Administrative/biographical history

The Brady Club for Working Lads was established in 1896 in Durward Street, London E1. The project was driven by Lady Rothschild and other philanthropists who wanted to improve the social quality of life and help to Anglicise the East End Jewish boys, who came mainly from East European refugee families, and whose common language was Yiddish. The building was situated behind Whitechapel tube station in what was then Bucks Row, now called Durward Street.

In 1900 the Brady Boys’ Club, the only Jewish Youth Club in the country at that time, was admitted to the membership of the London Federation of Working Boys Clubs which offered the opportunity to compete in sporting activities with youth clubs cross the capital; a huge step on the road to acceptance and integration. This meant that Jewish children of Yiddish speaking refugees from the Russian Empire, Ukraine, Romania and Poland were now fully-fledged members of a London-wide youth organisation that had never previously had Jewish children in its ranks.

Elsie Cohen (later Lady Janner) established the Brady Girls’ Club in 1925, which occupied the same building until 1935 when the girls moved to a purpose-built centre in Hanbury Street, London E1. She invited Miriam Moses OBE JP to be the Chairman of the Club, a position Miss Moses held for 25 years. By 1960, when the Boys’ Club moved from Durward Street to amalgamate with the Girls’ Club in Hanbury Street, the average nightly attendances exceeded 200. The Club left the East End for the suburbs in 1976.

The Club building in Hanbury Street continues to serve the local community as the Brady Arts & Community Centre.

Scope and content

In 1979 Hannah Charlton, a former editor of the Sunday Times, obtained a cache of approximately 1,300 photographs from the Museum of Labour History at Limehouse in the East End of London. She had been working as a freelance music journalist and writer, and when a move to a new building forced the Museum to dispose of some of its holdings, she offered to take the photographs and find a use for them. Not having a specific project for the photographs, she retained the collection and, with the help of photography curator and editor Zelda Cheatle, eventually donated it to the East End Archive at The School of Art, Architecture and Design at the London Metropolitan University in 2016. At this time, the provenance of the photographs was unknown and the collection formed the basis for an exhibition entitled Nostalgia is not Enough curated by Susan Andrews and the East End Archive at the Cass Foyer Gallery for Women's History Month in 2017. By chance, members of the Brady Club who were the subjects of the photographs saw this exhibition and began the work of identifying the content of the collection. The entire collection is now archived at the Bishopsgate Institute.

Quantity

4 Boxes.