Vidal Sassoon - Early Life

Early Life

Sassoon was born in Hammersmith, London, and lived in Shepherd's Bush. His parents were Sephardi Jews. His mother, Betty (Bellin), came from a family of immigrants from Spain, and his father, Jack Sassoon, was from Thessaloniki, Greece. Sassoon had a younger brother, Ivor, who died from a heart attack at the age of 46.

His father left his family when Vidal was three years old.

Due to poverty as a single parent, his mother placed Sassoon and his younger brother in a Jewish orphanage, where they stayed for seven years until he was 11 when his mother remarried. His mother was only allowed to visit them once a month and was never allowed to take them out. He attended Essendine Road Primary School, a Christian school, before being evacuated due to WWII to Holt, Wiltshire. After his return to London he left school at the age of 14 and worked as a messenger before starting a hairdressing apprenticeship. In his youth, he was also a football player.

At the age of 17, although having been too young to serve in World War II, he became the youngest member of the 43 Group, a Jewish veterans' underground organisation. It broke up what it considered Fascist meetings in East London. The Daily Telegraph calls him an "anti-fascist warrior-hairdresser" whose aim was to prevent Sir Oswald Mosley's movement from spreading "messages of hatred" in the period following World War II.

In 1948, at the age of 20, he joined the Haganah (which shortly afterwards became the Israeli Defence Forces) and fought in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, which began after Israel declared statehood. During an interview, he described the year he spent training with the Israelis as "the best year of my life," and recalled how he felt:

When you think of 2,000 years of being put down and suddenly you are a nation rising, it was a wonderful feeling. There were only 600,000 people defending the country against five armies, so everyone had something to do.