My funny family

My cousin Alan Coren would have been 85 on 27th June. The former editor of Punch and the Listener, regular panellist on The News Quiz, team captain on Call My Bluff, columnist and author was one of the most gifted and loved humorists of postwar Britain.

When he became editor of Punch, then a bastion of English satire, he was profiled by the Jewish Chronicle. He allegedly waved around a copy of the paper and said, ‘This is ridiculous –I haven’t been Jewish for years.’

He was, of course. I should know because my late parents were at his bar mitzvah. My father, Phil, was Alan’s cousin. Only a second cousin – not especially close – and Dad was 15 years older than Alan. But he was part of the Coren tribe, which always made my dad extremely happy.

I made him happy too, although when I became a Christian in my early twenties, his response was: ‘Fine – just don’t tell me about it.’ He died before I was ordained an Anglican priest – I can only imagine what might have been his reaction!

He was a working-class cab driver from Hackney, whose family had come to London in the late-19th century to flee East European pogroms.

Lots of Jewish men 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 enjoyed and was proud of what he did. But never so proud as when sitting at home in front of the television, with tea and a sandwich, and his cousin Alan would come on the screen. It was like a statement was being made, a triumph shared. ‘See, there’s a Coren.’

I told Alan this over lunch 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.’

Dad told me about that meeting –because he told me about how most of his working days had gone. He kept a diary, too, and an autograph book. Working in central London for 40 years meant lots of famous people would at some point get into his cab (just like in Derek and Clive’s Back of the Cab sketch): Laurence Olivier (‘very nice but very tired’); Alan Alda (‘lovely man but wouldn’t stop talking’); 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.

Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud didn’t say much but were polite, Peter O’Toole ‘filled the whole bloody cab with his personality. I liked him.’ Jeremy Thorpe was ‘shifty’. Jimmy Savile (‘something I don’t trust about him’) was a big tipper, but London cabbies – every journalist should have one as an informed contact – always seemed to be suspicious of him. They didn’t know the details of what is now public but, according to oracle Phil, even in the 1970s, ‘He’s not what he seems.’

Harold Pinter was a more awkward customer. Dad had been two years above Pinter at Hackney Jewish Youth Club. ‘Good Lord,’ said Pinter when he got into the cab. ‘Hello, Philip.’

My dad was Phil to everybody. Harold spoke with a refined and educated English accent; my dad, from an identical background, spoke as you’d expect a cabbie from Hackney to sound – clearly, one of them had worked at it.

Lovely Benny Green, the well-known musician, author and raconteur, was different. He too was of that Jewish youth-club generation but from a West End branch. Benny and Phil had played football against each other. Dad told Benny about picking up Harold Pinter. Benny just rolled his eyes, and they laughed.

How well-known people behaved in the cab, and how they treated the driver, had a strange effect on my life as a child. These people were on television or in the news, and I’d see them through the lens of my father’s experience.

If they were rude or dismissive, I’d hear about it. I grew up disliking the racing driver Graham Hill, even though I’d never met the man. ‘Bloody cheap sod,’ said Dad. He didn’t 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. That was why he was so proud of his cousin Alan, an Oxford graduate. Proud of his success and abilities, and also because he’d broken the barrier.

When our first child was born, a perfect little boy, we gave him a Hebrew middle name – my dad’s Hebrew name, Avi. That baby, now in his thirties, is a professor of philosophy at an excellent American university. I really do wish that Phil Coren could have seen that.

Rev Michael Coren is an Anglican vicar in Canada