Vidal Sassoon: Before The Scissors London’s Top Hairdresser Fought With Knives, Coshes And Knuckledusters
Hairstylist Vidal Sassoon is surrounded by models, showing his new cuts for 1976, in London, on Jan.23, 1976. The styles are called, clockwise from lower left; The Hummingbird, Question Mark, Feathers, Tomboy and Silver Lady.
VIDAL Sassoon (17 January 1928 – 9 May 2012) not only a famous hairdresser. He was the son of immgrant Jews and raised in a children’s home:
Sassoon recalled England’s hostile political atmosphere earlier this year: “Anti-Semitism was absolutely rife,” he said in a podcast for the Holocaust Memorial Museum. “I mean, it was nothing for another kid to say to you, ‘Dirty Jew.’ And although England was a good place to be, especially with Churchill and the fight against the Nazis, there was always that sense of the Jews being second-class citizens.”
In 1947, the fascists again began menacing London, this time under the tutelage of Jeffrey Hamm, head of an organization of thugs calling themselves the “Association of British Ex-Servicemen.” For Sassoon, this was not a fate to be accepted lying down.
As a response to Hamm’s provocations, a gathering of young Jews known as the 43 Group—named for the number of people in the room at their founding—announced that the fight back had begun. Among them was the slender, if wiry, Sassoon. As Hamm’s followers gathered on street corners bellowing that “not enough Jews were burned at Belsen,” Sassoon and his comrades, armed with knives, coshes, and knuckledusters, set about breaking up fascist meetings. In another interview, Sassoon remembered turning up for work one morning with a black eye. “I just tripped on a hairpin,” he explained to the worried customer who had just settled into a barber’s chair for a haircut.
Posted: 30th, August 2014 | In: Celebrities Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
