John ‘Jimmy’ Rodker (1894–1955) and Bomberg were both members of the group of aspiring Jewish East End writers and artists known as the ‘Whitechapel Boys’, including painters Mark Gertler and Jacob Kramer, poet-painter Isaac Rosenberg and writers Samuel Weinstein (Stephen Winsten) and Joseph Leftwich. A Conscientious Objector, Rodker was arrested and imprisoned during the First World War. Afterwards he wrote for modernist journals and translated, edited and published modernist writers including T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and James Joyce.
Gustav Metzger enrolled in Bomberg’s evening life drawing classes at the Borough Polytechnic in 1945, becoming a favoured pupil and initiator of the Borough Bottega, an exhibiting group designed to disseminate Bomberg’s teaching and practice. He recalled in 1953, ‘all I have been taught as an artist has come from Mr. Bomberg’.
