On December 5th 1900, the leaders and philanthropists of London’s Jewish community sat down for a Festival Dinner at the prestigious Hotel Cecil on the Thames Embankment. They were joined by several local and national politicians. The purpose of the dinner was to raise money for the Building Fund of the new Jewish Industrial School that was being erected in Hayes, eleven miles west of London.
An Industrial School was a Victorian institution aimed at helping destitute children who were in danger of falling into a life of crime. Their purpose was to give the children an education and teach them a trade. Children were committed to Industrial Schools by parents deciding they could not control them or by magistrates if they were found guilty of crimes that didn’t warrant lengthy prison sentences. One of the crimes they might be committed for was that of vagrancy, in other words of being homeless. Even if they weren’t committed of a crime but were just found to be destitute and wandering the streets, children could be sent to an Industrial School. Criminalising the homeless has a long history.
The Festival Dinner began with the toasts customary in Victorian society, to the Queen, the Imperial Forces and the Houses of Parliament. Lord Rothschild, who was the prime mover for the Industrial School, responded to the Parliamentary toast by bringing the gathering somewhat down to earth. He reminded them of the reasons for the dinner.
Rothschild said that it had been claimed that the Jewish community was erecting an Industrial School because of a large increase in the criminal population of the Jewish community. He refuted the allegation, saying that the only reason that the school was being built was that the Lewisham Industrial School, where Jewish children had formerly been sent, found it difficult to integrate Jewish children into their Christian regime. He said it would have been exactly the same had a Jewish school tried to accommodate children of another faith who “did not observe Saturday as the Sabbath, who on Passover ate hot cross buns in preference to matzos and who feasted on Yom Kippur while we fasted.” In fact, he said, the charge that the Jewish criminal population was growing was refuted by the figures; in 1893 there were 32 Jewish children in Industrial Schools, during the current year there were only 27.
Lord Rothschild wasn’t wholly straight with his audience. He failed to mention that three years earlier John Dickinson, the magistrate of the Police Courts, had complained that there was a marked increase in the number of Jewish children coming before him accused of pickpocketing and had accused the Jewish community of doing nothing about it. Nor did Lord Rothschild mention his own response at that time, he’d said that because of objections by people like Mr Dickinson, who was “by no means unkindly disposed towards Jews generally”, it was vital to build the school for the sake of the character of the community and its standing in the eyes of its neighbours.
A year after the school opened a visitor reported to the Jewish Chronicle that the school was run in an enlightened manner by its superintendent and matron, Mr and Mrs Ellis. Mr Ellis had told him that boys were not at the school to be punished, but “in order that they may be shown the right road.” The visitor noted with approval that when boys leave the school at the age of 18 arrangements are made to place them into a job or an apprenticeship.
It didn’t work out that way for one resident of the school, a young man named Moisha Cohen. The son of a tailor in the East End, he had arrived in England in 1889 at the age of 2; a large and potentially troublesome child. By the age of 10 he had broken his nose prize-fighting, where he had competed under the names of ‘Cockney Cohen’ and ‘Fat Moisha’. He’d learnt the art of pickpocketing from a Fagin-like character named Harry the Gonoff [Harry the Thief] and was earning a few pennies regularly by smashing windows for a local glazier who was then called out to repair them.
The law caught up with Moisha Cohen eventually and he was sent to the Hayes Industrial School. He later claimed that the five years that he spent there were among the happiest of his life. But he did not get a job when he left and he wasn’t enrolled in an apprenticeship. Instead he went back home to his parents and began to resume his former life. Not knowing what else to do with him, his parents decided to send him to Canada, to a farm owned by a friend of his father from Poland. However, his father’s friend didn’t want him either and sent him to live with a neighbour, a man named Bobby Clark who educated him in the art of shooting a gun and dealing cards from the bottom of the pack. After he hurt his right hand in an accident, Moisha learned to shoot with his left; when his right hand recovered he became known as Two-Gun Cohen.
Morris Cohen as he was now known, spent the next few years travelling though Canada gambling and brawling. He was arrested at least ten times and sent to prison twice. He frequented Chinese gambling dens, made many Chinese friends and on one fateful occasion he came to the rescue of a Chinese gambling-den owner who was being robbed. It changed his life. He became the go-to Westerner whenever anyone from the Chinese community had a problem that needed solving. His name reached the ears of Dr Sun Yat Sen, the future President of China who was in Canada at the time, raising money for his revolutionary movement. Dr Sun took him on as his bodyguard and employed him to buy weapons for the Chinese revolution.
When Dr Sun returned to China, Morris went straight, to cash in on a property boom in Canada. He became a real-estate salesman and earned himself a legitimate fortune. He went back to England, bought his family a house in London and in 1922 travelled to China where he renewed his acquaintance with Dr Sun who was now President of the Chinese Republic. Dr Sun gave Morris Cohen the responsibility of training his personal bodyguards and invested him with the rank of Colonel.
Known in China as Ma Kun, Morris Cohen worked in a personal capacity for Dr Sun and his successor as President, Chiang Kai Shek. He carried out clandestine missions, bought arms and headed up the presidential security operation. He channelled his wild streak into his social life, throwing lavish parties with his paramour, Butterfly Wu, in Canton and Shanghai.
In 1930, Cohen was appointed as the Head of Chinese Intelligence and promoted to the rank of General. When the Japanese invaded China in 1937 he went to Hong Kong where he worked with the Chinese resistance. He was captured there by the Japanese in 1941 while he was trying to protect Madame Sun, Dr Sun’s widow. He was thrown into Stanley Camp, one of the infamous Japanese labour prisons and severely beaten, losing 70 pounds in weight. He was released in 1943, as part of a prisoner exchange between the Japanese and Canada.
After the war he travelled to Palestine to help train the Haganah in their fight against the British to establish an Israeli state. He got hold of the plans for the British Naval base in Singapore and tried to persuade the Israeli fighters to blow it up. It was too big a step for them; they weren’t prepared to escalate their conflict to such an extent. After the War of Independence he put his name forward to be a general in the Israeli army but he was rebuffed. But the Israelis asked for his help in the early 1950s, when Palestinian terrorists were planting Chinese-made land mines in Israel. The following week Morris met the Chinese premier Zhou Enlai in Geneva. The mine-laying stopped shortly afterwards.
General Moisha Cohen finally settled down in Manchester, working as a consultant for Decca Radar and Rolls Royce aircraft engines, selling their products to China and Taiwan. He died in 1970 at the age of 83. Representatives from both China and Taiwan attended his funeral in Salford. His gravestone is engraved in Hebrew and Chinese.
As for the Hayes Industrial School, by the end of World War I the number of residents had grown to 128. Changes in social policy thereafter led to a decline in the numbers and by 1937 the building was deemed to be too large for the school’s needs. The trustees relocated the school to Weybridge in Surrey where it was renamed as Finnart House. It closed in 1973, just a few years after the death of Moisha Cohen, its most famous resident.
A tale well told! Shabbat Shalom.
What an extraordinary life. He didn't settle for what society handed him, did he?