Roots - Cyril

40 Warren Lane, 

Friston, nr Eastbourne, 

East Sussex,  BN20 0EP 

23rd of February 1984

Dear Ruth

Reading your letter, I recognised at once that I had for a great-niece a true Davnob. The chutzpah showed through! Faced with the problem of such a mind-boggling project as the production of a mini-family saga, what better and more effective way of dealing with it than on a work-sharing basis. And what are families for anyway? And another thing – they really do enjoy talking and writing about themselves anyway – isn't it?

More seriously, Ruth, I have enjoyed doing my part of your project, and what I'm sending you is just a fraction of what initially resulted from this exercise in recollection of things past. The fact is that there are many oddities of recollection that come to mind in the probing of memory over such a long period of time. But for the most part they're intimate things of great personal interest but not really relevant to your project.

What does emerge as interesting and maybe relevant, is our situation as a large Jewish family, living in a largely gentile neighbourhood in the decade before and after 1929. In the earlier period in Hull I cannot recollect ever being aware of anti-Semitism. For instance, I have a memory of our Rabbi – a powerful and distinguished figure with a full red beard – walking to Shul on the sabbath with wife and children following respectfully in the rear, and always respectful gentile spectators enjoying the weekly ceremonial procession.

It was not until the early thirties that I, at any rate, felt the full impact of the anti-Semitic poison, and this, of course coincided with the emergence of Mosley and his blackshirts meeting at street corners, and also the rise of Hitler. But what really brought the whole evil flavour home to me was the visit of our cousins, Harry and Joe, from Kaunas in Lithuania. They werel personally under threat. They returned to Kaunas – and disappeared forever.

It is true that the "pull" of the Zionist dream was in itself sufficient to attract Jews everywhere to the movement. But it is also true that the growth of anti-Semitism in the thirties was an additional and very positive spur. And all of us Davidsons and Nobles were in the mid-thirties involved in one way or another as active young Zionists.

But in those far off days I suspect that none of us really believed that fifty years hence we would have close relatives – and in Sophie's case children and grandchildren – living and working, and being educated in the Israel of today as Israeli citizens. For your grandparents, Ruth, it is a dream come true! 

We are all well here and are pleased to hear that everything is going so splendidly with you all in Haifa.

Give our love to your parents and the boys. 

Much love to you, 

Cyril.

Cyril Davidson

I was born in Hull on September 6, 1915, the eighth of my parents’ nine children, and the fifth of their six sons.

We lived in a three storied terraced property in a main road which ran parallel to the Docks. On the ground floor and facing the main road was our shop, from which my father ran his tailoring business, and my earliest recollections include the memory of a room behind the shop on which he sat at a sewing machine. Behind the workroom was a passageway which led to the nerve centre of the Davidson household – the kitchen. Here, always full to overflowing with my brothers and sisters and their friends, and full to overflowing also with talk and noise and warmth, and the delicious smell of baking and cooking, Mamma reigned, and my older sister, Sophie, supervise the activities of her younger sisters.

I attended the local elementary school at the age of five, and at the same time started cheder classes, one hour each weekday evening, and two hours on Sunday mornings. The latter came to an end with my bar mitzvah at the age of 13, and schooling finished a year later when, just before my 14th birthday, the family moved to London.

Within the first few days in London I managed to find a job as a messenger boy at the great liberal newspaper, the News Chronicle, where I began my career in newspapers on Monday, September 3, 1929, just three days before my 14th birthday.

I moved through various sections of the paper until the outbreak of the war in September 1939, when as a member of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, I was called up, and for the next six years served on minesweeping trawlers, operating all around the UK, and later much further afield off South and Eastern Africa, and in the Indian Ocean.

There was one brief and memorable interlude from my minesweeping activities when, on April 16, 1942, having obtained compassionate leave, and armed with an emergency wedding license, Kate and I were married at the Tottenham registry office. Six days later after a brief honeymoon at a war-rationed hotel in Surrey I sailed for Zanzibar.

I returned to the UK and was finally demobbed in October 1945, and by the end of that year was carrying on where I’d left off six years previously, at the News Chronicle. 

The action then switched to the domestic front!

Liz, my daughter, was born on April 9, 1946. 

John was the next arrival, on August 27, 1947. 

Three years later Paul arrived, on October 17, 1950. 

Then after a gap of 10 1/2 years, our youngest, Ben, was born on April 3, 1961.

In November 1953 I received an attractive offer to join the old Daily Herald as deputy circulation manager, and took up this new post in January 1954.

In 1963 I was appointed circulation manager of The Sporting Life, and later Reveille, and various other group publications became additional responsibilities, all of which I shed in October 1971 when I was appointed circulation manager of the Mirror group's flagship, the Daily Mirror, which was the biggest selling daily newspaper in the western world.

My final promotion came in and in October 1975 when I was appointed deputy director of the Mirror group.

I retired in September 1978 on the 63rd birthday, and in 1979 we moved from Beckenham to Friston in Sussex where we now live in a small house on a hill looking out onto the Sussex Downs and the sea.

Liz, our eldest, lives nearby in Crowborough, in a large converted old Victorian rectory, and has two children, Karen who is nearly 17, and Raffy aged 8.

John, who is a company lawyer with Ciba-Geigy, lives in Surbiton, Surrey, and is married to Roberta, and has a small baby girl, Louise.

Paul lives in Peckham, London, and is it present a trainee London bus driver. He has a three-year-old daughter, Tamara.

Ben is in his fourth and final year, at Keele University, and his immediate ambition is to travel to India next year on a bicycle!