86 Whitechapel High Street
Contributed by Survey of London on July 11, 2018
Within this unassuming, indeed dull, little building that might have been
knocked up any time in the past thirty years, lurks a much earlier house,
probably mid-nineteenth century. Only the floor heights indicate its age.
Alterations and extensions have, grandfather’s axe-style, eroded possibly all
original fabric, though a 19th-century outbuilding, part of No. 87 since it
housed the George Yard Mission in the 19th century, survives to the rear.
Until the Second World War No. 86 was stuccoed, the frontage flanked by giant
pilasters, the windows with scroll-bracketed pediments, the whole topped with
a cornice. These decorative affectations were scraped off after war damage,
the depredation completed by refronting in brownish bricks and concrete cills,
brown metal windows and a projecting tiled mansard attic c. 1991. In the
nineteenth century the building housed one of the longest-lived businesses on
the High Street, John William Stirling, pharmaceutical chemist, who arrived in
1816 and remained till his death there in 1871. His business, whose frontage
bore a royal crest in the 1880s, was sustained on an impressive range of
Stirling’s Pills, aimed variously at women, children and officers of the army
and navy, claiming to cure everything from gonorrhoea to flatulence. It
continued as a chemist’s until 1930 when Samuel Prevezer, wholesale hosier,
took over: ‘My grandparents, Sam and Fay, waited outside the stocking
factories where each night the rejects were thrown out. They matched them up
and sold them off their barrow in the East End. Eventually they made enough to
buy a proper shop, S. Prevezer Hosiery in Whitechapel High Street’. It
remained Prevezer’s until the 1970s, when another hosier took over until it
became a bureau de change in the 1990s, and from 2004 a café.
Samuel Prevezer remembered
Contributed by Aileen Reid on Nov. 2, 2016
From The Worst it Can Be is a Disaster (2007), the autobiography of the
theatre director Braham Murray (b. 1943):
'My mother's paternal family name was Prevezer. Originally there were seven
sons and four of them escaped from the Nazis to England. They came over on the
onion boats with nothing. My grandparents, Sam and Fay, waited outside the
stocking factories where each night the rejects were thrown out. They matched
them up and sold them off their barrow in the East End. Eventually they made
enough to buy a proper shop, S. Prevezer Hosiery in Whitechapel High Street
[No. 86]. The moved to Finchley; Uncle Jack, the richest, to Brighton; Uncle
Barney to Mayfair; and Uncle Max to Regent's Park.
....The curse of the Prevezers was total emotional constipation. Inside they
were cauldrons of feeling but none of it could be expressed.... If you gave my
grandfather a present, he'd look at it with worry on his face and say, "How
much costs such a thing?" Inside he was delighted.'