1909. It was part of a new Technical Education Scheme providing Preparatory Technical (Evening) Schools, so that the work force would be better equipped for the new century. There were some who doubted the wisdom of educating the masses who might then read radical literature and revolt.
Did anyone encourage her mother in her quest for education? Doubtful. Just thinking about it now fills Rosa with sadness and pride. It must have taken so much courage for the fifteen-year-old to enrol for evening classes. It’s hard to ‘get into’ Sadie’s mind. A year earlier, Nathan had finally got his way and withdrawn her from school. Was she angry? Miserable? Determined? She would have packed up the market stall, completed her chores at home and then walked back along Tudor Road and across the bridge to Wood Street. It was the smallest of entrances to the world of learning, and Sadie must have always known she’d been cheated.
Fourteen-year-old Rosa didn’t understand all the implications. Sadie contemplated her daughter who was taller by a head, and in many ways intimidating. The links that might have bound them during Rosa’s childhood were fast snapping. It wouldn’t be long before she would enter the Sixth Form, that wonderful dream world of English schoolgirls, studying Latin, playing hockey and rounders, where ‘crushes’ and deep meaningful friendships dominated adolescent life. It’s where Rosa would finally toss out cheder and Hebrew classes and adopt ‘British’ as a badge of identity. Experimentally.
‘It isn’t necessary for a girl to have so much education,’ Sadie once said sharply when Rosa asked to stay at school for another year. She didn’t mean it, thinks Rosa in 2017. ‘Let her have a chance,’ said Solly. Between the pair of them, they gifted their daughter the courage to try.