Guys,
I'd not heard of Bernard Buckman, but found this:
It was not until she was in her 50s that my mother, Irene Buckman, who has died aged 103, found her true vocation as a barrister. This came about because I refused to take another exam after graduating from Oxford and said that as she was so keen on the law as a profession, she should take it up.
Her many barrister friends, including Elwyn Jones, who later became Labour lord chancellor, enthusiastically urged her to do so, and she enrolled at Gray’s Inn and was taken on as a junior by Michael Sherrard in Morris Finer’s chambers. She was always meticulous about detail and conscientious in preparing her briefs, which enabled her to overcome her nervousness about arguing a case in public. Her solid success as a defence lawyer led to her being offered prosecution work and she also sat as an acting judge, which she greatly enjoyed: Jones said that, if only she had started earlier, he would have been delighted to appoint her to the bench.
She was born in east London, the oldest child of Mary and Isaac Amiel, who ran a sweetshop and delicatessen called Amiel Corner on Mile End Road. From Central Foundation school for girls, Irene won a state scholarship to University College London, where she studied French and Spanish and met Bernard Buckman at a student dance. Being the only one with a car, he offered to take her home, and did not object when she piled in with half a dozen friends. They were married on Valentine’s Day 1936.
During their honeymoon, Bernard’s family business went bust, so he took a management job at Richard Shops, a small chain selling women’s clothes, and Irene worked as a secretary at the West London Reform Synagogue. When the second world war came, Bernard, unlike many of his leftwing friends, enlisted; Irene’s father was killed working as an ARP warden during the blitz, and she helped her mother run the shop. I was their first child, born in 1941, Rob followed in 1948 and Jennie in 1949. Irene reluctantly agreed to help sort out management problems with a new family business, Ian Peters, which produced knitwear, but did not much enjoy working with her sisters-in-law.
While working as a lawyer, she also found time to lead an active social and cultural life, including writing Twenty Tales from Shakespeare (1963) for children, when she found there was no book to explain Shakespeare’s complicated plots in simple, contemporary language.
Bernard died in 1991; Irene continued to keep up with politics, go to the theatre and play bridge, and returned to the West London Synagogue to help with the senior citizens’ club, most of whose members were much younger than she was. She took enormous, and often critical, pride in her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, to whom she was the embodiment of intellectual rigour combined with loving generosity.
Rob died in 2011. Irene is survived by Jennie and me, nine grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. Peter Buckman
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My apologies - it's from the Guardian - but assume that it is still truthful, being Peter Buckman's obituary about his mother [and father, in effect].
From reading it, I gather that, while he was Jewish and a collector, he was from London, Reformed Jewish & leftist [Nisht undzerer {not one of 'ours'} as we say in Yiddish
], and, at least from 1980 to his death in 1991, not a member of the ICSBS.
My earlier membership directories are in Ireland.
I will ask Susan Page if she or Bob Hall knew him, etc.
I might be the 'Jew Guru'
, but even I could not know every older collector, MOT or not. And I'd rarely if ever be caught dead in a Reform Jewish Synagogue.
Best to all,
Joey