CHAPTER TWO: REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE ON HOUSING

The Epstein family fortunes were founded by Brian’s grandfather Isaac, a Jewish refugee from Poland, who came to Liverpool at the turn of the century. He opened a furniture store, later called I.

Epstein and Sons, in Walton Road, Liverpool. This in turn was taken over by his elder son, Harry, Brian’s father.

It is assumed by many people in Liverpool that the Epsteins have always owned NEMS, North End Music Stores, the name which Brian later made famous locally, through the record shop. But NEMS had been going long before the Epsteins. Jim McCartney, Paul’s father, remembered having a piano which came from NEMS during the First World War.

The Epsteins didn’t take over NEMS till the thirties. It was at the end of the block in Walton Road which contained I. Epstein and Sons and they had always had an eye on it for expansion. Harry saw that its record and music business would fit easily into his furniture firm, but it was the site as much as anything that he wanted when he eventually bought it.

Harry married into another highly successful Jewish furniture family, the Hymans from Sheffield.

He married his wife Queenie in 1933 when she was 18 and he was 29.

Brian, their elder son, was born on 19 September 1934, in a private nursing home in Rodney Street, the Harley Street of Liverpool. Their second son, Clive, was born 23 months later.

With two sons, the fortunes of the Epstein furniture firm seemed assured for many decades to come. Harry and Queenie were living in a large five-bedroomed detached house in Childwall, one of Liverpool’s most desirable residential areas. The Epsteins lived in this house, 197 Queen’s Drive, for the next 30 years, until Clive left to get married. Today it is lived in by the Dean of Liverpool.

The Epsteins lived in some style up to the outbreak of the war. They had two living-in staff – a nanny for the boys and a general help.

All that Mrs Epstein can remember of Brian as a baby is that he was the most beautiful child she’d ever seen. ‘As he began to walk and talk, he developed a very inquiring mind. He always wanted to know everything.’ Brian’s earliest memories are of the great excitement of being taken to visit his relations in Sheffield.

His first school of any sort was the Beechanhurst Kindergarten in Liverpool where he hammered wooden shapes into a plywood board. In 1940, when he was six years old, Liverpool was under heavy bombing and the family were evacuated first of all to Prestatyn, in North Wales, and then to Southport, where there was a large Jewish community. Brian was sent to Southport College where he began his formal education, the beginning of a very long and very unhappy process.

‘I was one of those out-of-sorts boys who never quite fit,’ so he recorded in his 1964 autobiography (A Cellarful of Noise, Souvenir Press). ‘I was ragged, nagged and bullied by boys and masters. My parents must have despaired of me many times.’

In 1943, the family returned to Liverpool and Brian entered Liverpool College, a private fee-paying school. The following year, at the age of ten, Liverpool College expelled him.

‘The official reason was for inattention and for being below standard. I’d been caught in a maths lesson doing drawings of girls. There were other crimes I was supposed to have committed. I’m sure my failings were many.’

He remembered arriving home and sitting on a sofa, with his father saying ‘I just don’t know what on earth we’re going to do with you.’

His mother thinks that in later years he tended to overestimate his own failings at school. She agrees he was hardly happy or successful at any of them, but she thinks it was often as much the fault of the school system as anything. ‘It was just after the war. Schools were hard to get into. There was none of the freedom they have today. They just threw you out if they didn’t like you.’

Brian himself thought that, apart from his own inability to fit in, there might also have been some anti-semitism. ‘I do remember being called Jew or Yid. But it didn’t seem to mean much more than the way a red-headed boy gets called Ginger.’

After his expulsion from Liverpool College, his parents found him another local private school, but they kept him there for only a few weeks. They realized it was the sort of pseudo-posh school that took advantage of such parents, caring little for education but a lot for taking money from wealthy parents who couldn’t get their kids in anywhere else.

In the end they found him a good Jewish prep school called Beaconsfield near Tunbridge Wells.

Here he took up horse-riding, which he loved, and art which he also loved and was encouraged to do for the first time.

At 13 he sat the common entrance exam. This is the examination needed to get into any of the good Headmasters’ Conference public schools. He failed this miserably, but it didn’t stop his parents trying to get him into one of them. Rugby, Repton and Clifton all turned him down. He went eventually to the sort of establishment that will take anybody. This was a very hearty, outdoor one in the West Country. He was forced to play rugby. He was very unhappy.

But his father didn’t give up trying and in the autumn of 1948, just on Brian’s 14th birthday, he got him into Wrekin College, a well-known and established public school in Shropshire.

He didn’t look forward to Wrekin as he’d eventually begun to settle down at the West Country school. He was getting on with his art and at last making a few friends. He wrote in a diary at the time: ‘Now for the Wrekin I hate. I am going there only because my parents want me to … it is a pity because it has been a great year for me. The birth of new ideas, a little more popularity.’

He eventually settled down at Wrekin, at least he found ways of putting the time in. His interest in art continued. He became top of the class in art and decided that he was going to be a dress designer.

‘I wrote to my father that I wanted to be a dress designer, but he was against it. He said it wasn’t the sort of thing for young men to do.’

At the same time, he developed an interest in acting. At home in Liverpool his mother took him to many plays. ‘I used to take him first of all to folderol sort of things. Then later to improve his mind I took him to Peter Glenville. I also took him to hear the Liverpool Phil.’

Brian took a star part in the school’s production of Christopher Columbus. ‘His daddy and I drove down to see it,’ says his mother. ‘We sat through it all and the headmaster came up and asked us afterwards if we’d liked Brian. He was just so good we hadn’t recognized him.’

He left Wrekin when he was 16, without taking his school certificate. No one thought he could ever have passed it. His father was still against him becoming a dress designer, but Brian decided he wanted to leave school and get a job all the same.

‘After seven schools, all of them rotten, I’d had enough. I’d been thwarted in the only thing I wanted to do, so I just accepted anything. On 10 September 1950, very thin, pink-cheeked, curly-haired and half-educated, I reported for duty at the family store in Walton, Liverpool.’

He started as a furniture salesman on £5 a week. The day after he joined he sold a £12 dining table to a woman who had come into the shop to buy a mirror.

He found he was a good salesman. And he enjoyed it. He also started taking an interest in the design and layout of the shop. His father had been naturally pleased that his elder son had at last decided to come into the business. Brian found, to his surprise, that it pleased him as well.

‘Brian always had beautiful taste,’ says his mother. ‘And he always appreciated lovely furniture.’

But Brian didn’t think the store’s window displays were all that lovely. He started experimenting, doing what was considered at the time very daring things, such as putting chairs with their backs to the window. His father thought perhaps he was doing things a bit quicker than was necessary, but didn’t complain as he was so pleased that his son and heir was settling down well in the career he had chosen for him. As further experience he decided to send Brian to another firm, not connected with them, to do a six months’ apprenticeship.

Brian spent the six months at The Times furniture store in Lord Street, Liverpool, still on £5 a week. He seems to have done well there too. When he left they presented him with a Parker pen and pencil set. (The pen was the one he loaned to Paul McCartney a few years later, to sign his first contract.)

After the six months, he moved back to Walton. He began to take over the designing of the whole store. ‘I enjoyed it, especially trying new things. I enjoyed selling as well, watching people relax and show trust in me. It was pleasant to see the wary look dissolve and people begin to think there were good things ahead for them and I would be the provider.’

He had a few rows over his plans for window dressing. ‘They wanted all the windows jam-packed. I preferred very little in the window, perhaps just one chair. I was also crazy about contemporary furniture. It was just coming in and I wanted everybody to know about it. I think if you show the public something lovely, they’ll accept it.’

On 9 December 1952, in the midst of his brave new schemes for I. Epstein and Sons, he was called up for national service. If school horrified him, the thought of the army was terrifying. ‘I’d been a poor schoolboy. I was sure I was going to make the lousiest soldier ever.’

He applied for the RAF and was made a clerk in the Royal Army Service Corps. He did his basic training at Aldershot.

‘It was like prison and I did everything wrong. I turned right instead of left and when I was told to stand still I fell over.’

He managed to get through his square bashing, after a fashion, and even had the notion that he might be chosen to be on parade for the Coronation. The year was then 1953. He thought the Coronation sounded glamorous and exciting and it would be nice to be part of it. But he wasn’t chosen. Instead he went round the pubs and clubs and got drunk.

He was about the only ex-public schoolboy in his intake who didn’t become an officer. But in his off-duty hours, dressed as always in impeccable taste and spending his time in smart West End clubs, he could easily have passed for one.

After Aldershot, he managed to get a posting to Regent’s Park Barracks in London, one of the most desirable postings for young officers around town. He had lots of relations in London and

managed to get out and enjoy himself. He drove himself back one night in a large car, wearing a bowler hat, pin-striped suit and carrying an umbrella over his arm.

As he entered the barracks, the guard saluted him, two soldiers confined to the guardhouse jerked their heads in Eyes Right and a clerk shouted ‘Good night, sir.’ But an officer inside wasn’t so easily misled. ‘Private Epstein. You will report to the company office at 10.00 hours tomorrow morning charged with impersonating an officer.’

He was confined to barracks for some time. It wasn’t his first offence. He’d been guilty of other minor insubordinations, or at least inabilities to do the right thing. ‘The army was generally getting on my nerves. I really was becoming genuinely upset. It was getting me down so much that I reported to the barracks doctor who referred me to a psychiatrist.’

Other psychiatrists were consulted and all agreed that Private Epstein wasn’t one of nature’s soldiers. They agreed that he was mentally and emotionally unsuited to military service. After twelve months, his national service only half completed, he was discharged on medical grounds. As is the way of the army, they still gave him most impressive sounding military references. These described him in glowing terms as a ‘sober, reliable and utterly trustworthy soldier’.

Brian told the story of his army debacle in very cheerful terms, almost hinting that he might have engineered his discharge. But there seems little doubt that he had been seriously disturbed by it all.

He ran all the way to Euston and caught the first train to Liverpool. He went back to the family store and worked very hard. He began to take an increasing interest in the record side. He’d always been interested in music, classical records mainly, but popular music as well. Edmundo Ros was one of his favourites at the time.

But he began to get even more interested in a new hobby, one he had been very fond of at school – acting. He was beginning to realize that perhaps he was more interested in artistic things than being a furniture salesman. He went to every production at the Liverpool Playhouse and began to spend more and more of his spare time either in amateur productions, or in the company of professional actors from the Playhouse. He became very friendly with two in particular, Brian Bedford and Helen Lindsay.

They suggested that he too could be an actor. He had the interest, the right feelings and, they were sure, the talent. Why didn’t he apply for RADA? They would help him. So he applied for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. And he got in.

‘I read two pieces for the director, John Fernald. They were from Eliot’s Confidential Clerk and from Macbeth. I got in without a full audition, for some reason. Perhaps the fact that I had no money problems helped.’

His father, naturally enough, wasn’t particularly pleased. Acting was second only to dress designing in his list of unmanly jobs. But at 22, his son and heir went off again to interrupt his career.

This time willingly, unlike the army. Perhaps even for ever.

He was in the same year at RADA as Susannah York and Joanna Dunham. Albert Finney and Peter O’Toole had just left. While a student at RADA he took a part-time job in a record shop in Charing Cross Road.

‘I was doing reasonably well. John Fernald had great faith in me. But I began to loathe actors and all their social life. I hadn’t enjoyed school. And here I was seven years later in another community life. I just didn’t like it, or any of the people. I began to think it was too late. I was more a businessman after all.’

From the day he’d started RADA his father was always asking him when he was coming back to the business. Each holiday, as he was going back to RADA, he asked him to stay. During the summer vacation of 1957, before he began his fourth term, he asked Brian again over dinner at the Adelphi Hotel. This time he said yes.

His father had decided to open a new branch in Liverpool, this time in the city centre, in Great Charlotte Street. It was hoped it would interest Brian in the firm. Clive, Brian’s younger brother, was by this time also working in the firm.

Brian was in charge of the record department with one assistant. Anne Shelton, the singer, opened the new store. On the first morning the record department took £20. In Walton the record department took £70 in a good week.

‘Most record shops I’d ever been in were lousy. The minute a record became popular, it went out of stock. I aimed to have everything in stock, even the most way-out records.

‘I did this by ordering in triplicate any record that anyone ever wanted. I reckoned that if one person asked for something, there must be others who would want it too. I even ordered three copies of the LP “The Birth of a Baby”, just because one person had wanted it.’

Every customer was encouraged to leave an order for a record if by chance it wasn’t in. An immediate delivery was always promised. Brian worked out a simple but ingenious stock index whereby it could be seen immediately which record had sold out. This consisted of strings attached inside each folder. When any were dangling down, it could be seen immediately that more records were needed. This was checked constantly throughout the day and replacements put in or reordered immediately.

He also worked out his own top twenty best-seller list of the pop records being sold in NEMS.

This was checked twice daily. Apart from being a good gimmick, of interest to customers and an encouragement for them to buy certain records, it also showed him exactly which of the up-and-coming records should be ordered in bulk.

‘I’ve never seen anybody work as hard before,’ says his mother. ‘He seemed to have found something which completely fulfilled him for the first time in his life.’

Brian agreed. ‘I did work very hard. I don’t think I worked physically harder in my life before or after. I started at eight each day and didn’t finish until well into the night. On Sundays I was in the store all day making orders.’

By 1959, two years after opening, NEMS in Great Charlotte Street had an extensive pop and classical department covering two floors of the store. The staff had expanded from two to thirty.

Business was going so well that it was decided to open another branch of NEMS in Whitechapel, the heart of Liverpool’s shopping centre.

The new shop was opened by Anthony Newley. Brian had got in touch with him through a Decca sales contact. The crowds on the opening day in central Liverpool were compared to the return of a triumphal cup-final team. Nobody in Liverpool had seen such a turnout for a pop singer, up till then.

Both shops thrived and expanded. By the August of 1961 Brian was boasting that the two NEMS records departments in central Liverpool in Whitechapel and Great Charlotte Street contained, ‘The finest record selections in the North’. This boast appeared in an advertisement on 31 August 1961, in

Both shops thrived and expanded. By the August of 1961 Brian was boasting that the two NEMS records departments in central Liverpool in Whitechapel and Great Charlotte Street contained, ‘The finest record selections in the North’. This boast appeared in an advertisement on 31 August 1961, in