In 1943, the family returned to Liverpool and Brian entered Liverpool College, a private fee-paying school. The following year, at the age of ten, Liverpool College expelled him.
‘The official reason was for inattention and for being below standard. I’d been caught in a maths lesson doing drawings of girls. There were other crimes I was supposed to have committed. I’m sure my failings were many.’
He remembered arriving home and sitting on a sofa, with his father saying ‘I just don’t know what on earth we’re going to do with you.’
His mother thinks that in later years he tended to overestimate his own failings at school. She agrees he was hardly happy or successful at any of them, but she thinks it was often as much the fault of the school system as anything. ‘It was just after the war. Schools were hard to get into. There was none of the freedom they have today. They just threw you out if they didn’t like you.’
Brian himself thought that, apart from his own inability to fit in, there might also have been some anti-semitism. ‘I do remember being called Jew or Yid. But it didn’t seem to mean much more than the way a redheaded boy gets called Ginger.’
After his expulsion from Liverpool College, his parents found him another local private school, but they kept him there for only a few weeks. They realized it was the sort of pseudo-posh school that took advantage of such parents, caring little for education but a lot for taking money from wealthy parents who couldn’t get their kids in anywhere else.
In the end they found him a good Jewish prep school called Beaconsfield near Tunbridge Wells. Here he took up horse-riding, which he loved, and art which he also loved and was encouraged to do for the first time.
At 13 he sat the common entrance exam. This is the examination needed to get into any of the good Headmasters’ Conference public schools. He failed this miserably, but it didn’t stop his parents trying to get him into one of them. Rugby, Repton and Clifton all turned him down. He went eventually to the sort of establishment that will take anybody. This was a very hearty, outdoor one in the West Country. He was forced to play rugby. He was very unhappy.
But his father didn’t give up trying and in the autumn of 1948, just on Brian’s 14th birthday, he got him into Wrekin College, a well-known and established public school in Shropshire.
He didn’t look forward to Wrekin as he’d eventually begun to settle down at the West Country school. He was getting on with his art and at last making a few friends. He wrote in a diary at the time: ‘Now for the Wrekin I hate. I am going there only because my parents want me to… it is a pity because it has been a great year for me. The birth of new ideas, a little more popularity.’
He eventually settled down at Wrekin, at least he found ways of putting the time in. His interest in art continued. He became top of the class in art and decided that he was going to be a dress designer.
‘I wrote to my father that I wanted to be a dress designer, but he was against it. He said it wasn’t the sort of thing for young men to do.’
At the same time, he developed an interest in acting. At home in Liverpool his mother took him to many plays. ‘I used to take him first of all to folderol sort of things. Then later to improve his mind I took him to Peter Glenville. I also took him to hear the Liverpool Phil.’
Brian took a star part in the school’s production of Christopher Columbus. ‘His daddy and I drove down to see it,’ says his mother. ‘We sat through it all and the headmaster came up and asked us afterwards if we’d liked Brian. He was just so good we hadn’t recognized him.’
He left Wrekin when he was 16, without taking his school certificate. No one thought he could ever have passed it. His father was still against him becoming a dress designer, but Brian decided he wanted to leave school and get a job all the same.
‘After seven schools, all of them rotten, I’d had enough. I’d been thwarted in the only thing I wanted to do, so I just accepted anything. On 10 September 1950, very thin, pink-cheeked, curly-haired and half-educated, I reported for duty at the family store in Walton, Liverpool.’
He started as a furniture salesman on £5 a week. The day after he joined he sold a £12 dining table to a woman who had come into the shop to buy a mirror.
He found he was a good salesman. And he enjoyed it. He also started taking an interest in the design and layout of the shop. His father had been naturally pleased that his elder son had at last decided to come into the business. Brian found, to his surprise, that it pleased him as well.
‘Brian always had beautiful taste,’ says his mother. ‘And he always appreciated lovely furniture.’
But Brian didn’t think the store’s window displays were all that lovely. He started experimenting, doing what was considered at the time very daring things, such as putting chairs with their backs to the window. His father thought perhaps he was doing things a bit quicker than was necessary, but didn’t complain as he was so pleased that his son and heir was settling down well in the career he had chosen for him. As further experience he decided to send Brian to another firm, not connected with them, to do a six months’ apprenticeship.
Brian spent the six months at The Times furniture store in Lord Street, Liverpool, still on £5 a week. He seems to have done well there too. When he left they presented him with a Parker pen and pencil set. (The pen was the one he loaned to Paul McCartney a few years later, to sign his first contract.)
After the six months, he moved back to Walton. He began to take over the designing of the whole store. ‘I enjoyed it, especially trying new things. I enjoyed selling as well, watching people relax and show trust in me. It was pleasant to see the wary look dissolve and people begin to think there were good things ahead for them and I would be the provider.’
He had a few rows over his plans for window dressing. ‘They wanted all the windows jam-packed. I preferred very little in the window, perhaps just one chair. I was also crazy about contemporary furniture. It was just coming in and I wanted everybody to know about it. I think if you show the public something lovely, they’ll accept it.’
On 9 December 1952, in the midst of his brave new schemes for I. Epstein and Sons, he was called up for national service. If school horrified him, the thought of the army was terrifying. ‘I’d been a poor schoolboy. I was sure I was going to make the lousiest soldier ever.’
He applied for the RAF and was made a clerk in the Royal Army Service Corps. He did his basic training at Aldershot.
‘It was like prison and I did everything wrong. I turned right instead of left and when I was told to stand still I fell over.’
He managed to get through his square bashing, after a fashion, and even had the notion that he might be chosen to be on parade for the Coronation. The year was then 1953. He thought the Coronation sounded glamorous and exciting and it would be nice to be part of it. But he wasn’t chosen. Instead he went round the pubs and clubs and got drunk.
He was about the only ex-public schoolboy in his intake who didn’t become an officer. But in his off-duty hours, dressed as always in impeccable taste and spending his time in smart West End clubs, he could easily have passed for one.
After Aldershot, he managed to get a posting to Regent’s Park Barracks in London, one of the most desirable postings for young officers around town. He had lots of relations in London and managed to get out and enjoy himself. He drove himself back one night in a large car, wearing a bowler hat, pinstriped suit and carrying an umbrella over his arm.
As he entered the barracks, the guard saluted him, two soldiers confined to the guardhouse jerked their heads in Eyes Right and a clerk shouted ‘Good night, sir.’ But an officer inside wasn’t so easily misled. ‘Private Epstein. You will report to the company office at 10.00 hours tomorrow morning charged with impersonating an officer.’