How a diatribe in a newspaper led my mom to forsake her heritage

Almost 30 years have passed since my mother, Phyllis, died from cancer of the brain, and it still hurts my heart to remember how she suffered so bravely through two gruelling but unsuccessful operations to remove her tumour and months of chemotherapy.

Yet my saddest memory is that of a woman who yearned for spiritual comfort and the reassurance of an afterlife, but feared what might become of her because — many years earlier — she had felt compelled to relinquish her Jewish faith.

During her final days, she would ask me to take her to Christian churches dotted around Morecambe, in Lancashire, and sit with her as she tried to pray for salvation, only to give up after a few minutes and say — with a wistful smile — that it was just no good: she must be ‘talking to the wrong God’.

The denouement to this painful story came after she died. Though mother had asked for a religious funeral, she hadn’t attended a synagogue — nor any place of worship — for decades and hadn’t specified where she wished to be buried, so my sister Karen and I didn’t know who might conduct the service.

As Phyllis had given English lessons to a young Polish Orthodox priest during her illness, he eventually agreed to lead the prayers — but only after receiving a special dispensation from his bishop in London, who insisted he must wear secular clothes rather than his robe and collar.

As her forbears had migrated to Britain from Eastern Europe, she now lies in the Polish section of a Lancashire cemetery, where her headstone is the only one to bear an English surname among row upon row of ‘-owskis’.

Poignant memories. They are never far from the surface, and they came rushing back last week, when I read Michael Gove’s landmark speech about the frightening ‘explosion of anti-Semitism’ now gripping Britain. (Before he announced that he was stepping down as an MP.)

With hate crimes against Jews at a record high, having risen by 147 per cent in 2023, the Communities Secretary described the ever-mounting threat to the safety of Britain’s 275,000 Jews as ‘the canary in the mine’.

He used this metaphor — a reference to the days when coalminers carried caged birds down the pits to detect the presence of poisonous gas — to stress that our entire democratic system would be imperilled if we failed to safeguard the nation’s Jewish population.

‘When Jewish people are under threat, all our freedoms are threatened,’ Gove said. Reminding us how anti-Semitism has morphed down the ages, from the crude religious prejudice of medieval times to the warped doctrine of ‘ethnic purity’ promulgated by the Nazis, he urged us all to learn the lessons of history.

It was a bold cri de coeur. In truth, however, anti-Semitism has never been far from the surface in Britain, even in the country’s seemingly welcoming and harmonious corners.

That much I know from the shameful saga that prompted my mother to deny not only her inherited religion but her entire Jewish heritage — and in so doing deprived me of the choice of celebrating mine.

Today, as Gove said, the hate-mongers are drawn together from all points of the extremist compass, from Islamist to far-Right and far-Left, often disseminating their poison via encrypted internet platforms.

Astonishingly, however, the vile anti-Semitic diatribe that condemned my mother to a lifetime of secrecy was written by a respected local newspaper proprietor and editor who had founded his town’s Sea Cadets Corps and chaired the hospital board.

And it was published amid trifling stories about parking offences and planning applications in the usually benign columns of the ‘Morecambe & Heysham Visitor’.

More extraordinarily still, the editor, James Caunt, saw fit to print his inflammatory rhetorical attack on the Jews just two years after the British public had been awakened to the full horrors of the Nazi death camps.

Before I tell you what he said, I should briefly relate my family’s history. The ancestors of my maternal grandfather, Marky Wood (a shortened and anglicised version of the name Scheinholz) fled to Britain in the mid-1800s to escape the pogroms in Russian-occupied Poland.

Decanted at Grimsby docks, they established a thriving tailoring business and the rabbi among them helped found the town’s synagogue, where there is still a plaque in his honour.

The enterprising Marky bought a decommissioned Royal Navy frigate, converted it into a trawler, and started a wholesale fish company that supplied high-end West End restaurants and fed the penguins at London Zoo. Along with three brothers, during World War I he also served with distinction in the Household Cavalry.

My grandmother, Leonora Bresler was born and raised in the Polish city of Kalisz and came to this country in her teens, along with several brothers and sisters, at the turn of the 20th century, also to escape purges against the Jews.

Had she remained, she would doubtless have been murdered by the Nazis, for when World War II started there were some 18,000 Jews in Kalisz. By 1945, just a few dozen survived.

Granny Leo had arrived in Grimsby speaking only Yiddish and carrying just a bagful of clothes, but she, too, worked ferociously hard and reaped the rewards. By the late 1930s, the dressmaking business she and her sisters started in a back-room had gained a foothold in London.

She moved into the elegant Marylebone apartment where pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rosetti was raised, holidayed on the French Riviera, and sent my mother to a Jewish finishing school in Switzerland.

Then the War came, and they were evacuated to Lancashire, acquiring a cottage near Morecambe. My mother joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service, rose to officer rank, and was co-opted into the fabled team that cracked German codes at Bletchley Park. After she was demobbed, she and my granny (by then divorced from Marky) opened a thriving fashion shop in Morecambe.

Down the years, they had frequently encountered bigotry and discrimination. In a memoir my mother left for me, she describes the discomfort of being the only Jewish girl at her secondary school, where classmates tricked her into eating rabbit droppings by pretending they were chocolate and the parents of her best friend banned her from visiting their house.

All this had led them to stay under the radar. Though they observed many aspects of their Ashkenazi culture — particularly when it came to food — they were cautious in revealing their Jewish background. Indeed, having remarried to the owner of a local hunting and fishing store, my grandmother lived like an English country gentlewoman — though she never managed to hide her accent.

My mother, for her part, had come to regret allowing the religious aspect of her heritage slide, and periodically considered a committed return to the synagogue.

All such thoughts were expunged on Wednesday, August 6, 1947, when she and my mother read their copy of the ‘Visitor’ newspaper.

James Caunt was a man of trenchant views and considerable civic clout who modelled himself on Winston Churchill, right down to the outsized cigar. Ordinarily, he used his opinion column to pronounce on parochial matters, such as the town council’s unholy decision to open parks for bowls on Sundays.

Yet on this day, Morecambe’s self-appointed moral guardian put local concerns aside to unleash a vicious attack on the Jewish race.

Then, as now, Palestine was in ferment. With the birth of the Israeli state still several months away, and thousands of displaced European Jews pouring into the British protectorate, our war-weary troops were struggling to keep the peace between Jews and Arabs.

But they were coming under attack from ruthless Zionist extremists determined to force independence through hastily, on their terms.

Their terror campaign reached its nadir in late July 1947, when they assassinated a soldier from Blackpool, just along the coast from Morecambe, and hanged two corporals from eucalyptus trees in retaliation for the execution of three of their captured fighters.

The leaders of Britain’s Jewish community were appalled by these atrocities and laid a wreath at the Cenotaph in memory of the murdered soldiers.

However, after a photograph of the dangling bodies appeared on the front of a British newspaper there was a ferocious nationwide backlash stretching from Plymouth to Glasgow. Synagogues were torched and daubed with vile slogans, and the windows of hundreds of Jewish businesses and homes were smashed.

The fires had barely stopped smouldering when the Visitor’s editor poured oil on them. The first few words of his editorial column, which I keep in an archive, quite simply take the breath away.

‘On the morn of the announcement of another catalogue of pains and penalties,’ Caunt began (referring to a new raft of post-War austerity measures announced that same day) ‘there is little about which to rejoice greatly except the pleasant fact that only a handful of Jews bespoil the population of our Borough.’

Unapologetically declaring that this was ‘an outburst of anti-Semitism’, he continued: ‘The time has come for plain speaking. The ‘Visitor’ therefore expresses the hope that Morecambe and Heysham will be spared the residence of any more of the Jewish community!’

In the next few paragraphs, he decried the ‘howls of horror’ from British Jews over the Palestine murders as hypocritical and false.

But then Caunt’s invective sank still lower — moving one national newspaper to later juxtapose his jowly, owlishly bespectacled face with that of Julius Streicher, the propagandist Nazi newspaper publisher sentenced to hang at the Nuremberg trials.

He claimed Britain was ‘in the grip of Jews’ and characterised them as spivs who dodged hard physical work in factories and mines, and hawked food and clothes, still subject to rationing two years after the War, on the black market.

Branding the Jewish community ‘a plague on Britain’, he urged readers to ‘ostracize them’, adding chillingly: ‘Violence may be the only way to bring them to their sense of responsibility to the country in which they live.’

Whether or not Caunt dropped his bombshell with the self-promoting intentions, the fall-out was immediate and far-reaching.

Though the Visitor then sold just 17,800 copies in a pocket of North-West Lancashire, Fleet Street soon latched on to the story of the small-town editor who seemed to be advocating physical reprisals against the Jews. Outraged MPs raised the matter in the House.

Leading the outcry was Left-wing Labour MP Tom Driberg — something of an irony given that insidious anti-Semitism has tarnished the party in recent years, causing Keir Starmer to ban his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn from standing for Labour at the coming General Election. (Corbyn on Friday created fresh ructions by announcing he would run in Islington North as an independent).

Days after Caunt’s article was published, Attorney General Sir Hartley Shawcross referred it to the DPP, and the editor was served with a writ for seditious libel — a charge seldom brought since Georgian times that alleges the incitement to cause a violent conflict between the King’s subjects.

The penalty ranges from a heavy fine to imprisonment. However, this didn’t appear to concern the editor, who quaffed champagne and chomped a cigar when briefly detained in a police cell.

His trial was staged that November at Liverpool assizes — an inappropriate setting, perhaps, given that the city had seen the worst of that summer’s anti-Jewish riots.

The prosecutor, Denis Gerard KC, said Caunt had overstepped the bounds of free speech, but the jury of seven men thought otherwise.

Accepting his claim — that he had never intended to provoke violence, but simply to warn Jews that it might come if they failed to ‘mend their ways’ — it took them just 13 minutes to digest the arcane legal argument and return a not guilty verdict.

Outside Morecambe, this extraordinary case was quickly forgotten. And by the following year the bigots were homing in on a new target — the Windrush West Indians shipped to Britain to ease the labour shortage.

For my family, however, the repercussions were just beginning, and continue to this day.

In court, Caunt had been asked whether he knew how many Jews lived — or as he preferred ‘bespoiled’ — the town’s 42,000 population.

Why, yes, he replied, ‘we made unofficial investigations the other week and we found that there were six Jews resident in our borough.’ He estimated that a further few — ‘less than 10’ — lived in surrounding districts where his newspaper circulated.

Did this handful of unwanted residents include Granny Leo and her sister Sally, who also lived in the area? Did it include my mother?

My family never did find out whether Caunt’s intrepid Jew-hunters had discovered their ethnicity, but with many ‘Visitor’ readers expressing support for his views, they weren’t about to take any chances.

From then they vowed never again to reveal their Jewishness to outsiders. Every small clue to their roots was expunged.

Incredible though it may seem, my mother would not even dare to admit her ethnicity to my own father — the scion of a prominent building firm that constructed many of Morecambe’s landmarks, and the nephew of a former town mayor. Whenever the conversation turned to her early life, she would simply say she was of Polish stock and change the subject.

But the fear of being found out was always there, and one day, when she was in her mid-forties, mum slipped away from home for a ‘minor operation’. When she returned home, I had trouble recognising her, for her nose had been reduced in size and reshaped by plastic surgery and her naturally black hair dyed blonde. Her denial was now complete.

I was 14 when she took me aside and told me in whispering tones of my birthright.

She was terrified about how I might react. After the shock wore off, however, I felt rather proud and excited, for in that post-hippy era, idealistic students were spending gap-years working on kibbutzim rather than staging pro-Palestinian campus sit-ins, and being Jewish carried a certain cachet.

For a time, I considered reclaiming my lost culture and taking religious instruction — though nominally Christian, I would not need to be converted because the Jewish status is matrilineal. But in the end, the hurdles seemed too overwhelming. So, that poisonous editorial altered the course of my life, too.

This is just one small family story. Insignificant, I know, amid the terrible suffering we see today, among Jews and Arabs alike.

Yet with anti-Semitic incidents in Britain at a record high and hate-filled slogans ringing around university campuses and town hall chambers, perhaps it might serve as a reminder of the misery that can ensue from a few malevolent words.

Misery that haunts me whenever I picture my treasured mother sitting in an alien church and reaching out in vain to ‘the wrong God’.