Rowing Against the Tide - A career in sport and politics Read Online Free

for the survivors of the holocaust to have a land of their own, and was delighted when the United Nations created the State of Israel, the terrible things that had happened in the run up to it’s creation, added to the anti Semitism, and that drove me further into my shell. The killing of the two British Soldiers in a reprisal to some offence by the army, and the bombing of the King David Hotel gave ample ammunition to those who, whatever the rights and wrongs in those last days of the Mandate, were only too happy to stoke the age old flames of anti-Semitism. In the first few years at Latymer I’d had a very good friend who suddenly said he couldn’t be friends or speak to me any more. His parents hearing I was Jewish banned him from having anything more to do with me. If I hadn’t been well below average height and about seven stone nothing, things might have been different and I might have reacted differently to what amounted to a form of bullying. However by the age of fourteen I was boxing at under eight stone, and just about holding my own. Being lousy at ball games, I took to athletics and rowing, and coxed the first boat in my last two years at school.
    In those years leading to the end of the war, and to 1950 when I left, rationing made school dinners at times hard to stomach, but we were rightly reproached for any waste. However in the sixth form we were allowed to either go home for lunch, or as many of us preferred, to cross the road from the school where a greasy spoon style café put on great lunches. The atmosphere was fun and the layout was in cubicles with tables for four or six. The waitress would come to the table, ask what we wanted and would then turn and holler to the kitchen at the back – one meat pie and chips, one pie mash and peas, and one without peas. I don’t ever remember her getting an order wrong, and the cost was no greater than the school dinner.
    I did not fancy the school cadet force, for shortly after coming to west London, my brother had made contact with a Scout Group, and at the age of eight, I with one other youngster, became the first members of the 3rd Chiswick Cub Pack, attached to the Scout and Rover Group. It was an unusual group, being completely open and unattached to any church, which was generally the norm at that time. The Scout Master was known only as Colonel, and his wife Gray, became the cub mistress. They were a great pair, and I and hundreds of others, owe a great deal to them, and that’s why I stayed with the Scouts rather than join the cadets at school. The group had an excellent working relationship with a group of female Sea Cadets, and a couple of marriages sealed that relationship.
    The Rovers were a great bunch, and when they returned from their war service, some had some great stories to tell. One Ginger Cole, had been in the Far East as a driver, and told of the time when in India he was driving in the dark, and misjudged a roundabout on which a cow was sleeping. He recalled a bump when he hit the roundabout, another just after, and then one as he dropped down the other side. When they heard the following morning that a cow had been killed, he kept his head down and said nothing ! Another, Gerald Kosterlitz had been in the Eighth Army in North Africa, as a tank driver. His tank was hit, and he was the only survivor. His family had been refugees from Nazi Germany in the thirties, and his father had been in the Kaisers Army in the First World War His father said that they could withstand a straightforward bayonet charge from the Brits, didn’t mind when the bagpipes brought on the Scots, but the ones they really hated were the little brown men with a rag round one hand, and a kukri in the other. The Ghurkhas he said, would strike fear into anyone! Another, Charlie King, by then too old for active service, was the local butcher in Turnham Green, but any resemblance to Corporal Jones, the butcher from Dad’s Army, was a million miles from the guy that was