What Would Oswald Mosley Have Thought?
Just watching the Holland-England game on the box.
One of the odd things of this match is that Holland are playing in all plain orange and England are playing in plain white. You don’t see that often these days, as marketeers think that fancy strips sell better. The new England strip says that they don’t, as it is selling well. I suspect that something plain is acceptable in many more places like decent restaurants and clubs!
It’s interesting to look at the England side and see how many players are not your average white bloke.
They started with Green, Johnson, Ashley Cole, Ferdinand, Terry, Barry, Beckham, Lampard, Young, Heskey, Rooney. Only Green, Terry, Barry, Beckham, Lampard and Rooney would fall into Mosley’s preferred racial group.
Look at who Fabio Capello would have preferred to play like David James and who he used as substitutes and you might have an England team that line is as James, Johnson, Ashley Cole, Ferdinand, Terry, Barry, Wright-Phillips, Lampard, Young, Heskey, Defoe. Here it’s only Terry, Barry and Lampard.
Does anybody care?
I don’t!
My father wouldn’t have either.
He told me he was there at the Battle of Cable Street, when a coalition of Jews, communists and anti-fascists opposed Oswald Mosley and his supporters marching through the East End of London. But my father wasn’t a communist, although he did have Jewish ancestry, but a left-wing member of the Tory party. That may seem strange today, but race and religion often wasn’t a problem for a lot of Edwardians. It certainly wasn’t for my father, who I never heard say anything racist.
As I get to know my father more from people who met him, I suspect that he was there and his claim that he hit Mosley with a tomato may well be true.
Dr. Egerton White
I am fairly unique amongst people these days in that I was delivered by my GP; Dr. Egerton White.
He was your classic GP of the time in North London. He had the Rover 90 or 110, the corporation, waistcoat and watch-chain, the kindly face and warm hands, and everything else that went with the job.
But why did he come all of the way from Winchmore Hill to my parent’s home in Cockfosters?
It was a drive of about five or six kilometres and all of my friends and neighbours used doctors who were much closer. My father always said that it was because his was one of the first houses built in the area and there weren’t any doctors. He may also have been a client of my father’s printing business. But then that wouldn’t add up, as the house was built in 1936 and I don’t think my father was working there at the time.
It has always been a puzzle.
I can still see Dr. White’s face in my mind, as he came many times to see me at home. I should say, that I also went to see him and his partner, Dr. Curley, at Winchmore Hill just as many times too. It was an unusual face in that it was round and covered in dark pigmented spots.
Only now, do I know what the problem is with my health. I am a coeliac, which means I’m allergic to the gluten found in wheat, barley and rye. But in those far off days of the late 1940s and early 1950s, no-one knew how to diagnose my problem. He thought I may have had an egg allergy, but try as he could, he missed the diagnosis. Incidentally, go through my medical notes and you’ll see all sorts of symptoms that now I put down to being a coeliac.
Note that I don’t use coeliac disease. I suffer from a diet-controlled non-illness.
One incident stands out. At about seven, I caught scarlet fever. Or did I?
I had all the symptoms and was placed in isolation at home. But according to Dr. White, I was the only case in London. So was it some weird manifestation of my allergy. I don’t know and I suppose I could find out if I had a test for the antibodies. But does it really matter? No! In the grand scheme of things.
About seven years ago, I bought a new car. The salesman had the same skin colour with the pigmented spots as Dr. White. And the salesman was black or of mixed-race!
So does this partly explain the reason how the good Dr. Egerton White came to be my family’s doctor in North London?
The Anonymous Widower 