Music in eighteenth century England was largely performed and taught by foreigners. There were Italian virtuosi, French dance masters, German music teachers, Dutch composers – all of them economically motivated immigrants. The fact that music was dominated by foreigners had much to do with the regard in which the art form was held in society. From Tudor times to the early seventeenth century, a spirit of Renaissance humanism had prevailed in English cultivated circles with regard to music. Henry VIII was a dedicated patron of the arts and of music in particular. He attracted many musicians from the Continent to his court and was a keen performer himself. His thinking was in line with Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (translated into English as Book of the Courtier in 1561 by Thomas Hoby and reprinted in London as late as 1724) where a gentleman’s participation in music was appreciated and encouraged. Written over a period of two decades, Castiglione had published his etiquette guide (what makes a perfect courtier?) in 1528 in the form of a set of fictional conversations taking place over the course of four evenings at the court of the Duke of Urbino. Music is frequently mentioned as being an integral part of aristocratic life.

By 1693, John Locke completely reversed that judgment in his influential essay ‘Some Thoughts Concerning Education’. Locke gives music the lowest place amongst all those ‘things that ever came into the List of Accomplishments’. He rejects the pursuit or performance of music as a waste of a young man’s time. Puritans had traditionally attacked music as an affront to morality. In The Anatomie of Abuses (1583) Philip Stubbes considers music as a major danger to the manners and morals of his time: ‘I say of Musicke … that it is very il for yung heds, for a certeine kind of nice, smoothe sweetnes in alluring the auditorie to nicesness, effeminancie, pusillanimity, & lothsomnes of life’. Music and the playhouse were a threat in the Puritan mind because, as it was argued, they cannot be enjoyed without ‘evil communications’. Music was considered a species of effeminacy. A puritanical element always remained part of the argument of those who were critical about the role of music in society.

In eighteenth century English society music increasingly functioned as a passive entertainment performed mostly by Continental professionals. England did not produce any outstanding composers during that era. Music being non-productive, it was considered a misuse of a man’s valuable time. The attitude is reflected in the pages of The Spectator where Addison (no. 18, March 1710/11) described music as an ‘agreeable entertainment; but if it would take the entire possession of our ears, if it would make us incapable of hearing sense, if it would exclude arts that have much more tendency to the refinement of human nature; I must confess I would allow it no better quarter than Plato has done, who banishes it out of his commonwealth’. Music’s social role, on the other hand, was valued in that it helped women fill their time. Music kept wives and daughters in the empty space assigned to them and hence contributed to the maintenance of domestic stability. The visual representation of music clearly shows a gender differentiation in instrumental application. Among the portrayal of girls with musical attributes the use of the tambourine is a popular image. This was considered a feminine instrument producing a gentle, non-aggressive sound. Boys on the other hand were depicted with infantry drums (Shakespeare’s ‘spirit-stirring drum’) which set aggressive rhythms preparing the youngster for a life of strife, power and conflict.

London’s musical waste land was soon occupied by immigrants who made a substantial contribution in developing the noble art in Britain, including in the domain of music publishing. Music in London became a proper cosmopolitan affair. Francesco Cianchettini was born in Rome in 1765/6. He was in London by 1799 when he married singer and pianist Bohemia-born Veronika Dussek, sister of the virtuoso pianist J.L. Dussek. He joined forces with the talented Italian cello player Sperati and published a series of twenty-seven symphonies in score editions each month between 1807 and 1809, using the imprint ‘London: Printed for Cianchettini & Sperati Publishers and Importers of Classical Music, no. 5 Princes Street, Cavendish Square’. Apart from eighteen symphonies by Joseph Haydn and six pieces by Mozart, Beethoven’s first three symphonies were published here as score editions for the first time in a score type that would not be common on the Continent until the 1820s. The first edition in voices, published in 1804 by a Vienna publisher, served as master. Beethoven did not know about this edition and did not receive any remuneration. Neither was it Beethoven who dedicated the composition to Prince Regent George but the publishers. Francesco’s son Pio Cianchettini, composer and pianist, was born in London 1799. At the age of five, he appeared at the Opera House as an infant prodigy. A year later, Pio travelled with his father through Holland, Germany and France, where he was trumpeted as the ‘English’ Mozart. Britain has always been quick to assume ownership of the triumphs of its immigrant residents.

Vincent Novello was the son of an immigrant Italian father of Piedmontese origins who had arrived in England in August 1771. Giuseppe Novello was a pastry cook and set up his own confectioner’s business having taken a lease of a small property at no. 240 Oxford Street. Vincent was born at this address. He became one of the leading contributors to the development of British musical life and education in the first half of the nineteenth century. As a boy, Novello was a chorister at the Sardinian Chapel in Duke Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where he learnt to play the organ. From 1796 to 1822 he became in succession organist of the Sardinian, Spanish (Manchester Square) and Portuguese (South Street, Grosvenor Square) chapels, and from 1840 to 1843 of St Mary’s Chapel, Moorfields. He acquainted himself with a large body of the (early) sacred repertory. At the time, this music was rarely performed and available only in manuscript. In an effort to disseminate it more widely, Novello published a ‘Collection of Sacred Music as Performed at the Royal Portuguese Chapel in London’ (1811). He was soon publishing other edited collections of sacred music. From these beginnings he established himself as a music publisher.

Novello was one of the (thirty) founding members of the Philharmonic Society in February 1813. London at the time did not have a permanent orchestra nor an organised series of chamber music concerts. The aim was to promote the performance of instrumental music in the capital. Concerts were held in the Argyll Rooms until it burned down in 1830. The first concert, on 8 March 1813, reflects the European involvement in the project. It was presided over by Bonn-born composer, violinist and impresario Johann Peter Salomon, who became one of London’s prominent musicians. Highly rated virtuoso Muzio Clementi was at the piano and child prodigy Nicolas Mori (born on 24 January 1796/7 in London, the son of an Italian wig maker) was the lead violinist. They performed symphonies by Haydn and Beethoven.

Novello’s great contribution lay in the introduction to England of unknown compositions by the great masters, such as the Masses of Haydn and Mozart, and the works of Palestrina. He was one of the pioneers of the Choral Harmonists Society (that was founded in January 1833 and lasted until 1851). This society involved amateur musicians in the performance of large choral works such as masses, madrigals and oratorios. Vincent’s son Joseph Alfred Novello had started his career as a bass singer, but became a regular music publisher in 1829. He was the creator of the business as we know it today. He established the publishing house at no. 69 Dean Street, Soho (no. 70 was added later to the company). The firm did not begin to publish contemporary music in a systematic way until the 1850s and 1860s. Edward Elgar signed to Novello and many others followed him, including Gustav Holst and Herbert Howells. The business is still going strong.

The nomadic lifestyle of the artist is a recurrent theme in contemporary literature and aesthetic thinking. Modern philosophy of art tends to depict the artist as a citizen of the world, a global mind, as the eternal traveller. This view is a relatively recent one. In Classical culture, he would have been identified as the inhabitant of a specific polis or city. Even during the humanist era outspoken cosmopolitanism remained the exception.

The term cosmopolitanism first appeared in the sixteenth century. Guillaume Postel visited the East on the orders of François I to collect manuscripts for the French Royal collection. In De la République des Turcs (1560) he gave a detailed and sympathetic account of Turkish culture. The book itself was signed by Guillaume Postel Cosmopolite (to later historians he became known as ‘le Gaulois cosmopolite’). One may find use of the word on occasion during the seventeenth century, but it was not until the Enlightenment that intellectuals came to regard themselves as proud members of a transnational ‘Republic of Letters’. In the eighteenth century, cosmopolitanism indicated an attitude of intellectual sophistication and open-mindedness. A cosmopolitan mind was not a follower of a particular religious or political authority, but an independent thinker and a man of the world. More often than not, he was a multi-lingual person who was at home in all European capitals. The 1789 Declaration of Human Rights was the result of cosmopolitan modes of thinking.

Artistic migration before and even during the Enlightenment was motivated by much more mundane considerations. The artist moved away from home out of economic necessity and in search of patrons. He had to make a living. Traditionally, London had been a destination for those who were artistically gifted. In Tudor times, Continental artists and musicians were lured to sell their skills to royal and aristocratic households. During the reign of Charles I and particularly since the Restoration a seemingly unending number of Flemish and Dutch painters, engravers and sculptors joint the court or aristocratic estates. The ‘glorious’ seventeenth century produced too many artists in the Low Countries and not enough clients. The market simply was too small for such an overwhelming presence of talent. It was a period of cultural overproduction. For many young artists there was only one solution to their predicament: relocate, move elsewhere, and find a more equal playing field where their talent would be acknowledged. Or, to put it more crudely, find a place where they could earn money, get some commissions, and make a living. And move they did. They moved in their hundreds. They headed for Italy, Sweden, Germany, even for Russia – most of them crossed the Channel. It is interesting to note that English ambassadors in the Low Countries regularly functioned as ‘scouts’ who informed the court and gentry about the talent they had spotted whilst performing their diplomatic duties. Or they tried to encourage artists to move to England with the promise and prospect of employment and/or commissions.

The courts of Charles II, James II, and William and Mary employed numerous foreign artists and craftsmen, and as a result English late seventeenth-century taste in interior decoration was decidedly Continental. In March 1709, a competition was announced to decorate the dome of Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral. The most coveted contemporary commission, it attracted bids from British and foreign artists. In March 1709, a competition was announced to decorate the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral.

By 1710 the field of competitors was narrowed down to two candidates, James Thornhill and Venice-born Antonio Pellegrini (a director of Godfrey Kneller’s newly founded art academy in Queen Anne Street, 1711), each being required to execute their proposed designs on a model of the cupola. On 28 June 1715 Thornhill was awarded the commission by a Whig dominated committee.

Archbishop Thomas Tenison’s pronouncement ‘I am no judge of painting, but on two articles I think I may insist: first that the painter employed be a Protestant; and secondly that he be an Englishman’, may not have an identified source, but it does echo a growing patriotic (anti-alien) sentiment which was put into words in the Weekly Packet of June 1715 by suggesting that the committee’s decision will ‘put to silence all the loud applauses hitherto given to foreign artists’. Others would argue that it reflected growing confidence in British native ability. As a consequence, the number of immigrant artists was dwindling rapidly.

At that time, foreign in painting meant Italian – more specifically: Venetian. Decorative and portrait painter Giacomo Amiconi [Jacopo Amigoni] was born in Naples of Venetian parents in 1682. By 1711 he had established himself as an artist in Venice. Having worked all over northern Europe, he arrived in London in 1729. As an architectural decorator Amiconi joined forces with Gaetano Brunetti working on Lord Tankerville’s house in St James’s Square in early 1730 and on the Duke of Chandos’s residence at Cavendish Square in 1735. He painted a Banquet of the Gods on the ceiling at Covent Garden Theatre as well as a fresco above the stage (lost with the 1782 renovation). He was identified with Italian opera through his close friendship with the castrato Farinelli who was resident in London from 1734, and his marriage in May 1738 to opera singer Maria Antonia Marchesini (known as ‘La Lucchesina’).

Amiconi’s work was fashionable in aristocratic London, but the established taste for Italian opera and for Venetian Rococo painting had started to decline by that time. A movement was in the making in favour of a more robust style in music, theatre and art. His staircase decoration for the Spanish ambassador at Powis House, Great Ormond Street, sparked controversy in 1734. The artist was attacked by James Ralph in the Weekly Register as one of those foreigners who painted in an overblown manner, compared with the more wholesome qualities of English art. Amiconi left London for Venice in August 1739 having been supplanted by Hogarth as decorator of St Bartholomew’s Hospital. Foreigners were less welcome than they had been previously.

Between 1732 and 1734, Amiconi occupied a house in Silver Street, Soho (now: Beak Street; the occupant is named in the rate books as James Amicony). When the latter encouraged fellow artist Antonio Canaletto to move to London, the latter settled in Silver Street as well. The Canal family, whose Venice lineage is traceable from the mid-sixteenth century, were ‘cittadini originari’, a class immediately below the patrician. Its most famous son was Giovanni Antonio Canal, better known as Canaletto.

His first dated work is a large ‘Capriccio of Classical Ruins and a Pyramid’ (1723), which already surpasses anything in this genre produced by his contemporaries. It shows an imaginary landscape (capriccio means ‘fancy’) with arched Roman ruins supported by Corinthian columns, through which a church with a campanile can be seen while small figures are digging around. Further back a pyramid and Roman statue are depicted. From the start architecture and architectural elements played a dominant part in his paintings. Just like his predecessor Luca Carlevarijs, the first of the great Venetian view painters, Canaletto realised that the demand for prospects of the city among foreign visitors offered a viable commercial opportunity. Throughout his career, in creating his urban panoramas he took the liberty of including distortions in order to ‘improve’ reality for pictorial effect and, of course, saleability. He also developed the additional skill of depicting ceremonial events and festivals.

From the late 1720s to the early 1750s Canaletto’s fortunes were bound up with the figure of Joseph Smith, British Consul in Venice. The latter was one of the foremost collectors in the city who, over three decades, acquired fifty paintings by the artist, which he housed in his impressive palace on the Grand Canal. They were eventually sold en bloc to George III in 1762, along with 142 of the artist’s superb drawings. By 1730, Smith was acting as an agent in the sale of Canaletto’s work to English collectors which resulted in a constant flow of commissions throughout the decade that marks the peak of the painter’s career. With the constant demand for Canaletto’s work came a need to delegate various tasks to assistants. One of those, in the late 1730s and early 1740s, was his nephew Bernardo Bellotto, the only artist to rival him as the greatest Italian view painter of the eighteenth century. Canaletto’s studio was turned into a factory of art. With the ever increasing demand for paintings, the artist’s studio was rationalised in a quite a remarkable manner. It became a kind of early industrialised work-floor with a proper division of labour amongst specialised employees who worked on a production line of art. Canaletto had learned from his predecessors. The example of Rubens’s studio is well documented. Similar ways of working were introduced by Anthony van Dyck or Peter Lely in their London studios. All this, of course, long before the notion of the ‘division of labour’ was discussed by the Scottish socio-economic philosophers of the eighteenth century.

The outbreak of the War of the Austrian Succession in 1741 restricted travel to Venice. As a consequence, the number of commissions for painted Venetian views diminished. In May 1746 Canaletto moved to London. There he was to remain for ten years as a resident at no. 16 Silver Street. Although his English paintings vary in quality, he soon found himself as busy as he had been in the 1730s. Like many artists before him, Canaletto was an economic migrant. Art does not acknowledge borders, neither physically nor intellectually.

Historically, public hangings were a festive occasion for Londoners. A rowdy and drunken mob followed the procession through the streets from the prison to Tyburn, pelting the convicted criminals with rotten vegetables. Executions drew large number of spectators. It was a profitable day for publicans, pie merchants, pickpockets, whores, and broadside sellers. At the place of punishment there was a lot going on. The condemned person was allowed to make a ‘gallows speech’. Then a prison chaplain would urge the criminal to repent in a final prayer. The hangman appeared, the noose was adjusted, and a bag drawn over the criminal’s head. The horse would be lashed to move the cart and leave the criminal hanging in the air. There was another, less reported aspect that may have contributed to the excitement.
Seventeenth century observers at public executions noted that some male victims developed an erection and occasionally ejaculated when being hanged.

This post-mortem erection (angel lust) has been attributed to pressure on the cerebellum created by the noose. This is a different mechanism from that of auto-erotic asphyxia which seeks to increase arousal by restricting the oxygen supply to the brain by tightening a noose around the neck. In 1990, the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction published an influential New Report on Sex. It describes auto-erotic asphyxia as ‘the deliberate reduction of oxygen to the brain – temporary suffocation. The belief is that it enhances orgasm, but no research has ever verified this effect’.

Journalist and translator Pierre-Antoine Le Motteux [Peter Anthony Motteux] was born ‪on 25 February‬ 1663 in Rouen into a Huguenot family. After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes ‪on 18 October‬ 1685, Motteux took up residence in London. He was made an English citizen ‪on 5 March‬ 1686. An able man, Motteux established himself rapidly in his adopted country, soon securing himself a place at the centre of its literary culture. He made his literary début as the editor and publisher of the Gentleman’s Journal (1692/4), a general magazine modelled on the Mercure Gallant. The journal contained poetry, literary and theatrical criticism, songs, enigmas, tales, burlesques, translations, essays, and scientific discoveries of the time. It has been called the ‘first English magazine’. One of its issues (October 1693) was devoted to ‘Pieces written by Persons of the Fair Sex’.

Motteux’s greatest literary successes were his translations of the works of Rabelais and of Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1700/03). His version of the latter work was widely admired throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for its lucidity and wit (although future translators would be far more critical of his effort). He was also active in the 1690s and early 1700s as a dramatist and librettist. During this period he produced a series of occasional poems, songs, prologues, and epilogues. Among his miscellaneous works, A Poem in Praise of Tea (‘the Nectar of the Gods’) published in 1701, is the best known. His literary output declined considerably in his later years. ‪From around 1705‬ he traded in East Indian merchandise and works of art. The last activity was the principal occupation of his final decade, and his ‘India warehouse’ in Leadenhall Street, City of London, became a fashionable meeting place. On his fifty-fifth birthday, in good health and full of life, he donned his famous scarlet cloak, and went out on the town. He picked up Mary Roberts, a prostitute, and after some dalliance returned to her bordello at Star Court, near Temple Bar, where he died in February 1718 from assisted erotic asphyxia.

Based upon contemporary case notes, the medical case of Motteux’s demise has been reconstructed by later researchers. By contrast, the court case dealing with the death in London of an immigrant musician towards the end of the eighteenth century hit the headlines. Composer and double bass player František Kocžwara was born in Prague about 1750. He seems to have been an itinerant musician in Germany and the Netherlands, but had moved to England by 1775. He lived in various places, including London and Bath. In 1783 he travelled to Dublin, where he played violin in the band at the Smock Alley Theatre, Temple Bar. While in Ireland he composed his most popular work, The Battle of Prague: a favorite sonata for the piano forte, with an accompaniment for the violin & bass (op. 23). His compositions are mainly piano works and chamber music for piano and stringed instruments. He had returned to London by May 1791, as he played in the Concerts of Ancient Music and the Handel commemoration in Westminster Abbey that month. Kocžwara is more famous for the spectacular manner of his death than for his musical output. On 16 September 1791 prostitute Susannah Hill was tried at the Old Bailey for the composer’s murder. At her trial, she described how, on 2 September 1791 at a house of ill repute in Vine Street, near Piccadilly, Kocžwara had drunk a great deal of brandy and asked to be hanged in order to raise his passion. When she cut him down minutes later he was dead. She was accused of his murder. However, the case was dismissed at the Old Bailey and she was acquitted.

In the historical literature males have figured more prominently than females (although various such cases have been reported), beginning with the death of Kocžwara. In medical science, however, erotic asphyxia was not defined for another two hundred years. The death of the Czech composer led forensic psychiatrist Park Elliott Dietz in Auto-Erotic Fatalities (1983) to suggest the term ‘Koczwarraism’ for behaviour utilizing asphyxial augmentation of the sexual response. The theme was touched upon in literature much earlier. In the same year as the composer’s death, Marquis de Sade published his notorious novel Justine which includes a graphic description of an episode of sexual asphyxia. In James Joyce’s Ulysses (chapter 12) Bloom explains ‘scientifically’ why hanged men undergo sexual erections at the moment of execution. Strangling oneself or others for erotic pleasure is depicted in William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959) and features in In the Realm of the Senses, a Japanese film of the notorious Sada Abe story, first shown in 1976. Both book and film were received with a sense of shock. The novel was originally published in Paris in July 1959 by Maurice Girodias, founder of the Olympia Press. Because of American obscenity laws, a complete edition by Grove Press did not follow until 1962. The film also generated fierce controversy during its release. In general, auto-erotic asphyxia has remained a taboo subject. It is one of social history’s better kept secrets.

The family name Gollancz originates from the town of Golancz in west-central Poland. It is also the name of a prominent Jewish dynasty of London immigrants which has a varied but distinct literary reputation. 

Rabbi and scholar Hermann Gollancz was born at Bremen on 30 November 1852. He came to England when his father was appointed rabbi of the Hambro Synagogue in Leadenhall Street, City of London. Hermann was the first Jew to obtain the degree of Doctor of Literature at London University. In 1902 he was elected Goldsmid Professor of Hebrew at University College London. He was the first British rabbi to be granted a knighthood. On retirement he presented his valuable library of Hebraica and Judaica to the University (which is housed as a separate collection within the splendid Mocatta Library). 

His younger brother Israel Gollancz was born in London. A Shakespeare scholar, he was Professor of English Language and Literature at King’s College from 1903 to 1930, and a founder member and the first Secretary of the British Academy. He edited the so-called ‘Temple’ Shakespeare, a uniform edition of the complete works in pocket size volumes. It was the most popular Shakespeare edition of its day. 

Hermann and Israel were brothers to Alexander Gollancz, a wholesale jeweller, who was father to publisher Victor Gollancz, born on 9 April 1893 at no. 256 Elgin Avenue, Maida Vale. Having rejected the orthodoxy of his parents, Victor became an independent thinker and an advocate of women’s rights. In 1918 he joined the publishing house of Benn Brothers (founded by the liberal politician John Benn: Gollancz recruited H.G. Wells for his employers), before starting his own firm in 1928. His publishing methods were revolutionary. 

In collaboration with Stanley Morison, he devised a striking typographical dust jacket featuring black and magenta on a brilliant yellow background, which was used on most of his titles. Gollancz was primarily an educationist, and his main concern as a publisher was to encourage an awareness of current affairs and, above all, send a socialist message. In 1933 George Orwell issued his debut novel Down and Out in London and Paris with Gollancz, his first publisher.

A significant undertaking that involved Gollancz was the foundation of the Left Book Club (LBC) in 1936. Housed at no. 14 Henrietta Street, it aimed at combating the dual threats of Nazism and Fascism in which authors like Arthur Koestler and George Orwell took part at a time when the need for the dissemination of left-wing politics was keenly felt among British intellectuals. The venture was an immediate success on its establishment, with 6,000 subscriptions after a month and a membership of 40,000 by the end of its first year. Gollancz was also actively engaged with a number of German writers in exile in London during the war (including Hilde Meisel).

The Free German League of Culture (FGLC = Freie Deutsche Kulturbund) was founded in 1939 at an informal meeting held at the Hampstead home of the Jewish refugee lawyer and painter Manfred [Fred] Uhlman. Aiming to represent all German exiles irrespective of religion or race, it was the foremost cultural and socio-political organisation representing anti-Nazism in Britain during the war. On arrival, these refugees were considered enemy aliens and most of them had suffered the pain of internment, either in the Isle of Man or as far adrift as Canada or Australia. At its peak, the League had some 1,500 members. It included a youth wing, the Freie Deutsche Jugend; it created a university in exile, the Freie Deutsche Hochschule; and it formed the core of the Free German Movement which planned for a democratic post-war Germany. The League was formally constituted at a meeting on 1 March 1939, when Uhlman was appointed chairman (later that year he was replaced by the novelist Hans Flesch-Brunninger), and four honorary presidents were elected: the painter Oskar Kokoschka, the drama critic Alfred Kerr, the novelist Stefan Zweig and the film director Berthold Viertel. The FGLC was advertised as politically neutral (to avoid interference from the British authorities), describing itself as an ‘anti-Nazi, anti-Fascist, non-party, refugee organisation’. From December 1939, the FGLC had premises of its own, at no. 36a Upper Park Road, Belsize Park. It was wound up in 1946.

In 1960 Gollancz published Fred Uhlman’s autobiography The Making of an Englishman whose ironical title points to the author’s struggle, as a Jewish intellectual from Stuttgart, to adapt to a life of exile in a British environment that felt completely alien to him. The book contains a vivid account of his internment experiences as an enemy alien at Hutchinson camp, Isle of Man (where he befriended Kurt Schwitters), a description of the depression and frustration he suffered, which was fuelled – even in retrospect – by a sense of outrage at the injustice of his treatment.

A prominent member of the German League was the communist author Jan Petersen. Born Hans Schwalm on 2 July 1906 in Berlin, he led a resistance group of anti-Fascist writers between 1933 and 1935. Being placed on the Nazi death list, he was forced to emigrate to Switzerland, France, and then to England. He was deprived of his German citizenship in 1938. Between 1940 and 1942 he was interned in Canada as an enemy alien by the British authorities. 

Petersen is remembered for an extraordinary act of bravery. In 1934 he had finished the manuscript of his novel Unsere Strasse, a true story about life on Wallstrasse in the Berlin district of Charlottenburg and an account of left wing resistance to Nazism just before Hitler’s ascension to Chancellor. To get this ‘explosive’ manuscript safely out of Germany was a huge problem. He made two copies, sending one to Hamburg where it was to be taken to England by a German soldier, but was eventually thrown into the Channel to avoid discovery. Friends failed to smuggle a second copy into Czechoslovakia. Finally, Petersen pulled off a dangerous trick himself. Dressed in ski clothes to look as though he was going on holiday, he set off for Prague. At the border, the SS guards searched his rucksack, only to find two tasty fruit cakes. Baked inside was the manuscript which remained undetected. The creative process demands courage and commitment. Few authors would have pushed the limits as far as Petersen dared. Translated into English as Our Street, the novel was published in 1938 by Gollancz’s Left Book Club. Petersen returned to East Berlin in 1946 where he was awarded a number of literary prizes in the course of his career. There he died in November 1969. His novel was republished by Faber & Faber in 2010.

With the passing of the Aliens Act of 1905, Britain was the first European state to establish a system of immigration control at the point of entry. It defined certain groups of migrants as ‘undesirable’. The Act was passed in response to anxieties about the impact of ‘aliens’, particularly Jews fleeing from persecution in Tsarist Russia, who were said to have introduced unprecedented levels of criminality.  Traditionally, crime had been associated with poverty among indigenous urban populations. By the 1890s, increasingly, criminal behaviour was seen as a result of liberal attitudes towards immigration. The cause of crime in Britain’s large cities was to be found in the racial character of foreign arrivals. In the public imagination a toxic mix was brewing of fear of terror, anxiety about anarchism, and antipathy towards foreigners. The rise of racism was imminent.

Militant anarchism caused panic. Newspaper headlines spread news of bombings and murders across Europe and in America (Chicago). Governments feared the spectre of an internationally coordinated anarchist revolution. International terrorism made an explosive appearance. The word terrorism was first used in English in 1795 in a specific sense of government intimidation during the Reign of Terror in Paris. With the 1798 Irish Rebellion the term acquired a broader interpretation, referring to the ‘systematic use of terror as a policy’. By the mid-nineteenth century, terrorism began to be associated with non-governmental groups. A few decades later it was generally understood as the use of indiscriminate violence in order to achieve a political or religious aim.

In the 1840s movements for democracy swept the Continent. Italy, France and Poland stood on the brink of revolution. Activists encouraged uprisings and failed. Many European revolutionaries ended up in exile in Britain. London became the home of other nation’s ‘terrorists’. One of the earliest groups to utilise urban guerrilla techniques was the Fenian Brotherhood, founded in 1858. Irish nationalists planted bombs on the inner circle tube line in 1883 and 1885, but it was the 1897 Aldersgate explosion that had fatal consequences – killing one and injuring sixty. Anarchist theorists had developed the concept of ‘propaganda of the deed’ (physical violence in order to inspire mass rebellion). Attacks by various anarchist groups led to a number of assassinations, including that of the Russian Tsar. During the nineteenth century, powerful and relatively stable explosives were developed. The use of dynamite became synonymous with terrorism and central to anarchist strategic thinking. In fact, the word ‘dynamitist’ preceded that of terrorist.

Fitzrovia, a district bounded by Oxford Street to the south, Great Portland Street to the west, Euston Road to the north, and Tottenham Court Road to the east, had been a centre of international radical politics for some time. Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man was published during his residence at no. 154 New Cavendish Street in reply to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. The author lived at no. 18 Charlotte Street. The area was a hotspot of Chartist activities after the Reform Act of 1832. After the failed 1848 revolutions, waves of German and Russian revolutionaries settled there. Swiss and Italian immigrants added to its cultural mix. It was a choice destination for French political exiles. From France, there were two main waves of migration separated by a generation. The first were supporters of the Revolution of February 1848 when the Second Republic was founded by Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. The second group of about 3,000 refugees arrived in the early 1870s after the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871. Many of these ‘compagnons’ remained in London until an amnesty in 1895 allowed some to return to France. 

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was the first political philosopher to call himself an anarchist. Although various thinkers have contributed to the formulation of the doctrine (including William Godwin), nineteenth century anarchism retained a strong Gallic flavour. Between 1880 and 1914 a considerable number of French-speaking anarchists lived in exile in London. These individuals had escaped intense post-Commune repression. Until the 1905 Aliens Act, Britain maintained a liberal approach to the containment of radicalism which, to a certain extent, allowed French residents in Fitzrovia to remain politically active. Charlotte Street and Goodge Street were the main axis of anarchism. Political refugee and author Charles Malato, a French anarchist of Neapolitan descent, described the area as a small anarchist republic. There were, however, plenty of worries amongst the local population about that ‘foreign lot’. 

Myths surrounding potential terrorist activities were reported endlessly by the popular press which led to poisonous public debates surrounding the asylum granted to international anarchists. Police spies, known as ‘Les Mouchards’, regularly patrolled the streets of the area. One of their prime suspects was the bookseller Armand Lapie at no. 30 Goodge Street. His shop was the main meeting point of French anarchists in the capital. In his book Van anarchist tot monarchist Alexander Cohen, the Dutch Francophile, has left a lively retrospective account of this shop where every early evening anarchists gathered to wait for the owner’s return from the depot with a load of French, Italian and Spanish newspapers. Gallic anarchists also brought their passion for eating and drinking with them. If London was a taste, it was not to the liking of French refugees.

Political exiles introduced gastronomic delight to Charlotte Street and to no. 67 in particular. There, in a three-story building, Victor Richard ran a grocer shop named ‘Bel Épicier’. He kept a shop in Paris when he was caught up in the events of the Commune. Although in his fifties, he fought bravely on the barricades, but in the brutal aftermath he was forced to flee. He settled in Charlotte Street. This colourful figure made a roaring success of his business, stocking Anjou wines, coffee, mustards, pâtes, and cornichon from his native Burgundy. His shop took on a central position among the community of refugees, many of whom were either destitute or in dire financial trouble. They knew that they could expect help in one way or another from the ‘generous Burgundian’. 

In political philosophy, anarchism advocates the idea of a stateless society. The state is harmful to the individual. Politicians are parasites. Education of the masses would cause government to wither away as a superfluous entity. Anarchism in practice, however, demands firm structures and a strict organisation. The London congregation of anarchists proved the value of tight networks and practical minds. This was exampled during the early 1890s by the international school for refugee children at no. 19 Fitzroy Square. The school was run by Louise Michel, the ‘grand dame’ of anarchy, who had fought on the barricades in defence of the Commune. This former Parisian teacher was exiled to London where she lived at no. 59 Charlotte Street. The guiding committee of the school included the exiled Russian Prince Peter Kropotkin, Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta, and English socialist William Morris. Staff and members of the committee aimed at keeping children away from religiously oriented state schools. The ideal was to produce broad-minded and creative youngsters who respected the freedom of others. The curriculum consisted of French, German, and English, as well as music, drawing, sewing, and engraving. The school was closed down when the police raided the school in 1892 and found bombs in the basement. They had been planted there by Auguste Coulon, a school assistant who turned out to be a police spy. To the authorities, the end justified the means.

Notorious among local Continental immigrants was the figure of Tours-born Martial Bourdin. He had moved to London around 1887 to join his brother Henri who worked as a tailor in a workshop at no. 18 Great Titchfield Street. Martial attended meetings at the Autonomie Club in Windmill Street, the chief refuge of foreign anarchists arriving in London. For a time Bourdin was secretary of the French-speaking section of the club. Having spent time back in France and later in America, he returned to London where he resumed his lodgings at no. 30 Fitzroy Street in late 1893. In the afternoon of Thursday 15 February 1894 he entered Greenwich Park and walked towards the Royal Observatory with a parcel under his arm. The bomb exploded prematurely. He died at the nearby Royal Naval Hospital. Bourdin’s act caused panic. Home Secretary Herbert Asquith, fearing that the funeral at St Pancras cemetery might be turned into a demonstration, gave orders to prevent any procession from following the hearse. Speeches at the graveside were forbidden. Public opinion demanded an immediate change in immigration policy.

Modern interest in the fate of this French anarchist derives from Joseph Conrad’s remodelling of him as Stevie in The Secret Agent (1907). The novel sustained his dubious reputation as the man who tried to blow up the Observatory – which seemed an odd target even by terrorist’s standards. Conrad confirmed in fiction what many at the time had come to accept as a fact: a terrorist is a mentally unstable anarchist who carries a parcel wrapped in brown paper (i.e. a bomb) under his arm. 

During the Second World War, radio was a vital tool of political power. By 1936, four million French citizens possessed a wireless in their homes with the choice of various main and local stations. After the invasion, the Nazis took hold of the dominant Radio-Paris, and Vichy gained control of stations in the south. To win the war of the radio waves (‘la guerre des ondes’) was judged as important as dominating the battlefields. From 1940 to 1944 Radio-Londres broadcast up to five hours a day from the BBC to occupied France. The station was operated by Charles de Gaulle’s Free French who had established their headquarters at no. 4 Carlton Gardens, Westminster. It opened its daily transmissions with the legendary words: ‘Ici Londres! Les Français parlent aux Français’. De Gaulle himself had made his famous appeal to the nation on 18 June 1940 to rise against the occupation. Radio-Londres was the voice of the French Resistance.

A group of young Free Frenchmen, including actor Jacques Duchesne (real name: Michel Saint-Denis, founder of the London Theatre Studio in 1935), painter Jean Oberlé, journalist and politician Maurice Schumann, entertainer Pierre Dac, Romanian-born composer Francis Chagrin and others (all close to De Gaulle) broke with broadcasting traditions and produced programs peppered with personal messages, satirical sketches, songs, and jokes. Jean Oberlé’s jingle ‘Radio-Paris ment, Radio-Paris ment, Radio-Paris est allemand’ (sung to the tune of ‘La Cucaracha’), first broadcast on 6 September 1940, was particularly memorable. Of deep significance was the contribution made by singer and songwriter Anna Marly. Born Anna Yurievna Betulinskaya on 30 October 1917 in St Petersburg she was a Russian refugee in France who made a successful career as a performer. After capitulation, she fled to London with her Dutch husband, Baron van Doorn, whom she had met whilst performing at The Hague. In London she joined up with the Free French. There she came across Emmanuel d’Astier de La Vigerie, a leading figure in the resistance, who had heard her sing the ‘Chant des partisans’ in Russian. He requested a translation of the song with the intention of using it as a replacement for ‘La Marseillaise’ which had been banned by the Nazis. It quickly established itself as the surrogate anthem of the French resistance both in France and Britain.

Radio-Londres broadcasts would begin with some ‘personal messages’ which were often amusing, confusing, or without apparent context. They were coded communications to underground agents. The station strongly supported the V for Victory campaign as an act of subversion. The idea was launched by the liberal politician and broadcaster Victor Auguste de Laveleye who was spokesman for the Belgian government in exile at Eaton Square, Belgravia. He also acted as newsreader for Radio-Belgique (Radio-België) which became the voice of Belgian Resistance. In a broadcast of 14 January 1941, he asked all Belgians – Flemish and Walloons – to choose the letter V as a symbol of unity in adversity: V for ‘Victoire & Vrijheid’. It was the start of the ‘Campagne des V’, which saw V graffity appearing in many urban settings in Belgium and the Netherlands. By July 1941, the emblematic use of the letter V had spread through occupied Europe. The campaign was endorsed by Winston Churchill in a speech of 19 July 1941.

Illustrator Maurice Van Moppès was born on 6 January 1905 in Paris, the son of an antiquarian. Between 1940 and 1943, under the initials MVP, he wrote a series of parodies on famous songs in which he ridiculed the German invaders and their French collaborators. Published as a booklet in 1944 entitled Chansons de la BBC, it was parachuted by the RAF into France in order to raise morale and encourage resistance. It included such songs as ‘La Chanson du Maquis’ (written together with Francis Chagrin). During the blitz on London, he wrote lyrics to the opening bars of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony calling it ‘La chanson V’ (the opening motif of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony became a powerful symbol for the Allied forces: the short-short-short-long rhythmic pattern correspond in Morse code to the letter V). It was broadcast on Radio Londres on 1 June 1944 when the Allied forces sent the first messages to occupied France of an imminent invasion. Shortly before the D-Day landings of 6 June 1944, Radio Londres read out the first stanza of Paul Verlaine’s poem ‘Chanson d’automne’ to let the resistance know that the invasion would begin within twenty-four hours: ‘Les sanglots longs / Des violons / De l’automne / Blessent mon coeur / D’une langueur / Monotone’. The final three lines of the poem were a specific call to action to the French Resistance.

It would be tempting (but unjustified) to suggest that the legendary entertainer and Free France broadcaster Pierre Brac came up with the idea of Verlaine’s poem as a coded message. Born André Isaac in Châlons-sur Marne on 15 August 1893 into an Alsatian Jewish family (his father was a butcher), young Brac mastered the violin. Unfortunately, his left arm was injured in action during World War I (his brother Marcel died in action) and he was obliged to forget his musical hopes and ambitions. Dac became a cabaretier known as ‘Le roi des loufoques’ (The king of crackpots). Having escaped France via Spain, he joined Radio-Londres, broadcasting bitingly satirical songs, and deriding Nazi ideology and the German war machine. Pierre Dac was an unlikely hero of the French Resistance.

By late 1944, Allied victory in France sounded the end of Radio-Londres. What stands out in this period is the European spirit that was emerging amongst those who had been exiled in Britain. To them, London was a catalyst. Most refugees returned home, grateful towards their host country, and with one resolution in mind: this shall never again. Europe must unite. Churchill agreed. In a speech delivered at the University of Zurich on 19 September 1946 he called on European countries, including Germany, to form a regional organisation for security and cooperation on the Continent. Today, that unifying spirit has evaporated. Memories are short and political egos overbearing. Darkness has fallen. The Brexit Betrayal has killed the flame and reduced Europe to the level of trade figures, car sales, currency fluctuations, and the V fingers that signify ‘fuck off you foreigner’. The dogs are loose. Prejudice barks, bigotry bites. Crackpots are back in charge. Bring out the violins. This shall never happen again.

[The images in our blog are always anonymous. I make an exception for the first and the last image. The last is a photo of Jewish musicians who were forced to play while the victims of the Nazis were marched to the gas chambers. The first image shows a nice portrait of the infamous Farage. I honor the musicians, what I think of Farage, well … – Paul Dijstelberge]

Cordwainer is a small ward in the City of London named after the cordwainers, which were professional shoemakers who lived and worked in this area. Streets within its boundaries are, amongst others, Bow Lane (formerly: Cordwainer’s Street), Pancras Lane, and part of Watling Street. The word cordwainer was derived from ‘Cordovan’, meaning fine leather produced in Córdoba. Historically, there was a distinction between cordwainer (maker of shoes and boots) and cobbler (repairer of footwear). The Guild of Cordwainers was in existence by 1272 and obtained a Royal Charter in 1439.

Traditionally, four persons are known in English common law: natural born subject; denizen; alien friend; and alien enemy. In his Commentaries on the Law of England (1766) William Blackstone, Professor of English Law at Oxford University, summarised the position of the latter in times of conflict: ‘alien enemies have no rights, no privileges’. The Crown in other words possessed absolute power over alien enemies. When Mussolini declared war in June 1940, Churchill ordered to ‘collar the lot’. Mass internment followed. The precedent had been set during World War I.

On 4 August 1914, Britain declared war on Germany. The next day Parliament passed the Aliens Restriction Act, transforming every foreigner born in Germany or Austria-Hungary into an enemy alien. This person was not permitted to send letters; he could not travel more than five miles from the police station at which he had registered; he could not carry a camera, or own a car, a motorcycle, or a carrier pigeon; he was forbidden to obtain military maps or possess a gun. To many, mere registration of enemy aliens did not settle the issue. In the years preceding the war, newspapers had sounded the alarm about nefarious Germans. Since 1870, the British image of Germany had changed drastically. The old stereotype of a nation populated by philosophers, composers, and drunken students, had transformed into one of military brutes, megalomaniac scientists, and spymasters. Germans were considered a dose of bad germs. As early as 1909, papers had reported (imaginary) Zeppelin sightings and warned of the threat posed by an expanding German navy. Lord Northcliffe, owner of both the Daily Mail and the Times, further stoked the fear of invasion, warning that German waiters and barbers lurked at the heart of a hidden spy network.

Pressured by Parliament to arrest all enemy aliens as prisoners of war, British Home Secretary Reginald McKenna initially refused. Internment, he noted, was reserved for those who were military personnel or seen as dangerous to the nation. On 7 May 1915, however, a German submarine torpedoed the British ocean liner Lusitania, killing more than a thousand civilians. Riots erupted in the streets of London and across the British Empire, from Johannesburg to Melbourne. Looters ransacked German bakeries, butchers and pubs. In Liverpool, police had to take citizens of German descent into protective custody. Political resistance to mass internment vanished overnight. Less than a week after the Lusitania’s destruction, the government announced that male enemy aliens – whatever their status or profession – would be rounded up. Many of them had settled years before, some families had been in Britain for generations. Tens of thousands of men were registered and locked up for the duration of the war. In north London, Alexandra Palace became a holding camp for up to 3,000 aliens. Eventually, they were sent to the village of Knockaloe on the Isle of Man which was turned into a complex of wooden sheds housing 25,000 internees. They were not soldiers, but low-grade hostages who were forced to endure their miserable fate and the breaking up of family life. The majority of those interned left Britain after the war or were deported. Many never saw their relations again.

Ironically, some immigrants were amongst the most ardent champions of internment. Emma Orczy was born in Hungary into a noble family. She was fifteen years old when her father took the family to London. She became a blockbuster author. Her novel The Scarlet Pimpernel was phenomenally popular. Between 1906 and 1940, she wrote fourteen sequels to the story. During World War I, Emma showed loyalty to her adopted country by founding the Active Service League, an organisation that urged women to make the following promise: ‘I do hereby pledge … to persuade every man I know to offer his services to the country, and I also pledge myself never to be seen in public with any man who … has refused to respond to his country’s call’. It was up to women to send their men to the trenches. Novelist William Tufnell Le Queux was born in Southwark in 1864, the son of an immigrant from Chateauroux in central France. Educated on the Continent, he became a prolific writer. From about 1905 he was a self-proclaimed patriot and Germanophobe. In 1906 Le Queux wrote for Lord Northcliffe’s Daily Mail a serial titled ‘The invasion of 1910’ (later published in book form). It warned of German atrocities and urged the introduction of compulsory military training. At the same time, politicians and newspaper editors became fixated on the idea that German prisoners in Britain had a pleasant time while British prisoners of war in Germany suffered brutal treatment. Internment deteriorated into organised xenophobia. The impact of such hysteria, which resulted in mass deportation of German civilians at the end of the conflict, would survive well beyond 1918.

Who were the victims? George Sauter was born in 1866 at Rettenbach, Bavaria, and studied art at the Royal Academy in Munich. He moved to London in 1895, having worked previously in Holland, Belgium, France and Italy. He married Lilian Galsworthy, daughter of the writer of the Forsyte Saga, and was appointed Honorary Secretary to the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers during Whistler’s presidency. Having lived in London for two decades but not become a British citizen, Sauter was interned with his son Rudolf (who became an artist in his own right) at the Alexandra Palace in December of 1915 and repatriated to Germany in early 1917. He never returned to Britain. George Kenner was born Georg Kennerknecht on 1 November 1888 in the small town of Schwabsoien, Bavaria. He moved to London in 1910 where he furthered his education at the Lambeth School of Art. With a British partner he set up the art company Waddington & Kennerknecht at no. 73 Farringdon Street. He was interned in May 1915. He was permitted by the camp authorities to use his skills as a professional artist. He created 110 paintings and drawings of his experiences as a civilian prisoner of war. It is the most extensive and moving collection of this nature that has survived. Kenner was transported to Knockaloe in June 1916 and sent back to Germany in a prisoner exchange in March 1919, four months after the Armistice. He never returned to Britain and eventually moved to Cheltenham, Pennsylvania.

Not all internees left Britain altogether. Carl Bartels was born in Stuttgart in 1866 into a Protestant family. He father was a woodcarver from the Black Forest. Having married Mathilde Zappe in 1887, the couple visited Britain on their honeymoon and decided to stay. He settled in Haringey, north London, and soon gained acclaim as a sculptor and woodworker. His reputation was enhanced when he won a competition to design two copper birds for the twin clock towers of Liverpool’s Royal Liver Building. His designs were brought to life by the Bromsgrove Guild of Applied Arts. After the Lusitania tragedy, Bartels was imprisoned at Knockaloe, even though he had been a naturalised Briton for more than twenty years. After the war Bartels was repatriated to Germany and separated from his wife and children. He regained residency in 1931 when his nephew’s employer offered permanent employment. Ironically, his designs were used in the modernisation of the RMS Mauretania, a sister ship of the Lusitania, although the building of the ship was scrapped in 1934. During the Second World War he made artificial limbs for injured servicemen.

The First World War was a watershed moment in the treatment of civilians during times of conflict. In the summer of 1914, concentration camps were a defunct concept. By the end of the war, they stretched across six continents. In only four years, mass detention of innocent civilians had been legitimised all over the world. Every nation has a black era or shameful episode it would prefer to exclude from historical accounts. For Britain, mass internment (and deportation) is one of those occurrences which has barely been acknowledged.

Merchant Thomas Romeyn may have been of Flemish descent. He made a remarkable career in London’s governing mercantile class. He became a citizen before 1280, was elected sheriff in 1290, alderman in 1294, and mayor in 1309. In 1285, Edward I had forced London authorities to admit aliens of good repute to its citizenship. In the early 1280s, Romeyn first appears in the records as a citizen purchasing a shop in the pepperers’ trading quarter of Soper’s Lane, Cheapside. He sold spices, cloth and furs to members of the nobility. He also invested in property. In 1292 he was one of London’s top taxpayers. In the previous year he served as sheriff with another pepperer, William Layer. Their election as aldermen during that decade symbolised the socio-economic advancement of the pepperers, which had been achieved through their co-operation with Italian and Provençal traders who imported their goods and gave them credit. 

The Guild of Pepperers was formed in 1180. Pepperers subsequently became wholesale merchants dealing en gros (hence the word ‘grocer’) and in 1428 were incorporated as the Worshipful Company of Grocers. However, some sections of the London population resented the success of immigrants and, as the economy slumped in the later 1290s, the aldermen had to deal with violent protests and riots. Romeyn and his wife, Julia or Juliana, suffered from one such attack in their house in 1298. As Mayor of London in 1309/10, Romeyn skilfully balanced the grievances of the local population against the interests of the alien merchants in the city. He died in March 1313.

The first London goldsmiths were Jewish. They also acted as bankers and moneylenders, but medieval attitudes to usury were critical. In 1275, Edward I issued the ‘statutus de Judeismo’ banning Jews from lending money at interest. It was one of many repressive measures which culminated in the expulsion of the impoverished Jews from the country in 1290, at which time they may have numbered as many as 16,000 souls. 

It would take over 350 years before they were allowed to return to Britain. Their powerful position as moneylenders to the English Crown was taken over by Italians with Lombard Street as its financial centre. The area was originally a piece of land granted by Edward I to goldsmiths and merchants from Lombardy and is mentioned by name in a Charter of Edward II in 1319. Economically sophisticated and socially self-contained, the Italian merchant elite regarded itself as the financial aristocracy within the larger London stranger community. Many commercial terms such as debtor, creditor, cash, bank, or bankrupt were directly derived from the Italian. In Das Kapital Karl Marx specifically refers to Lombard Street in reference to credit and money-lending. 

The first Italian settlers were members of the Corsini dynasty, a Florentine dynasty who made their fortune in the fourteenth century as politicians and traders. They lost political power with the emergence of the Medici family, but continued to flourish economically. Filippo and Bartolomeo Corsini increased the wealth of the family thanks to their network of banking offices around Europe, connected with a fast private postal service. They accumulated fabulous wealth in a relatively short time in London – so much so, that Italians in London at the time were referred to as ‘Caursinis’. With the emergence of the Hanseatic trade, the pre-eminence of the Italians was challenged by merchants from the Low Countries and Northern Germany. During the last decade of the fifteenth century as many as eighty Hanseatic merchants were resident in London, mostly quartered in Dowgate Ward, better known as the Steelyard. Lombard Street however retained its reputation as being at the heart of London’s financial centre.

There are many ironies in the turbulent history of Anglo-French relationships. One of those is that the British Ministry of Justice is located at no. 102 Petty France. The name of the street refers to the settlement of Huguenot refugees there. It is also used to refer to the area in the vicinity of the street, the seventh Ward of Westminster. It has been asserted that the name originated from a settlement of French refugees after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, but the name is much older and was most likely derived from a habitation of French wool merchants who came for purposes of trade. 

There was a district nearby known as Petty Calais where the wool-staplers principally resided. The Merchants of the Staple was an English company incorporated by Royal Charter in 1319 which controlled the export of wool to the Continent during the late medieval period. The staple was first fixed at Antwerp, then successively moved between Bruges, Brussels, and Louvain. In 1353 the staple was fixed at Westminster which drew so much business it was raised to the dignity of a town. 

During the high and late Middle Ages the vast majority of strangers in London were individual members of a multi-national merchant class. In 1303, Edward I signed the Carta Mercatoria or 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, bridge 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. In 1334, in exchange for financial assistance, Edward III replaced the general grant of rights to foreign merchants with a particular charter granted to the Hanseatic League. London became part of the Hanse. From the late thirteenth until around 1600, merchants in several Northern European cities like Bruges, Lübeck, Hamburg, Danzig, Copenhagen, Bremen, and even Novgorod in Russia formed a trading company known as the Hanseatic League. 

The merchants in the League met on a regular basis to make trading agreements and to work out issues of common interest. As a result of these meetings, the member cities became highly influential politically. The Hanse had a lasting influence on our notions of commerce, economic association, the importance of free trade, and the role of the nation state. Some seventy cities were regular League members and around one hundred more were passive associates without decision-making power. 

The 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 strict code of laws. It was called the Steelyard (‘Stalhof’ in German) either in reference to the great steel beam used for weighing goods, or to the courtyard where goods were bought and sold from stalls. It was not dissolved until Lübeck, Bremen and Hamburg sold their common property in 1853.

Merchant and author Francesco di Balducci Pegolotti was born around 1280 into a well-to-do Florentine family. He worked for the Compagnia dei Bardi, one of the largest mercantile enterprises in Europe which was started by the Bardi family, until their bankruptcy in 1345. From 1317 onward he represented the company in England. 

He directed the London office in Lombard Street between 1318 and 1321. In this capacity he exercised a prominent role in the company’s trade through English ports. He also participated in the negotiation of loans to the crown (in 1320). His other responsibilities included transferring money from England to the papal court at Avignon. He left London in December 1321 to take up a new assignment in Cyprus. He spent his final years in Florence. In 1347 he was involved liquidating the assets of the Bardi firm, but nothing is recorded of him thereafter, and it is not known when he died. Pegolotti compiled the merchant’s manual to which he owes his fame in Florence. 

The manual survived uniquely in a manuscript of 1472 in the Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence. Its present title, La pratica della mercatura, was invented for an edition of the work published in 1765/6. An important source for students of medieval international trade, the manual supplies extensive detail about the regions to which Bardi interests extended, from England eastwards to Persia and the Black Sea. His information about Britain includes lists of monastic sources of wool in England and Scotland. His work also provides information about London prices (wool, metals, spices, and silk) and estimates of exchange rates.

 
Nonsuch Palace was built by Henry VIII in 1538 just south of London. Many artists from the Continent were involved in the project including Florentine High Renaissance painter Bartolommeo Penni who moved to London around 1519. He served as court artist to Henry VIII between 1531 and 1533. He had made the journey in company of fellow Florentine painter and architect Antonio di Nunziato d’Antonio who in English records is referred to as Anthony Toto. The latter was naturalised in 1543 and appointed to the lucrative court position of Serjeant Painter in 1544. Toto and Penni spent most of their time after 1538 working on Nonsuch Palace, including elaborate stucco work for Henry’s most advanced building, now vanished. Penni is recorded as still in England in 1538 and also worked as painter-decorator to Henry’s son and successor Edward VI. Toto died a rich man in 1554 in England.

Teacher and translator Jean Belmain was a French Huguenot scholar who served as a language teacher to future English monarchs Edward VI and Elizabeth I at the court of their father Henry VIII. A committed Calvinist, Jean Belmain was a refugee from persecution in France. He may well have had a major role in forming Edward’s Protestant views. Belmain began his teaching duties in 1546 and also completed a French-language translation of the strongly anti-Catholic prose devotion Lamentations of a Sinner written by Catherine Parr (Henry’s last of six wives) in which his most noticeable adaptation was to add exclamations. He died some time after 1557.

Little is known about the background of landscape painter Gerard van Edema. A native of Friesland, he was born around 1652 in Amsterdam. Before settling in England around 1670, he had travelled extensively, to Norway, Newfoundland, New York and Surinam. He may have been the Nicholas Edema who painted insects and plants in Suriname. His arrival in England coincided with an increasing popularity of this genre in the decoration of country houses such as Althorp or Drayton House in Nottinghamshire. From his own estate in Richmond, he painted views of the Thames at least twice (one of the paintings is in the Royal collection). He was partly responsible for creating a vogue for dramatic Scandinavian scenes and the depicting of wild natural images with mountain storms, cliffs, waterfalls, winding rivers and fallen trees – everything one does not associate with the Low Countries. 

Van Edema’s work contributed to the evolution of the Picturesque. Mount Edgcumbe House overlooks Plymouth and the waters of the Sound and the English Channel. It was the ancestral home of the Edgcumbe family for over four hundred years. Richard Edgcumbe employed three Dutch immigrant painters, Van Edema, John Wyck and Willem van de Velde the Younger, to have a series of views painted for his collection. The artists remained for some time at Mount Edgcumbe. A heavy drinker, Van Edema died at his home in Richmond about 1700.

For us, the three million EU migrants in Britain, 29 March 2017 is a dark day. With a stroke of the PM’s pen, our legal presence in the country has become precarious. Psychologically, Brexit has brought upon us the status of outcast through the shameless manoeuvring of politicians, the relentless feeding of fake news by the press, and the gullibility of a poorly informed public.

Migration is the most contentious socio-political concern worldwide. For individual migrants, the difficulties associated with upheaval, loss and settlement are likely to increase their susceptibility to developing mental health problems such as depression, anxiety, or addiction to alcohol and drugs. Migration, if anything, is a journey of the mind. Insecurity and low self-esteem (a lack of ‘balls’) are the migrant’s worst enemies.

Psychiatrists have used the phrase ‘psychic castration’. Banishment hurts. One of the defence systems is dissociation. This manifests itself in two contrasting ways: one is that of denigrating all that was left behind and exaggerating the love for one’s adopted country; the other is to idealize what is lost and curse the host country for its defects. Whatever psychological system may be in operation, emigration (either voluntarily or enforced) is a traumatic event.

Isolation and nostalgia force a sense of incompleteness upon the immigrant. Following his (her) arrival, he (she) experiences a mental state similar to that of a bereavement. It is the passing of a previous life, the loss of what has been abandoned and left behind. The speed of the integration process depends on the depth of these feelings raging within the individual. One of the early expressions of the psychological trauma of migration is recorded in a novel.

Prior to Napoleon’s invasion in 1797, Venice had long established a Republican government that encouraged both business and art. At its height, the Republic of Venice was home to renowned architects, painters and printers. Ugo Foscolo was born on 6 February 1778 on the Ionian island of Zante, then under Venetian control. Having completed his studies, he made his way in literary circles as a poet. By then, however, Venice’s days of glory were over.

In February 1789, Lodovico Manin took on the office of Doge, the last person to hold this once powerful position. He was forced to abdicate by Napoleon who disassembled Venice’s naval fleet, leaving the city defenceless. In 1815 the Congress of Vienna decreed Venice to Austrian control, where she would remain until Italian unification. By then, Foscolo had gone into exile. Having moved to Milan first and from there to Switzerland, he arrived in London in September 1816. Living at no. 19 Edwardes Square, Kensington, he fell repeatedly into debt and suffered frequent spells of depression.

His pain found an outlet in the creation and re-writing of an epistolary novel (the first in Italian literature) titled Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis. The novel was composed in Milan between 1798 and 1802. A second edition, with major changes, was published in Zurich (1816) and a third one in London (1817). The story features a young man who flees from Venice to escape Austrian occupation and commits suicide in despair whilst in exile. The inspiration for the novel was derived from a news story that had struck the author. Gerolamo Ortis, a student from Friuli, had killed himself in Padua under circumstances akin to those described in the story. Suicide was a much discussed topic at the time amongst Venetian migrants. As a fictional theme it set a precedent. Self-murder was not included (or accepted) in the novel until later in the nineteenth century.

Is there a link between migration and suicide? Linguistics illuminates what is emotionally hard to express. In 1945, novelist Thomas Mann celebrated his seventieth birthday in exile. There was a public meeting in his honour. In a speech he explained the common Latin origin of the English word ‘alien’ and of the German term ‘Elend’ (= misery). The migrant is an alien in the double interpretation of the word. The psychoses dubbed ‘bacillus emigraticus’, the virus of nostalgia and homesickness, hits every migrant at some time to a varying degree. Interestingly, the word alienate: make estranged in feelings or affections, was introduced into English in 1548, during a time that the first waves of immigrants from the Low Countries have been recorded (in the sense of ‘loss or derangement of mental faculties’ the word is recorded as early as 1482). It is significant that the early students of psychology were known as alienists.

Research on migration and rates of self-murder is inconsistent and inconclusive. It is doubtful if any clear association can be established. The act of leaving one’s country is tough, but once the decision is made, the migrant will give his utmost to succeed and to prove his worth to himself and the host country. Migration demands courage, energy and determination. Survival, not suicide, is in the migrant’s DNA. Integration is always possible, inclusion feasible, and participation essential. But whatever effort he makes, however substantial his contribution may be, or wherever he leaves his footprint, a sense of otherness, of being alien, of not belonging, will remain. It is the ‘motherless child’ syndrome. At times, this feeling fuels the urge to do more and better; on other occasions, it leaves a stifling sense of despondency and depression. That is the migrant’s trap.

In spite of – possibly: because of – social media, contemporary society is one of separation, isolation, and rising mutual hostility. Constant communication creates an island of loneliness in the middle of masses. Kiev-born existentialist philosopher Lev Shestov (he lived in exile in Paris after the October Revolution) suggested in All Things Are Possible (1905) that ‘Crusoes are to be found not only on desert islands. They are there, in populous cities … Loneliness, desertion, a boundless, shoreless sea, on which no sail has risen for tens of years, do not many of our contemporaries live in such a circumstance?’

Many city-dwellers may well share this experience. The migrant suffers the Crusoe challenge to an extreme degree. Isolation is his fundamental condition; adaptation his ultimate challenge. It is often (conveniently) forgotten that Daniel Defoe’s most celebrated character Robinson Crusoe – ‘the emblematic English emigrant and imperialist’ as the chauvinist interpretation goes – was in fact an alien, the son of a German merchant. His name Kreutznaer was corrupted to Crusoe. Defoe’s story of a castaway fighting against all odds on a hostile island is an allegory of immigrant life in Britain – then and now.

 
Ticino, the southernmost canton of Italian-speaking Switzerland, is known for its chestnuts. Traditionally, unemployment was high there. For centuries locals gained an additional income from selling roast chestnuts on the streets of cities such as Milan, Genoa or Lyons. The men would return home in spring with the money earned in the previous winter and then, in late summer, work on the next yield of chestnuts. During a succession of poor harvests between 1847 and 1854, large numbers of young men reluctantly left their homes in Valle Leventina or Val di Blenio for other European countries. The 1851 London census shows that a number of Ticinese workers were employed as artisans or waiters. Others continued selling chestnuts, large amounts of which were imported to the West End. Many of these immigrants had travelled by foot over the St Gottard Pass (only open from June to September) and then moved onto Calais via Geneva, Lyons or Paris. The prospect of finding paid work in London’s Swiss-Italian catering industry encouraged a further exodus of emigrants in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Many of them brought political convictions and home hostilities with them.

Hungerford Market, created in 1680, was located between the Strand and the Thames on a site formerly occupied by an estate belonging to the Hungerford family of Fairleigh in Wiltshire. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the old market had become dilapidated and was rebuilt in 1831. It was here that Carlo Gatti, a member of an impoverished patrician family from Marogno in Ticino, opened a French-style café after his arrival in London in July 1847. He was the first in a dynasty of restaurateurs and theatre owners. He began his career selling ‘goffres’ (a kind of waffle sprinkled with sugar) in Battersea Fields and from a stall at Hatton Wall in the Italian immigrant quarter of London. 

From there he went on to open a number of cafés in the area which created a stir for their elegant marble tables, plate-glass mirrors, red velvet seating, small string orchestras, and high quality fare at moderate prices. He recruited relatives and locals from Ticino to work as waiters, chefs and managers in his establishments. In the course of the 1850s Carlo became the first mass manufacturer of ice cream, which had previously been an expensive delicacy. By 1858 he claimed to have sold up to ten thousand penny ices a day. Chocolatier Battista Bolla was born in 1819 in Ticino. He established his premises at no. 129 Holborn Hill. In 1849 he joined forces with Gatti. They exhibited their chocolate making machine at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Although imported from France, is was a ‘must see’ novelty in London at the time. Under pressure from his clientele and always willing to expand, by the end of the decade some of Gatti’s outlets began to provide ‘chops and chips’, thereby becoming London’s very first ‘Swiss café-restaurant’. Energetic and garrulous, and in spite of enormous commercial success, ‘Il Gatton’ (The Big Cat) never lost the demeanour and mannerisms of a mountain peasant.

The leading members of the next generation were Agostino and Stefano, the sons of Carlo’s brother Giovanni Gatti. In 1862, when Hungerford Market was demolished to make way for Charing Cross Station, the family was amply compensated, allowing to plan new ventures. The brothers opened a music-hall named Gatti’s Palace of Varieties at Westminster Bridge Road. After 1882 they redeveloped the interior of the Royal Adelaide Gallery to create a café-restaurant with entrances onto the Strand, William IV Street, and Adelaide Street. They installed an electricity sub-station in the cellars. The bar was much frequented by actors and gained a reputation as the Marble Halls because of its rich decoration which gave rise to the line ‘O God bless Gatti and the Marble Halls’. By the 1890s the Gallery was employing between 180 and 200 predominantly Italian-speaking waiters and forty chefs in enormous subterranean kitchens. Of the sons of Ticino who made the long trek to London, the Gatti’s were by far the most successful immigrants – but there were others figures too with an intriguing tale to tell. 

Pietro Pazzi travelled from Ticino to Paris after the floods that devastated his valley in the winter of 1868/9. In 1870, most likely in connection with the upheavals of the Franco-Prussian War, he moved to London. Having worked as a waiter first, he opened Pazzi’s Restaurant at no. 271 Seven Sisters Road. The spot was well chosen. Finsbury Park station had been opened in 1869, marking the north-eastern limit of the suburban railway of what was to become the London underground system. Driven by nostalgia and radical political views, Pazzi founded the Unione Semionese in 1875. The union held its meetings and celebrations at his restaurant. The political divisions within his canton of origin were reflected in the London exile community and tore its unity apart. The split became public. Some, like the Gatti family, were hard-line conservatives. Stefano and his older brother Agostino acted as political recruiting agents and regularly shipped their waiters to Switzerland to vote for their conservative allies. Others, like Pazzi, resentful of the poverty that had forced their migration, became radicalised by the anarchist and socialist ideas circulating in the capital at the time. 

Ticino did not just produce restaurateurs. Historically, the Ticinese were professional masons, stonecutters, stucco workers and sculptors. One of them, Raffaele Monti had joined the insurgents in the 1848 Italian rebellion. After defeat by the Austrian army, Monti fled to London where he was to remain for the rest of his life. He allied himself with manufacturers of ornamental sculpture and became involved with the Crystal Palace Company, which transferred Joseph Paxton’s exhibition building to Sydenham, Kent, in 1853. Monti provided allegorical statuary for the palace and its grounds. More intriguing is the figure of Angelo Castioni. Born in 1834 in Stabio, Ticino, he had settled in Paris. He took an active part in the 1871 Commune. As a member of the central committee and the commander of a battalion of the National Guard, he was held responsible for the executions of several conservatives. He took refuge in London in 1872. A sculptor who specialised in finishing the work of other artists, he established himself at no. 3 Upper Cheyne Row (his nephew Rudolph Pelli, also a sculptor, lived at the same address). By the 1880s he was assistant to the most eminent sculptor of the age, Viennese-born Edgar Boehm, a close and loving friend of Princess Louise, Queen Victoria’s rebellious daughter. 

Politically, Castioni remained a radical. In August 1890 he travelled to Tuscany at the request of Boehm to select and order marble blocks directly from the quarry in Carrara. He made a detour to Bellinzona, the cantonal capital of Ticino, where on the evening of 10 September a popular uprising broke out. During the troubles Luigi Rossi, a conservative politician and member of the State Council of Ticino, was shot dead with a revolver by a flamboyantly dressed figure with an enormous red beard. The assassin was Angelo Castioni. With the support of fellow revolutionaries he was smuggled out of the country. Pietro Pazzi actively backed the September revolution and it was rumoured that he had organised the murderer’s quick and safe return to London.

The Swiss government formally requested Castioni’s extradition from Britain. He was arrested and brought before the magistrate at the police court at Bow Street. The extradition treaty with Switzerland, dated 26 November 1880, stated that a ‘fugitive criminal shall not be surrendered if the offence in respect of which his surrender is demanded is one of a political character, or if he prove that the requisition for his surrender has in fact been made with a view to try and punish him for an offence of a political character’. Since the murder had been politically motivated, the request for handover was rejected thus setting a precedent that established the principle of immunity for such crimes in English law.
Following the failure of the September 1891 uprising in Ticino, Pazzi turned his back on his radical past and became an upright British citizen. He died in August 1914, a wealthy man, and was buried as Peter Pazzi in the prestigious Circle of Lebanon vaults at Highgate Cemetery, surrounded by the great and the good of England. In 2015 an unsigned portrait bust of Pazzi was discovered in the family vault, most likely the work of Angelo Castioni and made in gratitude for the help he had received from his benefactor. Having renounced his radical past, Pazzi kept the bust away from curious eyes which may have led to embarrassing questions. He took it to his grave instead.

In 1670, twenty-year old merchant and financier Solomon de Medina, of Portuguese Jewish origin, moved from Middelburg to London. He established a successful business supplying imported silks and other luxury textiles to the rich and famous. From 1689 onwards Medina acted as London factor for Antonio Alvarez Machado and Isaac Pereira, both of similar backgrounds, the ‘providiteurs généraux’ to the army of William of Orange in England and to the land forces of the allies in the Low Countries. In 1697 he moved to Richmond, becoming the first known Jewish resident there. 

On 18 November 1699 William III dined at Medina’s house in Richmond, probably at Heron Court. Modern day Heron Square contains the site and some of the surviving buildings of old Heron Court which became the focus of Jewish population in eighteenthth century Richmond. Heron Court itself was once called Herring Court, but the name was changed for reasons of social grace. On 23 June 1700, in recognition of his services, the king knighted Medina at Hampton Court. He was the first professing Jew to be knighted. After the king’s death in March 1702, Medina returned to the Netherlands where he was involved in the food supplies to the allied troops throughout the campaigns of John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough. In 1711 he was summoned before the parliamentary commissioners for examining the public accounts. Medina admitted that he and his predecessors had regularly paid commission on their contracts to Marlborough. His evidence was used by the Tories to bring about Marlborough’s downfall. Medina died in 1720.

In June 1672, Charles II issued a declaration in which Dutch artists are invited to move to England. After the Restoration there was an expanding market for paintings in England, especially portraits and marine subjects – but increasingly also for landscapes in the Italianate or northern styles – that could not be satisfied by English artists. Leiden-born marine painter Willem van de Velde (of Flemish descent) responded to the call and left Holland for London to enter in the service of the king. Personal careers counted for more than loyalty or national pride at the time. 

He was joined by his son Willem van de Velde the Younger who was to become the most famous of all marine painters, originating a rich English tradition in this genre. Soon after arriving they began their first major commission for the king, designs for a set of tapestries of the recent sea-battle of Solebay during the Third Anglo-Dutch War. He initally he lived with his family in East Lane, Greenwich, using the Queen’s House (now part of the National Maritime Museum) as a studio. 

Following the accession of William and Mary this facility was no longer provided, and by 1691 he was living in Sackville Street, now close to Piccadilly Circus. Over the next three decades or so they painted pictures of ships, battles and the sea for the court, the aristocracy and naval officers. Willem the Elder died in December 1693, his son in April 1707.