HELEN DEAL CIRCLE OF LIFE CELEBRANT

Fanny Maisner was born in 1918 in London’s East End... A political Jewish family, apprenticeship as a dressmaker and the wartime bombings that saw her carrying her first baby home in a suitcase, have helped make her the straight-talking, funny, interesting woman she is today. 

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Fanny was the sixth of eight children whose parents had emigrated from Poland just before WWI. Her parents’ story was a bit like Fiddler on The Roof, she says.

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‘At those times, you’d have a sink in the back yard and a lavatory between three or four families. We were poor, but it was a happy life, friendly people, families coming together for social events and kids playing in the streets. I used to be the look-out when we were playing cricket on the grass, which wasn’t allowed!’

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She went to the Jewish Free School – then in Bell Lane – and left with her school certificate at 14.

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Apprenticed as a dressmaker at 14

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‘I left school on the Friday and was apprenticed to my sister as a dressmaker on the Monday. There used to be a sample dress hung in the middle of the room and we’d have to copy it and make 18 a day, throwing the finished garments into a well in the middle when you finished.

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‘You’d be given a bundle of work and do part of the dress before handing it on to the next person – like doing a jigsaw puzzle. I used to do the button holes.’

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This was the 1930s. The factory, Laura Lee, employed 90 people and Fanny remembers an American man came to the factory and taught them to insert zips.

 

A political upbringing

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Fanny’s was a political family, her brothers often speaking at Speaker’s Corner. She recalls first-hand the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 and the tensions between the Blackshirts and the communists:

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‘Dockers were tearing up paving slabs and children were putting marbles under the hooves of the police horses because the police were protecting the fascists. Trade Unionists from all over England were involved in the protests – a real case of workers of the world unite.’

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Mostly people in the East End were united and patriotic but she recalls some uncomfortable moments:

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‘There was a girl at the factory who I sat next to everyday – Iris – and one day during the war she referred to it as “a bloody Jews war”. I told her “well I’ve just seen my brother off to war this morning so that’s at least one Jew who’s fighting it.”

 

‘It just shows, you didn’t always know what people were thinking…’

 

‘Bombed out’ six times in the war, but life went on

 

Fanny’s war was spent making fancy gas mask cases at the factory, helping in the first aid tents, keeping the home going for her father and siblings after the loss of her mother.

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‘Life went on’ she said: ‘We went to the cinema and went dancing all through the war.’

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It was doing the Jitterbug at Hackney Empire that she met her future husband Jack. She invited him home and offered him the precious commodity of an onion – which her evacuated younger brother had sent up from the country.

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Eventually families ganged up and slept in the tubes 

 

‘You got used to it – one day another bit of the house would be gone or the whole of one side of the street. Our “secure place”, where we were supposed to take our mattresses at night, was a cork factory on the corner of our street – Wiggins, Teape and Co of Aldgate – next to a garage and with a paper mill not far away!

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‘Later on people ganged up and decided to go down the tubes.’

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She remembers the Blitz and the 1941 air raid when St Paul’s was burning: ‘I was with my sister and her baby at home when the fireman told us to leave the house and head for Tilbury Docks. There was no water, no gas; people were hiding under fire engines and coming out covered in horse muck.’

 

She tells how, heavily pregnant in Stoke Newington, the landlady’s house collapsed around her and Jack as they slept in the sitting room.

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‘Only the couch we were sleeping on was left – when I put out my hand for the alarm clock in the morning, even that was gone. The passageway was blocked by rubble and we had to climb out through a hole in the wall. Jack had been sleeping naked so he had to wrap himself in a blanket.’

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Jack was often away doing work for the Ministry Of Defence so persuaded her to go by train to Pembroke Docks in Wales to have the baby, eventually brought home to London in a suitcase.

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‘I thought we were poor in London until I saw the living conditions there, with their orange boxes for furniture.’

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In the 1960s she turned to teaching - effectively keeping some tough-talking young girls 'off the game'

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Fanny and Jack eventually had three daughters, six grandchildren and six great grandchildren. Their first home was a Stoke Newington prefab and Jack took on his father’s metal spinning business and a workshop in Hackney.

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‘His dad had spent 30 bob on machines but Jack invested £6,000 on new equipment, which was exciting but it was hard.’

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Jack’s craft eventually earned him the Queen’s Award for Workmanship and a visit for both of them to St James’ Palace.

 

Later in the 1960s – the years of the mini car and ‘the twist’ – the family lived in Arnos Grove, where Fanny worked as a teacher for 10 years instilling her own love for dressmaking in other young girls.

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‘The school leaving age had just gone up to 15 and I was originally asked to fill in for three weeks before Christmas.’

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The girls were tough Londoners who set out to shock her and she admits she was ‘shaking’ when she first started: ‘One told me “I’m going on the game when I leave school”… but I won them all over in the end.

 

‘There was another girl I particularly remember, whose Dad bought her a sewing machine after our end of year fashion show – she told me she was the “happiest girl” alive.’