Vidal Sassoon with Mia Farrow on the set of Rosemary's Baby

IN the world of fashion and hairdressing the achievements of Vidal Sassoon are legendary. The superstar crimper and Sixties icon, who has died at 84, practically invented modern hairdressing, created the geometric bob, was responsible for Mia Farrow’s elfin crop for Rosemary’s Baby and was labelled “the Chanel of hair” by Mary Quant. He had top models and hairdressers fighting to get an appointment in his salon while “a pack of screaming girls” used to chase him down the street. He also made a mint from his own-range products. (“Why take two bottles into the shower? I just want to wash – and go.”) But it is Sassoon’s early life on the streets of London’s East End which is the lesser known – and fascinating – story. One phase in particular was kept hidden by Sassoon for half a century, despite his obvious pride in his exploits. This was the period following the Second World War when Sassoon spent his days as a teenage apprentice learning to cut the hair of wealthy customers, while by night he was fighting with knuckledusters and cut-throat razors in the back streets. It might seem unlikely but 17-year-old Sassoon, who was evacuated during the war, had returned to London only to find his beloved Jewish community in the East End under threat from post-war fascists.

I remember the Duchess of Bedford sitting on the stairs because there wasn’t any room Vidal Sassoon

Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union Of Fascists, had been jailed by Churchill but after his release in 1943 he tried to reignite his campaign against London’s Jewish population. “Suddenly there were fascists preaching hate on every corner,” Sassoon explained in the early Nineties when he broke his silence over those days. The young Sassoon – whose parents were both Jewish – took little time in joining an organisation called the 43 Group, which was originally composed of 43 Jewish former servicemen but which swelled to be 1,000 strong. They were a crudely armed paramilitary force with the aim of breaking up Mosley-inspired meetings – with force if necessary. Sassoon likened the clashes between fascists and the 43 Group to “pitched battles” and he was usually in the thick of the fray. He once described the fighting as “horrendous” but insisted that “you had to be involved – you just had to be”.

“You would never have guessed what a big-deal hairdresser he would become,” a former 43 Group member once recalled. “He was just the sort of guy you wanted standing right by your side when the fighting started.” At work, however, Sassoon had an image to maintain. At the time he was apprenticed to a distinguished hairdresser called Adolph Cohen, a disciplinarian who insisted on smartly turned out staff with creases down their trousers. Sassoon would try to patch up the injuries he received at night but he once recalled: “I’ll never forget the morning I walked in and I had a hell of a bruise – it had been a difficult night – and a client said, ‘Good God, Vidal, what happened to your face?’ And I said, ‘Oh nothing, madam, I just fell over a hairpin’.”

After one particularly violent clash Sassoon was arrested but after a night spent in jail a judge told him to “be a good boy” and let him go. However the experience of fighting with the group sharpened Sassoon’s political instincts and led to him leaving Britain in 1948 to fight for the Israeli army in Israel’s War of Independence. He described the training as “the hardest physical exercise I’ve ever had in my life” but after the war was keen to stay in the country. He left only when he received a telegram from his mother Betty that read: “Stepdad had a heart attack. Stop. Come back to London and earn a living. Stop.” SASSOON'S biological father, Greek-born Jack Sassoon, had hardly featured in his life. When Vidal was three the philandering Jack left the family – including Sassoon’s mother and younger brother Ivor – and Sassoon later confided: “I was told my father spoke seven languages and had sex in all of them.”

Meanwhile the family were forced to move from Hammersmith into the poverty of East London, staying with Sassoon’s aunt in a cramped two-room tenement in Petticoat Lane. When that became too much ­Sassoon’s mother put him, and later Ivor, into a Maida Vale orphanage. “She simply couldn’t cope any longer,” Sassoon explained later, although at the time he was heartbroken, feeling “scared, unwanted, unloved”. He wrote in his 2010 autobiography about the “dreaded” day he was taken there saying: “I grabbed my mother’s skirt as she tried to leave and just wouldn’t let go. Through my tears I begged and pleaded.” He was just five. At one point he ran away to see his father who again rejected him and immediately took him back. Sassoon never saw him again.

After six years his mother had remarried and felt able to reclaim her children. Her new husband turned out to be the father Sassoon had never had while his mother mapped out his future. Sassoon “wanted to be a footballer” but his mother had a premonition that hairdressing would be good for him. She signed him up to his apprenticeship with Cohen when he was 14 but it was only when he returned from Israel at 22 that Sassoon decided that if he had to be a hairdresser he would “try to be the best”. H e took a job with the best-known crimper of his day, Raymond “Mr Teasy-Weasy” Bessone but soon outshone his teacher. He even lost his Cockney accent, saving to take the bus into the West End for theatre matinees, studying the accents of John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. “In those days,” he said, “you couldn’t get hired in the fashionable West End with an Artful Dodger accent like mine.”