Marriage and Children 1948-1958

 

 

 

"Alfred agrees that I should not give up my career merely to keep house...it was always a nightmare of mine that I would have to give up my career in order to do housework (I can't impart on paper the venom I could put into that word)"  

Letter to Reggie Grant, 13/1/1948

 

Shirley and Alfred met at a party in the summer of 1947. They got engaged in January 1948. Shirley describes Alfred and sets out some typically forthright views on marriage in a letter to her close friend Reggie Grant who was now living and working in New York.

 

They married on 31st August 1948 in the Hampstead Garden Suburb Synagogue in north west London, and both remained lifelong and very active members of that community.

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Alfred was a woollen merchant. During the 1950s and early 1960s he ran a shop in Whitechapel, in the East End of London. In the mid-1960s he moved to a shop in London's West End, and became very successful exporting British-made cloth to markets in the Far East. Shirley occasionally accompanied him on his visits to Hong Kong and Japan. Later, as British manufacturing declined drastically, Alfred shifted to importing cloth made in the Far East. 

 

For  the first ten years of their marriage, Shirley and Alfred lived in a flat in Temple Fortune in North West London.  On 1st January  1958 they moved to a detached house on Aylmer Road, East Finchley.  In 1985 they moved to a flat in Hampstead Garden Suburb, a stone's throw from the Hampstead Garden Suburb Synagogue which played such a large part in their lives and to which they both gave great service.

 

Paul was born in October 1950.

Robert was born in June 1953.

Michael was born in April  1958.

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