Highgate Road (Kentish Town)

Boost, Baste and Lambast (How to Poach a Periodical)
On 27 January 1990 a ninety-three year old man named Alfred John Barret died in the cathedral city of Wells in Somerset. He was cremated and his ashes scattered. Having moved from London in 1952/3, he had lived in Wells for some four decades with his Scottish wife, leading an unassuming life in a modest red brick housing estate. His death went unnoticed.

Alfred Perlès was born in 1897 in Vienna. His father was an affluent Czech Jew; his mother French and Catholic; his education Austro-German in the tradition of Goethe, Hölderin, and Mozart. As a young man he had the ambition of becoming a writer and, according to his own memoirs, he had sold a German-language film synopsis shortly before the outbreak of war – his only pre-war publication. Apparently there were several novels (or fragments thereof) written in German, but these were never published. During World War I he served as a junior officer in the Austrian army. Having been sent into action in Romania, he was court-martialled for a serious dereliction of duty and spent the remaining years of the war in an asylum. After the war he left Vienna never to return. The first phase of his life had ended in disgrace.

Carrying a Czech passport and very little money, he roamed through the streets of Berlin, Copenhagen and Amsterdam, before arriving in Paris around 1920. When his affluent parents realised that their son had falsely told them that he was studying medicine at the Sorbonne, they stopped sending him money. Battling extreme poverty, he held a variety of odd jobs and survived in the margin of society, acquiring a ‘wolf nature’ (his own term) with a street instinct for securing shelter and food. He lived the life of the wandering artist: exiled, rootless, and assuming numerous identities (his aliases were Alf and Joey and Joe and Fredl; he was the infamous Carl of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Quiet Days in Clichy). Perlès was one of the ‘Internationale’ of drifters in Paris – possessing an amazing ability to adapt to new socio-cultural surroundings. He quickly began writing in French and thought of himself as standing in the tradition of Joseph Conrad, Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, or William Saroyan. They all had adopted a foreign tongue and made creative use of it. To Perlès it was a condition of modernism: writing in another language intensifies one’s consciousness, opens new horizons, and deepens the range of feelings and sensations.

Perlès met Henry Miller when the latter first visited Paris in April 1928, but it was not until early 1930 that their close friendship began. At the time, Perlès was scraping together a living as a journalist, writing feature stories for the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune. Miller once described Perlès’s existence in the metropolis as the ‘life of a cockroach’. Miller himself was in an even worse state, broke, starving, and homeless. Perlès offered him all the help he could afford. They became roommates in Clichy, a poor district just outside Paris. Six years older than his companion, Perlès was Miller’s mentor in how to survive hardship and be an artist. Miller memorised the experience in Quiet Days in Clichy (written in 1940; published in 1956). Together they penned a pseudo-manifesto called ‘The New Instinctivism: A Duet in Creative Violence’ (1930). In 1936 Perlès wrote his first French novel Sentiments limitrophes. Creatively, these intimate friends and artistic rivals spurred each other on.

In 1934 Perlès was made unemployed once again with the closure of the Chicago Tribune office. Soon after, an unexpected opportunity came his way. Situated about twenty miles east of Paris, the American Country Club of France had been founded by elderly businessman Elmer Prather for the pleasure of affluent Anglo-American expats and a handful of local lovers of the game. The Club also provided its members with tennis facilities and a swimming pool. Prather launched a monthly magazine with club notices, sporting news, and advertisements for golf clubs, waterproof clothing, etc. Lacking editorial expertise, he decided to delegate the job to a professional. In 1937, he handed over ownership to Perlès on condition that the magazine’s old name be kept and its connection to the Country Club maintained by printing in each number two pages of golf news. For Prahter it seemed a shrewd move. The editorial responsibility was given to a proper writer whom he did not have to pay. At the same time he would have his notices published for free and the Club’s name would benefit from its association with a quality magazine.

It was a golden opportunity for Perlès & Friends. Together with Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, and Anaïs Nin, he poached the journal and turned it into an avant-garde enterprise (in English & French). Modernism was the motivator. In a letter soliciting subscriptions, Henry Miller announced that the editors were planning to ‘boost, baste and lambast when and wherever possible. Mostly we shall boost. We like to boost, and of course to begin with we are going to boost ourselves’. In the wider Parisian artistic scene, the modernist idea had been pushed forward in countless manifestos that were diffused in a flow of little magazines. Manifestos were battle cries, not sets of rules and regulations. One of the ambitions of the movement was to abolish all directives that had been imposed upon writers and artists. Modernist art was spontaneous rather than ‘programmed’. The Booster took a unique place in that tradition. Its starting team was impressive: managing editor: Alfred Perlès; society editor: Anaïs Nin; sports editor: Charles Nordon (Lawrence Durrell); butter news editor: Walter Lowenfels; department of metaphysics and metapsychosis: Michael Fraenkel; fashion editor: Earl of Selvage (Henry Miller); literary editors: Lawrence Durrell and William Saroyan.

Since the magazine was dependent on advertising patronage of the golfing elite, a measured approach would have been a pragmatic position to take. The opposite was the case. The editorial stance was uncompromising and subversive. Financial backing soon dried up and was halted with the publication of Nukarpiartekak, a Greenland saga which had been brought to European attention in 1884 by the Danish explorer Gustav Holm.* It tells the tale of an old bachelor, a lustful Eskimo, who disappears entirely in the vagina of a young woman. What is left of him is a small skeleton she passes into the snow the next morning. The publication was publicly denounced as obscene by the Club’s president. The magazine changed its name to Delta. It ran for another three issues before being discontinued. Boosting was no longer acceptable.

In 1938 Alfred published his second French novel Le quatour en ré majeur. Soon after, the band of friends broke up. Miller moved to Greece and Perlès fled to London. The Bohemian stage of his life came to an end. After coming to England in December 1938, he was briefly interned (he recorded his experiences in 1944 in Alien Corn). On his release he joined the British Pioneer Corps helping to clean up rubble after the Blitz. He turned into a British patriot, concerned about the future of humanity and with an intense hatred of Nazi Germany. He expressed a moralistic seriousness which his friends of old greeted with dismay. He suggested in writing that he ‘had conquered the futility’ of his existence and emerged on ‘a higher plane of life’. He may have regretted his wild years in Paris, but there remains at least a linguistic link between his involvement in the avant-garde and his activities in the Pioneer Corps. By the mid-fourteenth century the word ‘pioneer’ (of French origin) referred to foot soldiers who marched ahead of their regiment to prepare the way, dig trenches, clear roads and terrain, with their picks and shovels. Pioneers were send in advance of the army. Napoleon’s use of the term avant-garde was identical before it became a cultural metaphor.
In 1943 Perlès published his first novel in English, entitled The Renegade. Around this time, he met Anne Barret who became his partner and later, in 1950, his wife. At the time of his naturalisation on 11 November 1947, he was living at Lissenden Mansions, Highgate Road in Kentish Town. By then he had changed his name to Alfred John Barret. In 1952 the couple moved to Wells. Perlès and Miller maintained a lifelong friendship. Miller visited Perlès in Britain and Perlès went out to see Miller in 1954/5 in Big Sur, California, where he wrote My Friend Henry Miller. In 1979, Miller composed a tribute to Perlès in the memoir Joey (the name given to him by Miller and Nin). The latter’s autobiography Scenes of a Floating Life is out of print (and should be re-issued). His relative quietness as an author in Britain and his disappearance from public life is intriguing and goes deeper than a more ‘mature’ outlook at life.

Ironically, it was the friendship with Miller that lies at the bottom of Alfred’s reduced creative powers. Perlès was a floater, an individual who was able to assume a variety of identities and act out different parts without ever belonging to any specific cultural group. He drifted from Vienna, to Paris, to London, writing in German, French, and English, but was unable to find a sense of totality or personal completeness. His psychological make up was as bewildering to himself as it was to others. He never showed the force of character to channel his creative talent. Young Miller was of a different disposition. Working in Paris on his first novel Tropic of Cancer, he submitted himself to a set of rules which were formulated in the process. It was a program of obsessive work based on a regime of relentless self-discipline. Sustained creation is not possible, but work always necessary (Miller was the fastest typist Perlès had ever met in his life). In the end, Miller’s sheer creative power inhibited his friend. It proved impossible to wrench himself free from the presence of genius. Perlès was acutely aware that his younger roommate would overshadow him in creative achievement – in the domain of ultimate human pride. He withdrew into the quiet splendour of England’s smallest city.

* Nukarpiartekak – Modernist Magazines Project – Magazine Viewer
http://www.modernistmagazines.com/magazine_viewer.php?gallery…article_id=681

Euston Road (Camden)

Brass instrument maker Gustave Auguste Besson was born in Paris in 1820. At the age of eighteen he produced a revolutionary design of cornet which surpassed all contemporary models. He formed the Besson Company in 1837 and his products quickly gained a great reputation throughout Europe.

In 1857, he moved to London where he built a large factory at no. 158 Euston Road. Following Besson’s death in 1874, the company changed its name, becoming Fontaine-Besson in 1880 in France, and Besson in England. At the end of the nineteenth century (1894), the Besson factory of London employed 131 workers, producing some hundred brass instruments a week. In 1968, the group Boosey & Hawkes acquired the Besson London brand. As a consequence, Besson cornets, horns, trombones, tubas and other instruments are still made today. The Boosey family was of Franco-Flemish origin. The company traces its roots back to John Boosey, a bookseller in London in the 1760s and 1770s. His son Thomas continued the business at no. 4 Old Bond Street.

JAMES JOYCE AND THE BERGSON BROTHERS Ordnance Road (Marylebone)

In 1727, Alexander Pope coined the literary term bathos in his short polemic essay ‘Peri Bathous, or The Art of Sinking in Poetry’. To him, the word meant a failed attempt at sublimity, or a sudden transition from a lofty style or grand topic to a common or vulgar one. The effect is one of anti-climax. For Pope, it violated ‘decorum’ and the fittingness of subject. In a modernist context bathos suggests an irreverent attitude towards our cultural heritage; it is mixing learning with bawdiness and confronting the serious with the frivolous, the lofty with the vulgar, or the revered with the ridiculous. James Joyce was a master of the bathetic.

Leopold Bloom in Ulysses is a middle-aged Jewish advertising salesman who seeks commissions from small businesses, designs imagery and copy, and negotiates its placing in Dublin newspapers. At the same time, he has literary ambitions. Explaining the term ‘metempsychosis’ to his wife Molly who had come across the word in a popular novel, he points to a picture named ‘The Bath of the Nymph’ which is framed above the marital bed in order to illuminate the finer detail of his argument. The print itself, in spite of its Classical allusion, was a handout given to those who had bought the Easter number of the softcore weekly magazine Photo Bits – Joyce uses pornography in aid of exploring Greek philosophy. The intellectual high and low are entangled in a single passage. Time and again, Joyce counter-balanced erudition with aspects of popular urban culture such as sexy peephole machines, music-hall tunes, or naughty images – Ulysses may follow the structure of Homer’s Odyssey, but it is the (erotic) vibrancy of the modern city not a legendary past that captured the author’s creative attention.

Bathos in Ulysses works at a more subtle level. A particular reference in the ‘Calypso’ episode is a literary one, its location less elevated. Seated on the loo, Leopold Bloom opens an old issue of the penny weekly Titbits, taking his time to read the columns of its main story, and allowing his bowels to release the constipation he had suffered from the previous day: ‘Asquat on the cuckstool he folded out his paper, turning its pages over on his bared knees. Something new and easy. No great hurry. Keep it a bit. Our prize titbit: Matcham’s Masterstroke. Written by Mr Philip Beaufoy, Playgoers’ Club, London. Payment at the rate of one guinea a column has been made to the writer. Three and a half. Three pounds three. Three pounds, thirteen and six’. Bloom admires Beaufoy. He dreams of writing a story himself and of emulating the author of a series of prize-winning contributions. The magazine was known for sponsoring competitions. P.G. Wodehouse, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and D.H. Lawrence all submitted stories seduced by the financial reward (young Joyce himself once planned to contribute a story). The wish to write a story returns in the ‘Circe’ episode. Bloom imagines a literary trial against him in which he is attacked by Beaufoy for being a plagiarist and a fake author.

The real Philip Beaufoy was a hack, a writer of shoddy and melodramatic prose, of books for children, the author of practical handbooks such as How to Succeed as a Writer, and he was indeed a member of the Playgoers’ Club on the Strand (founded in 1884 with the aim of raising the status of traditionally rowdy playgoers). Beaufoy contributed articles, stories, and letters to various other periodicals at the turn of the century. He was a prolific writer of immediately forgettable fiction – the kind of author Joyce would have despised. And yet he was given a portrait in the Dublin gallery of characters to which Joyce introduced his readers. Who then was this Philip Beaufoy (also known as Philip Beaufoy Barry)? The family history is an extraordinary one.

Composer and piano teacher Michael Bergson was born Michał Bereksohn in Warsaw on 20 May 1820 into a prominent Jewish family. His great-grandfather Szmul Jakubowicz Sonnenberg, called Zbytkower, was a prominent banker and a protégé of Stanisław August Poniatowski, King of Poland from 1764 to 1795. He studied in Dessau and Berlin (under Chopin?) and started his career in Italy. In 1865 he was appointed Professor of Music at the Conservatory of Geneva. On the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, and living in Paris at the time, he took his family to London where he would stay for the rest of his life. He initially settled at no. 1 Ordnance Road, Marylebone (now: Ordnance Hill, St John’s Wood). In 1881 the family lived at no. 92 Percy Road, Hammersmith; by 1891 they had moved to no. 50 Alexander Road, Willesden. He worked as a piano teacher, composed, and promoted Chopin in Britain. His composition A Dream Wish was played at a Promenade concert in 1875. He wrote two operas and a large number of songs. One of his best-known pieces is the ‘Scena ed Aria’ for clarinet, was played by military bands throughout the world. His Islington-born wife Catherine [Kate] Levison, daughter of a Yorkshire surgeon and dentist, was from an Anglo-Irish Jewish background. The couple had seven children, three of which are worth mentioning in this context.

Mina [Minna] Bergson was born on 28 February 1865 in Geneva. She was still young when the family moved from Paris to Ordnance Road, Marylebone. At the age of fifteen Mina was admitted to the Slade School of Art, she shared a studio with Beatrice Offor, and became close friends with Annie Horniman who would later sponsor her research in the occult. In 1887 she met Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers [S.L. Mathers] who she married three years later in the library of the Horniman Museum, changing her name to Moina Mathers. Her partner was the founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn of which she was the first initiate in March 1888. In their occult partnership, her husband was described as the ‘evoker of spirits’ and Moina as the clairvoyant ‘seeress’. In 1918, when her husband died, Moina took over the Rosicrucian Order of the Alpha et Omega, a successor organisation to the Golden Dawn, as its Imperatrix. 

Mina’s younger brother Zaleq Philip Bergson was born in 1878 in London and educated at the City of London School. One of the great benefactors of the school had been Henry Benjamin Hanbury Beaufoy, a wealthy London distiller, Member of Parliament for Hackney Wick, and collector of books (copies from his library of the First Four Folio Editions of Shakespeare were auctioned separately by Christies in July 1912). The ambitious young author most likely considered this figure a role model and took his nom de plume from him. Both in the 1891 and 1901 census Philip was living at home at no. 92 Percy Street, Hammersmith. By then, his career as an author and journalist had taken off (he is mentioned in the 1933 edition of Who’s Who in Literature under the name of BARRY, Philip Beaufoy). There is evidence that there was some musical collaboration with his father. Beaufoy, the ‘old hag’ as he is referred to in Ulysses, made a prosperous career out of creating literary garbage. A notice of his death on 19 January 1947 in the London Gazette mentions his residence as the Heathfield Hotel in Guilford Street, Bloomsbury. He had previously resided at no. 31 Regent Square, Bloomsbury, one of London’s most desirable areas. James Joyce, the novelist who revolutionised fiction, had died six years earlier, half-blind and in poverty.

The Bergson clan that moved to Ordnance Road in 1870 included an eleven year old son. Henri Bergson had been born in Paris on 18 January 1859 (the year Darwin published On the Origin of Species) at Rue Lamartine, close to the Palais Garnier, the old opera house in the capital. Having entered the Lycée Fontanes (renamed Lycée Condorcet in 1883) in 1868, he returned to Paris to complete his studies and maintained his French citizenship. By 1900 he was a Professor at the Collège de France and one of Europe’s outstanding intellectuals. His mother being English, he was familiar with the language from an early age and he remained in close contact with Britain. 

In 1889 Bergson published his doctoral thesis Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience. The study was translated by Frank L. Pogson into English in 1910 as Time and Free Will. It established Bergson’s international reputation as a highly original thinker – 1911 was a crucial year in the process. That year L’évolution créatrice was translated into English (Creative Evolution) and Joseph Solomon published his groundbreaking study on Bergson. One of his dedicated supporters was Herbert Hildon Carr, Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London, who published Henri Bergson: The Philosophy of Change (1911) and was involved in the organisation of Bergson’s first series of lectures in Britain. These included two lectures at Oxford University on The Perception of Change, and the Huxley Lecture delivered at the University of Birmingham on Life and Consciousness, published in the Hibbert Journal in October 1911. He also delivered four lectures at the University of London on The Nature of the Soul. Just before the outbreak of the Great War, Bergson was invited to deliver the prestigious Gifford lectures at several universities in Scotland. He presented the first series of eleven lectures on The Problem of Personality at the University of Edinburgh, but the outbreak of the war prevented his second lecture series. In 1913 he had been appointed President of The Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Founded in London in 1882, early members of this Society for investigating paranormal phenomena had included psychologist Edmund Gurney; poet and philologist Frederic W.H. Myers (who coined the term telepathy); philosopher Henry Sidgwick; physicist William Fletcher Barret; and journalist Edmund Dawson Rogers. During the early twentieth century other prominent members were Oliver Lodge and Arthur Conan Doyle. The escapologist Harry Houdini also had links to the Society. Mina’s Bergson interest in the occult was shared by her elder brother.

Joyce was a devotee of Bergson’s philosophy. He had a copy of L’évolution créatrice in his bookcase (and also of The Meaning of War, published in 1915) as well as Solomon’s study on the philosopher. The crucial influence of Bergson’s theories on the development of British literary modernism has frequently been discussed. In the early twentieth century his work was widely read and debated. His notion of ‘pure duration’, that is: the subjective and qualitative experience of time as set against the ‘spurious’ concept of time that is quantified into countable units, made a profound impact and left an imprint on modernist fiction and film. The psychological concept was developed by William James who described consciousness as ‘a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations’. Nothing is jointed; everything ‘flows’. James and Bergson contributed to developing the narrative device of a ‘stream of consciousness’. This stylistic process, masterly applied by Joyce, eliminates narratorial mediation in order to transfer a direct ‘quotation’ of the character’s mind, either in loose interior monologue or in relation to sensory reactions to external occurrences. Joyce’s literary technique owes a great deal to Henri Bergson’s erudite philosophy, but it is his brother Philip, the author of shoddy and melodramatic tales, who is represented in the narrative of Ulysses. Would it be too much to suggest that Joyce knew exactly what he was doing here? The author does not refer to the sophistication of thought to which the novel owes much of its structure, but instead he focuses on vulgar titbits penned down by an old hag for which he is richly rewarded by the word, the column, and the page. Two Bergson brothers representing extremes of the sublime and the vulgar. This is Joycean bathos in all its bravura.

Big Hitting, Hard Drinking Dutch Sam : Petticoat Lane (Whitechapel)

 

The London Jewish community of the mid-eighteenth century was expanding rapidly, mainly through immigration. These immigrants fell into two broad categories: Ashkenazim, who had arrived from Eastern and Central European countries, and Sephardim, largely of Iberian descent. The Ashkenazim were poorer and tended to integrate less well. They accounted for most of the Jewish pedlars and small-dealers.

The Sephardim, by contrast, were wealthier and tended to be laxer about religious observance. As merchants and financiers they fought to have restrictions lifted on international trade. British law at the time dictated that foreign-born persons applying for naturalization had to receive the Sacrament at Anglican Holy Communion. Jewish immigrants could be exempted from this requirement, but were granted ‘endenization’ which carried fewer rights than full citizenship (such as the right to own land or trade with the colonies).

In 1753 Henry Pelham’s Whig government proposed a bill allowing Jews who had been resident in Britain for three years might be naturalized without taking the Sacrament. The Jewish Naturalization Act (or ‘Jew Bill’) passed through both Houses of Parliament, but created press-inflamed agitation amongst the public. Tory papers denounced the Act as an attack upon Christianity. As it happened, 1754 would be an election year. Beginning in May 1753, the opposition sponsored articles in the London Evening Post attacking the Jew Bill. Much of the opposition was cynical politicking, but it revealed deep-rooted social anxieties too. The London Evening Post was particularly aggressive in building up a picture of Jews as cruel and sinister ‘monsters’.

Early in his career Henry Fielding had created The Grub Street Opera (1731). The ballad-opera failed, but one song survived and was integrated in Don Quixote in England (1734). Its title was ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’. Thanks to the intervention of singer-composer Richard Leveridge who added a few new stanzas and gave the song a catchier tune, it gained the status of a national anthem.

In 1748, William Hogarth painted The Gate of Calais, better known as The Roast Beef of Old England. He established in visual form the stereotype of poverty-stricken French citizens that was used time and again by satirists after him. His picture shows a huge rib of red-blooded beef being delivered to Madam Grandsire’s English hotel in Calais. Surrounding the porter are a trio of poor fishwives, a pair of miserable soldiers, a salivating friar, a couple of emaciated cooks, and a pauper in the tattered uniform of the failed Jacobite rebellion. All are in contrast to the anticipated plenty represented by the hunk of English meat central to the scene.

The symbolism is plain: native means wholesome, foreign indicates weakness and effeminacy. Loathing of foreigners was multi-adaptable: what applied to one, applies to another. In the mind of the British public the Jew was a foreigner. The Evening Post’s adaptation of ‘The Roast Beef’ simply swaps hatred of the French for that of Jews (28 July 1753; first verse):

When mighty Roast Pork was the Englishman’s Food,
It ennobl’d our Veins and enriched our Blood,
And a Jew’s Dish of Foreskins was not understood,
Sing Oh! the Roast Pork of Old England,
Oh! the Old English Roast Pork.

The ‘pamphlet war’ was an ugly one. In broadsides and ballads Jews were accused of ritual murder, of planning to turn St Paul’s Cathedral into a synagogue, of wanting to force British males to be circumcised. Antisemitism had returned with a vengeance. The gloves were off. The outburst of hatred postponed any further attempt to modify the legal status of Jews within society. In the clamour of anti-Jewish propaganda the dictionary of medieval slurs was reopened and, more worrying, elements of modern ‘racial’ stereotyping were introduced. It undermined any tendency towards religious tolerance for generations to come. The rhetoric of the row suggested that Jewishness and Englishness were incompatible. Integration was impossible. Five months after its introduction, the government withdrew the Act.

During the later decades of the eighteenth century the East End of London began to be occupied by poorer classes of Jews from Central and Eastern Europe, their numbers overrunning those of long-established immigrants in the area which caused strains of overcrowding. In this tense atmosphere, Samuel Elias – better known as Dutch Sam – was born on 4 April 1775 in Petticoat Lane, Whitechapel. In this tough area, boxing was a narrative of the immigrant poor. For young Jewish boys fighting helped to confirm a sense of identity and ethnicity. The ring was a place to knock out stereotypes, a punching stage of liberation. Sam learned to box at former heavyweight champion Daniel Mendoza’s academy.

Known as Mendoza the Jew, this bare-knuckle-fighter of Paradise Row, Bethnal Green, had captivated Regency London with his skills and set an example for Jewish kids to follow. Sam’s first recorded boxing match took place in 1801. He became the sensation of the pugilist circuit. The young lightweight faced opponents who were taller and heavier than he, but his blending of power and guile proved lethal. On 7 August 1894 he faced Caleb Baldwin, the ‘Pride of Westminster’. Sam ‘invented’ the uppercut and humiliated his celebrated opponent in the only defeat of his career. It cemented Dutch Sam’s reputation as the biggest hitter in the game, earning him the nickname of the ‘Man with the Iron Hand’. The ‘Terrible Jew’ (another nickname) was unbeatable. He succeeded Mendoza as the sporting hero of the London Jewish community.

His training regime was unusual. Sam could not go through his exhausting physical routines without an ample supply of gin. In one of his fights (April 1805) he was, according to reports, ‘positively inebriated’ when entering the ring, but in spite of that he professionally trounced his opponent. Considering the ‘rules’ of the game at the time that was quite a remarkable feat. Until Queensberry, there were no written regulations, no weight divisions, no round limits, no rest periods, and no referees. A boxer was declared the winner when his opponent was physically no longer able to continue. A single bout went a long way. Dutch Sam fought Tom Belcher, the brother of former heavyweight champion Jem Belger, on three occasions. The first fight, held in 1806, ended in a 57th round knockout win for Sam. The second match, which took place the following year, ended in a draw; the third was a 36th round stoppage win for Sam. Such was his standing that Daniel Mendoza agreed to act as second in his corner for all three bouts. After defeating Ben Medley in 1810 in round 49, Dutch Sam retired undefeated in over a hundred contests.

Sam was admired for his skill and agility. Between 1812 and 1828 Pierce Egan published his Boxiana; or, Sketches of Modern Pugilism with illustrations by George and Robert Cruikshank (the book went through several editions in five expensive volumes). The author charted the ‘Sweet Science of Bruising’, the progress of bare-knuckle boxing from its emergence in the early eighteenth century to its decline in the 1830s (and he also included an anthology of pugilistic verse). His verdict on Dutch Sam was full of praise: ‘Terrific is the only word that adequately describes his manner of fighting’. In 1814, Sam made the fatal error of a comeback. Not for money or pride, but because of a drunken dispute with William Nosworthy, a young baker from Devonshire who had recently beaten a Jewish boxer.

His anti-Semitic remarks upset the Dutchman who challenged him to a fight. Against medical advice he once again entered the ring. Although Sam had remained in training, his gin habit had deteriorated. A shell of his former self, he was knocked out by his opponent in the 15th round. After a life of fighting and boozing, he threw in the towel on 3 July 1816 and was buried in Whitechapel. His son, known as Young Dutch Sam, also became a professional fighter. Arthur Conan Doyle (who showed a keen interest in boxing and wrestling) included Sam as a character in his 1896 boxing novel Rodney Stone. The Iron Fist had made a mark, bruising his way out of a life of misery and discrimination towards levels of recognition that young London refugees could aspire to. East London’s uncompromising environment produced more champion fighters than any other part of Britain – most of them were of Jewish immigrant descent.

The Cosmopolitan Mind : Palace of Westminster (Westminster)

The Renaissance held music in high regard. It played a prominent part in religious, court and civic life. The interchange of ideas in Europe through ever closer economic and political contact brought about the creation of new musical genres, the development of instruments, and the advancement of specialist printing. By about 1500, Franco-Flemish composers dominated the domain. Most prestigious among them was Josquin des Prez who, like fellow artists at the time, travelled widely. The intensity of international encounters led to stylistic developments that have been qualified as truly European. By the beginning of the sixteenth century Antwerp had developed into an international hub of musical activity. The important initiatives were undertaken by the church. Antwerp Cathedral employed twelve choristers who lived in a private house where they received instruction from a singing master. At the beginning of the century this office was held by Jacob Obrecht, famous for his polyphonic compositions. His prolific output consists of some twenty-six masses, thirty-two motets, and thirty secular pieces, not all texted. Antwerp also employed a company of fiddlers for both secular and ecclesiastical performances. Musicians from all over Europe chose Antwerp as their home, amongst them a number of English composers.

Peter Philips had moved to the Continent as a refugee. He was one of many Catholic musicians who left England for Flanders. A prolific composer of sacred choral music, he was made organist to the Chapel of Archduke Albrecht in Antwerp. In 1593, he travelled from the Southern Netherlands to Amsterdam to ‘see and heare an excellent man of his faculties’. The man he referred to was Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, a composer and organist known as the ‘Orpheus of Amsterdam’. The latter had converted to Calvinism in 1578, but remained sympathetic to his old faith. Another refugee in Flanders was Hereford-born John Bull. Appointed chief musician to Prince Henry in 1611, he furtively disappeared to Flanders after the death of his patron in November 1612. Bull later explained his flight because of the accusation of Catholic sympathies made against him. He moved to Brussels where he was employed as one of the organists in the Chapel of Archduke Albrecht VII, sovereign of the Habsburg Netherlands. From September 1615, he held the post of organist of Antwerp Cathedral. In December 1617 he acted as city organist at ‘s Hertogenbosch. Bull’s reputation rests mainly on his keyboard music. The composition of God Save the Queen has been attributed to him.

Antwerp was renowned for its printing. Originally, all music was notated by hand. Manuscripts were costly and owned exclusively by religious orders, courts, or wealthy households. That all changed in 1501 when Venetian printer Ottaviano Petrucci published Harmonice musices odhecation, the first significant anthology of (100) polyphonic secular songs. The availability of notation in print boosted the development of instrumental music for both soloists and ensembles, and engendered the creation of new genres. In Flanders, Tielman Susato was the first printer to gain esteem for producing music books. Nothing is known about the date or place of his birth – he may have been Dutch or German. Details about his activities begin in 1529 when he was working as a calligrapher for Antwerp Cathedral. He also played the trumpet and was listed as a ‘town player’ in the city. In 1541, he created the first music printing company in the Low Countries which he combined with selling musical instruments from his home. During a prolific publishing career he was responsible for twenty-five books of chansons, three books of masses, and nineteen books of motets. The indefatigable Christopher Plantin was also active in printing music and produced some of the finest choir-books of his day. From the 1570s onwards, the Bellerus and Phalesius families were leading printing houses within the domain. The whole contemporary repertoire was made available by Antwerp presses: vernacular song books and psalms as well as polyphonic secular and religious music. Composers from all over Europe had their work printed in this, the most musical of all cities at the time.

Flourishing musical life in Antwerp and Brussels did not go unnoticed at the Palace of Westminster. Henry VIII himself had received a thorough musical education and was a dedicated patron of the arts. He was accomplished at the lute, organ, and virginals and, apparently, sang as well. Henry recruited the best musicians to join his court. A number of Flemish musicians figured amongst the many Europeans that were attracted to take part in music making in and around London. Dyricke Gérarde [Derrick Gerarde] arrived in England in 1544. Little is known of his life, but almost his entire musical output is contained in manuscript at the British Library. These manuscripts constitute one of the largest collections of polyphony by a single composer to have survived from the Elizabethan era. His achievement however was overshadowed by the reputation of a Flemish composer who had arrived in in the capital some two decades previously.

Lutenist Philip van Wilder was first recorded as a resident in London in 1522. By 1529 he was a member of the Privy Chamber, the select group of musicians who played to the king in private. During the second quarter of the sixteenth century Van Wilder oversaw secular music-making at the court, a position that brought him close to Henry VIII. He taught playing the lute to Princess (later Queen) Mary and subsequently to Prince Edward (later Edward VI). At the time of Henry VIII’s death in 1547 Van Wilder was Keeper of the Instruments and effectively head of the instrumental musical establishment at Westminster, a post later known as Master of the King’s Music. The upkeep of the Royal instruments at Westminster was a heavy duty. The scope of that task becomes clear from the inventory of Henry’s possessions at his death, listing thirteen organs, nineteen other keyboard instruments (virginals and clavichords), and several hundred smaller wind and string instruments including viols, lutes, and recorders.

Van Wilder continued to enjoy Royal favour during the reign of Edward VI. He was granted a coat of arms and crest and, in 1551, authorized to recruit boy singers for the Chapel Royal from anywhere in England. Three years after his death in February 1554 an anonymous tribute was paid to the musician and printed by Richard Tottel in his collection of Songes and Sonettes (1557), commonly known as ‘Tottel’s Miscellany’, containing the following line:

Laye downe your lutes and let your gitterns rest.
Phillips is dead whose like you can not finde,
Of musicke much exceeding all the rest.

In an age of wandering artists and scholars, the Renaissance was an internationalist movement united by a common (Latin) language. Its civic life teaches our age the salutary lesson that a nationalist message is one of disengagement. The appeal to nativist emotions conceals the yearning for a flawless world that never was or will be. The cultural strength of a country manifests itself in participation – that is, in the openness of borders, the assimilation of non-native concepts, and the embracing of external influences. It takes a cosmopolitan mind to be a patriot.

 

The Scum of Europe (Batty Street – Tower Hamlets)

From 1881 onwards the mass exodus of Jews from Eastern Europe to London turned Whitechapel and surrounding boroughs into massive immigrant communities. The arrival of newcomers transformed these areas. Living in poverty, settlers were accused of bringing dirt and disorder with them. Streets strewn with decomposing fish and rotting vegetation were classified by commentators as ‘Jewish’ as though there was a connection between filth and faith. Lack of accommodation led to rent rises and overcrowding which provoked racial agitation. In February 1886 The Pall Mall Gazette warned that ‘foreign Jews … are becoming a pest and a menace to the poor native born East Ender’. With a number of churches turned into synagogues, the clergy feared for the future of Christianity. In 1902, Cosmo Gordon Lang, Bishop of Stepney, accused immigrants of ‘swamping whole areas once populated by English people’. The term ‘swamping’ in the context of immigration would cause renewed controversy during the Thatcher era.

Local inhabitants expressed a sense of isolation which in turn intensified discord. Policing Whitechapel proved problematical because of language barriers. The want of Yiddish among police officers hampered the maintenance of law and order, and impeded investigations into the perceived presence of political agitators. Instead, officers acted as surrogate social workers. They monitored the movement of migrants and were required to brief politicians on socio-economic conditions in the immigrant ghettos. The East London Jewish population was a largely self-surveilling community. The newcomers, though quarrelsome and noisy at times, were hard-working and home-centred – not given to brawling or boozing. This contributed to high rates of social mobility within the community. Territoriality and inter-communal conflict were the main causes of public disorder. Collective resistance to prevent Jewish settlement was rife and the general trend was towards segregation. Rival gangs battled for control of the street. Sections of the borough tended to become either all Jewish or remain Anglo-Irish.

East London immigrants produced individual criminals, but no criminal classes. Urban villainy in the later nineteenth century was an urgent problem, but the reported crime-rate amongst immigrants remained comparatively low. Who was responsible for the ‘new’ wave of wrongdoing? Finger pointing journalism – Daily Mail style – started there and then. Immigrants came to be treated as potential burglars, armed robbers, sex offenders, or murderers. Their crimes were reported in hysterical detail and with a great deal of moral indignation. On 14 November 1864 twenty-four year old Cologne-born Franz Müller was executed before crowd of 50,000 cheerful spectators outside Newgate prison. He had murdered Thomas Briggs, a City banker who was travelling on the 9.50pm North London Railway from Fenchurch Street. The assailant – a tailor by profession – took his gold watch and spectacles and threw the victim’s body from the compartment. It was the very first killing on a British train. His hanging was one of the last public executions in London.

Israel Lobulsk was born in Warsaw in 1865. Having experienced the horrors of the 1881 Christmas pogrom in the city, he left Poland and arranged a passage from Frankfurt to London in exchange for work on a cattle boat, arriving penniless in 1885. Adopting the name Israel Lipski, he worked as an umbrella maker and was one of fifteen persons living in a house at no. 16 Batty Street, running off Commercial Road, East London. In June 1887 one of the other tenants, Polish immigrant Miriam Angel, a pregnant woman who lived one floor below Lipski, was found murdered with nitric acid (_HNO3_ or aqua fortis) poured down her throat. When the police arrived, they found Israel Lipski under the bed, unconscious, with the same corrosive liquid in his mouth. It was concluded that after committing the crime, he had tried to kill himself. Lipski denied any involvement. The case caused furore and touched upon the issue of unrestricted Jewish immigration. A two-day trial took place at the Old Bailey before James Fitzjames Stephen, a well-respected judge. Lipski was poorly defended and, after just eight minutes of deliberation, he was found guilty by members of the jury. Observers raised doubts about the trial’s fairness, but Lipski was hanged on 22 August 1887 at Newgate prison. The execution was carried out by James Berry (during his seven years in office he was responsible for 131 hangings). When the black flag was raised, a crowd of over 5,000 persons gathered outside the prison burst out in jubilation. Thereafter, ‘Lipski’ became a term of ethnic abuse against Jews.

Fear turned into panic in 1888 with a spade of barbaric murders in Whitechapel. The hunt for Jack the Ripper was the talk of the day. Who was this maniac? Surely not an Englishman. Public hysteria, whipped up by unscrupulous politicians and populist press barons, created a Lynch’s Law mentality.

Intense xenophobia made people decide to seek vengeance against a community of aliens in their midst. Hatred of foreigners became mixed up with vitriolic antisemitism. The British Brothers League (BBL) was formed in May 1901 along paramilitary lines with the support of numerous (Conservative) politicians. Using the slogan ‘England for the English’, the movement organised marches and rallies and called for closure of Britain’s borders. London, it was argued, had become the ‘dumping ground for the scum of Europe’. The Gothic metaphor was prevalent in anti-immigration writings, evoking the spectre of racial conflict and painting a hellish picture of cultural ruin. Britain’s identity was at stake. The Eastern Post and City Chronicle headlined BBL activities and demanded that the government end the ‘foreign flood which has submerged our native population of East London’. Within months the league claimed 6,000 members. Parallels with present-day movements are too close for comfort.

The Artist as Wallflower (Piccadilly, Westminster)

Usually, the phrase ‘migrants and their families’ is a code for ‘male migrants and their wives and children’. The near-invisibility of women as migrants and their presumed passivity in the migration process in historical reports on the subject, does not reflect reality. For many women relocation meant deliverance from assumed traditional roles and behaviours – as is reflected in the notable careers of two immigrant artists.

Angelica Kauffmanwas born on 30 October 1741 in Chur, capital of the Swiss canton of Graubünden. In 1742 the family moved to Lombardy and ten years later to Como. The young girl showed talent for both art and music, but pursued a career in painting. Whilst in Rome, she became acquainted with German antiquarian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, whose portrait she painted. She also befriended British neo-classical painters Gavin Hamilton and Nathaniel Dance. These contacts inspired her to concentrate on classical and mythological subjects. Since her work proved popular with grand tourists, she readily accepted Lady Wentworth’s invitation to continue her career in England. She arrived in London in June 1766. Within a week she visited Joshua Reynolds in his studio, and her pictures were soon in demand. After lodging in Suffolk Street, Charing Cross, Kauffman occupied a fashionable house in Golden Square, Westminster. In 1767, she suffered a disastrous relationship with bigamist Count Frederick de Horn, who claimed to be a Swedish nobleman. She married him in secret. He signed a separation agreement (February 1768), after being exposed as a fraud and forced to leave the country. She stayed single until July 1781 when, after receiving news of De Horn’s death, she married Venetian painter Antonio Pietro Zucchi, who also resided in London. The couple settled in Rome where her studio became a popular stop for visitors on the grand tour.

Mary Moser was born on 27 October 1744, the daughter of George Michael Moser who had moved from Schaffhausen to London in 1726 where he worked for a cabinet-maker in Soho. During the 1740s he established himself as the finest gold chaser of his generation and a prominent member of the capital’s artistic community. He died in January 1783. At his burial at St Paul’s, Covent Garden, Joshua Reynolds was chief mourner. In his obituary he paid tribute to Moser as the ‘Father of the present race of Artists’, because of his individual skills and inspirational teaching at London academies. Mary had trained with her father and gained the patronage of Queen Charlotte for her flower paintings in oil and watercolour. Her most elaborate work was executed between 1792 and 1795 at Frogmore House, Windsor, where she ornamented rooms with flowers painted directly on the walls as well as large inset canvases that invoked the impression of cascading garlands.

On 28 November 1768 George Michael Moser, together with Francis Cotes, Benjamin West, and William Chambers, petitioned the king to patronise a Royal Academy. Subsequently, the Royal Academy of Arts was founded through a personal act of George III on 10 December 1768 with the aim of establishing a system of professional training and to arrange regular exhibitions of contemporary works of art. The immigrant contribution to the creation of the Royal Academy was considerable. Founding members included Jeremiah Meyer, Francesco Bartolozzi, Giovanni Battista Cipriani, Augostino Carlini, Francesco Zucarelli, and Dominic Serres. Art in the capital was a truly European affair. Moser was elected Keeper of the Academy. Initially located in cramped quarters in Pall Mall, the institution was given temporary accommodation in Old Somerset House in 1771. It moved to Burlington House in 1868, where it remains.

Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser were the only women mentioned among the thirty-six founding members of the Royal Academy. As females, however, they were prohibited from the proceedings of the Academy and excluded from committee meetings and dinners. In fact, their presence seemed to cause embarrassment to male members. Johan Joseph Zoffany was born on 13 March 1733 near Frankfurt am Main. After a successful career as court painter to the Elector of Trier, he decided to try his luck in London where he settled towards the end of 1760. Actor David Garrick commissioned him to paint informal scenes at his villa at Hampton where the actor had built a ‘Temple to Shakespeare’. At a stroke a new genre was created. Setting up a studio in Covent Garden, Zoffany painted a series of pictures which became known as ‘theatrical conversations’. Success earned him the patronage of George III and Queen Charlotte.

In 1762 Zoffany was nominated a member of the Academy by the king and painted the group portrait ‘The Academicians of the Royal Academy’ (exhibited in 1772). Fellows are gathered around a nude male model at a time when decency demanded that women were barred from such spectacles. In order to include Mary Moser and Angelica Kauffman, the painter added them not as participants to the scene, but – rather unflattering – as portraits (face only) hanging on the wall. A later painting by Henry Singleton, ‘The Royal Academicians in General Assembly’ (1795), shows the ladies alongside other academicians, but their bodies hidden behind the President’s chair with only their heads detectable. Emancipation among artists has seen strange turns and twists. For long, the art world was boys club. Women artists remained virtually invisible to the public eye, they were wallflowers at best. Mary Moser’s death in 1819 marked the start of an extensive stretch of time in which women were excluded from the Academy. It was not until 1936 that impressionist painter Laura Knight became the next woman to be elected a Royal Academician. This long interlude makes it all the more remarkable that these two women who shared an alien background (temporarily) broke the pattern of male exclusivity in British art societies. They demonstrated that migration unshackles mind and emotion. The need to adapt is a force of release from limiting traditions and attitudes.

Borders, Migration and Linguistics

Language is a ragbag of terms and phrases that are handed down, created or borrowed over a long period of time. A loanword is a term adopted from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language without translation. Loanwords are immigrants. They arrive in alien surroundings, adapt to the new vocabulary, integrate and become domesticated (spelling, pronunciation, etc.), at times losing part of their original meaning. In English, loanwords (mostly nouns) appear in a variety of contexts, such as trade, art, fashion, food, technology, war, etc. Such words tend to be taken from a field of activity where the foreign culture has a dominant role, hence the many Italian words in the sphere of music and opera, or French terms in that of ballet.

When the Merchant Adventurers set up headquarters Bruges in 1344, it marked the beginning of a long period of commercial and artistic interaction between the Low Countries and England. Contacts were intense. In order to defend their interests, foreign merchants united in ‘Hansen’, including the powerful ‘Flemish Hanse of London’. From 1463 to 1469 William Caxton stayed in Bruges as governor of the Merchant Adventurers. He learned the art of printing in Flanders and, on his return, installed the first printing press near Westminster Abbey in 1476. Later, when Elizabeth I provided a safe haven to Protestants from the Low Countries who had escaped Spanish persecution, the country received their skilled industry and commercial experience in return. Refugees introduced new trades to local economies, such as Canterbury silks, Norwich stuffs, or Yarmouth herring. Flemish and Dutch professional craftsmen and artists were enticed to cross the Channel. English ambassadors in the Low Countries functioned as industrial and artistic ‘spies’. The brain drain existed long before the term was invented. It is clear from Johan Frederik Bense’s impressive Dictionary of the Low-Dutch Element in the English Vocabulary (1926) that many early words borrowed from Flemish/Dutch belong to the economic and commercial domains.

In 1519, Jan Ympyn returned from a twelve years stay in Venice where he had been sent by his merchant father to learn commercial practices and the art of bookkeeping. Ympyn settled in Antwerp where he prospered as an exporter of silks, woollens, and tapestries. Much of his business was directed towards England. Today he is remembered as the author of the first Flemish manual on bookkeeping, entitled Nieuwe instructie ende bewijs der looffelijcker consten des rekenboecks, published posthumously in Antwerp in 1543. Four years later this manual was translated into English as A Notable … Woorke, Expressyng and Declaryng the Forme how to Kepe a Boke of Accomptes or Reconynges. The last word is literally adopted from the Dutch/Flemish word ‘rekening’. Reckoning is one of those loanwords that in the course of time began a ‘life of its own’. This book is the oldest extant text on accounting in English. It has been suggested that merchant and financier Thomas Gresham, resident in Brussels in 1543, had been responsible for the translation, but the claim has not been substantiated.

Under the Treaty of Nonsuch in 1585, Elizabeth I decided to intervene directly in the war between the United Provinces and Spain. She sent Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, with some 5,000 troops to assist the Dutch. For years to come, English troops were stationed in Flushing (Vlissingen). During the eighty years of struggle many new weapons, strategies, systems of fortification, and other innovations in the art of warfare were introduced. To British soldiers and mercenaries, the Dutch experience was crucial in their personal career development. The first substantial Dutch-English dictionary (31,000 entries) was compiled by the soldier and scholar Henry Hexham in 1648 and is entitled A Copious English and Netherduytch Dictionarie. He was responsible for introducing many Dutch military terms into the English vocabulary, including booty (buit), beleaguer (belegeren), quarter-master (kwartiermeester), knapsack (knapzak), plunder (plunderen), and tattoo (taptoe).

In 1598, Richard Haydocke, former English ambassador to The Hague, translated Paola Lomazzo’s Trattato del’arte della pittura. Searching for an English equivalent for the Italian paese, he recalled the word landschap from conversations with artists in the Low Countries, the second syllable in the word being derived from scheppen (to create). His Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge introduced a new set of terms in the vocabulary of the English art critic, first landscape, soon to be followed by seascape, cloudscape, riverscape, and townscape, all terms conjuring up the image of the Flemish or Dutch artist contemplating his surroundings and creating scenery, clouds, rivers and urban views in paint.

Certain loanwords have not survived or are rarely used. They appear in the dictionary, but seem lost in a mass of entries, isolated, ignored. Because they are exceptional, such terms tend to hint at a notable event or happening. One particular word tells a story of political intrigue. In its early days Tyburn was a country village in Middlesex, close to the current location of Marble Arch. Until 1783 it served as London’s primary public place of execution. The first recorded hanging took place in 1196 and concerned the charismatic figure of William Fitz Osbert, known as ‘William Longbeard’, the populist leader of London’s poor who was apprehended after a mob uprising against the rich. It was one of the first explosions of urban violence in England. Early executions tended to be of a political nature. Order had to be protected at any cost, hence the public displays of punishment. Tensions within society grew with an increasing influx of refugees into London and elsewhere. It created anxiety among the authorities that certain aliens might have immigrated ‘under the colour of religion’ and could be agents or spies. Such suspicions were not unjustified. Impostors had tried to claim the English throne on a couple of occasions. In both instances a foreign connection was evident. There was the failed attempt by Lambert Simnel, a young pretender to the throne of England and most likely of Flemish descent, whose supporters were beaten in the Battle of Stoke Field in June 1487. Simnel was imprisoned for life, but Henry VII pardoned the young man and gave him a job in the Royal kitchens.

Tournai-born Perkin Warbeck was possibly an illegitimate son of Henry IV. He called himself Richard Shrewsbury, Duke of York. Various European monarchs accepted Warbeck’s claim to the English throne in order to pursue their own diplomatic objectives. In 1497 he landed in Cornwall with a small army of men hoping to capitalize on local resentment in the aftermath of a recent rebellion against the war taxes imposed by Henry VII for his Scottish campaign. As the rebels had been heavily defeated, Perkin found little support for a renewed uprising. He was captured and hanged as a traitor at Tyburn. The story of events was dramatized in 1634 by John Ford in a play entitled The Chronicle Historie of Perkin Warbeck: a Tragedy. In 1830, Mary Shelley wrote a story about him. A linguistic link to the impostor remains. ‘Landloper’ is a Dutch/Flemish word for vagabond or vagrant. The word was first recorded in Britain in the early sixteenth century and used by Francis Bacon in Henry VII (1622) when referring to Warbeck: ‘He had been from his Child-hood such a Wanderer, or (as the King called him) such a Land-loper’. It may well be that Perkin had brought the word with him when he crossed from Flanders to England.

The integration of loanwords can be controversial. In the circle of linguistic sticklers such terms are frowned upon. They suffer hostility and discrimination. Purism is the practice of defining one variety of language as being of intrinsically higher quality than others. By definition, the purist is a prophet of doom. An invasion of foreign words is a sign of decline, fatal to a nation’s cultural wellbeing. He/she strives for a form of prescriptive linguistics, aiming to establish a standard language that is resistant to change, and immune to foreign importation. Purists are the border agents of language, overseeing the strict control of the movement of words. Their record is just as poor as that of the UK Border Agency itself. They have failed in the past and will continue to do so. Nations and languages do not live in a vacuum, but they flourish in a continuous interactive relationship with other countries and peoples. Freedom of movement and exchange are the essential characteristics of a dynamic culture. Mapping the spread of loanwords offers an insight into the balance of power between nations and the migration of peoples at any given period in time.

Patriotism and Resentment : A Tale for our Time

The London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) is the oldest of the capital’s orchestras and the first British orchestra owned by its players. As a self-governing body, LSO gave its first concert on 9 June 1904, conducted by Hans Richter (the first principal conductor until 1911) at Queen’s Hall, Langham Place, Westminster. Since 1982, the orchestra has been permanently based in the Barbican Centre. Among conductors with whom it is most associated are, in its early days, Hans Richter, Edward Elgar, and Thomas Beecham. In more recent decades Pierre Monteux, André Previn, Claudio Abbado, Colin Davis and Valery Gergiev have been working with the orchestra. Simon Rattle will take up his position of musical director from September 2017. The creation of LSO was the result of a musical uprising in which immigrant musicians played a prominent part. 

At the turn of the twentieth century there were no permanent salaried orchestras in London. Musicians were contracted on an individual basis. Since there were competing demands for the services of performers and no binding contracts, a player was free to accept a better-paid engagement at any time. He (it was male dominated profession) would simply hire another player to deputise for him at the original concert. In September 1903, Robert Newman, the manager of the Queen’s Hall, and the conductor of his promenade concerts, Henry Wood, unilaterally decided to end this chaotic system. In response, approximately half of its players resigned from the Queen’s Hall Orchestra. Musicians were not highly paid, and removing the opportunity of more lucrative engagements was a financial blow to many of them. Some of the leading players decided to form their own orchestra. 

The principal movers of the initiative were horn players Adolf Borsdorf, Thomas Busby, and Henri van der Meerschen, and trumpeter John Solomon. As performers these men were highly regarded and referred to as ‘God’s Own Quartet’. Busby organised a meeting in which he set out the principles. A new ensemble named the London Symphony Orchestra was to be run on co-operative lines, something ‘akin to a Musical Republic’. Members would share in the orchestra’s profits at the end of each season. The proposal was approved unanimously. Newman held no grudge against the rebels, and made the Queen’s Hall available to them. He and Wood attended the LSO’s first 1904 concert which included the prelude to Die Meistersinger, music by Bach, Mozart, Liszt, Elgar, and finally Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. German music ruled the capital.

Henri Louis van der Meerschen was born in Brussels on 30 September 1866. He attended the Brussels Conservatoire studying under Louis-Henri Merck. There he earned the Premier Prix with distinction in 1885 after which he was invited by Bruges-born Eugène Goossens to become a member of the celebrated Carl Rosa Opera Company at Drury Lane. This company had been founded by Hamburg-born Karl Rose with the aim of producing operas in English. The British premier of Puccini’s La Bohème and Madame Butterfly were among his successes. He was also the outstanding performer of Wagner at the time, presenting The Flying Dutchman (1876), Rienzi (1879), Lohengrin (1880), and Tannhäuser (1882) to an English audience. Having joined Henry Wood’s Queen’s Hall Orchestra, Van der Meerschen was one of the four rebels who initiated the foundation of LSO. 

In 1914 the LSO had just reached its tenth birthday. Financially sound and artistically refined, the orchestra was acknowledged to be among the finest in the world. The outbreak of war intervened. Conductors and musicians cancelled tours and performances because they were unable to travel; some members of the orchestra were enlisted. In spite of difficulties, LSO declared that it would continue playing concerts. By 1916 the situation became more problematical. Grave news from the front spread gloom and pessimism at home. The Zeppelin bombardment of London kept audiences indoors. At the start of the year conscription had been imposed. By July 1917 thirty-three members of the orchestra (about a third of its male membership) were sent to the trenches for active service. An increasing number of female players acted as their replacements. 

Traditionally, the LSO had strong German roots and preferences. In 1915 it had initiated a successful ‘Three Bs Festival’: Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. An attempt to repeat the treat in 1916 hit the brick wall of a hostile press and public opinion. In September 1916 the Pall Mall Gazette attacked the orchestra in a crusading series of articles for the overwhelming presence of German music in their repertoire. It argued that those in London ‘who have felt war in their skins are not to be drugged with sound, however sweet’. LSO was forced to present a more patriotic, if not jingoistic program of performances. 

Edward Elgar, who had been LSO’s principal conductor during 1911/2, was living in London at the outbreak of war. In 1914 he was asked to contribute to an anthology called King Albert’s Book to raise money for Belgian refugees affected by German occupation. Brussels-born playwright, poet and translator Émile Leon Cammaerts had moved to England in 1908. He translated works by John Ruskin into French and selected a number of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown detective stories in La clairvoyance du père Brown. In 1933 he was appointed Professor of Belgian Studies at the University of London. He married actress Helen Tita Braun (stage name: Tita Brand), a daughter of the Wagnerian diva Marie Brema (who was born Mary Agnes [Minnie] Fehrmann, the daughter of merchant from Bremen in Liverpool). Elgar set Cammaert’s poem ‘Après Anvers’ to an orchestral accompaniment. It was premiered under the name of Carillon by the LSO on 7 December 1914 at the Queen’s Hall. The composer himself conducted and Tita Brand recited the poem. It roused anti-German spirits at the time and was revived for the same reason during World War II with a new text by Laurence Binyon.

For resident German musicians in Britain the war years were a bitter and painful experience. Impresario Alfred Curtis was born Alfred Schulz-Curtius around 1853 in Germany. He settled in London in the early 1870s. He founded a music and artists’ management agency at no. 44 Regent Street, Piccadilly Circus, in 1876. He was the first to bring Richard Wagner’s music to the London public. In 1882, he arranged the British staging of the Ring Cycle under the Hungarian conductor Anton Seidl. During decades of professional activity, Schulz-Curtius organised dozens of concerts in London’s venues and worked with many of Europe’s major conductors and performers. At the beginning of the First World War he was arrested and interned as an enemy alien, despite of having become a naturalised British subject in 1895, and changing his name by deed poll to Alfred Curtis in September 1914. He died in March 1918.

Adolf Borsdorf was one of the leading figures in the rebellion against Newman and Wood in 1903/4 and the subsequent foundation of the LSO. Born on 25 December 1854 in Dittmansdorf, Saxony, he studied French horn at the Dresden conservatory and played in a military band. In 1879 he moved to London where he stayed for the rest of his life. He was appointed Professor at the Royal College of Music, South Kensington, when it was founded in 1882. He was playing principal horn in the orchestra that Henry Wood conducted at the first Promenade Concert in the Queen’s Hall in 1895. He was also in the orchestra when Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel was given its first English performance in 1896 with the composer conducting. Enjoying an international reputation, he used his influence to secure Hans Richter to conduct LSO’s first concert. 

The intensity of anti-German feeling during of the First World War would deeply hurt him. At the outbreak of hostilities, he had been living in London for more than thirty years and his wife was British. In spite of that, the members of the orchestra turned against him. They requested his removal from their ranks. By October 1915 he was told that he would not be allowed to play again until the end of the war. In November he felt forced to resign from an orchestra he himself had helped to create and to flourish. Borsdorf never performed professionally again. He died in April 1923. His vital contribution to London’s musical culture in general and to raising the standard of British horn playing in particular was only recognised in retrospect. The risk of whipped up patriotism is that it quickly runs sour. In becoming an expression of resentment rather than pride, the spirit of tolerance is sacrificed.

Palace of Whitehall (Westminster) : 1674-1704

Painter Egbert Jasperszoon van Heemskerk was born in Haarlem in 1634. He settled in London about 1674 and made a career as a genre painter. His contemporary reputation was that of a prolific and skilful painter of tavern and drinking scenes, peasant feasts, and Quakers-meetings. He frequently introduced his own portrait into his pictures. 
The loutish tone of his work was appreciated by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, for whom he painted a number of works. Rochester was a member of the drunken Merry Gang at Charles II’s court. His attachment to Heemskerk’s work was in line with his personal behaviour. Heemskerk’s work was also reproduced in engravings, especially mezzotint. He died around 1704, but his reputation endured.