My ancestral voyage from rag traders in London to musical icons in Sydney

COLIN SHINDLER discovers an unlikely lineage from his working class forebears to the 'father of Australian music'.

Forty years ago, I began to explore my family tree and wrote a letter to the delightfully named Reverend Sunshine at the Chief Rabbi's Office in London. In a pre-computer age, he was the keeper of the records of Jewish births, marriages and deaths. I asked him specifically about my mother's family — the Nathans — and discovered that they and their forebears had been living for centuries in the impoverished East End of London near the Tower of London and the River Thames.

The Nathans were mentioned in the first British census of 1841 and they clearly went back to at least Napoleonic times. They were settled in London long before the great wave of Ashkenazi Jews which followed the pogroms in the Tsarist Empire in 1881. I discovered that my antecedents were not eminent rabbis who delivered learned sermons in shul or Jews who had pulled themselves up by their bootstraps to become captains of industry. They were peddlers and hawkers as far back as I could reach.

In my immediate family, my grandfather followed the illustrious path of his ancestors and became a bookmaker, as did two uncles. My father was a gents' tailor who worked hard in a factory all his life while my mother took in clothes to sew buttonholes on jackets. My roots were in the proud Jewish working class.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, several family members would have been involved in the trading of old clothes. There had been a Rag Fair in Rosemary Lane since 1700. Janice Turner, who wrote her doctoral thesis on Rosemary Lane, described it as possessing “one of the most powerfully articulated reputations for disorder of any London street. In the imagination of both novelists and social investigators, it was thought to be squalid, dangerous, dirty - the stereotypical ‘den of iniquity’.”