Contributed Stories

Wally Walters

Islington stalwart Wally Walters (1902-1987) started life several miles away from N1, in Euston NW1, where his father Harris was a prominent tailor known as ‘the guvnor’ to all the Irish navvies for whom he made suits. Famous locally for winning a flat in Camden Town in a game of poker, Harris expanded his business interests by buying 104 Upper Street in Islington around 1918.

The shop was initially run as a dry-goods store by Harris’s son-in-law Issy Israel - Issy’s wife Cissie gave birth above the shop in 1921 to their son Leslie, who became an RAF pilot in World War Two, flying Halifax Bombers and rising to the rank of Flying Officer. Leslie was killed when his plane crashed on 18 November 1943, and when his grandmother Leah Walters – wife of Harris and mother of Wally – passed away a few weeks later, in January 1944, the family were convinced that she died of a broken heart.

Subsequent to Issy Israel operating a general store, 104 Upper Street passed through the family, becoming a tailor’s shop for Harris’s elder son Louis, whose wife Becky gave birth to their daughters Muriel and Shirley upstairs in the premises in 1927 and 1931 respectively.

Wally took over the reins and opened as Walters Furriers in 1947. Prior to this, he had run another of Harris’s business interests, Bayly’s General Stores in Seymour Street near Euston Station, and then spent time in Hull apprenticed to a furrier to learn the trade.

The property interests of Wally’s father Harris weren’t restricted to his tailoring premises in Euston, Bayly’s Stores nearby in Seymour Street with a second branch in Gospel Oak, and 104 Upper Street – family legend has it that he owned a row of six terraced houses in the East End which he sold for £100 each. Today those properties are each probably worth over a million pounds.

But before concentrating on Wally, let’s trace the Walters family in England. Wally’s grandfather Lewis (Harris’s father) was born in Poland in 1815, and married a local girl with whom he had nine children and celebrated a silver wedding anniversary. Lewis’s wife died, after which he married a younger girl, with whom he had a further nine children and again celebrated a silver wedding anniversary.

Lewis came to England in 1881 with his family, including Wally’s father Harris who had been born in Poland in 1873. Harris spent the rest of his life here except for a two-year spell away from his wife and first child when he was in South Africa from 1896 to 1898, making suits for gold miners from a workshop that he set up in a shack.

Wally was born in September 1902, the third of four children. (Wally’s younger sister Beattie achieved family notoriety some years later when she wanted to become engaged but her parents opposed a union because they didn’t think their prospective son-in-law had any prospects. He was a market trader, his name was Jack Cohen and he subsequently founded Tesco.)

Back to Wally. Family legend has it that he was always a lobbus. Before WW1, aged about ten, Harris sent Wally on his own to Margate by train, as there was an egg shortage in London but rumours of plentiful supplies on the coast. Wally made his way to Kent, carefully filled a holdall with eggs and carefully navigating his way back to London. Then he proudly brandished his bag of eggs for parents Leah and Harris to see, before plonking the bag down on the kitchen table and breaking all the eggs.

By 1947, Wally had been married to Annie for 20 years and they, together with sons Martin and Sidney, moved to 104 Upper Street, where Wally’s furriers flourished enough to indulge his passions of betting on the horses, chain-smoking and freemasonry. The manufacture of fur coats was left mainly to Wally’s younger son Sidney, who had joined the business in the early 1950s.

Martin moved to Edgware on marriage in 1957 but continued the association with Upper Street. A chartered accountant practising in Holborn, he placed a plaque outside Wally’s furriers in Upper Street and considered his parents’ fur business as an outpost of his accountancy practice.

Martin was inadvertently involved in one of Wally’s most notorious ‘adventures’ in Islington. You see, Wally wasn’t a car driver – he obtained a licence during WW2 when driving tests were suspended by the government, but he had never driven a car. In about 1949 or 1950, when Martin was 19 or 20, passed his test and bought his first car, Wally insisted on taking it for a spin. Martin protested but Wally insisted. And so Wally turned on the engine, put the car in gear, and drove straight into an oncoming car.

Martin’s reaction wasn’t recorded, but that was the end of Wally’s driving career. It lasted less than five seconds.

Annie busied herself helping in the fur trade (she was an accomplished seamstress) and running the family home, buying from stalls in Chapel Street Market and from the kosher delicatessen, baker and butcher back when Upper Street and neighbouring areas boasted them all. Norman Jacobs the butcher had a shop round the corner in Liverpool Road and Annie’s family loved a good steak!

Meanwhile, Wally was rarely seen without a cigarette in his mouth, and Martin’s older son Simon - Wally’s older grandson - remembers being given half a crown (12½ pence) and being sent to the tobacconist in Theberton Street to buy 20 John Player’s.

Imagine that today, giving money to a six-year-old to go and buy cigarettes. Wally had started smoking aged 10 (and never stopped) - it was a different era.

Annie and Wally were members of Lofting Road shul until it closed in 1958 - Wally was Chatan Torah in 1953. Lofting Road shul had a vibrant community in those days. Some years the shul would hire a charabanc for congregants to see the illuminations at Southend-on-Sea, and every year the Hebrew Classes would have an outing to Virginia Water. One Chanukah there was a party for the congregation and Hollywood star Theodore Bikel was the entertainer. Each child was given a silver 6d piece (2½ pence). Unusually in those days (and unusual even now), the shul had a mixed choir – Wally’s future daughter-in-law Beryl Cramer and her sister Lilian sang in it. This was the thriving community of which Wally and his wife Annie were members.

Wally held prominent roles in several Jewish Masonic lodges, following in the footsteps of his father Harris. Later Wally’s sons Martin and Sidney followed him into the ‘craft’ (as it was sometimes called). Wally held office at Grand Lodge, for which you have to be invited after an exceptional masonic career. Wally’s grandson Simon remembers that when his grandpa died in 1987, the family received a letter of condolence from a masonic body and the letter-heading showed the names of the leaders of the Grand Lodge – all of them were Lords apart from Wally Walters!

Yiddishkeit was important to the family. Being ‘in trade’ (as so many Jews were in those days) meant that they didn't observe Shabbat strictly, but the wider family would gather in the dining room above the fur shop every Saturday afternoon for tea. Wally would allow himself to lock the shop for a few minutes to hear stories from the week just passed, and possibly to watch the 4:15 from Haydock Park or the 4:30 from Aintree.

Until an accumulation of grandchildren in the 1960s necessitated relocating Seder nights to the home of Martin and his wife Beryl in Edgware, the extended Walters clan raucously held two Seders each year at 104 Upper Street, and with the Jewish community having dwindled to the stage that Lofting Road shul closed in 1958 (Poets Road shul closed in 1967), it is possible that the Seders led by Wally were the last held in Upper Street until Rabbi Mendy Korer led annual Seders in Islington Town Hall more than half a century later.

Wally really was embedded in the Islington community, rarely straying away from it. He and Annie rarely – possibly never – went on holiday. In the late-1960s they took a day off to take their grandchildren to Chalkwell near Southend for the day, a trip involving myriad buses and trains, but that is as far as they ventured.

Times change, places change. Wally had been too old for front-line service in WW2, so had been an auxiliary policeman during the war. After he moved to Islington in 1947, he slept each night in his bed upstairs from the furriers with his policeman’s truncheon on the bedside table for almost 30 years - “just in case” - in those days Islington was a working-class neighbourhood full of people who you might describe as ‘characters’.

Upper Street wasn’t yet its modern-day collection of restaurants, coffee shops, clothing boutiques and estate agents. Today’s Upper Street followed a period of ‘trendification’. It can’t be described as gentrification - no gentry were involved.

Having had the property in the family since the end of the First World War, Wally sold 104 Upper Street in 1975 for £27,250, and the site became the dental practice that it remains today.

Retiring to a flat in Edgware to be nearer to grandchildren Helena, Simon and Leslie, the bookmakers and tobacconists of Station Road in that NW London suburb soon became familiar with Wally, but it was in Upper Street that he remained a local legend.