The Mothers' Hospital

Interviewed by Claudia Jessop

Muriel King was born in South Hackney in 1929, and apart from a spell in Aldgate when she was first married, has lived in Hackney all her life. Both her parents were Jewish. Her mother was born in Odessa in Russia and came to England in the 1920s. Her father was born in London and was a shopkeeper and later a painter and decorator for Hackney Council. He also fought in the First World War. Muriel attended Lauriston Primary School, in its original Victorian London School Board building on Lauriston Road, and Gayhurst Primary School in London Fields. In 1939, when she was ten years old, she was evacuated to Devon. She returned to London in 1942 and the following year she left school to begin work as a shop assistant in Jax’s Department Store in the Narroway. Eventually, she became a window dresser, and worked for Jax’s for the next ten years, travelling all over the country to dress their shop windows. She met her husband, a local gents’ tailor’s cutter, at a family party, and they were married at Brenthouse Road Synagogue. Her first son was born at Mile End Hospital in Bancroft Road, but by the time her second son was born the family had returned to Hackney, and he was born at the Mothers’ Hospital in 1960.  For 23 years, between 1970 and her retirement in 1993, Muriel worked as the receptionist at Frydman's Opticians in Mare Street (formerly Silverman and Frydman, this optician's has been on the same site since just after the second world war). Muriel still lives in the same flat in South Hackney that she moved into with her family 38 years ago. They were the very first occupants, in one of the new blocks built to extend the Frampton Park Estate in the early 1970s.