Judith Piepe, songwriter, social worker
Hyfler/Rosner
Judith Piepe
Worker for the Soho homeless and early influence on Paul Simon
02 July 2003
Judith Maria Sternberg, social worker and songwriter: born 22 February
1920; married secondly Tony Piepe (one daughter), third 1981 Stephen Delft;
died Levin, New Zealand 19 June 2003.
The burgeoning Soho scene of the Sixties and Seventies, when soon-to-become
famous young guitar geniuses and singer-songwriters could be heard for a few
pence in folk cellars and church crypts, was presided over by Judith Piepe,
a big, motherly German refugee whose speciality was ministering to the
homeless.
She befriended some who became big names, like Simon and Cat Stevens, but
will also be remembered by the countless waifs and strays who flooded into
London at that time, seeking their fortunes, but often finding only
loneliness in its empty streets. Piepe always said her fondness for these
lost ones came from having wandered through Europe as a stateless person in
the years before her arrival in UK on the very eve of the Second World War.
She kept open house at her home in Cable Street, east London, for almost any
folkie who needed a place to crash.
Simon later recalled:
They all came down to Judith's house. There was Sandy [Denny, singer with
Fairport Convention], and Al Stewart. It was a really rich seam, and it's
too bad it's never been documented, because it was really important. It had
a big, big effect on a lot of people, and really influenced English pop. The
Beatles were touched by it, and the Moody Blues and a whole lot of other big
groups.
Piepe had heard Simon perform at the Flamingo club, usually a rhythm
'n'blues haunt, and worked hard to get him a daily spot on the BBC's Five to
Ten religious slot in March 1965, which she introduced herself. As a result,
he was offered a contract by CBS, for whom he recorded the rare Paul Simon
Songbook (never released outside the UK), a one-hour session of solo
acoustic recordings of songs that later hit the charts during his
partnership with Art Garfunkel. Piepe wrote the notes on most of the songs,
and also the foreword for a printed songbook of the same title, in which she
said:
I consider Paul Simon to be particularly significant because of the wide
range of his songs, his intellectual and emotional approach give them an
appeal to far more than just a narrow section of the population.
Paul Simon's songs are personal and individual, the expression of his own
thoughts and feelings, hopes and fears, problems and frustrations of our
time, of his generation. In speaking for his generation he says what others
feel but cannot find the words to say, and in doing so has a liberating and
healing effect.
Judith Piepe was a larger-than-life woman around whom legends accumulated.
She was said to have driven ambulances for the Loyalists during the Spanish
Civil War, yet when I knew her she said she couldn't drive. She was said to
have worked for British political intelligence during the early days of the
war, which might explain why she was able to obtain British citizenship when
so many other anti-Nazi Germans were being interned as enemy aliens.
Even her birthplace was in doubt. She was very proud that she was a
"Schlesian", born in Silesia, then part of Prussia, now Poland, in 1920. Yet
she spoke German with a Berlin accent, and her daughter maintains she was
born in the German capital. Her mother was said to be a French gypsy; not
so, say others, she was a well-known Jewish intellectual and art dealer.
She said very little about her father, which was also strange, since he was
Fritz Sternberg, an esteemed Marxist economist who had exchanged polemics
with Trotsky and ended his days in the United States, where he became a
member of Roosevelt's "kitchen cabinet" and was a respected contributor to
learned journals like The Nation. She fell foul of the Nazis as a teenager
in Berlin and was arrested for a time by the Gestapo, escaping after three
months in jail just before being tried in absentia and sentenced to death
for high treason.
After acquiring British citizenship, she never lost her charming Mittel
Europa accent. She married Tony Piepe (actually her second marriage, though
she never spoke of the first) and mothered a daughter, Ariel. Though her
father was Jewish and she was brought up an atheist, by the time I met her
she had converted to Christianity and was associated with St Anne's Church
in Soho.
In actual fact, by asking her musician and singer-songwriter friends to play
there she created what was in effect one of the country's first folk clubs
to have its own premises, though Russell Quaye's skiffle cellar and Les
Cousins in Greek Street were probably already the main reasons so many
youngsters flocked into Soho.
However, not all her protégés remembered the time happily. Simon said some
years later:
One day I got caught in a downpour and I stepped inside St Anne's Cathedral
[sic], which is on a little park in Soho. I was impressed with the sermon
that I heard being delivered. What impressed me was that it didn't say
anything, nothing.
When you walked out of there, it didn't make any difference whether you
walked in, unless you dug stained-glass windows, you know. Because the meek
are inheriting nothing, nothing and that's the basis of this song called
"Blessed".
Three members of the Soho crowd in those days, Peter Bellamy, Heather Wood
and Royston Wood, under the name Young Tradition, recorded her song "The
Hungry Child" on their album for Transatlantic So Cheerfully Round, in 1967.
In the winter of 1969, the St Anne's crypt became a regular night shelter
for the homeless and developed into the charity Centrepoint, taking its name
satirically from the nearby office tower block at the top of Charing Cross
Road, whose owners found it more cost-effective to maintain it empty.
Judith met and became the partner of Stephen (later Simcha) Delft, a guitar
builder and repairer. They married in the summer of 1981 and emigrated to
New Zealand the following year. She became very frail in her later years and
was taken into a rest home two years ago.
Karl Dallas
markla...@gmail.com
saxm...@gmail.com
lawrence...@hotmail.co.uk
anthony...@gmail.com
Tony Page. x
kiddl...@gmail.com
> Judith was my grandmother - and the name Rosner sounds familiar (nee Fadenhecht?)
I knew Judith when she lived here in New Zealand. Have spent untold hours hearing her legendary storys and she really was an amazing dynamo :-)