by Jason Lever
Posted on Sun, 01 Dec 2013 18:08:30 GMT
Family and public reaction
In the words of his aunt, Esther Lash (nee Levy), in an unpublished memoir she wrote in 1962 in Australia:
‘He was only sixty-five years of age, and had planned to go to Canada to visit his daughter, Lily [his other daughter, Isabel, was also living in Canada], and grandchildren. His daughter had married a Canadian officer in London during the war, but poor Solly Lever never lived to see them. His wife, as a widow, had a nervous breakdown, poor Annie Lever. This news gave us all a terrible shock, as he was a good man’ (ref: Lash)
In the national and local press reports, he was referred to as ‘
a friendly little man born in Poland’ and ‘
known to Jews in London’s East End as “Uncle Sol”’. A member of the friendly society was quoted as saying ‘
it would be difficult to replace such a lovable and generous man’.
A famous reporter, George Gale (later editor of The Spectator) described Solomon Lever as ‘
a man whom the limelight caught twice’ on page 4 of the Daily Express (ref: Hackney Archives).
Writing on the day of his death in the Daily Express, he was referring back to Solomon’s speech in 1954 at the TUC described in an earlier section. Mr Gale remembered the occasion well, when the issue of German rearmament was ‘
convulsing the Labour Party even more than the hydrogen bomb does today [in 1959]’. ‘
A small, grey man climbed to the rostrum of the Trades Union Congress and made a speech’, a simple speech and one spoken very quietly. He observed that ‘
if there were any votes not yet committed but were ready that day to be swayed it was Solomon Lever who swayed them’.
George Gale concluded by saying that was ‘
just one more death, one more act of lunacy – or panic, or greed. This time it was a good man, a quiet man, a man whose life was given to service’.
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