Over time, there have been two – maybe unexpected – places in the workplace where women earned early positions of responsibility, although their achievements were gained almost by default. Both printing and photography were in their early stages of development open to all newcomers. These were fresh fields of skill and technology and as such unhindered by the authority of strict regulations, laws or prejudices to deny anyone access (as was the case in more traditional professions and forms of art). Marginalisation was not an issue. Both women and immigrants found free entry in these domains of activity.

Since at least the late sixteenth century women had been participants in the printing trade. This included boarding youngsters serving as apprentices and journeymen as well as tasks in the shop itself, from keeping books to overseeing the sale of printed matter and stationery. A small number of women became masters of offices, running the entire business by themselves. In most cases they succeeded to their positions as widows after the death of their printer-husbands. These women often ran the offices for a relatively short time before they handed operations over to a member of family or foreman, who in turn would provide an income for the remainder of her life. The early history of American printing supplies a spectacular example of the process. In 1638, the ‘John of London’ sailed from Hull to Boston, Massachusetts. The ship was captained by George Lamberton. On board were clergyman Ezekiel Rogers and a number of families that went on to settle the plantation of Rowley, Massachusetts. The ship also transported the first printing press to North America. It was brought by Reverend Joseph Glover who, when deprived of his position in the Church of England for his non-conformist Puritan beliefs, shipped his family and equipment to the Massachusetts colony. He also paid for the passage of the man in charge of running his press, Stephen Daye, and his son Matthew, an apprentice printer.

Glover did not survive the passage to the New World, leaving ownership of the press to his wife Elizabeth. Settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she established the Cambridge Press. It was an act of great initiative. As a woman, Glover needed special permission from New England officials to open a business. Within the first year in Massachusetts Bay, Daye and son printed a broadside for her entitled ‘The Freeman’s Oath’, probably the first tract published in British North America. Daye printed the first book in the New World, The Bay Psalm Book, in 1640 (only eleven copies survive today). This book was in demand throughout the colony for the remainder of the seventeenth century. In June 1641 Elizabeth married Harvard’s first president, Henry Dunster, who took over operations of the Press until his death in 1654, when the business was turned over to Harvard College.

Intriguingly, a number of Jewish women were among the pioneers of photography. In traditional Judaism, the primary role of a woman is that of wife and mother, the keeper of the household. The typical Jewish woman, sometimes herself a seamstress working from home, was the wife of a craftsman or shopkeeper. She was barely visible in early communal and religious life. Public Judaism was reserved for males. Mass immigration forced changes upon the community. Concentrated in large urban centres women sought employment in textile and tobacco factories, assisted husbands in workshops, or kept shops themselves. Many women combined employment and care of their children by working out of their homes. Increasingly, they made their presence felt by joining the debate on social justice and emancipation. For many middle class women, however, staying indoors remained the norm. Careers outside the home were not encouraged. Women were expected to play a role in philanthropic activities (‘domestic feminism’), while upholding the myth of pure and pious homemakers.

The participation of women in photography goes back to the very origins of the process. Like in printing earlier in history, initially it was a case of partnerships. Several of these female photographers were married to male practitioners or had close relationships with their families. It was above all in northern Europe that women first entered the business of photography, opening studios in Austria, Germany, and Scandinavia from the 1840s. Bertha Beckman was the first Jewish, and perhaps the first European photography professional. In 1843, she established a studio in Leipzig together with her husband. In 1848, on the death of her partner, she took over the operation of their atelier. Thereafter she opened a chain of stores, including one in Vienna and another in New York. Photography flourished in Vienna.

In this city, Adèle Perlmutter-Heilperin together with her brothers Max and Wilhelm founded the Atelier Adèle in 1862. The studio prospered and around 1890 it was named Photographer to the Imperial Court. Dora Kallmus was born in 1881 into a Viennese Jewish family of lawyers. In 1905, she was the first woman to be admitted to the art and design courses at the prominent Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt in Vienna. That same year she became a member of the Vienna Photographic Society. Together with Arthur Benda, she opened a studio in 1907. The Benda-D’Ora Studio was so successful that they started another business in Paris in 1924. Having settled in the French capital, Dora became famous for her society and fashion photography during the 1930s and 1940s. Her subjects included Josephine Baker, Maurice Chevalier, Colette, Alban Berg, and many other prominent figures in French cultural life. Russian-born Ida Kar had settled in London in 1945 and quickly became a leading portrait photographer of the many artists and writers living in Soho during the early 1950s. Her most famous portraits include those of Jacob Epstein and Bertrand Russell. In 1960 she exhibited her work at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, the first solo photography show held in a major public art gallery in London. Women have achieved many ‘firsts’ in the history of photography.

British intellectual and cultural life profited enormously from the departure of Jewish talent from the Continent during the 1930s. The exodus included a number of outstanding women photographers. Gerti [Gertrude Helene] Deutsch was born in Vienna in 1908. She trained as a professional pianist at the Vienna Academy of Music, but her concert career ended when she developed an inflammation of the nerves in her arms. She switched to photography. During the build up towards the Anschluss of 1938 she moved to Paris where she earned a living as a photojournalist. In 1938 she settled in London, working from a studio in New Bond Street, and started photographing for the Picture Post, Britain’s premier photojournalistic magazine.

Her first assignment for the Post was ‘Kindertransport’ (1938), a series of images showing the passage of German-Jewish children to safety in Britain. Her preoccupation with music was reflected in her portraiture. She created images of the most celebrated musicians of the day, including Arturo Toscanini, Benjamin Britten and Yehudi Menuhin. In 1948 she returned to Vienna to document the city after the Nazis surrendered control to the Allies. Gerti Deutsch captured the turbulent 1930s and 1940s in a series of iconic images.

Dorothy Bohm was born Dorothea Israelit in 1924 in Königsberg (now: Kaliningrad), East Prussia, into a German-speaking family of Jewish-Lithuanian origins. She was sent to Britain in 1939 to escape Nazism and studied photography at the Manchester Municipal College of Technology. In 1946 she set up her own portrait studio. Having travelled extensively, she settled in London in 1956, living at no. 15 Church Row, Hampstead. By the late 1950s, she abandoned studio portraiture in favour of ‘street photography’. In 1971, Bohm co-founded (with Sue Davies) the Photographers’ Gallery at no. 16/8 Ramillies Street, Soho, the first independent British gallery devoted entirely to photography. She worked as its Associate Director for the next fifteen years. Dorothy Bohm is generally considered as one of the doyennes of British photography. The splendid careers of these women underlines that, more often than not, emigration functions as a power of liberation and an unshackling of conventional ideas and customs.

Costume designer Sophie Fedorovitch was born in 1893 in Minsk to Polish parents. She studied painting in Kraków, Moscow, and St Petersburg and migrated from Russia to London in 1920. She was established as a painter – she held her first solo show at the Beaux-Arts Gallery in London in 1928 – until she met Frederick Ashton in 1925, after which she increasingly devoted her career to set and costume design.

They worked together from A Tragedy of Fashion, Ashton’s first ballet in 1926. Costumes and scenery were by Fedorovitch, who continued to work with Ashton for more than twenty years. They collaborated on eleven works. She soon was acknowledged a key figure in British ballet. She took on British citizenship in 1940.

Fedorovitch designed for several other British choreographers including Ninette de Valois and Antony Tudor, as well as for opera and theatre. From 1951 until her death in 1953, she was a member of the artistic advisory panel of Sadler’s Wells Ballet. Fedorovitch died in 1953 as a result of a gas leak at her house at no. 22 Bury Walk, a short, hidden, narrow street between the Fulham and King’s Roads in Chelsea. The house, a folly known as the ‘Gothic Box’, was built to resemble a toy Gothic castle with pointed windows and castellated roofline. On its façade is a memorial plaque to ‘Sophie Fedorovitch, costume designer’.

One of the major thoroughfares of the City of London, Cannon Street runs parallel to the Thames from St Paul’s Churchyard in the west to Eastcheap in the east. The street owes its name to one particular local industry. Cannon Street is a corruption of Candlewick Street which relates to the candle makers and wax chandlers who conducted their trade there in the Middle Ages. The name was gradually corrupted into Cannon Street. Pepys already uses the name in his diary. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Cannon Street was home to the Steelyard or ‘Stalhof’, the trading base of the Hanseatic League in London.

During the high and late Middle Ages the majority of strangers in London were individual members of a multi-national merchant class. In 1303, Edward I had signed the Carta Mercatoria (Charter of the Merchants), an agreement in which rights were granted to foreign merchants in return for dues and levies. Under its terms overseas traders were free to come and go, import and export; they enjoyed freedom from city and road tolls; and were allowed to enforce contracts and settle disputes. Freedom of trade was inevitably accompanied by freedom of movement. Although attempts were made to regulate migration, many strangers settled in London and were able to pursue their business careers without too many obstacles. In 1334, in exchange for financial assistance, Edward III replaced the general grant of rights to foreign merchants with a particular charter granted specifically to the influential Hanseatic League. This trading company was formed by merchants from several Northern European cities including Bruges, Lübeck, Hamburg, Groningen, Danzig, Copenhagen, Bremen, and Novgorod. The merchants in the League met on a regular basis to make trading agreements and to work out issues of common (often political) interest.

The Hanse formulated many of our notions of commerce, economic association, the importance of free trade, and the role of the nation state. In its heyday, some seventy cities were regular League members and around one hundred more acted as passive associates without decision-making power. Its London branch occupied a walled area on the north bank of the Thames, just south of London Bridge. It was in effect a separate community, independent of the City of London, and governed by its own code of laws. It was called the Steelyard, either in reference to the great steel beam used for weighing goods, or to the extensive courtyard where products were traded from stalls. The yard was not dissolved until the German cities of Lübeck, Bremen and Hamburg sold their common property in 1853.

Hans Holbein the younger was born in 1497/8 in Augsburg. His father had settled in that city in 1494 and presumably both his sons Ambrosius and Hans took their places in his workshop where he produced large altarpieces. By 1515 Hans and his brother appear to have migrated to Basel. This date is established by the survival of a copy of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, in which the margins are illustrated in pen and ink by Holbein and his brother. He was active in the city not only as a painter of portraits, religious pictures, and wall paintings, but also as a designer of woodcuts, engravings, and stained glass. Holbein’s earliest surviving dated paintings are the portraits of Jacob Meyer, ‘burgomeister’ of Basel, and that of his wife, both painted in 1516. He was appointed town painter in 1518/19. He may have painted relatively few portraits at the time, but the images he produced of his friend Erasmus in 1523 were prove of his prodigious talent.

The lure of a lucrative Royal post tempted Holbein to travel to England in 1526. Erasmus had many close contacts there and they helped him to find immediate patronage. His arrival effectively brought the stylistic Renaissance in painting from the Continent to England. He was commissioned to paint a series of portraits, including those of clergyman William Warham (patron of Erasmus), astronomer Nikolaus Kratzer, and of course that of his own patron Thomas More. Holbein’s first visit to England lasted only two years. He left London in 1528 for Basel, but the violent upheavals of the Reformation encouraged a swift return to in 1531/2. He stayed in London until his death in 1543. These were turbulent years in English history too, both politically and socially. During Holbein’s second spell in England, Thomas More resigned from office. Unable to depend on More’s influence to obtain commissions, he found employment amongst fellow countrymen, the German business community in London. Holbein created eight portraits of Steelyard merchants.

The first of those was a portrait commissioned by Georg Giese, titled ‘Der Kaufmann Georg Gisze’ (1532). This detailed composition may have been intended as a show piece to elicit further Steelyard commissions. A plaque depicted over the sitter’s head identifies him as a person and states his age. He is holding a letter he had received from his brother, written in Middle Low German. The portrait generally thought to have followed that of Georg Giese is that of Hans of Antwerp, which is dated 26 July 1532. This sitter resided in London from 1515 to as late as 1547 and was married to an English woman. He was employed as a jeweller by Thomas Cromwell and associated with the London Steelyard, combining the activities of goldsmith and merchant. Since Hans of Antwerp spent most of his life in London, it seems unlikely that this portrait was sent abroad, which may account for its early entry into the Royal Collection (first recorded in 1639).

In 1536, Holbein was appointed as painter to the court of Henry VIII. Thereafter, he devoted most of his time to Royal commissions. He is known to have been living in the parish of St Andrew Undershaft in Aldgate in 1541 and there is no evidence to suggest that he ever worked at Whitehall Palace. In addition to his role as painter to Henry VIII, Holbein created the portraits of many of the king’s courtiers, as well as those of other prominent figures living in London. A number of painted portraits survive, mostly unsigned, but there are a far greater number of preparatory drawings for them, the vast majority of which (more than eighty) are today in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle. Holbein’s surviving portraits and drawings provide an unparalleled depiction of the men and women of the Tudor court, including a striking image of Henry VIII.

During Holbein’s stay in London the nature of immigration was changing. The Steelyard community had been a class of powerful merchants, influential but aloof, rich but reclusive. Members were welcomed in the highest circles, but did not mix with Londoners in their day to day business. In the course of the century however immigration moved on from a transient presence of merchants to a permanent settlement of an artisan class whose members mainly came from the Low Countries. This change in itself brought about substantial economic benefits to London and the Southeast, but the presence of a large number of strangers also created tension and occasional outbreaks of anti-alien violence. As far as immigration is concerned, Holbein’s portraits represents an earlier, more static state of affairs in the capital.

The site of Tyburn Tree at the junction of Edgware Road and Oxford Street was for over 700 years a place of execution. Until 1783 Tyburn served as London’s primary place of hanging, burning and gibbeting. Public displays of executions were once a vital part of the criminal justice system which relied upon fear of retribution.

The main purpose of severe penalties for even relatively minor crimes was that they would serve as a deterrent. After re-development in the mid-1800s the area became known as Tyburnia. It was laid out with grand squares and cream stuccoed terraces. Thackeray described this residential district as ‘the most respectable district of the habitable globe’. Not a place one would expect political radicalism to manifest itself – and yet, it did.

On a left-hand corner in Westbourne Terrace one of the last of the original detached houses still stands (now turned into flats). The splendid mansion is named Orsett House. On the evening of 10 April 1861, the property was ablaze with light from thousands of gas-jets, and packed with celebrating Russians, Poles and other émigrés from the Slav nations, as well as a few English radical thinkers, and fellow exiles such as Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini and French socialist Louis Blanc.

It was a grand occasion to celebrate the Emancipation Reform under Alexander II which effectively abolished serfdom throughout the Russian Empire. Over the portico of the house two banners flew in the wind with messages of The Free Russian Press on one, and Freedom of the Russian Peasant on the other. Host and organiser of this red hot European party was Alexander Herzen, the first self-proclaimed Russian socialist and the most significant of all the activists who spent years of political exile in nineteenth century London.

Herzen was born in 1812 in Moscow at a time that the city was being evacuated in the wake of the defeat by Napoleon’s armies. He was the illegitimate son of a wealthy landowner and a German woman whom his father had met while in diplomatic service. In 1829 Herzen entered the University of Moscow to study natural sciences and became the leader of a small group of radical students. In 1834, he and his closest colleague, the poet Nikolai Ogarev, were arrested. He spent six years in prison. In January 1847 Herzen left Russia for Paris with his entourage (wife, three children, his mother, a tutor, and two female dependents) and most of his capital – hardly a stereotype case of revolutionary exile. None of them would see Russia again.

After the disillusion of the failed 1848 revolution, Herzen moved to London and lived in the capital for some twelve years, first alone, and then with his family, accompanied by the German writer Malwida von Meysenbug, who acted as housekeeper and governess to his children from 1853. Malwida Rivalier von Meysenbug is an intriguing person in her own right. She was born on 28 October 1816 at Kassel in Hesse. Her father, Carl Rivalier descended from a family of French Huguenots and was the principal minister for two Archdukes of Hesse-Kassel. He was granted the vacant Meysenbug title and was later raised into the Habsburg aristocracy. The ninth of ten children, she broke with her family because of her political convictions. She was an avowed democrat and supported demands for constitutionalism in the German states. During the years preceding the 1848 revolutions in Europe, Malwida was more radical than many male revolutionaries in that she advocated equal opportunity for women in education and employment. When Meysenbug moved to Berlin she was placed under police surveillance for mixing in ‘suspicious’ company. Forewarned in May 1852 of her impending arrest she fled by way of Hamburg to London where she became a prominent member of the refugee community. She supported herself by writing romantic novels and short stories with underlying themes of egalitarian utopian societies. More significant are her Memoiren eines Idealistin, the first volume of which she published anonymously in 1869 (followed by two subsequent parts in 1875 and 1876).

Throughout his stay in the capital, Herzen moved around between dozens of addresses, before settling at Orsett House in November 1860. His life in London was conducted mainly in Russian circles, but he remained a private figure who concentrated on intellectual and propaganda work. In the spring of 1853 he established the ‘Free Russian Press in London: to our Brothers in Russia’. Its printing press was initially housed alongside that of Democratic Poland published by the Polish Democratic Society at no. 38 Regent Square. The arrangement with this society of fellow exiles lasted almost eighteen months, until December 1854 when it was feared that the bailiffs might move in. The Free Russian Press moved to no. 82 Judd Street (in 1857 the office moved to no. 2 in the same street). It was here that the work of the Press took off. In 1855, he published the first volume of Poliarnaia zvezda (The Polar Star). Much of the first volume was written by Herzen himself, although it also contained letters by Michelet, Proudhon, Mazzini, and Hugo, and the correspondence between Belinsky and Gogol.
In April 1856 his former comrade Nikolai Ogarev arrived in London and joined Herzen in working on the Press. It was at no. 2 Judd Street that the Free Russian Press built its reputation with the publication of the weekly newspaper Kolokol (The Bell) which ran from 1865 to 1867 with a circulation of up to 2,500 copies.

During Herzen’s residence at Westbourne Terrace numerous compatriots travelled to London to visit him, including Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Nekrasov, Bakunin, Vasily Botkin, and others. On Sundays, Orsett House was the place to be. The family remained at the residence until June 1863, and then moved out again, this time to Elmfield House, Teddington. Herzen’s inability to settle in exile reflects the restlessness of his mind. He finally left England in 1864. Herzen is the author of a set of magnificent memoirs entitled My Past and Thoughts which are an irreplaceable time document for the European socio-political developments of the day. His presence in London does not take up a prominent part in these memoirs. What the metropolis offered him was anonymity. To him, London was ‘adapted for training one away from people and training one into solitude’. This suggestion implies a paradox of political exile: by its very condition it denies the here and now, it looks forward by always looking back, escaping into an almost Confucian dream. Exile and nostalgia are not synonymous, but they stem from similar experiences. They are stories of loss and memory. Nostalgic memory may bring some solace, but the sigh of separation from place, language and culture is forever present. This pain hits exile and newcomer alike. It weighs heavier on the former who lives in anticipation of an imminent return home. The exile is – psychologically at least – banished for the short term. He hates the past, despises the present, and dreams of the days ahead. He seeks consolation in futurity. Utopia is a dissociation from the here and now. Living in the present in order to effect social change is a more difficult task. Herzen was well aware of the challenge and this realisation gives his memoirs their lasting relevance.

Thames Street (City of London) 01 A shibboleth is a linguistic identity marker. It is a phrase (or custom) that acts as a test of belonging to a particular social group or class. Its functions as a password and excludes those that do not ‘belong’. A person whose way of speaking violates a shibboleth is identified as an outsider. In ancient Hebrew dialects the word meant ear (of grain or corn).

The book of Judges (chapter xii: 1-15) describes the battle between two Semitic tribes in which the Ephraimites are defeated by the Gileadites. The victorious soldiers set up a blockade across the Jordan River to prevent fleeing enemies to get back to their territory. The sentries asked each person who wanted to cross the river to say the word shibboleth. The Ephraimites, who had no sh sound in their language, pronounced the word with an s. They were thereby unmasked and killed. It is a way of ethnic cleansing that has become all too familiar. Time and again, during armed ethnic conflicts language is a tool for persecution and brutality. In the late 1970s during riots in Sri Lanka, Sinhalese forces at makeshift roadblocks stopped cars and forced passengers to say a phrase or two. Physically, they could not distinguish between Sinhalese and Tamils. But they could tell by word choice, accent, and intonation. Anyone who spoke in an identifiably Tamil manner was hauled out of the car and beaten up. Such examples are as numerous as they are disturbing.

The word ‘mob’ is derived from the Latin phrase mobile vulgus (the fickle crowd). It had its origin at the period of the Exclusion Crisis when the nation became divided into party and faction, Whig versus Tory. Elections for parliament, and other public meetings, resulted inevitably in riots, fights and other disturbances. Initially the word ‘the mobile’ circulated. It was soon shortened to ‘mob’. The term gradually entered the language that Londoners used to describe disorder over the next few decades. Many objected to the influx of new ‘slang’ abbreviations but most of such words took root relatively quickly. The protests of those who like Swift objected to the neologism and insisted on the older word ‘rabble’ were ignored. Justices of the peace did not use the term to refer to riots in their Court of Quarter Sessions records until the first decade of the eighteenth century.

The connotation of ‘party political’ unrest may be a relatively recent one, but rioting had long been a facet of urban life. Londoners were used to disorder in the metropolis. The first manifestation of mob violence in the capital was caused by the imposition of the poll tax in 1381. The revolt took place in the dark aftermath of the Black Death epidemic of the late 1340s which had devastating socio-economic consequences both in rural and urban parts of the country. Rioters rebelled against the landowning classes and the incompetent government of Richard II. They murdered the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Treasurer of England, numerous lawyers and royal servants, and laid siege to the Tower of London. This, the Peasant’s Revolt, began in the Essex village of Fobbing in May 1381 with the arrival of a Royal tax commissioner, John Bampton, enquiring into evasion of the new tax. Unrest spread quickly through the county and then into Kent. On 7 June Wat Tyler joined the uprising in Maidstone and assumed leadership of the Kentish rebels. He marched his men into London. They left a trail of destruction behind them, including the burning of Savoy Palace, home of the hated, the fourth son of Edward III and Philippa of Hainault who took his name from his godfather, John, Duke of Brabant, one of Edward’s allies in the Low Countries. Gaunt is a corrupted form of Ghent. Bringing the riot under control proved difficult and the rebellion soon appeared to be out of control. A horde of drunken men went in search of immigrants and a massacre took place in the neighbourhood of St Martin’s Vintry.

The revolt turned out to be a lynch party long before the word ‘lynching’ was entered into the dictionary. The spirit of rebellion lasted all summer. The violence in London was related by the anonymous author of the Anonimalle Chronicle 1333 to 1381 who has left the following record: ‘whoever could catch any Fleming or other aliens of any nation, might cut off their heads; and so they did accordingly … they went to the church of St Martin’s in the Vintry, and found therein thirty-five Flemings, whom they dragged outside and beheaded in the streets .On that day there were beheaded 140 or 160 persons. Then they took their way to the places of Lombards and other aliens, and broke into their houses, and robbed them of all their goods that they could discover’. Jack Straw was a leading figure in the London riots who was later executed for his involvement. In The Nun’s Priest’s Tale Geoffrey Chaucer (whose father lived locally) refers to the massacre of Flemings by Straw and his gang:

Jack Straw and all his followers in their brawl

Were never half so shrill, for all their noise,

When they were murdering those Flemish boys.

One of the victims was an illegitimate wine merchant, financier and royal advisor Richard Lyons who was of Flemish descent. He was beheaded in Cheapside on 14 June 1381. His head was carry round the city on a pole. At his death he held lands in Essex, Kent, Suffolk, Surrey, Sussex, Middlesex, and Hertfordshire, as well as London property which included a large house in Thames Street, a narrow riverside street in Vintry, which contained grand residences of courtiers and merchants. The street represented money, authority and foreign influence. Dozens of Flemings were dragged from their dwellings and the sanctuary of city churches, beheaded, and their bodies left to rot. Nobody was spared during that violent outburst, except those who could plainly pronounce the shibboleth ‘bread and cheese’. If their speech sounded anything like ‘brot and cawse’, off went their heads, as a sure mark they were Flemish. Language has been a controversial aspect of the immigration debate from the outset.

Another eye witness was an immigrant. Historian and poet Jean Froissart was born at Valenciennes, Hainault, towards the end of 1337. This county was then part of the Low Countries in the western tip of the Holy Roman Empire (now in France). Around 1360 he was employed by Philippa of Hainault, Queen Consort of Edward III, as court poet and historian. In his Chronicles he depicts the London rebellion describing Wat Tyler as a ‘tiler of houses, an ungracious patron’. A lavishly illustrated edition of the Chronicles was commissioned by Louis of Gruuthuuse, a nobleman within the Burgundian court and bibliophile from Bruges, who was awarded the title of Earl of Winchester by Edward IV in 1472. The four volumes contain 112 miniatures of various sizes painted by some of the best Brugeois artists of the day, including splendid images of Richard II meeting the rebels, and the murder of Wat Tyler, in the style of Flemish illuminator Loiset Liédet. The London cityscape figures splendidly in the background of both scenes. After the death of Queen Philippa at Windsor Castle in August 1369 Froissart returned to the Continent. It is a bitter irony that one of the bloodiest moments in London’s history helped to bring about what is arguably the most superbly illustrated book about the capital.

Gauden Road (Clapham)
Chess player Vera Menchik was born on 16 February 1906 in Moscow. Her father was Bohemian and the manager of several estates owned by the nobility in Russia. His English wife Olga worked a governess. After the Revolution her father lost his livelihood.

The marriage broke down and in the autumn of 1921 Olga and her two daughters returned to Hastings to live with her mother. Vera joined the Hastings Chess Club in March 1923. In January 1926 she won the first Girls’ Open Championship at the Imperial Club in London with her younger sister Olga coming third. She won the first Women’s World Championship in 1927 and successfully defended her title six times in every other championship held during her lifetime (losing only one game). She was a member of the West London Chess Club.

In 1944 Vera still held the title of women’s world champion. On 27 June of that year Vera, Olga, and their mother were killed in a German bomb attack which destroyed their home at no. 47 Gauden Road, Clapham. The trophy for the winning team in the Women’s Chess Olympiad is now known as the Vera Menchik Cup.

Jeweller and watchmaker Mosheh Oved was born in 1885 in Russian Poland. He settled in London around 1902 where he became involved in the jewellery trade and founded his own shop, Cameo Corner (originally Good’s Cameo Corner). Cameo Corner was the principal centre for the sale of jewellery in London for the first half of the twentieth century. It was located first at no. 1 New Oxford Street and after the Second World War in Museum Street – always within easy reach of the British Museum.

Mosheh Oved (alias Edward Good) was a well-known figure in London’s Jewish community and a founder member of the Ben Uri Jewish Art Society. He designed and made his own jewellery and metalwork, and was also interested in sculpture; he was a friend of Jacob Epstein, whose work he collected. He wrote several books on aspects of his life and Jewry in Europe, and especially a series of memoirs, assembled in a single volume Visions and Jewels published first in Hebrew, then in an English translation (1952).

His wife Sah Oved was born Gwendolyn Ethel Rendle in 1900. She served her apprenticeship with the Arts and Crafts jeweller John Paul Cooper until 1923 and subsequently created some of the most original and striking jewellery designs before the Second World War. In 1961 a collection of her jewellery designs was shown in the First International Jewellery Exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Mosheh had died three years previously.

Vigo Street (originally Vigo Lane) is a short street running between Regent Street and the junction of Burlington Gardens and Savile Row. It is named after the Anglo-Dutch naval victory over the French and Spanish in the 1702 Battle of Vigo Bay, northern Spain, during the opening years of the War of the Spanish Succession. The street has strong literary connections. Publishers John Lane and Elkin Mathews were in partnership in Vigo Street. Together they – notoriously – published The Yellow Book (volumes one and two) in 1894.

Later they founded The Bodley Head and continued to publish the work until it ceased in 1897. When the partnership ended, both publishers continued to have premises in Vigo Street. Mathews published the first editions of a number of important literary works, including Yeats’s The Wind among the Reeds in 1899 and James Joyce’s Chamber Music in 1907.

The story of Penguin Books is well-known – in part at least. Its creator Allen Lane had learned the book trade at The Bodley Head, no. 8 Vigo Street, where he was employed by his uncle John. He became a director of the firm when John Lane died in 1925 and was appointed chairman in 1930 while still in his twenties. In 1934, returning from a weekend in Devon, he was upset to find nothing in the Exeter station bookstall that was worth reading on his journey back to London. He decided to re-publish quality titles in cheap paperbacks and settled for the name Penguin Books.

The covers were to be green for detective stories, orange for fiction, and blue for non-fiction, with the title in plain lettering on a broad white band across the middle. He adopted an alternative approach to typography and cover design by appointing Jan Tschichold (born Johannes Tzschichhold on 2 April 1902 at Leipzig) as his typographer.

After Hitler’s election in Germany, all designers had to register with the Ministry of Culture. Soon after Johannes had taken up a teaching post at the Munich school for German master printers, he was denounced as a ‘cultural bolshevist’. He and his family were placed in ‘protective custody’, but they escaped to Basel where he worked as a freelance typographer. He stayed in Switzerland for most of his life and became a master of his art.

Between 1947 and 1949 he lived at the Old Mill House, Mill Road, West Drayton, working on the typographical re-design of Penguin Books by imposing on its printers high standards of design and page make-up, consistent with mass production. He was also an accomplished designer of type. Sabon (1966/7) remains to this day one of the most popular typefaces for bookwork. Allen Lane’s venture proved successful. On New Year’s Day 1936 he created Penguin Books as a separate company. In 1950 a leader in The Times saluted him for making up for the loss of Empire by using the English language and classy paperbacks to spread British influence worldwide in a form that was less objectionable, but just as powerful as the earlier imperialism. To any non-British observer such statements remain incomprehensible, because in reality the creation of Penguin and the wider flourishing of post-war publishing in Britain was a truly cosmopolitan affair through the active participation of refugees from the Continent.

Typographer Hans Schmoller was born on 9 April 1916 in Berlin into a Jewish family. His father was an eminent paediatrician and a pioneer of infant welfare clinics. Having finished his early education in 1933, he intended to study art history but university entry was banned for Jews. Instead he began an apprenticeship as compositor in the Jewish book-printing firm of Siegfried Scholem. From October 1937 to February 1938 he attended a course at the Monotype Technical School, London. Knowing that he could not return to Germany (both his parents died in concentration camps), he accepted a job at the Evangelical Missionary Society in Basutoland (now Lesotho) as manager of its press. He established a reputation as a fine designer and typographer throughout South Africa where he was co-founder of the Imprint Society for the Advancement of the Graphic Arts. He was interned from July 1940 to April 1942 as an enemy alien.

He moved to London in 1947 where he was appointed manager of the bindery and assistant to Oliver Simon at The Curwen Press, Plaistow. There he designed many handsome catalogues and book jackets. In 1949 he replaced Jan Tschichold as typographer at Penguin Books and acted as head of production from 1956. From 1960 to his retirement in 1967 he was a director of the company. During his Penguin years Schmoller played a crucial role in post-war British typography. Some of his outstanding achievements include Buildings of England (written by the historian Nikolaus Pevsner, himself a Jewish immigrant) and The Complete Pelican Shakespeare.

London in the 1950s liberated British artists. The Bohemian underworlds of Fitzrovia and Soho were brimming over with ideas and movements: Neo-Romanticism, Social Realism, Pop Art, the Kitchen Sink School, Abstract Expressionism and others. Soho symbolised the energy of a city in intellectual and artistic ferment after the shell-shock of war. In the midst of it all were large numbers of displaced refugee intellectuals and artists who were desperate to build up a new career and identity.

London turned into a cosmopolitan melting pot. Situated on the corner of Old Compton Street and Dean Street, Café Torino was a favoured spot for many of the political and art sects prevalent in London in the mid-1950s. Its marble-topped tables were home to exiled Spanish Republicans, anarchists and communists plotting the overthrow of Franco. To them the house was known as the ‘Madrid’. Above all, it stood as a testament to the enduring influence of cafés on the creative life of post-war Britain. Cafés like Torino were part of the birth of British ‘cool’. Torino had been run by the Italian Minella family since before the war. Officially it was a restaurant serving pizza, spaghetti and risotto, but clients could talk for hours over a small cup of coffee without being disturbed. One of its regulars was Germano Facetti.

Graphic designer Facetti was born on 5 May 1926 in Milan. He was arrested in 1943 by the Germans as a member of the resistance and for putting up anti-Fascist posters. He was deported to the labour camp of Mauthausen, Austria, which he survived. There he met Lodovico di Belgiojoso who later invited him to join his BBPR architectural partnertship in Milan (another partner Gianluigi Banfi had died in the camp). He moved to London in 1952 where he took evening classes in typography at the Central School of Art & Design. By the late 1950s he was art director at Aldus Books, Fitzrovia, and working as an interior designer. His planning for the Poetry Bookshop in Soho motivated Allen Lane, director of Penguin, to hire his services in 1960.

Facetti was instrumental in re-designing the Penguin line, in particular Penguin Classics, introducing photo-typesetting, the ‘Romek Marber grid’, offset-litho printing, and photography to their paperback covers, that set the benchmark for exemplary design in the publishing world. He helped establish the Design and Art Directors Association in London in 1963. Working at Penguin until 1972 (when he returned to Milan), his book covers gave an unmatched visual impact to a series of paperbacks that would make a lasting impact on British cultural life.

Romek Marber was born in Poland on 25 October 1925 into a Jewish family. In 1939, he was deported to the Bochnia ghetto. In 1942, Marber was saved from being sent to the Belzec death camp by Gerhard Kurzbach (a commander who is credited with saving many Jews). He eventually arrived in Britain in 1946. He followed a course in Commercial Art at St Martin’s School of Art in the early 1950s and attended the Royal College of Art in 1953.

During the late 1950s, his work for The Economist impressed Penguin’s art director Germano Facetti who, in 1961, commissioned him to design covers for Simeon Potter’s Our Language and Language in the Modern World. Facetti has taken credit for the re-styling of Penguin books during that decade, but the essential new look of modern Penguins was the work of Romek Marber. Facetti asked Marber to submit a proposal for a new cover approach for the Penguin Crime series. His arrangement was adopted for much of the rest of the Penguin line giving that publisher its distinctive visual unity throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Marber retired in 1989, becoming a Professor Emeritus of Middlesex University.

A German ‘cultural bolshevist’, an Italian communist, a German and a Polish Jew – these refugees created the iconic look of a famous publishing institution. Penguin was (and remains) a great British team in the premier league of culture – most of its star players had been foreigners.

London has always attracted the weird and wonderful. Throughout its history, the city has known countless oddballs and fruitcakes. In the eighteenth century foreign visitors to the capital were often surprised by the frank, if not rude attitude of its population. Society celebrated eccentrics and social rebels. It ridiculed affectation. Hypocrisy was considered an evil. That seems to be a lasting legacy. Cities in general tend to breed conformity, but that encourages single individuals to stand out and be unusual. The passion to be different supplies the air and breath that are essential to the vitality of London life. Loonies are the lungs of an urban culture.

One such characters was an Irish immigrant into London by the name of James Salter. He had formerly been a barber and a valet to Hans Sloane, before opening a coffee house at no. 59 Cheyne Walk, at the corner of Lawrence Street, in 1697. By 1715 he had moved his coffee house to the west side of Danvers Street, and then in 1718 to its final location at the newly-built no. 18 Cheyne Walk, close to Sloane’s manor house which stood at numbers 19-26 (the mansion was demolished in 1760). He named his Chelsea establishment Don Saltero’s Coffee House. The owner (most likely with a passion for Italian opera) was famous for his punch, he could play the fiddle, and would shave, bleed and draw teeth. He was an Irishman of all trades. Part of the attraction of the coffee house was the display of a large collection of unusual objects and curiosities.

The modern museum was preceded by what was known as a cabinet of curiosities. These sixteenth century cabinets were gathered by collectors with different social backgrounds and their contents varied according to the means and interests of the owners: physicians collected anatomical specimens; merchants bought rarities from far-flung trading posts; artists gathered prints, drawings and casts of ancient sculpture. By the turn of the seventeenth century collecting became increasingly an obsession of the wealthy and the well-connected. They were hoarding objects into vast personal collections. Starfish, forked carrots, monkey teeth, alligator skins, phosphorescent minerals, Indian canoes, and unicorn tails were acquired eagerly and indiscriminately. Critical taxonomy was rarely in evidence. The curiosity cabinet performed an educational function, facilitating the dissemination of knowledge. Unlike the museum, the curiosity cabinet was not intended for a public audience, but rather for the educated few. The coffee house museum functioned as an intermediate. The collection was there to attract the paying public into the establishment. It was a business venture in which the craving for coffee was linked to the growing urban passion for collecting curiosities and exotics. The experiment proved tremendously popular.

Saltero’s soon was frequented by Chelsea’s wealthy and fashionable residents, having received a special notice in the Tatler of June 1709. It was a favourite meeting-place for men like Hans Sloane, Richard Mead, and Nathaniel Oldham. As one of the local sights, the house was visited by antiquarian Ralph Thoresby in 1723 and by Benjamin Franklin about 1724. It also features in a passage of Fanny Burney’s novel Evelina (1778).

Items on display at the coffee house were donated by Hans Sloane, John Munden, Richard Steele and other Chelsea residents. Salter’s museum was an assemblage of oddities, including a petrified crab from China; medals of William Laud, Gustavus Adolphus, and the seven bishops who resisted James II’s declaration of indulgence; William the Conqueror’s flaming sword; Henry VIII’s coat of mail; Job’s tears (of which anodyne necklaces were made); a bowl and ninepins in a box the size of a pea; Madagascar lances; and last but not least: a hat which had belonged to the sister of Pontius Pilate’s wife’s chambermaid.

The curiosities were placed in glass cases in the front room of the first floor. Weapons, skeletons, and fishes covered the walls and ceiling. A poetical autobiography and account of his ‘Museum Coffee House’ appeared in the British Apollo and in Mist’s Journal (22 June 1723). Salter also published A Catalogue of the Rarities to be seen at Don Saltero’s Coffee House in Chelsea which he offered for sale to his customers (no less than forty-eight extant editions range from 1729 to 1795). This Irishman ran a roaring business. Salter died in 1728 and his daughter went on to run the premises as a tavern until 1758. It continued to attract considerable custom, but in 1799 the collection was sold in 121 lots at auction and dispersed.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the coffee house was described as a ‘quiet tavern’, and in 1867 the property was converted into a private residence. Salter’s ‘Chelsea Knackatory’ was not the only establishment that attracted a curious audience with his exhibition of rarities. He had in fact a rival which is evident from another published catalogue entitled A Catalogue of the Rarities to be seen at Adams’s, at the Royal Swan, in Kingsland-road, leading from Shoreditch Church, 1756. This catalogue lists some 500 rarities, including African artefacts. Visitors to the Royal Swan would be entertained by the sight of Walter Raleigh’s tobacco pipe; the Vicar of Bray’s clogs; an engine to shell green peas with; a set of teeth that grew in a fish’s belly; Wat Tyler’s spurs; Adam’s key of the fore and back door to the Garden of Eden, etc. There was fierce rivalry amongst the proprietors of coffee house museums to catch the public’s ear, eye and purse.

Cheyne Walk, known as the ‘village of palaces’, is named after the Cheyne family who owned an estate on the site. They were Lords of the Manor of Chelsea from 1660 to 1712. The first houses to be built in the Walk were a row of grand Queen Anne houses. At its creation Cheyne Walk was a desirable place to live and remained so to this very day. It can list a long line of famous residents, including Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards (no. 3); novelists George Eliot (no. 4) and Henry James (no. 21); painter James McNeill Whistler (at various times at nos. 21, 72, 96, and 101); author and social critic Thomas Carlyle (no. 24); Dracula’s creator Bram Stoker (no. 27); Hungarian film producer and Jewish refugee Max Schach (no. 35); pop stars Mick Jagger and Marian Faithful (no. 48); novelist Elizabeth Gaskel (no. 93); engineer Marc Brunel (no. 98); prophet Nicolaus Ludwig Zinzendorf of the Moravian Church (no. 99/100); Anglo-French poet Hillaire Belloc (no. 104); and painter J.M.W. Turner (no. 119).

The life of poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti is an extraordinary success tale in the history of migration. His father, the scholar, poet and revolutionary Gabriele Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti, was born on 28 February 1783 in Vasto, Kingdom of Naples. The original family name was Della Guardia. Probably the diminutive Rossetti was given to a red-haired ancestor and, for reasons unknown, stuck. The son of a blacksmith, he made an impressive early career. In 1807 he was librettist at the San Carlo opera house in Naples and was later appointed curator of ancient marbles and bronzes in the Capodimonte Museum. His political poetry caused him trouble. As a member of the revolutionary society Carbonari in Naples, he directed his anger against Ferdinand II who had revoked the Constitution in 1821. Gabriele was sentenced to death. He escaped to England via Malta in 1824 never to see his homeland again. In 1826 he married Frances Mary Lavinia Polidori, the daughter of another Italian man of letters, Gaetano Polidori, Tuscan by birth but Londoner by adoption. The couple lived at no. 38 Charlotte Street, Fitzrovia.

It was here that Dante Gabriel Rossetti was born. The Rossetti children, all born in London, would make a massive impact on British cultural and artistic life. Gabriele was appointed Professor of Italian at King’s College London in 1831, a post he held until 1847.
09 D.G. Rossetti moved into Tudor House at no. 16 Cheyne Walk soon after the death in February 1862 of his wife, the Pre-Raphaelite model Elizabeth Siddall, from an overdose of laudanum. He spent several bohemian years at the place. It was here that he began collecting a menagerie of exotic animals and developed a passion for hoarding antique furniture, blue-and-white china, and vast amounts of bric-a-brac. His former lover and model Fanny Cornforth became housekeeper of the male-dominated daily life at Tudor House.

Rossetti shared the place with Algernon Charles Swinburne, the ‘demoniac boy’ of poetry. The latter contributed to the dissolute state of the place by drinking past excess to unconsciousness and getting into physical arguments with guests. Whistler, who lived nearby, was a regular visitor. Henry Treffry Dunn, who was Rossetti’s studio assistant and secretary between 1867 and 1880, has left a written account of life in Chelsea in his Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his Circle (Cheyne Walk Life). Dunn illustrated the book himself and his watercolours of Tudor House give a unique and intimate glimpse into the artist’s home – a Chelsea knackatory of chaos and creativity.

Hell is a city much like London, Shelley wrote in 1819. The imagination cannot conceive a viler criminal than he who should build another London like the present one, nor a greater benefactor than he who should destroy it, George Bernard Shaw concluded some eighty odd years later. To a number of nineteenth century social commentators London was the capital of degeneration. The urban poor were described as stunted and rickety. They were scarred by sores and scrofulous lumps, the stigmata of sickness.

The ‘great unwashed’ were said to be indifferent to the filth in which they lived and bred. To some observers they constituted a distinct type, a race apart, a threat to civil society. Whilst other scientists suggested that the environment had a major impact on degeneracy, thereby implying that improvement was possible, hard-line eugenicists on the other hand argued that the sole cause was heredity. They claimed that morality arises from the law of the preservation of the species. Only that what lifts a person to a higher level of mental or physical perfection can be considered as moral. Altruism and humanitarianism are impediments to evolutionary progress. Social Darwinists fanned fears that a horde of degenerates was dragging the nation down into biological decline. The ‘survival of the un-fittest’ was a peril that had to be confronted. Gymnastics provided one solution.

During antiquity sport had been praised for preparing soldiers with the training they would require in battle. In the early modern period the state’s primary justification for declaring any sports to be lawful, even in the face of opposition from religious zealots, was based upon the ancient argument that they provided men with the physical conditioning necessary to their engagement with the enemy. The military of the British Empire had a long tradition of involvement in sport. Along with exercising and drilling, it was one of the few other activities for troops posted in colonial settlements in Australia and India. Sport also became a tool in the battle against urban degeneration. The dual aspects of military capability and social regeneration are part of the early history of the European obsession with sporting activities.

The 2012 London Olympic Games saw British gymnasts make history by producing the best results since the foundation of British Gymnastics (also known as the British Amateur Gymnastics Association) in 1888. The adoption of gymnastics in Britain was facilitated by immigrants. As a specific discipline of physical exercise, it had been developed in Germany by Friedrich Ludwig Jahn with the aim of improving the fighting fitness of the army. Known in Germany as ‘Turnvater Jahn’ (father of gymnastics), he was troubled by the humiliation of his native land by Napoleon. He argued that the practice of gymnastics would restore the physical strength and with it, the pride of his countrymen. He opened the first ‘Turnplatz’ (open-air gymnasium) in Berlin in 1811.

Young gymnasts were taught to regard themselves as members of a kind of guild for the emancipation of their fatherland. The ‘Turnverein’ (gymnastics association) movement spread rapidly. One of the youngsters brought up in this tradition of physical exertion was Ernst Ravenstein who was born in Frankfurt am Main on 30 December 1834 into a family of engravers. Having completed his studies, he moved to London in 1852 where he was employed as a cartographer at the Ministry of War. He retired in 1872, declining the position of chief cartographer at the Royal Geographical Society because he was refused permission to smoke on the premises. In spite of that, he remained an active member of the Society as cartographic editor of the Geographical Magazine. He also sat on the councils of the Royal Statistical Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He briefly taught as Professor of Geology at London’s Bedford College (1884/5). His work on migration influenced geographers, demographers and sociologists. In 1902, Ravenstein was the first scientist to receive the Victoria gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society.

Ravenstein also had a passion for sport. His 1893 ‘Oarsman’s and Angler’s Map of the River Thames’ was reprinted nearly a century later. In 1861 he founded the ‘Deutsche Turnverein’ (German Gymnastic Society) in London and was its President until 1871. In that capacity, he established the ‘Turnhalle’ (German Gymnasium) at no. 26 Pancras Road. The building – now listed – was designed by Edward Gruning and constructed in 1864/5 for use by the Society. It was funded solely by the German community in London. In its first year the Gymnasium attracted 900 members, of whom 500 were German, 203 English, 67 Scottish and the rest spread across different nationalities. On 7 November 1865 the Liverpool Mercury reported the formation of the National Olympian Association (NOA). Its inaugural meeting was held at the Liverpool Gymnasium in Myrtle Street. This meeting was the forerunner of the modern British Olympic Association. In 1866, the newly built German Gymnasium was one of three venues in London to host the first ever national Olympian Games held during the modern era. The NOA lasted until 1883 and its Olympian Games ‘were open to all comers’. The undertaking influenced the thinking and ambitions of young Pierre de Coubertin.

German gymnasts helped increase awareness of physical education during the Victorian era, but ultimately the British would adopt a form of gymnastics which had its roots in Stockholm rather than Berlin. This was partly because German gymnastics were geared towards military needs. The battle for ideas on physical exercise in Britain was won by another immigrant.

Homoeopath and therapist Mathias Roth was born in 1818 in Kaschau (Košice), in the Habsburg Empire, into a Jewish family. Having supported the unsuccessful Hungarian revolt against the Habsburgs he had to flee the country. He arrived in London in October 1849 where, in 1850, he was one of the founding members of the short-lived Hahnemann Hospital at no. 39 Bloomsbury Square which aimed at relieving the poor who suffer from acute diseases by receiving them as in patients (between 1850 and 1852 over 9,000 patients were treated). In 1851 he published

The Prevention and Cure of many Chronic Diseases by Movements, a long treatise on the philosophical, physiological, and medical foundations of Swedish gymnastics which had been pioneered by Pehr Henrik Ling earlier in the century. Roth developed the concept of scientific physical education, advocating the teaching of physiology, hygiene, and educational gymnastics. The Swedish model offered an alternative to those who were put off by the military connotation of the German version of strengthening the muscles.

The latter part of the nineteenth century suffered from nerves. As a curative for neurasthenia doctors prescribed fresh air and physical exercise. Organised sports, swimming, weight-lifting, or horse riding, were considered a means of overcoming the perceived crisis of masculinity. In a world where only the fit survive, there was no place for weak men. Muscular activities were supposed to sharpen aggression and increase competitiveness. There was a spiritual dimension to the argument too. Many observers believed that the Church contributed to man’s meekness. They called for a more robust religiosity. The phrase ‘muscular Christianity’ appeared in the late 1850s in connection with Charles Kingsley’s fiction.

The underlying idea was that the image of Christ communicated by the (Anglican) Church was too effeminate, passive and unheroic. The age of nervousness needed a new Messiah, a figure of power and strength, a leader who would turn feeble followers into supermen of masculinity. There were cultural prototypes. Burckhardt had presented his age with a nostalgic image of the Renaissance Uomo Universale, Nietzsche introduced his Übermensch, and Marxists created their own myths of the Working Man’s might and muscle.

Friedrich Wilhelm Müller was born a delicate child in Königsberg, East Prussia, on 2 April 1867. Having adopted the name Eugen Sandow, he would become the revered ‘blond god’ of nineteenth century manhood, the ‘father of modern bodybuilding’, and the creator in 1897 of the London Institute of Physical Culture, a gymnasium for bodybuilders. He held the first bodybuilding contest at the Royal Albert Hall in September 1901 (where his friend Arthur Conan Doyle acted as one of the judges). Sandow was a living image of classical sculpture. He himself helped to develop the ‘Grecian ideal’ as a formula for the perfect male physique.

That same year, Ray Lankester, Director of the Natural History Department of the British Museum, mounted an exhibit displaying examples of all the races of the world. Eugen Sandow represented the Caucasian race. A complete cast of his body was made by the London based Italian firm of Brucciani & Co. and put on a pedestal. The cast represented the ideal type of European manhood: Sandow was superman. A time that was obsessed with the notion of degeneration projected his powerful body as an antidote for neurasthenia. In 1911, Sandow received Royal approval and was appointed Professor of Scientific and Physical Culture to George V.

The physical reconstruction and regeneration of the people, subtitle of his ‘classic’ book Life is Movement (1919), was the ultimate mission of all his undertakings. In early history a desperate search was made for the one medicine that would cure a range of epidemic diseases. Herbs from the East and even tobacco were hailed as ‘miracle’ cures. The late nineteenth century sought for a similar panacea to overcome its social evils. Eugenics promised both diagnosis of and cure for a paradox that was observed by numerous critics of society: on the one hand a firm belief in progress and the confident prediction of ever increasing prosperity; and, on the other hand, the contrast of the depravity of a large part of the population of city-dwellers (Jack London’s ‘people of the abyss’).

During the late decades of the nineteenth century the ideals of the French Revolution: liberty, equality, and fraternity, had become outdated dogmas that were no longer considered relevant from a scientific point of view. The theory of evolutionary progress had replaced them by the new triad of determinism, inequality, and selection. Social Darwinism is an ideology that uses the concept of the struggle for existence as the basis for social theory. The concept proved fruitful for those liberals who advocated the principle of laissez faire in socio-economic life, as well as for later commentators who set out to justify imperial and racial policies. Eugenics became part and parcel of that theory. Once the politics of brutality had taken over, Europe would pay a heavy price for its ‘scientific’ interest in these fields of research.

Livorno Jews have played a prominent part in the emancipation of the Jewish religious and civil community living in London. David Nieto was born in January 1654 in Venice, but spent his early professional life in Livorno. In 1701 he was called to London as haham (chief rabbinical authority) of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish congregation which that year had moved to the newly built Bevis Marks Synagogue at no. 4 Heneage Lane.

An intellectual with a keen interest in astronomy and the scientific thinking of Newton, he spent most of his energy on helping crypto-Jews who, newly arrived from the Iberian Peninsula, were returning to open Judaism. One of his successors was Raphael Meldola who was actually born in Livorno in 1754.  His son David served as Chief Rabbi for over twenty-five years until his death. He was a co-founder of the London Jewish Chronicle.

The word milliner, meaning a maker of hats, was first recorded in reference to the products for which Milan and the northern Italian regions were well known (i.e. ribbons, gloves and straws). The haberdashers who imported these popular products were called ‘Millaners’. Another staple import from Italy was the straw bonnet, associated with the name of Leghorn (Livorno), which became popular in England owing to the patronage of the stunningly beautiful Irish-born sisters Maria and Elizabeth Gunning. Leghorn bonnets, made from straw turned into a sparkling bleached white, became the height of fashion. They played a notable part in England’s fashion history of the age.

During the eighteenth century Italian immigrants dominated the London hat trade, both as sellers and makers. A strong impulse had been given to Anglo-Italian trade through the establishment, in 1740, of a branch of the great Venetian and Levantine banking house of Treves in London, and consequently Italians, chiefly Jews, were flocking into the country throughout the 1740s. Moses Vita (Haim) Montefiore was a Sephardic Jew who had emigrated from Livorno to London in the 1740s, but retained close contact with the town. He was involved in the bonnet trade and laid the foundation for the wealth of this notable Italian family in London.

Benjamin Disraeli, grandfather of the politician, author and Conservative Prime Minister, was born in Cento, near Ferrara, in September 1730. He moved to London in 1748 where he was employed in the counting-house of Joseph and Pellegrin Treves in Fenchurch Street. Soon after, he established himself as a merchant. He had brought with him a sound knowledge of the traditional Italian straw bonnet trade and he specialised in the import of Leghorn hats, Carrara marbles, alum, currants, and other merchandise.

For a decade he devoted himself to his import business, which he carried on at no. 5 Great St Helens. In 1769 the business had become one of the leading London coral merchants (a trade dominated by Jews). He also acted as an unlicensed broker at the Stock Market. In 1779 he invited two partners and together they founded the firm of Disraeli, Stoke & Parkins which became successful dealers. When, in 1801, plans were laid out to build new premises at Capel Court for the Stock Exchange, Disraeli was appointed as a member of the Committee for General Purposes entrusted with the plan of conversion.

Michael (Meyer) Solomon was a Bishopsgate manufacturer, and one of the first Jews to be admitted to the freedom of the City of London. Solomon’s family had arrived in England from Europe, possibly Holland or Germany, sometime at the end of the eighteenth century. Aaron Solomon had started a hat business in London in 1779. Michael and his family lived among a well-established Jewish community at no. 3 Sandys Street, Bishopsgate, and his considerable wealth allowed him to be accepted by London society. His main business concern was as a manufacturer of Leghorn hats.

Three of his children, Abraham, Rebecca and Simeon, were notable painters. Simeon was identified with the Pre-Raphaelites through his friendship with D. G. Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones and Algernon Charles Swinburne.

He was one of several notable artists in the Pre-Raphaelite circle commissioned by the brothers George and Edward Dalziel who ran a highly productive firm of engravers to produce drawings for their projected illustrated Bible. The project was never completed, although the illustrations appeared in Dalziel’s Bible Gallery (1880) with narrative captions. His life ended in tragedy. In 1873, Simeon was arrested in a public lavatory and charged with committing buggery. Although the incident was not reported in the newspapers his public career was effectively at an end. Most of his former friends disowned him and he began a precarious existence which led him to the workhouse and dependence upon institutional and family charity. In May 1905 he collapsed on the pavement in High Holborn and died shortly after.

Evidently, not all of the Livornesi were hat makers. Domenico Angelo Tremamondo was an immigrant from Livorno who, after arriving in London, established a School of Arms in Carlyle Street, Soho. He also ran a riding school in the rear garden of the house (where Johann Christian Bach was a tenant). As an instructor of swordsmanship to royals and aristocrats he turned fencing from an act of war into an elegant sport.

In 1763, he published the popular and often reprinted folio École des armes with forty-seven splendid plates after draughtsman John Gwynn, a founding member of the Royal Academy. Around 1785, his Eton-educated son Henry Angelo took over the running of the fencing academy (Sheridan, Fox and Lord Byron were among his many pupils). He moved the academy from his fathers’ residence in Carlisle House, first to the Royal Opera House in Haymarket and then, after a fire in 1789, to Bond Street, where he shared premises with the former champion boxer John ‘Gentleman’ Jackson (to whom boxing-mad Lord Byron referred to as his ‘corporeal pastor and master’). In 1828, looking back at his life, he wrote a series of entertaining Reminiscences that give a unique insight in the urban eccentricities of his time. Henry was a full-blooded Londoner. Social and intellectual integration demands little more than a generation. After all, it took two generations for an immigrant’s descendant to become Prime Minister of the nation.

Botanist and mathematician Henry Fox Talbot produced his first successful photographic images in 1834, without a camera, by placing objects onto paper brushed with light-sensitive silver chloride, which he then exposed to sunlight. By 1840, Talbot had succeeded in producing photogenic drawings in a camera, with short exposures yielding an invisible or ‘latent’ image that could be developed to produce a usable negative. This made his process a practical tool for subjects such as portraiture and was patented as the ‘calotype’ in 1841. Talbot’s negative-positive process formed the basis of almost all photography on paper up to the digital age. His work was certainly not a solo effort. Major inventions rarely are.

Nicolaas Henneman was born in Heemskerk in the Netherlands on 8 November 1813. Having worked in Paris for a while, he arrived in England around 1835. He was employed as valet to Fox Talbot at Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire, where he assisted the photographer in preparations and printing, and he took many photographs himself. He accompanied Talbot on expeditions around Britain, and in 1843 the pair ventured into France, securing important photographs later published in The Pencil of Nature (1844/6: the first commercially published book illustrated with photographs).

Later that year, Henneman left Talbot’s employ to set up the world’s first dedicated photographic printing works at no. 8 Russell Terrace in Reading. Unable to sustain that operation he moved to London in 1847, this time in a business largely owned by Talbot, but called Nicolaas Henneman’s ‘Sun Picture Rooms’ at no. 122 Regent Street. In 1848 he was joined by the young chemist Thomas Augustine Malone, and by the next year Henneman & Malone were billing themselves as ‘Photographers to the Queen’. While Henneman taught many successful photographers, he never achieved true artistry himself. In the increasingly competitive world of the 1850s he lost out. By 1859 financial difficulties forced him to shut down his business.

His lasting claim to fame is his involvement in the publication of the first photographically illustrated book on art. To the three volumes of text of William Stirling’s Annals of the Artists of Spain (1848) was added a limited edition volume of sixty-six photographic illustrations. These were the first photographs ever published of Spanish paintings, drawings, sculpture and prints, by artists including El Greco, Velázquez, Murillo, Zurbarán, Ribera and Goya, in addition to examples of architectural designs and book illustrations. The photographs were taken by Henneman who used the Calotype process invented by Talbot. The book has become extremely rare. Only fifty copies of the Annals were produced, and their deterioration, due to daylight, chemicals and other factors, began immediately.

Henneman was not the only immigrant from Northern Europe who made an impact on the history of the photography book in Britain. Oscar Gustaf Rejlander was born in 1813 in Sweden, but nothing is known about his early life. He apparently studied art in Rome in the 1830s and supported himself there by working as a portrait painter and copyist of old masters. He was in England by 1841.

In 1845 he had settled at no. 42 Darlington Street, Wolverhampton, where he opened a painter’s studio. He took up photography in 1853 and two years later began to exhibit his photographic compositions consisting of portraits, landscapes, nudes, anatomical studies, and subject pictures. His genre photographs earned him the reputation as one of Britain’s leading photographers. His ‘Night in Town’ (also known as ‘Homeless’), depicting a child in rags huddled on a doorstep, was used by the Shaftesbury Society for over a hundred years to highlight the plight of homeless children.

In the spring of 1862 Rejlander moved to London and settled in Malden Road, Chalk Farm. On the relationship between photography and painting, he insisted that artists had as much to learn from photography about observation and draughtsmanship as photographers had to learn from painting about composition and expression. Contemporary critics described him as ‘the father of art photography’. As a portraitist Rejlander photographed several illustrious sitters, including Alfred Tennyson, Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), Henry Taylor, Charles Darwin, Gustave Doré, and Prince Albert.

In 1868 he opened a richly furnished studio opposite Victoria Station. It was soon after this move that Charles Darwin entered his shop and asked for his cooperation. Rejlander was commissioned to supply Darwin with nine illustrations depicting people in various emotional states for The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872).

The photograph illustrating ‘mental distress’, that of an agitated infant boy dubbed ‘Ginx’s Baby’ by critics, became a best-seller after Rejlander also created versions on cartes-de-visite and cabinet cards. The title for the photograph was taken from a popular satirical novel about an orphaned boy by radical Victorian author John Edward Jenkins. The striking image of this helpless working class child soon became part and parcel of the Victorian social and political debate on poverty, charity and social justice. Photography took on a new relevance. It suddenly dawned upon critics and observers that certain photographic images have the power to influence public opinion and determine or change its course. A single shot can strike deeper than a million words.

Durex is the world’s best-selling condom brand. The history of the term may remain obscure but, over time, condoms have been given interesting euphemistic names such as Johnnies, French letters (purses, ticklers), English raincoats, and a range of slang words that fill page after page of the Urban Dictionary. Such exotic references obscure the fact that the first branded sheaths came from Germany. The initial promotion of condoms was a matter of the military. The German army was the first to encourage its use among soldiers, beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century. German manufacturers would become the main producers of condoms and exported their products to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the rest of Europe. World War I interrupted the trade, but even its continuation elsewhere had a German dimension. Julius Schmidt was born on 17 March 1865 in Schondorf and moved to New York in 1882, changing his name to Schmid. He founded Schmid Laboratories in New Jersey in 1883 and later became the main supplier of condoms to the European Allies. By the early 1920s, however, most of Europe’s condoms were once again made in Germany.

Syphilis was the urban scourge of the late nineteenth century and yet a taboo subject. Ibsen’s treatment of the subject in his play Ghosts was judged to be shocking and indecent. It sparked an outcry of moral indignation. In London the play was performed by Jack Grein’s Independent Theatre at the Royalty Theatre, at no. 73 Dean Street, Soho, on 13 March 1891. More than 3,000 people applied for tickets, and the production became a cause célèbre. In the press it was considered to be repulsive, coarse, and vulgar (The Daily Telegraph referred to the play as an ‘open drain: a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly’), but amongst the audience were literary figures such as George Moore, Oscar Wilde, John Gray, and artists such as Charles Shannon and Reginald Savage – all of them standing in the vanguard in the battle against oppressive Victorian values and hypocrisy. The pressures of war swept all secrecy and concealment aside.

Family planning was one aspect of consideration in the debate about the use of condoms, but to the authorities the physical health of soldiers was a more urgent issue. During the First World War, venereal disease caused over 400,000 hospital admissions among British troops. Roughly five percent of all the men who enlisted in Britain’s armies became infected. In 1918, there were over 60,000 hospital admissions for VD in France and Flanders alone. By contrast, only some 74,000 cases of Trench Foot (caused by prolonged exposure of the feet to damp, unsanitary, and cold conditions) were treated by Franco-Flemish hospitals during the whole of the war. Venereal patients required on average a month of intensive hospital treatment which caused a huge drain on the army’s resources. It was not until 1905 that the causative organism was first identified which led to more effective forms of treatment. Until the advent of penicillin in 1943, ‘cures’ for syphilis were based on the use of heavy metals such as mercury or, as the saying goes, ‘a night in the arms of Venus leads to a lifetime on Mercury’. Safe sex and sexual wellbeing were burning issues at the time.

Jewish Law has traditionally opposed the practice of birth control. The first mitzvah (commandment) in the Torah is to ‘be fertile and increase’. Condoms are unacceptable, because they block the passage of semen. That did not stop Jewish merchants from getting involved in the profitable rubber trade. Chemist Julius [Israel] Fromm, born on 4 March 1883, was an immigrant of Polish-Jewish descent into Germany. He invented the process for making condoms of liquefied rubber. Launched shortly after the First World War in Berlin, so-called ‘Fromms’ (synonym for condom) came to dominate the market. Mass production started in 1922; his invention of the condom vending machine followed later. Crown on the Condom Empire was his commission in 1930 of a flagship factory designed by avant-garde architects Arthur Korn and Siegfried Weitzman in the Berlin suburb of Köpenick – condoms in the style of Neue Sachlichkeit. In 1938, on the grounds that his supplies of rubber were needed for the war effort, Fromm was forced to sell his business at a fraction of its value to Baroness Elisabeth von Epenstein, Hermann Göring’s godmother. Fromm ended his productive life as a religious refugee in Hampstead Gardens Suburb where he died days after the collapse of the Reich.

Hairdresser and tobacconist Siegmund Jacoby was born around 1835 in Berlin into a Jewish family. He married Henrietta [Jetta] Meyers and the couple moved to London at some time in the 1860s. His son Daniel followed him in the same profession. A year after the death of his father in September 1885, Daniel and four others were charged with violent robbery at the Euston Road business of the elderly Jewish diamond merchant Julius Tabak. He was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. He was released and, a reformed character, set out to build a career and start a family. The 1891 census shows him living at no. 95 High Street, St Pancras. His son Lionel Alfred Jacoby was born in 1894, and he too took up the same line of work. In 1915, having his name changed to Lionel Alfred Jackson, he founded the London Rubber Company, selling condoms and barber supplies that were imported from Germany and America. He operated the firm from his father’s hairdresser and tobacconist shop. By 1920, he had opened a shop at no. 3 Mincing Lane and a wholesale surgical rubber business at no. 183 Aldersgate Street. There is some irony in the name of the first location: it is a corruption of Mynchen Lane, so-called from the tenements held there by the Benedictine ‘mynchens’ (nuns) of the nearby St Helen’s Bishopsgate church.

Why a barber/tobacconist? Condoms could be openly marketed as birth control devices in Britain, but there were social factors that inhibited sales. Condoms were available at local chemists that usually had female shop assistants. Many men were embarrassed by asking a young woman for a packet of condoms and bought them at the barber shop. They were generally requested with the euphemism ‘a little something for the weekend’. Boots, the largest pharmacy chain in Britain, stopped selling condoms altogether in the 1920s, a policy that was not reversed until the 1960s. Business was brisk, in spite of opposition to the product – and there were some prominent critics of condoms. Moralists rejected all methods of contraception. At the 1920 Lambeth Conference the Church of England condemned ‘unnatural means of conception avoidance’. The Bishop of London complained of pollution, because of the huge number of condoms discarded in alleyways and parks, especially after weekends and holidays. Feminists resisted all ‘male-controlled’ contraceptives. Freud disapproved of birth control methods on the grounds that failure rates were high and that their use diminished sexual pleasure. Concerned about falling birth rates after the First World War, the French government outlawed all contraceptives, including condoms. Contraception was also illegal in Spain and Ireland. European militaries nevertheless continued to provide condoms to their members for disease protection, even in countries where they were illegal for the general population.

Jackson was greatly helped by the 1930 Church of England ruling that birth control could be used by married couples. London Rubber’s first latex condom for sale in Britain was an export from the American Youngs Rubber Company in 1929. By 1932, London Rubber had become Europe’s first manufacturer of such condoms using the latest liquid latex dipping technology. These were made at their factory in Shore Road, Hackney, and branded Durex. The name was formed from the first two letters of the words DUrability, REliability, and EXcellence. Lionel Jackson died in 1934 and his brother Elkan (born: Maurice Elkan Jacoby) became Managing Director of the company. In 1937 the London Rubber Company moved to Chingford. At this time the company had about fifty percent of the British condom market. With the outbreak of World War II, it became impossible to acquire condoms from Germany. London Rubber Company expanded at enormous pace to meet the high demand for Durex condoms that were issued by the government to British servicemen. In 1968, the company was the largest manufacturer of dipped rubber goods (balloons, rubber gloves, paint brushes, surgical footwear, toothbrushes, soaps, and other products) in the world, employing over 2,000 people. In 2007 its last remaining condom factory was closed and production moved to China, India and Thailand. From the East End to the Far East – Durex has stretched itself from one end of the globe to the other.

Picture frame maker Abdon Ercolani was born Sant’Angelo in Vado (in the province of Urbino) in 1853/4. He moved to London around 1897 in search of work, and was joined by his family in 1898. He settled at no. 27 Claremont Road, Walthamstow. Given that his death has not been traced in Britain, it is possible that he retired to Italy, leaving his sons to continue the business as cabinet manufacturers until the eve of the Second World War.

His son Lucian Randolph Ercolani, furniture designer, was born in St Angelo, Tuscany, on 8 May 1888. Lucian Ercolani attended a Salvation Army school in East London. By 1906, he was working in the Salvation Army joinery department, producing staircases and handrails. In 1910, Frederick Parker employed him at his furniture workshops in High Wycombe (the ‘furniture capital’ of England). In 1920, he joined a local consortium there known as Furniture Industries. In the late 1940s, Ercolani developed a range of mass-produced which became a household name in post-war Britain (and which continues today). Lucian died in June 1976.

1897-1976

Engraver and landscape painter was born at Chambéry in 1755. He entered the engineering school at Mezières and, in 1775, joined the Sardinian army as an engineer. At this time Sardinian territory extended into what is now Provence, and Beaumont was working as a hydraulic engineer at Nice, where he met the Duke of Gloucester who engaged him in 1780 as a teacher of mathematics to his children.

Beaumont then accompanied the Duke on his travels in the Alps. A few years later he travelled through the Maritime Alps from Cuneo in Italy to Nice by the newly constructed road across the pass of Lanslebourg. In the 1790s he went through the Lepontine Alps, from Lyons to Turin. Beaumont’s accounts of these journeys show a lively interest in the classical and geographical history of the area. Published in folio, these accounts are embellished with maps drawn by himself and by drawings in simple and sepia-washed versions, the latter coloured by Bernard Lory the elder.

The books were printed in London by C. Clarke and sold by the bookselling firm of Thomas and John Egerton at their office at no. 32 Charing Cross (opposite the Admiralty). Once settled in London, Beaumont went into partnership with Thomas Gowland and employed Dutch artist and diplomat Cornelius Apostool as engraver. Between 1787 and 1806 he published a series of views Switzerland, Mediterranean France, and Piedmont. He afterwards took to landscape painting. Under the Empire he retired to La Vernaz in the Haute Savoie where he reared sheep. He died in 1812.

1780-1806

Painters’ brush maker Joseph Derveaux was born in France. Details about his birth and background are not available, but he was in London by around 1789 and established in business at no. 18 Charles Street, St James’s Square.

Fellow French immigrant and outstanding artist Philip Jacques De Loutherbourg owned hundreds of Derveaux’s brushes, which appeared in his studio sale after his death in 1812 described in Peter Coxe’s sale catalogue (18-20 June) as ‘French tools of the finest quality, manufactured by Derveaux’ (Lugt 8209). To have a brush maker identified by name in a sale catalogue is exceptional. The reputation of Delveaux at the time must have been considerable. There are no further details about him

1789-1812

In 1589, drainage engineer Humphrey Bradley, born in Bergen op Zoom, Brabant, of Anglo-Dutch parenthood (his father John was concierge of the English trading house there and had married Anna van der Delft), was engaged on a number of local drainage schemes in Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire, anticipating the methods that would later be applied by Vermuyden.

It was Bradley who drew up one of the earliest comprehensive plans for the drainage of the Fens, but his efforts foundered upon the rocks of vested interest and political manoeuvring. His two children were baptised at the Dutch Church in London, but he left England in 1594. He moved to France where he gained a practical monopoly of land drainage throughout the country. He presided over extensive drainage work in the Auvergne, Languedoc, and Saintonge. Bradley died in 1625.
1589-1594

In the London geography of migration Soho played a central part. Its population has always been heterogeneous. Originally an undisturbed area of rural grassland and fields, once urbanised Soho attracted waves of immigrants who tended to congregate together with their compatriots in close-knit ethnic enclaves. Greek Street is just one reminder of the many people (escaping Ottoman persecution) who were forced to make London their new home. Soho’s Frenchness since the arrival of large numbers of Huguenot refugees has been well documented. Until the 1950s, the area took its character mainly from French immigrants. They had their own school in Lisle Street, a hospital and dispensary on Shaftesbury Avenue, a number of churches, and an abundance of restaurants, cafés, boucheries, boulangeries, patisseries, chocolateries, and fromageries. The signs were in French and so was the language between staff and customers.

Daniel Nicholas Thévenon was born in 1833 in Burgundy where he started his career as a coach-builder. In 1854 he married Célestine Lacoste and in the mid-1850s they bought a wine shop from a relative.  The business did not succeed. Facing bankruptcy, the couple fled France for London in October 1863.  He assumed the name of Daniel Nicols. Lodging in Soho, he took on odd jobs while his wife worked as a seamstress. By 1865 they took over an oilcloth shop at no. 19 Glasshouse Street, turning it into Café Restaurant Nicols.  Having enlarged the premises in 1867, they renamed it the Café Royal. After the Franco-Prussian war of 1870/1, many French political refugees settled in or near Soho, and congregated at the Café Royal. Nicols invited his nephew Eugène Lacoste to stock the wine cellar. He laid down London’s finest collection of vintage wines and brandy. The decoration of the café with mirrors, crimson velvet and gilt, evoked the atmosphere of the Paris of the Second Empire. Georges Pigache, a lace maker and political Bonapartist living in London, designed the iconic emblem for the Café Royal with the French imperial crown and the letter N (for Nicols, but also for Napoleon). The sign was displayed on all the glass, china, napkins, and menus. Increasingly, the café attracted a bohemian clientele. Calling themselves the Café-Royalistes, artists such as James McNeill Whistler, Augustus John, and Auguste Rodin met here. During the early 1890s the café was frequented by Oscar Wilde and his circle of friends. By 1892 it was advertising itself as ‘the largest, most brilliant, and best known Anglo-French café in the world’.

Victor Aimé Berlemont ran the Restaurant Européen in Dean Street, Soho. At the outbreak of World War I he bought the pub next door from a German owner who feared internment. By then he was the only foreign landlord left in London. The Berlemont family was in fact Belgian, though it suited them to allow people to think that they were French. The pub, renamed Victor Berlemont until Watneys acquired the freehold after the war and, typically, came up with the boring name York Minster, was universally known as the French pub, or simply ‘The French’. In the 1920s its clientele included singer Edith Piaf, boxer Georges Carpentier, and many ladies of the night (known as Fifis). During World War II the pub a gathering place for the Free French forces and proved to be a valuable centre for communication, as Berlemont kept an unofficial register of the French who passed through London. Whisky could be obtained only under the counter, with a request for ‘vin blanc écossais’. The story that Charles de Gaulle wrote his appeal to resist the Nazis after a good lunch in the upstairs dining-room is a myth, but the General certainly visited the pub at least once. The visit was not a success. The English clients in the pub kept quiet and the Free French stood to attention, while De Gaulle drank a glass of wine.

Victor Berlemont died in 1951. His son Gaston continued the business. He had luxuriant handlebar moustaches and was extremely gallant to women. Beer was dispensed only in half-pint glasses, to discourage its consumption in favour of the more profitable wine that Gaston imported and bottled himself. Those who drank in the house included Dylan Thomas, who unconcernedly left behind the manuscript of Under Milk Wood one night, knowing it would still be there in the morning; Brendan Behan, who was said to have disgusted Gaston by eating his ‘boeuf bourguignon’ with both hands; Augustus John, Max Beerbohm, Nina Hamnet, and Stephen Spender. Later customers were a roll-call of bohemian Soho: Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Caroline Blackwood, the Bernard brothers, and many others. On 14 July 1989 Soho gathered on the pavement outside ‘The French’, not to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, but to mark Gaston’s retirement, aged seventy-five.

The bar in ‘The French’ boasted a superb water urn with twin taps that emitted a trickle of water for pastis or for the absinthe that Gaston was said to keep for his regular Soho Francophiles. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards absinthe had become associated with bohemian Paris. It featured frequently in paintings by such artists as Manet, Van Gogh and Picasso. They drank it in large quantities, joined by such poets as Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine. Spurred on by an odd but vocal alliance of social conservatives, prohibitionists, and winemakers’ associations, the consumption of absinthe became associated with social disorder and degeneration. In 1905, Swiss farmer Jean Lanfray murdered his wife in a drunken rage. His trial became known as the ‘Absinthe Murder’. After a referendum in July 1908, the drink was banned from Switzerland. Belgium (1906), The Netherlands (1909) and the United States (1912) followed the Swiss example. France held out until 1914 (the same year that Pablo Picasso created his cubist sculpture Le verre d’absinthe). Britain never banned absinthe. The reason is clear. The drink was only enjoyed by a tiny number of people (mainly artists) whose spiritual home was Paris rather than London. One of those ‘absintheurs’ was George Orwell. Having arrived in Paris in 1928, he soon learned to dance with the Green Fairy (a lively description of the drinking habit in Paris can be found in chapter seventeen of Down and Out in London and Paris). He brought his liking for absinthe back to London. Bateman Street is a short stroll away from Dean Street and home to a tavern named The Dog and Duck. It was here that the landlord had ‘mysteriously acquired a cache of real absinthe’, and although sugar was rationed, he allowed Orwell and his friends to drink it the traditional way, with water that dripped slowly on to it through a sugar cube.

London owes a great deal of gratitude to French immigrants. They taught beer-drinking England the delights of wine, champagne and brandy. They were connoisseurs and educators. Paris-born André Louis Simon deserves a statue. In 1899 he began an apprenticeship with the champagne house of Pommery & Greno (Rheims) and was sent to London in 1902 to become the firm’s agent. In 1905 he published the first of more than 100 books and pamphlets entitled The History of the Champagne Trade in England, followed by his substantial History of the Wine Trade in England (1906/9) in three volumes. He was a co-founder of the Wine Trade Club in 1908. In 1919 he issued the delightful Bibliotheca vinaria, a catalogue of books he had collected for the Club. Simon believed that ‘a man dies too young if he leaves any wine in his cellar’, and in keeping with that philosophy, only two magnums of claret remained in his basement when he died at the age of ninety-three.

Photographer and collector Felix Hans Man was born Hans Felix Sigismund Baumann on 30 November 1893 in Freiburg im Breisgau. His father had been born in Riga, then in imperial Russia, where he was a music critic for the Rigaer Tageblatt. Felix enjoyed a musical background, but graphic art was to dominate his artistic life.

It was not until 1927/8 that he turned to photography changing his name to avoid confusion with another photographer called Baumann. In 1929 he met Simon Gutmann, owner of the photographic agency Dephot (Deutscher Photo Dienst). Gutmann was one of the first to understand the nature of the ‘picture story’ which was to revolutionise magazines worldwide. Man became Gutmann’s chief photographer providing numerous photo-stories for Ullstein’s Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung and other publications during the period between 1929 and 1933. He also formed a long-lasting friendship with Stefan Lorant, a Hungarian Jew like Gutmann, who became editor of the Münchener Illustrierte Presse.

In 1933 the Nazis took over the Jewish-owned Ullstein Press. Lorant left for London and although not Jewish himself, Man too emigrated to England. The change in Man’s career came in 1938 when Lorant persuaded newspaper proprietor Edward Hulton to start the Picture Post. The successful magazine was produced at no.43/4 Shoe Lane. Man became a major contributor. He was interned briefly on the Isle of Man in the early days of the Second World War and became a naturalised British subject in 1948.

Between 1945 and 1948 he took few photographs, concentrating on his fine collection of lithographs. The climax of his collecting career came in 1971 when the Victoria and Albert Museum staged the exhibition ‘Homage to Senefelder’ entirely from his collection. In this masterly lithographic portrait (1969), David Hockney captured the personality of this passionate collector. Felix Man died in January 1985. He was one of the first photo-journalists and to many critics he remains the greatest.

The Print Collector (Portrait of Felix Man) 1969 David Hockney born 1937 Presented by Curwen Studio through the Institute of Contemporary Prints 1975 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/P06289

Art dealer and gallery owner Heinrich Robert [Harry] Fischer was born in Vienna on 30 August 1903. By the mid-1930s he was running one of the city’s largest bookshops. The Nazi annexation of Austria forced him to flee to Britain. In 1946, he opened his first art gallery on Old Bond Street with fellow Viennese refugee Frank Lloyd (born: Franz Kurt Levai). They named it Marlborough Fine Art for its aristocratic connotations. Between 1960 and 1970 Marlborough Gallery expanded into an international force with branches in New York, London, Rome, Zurich and other cities.

Lloyd and Fisher dissolved their partnership in the early 1970s, after which Harry Fisher established Fisher Fine Arts in London. He died in London in April 1977. In 1996 Elfriede Fischer donated his collection of books and catalogues to the V&A’s National Art Library. The collection (sixty-nine books in total) includes works by George Grosz, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oscar Kokoschka, Emil Nolde and Kurt Schwitters, among others.

The Fischer Collection holds the only known copy of a complete inventory of ‘Entartete Kunst’ confiscated by the Nazi regime from public institutions in Germany, mostly during 1937 and 1938. The list of more than 16,000 art works was produced by the Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda around 1942. The inventory was compiled as a final record after the sales and disposals of the seized works of art had been completed in the summer of 1941. The inventory’s two typescript volumes provide crucial information about the provenance, exhibition history, and fate of each artwork.

The painter George Grosz suffered badly from the Nazi madness. Their officials confiscated nearly three hundred of his works in museums and galleries, some were looted, some sold, and others burned. About seventy paintings vanished without a trace. One of the paintings labelled ‘degenerate’ was Grosz’s stunning portrait of his friend, the poet Max [Macke] Herrmann-Neisse.

The latter was born Max Herrmann in 1886 in Neisse (in Polish: Nysa), Silesia, into a family of small innkeepers. He was a physically disabled and deformed child. A continuous sense of otherness was part of his intellectual development and he started writing at a young age. He studied literature and history of art in Munich and Breslau, then turned to journalism and writing. He created mainly poetry and, influenced by Expressionism, contributed to avant-garde periodicals such as Die Aktion, Pan, and Die weissen Blätter.
In 1914 S. Fischer Verlag published his first collection of poems entitled Sie und die Stadt. The poet’s future looked bright, but the First World War brought disaster. It ruined the business of his parents. His father died in 1916 and his mother drowned herself shortly after.

Herrmann-Neisse married a local girl named Leni Gebek in May 1917 and the couple settled in Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm where they involved themselves in the city’s vibrant mix of artistic, socialist and anarchist movements. From that time onwards he added his place of birth to his name. He and his wife were a very visible and often photographed couple in bohemian Berlin. Herrmann-Neisse was known in most cafés, bars, studios, theatres, seedy cabarets and brothels in town. He was the Toulouse Lautrec of Berlin. He shared the same radical politics, sense of humour, and cynical outlook as his friend George Grosz. At the same time he created an ever growing number of poems, stories, essays and cabaret pieces. He was awarded the Eichendorff-Preis in 1924 and the Gerhart Hauptmann-Preis in 1927.

Five years later his situation changed dramatically. Grosz’s portrait of the poet with his hunched back and bald head had first been shown at the Neue Sachlichkeit Exhibition in Mannheim, 1925. The Nazis confiscated the portrait from the Flechtheim Gallery in Berlin in 1933 and displayed the work as a prime example of degenerate art. Two days after the Reichstag fire in February 1933, Max and Leni fled Berlin. Via Switzerland and the Netherlands they arrived in London in September that same year. A few months later, the Nazis burned his books.

Unable to speak English, living in the poorest of conditions, and deprived of his German citizenship in 1938, his poetry soon became an expression of utter isolation. Sometimes one may detect a tone of defiance like that in the poem ‘Ewige Heimat’: the homeland will live on ‘in the song of its banished sons’ (‘in dem Lied verstossner Söhne’). He applied for British citizenship, but the request was refused. In 1936 he published a collection of poems in Zurich entitled Um uns die Fremde (with a preface by Thomas Mann), but by then his personal life was becoming increasingly bizarre and intolerable. From 1936 onwards, he and his wife lived in a ménage à trois with Leni’s lover, the Greek-born Jewish jeweller and diamond dealer Alphonse Aron Sondheimer, who supported the three.

They occupied an exclusive flat owned by Sondheimer at no. 82 Bryanston Court, George Street in Marylebone (another apartment in the block was occupied by the American socialite Mrs Wallis Simpson: it was here at Flat 5B, first floor, that the love affair between her and Edward VIII had started in 1933). The arrangement lasted until Herrmann-Neisse’s death from a heart attack on 8 April 1941. He was buried at East Finchley Cemetery in East End Road. There he rests in a lonely grave, a soon forgotten immigrant, far from his beloved Berlin. Leni subsequently married Sondheimer (who became a British citizen in June 1947) and committed suicide when he died in 1961.

During his years of exile Hermann-Neisse continued to write poetry. Some of the poems are counted among his best. Shortly before his death he wrote ‘Litanei der Bitterness’, which is both a reflection on his life in exile and the painful awareness of the affair of his wife and his dependence on the goodwill of her lover:

Bitter ist es, das Brot der Fremde zu essen,
bittrer noch das Gnadenbrot,
und dem Nächsten eine Last zu sein.

The old anarchist lived a total paradox in later life. Not capable of earning a living and deprived of any outlets to publish his work, he resided amidst the decadence and senseless wealth of one of London’s most exclusive residential areas. Consumed by bitterness, the poet suffered all the pains of physical and linguistic exile. As a young man he had touched virtually every brick of every bar within reach while staggering through the streets of Berlin. Socially and psychologically he was inextricably bound up with the city as any of the stones in any of its buildings. Without the architecture of that structure, its use and meaning completely changed. For Herrmann-Neisse the building had collapsed completely. Death may have come as a relief. The psychoses dubbed ‘bacillus emigraticus’, the virus of homesickness, hits every exile at some time to a varying degree. It broke Hermann-Neisse.