Early History
The title "43 Group" came from the number of people in the room of Maccabi House during the group's founding meeting. The instigators of the foundation meeting were Morris Beckman, who served in the Merchant Navy in World War II and was torpedoed twice, Gerald Flamberg, Middleweight boxing champion, 156 Battalion, who won the Military Medal at Arnhem during Operation Market Garden, Leonard Sherman, martial arts expert (Welsh Guards), and Alec Carson, who flew Hawker Hurricanes in the Battle of Britain. A 17-year-old Vidal Sassoon, joined the group in 1947, and went on to fight in the Israeli Defence Forces during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and later founded an international hairdressing empire.
The group grew to include many hundreds of men and women, and not all Jewish. The initial membership was of around 300 people and included holders of bravery decorations, a VC (Petty Officer "Tommy" Gould) Thomas William Gould, DSOs, DFCs, DSMs and MMs. The organisation was sometimes portrayed by its enemies as a front for either Jewish terrorists or communists, but this was not the case and it was mostly composed of British ex-servicemen.
Read more about this topic: 43 Group
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or history:
“It is easy to see that, even in the freedom of early youth, an American girl never quite loses control of herself; she enjoys all permitted pleasures without losing her head about any of them, and her reason never lets the reins go, though it may often seem to let them flap.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)