On December 15th, 1958, Miriam Moses was sitting in the audience of the popular TV show, This Is Your Life. Her niece Hannah had invited her to join her; she said she’d been given tickets for the show. Miriam had been around long enough to know that the programme always began with the host, Eamonn Andrews, walking up to a member of into the audience and telling them, much to their surprise, that the story of their life was to be the subject of that evening’s programme. Could she have Imagined that she had been invited to the show just to watch someone else’s life story unfold? She said afterwards that she had been stunned when Eamonn Andrews called her out of the audience. But could she really have been surprised? After the life she’d lived?
Miriam Moses was born in East London’s crowded immigrant district in 1884 (the date on her plaque, pictured above, is wrong). Her father Mark lived as busy a life as Miriam would; he was a master tailor, an activist helping to settle penniless new immigrants as they arrived off the boats, a politician on the local Council, President of the synagogue next door and a member of the Board of Deputies, the Jewish community representative body. His workshop was on the ground floor of the family home in Princelet Street; Miriam, her mother and eight siblings lived above. As if the house was not crowded enough, her father also used it for meetings, as a place to plan the social campaigns he was involved in and as a refuge for stranded immigrants.
Miriam was fourteen when her mother died. She took on the task of running the household and of looking after the many desperate visitors coming to seek her father’s help. She spent her teenage years helping others. That may be why she devoted so much of her energy in later life to helping teenagers.
She began her lifetime of social activism by helping immigrant parents, who knew no English, to enrol their children in the local schools. It wasn’t just a question of signing them up to the school; many of the children were starving, shoeless and at risk of exploitation by predatory gangs. She was so effective in garnering support for disadvantaged children that at the age of 23 she was appointed Superintendent of the Deal Street School, run by a charity dedicated to the support of immigrant children.
She had little time for those who did good works but could not see beyond the particular cause they were involved in. When the Jewish Chronicle published a letter asking for donations of clothing for a charity that provided summer holidays for disadvantaged children, her reaction was scathing and practical. “Would it not be better if a general appeal was issued on behalf of the whole of the East End schools. I suggest that a small committee . . . be formed to draw up an appeal.”
She volunteered as a nurse during the 1st World War, chaired a committee caring for sufferers of tuberculosis and worked for the Stepney Children’s Holiday Fund, all the while supporting those who came to her in need of food, shelter or advice. Unlike many East End Jews, she was neither a communist nor socialist; she joined the Jewish Suffragette movement but in her politics she was always middle of the road, a member of the Progressive or Liberal Party. When her father died in 1921 she stood, as a member of the Progressive Party, for his seat on the local Council. She won hands down, gaining nearly three times as many votes as the runner up. She became a magistrate the same year, sitting in the Stepney Juvenile Court, aiming, as far as possible, to keep young people out of prison.
The This Is Your Life programme had an unchanging format. Once the programme’s unsuspecting subject was extracted, often unwillingly, from the audience, they would be introduced to a succession of old friends, colleagues and admirers. As Miriam Moses, at 74 years old, sat in the armchair on the This Is Your Life stage, on walked two women who had travelled from America just to be on the programme. Another appeared by video link from Australia. They had all been members of the Brady Girls’ Club. Of all the causes she had worked for, Brady Girls was the one closest to her heart. Set up five years after the Brady Boys Club, the two institutions worked to provide activities, education, a social life and opportunities to young people from immigrant or disadvantaged homes. Elsie Cohen, who founded the club, invited Miriam to become chairman. She held the post for 25 years.
In 1931 Miriam Moses was elected Mayor of Stepney. She was the borough’s first woman mayor and the first Jewish woman anywhere in the country to be elected to a mayoral post. She said that during her year in office her priorities would be to relieve unemployment, improve maternity and child welfare, combat tuberculosis and expedite the rehousing of people living in the borough’s many slums. A formidable target for just one year.
Shortly after her mayoral post came to an end, she uncharacteristically admitted a weakness. She said she had always feared drawing the attention of the wider Jewish community to the slum housing conditions in the East End. She didn’t say why this was. It may have been because she had been attacked by the Labour Party for advocating that philanthropists, rather than the government, be asked to fund the development of new housing in the borough. Whatever the reason, having read an article in the Jewish Chronicle condemning the appalling conditions in the slums, she took up the cudgels. She wrote to the paper, saying she felt sure that “even in these difficult times there are still some great philanthropists who will help mitigate such a big evil.” Never one to miss an opportunity to right a wrong, she concluded her letter by attacking a local housing foundation, the Samuel Lewis Trust, for not accepting immigrant tenants. She was certain that the Trust’s benefactor “who was a member of our Community, surely never meant to debar persons of his own persuasion from benefitting from his munificence.”
During the 1930s, the Jews of the East End were targeted by the British Union of Fascists, led by the singularly unpleasant Oswald Mosley. Wearing black shirts and known, unimaginatively, as ‘blackshirts’, Mosley’s provocateurs smashed the windows of Jewish premises, abused and attacked Jews in the streets and fought pitched battles with Jewish street fighters. In 1936, Mosley led his blackshirts in a highly publicised march through the East End. A coalition of dock workers, Jewish fighters, and communist activists blocked their path in Cable Street. A battle broke out and the blackshirts were forced to turn back.
A couple of weeks later, the Board of Deputies of British Jews debated the event. One delegate insisted that the Jewish community was shamed by the Jews who took part in the fight. He claimed that they had played into the hands of the fascists by enabling them to condemn Jewish violence. Miriam Moses (who among her many other roles was also a member of the Board of Deputies) went ballistic. She castigated the speaker for his views and told the meeting that they had no right to leave their seats that morning until they had come up with a proper strategy for leading the community. She warned them “as a woman who has done public service for years”, that otherwise they would not be able to restrain East London’s Jewish Youth, who were growing increasingly militant. “They want a leader and they are looking around groping in the dark for some man or woman to lead them in the right direction in this terrible tragedy.”
In the end, it was neither the Board of Deputies nor Miriam Moses who put paid to the blackshirts. It was World War Two. Alongside all her other tasks, Miriam was appointed Chief Officer at the Air Raid Patrol post at the Brady Street Girls Club. Her job involved issuing warnings of impending air raids, coordinating the air raid wardens under her command, enforcing the blackout, helping to rescue people trapped under rubble, assisting the injured and putting out fires. A part of her may have thought it ironic that it took enemy bombs, rather then the British government, to eradicate the slum housing that blighted the East End.
On 27 March 1945, as the war was drawing to an end, the last bomb to be dropped on London fell on Hughes Mansion, around the corner from the Brady Club. 134 people were killed. Many were Jews. It was the day before the festival of Passover. Miriam spent all day among the rescuers, scrabbling in the rubble to try to get the survivors out. Somehow, among it all, she managed to supervise the preparations for the Passover seder meal for the girls who had been bombed out of their homes and were living at the Brady Street Club. King George VI enrolled her in the Order of the British Empire for ‘services to the people of Stepney.’
Miriam Moses died in 1965. In her latter years she lived near us - I remember going to her flat several times. I was a teenager, I remember the questions she asked though I didn’t realise why she took such an interest in young people. My enduring memory is the impact she had on my mother. It was due to Miriam Moses’s encouragement that my mother became involved with the Jewish Welfare Board, becoming one of its leaders and transforming it into Jewish Care, the largest and most effective welfare agency in Britain. Miss Moses, as she was known, continued to have an impact from the grave. No doubt she still does.