Rowing Against the Tide - A career in sport and politics (6 page)

Sally in 1968

No computer would have put us together, for she was from a farming family, a real county set, and Church of England. I was a Jewish dress manufacturer from the East End of London, so our backgrounds could not have been more different. Yet we hit it off, and after about a year, I did the proper thing and asked her father if we could get engaged. He wanted the weekend to think about it, for clearly there were problems to consider, but having asked if I would wait a year until she was twenty one, I agreed, and the following week we sealed it by choosing a beautiful sapphire ring. We had to face the fact that we could not marry in a Church or Synagogue, so we had a civil wedding in September 1964 in Oundle near to Fotheringhay where my in-laws farmed. Sally understood that over the centuries, if you were born Jewish, whatever you might or might not believe in after that, you would always be known as a Jew. Even Disraeli who was baptised at the age of eleven, was always known as our first Jewish Prime Minister.

For both of us, our wedding wasn’t just the expected happy day, but a great giggle, for the mix of guests gave us much to laugh about long after the event. The mixture of our families, my business friends and some executives from our various businesses, together with the rowing fraternity and the county set, gave us much to chuckle about. Two of our Jewish directors in one of the subsidiaries that manufactured for Mothercare, could never have been on a farm before, and were confronted by father-in-law’s enormous Hereford bull. They stopped transfixed by the giant equipment the bull had, and were heard to remark, in a way only Jewish people can say it “You can make a living at this?”

Two views of our house in 1966 (above) and in 2011 (below)

At that time the Tom Jones black bow worn in the hair by many women was all the rage. When my boss Rick and his wife Lily and daughter Wendy arrived, he parked the car, whilst the two women walked to the house. Mother in Law, just assumed that the black bows indicated they were a couple of the waitresses they’d booked and sent them to the back kitchen. They took it in good part, and had a good laugh, though mother-in-law took some time to get over the embarrassment.

We decided to honeymoon in the Holy Land, Israel, and did that both as our preferred choice, and to appease my mother in law, who to be fair had only ever met one other Jewish person before, and was staunchly Church of England. She had a very narrow view of her Christianity, and could never accept that Jesus was a Jew. She insisted he couldn’t have been, after all he was a Christian, and no explanation of the history of those times was ever going to change her mind. Over the next couple of years, Sally undertook a period of study to convert to Judaism, for we were determined to be a united family with no religious divisions. We also agreed that if we had children we would bring them up in the Jewish faith, giving them so to speak, a hook to hang their hat on, and what they did when they were adults would be up to them. As it turned out we have two great sons of whom we are justly proud, Paul born in 1967, and Joel in 1971. Both the boys have great families, and we have enormous pleasure and joy in seeing our grandchildren growing up. Our eldest Paul, with an environmental honors degree, after spells in a few jobs and one with RBS, decided he would never work for a corporation again, and is happy running his own gardening business. The youngest made it to Oriel - Oxford - and after a spell in the music industry is now the CEO of the UK branch of Travelzoo, a highly regarded online company in the travel and entertainment business.

I’d never been overly religious, but going to Israel at that time, certainly gave me a feeling I’d not experienced before. The bible became a history book, rather than just a religious tract, and I read it through on return home. At that time, I believe on a Sunday evening, was a TV programme where a very Jewish sounding David Kossoff, a brilliant actor, sat in on large high backed throne, with children gathered at his feet. He read from his version of the Bible, telling the story of those times in his own way, as perhaps only he could. It became reading for our boys whenever I was around at bedtime, which sadly I confess was not as often as I would have wished.

I recall standing in the center of Be’er Sheva by the well in the centre of the old town. The Israelis appeared to have policy of leaving the biblical towns untouched, and building the new alongside the old town, which also carried the old biblical name. Looking down we realised you could not have moved this central well from place to place, and this therefore would have been the same well as had been there since back in biblical times. That sense of history came through in a way I had never experienced, even when visiting old churches or monasteries at home or in Europe. We visited all the well known biblical sites, and down to Elat on the Red Sea. In the desert just north of Elat was a kibbutz, home solely to West German youngsters who felt that helping the desert to grow was in some way helping to put right the evil their elders had committed during WW11. One thing struck us was that on a hill just south of Jerusalem and looking west to the sea, we saw row after row of young trees growing, helping to restore the land from a desert to the land of milk and honey of yesteryear, whilst looking east towards Jordan it was just barren. Sally of course planted the traditional tree that all visitors did, I recall for the equivalent princely sum of seven and sixpence. Many Jewish people from around the world pay to have a grove of trees planted to commemorate someone in their family they may have lost, and an appropriate plaque would be fixed to a tree or rock. However I cannot say that some of the plaques weren’t moved around when it was convenient to do so.

Tel Aviv, which was our base, was of course a largely new town, but walking to the adjacent Jaffa took us back centuries. Caesarea, Galilee, the place of the walking on water, the site of the Sermon on the Mount, Nazareth and above all Jerusalem were places where you just soaked up the history of that tiny country. The narrowest part of the country at that time was the site of Latrun, where from the eastern border to the sea was just ten miles. At the southern end of Lake Galilee sits one of the earliest Kibbutz; Degania. At its entrance is a burnt out Syrian tank from the 1948 war, left as a memorial of that conflict, and to show that it was the closest the Syrians got to that settlement. In Jerusalem in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre which was part of the old city and sat on the border, illustrated the problem that still faces everyone today. The “churchyard” to the rear of the church was accessible to us, but at the rear was an archway with a notice forbidding further access since we would then have been in Jordan. We inevitably had to have a photo of Sally standing right on that border. Worse was the sight of the Mandelbaum Gate crossing, with barbed wire across parts of the road, again distinguishing between Israel and Jordan. Whatever the hoped for outcome of any peace agreement, I cannot see anyone wanting or agreeing to see the City of Jerusalem divided in that way again. Of course there has to be proper recognition of the rights of Palestinians and other Islamic people being able to visit unhindered their holy sites, just as Jewish people must also be free to visit the Western Wall. At a later trip to Israel, when I put the point to Shimon Peres, he remarked that a vaticanisation of Temple Mount had always been on the table.

Just in the north of the country we were invited by a young Arab boy to enter his garden and join him for some tea. He had a patio overlooking his field, and there was a donkey walking slowly round and round a central pole, dragging a steel sheet behind it. It was an ancient way of threshing corn. He was happy to be an Arab Israeli, and at that time some 250,000 Arabs had remained within those 1948 boundaries. I have never understood why it is OK for Arabs to be able to live in Israel, and not the other way round, for there is no reason why people of differing faiths cannot live in peace with one another in the same patch of land. People will recall, that when the West came to the aid of Kuwait, the troops had to obtain special dispensation to be able to hold a Christian service, in what are claimed to be the exclusive lands of Islam. These are just some of the stumbling blocks to peace in that part of the world.

In 1979

We set up home in my flat in the Nottingham Park, situated in the centre of the City, giving ourselves time to decide where we wanted to make our permanent home. I’d lived there for nine years before I met Sally, and it had been a place of refuge and overnight accommodation for many of my rowing colleagues over those years. After only eighteen months, Sally spotted an advert for an old farm house, well within the twelve mile radius from the factory that I felt would be manageable bearing in mind early opening and closing of the factory. It was a timber framed and brick building, roofed with old hand made pantiles, and may have been the “Old Farm” part of the estate including Barton in Fabis which belonged to the Clifton family from the 15th century. In it’s earliest appearance it may have been one or more cottages, which over the years were brought together, but certainly it was a single property at the time of the Civil War. Charles 1st came through the village, crossing the river Trent on the ferry which operated until 1965, and raised his standard on what is now called Standard Hill in Nottingham.

It was semi-derelict, and the farmer and his brother had moved to smaller homes in the village a few years earlier, but rejected advice from a local developer to knock it down and sell it as a cleared site. Apart from it being a listed building, he could not see his old family home wiped away, and given that Sally had grown up in such homes, she could see its potential. Two of the upper bedrooms feature Yorkshire sliding panel windows, where the central panel is protected by iron bars making them secure rooms that would have served as such during the Civil War. When the roof was restored in 1966/7 almost perfectly ball shaped rocks were found in the roof, which were likely to have been “weapons” used in the war. One has been kept as a souvenir. It has been said that there was a tunnel from the house to the church 100 yards away, but the passage of time has probably closed it in. A previous owner indicated that as late as the early part of the 20th century, the house still featured a “priest hole”, adding further to the belief in the tunnel. The main residential accommodation was on the ground and first floor, but when our eldest got into Heavy Metal, we converted two spare rooms in what from the outside was roof space, but was a level covering six unused rooms where years back the farm hands would have lived. At least with Paul settled at the far end, well away from our end of the house, peace reigned. In the garden is a barn which we converted initially into a hairdressing salon, and subsequently into my Parliamentary office on the ground floor, and an artist studio on the first floor. It is a house and home full of history and interest, and has been a great family home until this day.