One Week With John Gulliver - End of an era as people attended Ellen Luby's Funeral

Published: 29th July, 2010

WHERE does the Cockney swagger come from? I have never been able to work it out, and I assume it may have baffled one or two social anthropologists.

But it seemed all around me as I stood outside East Islington Crematorium on Friday.

As the mourners gathered for the funeral of Ellen Luby, my eyes were drawn to one of the mourners, Terry Hutt.

Terry had Cockney stamped all over his face as he hugged an old friend, Harvey Bass: the wide smile that cut Terry’s face in two; the hunched shoulders; the cocky walk. 

It was all there.

I had never thought of Ellen as a Cockney but there was no doubt many of her friends and fellow campaigners were.

And, essentially, she was one too, I suppose.

Animatedly, Terry was reliving how he had been a patient at the University College Hospital when Ellen and scores of campaigners burst into his ward and took it over – with the help of nurses – as a protest against plans to shut down the hospital.

It had been nearly 20 years, but judging by the laughter and excitement you would have thought it had happened yesterday.

Typically, Ellen had been in the thick of it.

But my mind kept on going back to all the Cockneys at the funeral and why they were what they were

I don’t know whether there is a Cockney gene that is passed down the generations, though, so many old working-class Londoners

seem to carry that Cockneyism with them.

You can even see the Cockney swagger occasionally in young black Londoners Ellen absorbed all that and more.

She became the person she was because of where she came from.

But what would she have become if fate had dealt her a kinder hand as a young woman? Imagine her devastation when the man she loved so deeply, her husband, was killed by a German sniper just a few days before the end of the Second World War.

For a moment as I sat in the chapel for her funeral service, I imagined a different Ellen, and how women of her mettle – perhaps with a more disciplined temperament – had become such roaring radicals.

Barbara Castle springs to mind, for instance.

But it would have been the same Ellen, a woman aflame with that burning passion and anger.

A congregation inspired by its princely priest

YOUR eyes may turn to the familiar Royal – Prince Edward, before he later abdicated – in this photograph taken in the early 1930s, but look at the priest standing next to him.

He was a special man, a hero to many in Somers Town.

And over the weekend a service was held at St Martin-in-the-Fields to mark the 75th anniversary of the untimely death of Father Basil Jellicoe.

Reverend John Caster, team vicar in St Mary’s Somers Town, took part in the service presided over by the Bishop of London Dr Richard Chartres.

Revd Caster said it was “an honour and an inspiration” to be serving in the district where Fr Jellicoe worked in the 1920s and 1930s, campaigning to replace slums with decent housing.

Fond memories of the radical Fr Jellicoe have become part of the DNA of the people of Somers Town.

Revd Caster told me:  “I was speaking to women in the Hillwood Centre the other day, who remembered him from their childhood.

“He was young, full of passion and zeal for his Ministry and it was infectious.

“A handsome and vibrant young man, children loved him.

When he was in the street they would follow him.

“There is still a lot of respect for him, even among the younger people who never knew him, because they have been told about him by their parents.”

Fr Jellicoe was part of the Magdalen College Mission, which sent Oxford graduates into some of the most deprived parts of London, where they worked to bring about improvements.

Revd Caster said: “Someone told me he  knew ‘one of those double-barrelled priests’  in Somers Town’ – that is, people from well-to-do backgrounds who went to work in the worst parts of London.

“What they pulled off was nothing short of a miracle. Fr Jellicoe got someone in the film industry to shoot footage of conditions in Somers Town because a lot of people had no idea how bad things were.

“Better housing was built as a result.”

Bishop Chartres said Fr Jellicoe’s deep-rooted beliefs made him able to glimpse the kind of Jerusalem that could be built in Somers Town.

Jellicoe died aged just 36 after suffering from ill health caused partly by the feverish energy he brought to his work.

A coalition of right-minded politicos is a radical thing

I GOT a telephone call on Tuesday evening that made me realise that a kind of political coalition in Camden sprang up long before Cameron and Clegg got together.

My caller, Blanche Mundlak, now 86 and a grand dame of Tory circles in the borough for decades, told me about how well she got on with that veteran Old Labour MP, Frank Dobson.

Blanche still keeps council deliberations in her sights, and this week has fired off a sharp letter about high salaries paid to Town Hall officials.

As if that wasn’t enough to keep her occupied, her diary of appointments for Wednesday was long enough to tire a younger woman.

In the morning, she joined friends – of all political persuasions – at a meeting of the London Friendship Centre, held at the Montague Pyke pub in Charing Cross Road.

Only coffee passed her lips, not alcohol.

In the afternoon she and friends went off to the Commons to have tea with a new Tory MP, Margo James, with whom she struck up a friendship when James fought Dobson for the Holborn seat five years ago.

During the year, when she isn’t involved in Tory politics, Blanche helps friends to raise funds for various charities.
For more than 30 years she ran one of the most popular music shops in the borough, in Eversholt Street, in Mornington Crescent.

A talented violinist herself, Blanche also conducted a successful amateur orchestra.

Her reputation was valued in music circles in the capital, and soon she began to collaborate with that great woman of the theatre, Dame Sybil Thorndike, for performances of Peter and the Wolf.

I suppose another kind of coalition reigned with Dame Sybil, who was known for her support of  radical left wing causes.