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Recordiad sain / Audio recording: Jacqueline Magrill
Oral history recording with Jacqueline Magrill 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 1926. My father came over from Russia around 1908 when he was very young. He first went to New Tredegar, South Wales, where he knew some people from Russia. He started life with very little English and got himself elocution lessons to learn to speak properly. He started off going from door to door selling bits and pieces like sewing things to housewives. One time he went to Lloyds Bank and asked the bank manager to borrow £10. Without any collateral, the bank couldn’t loan him the money, but the bank manager liked the look of my father and gave him £10 from his wallet and the next week my father paid him back. My father later went on to have forty drapery stores all over Great Britain, and every store he ever took over, he made them change to Lloyds Bank because he always felt they started them off. The first store he had was called Lermons, my maiden name, which was in Cardiff city centre. I always had great admiration for my father, and my mother was a wonderful person too. My mother was quite Orthodox as far as food was concerned. She always had staff and if one of them mixed up the meat cutlery with the milk you had to dig them in the earth for twenty-four hours to cleanse them and then wash them afterwards. We had a flowerbed outside our kitchen window and you’d think the cutlery was growing out of the earth. I don’t know if people still do that, but I laugh about it now, what used to happen in my mother’s day. After I left school I went to technical college and got a job with the Ministry of Food. My office was in a house on Cathedral Road. When I told my mother she burst out laughing and said, “That was the room you were born in”, but we had moved when I was a baby so I didn’t remember it. Then I met my husband and we got married, and we had sixty-two wonderful years. He was an amazing person. He died recently aged ninety-six, but he went to work in his office till he was ninety-four. I kept house and was a mum to our two daughters. I used to do quite a bit of voluntary work and made a lot of coffee mornings for various charities. To me, it was always a pleasure and it kept me busy, and I think it’s nice remembering people you’d got to know. I was a member of the Orthodox shul until my daughters got married; then my husband and I moved to the Reform and have been with them for fifteen years. I don’t go every week but when I feel I’d like to. I never learnt to read or speak Hebrew but I can read the English and know what’s going on, and I think it’s very important, if you go to synagogue, to know what the service is about. We’re very lucky, we have the most wonderful rabbi – Charles Middleburgh. He’s a very brilliant man and works very hard. He’s got time for everybody and is a very caring person. I think I have a feeling of belonging to something that is a very wonderful thing to belong to, but also it’s part of me and I don’t really think about it as something different. I don’t feel different from other people, except I feel comforted by the fact that I’m Jewish and I wouldn’t want to be anything else.