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Recordiad sain / Audio recording: Eric Joseph
Oral history recording with Eric Joseph collected as part of The Hineni Project, an insight into the life and stories of a Jewish community in all its diversity. Hineni was a collaborative project between Cardiff Reform Synagogue and Butetown History & Arts Centre.
I was born in Cardiff in 1927. My mother came from Germany before the First World War and met my father in London, and they got married and moved to Maesteg. My father apparently started off just by carrying glass on his back around the Valleys and replacing people’s windows, and then he had a furniture shop in Maesteg and later Cardiff. We weren’t a very observant family, but there was always a Friday night meal with candles, and my mother used to fry fish and make sweet and sour chicken. I remember going to Krotosky’s butchers on Caroline Street and Zendler’s on Wood Street, with the barrels of gherkins and salt herrings. Queen Street seemed enormous, and it had tram cars running down it, and because it was so dangerous, my older brother David used to put me on his shoulders and walk me across to Woolworths to buy me a toy. After the war started, I was evacuated to a farm in Abergavenny with my sister and one of my aunts. I learnt a lot about the farm and did a bit of work. We used to grow things and it was a happy time. Recently my wife and I were in Abergavenny one day and went to see it. It hadn’t changed a bit. It was a magical day. I went to Roath Park School, and during the war was evacuated to Cowbridge Grammar School where I boarded. There was a bit of anti-Semitism there and I was unhappy, so I ran away in the middle of the night and walked nearly all the way back to Cardiff and got a lift on a milk float. I subsequently became a day boarder. Later I went to the University of Bristol to study dentistry and set up my first dental practice in my mother’s house in Llanedeyrn Road, Cardiff. After a year or so it became so busy there that I decided to move to Cathedral Road, where I had my practice for over forty years.