The late Alan Coren was a columnist, editor, author, and broadcaster. He was one of the most gifted and loved humourists of postwar Britain, and had a huge fan base in Canada too. He was once profiled by the Jewish Chronicle in Britain, and allegedly waved around a copy of the paper and said, “This is ridiculous —I haven’t been Jewish for years.”
He was though. I should know, because my late parents were at his Bar Mitzvah. My father, Phil, was Alan’s cousin. Not a first cousin, not especially close, and Dad was 15 years older than Alan. But part of the Coren tribe, which always made my dad extremely happy. He was a cab driver, a working-class man from Hackney whose family had come to London in the late 19th-century to flee east European pogroms. Lots of Jewish men in London drove cabs after the Second World War because no family connections were needed, antisemitism wasn’t an obstacle, and with hard work (50-hour weeks, very few holidays) there was a fairly good living to be had.
He generally enjoyed and was proud of what he did, no matter how hard the work or long the hours. But never so proud as when sitting at home in front of the television with tea and a sandwich, and his famous cousin Alan would come on. It was like a statement was being made, a success shared. “See, there’s a Coren.”
I told Alan this over lunch once when I was starting out as a journalist in the early 1980s. I think he already knew. “I once got into a cab in the middle of the day and the driver was Phil,” he said. “We had such a wonderful conversation. He was quite emotional … and so was I.”
Actually, Dad had told me about that meeting. Because he told me about most of how his working days had gone. Kept a diary too, and an autograph book. Working in central London for 40 years meant a surprisingly large number of famous people would at some point get into his cab. Laurence Olivier (“very nice but very tired”), Alan Alda from M*A*S*H (“lovely man but wouldn’t stop talking”), the actor Richard Harris (“very down-to-earth, funny, and seemed genuinely curious about what driving a cab was like”). Dustin Hoffman had an artificial fart balloon with him, which he insisted on showing off.
Legendary actors Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud didn’t say much but were polite, Peter O’Toole seemed to “fill the whole bloody cab with his personality. I liked him.” Nobel-prize winning playwright Harold Pinter was a passenger once, and this was a little more awkward. Dad had been two years above Pinter at Hackney Jewish Youth Club. “Good Lord” said Pinter. “Hello Philip.” My dad was Phil to everybody. Harold, of course, spoke with a refined and educated English accent; my dad, from an identical background, spoke as you’d expect a cabbie to sound — clearly, one of them had worked at their accent.
How well-known people behaved in the cab, and how they treated the driver, had a strange effect on my life as a child. Because many of these people were on television or the news, I’d see them through the lens of my father’s experience. If they were rude or dismissive, we’d hear about it vicariously. For example, I grew up disliking the Formula One World Champion racing driver Graham Hill, even though I’d never met the man. “Bloody cheap sod” was my dad’s biographical analysis. Apparently, he hadn’t given a tip at the end of a long trip. Poor man probably just forgot, but Phil Coren didn’t.
Dad was intelligent, good, and wise. Born two decades later, he would likely have gone to university just as his son did, and the children of so many people from first- and second-generation immigrant families, in Britain and here in Canada. I think that was one of the reasons that he was so proud of his cousin Alan. Proud of his success and abilities, but also because he’d broken the barrier, smashed down the wall.
When our first child was born, a perfect little boy, we gave him a Hebrew middle name. The Hebrew version of Philip, after my dad. That baby is now in his 30s, and just took up a tenured position as a professor of philosophy at an excellent US university. I really do wish that Phil Coren could have seen that. I really do wish he could.
