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Recordiad sain / Audio recording: Alec Lermon
Oral history recording with Alec Melech Lermon 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 1940. My father, Harry, was born in 1897 in a small Russian shtetl called Kublich (in modern-day Ukraine), and was one of eight children. My grandparents knew a man from the same shtetl who settled in South Wales in New Tredegar, so the family ended up there, before moving to Newport and then Cardiff. In 1916, when my father was nineteen, he went to Chicago in America, and I can only speculate that he was either sent by his parents or decided to run away himself because the First World War was raging. After the war he came back to Britain and started a business with his younger brother, Louis, a department store in Cardiff called the Emporium, which they ran for a number of years. I remember in 1945, at the time of the Victory, I was five, and children were all encouraged to dress up and make little floats. I remember the Emporium decorated my tricycle with red, white and blue ribbons and pictures of the King and Queen and maybe Winston Churchill as well. My father was a character, no doubt about it. He had a dog called Boxer. This dog was extremely well trained and didn’t like my father going to work and would track him down during the course of the day. There’s a marvellous story of Boxer getting on the tram and going into town, and when my father went home he was told by the conductor: “Oh, and you owe me a penny for your dog.” There’s another story, in the days when the advertisements in cinemas were just slides and one slide went up: “Mr Lermon, please come to the foyer – your dog is waiting.” When my father and Louis sold the business around 1947, they went into money lending, and as a sideline, they ran dancehalls well into the early ’50s. My father died in 1952. The other big business in the family was the one Morris Lermon started – Lermons in Hayes Bridge Road, Cardiff. Interestingly, Hayes Bridge Road gets its name because when he built the store it was on Bute Street, which had a rather unsavoury reputation, so he campaigned to get the bit of Bute Street north of the railway line changed, and it became Hayes Bridge Road. The name has disappeared, and today the address is The Hayes. Lermons eventually merged with Macowards Department Store in Swansea, eventually merging with Maples in Tottenham Court Road to form Maples Macowards. I went to school in Cardiff and London. I left Cardiff in 1967, and was away for thirty-two years. I lived in Miami in America for a while, but I didn’t get on with the weather or the area. When I returned to Cardiff in 1999, it had become a very interesting city. My uncle Louis was one of the founders of the Reform synagogue but my father wasn’t active. I first joined the Reform community in 1960. Since 2004, I’ve been producing the synagogue’s newsletter. I promised I would do it for just a couple of months, but it’s been many years now. Coincidentally, the very month I started, Cardiff New Synagogue changed its name to Cardiff Reform Synagogue so I decided the newsletter would be called The Reformer and would go out monthly. And here we are, many years later, and I produce one every month on a regular basis, always on time.