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![]() Sheila Peacock Sheila Peacock is a former mayor of Tottenham and the organiser of Bruce Grove's annual carnival. She has spent all her life in the street. "The shops have all changed - from ordinary, plain, English-type greengrocers and grocers. It's wonderful really, that you can buy all these different foods in just one small street, whereas before it was English or nothing. My grandparents lived in Kiev, and at the turn of the century it was very bad to be a Jew in that particular area. They literally fled with just their few belongings wrapped up in a tablecloth. That's how they arrived in England. When my grandfather came over he couldn't speak any English, and when they asked him what his name was he didn't understand. So he said to them in Yiddish that he was a schneider - a tailor - so they wrote down Schneider as his name. So we had Fanny and Samuel Schneider from Russia. There have been Jews here for a very long time. When my parents came to Tottenham it was because there were other Jews here - there were synagogues here already. It was very quiet - mostly white people, you very rarely saw anybody that wasn't white. If they were different they might have been Orthodox Jews or something like that. I was at my father's shop one day in the 1950s and my father said 'quick, come, look out the door - there's a black man walking down the street.' But after a few years you didn't think anything of it - and certainly nobody ever rushed out to see a black man passing because nearly every man that passed was black." ![]() |
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