London the capital ofEngland has long been home to many Jews. At one time most of them lived in a district called theEast Endand it was there in 1895 on a street calledHackney Road that three brothers — Harry Abe and Jacob Reuben — opened a business.

Like many other Jewish traders in the area they worked with wood but they did not make furniture. The Reuben brothers traded mainly in plywood timber and wood veneers.

“What are wood veneers?” I asked my son-in-law Jeffrey Reuben the fourth generation of Reubens to own and manage the business now known as Constructional Veneers Ltd.

“Wood veneers are thin layers of wood” he told me “either peeled off a log (the trunk of a tree) as it rotates like a chicken turning on a spit or sliced off it by a machine called a veneer slicer.