EXHIBITION: The Life of Maurice Dorfman at Mary Seacole Centre, Clapham

Behind the Shop Facade – The Life of Maurice Dorfman is a visual journey through nine decades of a remarkable man with a remarkable story.

Maurice (or ‘Murray’) Dorfman is an unsung hero posthumously celebrated by award-winning social-documentary photographer Jim Grover with an exhibition and accompanying book.

For the past 18 months, Grover has researched Maurice’s story – a man who to many was the amenable solitary owner of Jeannette Fashions, the longest surviving traditional shop in Clapham High Street.

His Jewish family fled the pogroms in Russia at the end of the 19th century and arrived in London’s East End in 1902.

He came to South London at the beginning of the 1950s, and for almost 40 years he ran Jeannette Fashions, a traditional haberdashery shop following in the tailoring footsteps of his Jewish grandfather and both his Jewish parents.

Behind the facade, here was a shopkeeper from a bygone era dedicated to serving his customers in his own distinctive and endearing way.

His was a long and full life that embraced life’s simple pleasures: dancing; sailing; motorbiking; cycling; music; visits to the theatre and ballet; pets; and camping holidays in the UK with his girlfriends.

One too that embraced many challenges: growing up at a time of anti-Semitic feeling; the bankruptcy of his father; the fracturing of his relationship with his only sibling; saving the family business from financial ruin; battling cancer twice; love affairs that ended with disappointment; growing old and living by himself for some 30 years in an enormous and decaying building; and sustaining Jeannette Fashions as it steadily dwindled in its twilight years where it remains for the time being untouched like a time capsule.

Grover says in Behind the Shop Facade – The Life of Maurice Dorfman: “He danced around the shop with me playing his music.

“And he’d even cycle around the shop. He was a very playful character.  His shop was like a theatre space and so you felt like you could go in and you could do anything there.

“He was a very engaging guy without it being apparent. He was like an understatement. He was also intriguing and he had such a fun side to him. It allowed the mischievous to come forward.”

On February 18, 2020, Dorfman passed away at the age of 87, with no direct family to pass the business on to.

Sixty years of clothing manufacturing and haberdashery trading by the Dorfman family on the high street ceased. It was the end of an era but one that Grover, has been determined to celebrate and preserve – an extraordinary social history.

A Clapham resident himself, Grover’s interest in Dorfman stems from 2016 when he befriended him as part of his photo-essay, 48 Hours on Clapham High Street.

Grover remained, like so many, friendly albeit at a distance from Dorfman.

It was the sheer volume of memories and emotions that Dorfman’s passing triggered among so many friends and customers from over the decades that inspired Grover to pay one final monumental tribute to Dorfman.

He did that by assembling this exhibition and accompanying book in celebration of his astonishing life and the family business; his unassuming kindness to so many of the people within.

April 1 to 30, at Clapham Library, Mary Seacole Centre, 91 Clapham High Street, SW4 7DB. Free.

 

Pictured: Maurice Dorfman – From Behind the Shop Facade – The Life of Maurice Dorfman by Jim Grove