Rosa. Ros Collins
look at the old photographs,’ said Rosa, and Sadie took the little album from the cedar box. There was a faint scent of lavender, eau de Cologne and Kodak chemicals, and the tiny pictures taken on a Box Brownie were all neatly arranged on cardboard pages with small adhesive triangular ‘corners’ to hold them in place. Sadie sighed with nostalgia, and Rosa missed a golden opportunity, as she so often did, to ask questions. (Now, seventy years later, she’s reduced to guessing.)
The girls were all lined up across the centre of Plantagenet Street, Cardiff, in their flapper-style coats with the fur collars, dropped waistlines and their t-bar shoes: Rosie Posner, the Glassberg sisters, the Gordons, and Sadie and Rosie Samuel. Probably 1924. Everyone was in high spirits. Sadie, the shortest of the row, wore a jaunty beret with a brooch on one side and she was smiling happily. They were all having a great time.
In the following year, in 1925, Sadie would meet Solly. Four years on and, after refusing him repeatedly, they would marry on 1 January 1928. She would be thirty-four and he would be twenty-five.
There were also two studio portraits in the album. At eighteen, Rosa’s mother had been beautiful with her ringlets and ribbon; at twenty or so with a fashionable bob she was quite stunning. After she died and Solly came alone to visit Rosa and her family in Melbourne, he slept with the portraits in silver frames under his pillow, together with the little red woollen mittens she wore because her arthritis was so painful.
Here, posing with her girlfriends in Plantagenet Street, she was about thirty years old, pretty and vivacious and, as Solly was to comment in his own memoir, As I Remember (a labour of great love written in 1968 for his far-away grandsons in Australia), very attractive. She must have been the eldest of the group. But the median age for a woman to marry during the 1920s was about twenty-one, so there’s a mystery about her single status.
As her mother Eva gradually became blind, Sadie’s sense of duty must have dominated her thinking. Rosa has no doubt that the other Samuel children were only too happy with the status quo; if Sadie remained, they could leave. There were the three boys and they weren’t expected to do anything other than find good jobs and ‘work their way up in the world’; her brother Jimmy was already married and lived around the corner; her sister Rosie was seven years younger than Sadie, enjoyed dancing and socialising and already had a beau; Dora shyly hoped for marriage; Dinah and Rachel looked forward to careers; Hetty, the disabled child of Eva’s middle age who was cared for in a ‘home’, completed the family.
Sadie was caught fast. Solly wrote that Nathan was a gentle man who kept chickens in his backyard and allowed the baby chicks to play on the sewing machine tables in his workshop. It’s a charming tableau, but Rosa in 2017 is not impressed. Nathan had very nearly ruined Sadie’s life, denying her the education she craved, exploiting her domestically and stressing duty over personal fulfilment. So, times were hard, he had no choice, he needed her to support the family, who else was there? But Rosa cannot forgive.
There’s no doubting the truth of the romance. Sadie and Solly met at the theatre; the show was Rose-Marie at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. Booked seats were expensive, so Solly and his East End friends arrived early, and for threepence were able to reserve little wooden stools in a queue on the pavement. The Great Western Railway (GWR) obliged its provincial passengers with ‘excursion’ services enabling customers to travel cheaply to London on a morning train, visit the theatre to see a show in the evening and return home on the milk train, leaving London about midnight.
Sadie and her friends also had places in the queue nearby. The seats were for the gallery ‘up in the gods’ and as the hours until show time passed, the community on the pavement became very friendly.
When the doors opened and the crowd surged in for the best seats, Solly held everyone back so that Sadie was not crushed, and when they were seated they were placed together.
There’s no record of what she wore, maybe the coat with the little fox fur collar. His outfit was spectacular, a grey pinhead suit with double-breasted waistcoat, a silver topped cane and a bowler hat. The musical is set in the Canadian Rockies and concerns Rose-Marie, a French Canadian girl who loves a miner.
Edith Day sang the excruciating ‘Indian Love Call’:
Oo-Oo-Oo-Oo, Oo-Oo-Oo-OoWhen I’m calling you Oo-Oo-Oo-Oo, Oo-Oo-Oo-OoWill you answer too? Oo-Oo-Oo-Oo, Oo-Oo-Oo-Oo
Rosa clearly remembers her parents getting dewy-eyed and emotional whenever in later years Nelson Eddy and Jeannette MacDonald were on radio singing the same song.
Rose-Marie was followed by The Student Prince, The Vagabond King and The Desert Song, all wildly popular operettas with lush romantic scores by European composers. Sadie would come up on the excursion train, and she and Solly walked and talked along the Thames riverbank, saw the show, visited Johnny Isaacs’ fish and chip shop in Mile End and sometimes, rather daringly, drank coffee at a Kardomah café, before he took her to Paddington to catch the train home.
The Thames Embankment always had a special significance for Sadie, and Rosa can now understand why. It was dreamtime: a time when she and Solly might forget duty and family obligations, when they would be something other than just the children of poor migrants, when they could imagine a life beyond the East End, maybe on a new estate among ‘the English’. But it was always going to be hard to get away – as hard as it would be for Rosa in 1957.
Sadie and Solly were a sentimental couple and in later years would go for an ‘outing’ to Paddington Station – not to buy a ticket and embark on one of the new diesel trains, but to sit on a bench and remember the times when he would wait there for his ‘Welsh lass’ arriving on the steam-driven excursion train. Sentimental and romantic. Solly wrote a poem about it all:
I carried a cane then with a silver knob,
we thought it was smart, it was just the job.
She carries a cane now on which to lean,
she’s not quite so agile as at seventeen.
The seat that we sat on marked ‘GWR’
has now been removed, so has the bar,
And the lounge where we met and agreed what to do.
I wonder how many of those dreams came true.
‘I’m the eldest, Mother’s almost blind and the family all depend on me,’ Sadie told him.
‘My father died last year and my mother and five sisters all depend on me,’ replied Solly.
‘Would you like to come to Cardiff and meet my family?’ asked Sadie.
It was only four hours on the train but it might as well have been a trip to Paris, so different was travel in the 1920s.
Sadie always referred to Nathan and Eva as ‘Father’ and ‘Mother’ and the house in Plantagenet Street as ‘home’. Solly wrote that he was cordially welcomed, but eighty years on Rosa wonders about the family dynamics and what her father might have diplomatically omitted.
‘My brother Will isn’t here, he’s “on the road”, a commercial traveller,’ said Sadie, making the introductions. ‘Next year he’s getting married to the sister of a rabbi in London and he’s going into business on his own. These are my other brothers: Jimmy, who’s married, helps Father in the workshop, but he’s more interested in selling insurance. And this tall young man is my “little” brother Gus.
‘My sister Rosie has a boyfriend in London and we think they’ll get married, as she’s very popular; she’s gone out tonight but you’ll meet her when she gets home. This is Dora who does all the cooking since Mother can’t see well any more and she’s very good at it. And these two are my youngest sisters: Dinah’s just got a clerical job and Rachel’s still at school. Father said she could have an extra year because she’s