But not for long . . .
Hendon-but-not-for-long
This was the street sign idea I proposed, as a small design project, to a conceptual artist friend.
Jason and I both grew up in Hendon, the suburb of North-West London which most people – or at least those whose interests and aspirations extend beyond a healthy Jewish community and an excellent selection of synagogues (including, of course, the ones that you don’t go to) – long to get away from. And during university vacations, following months of undergraduate decadence, Jason and I would invariably bump into each other and catch up in Hendon Central, always reflecting – though with humour and no little affection – on the sheer dullness of our childhood home. Indeed, whenever a woman in whom I had an interest would ask where I was from, I would always mutter the response in an extremely throwaway manner. “Hendon” had always been a conversation stopper.
Even ignoring Hasmo and its Legends, however, Hendon features more landmarks and places of interest than your average suburban neighbourhood: the RAF Museum, Police Training College, one end of Britain’s best known motorway (the M1), the Welsh Harp, Hendon Hall Hotel (where FA Cup Final teams would stay, a safe distance from any action, on the night before the big day), Middlesex University (if you couldn’t get in anywhere else), Barnet Copthall Stadium, and that paradise of the bored North-West London Jewish housewife, Brent Cross Shopping Centre.
Hendon has somehow contrived, however, to be far less than the sum of its parts. I have no desire to even visit (and if I do, it will only be for free board and/or Brent Street’s excellent Lahore curry house).
But, perhaps as with all childhood homes, nostalgia tends to drown out reality. And the memories of many former Hendonites are fond. Following his return to Israel from a recent visit, my cousin Marc said something that tickled me: “You know what, Michael, I walked down Brent Street, and it meant nothing to me.” Now, anyone who knows Brent Street will be amazed that this dreary suburban high street – with seventies eyesore, Sentinel Square, at its miserable heart – could ever have meant anything to anyone. But Marc and I regularly reminisce lovingly about the “old country” during our concurrent morning drives through the Israeli traffic.
Or was the Hendon of our childhood really a better place?
The neighbourhood supplied no shortage of characters. There were the Carmels who owned the greengrocery on Vivian Avenue, and whose hotheaded son Danny was constantly fighting with customers over one thing or another, often the handling of his fruit. Opposite them was irascible old Mr. Kaplan the grocer, with his unfeasibly strong Mitteleuropean accent, who was just as prone as Danny to upset patrons.
And who can forget the Irishman charged with running the tennis courts at Hendon Park (below right), but whose little green (appropriately) hut – for booking the courts – was nearly always closed (judging by the hue of his cheeks when he eventually appeared, it was never too difficult to work out where he had been)? The usual form was:
- turn up . . . to find the hut shut;
start playing anyway;- run off when the Irishman eventually appeared (because we were near the end of the match anyway . . . and Jewish, considering the 30p an hour fee better put towards the cost of our first flat or car);
- find refuge in the “corner shop” next to the Hendon Classic (cinema), where we would drive the Asian owners to distraction, leafing through their comics (and, later, other “mags”) with no intention whatsoever of making a purchase.
If Hendon’s most famous son was the great Test batsman Denis Compton, its celebrity resident was heavyweight boxing champion Henry Cooper, who once dumped Cassius Clay on his backside, but who would unfailingly offer a warm “hello” as he strolled his giant poodle up Brampton Grove. Carry On and East Enders actress Barbara Windsor also lived in Hendon, while eighties soul band Imagination frequented the local video shop on Sentinel Square (or was that Just an Illusion?)
Talking of carry-ons, the forty-odd detached homes on our street, Edgeworth Crescent, seemed to house and generate more characters and drama than your average small town. And I am not just talking about the product of the lively – some would say perverse – imagination of award-winning author Clive Sinclair, who grew up next door and who, on revealing his Hendon roots, has been quoted as exclaiming “God help me!”
Where there is now a Holmes Place and sheltered housing, however, once stood two ‘proper’, old-style cinemas: the Classic (opposite Hendon Central tube) and the Odeon (in the Quadrant). Hendon was also home to numerous traditional English pubs. The White Bear, on the Burroughs, provided shelter to a much-loved stuffed polar which disappeared with the pub’s character when it – like so many others – was converted into a vapid theme pub, the only discernible theme being its absolute dreariness.
Another Hendon institution sorely missed is its football club, Hendon FC, which now groundshares with Wembley FC after, this year, being forced to leave its home of 80 years, Claremont Road.
Another goal for the mighty Greens, as the away keeper reacts a tad late.
Perhaps it is just me (and the several dozen other saddos who watch Hendon), but I always found it oddly gratifying being able to stand right behind the away goal and to viciously abuse the generic “fat useless c*nt” – i.e., every visiting goalie (irrelevant of ability and girth) – knowing that he would hear every word (and, often, respond). You can’t do that at Arsenal. 
And standing among us was another favourite son of Hendon, David “Got your number!” Bedford (with caricature, right), the former 10,000 metres world record holder and – more significantly for fans of Hendon – vice-chairman and champion of our ailing club.
The Burroughs still provides a strong sense of a more distinguished past. And, on three consecutive General Election nights, we gathered beneath the balcony of Hendon Town Hall to hear Maggie Thatcher – whose constituency was neighbouring Finchley – deliver her victory addresses.
The study room of the adjacent Hendon Library was where we revised for our O and A level examinations. Its stereotypically plain librarians – remember the lovely “Olive Oil”, anyone? – would never fail to take the bait of pranksters who would ring up asking for “Mike Hunt”. During the heat and pressure of summer exams – as frum (primarily Hasmonean) boys had their closest exposure yet to non-religious Jewish and Gentile girls – there were more Jewish erections in that room than on your average West Bank hilltop.
Raleigh Close (Hendon United) Synagogue still is, for me, Shul. A reader of melchett mike has opined, interestingly, how Reverend Hardman z”l, Rabbi Silberg, and the incumbent Rabbi Ginsbury “so accurately represented, and represent, the state of Anglo-Jewry at the time”. 
And shammes (beadle) Moshe Steinhart (right) became an inadvertent communal legend, his wonderfully naive, malapropistic weekly announcements sparking more hilarity than your average stand-up comedian.
Last month, at the lacklustre Kol Nidrei (Yom Kippur eve) service in Tel Aviv’s Great Synagogue, my mind wandered back to the atmospheric Raleigh Close Kol Nidreis of my childhood and youth, where Hendonite coreligionists whom one hadn’t seen for an entire year would spend the entire service awkwardly rearranging their garish kippot (skullcaps) – each with its own unmistakable year-long crease across its middle – on their often equally shiny bonces.
But Hendon possessed a wider sense of community too. Every Sunday morning and summer evening, there were “pick up” games of football in Hendon Park, where Jewish kids, black kids, Greek kids, and those from local council estates, would all muck in very happily (Asian Muslim kids however never did, the first time we became aware of any “them ‘n us” tension, though it was of course to get much worse). And there were real characters there too (whatever became of “Mad” Dave?)
But all that has gone.
I still see Stuart – known as “Rushie” in those games because of his remarkably cool (for park football), Ian Rush-like finishing – on my increasingly infrequent visits to London. He still lives in Hendon, and bemoans the changes there, not least the increase in crime and general feeling of insecurity on its streets, which he blames on the influx into the neighbourhood of eastern Europeans.
Whatever the accuracy of his analysis, there is a perceptible dearth of ethnically English people left in Hendon. These days, the roads not sufficiently desirable for Jews to inhabit are occupied primarily by Asians and the eastern Europeans who Stu so decries. There is virtually nothing “English” about Hendon left. And – however un-PC, and impertinent for a Jew, to say so – that strikes me as sad.
Hendon was our shtetl, our East End: good times and great memories . . . though I, for one, would not want to be back there.
I had the strong feeling that the ensuing interview was only being conducted because it ought to be, and that, as far as Rabbi Roberg was concerned, it didn’t really matter anyway because, after all, I was only a French teacher. When he heard that my degree was in German and Spanish too his eyes lit up, presumably thinking of the cost-effectiveness of this arrangement. I insisted that I had had no experience of teaching German and had forgotten most of what I had learnt. So, of course, I was told I would be perfect for the sole A-level student (who, incidentally, was quite brilliant and taught me a thing or two).
This site is a shame on all of us normal people who have a great deal to be thankful for to Hasmo. If Mike and Co. won’t close it down themselves, or at least remove the offensive comments about teachers and Rebbes and start to be more positive and grateful, then the rest of us should not give it any support by contributing any comments to this site. It is a disgrace to all of us ex-Hasmos! Let’s silent this scab! After all, most of us ex-Hasmos know full well that wherever we go in the world, Hasmo is known and its ex-pupils are looked up to – and with good reason! But these malcontents want to spoil all that. For why? Of course we all know that there were/are areas that could have been better. OK, so what? Does that cancel all the good that is Hasmo?
Well, I’ve gone on for long enough. Perhaps I shouldn’t have come down so heavily but I know that some of the comments about some of the people are most unkind and really have hurt the feelings of the people concerned, Jew and non-Jew alike. Every human being has feelings, and if he hasn’t, then he’s not human. Which makes one wonder about the person who runs this site, does it not?
And the good story does not relate to the start of the eighteenth Maccabiah Games. I can’t get too excited about a “Jewish Olympics” . . . which, for me, is about as interesting as an Islamic beer, or Christian Klezmer music, festival.
For a sporting “minnow” like Israel – which, less than four years ago, was on the brink of virtual disappearance from the international tennis map – to beat the mighty Russia 4-1 and reach the Davis Cup semi-final (in Spain, in September) is little short of sensational. Indeed, alongside Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball team’s five European Cups, it must go down as one of Israel’s greatest sporting achievements (and further poetic justice following 
These anti-Zionists do not recognise the sovereignty or legitimacy of the secular State of Israel, and – like other, merely non-Zionist, charedim (for a brief background on charedim and Zionism, click 
Anyway, my suggestion to all of those charedim who don’t like it here in Israel, do not recognise and respect the country’s laws, and/or who oppose the very basis of the State – like the Neturei Karta filth who demonstrate against Israel alongside the most hateful of anti-Semites, 
In spite of my late father having been a brilliant mathematician and physician, I was hopeless at both maths and the sciences. Indeed, Hasmo’s science labs were as uninviting to me as its gym was for some of the more pasty NW11 and N16 frummers (the sensitively-named, by Chich, “spastics”). I hated the places (my only enjoyment being to poke a sharpened pencil through the inviting – what other purpose did it serve? – slit in my neighbour’s high stool).
Flop, in appearance a kind of Semitic Brian Blessed, was a strange bloke to say the least. His behaviour could vacillate between the genial and the almost cruel (sideburn yanking being his punishment of choice), and his fondness for Bissli snacks (barbecue flavour) usually resulted in more finding their way into his unkempt beard – nestling there for the remainder of the school day – than into his not insubstantial stomach. And those squawking noises – “Urrrggh, Isaacson . . .” – have not been heard outside the Star Wars movies or Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.
For five long, unforgiving years, I sat in the maths B group of Simon Lesser (back row, fifth from left). If he had explained his algebra and geometry in some obscure dialect of Urdu, I would have had no less idea of what he was on about. And, for half a decade, my end of year maths results always hovered around 30 to 35 percent.
When the second of the excerpts, above, continued that “It was no wonder Margaret Thatcher relied so greatly on him for economic issues”, it dawned on us that we had the wrong Alan Walters – Sir Alan (right), Chief Economic Adviser to the Iron Lady . . . as opposed to “Big Al”, whose sympathies lay rather closer to the Iron Curtain, and who would have had considerably more time for Mrs. B than Mrs. T.
Wild eyes, staring out from beneath a forest of black hair – which looked like it hadn’t been trimmed since his bar mitzvah, when “Granny” Walters had a go at it with her garden shears – Big Al had much of the dishevelled, angular awkwardness (if rather less of the talent) of Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker (left).
Big Al seemed to get through myriad old bangers during his time at Hasmonean, but one in particular, a bright red Citroën 2CV, will be forever etched in our memories. How expectantly we gazed, as the “deux chevaux” bounded and creaked over the potholes of the front playground, just waiting for all four wheels to drop off simultaneously, for a jet of water to shoot up from the bonnet, flowers to sprout through the roof, and for Big Al to be ejected by his seat springs, accompanied by a rude raspberry sound.
This is a fascinating line of speculation: did Alan Walters perchance join Hasmonean’s teaching staff an earnest and talented young historian, keen to make his mark on academia, but – like Jack Torrance (left) in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining – become inebriated by the sheer madness of the place?
I have one particularly vivid recollection of “Jeff” walking up the playground from the Sixth Form Block, while my classmate Abie Cohen – seated in the middle of our 
I recall Mr. Marks fondly, not just because his was my favourite subject (it didn’t face much competition), but because he was one of the few teachers at Hasmonean who actually attempted to treat us like adults. This was especially true for those of us who took English Literature A Level, which presented the first opportunity for us, largely repressed, Jewish boys to explore sexual themes through literature . . . an opportunity we rarely missed.
Mr. Marks was frustrated by the “study aid” mentality of Hasmo boys. Rather than appreciating the rich source texts, we would buy up Dillons’ stock of Pan Study Aids, and York and Brodie’s Notes. For English Literature O Level, my classmate, Grant Morgan, went so far as to purchase Macbeth in comic form. He memorised the text by rote, and would walk up to puzzled boys in the playground – some of whom didn’t even know him – proudly proclaiming “So foul and fair a day I have not seen.” He got an E.
melchett mike 
