Triangle Shirt Fact­ory NY fire tragedy 1911.

Shirtwaist designs, The Modern Priscilla Needlework Magazine, 1906

5 Minute History

Russians Max Blanck and Isaac Harris immigrated to the U.S in the early 1890s and, like hundreds of thousands of other impoverish­ed Jew­ish im­migrants, they began working in the garment industry in sweat­shops. Har­ris became familiar with popular fashion designs while Blanck became a garment contractor. They made a partner­ship, founding the Triangle Waist Co in 1900. In time, The Triangle Shirt­waist Fact­ory was located in the top 3 floors of the Asch Building in Manhattan. They hired 500 work­ers, mostly female Jewish and Italian immigrants, half of them teens. It was a true sweat­shop; the immigrants worked in a cramped space at lines of sewing machines for 12 hours a day. These young women worked 6-7 days a week for tiny wages and little ventilation. The male owners gave male workers the higher-paid jobs, ass­uming women were less skilled.

In 1909, the USA was advancing towards greater mass production and in­creasingly dangerous working conditions. That year the Uprising of 20,000 Strike was organised mainly by Yiddish-speaking garment workers female due to their horrid conditions, long hours and low wages. Their primary motive was to get attention paid to the mist­r­eat­­ment of imm­igrant work­ers. While there were short term agreements to meet their dem­ands, the strike ultimately failed. How­ever it DID succeed some­what in exposing poor working conditions. Progressives and unionists cal­l­ed for different reforms, but Tammany Hall opposed them; the polit­ical machine stalled any legislation that might have benefitted the workers.

Fire danger in factories was common, but corruption in both the industry and city government generally ensured that few useful precautions were taken. The Triangle factory was burned in 1907 and in 1910, the owners appar­ently torching their own work­places before business hours in order to collect on the large fire-insurance policies they purchased, a not unknown practice in the early C20th. While this did not cause the 1911 fire, it contr­ibuted to the tragedy, as Blanck & Harris refused to install sprinkler systems.

Women workers pre-fire

Barbara's Bookstore

 

In 1911 Triangle Shirt­waist Fact­ory had 4 elevators accessing the fact­ory floors, but only one was fully operational and the workers had to go along a narrow corridor to reach it. There were two stairways down to the street, but they were locked from the outside to prevent the workers steal­ing.

The fire escape was so narrow, it would have taken hours for all the workers to use it, even if it had not burned down.

In Mar 1911, there were 600 workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Fact­ory when a fire began in a material bin. The manager tried using the fire hose to extin­guish it, but the hose was rotted and its valve rust­ed shut. The fire spread and panic ensued. The young workers tried to exit the building by the elevator but it only held 12 people and the operator could only make four trips before it stopped in flames. Young women bec­ame trapped by bulky equipment as flames enveloped the 8th, 9th and 10th floors of the Asch Building. As people struggled to escape, sev­eral fell into the flames, their bodies piling by blocked exits. In a desper­ate at­tempt to escape, the girls still waiting for the elev­ator plunged down the shaft to their deaths. The girls who fled via the stairwells found the locked door at the bottom of the stairs, and were burned alive.

Fire­fighters arrived & saw their lad­ders reached only 7 floors high but the fire was on the 8th floor. So the girls who did not make it to the stairwells or elevator were trapped by the fire inside the fact­ory; they began jumping from the wind­ows to es­cape and died on the conc­rete below. Within 20 mins they found 49 workers burned to death, 36 died in the elevator shaft, 58 died from jumping from the 8th floor and 3 more died in hospital. 146 people were killed altogether.

The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union had fought for better working con­dit­ions for all sweatshop workers. The union didn’t gain real attention until after the Triangle Waist Co owners were indicted for first degree manslaughter, but were found to be not guilty by the grand jury. To settle lawsuits against them, the owners DID pay $75 in compen­sat­ion to each victim’s family, a frac­t­ion of the $400 per death that they were paid by their insurer.

Nonetheless the tragedy led to the growth of a series of laws and regu­l­ations that better protected work-ers’ safety. The fire unified organised labour and reforming polit­icians like NY Gov Alfred Smith  and Sen Ro­b­­ert Wagner, a le­g­isl­ator in Pres Franklin D Roosevelt’s (1933–45) New Deal  agenda. And the Factory Investig­ating Comm­ission in N.Y was set up af­t­er the fire. The workers union set up a march on 5th Ave NY to prot­est the conditions that had led to the fire, attended by 80,000 people.

The huge death toll for which they were responsible DID finally compel the city to enact reform. The Fire Prevention Law passed, and N.Y Democrats took up the workers’ cause; both were crucial in lim­iting similar disasters in the future.

Desperate women threw themselves down from the 8th storey to death

New York Herald

March 1911

Conclusion 

In this era, progressive movements sought to red­uce the impacts of the deplorable working conditions brought by industr­ial­­is­ation and inequality between rich and poor. The 1911 day became the deadliest indust­rial disas­ter in Manhattan history, when 123 women and 23 men died. Workers, union leaders, progressive reformers and political lead­ers all begged for higher environmental standards fitting for US. The Triangle Factory fire DID help create laws for a better workplace to keep employ­ees safer, but at an unthinkable cost for the immigrant families.

Chaim Soutine, great artist but disturbed?

Portrait of a Young Woman, 1915

Wiki

Pastry Cook of Cagnes, 1922 

The Guardian

Grotesque self portrait, c1923

Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris.

Thanks to George Prochnik for this review. From 1913, to get from Smilovichi, a shtetl in Belarus, to Paris. 20 year old artist Chaim Soutine (1893-1943) made many visits to the Louvre to study the canvas. In the mid-1920s he decided to translate it into his own idiom: a huge impasto, churning with deep, febrile colours. Where Rembrandt’s hanging carcass was mottled with pale tones once the blood has drained away, Soutine’s reds appear to be fermenting. It’s not a picture of mortality! Interpreters of Rembrandt’s ox often place it in a memento mori, but Soutine’s picture convulses with what is happening right now.

Soutine insisted that he could only depict a subject if he had it in front of him, and various accounts of how he managed this with a huge quarter-side of beef came down to us. In her passionate biography, Celeste Marcus shares the most lurid. After hauling the carcass from the slaughterhouse to his studio in darkness, Soutine set to work painting it, but after a few days it began to go green and give off a terrible stench. He returned to the abattoir to get a bucket of blood so that he could keep the colours vibrant. But the blood dripped through the floorboards into the apartment below. The street was aghast. The official sanitation squad paid him a visit to shut down the project, but Soutine’s assistant prevailed on them to let him finish the work, whereupon they relented and showed him how to inject the meat with ammonia to preserve it. Soutine was also busy painting dead ducks, turkeys and chickens! The smaller bodies still stank making him a troublesome neighbour, but Soutine’s devotion to his work kept complaints to a minimum. 

Much death went into making Soutine’s art. Yet it is Marcus’ argument that everything Soutine does on the canvas should be understood as part of the artist’s pursuit of life. His canvases bear witness to his epic struggle for self-mastery, discipline and skill to communicate satisfactorily the energy of life itself. Plus many of his landscapes appear deliquescent, while the figures and faces of his human subjects are contortions. He shows us scenes in which our perspectives on life and painting have become unstuck, inverting his subject matter inside out. 

In an important 1963 essay on Soutine, critic David Sylvester noted the painter’s debt to Cézanne. Sylvester describes how Soutine’s endeavour recalls Cézanne’s determination to take hold of volume in its full tactile reality and beat it, as it were, into the picture-plane. Both artists aspired to re-create – which meant capturing the swing between broad, organic continuity and individual ephemerality. 

Marcus recognises the pitfalls of writing a biography about an artist who made so few personal statements, and for an understanding of whose formative experiences we are forced to rely on sketchy anecdotes supplied by those who knew the painter – or had heard the stories first-hand. She makes good use of this material, however, especially in her account of how Soutine left behind his constricted youth in an orthodox eastern European Jewish village for bohemian Paris. Here he lived a destitute, industrious, essentially monastic life for many years, despite soon earning the esteem of his peers in Montparnasse, among them Modigliani. 

Then c1922 collector Albert Barnes encountered Soutine’s work, seized on the artist as a star-in-waiting and bought 50+ paintings in one go, liberating Soutine from the struggle for survival, until the rise of Fascism stripped his life of all security once more. Soutine spent his last years moving from flat to flat, trying to keep out of sight. He relentlessly worked, but his health deteriorated. Medical care for the stomach problems that probably began with youthful malnutrition became more challenging under the new political realities, leaving him more vulnerable until, in 1943, he died of a perforated ulcer.

Marcus fills out this chronicle with mini-biographies of some of Soutine’s intimates, including Gerda Michaelis, the German-Jewish refugee who in 1937 became Soutine’s partner and one serious love affair. Conceptually however the author honours the position articulated by Hilton Kramer, that the painter had no biography outside his art; one might even say that his art was a substitute for a biography. She scoffs at those who insist he left no traces: he is there, right before our eyes. The man was his art, and his paintings bellow from the walls on which they hang. This is a legitimate position to take, but it is somewhat surprising to confront the confidence with which Marcus pronounces on what this bellowing is communicating.

Plucked Goose c1933,

Artists Rights Society, New York

 Carcass of Beef, 1924

The New Yorker

Marcus wants to rescue Soutine from critics who ascribe his work's emotional content  to traumatic Jewish experience. To consider this view of his art, she takes a formalist approach making Soutine’s evolution an almost exclusively interior, technical development. Marcus has enlightening things to say about the increasing strength of Soutine’s style, some informed by her own paintings. Yet it’s unclear what is gained by trying to draw so strict a line between the historical & personal. World horrors can penetrate even the most focused creative consciousness. Nor did Soutine try to keep his head down as evidence for Hitler’s designs on Europe were mounting.

The firewall Marcus puts up between Soutine’s subjection to history and his creative genius leads her to minimise the ways in which his first 20 years might have shaped his sensibility. There are conflicting ideas about how miserable Soutine was in the shtetl. He seems to have found the country beautiful and the markets lively, but he suffered poverty & physical abuse. Some versions of his story indicate that he was beaten by his brothers, perhaps for making art, and received at least one significant beating from others for painting an old man in the community, although accounts differ about whether a violation of Jewish law was the issue. Once he left the Pale of Settlement there is no outward indication that Soutine ever looked back. But the experience ?continued to gnaw at him.

Given the bias against visual culture within Orthodox Judaism, it is perfectly plausible to view his art as a reaction against it.  Many of his paintings do seem to demand that we look when others turn away – and to stare hard.  Soutine said When I painted the beef carcass it was still this cry that I wanted to liberate. I have still not succeeded. Francis Bacon, who acknowledged the fertile shock produced by his encounter with Soutine’s work, and whose homage to Rembrandt’s ox seems more indebted to Soutine than to the Old Master, made the screaming mouth a leitmotif, even in the absence of a visual cue.

John Ashbery found Soutine’s MOMA show in 1950 a heady revelation that increased his sense of possibility as a writer: the fact that the sky could come crashing joyously into the grass, that trees could dance upside down and houses roll over like cats … I began pushing my own poems around. It’s a topsy-turvy scene but there is danger pulsing beneath that fallen sky. Writer Maurice Sachs, who met Soutine some times in the early 1930s, said he painted in a state of lyrical panic. He slashed his canvases and destroyed them when he felt they'd failed. Surely he was addressing a dilemma with historical and political dimensions; what Freud described as the perpetual agon between humanity’s life and death drives. Freud saw the future of civilisation as dependent on the life urge prevailing, but already by 1930 the prospects of that outcome were dwindling. Chaim Soutine died in 1943.

Good looking and young, even towards the end of his life

wiki

I Helen know that there was never a formal diagnosis from a psychiatrist to suggest the Expressionist painter Soutine was psychotic, even though his turbulent life and distorted paintings strongly suggested his mental state wasn't normal. If anything Soutine was a painter of his own obsessions, probably due to family rejection, exile, extreme poverty, physical illness and Nazi terror. I am on Hilton Kramer's side: Soutine's life was a harrowing tale of impossible aspirations,  unappeasable emotions and impossible appetites, not handled except perhaps through Expressionism.

Read Chaim Soutine: Genius, Obsession, and a Dramatic Life in Art By Celeste Marcus

Latvian shoot-up London 1910-1

Few places in the world were as infamous for murders as the East End of London. Jack the Ripper, The Krays and 1811 Ratcliffe Highway murders were all frightening. But the Latvians threatening London’s East End were UNexpected. They arrived from the Russian Empire against an intense debate about the large numbers of struggling immigrants from Eastern Europe.

Matching the earlier horrors were 2 events in Dec 1910-Jan 1911. Houndsditch is a mainroad running from Bishopsgate to Aldgate High St. Located at 120 Houndsditch was an import business run by Max Weil. In mid Dec 1910 Weil arrived at #120 to find his sister and housemaid in a state of agitation. They heard noises coming from the jeweller’s shop next door, as if someone was breaking at the rear.

Latvian revolutionaries aka Leesma weren't revolutionaries; later research found the c13 members carried out robberies to fund Lenin and his Bolsheviks.

Home Secretary Churchill, watching the Siege close up

Wiki

#119 backed onto a flat at 11 Exchange Buildings. Weil alerted the police of a likely break-in to the Exchange Buildings jewellers. He returned with Constable Piper who knocked on #11’s door. Piper had a brief talk with the man who answered the door and then left to summon help. Fritz Svaars & Josef Sokoloff were from Latvia in the Russian Empire. They’d fled the country after a failed attempt to overthrow the Tsar in 1905. Robbing jewellers was to raise funds for their cause.

Cons. Piper returned with 3 sergeants and 5 constables. Sgt Bentley hit on the door which was answered by the same man who had spoken to Piper. After another brief talk, the man tried to shut the door in Bentley’s face. However the sergeant pushed his way into #11 and chaos erupted. Bentley received two gunshots in the neck. He staggered back through the doorway and died. Standing behind him, Sgt Bryant now saw the gun being turned on him, hitting him in the chest. Constable Woodhams ran to his assistance only to fall to a bullet in the thigh. Both Bryant and Woodhams survived their wounds but were invalided out of the police force. Sgt Tucker was shot in the heart by a man in doorway #11 and died. The killer ran from the building, followed by other men and a woman. As they fled, Cons. Walter Choat jumped out of the darkness at them, grabbing an escapee who fired bullets into his leg. A gang-member came behind Choat and shot 2 bullets in his back. Choat fell.

Murdered police officers, 

London Museum

The gangster who’d been shot by his own cohorts was found dead in his room a day later. George Gardstein had been the de facto leader of the gang of Latvian revolutionaries in Leesma! After Russia’s revolution, one Leesma member Jacob Peters was 2nd in command of Cheka, the feared Bolshevik secret police. Perhaps Latvian Peters had killed Englishmen Bentley, Tucker & Choat, and injured Bryant.

Metropolitan & City Police launched an operation to hunt down the surviving revolutionaries and by that year Peters & others were caught. In Jan 1911 a figure slipped at night into London City’s police headquarters in Old Jewry. Although not officially identified he was perhaps Charles Perelman, former landlord to some Leesma members. Perelman had important information: Svaars & Sokoloff were hiding in a 2nd floor room in Sidney St, armed with Mauser pistols.

On 3rd Jan a file of police officers wound through the silent East End to Sidney St, from Commercial Rd to the northern junction of Whitechapel and Mile End Rds. The officers hadn’t been told about the mission, but they knew that it was dangerous; married policemen were excluded! Some were armed but their weapons were antique, as compared to the powerful hand-guns the Latvians carried. On getting to Sidney St, the police evacuated the first two floors of #100 and by daybreak the stage was set.

Svaara & Sokoloff were soon alerted to their danger. The front door was banged and stones were hurled at the revolutionaries’ window. They answered with some shots. Det Sarg Leeson fell gravely wounded but like Bryant & Woodhams, he survived. Battle commenced, and despite being so heavily outnumbered, it was Svaars and Sokoloff who won the firefight. Equipped with rugged handguns, they easily beat the police’s inferior weapons.

Hours passed, so the police appealed to Scotland Yard for assistance and they in turn sought help. Home Secretary Winston Churchill permitted the army to respond and soon 20 Scots Guards arrived, changing the situation. And the fire brigade arrived, to prevent fire from spreading.

Firing line of Scots Guards. Sidney Street Siege

gravelroots

Now the soldiers elevated their efforts, shooting into #100’s windows. Sokoloff peered at the maelstrom but the burning house collapsed. The ceiling killed him, ending Sidney St’s siege. And one more death. On entering #100 District Fire Officer Charles Pearson was hit by falling masonry, severing his spine and dying 6 months later. A honour plaque to the dead first responders was unveiled there much later.

Detectives inspect the 100 Sidney St house, post-siege

Gravelroots

Other Latvian anarchists, Jacob Peters, Yourka Dubof, John Rosen & Nina Vassileve were tried for the Houndsditch murders in the East End but 3 of them were acquitted. Only Vassileve was found guilty of a minor offence, later quashed. Gardstein, Svaars and Sokoloff were “probably guilty”.

The police soon tracked other revolutionaries, offering rewards for the capture of named suspects. Well covered by the press and captured on newsreels, the Siege also had lasting impacts for the scared communities living in the East End’s early C20th: political refugees, socialists & ex-Eastern European Jews, including my Russian Jewish grandmother.

Read Devilish Kind of Courage: Anarchists, Aliens and the Siege of Sidney St, 2024, by Andrew Whitehead 

Picnics from noble feasts to rural relaxing

Picnics were the very epitome of innocent pastoral delight, but allow Alexander Lee to give us the history of this form of fun. Then I will add my own histories.

The French root of picnic may derive from piquer/to peck and nique/small amount. The word first appeared in 1649, a burlesque satire on Fronde hypocrisy, an insurrection chal­l­enging French absolutism. Ironically the main character, Pique-Nique, was a guzzling millitary hero.

In any case, it caught the imagin­ation of Paris’ beau monde and soon lost any pejorative assoc­iations. As Gilles Ménage’s Dictionnaire (1694) showed, a pique-nique had become a fashionable dinner, to which each guest contributed.

Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 
Édouard Manet, 1863 
Pushkin Museum, Moscow. 

Picnics really started to come into their own during the C18th. A favourite pastime of the aristocracy, they were indoor affairs, held at home or in hired rooms. They were contrasted with the elab­orate fêtes champêtres depicted by Antoine Watteau etc. Att­end­ees could either bring a dish or drink, OR pay a share of the cost.

Like cultural salons, picnics were linked to intellectual refinement. Typical was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who, while rewriting the first act of Les Muses galantes in Paris, would often dine with the Abbé de Condillac ‘tête à tête en pique-nique’. At larger gatherings, there was also music or a dance, just like a party.

The French Revolution changed everything. Many aristocrats fled abroad to Austria, Prussia or America; but more chose Britain. Settling prim­arily in London without much money, they did their best to maintain their old lifestyle. But in London, the picnic became more raucous, thanks to a group of 200 wealthy young Francophiles, who founded the Pic Nic Society in late 1801. Held in hired rooms in Tottenham St, their gatherings were extravagant. Every member was required to bring a dish and six bottles of wine, and each strove to outdo the others in luxury. After dinner there was singing, dancing and gambling; but the key entertainment was always an amateur play.

Before long journalist-politician  Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816) , owner of Drury Lane Theatre, was alarmed at losing business to the Pic Nics. Sheridan used his influence to have the Pic Nics shut down; but not before the caricaturist James Gill­ray had ridiculed the lot of them in 1802.

Just as Sheridan was becoming furious in London, picnics were taken up by the emergent middle classes and moved outdoors. Why? Possibly the socially asp­irat­ional applied a fash­ion­ab­le French word to a pre-existing prac­t­ice, without being aware of its connotations. Anyhow picnicking ceased to be associated with music-dancing and became a simple, hosted meal. And thanks to the ideal­is­ation of the countryside, the event became more innocent.

The earliest reference appeared in John Harris' The Court­ship, Merry Marriage and Pic Nic Dinner of Cock Robin and Jenny Wren (1806), a children’s book. But such was its popularity that it soon found its way into literary works. In 1808, writer Dorothy Word­sworth picnicked with others on Gras­mere Island. In Emma (1816) Jane Austen gave a vivid port­rait of a rustic picnic on Box Hill.

James Tissot 
Holyday, aka The Picnic, c1876. 
Tate Gallery 

In the Victorian era, picnics were grand affairs! In 1861, a definitive list of upper class Victorian picnic fare appeared in Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Manage­ment. One couldn't eat outdoors without tables, linens, crystal and servants!

The development of new modes of transport (trains, cars, bikes) and the acceleration of social change made the country­ accessible to a greater proportion of the population. Be­fore long, their popularity had grown so much that picnic baskets were being produced for the mass market eg Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows (1908).

Though restoration of the French monarchy accompanied the ret­urn of picnicking to French aristocracy, the indoor version prev­ail­ed. When outdoor picnics eventually gained ground in France, they were regarded with sus­pic­ion. Perhaps because of a growing reaction against the Romantic ideal­is­ation of nature, they were not seen as innocent and whole­some. But as decadent. This was most ev­ident in Édouard Manet’s Le Dé­jeuner sur l’herbe (1862-3), depict­ing one naked and one scantily clad woman, picnick­ing with two fully dressed men.

As the outdoor picnic found its way to the USA, it remained a gent­eel pursuit of the urban middle classes. But unlike in Britain, its bucolic setting was associated more with a flight from civilisation than with childlike simplicity. Though still tinged with innocence, depictions of American picnics eg by Thomas Cole and Winslow Homer, tended to be craggier.

Pierre-August Renoir's 
Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881 
The Phillips Collection, Washington DC 

Now allow me to add important possibilities that had noth­ing to do with France. People have been eating outside since the beginning of time. The outdoor affair was like a lucky-dip meal; a group of people got together, each contributing to the meal. Cons­id­er Robin Hood and his Merry Men who informally dined outside on bread, cheese and ale. And during the C14th, the earliest picnics were mediev­al hunting feasts in England. These pre-hunt feasts were important, specialising in hams, baked meats and pastries.

Now consider that outdoor summer meals were very popular in countries with long, cold winters. The concept of a picnic was known in Russia, Ger­­many and Sweden be­f­ore it became part of English soc­iety. Russians loved holding picnics, partially because sunny weather was a rare delight to be treas­ured. Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) cited the experience in a number of his stor­ies, usually along a river or beach. The Romanovs had elab­orate feasts that richly fed dozens of people; my grandmother had Friday night left-overs, just for the immediate family.

Picnic at Freshwater NSW,  1895, centred around cricket
photographer Arthur Phillips
Collection: Powerhouse Museum

But in Australia, the hottest, most outdoorsy time of year was al­ways Christmas to New Year, when workers were given paid hol­idays and schools were closed. See the Australian picnic with young men and women: cricket stumps and bat were visible, as were the billy and picnic hamper. Kitchen items eg cheap versions of cups, plates and picnic cases, were ad­ver­tised in the catalogues of turn-of-the-century shops eg Anthony Hordens and later David Jones.

School girls enjoying a picnic at Hanging Rock

set in 1900 in Macedon Ranges Vic
Forward

Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) was one of Australia’s most famous books and films. The teenage girls came from a classy private boarding school in the City.

Russian Grand Duchess Anna Anderson?

Romanov family with Grand Duchess Anastasia seated far right.
Credit: Ati

In July 1918 Bolshevik revolutionaries shot Czar Nicholas II, Czarina Alexandra, four Grand Duch­esses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, son Tsarevich Alex­ei and 4 servants. Their bodies were taken from the Yekaterinburg cellar in the Urals, and buried in the forest, yet rumours started that the body of the Grand Duchess Anastasia had not been accounted for. Did she hide in the closed cellar?

Since 1918 many women called them­selves Missing Anast­asia. But only two women gathered subs­tant­ial support. See an earlier post about Anna Anderson and the other pretenders.

The princesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia

Alexander Palace, 1916

Anna Anderson was suicidal and was sent to Dall­dorf Mental Asylum in Berlin in 1920. One of the pat­ients believed Anna was the Grand Duchess and two years later Anna also started believing the story. So the Czarina of Russia’s brother, Ernest Louis Grand Duke of Hesse, hired private investigator Martin Knopf in 1927 to discover who she really was.

He found she was Franziska Schanzkowska, who’d worked in a munitions factory in WW1. After her fiancé was killed at the front, a grenade fell out of her hand and exploded. She had head in­juries and a foreman was killed in front of her.

In 1928 she moved to USA and liv­ed off Rus­sian Princess Xenia Georgievna, a distant rel­ative of the Romanovs. But Anna had to return to Germany. For 20 years she struggled to get her name recognised by the Eur­op­ean courts.. and failed. In 1968 she moved back to the USA wh­ere she married a wealthy man. And­ers­on died in the USA in 1984.

More recent events Canonisation of the dead Romanovs in Nov 1981 told the world the Orthodox Church made them saints. This was based on the bel­ief that all the ro­y­al family were all totally, irrev­oc­ab­ly murdered.

The bodies of Tsar, Tasarina and 3 of the daughters were found in the woods outside Yekaterinburg in 1991. Exhaustive post mortem exam­in­ations con­firm­ed that the bodies were indeed the Romanovs, so they were quickly was buried in a vault in Saints Peter & Paul Cathed­ral, St Petersburg. But this did not end the rumours because the son and one of the 4 daugh­t­­ers might still have been alive.

Questions remained: had Grand Duchess Anastasia really es­c­aped from Russia and later resurfaced as Anna Anderson? Tissue samples were kept after And­ers­on died, so plans could fin­ally made for post-mortem DNA tests. In 1994 DNA tests on a lock of Anna's hair and sur­v­iving med­ic­al tissue samples sh­owed that her DNA did NOT match any Romanov rem­ains.

Anastasia, c1914                                                                            Anna Anderson, c1917

Ati                                                                                                   Ati 

This claim was investigated by com­paring Anna’s DNA with DNA ext­racted from the Ro­m­­anov bones. Mat­ernally inherited mitochondrial DNA, which is pass­­ed un­ch­anged from mother to child, was analysed from each of the samples. If Anna had really been Anastasia, her mitoch­ond­rial DNA should have been a perfect match to her mother’s and sister’s DNA. As most historians ex­pected, multiple diff­erences were detected between Anna’s DNA prof­ile and the DNA profile of her mother and sisters. Anna Anderson was just an imposter!

So who WAS Anna Anderson? Instead Ander­son's mitochondrial DNA was compared to that of Carl Maucher, a great-nephew of Franz­iska Schanz­kowska via the maternal line. The DNA profiles from Anderson and Mau­ch­er were a close match, provid­ing strong evidence that Anna And­er­son was indeed Franzisca Schanz­kow­ska. We may never know the rea­s­ons she claimed to be a Romanov, but perhaps her mental illness led her to believe that she truly was a Grand Duchess.

Unexpectedly, in 2007, the 4th daughter and the son were found cremated near Yek­ater­in­burg. It was never verif­ied if the 4th sister was Maria or Anastasia, but ALL 4 girls had been proven by DNA testing to be part of the royal family.

Her story has been adapted into plays, cartoons and films includ­ing the film Anastasia (1956) that earned Ingrid Bergman an Oscar for her role as the Romanov princess. And the award-winning film Anastasia: The Myst­ery of Anna (1986). But remember that the DNA tests from the above studies had not been carried out before the plays and films were made. The true DNA profile of Anna Anderson had not been confirmed, or denied, before 1994.

Thanks to allthatsintersting. 

 

Margot Fonteyn: ballet star, sex, politics

Born Margaret Hookham (1919–91) in Surrey, she showed early promise at ballet which her mother encouraged. Margot's fath­er worked for The British American Tobacco Co., so the family moved to Sh­anghai. Her mother brought her back to London when she was 14 to pursue ballet, and once she chose to abandon school comp­letely, she chose Mar­got Fonteyn for more re­fined, professional name. 

Helpmann and Fonteyn

Façade 1936, Wiki

In 1934 she joined Sad­ler’s Wells Sch­ool. When Alicia Markova left the Co. in 1935, Fonteyn took her roles and developed a fine partnership with Aus­tralian dancer-choreo­grapher Robert Hel­pmann into the 40s. The Help­mann part­ner­ship helped to dev­elop her theat­ric­al­­ity.

Inspired by a Markova performance in Les Syl­ph­ides, Margot devoted herself to ballet full time. Sadler's Wells Director Ninette de Val­ois spotted the lass and gave her the pr­in­cipal roles in Giselle, Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty.

Although Fonteyn’s dancing seemed very innocent, she apparently had many lovers. Her affair with the married older cond­uctor Const­ant Lambert was problematic, due to his alcohol and women. And when Mar­got visited Cambridge Uni in 1937, she met Roberto Tito Arias (1918–89). The young law stud­ent from Panama fasc­in­ated her, so the pair enjoyed spending time to­get­her for the week. But when he return­ed to Panama, they ceased com­mun­ication.

 Throughout WW2, Margot danced nightly and sometimes daily, to ent­ert­ain troops. In Sep 1940, as the London Blitz began, Sad­l­er's Wells Theatre was turned into an air raid shel­t­er. The Co. was temp­orarily displaced, so in 1940 they went on tour to Eur­ope, start­ing in Hol­land which was full of Germans. When the bombing started, the dancers had to be rescued by a car­go boat.

In 1946 the Co. moved to the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden. One of Fonteyn's best roles was Aurora in Tchaik­ovsky's Sleeping Beauty, the bal­let that became a signature production for the Co. and a major role for Fonteyn. Reprising Aurora in 1949 when the Royal Ballet tour­ed the U.S, Fonteyn instantly became a celebrity with Americans.

On another American tour in 1953, Fonteyn re-met Tito Arias when he surprised her, after seeing Sleeping Beauty. Arias was now a pol­it­ic­ian and Panamanian delegate to the United Nations. Although he had a wife and 3 children, Arias win­ed and dined her, and bought her fur coats. She re­sisted, but in 1955 they married in Paris!

Arias and Margot, 1965

whosdatedwho

 Fonteyn became Pres­ of the Royal Academy of Dance, and was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1956. Tito had been appointed an amb­assador to the Court of St James, so Fonteyn also fulfilled a dip­l­omat's wife duties. In 1956 she was critic­ised for performing in racist Johannes­burg, and she and Tito were also criticised for be­friending Imelda Mar­c­os & Nor­iega. Was it to help Tito in his schemes to obtain power in Panama? She did believed her husband would become head of Panama, and that she would the Queen.

In April 1959, Arias staged a failed coup d'état again­st Panama’s President Ernesto de la Guardia, ? with the support of Fidel Castro. Fonteyn said the plot was hat­ch­ed in Cuba in Jan 1959, with Cas­t­ro promis­ing to assist Arias with arms or men. During a sea voyage, Arias jumped ship while Font­eyn used her own yacht, to divert the government forces. She returned to Panama City to turn herself in, and meeting at the prison with the British ambassador to Panama, she confes­s­ed her involve­ment. While the Bri­t­­ish Foreign Office got her to NY, Arias hid in Brasil’s Panama embassy and got safely to Peru.

As a retreat from London, the couple bought a house Taplow Bucks

in the 1950s, Daily Mail Aus

Just when she might have retired, Fonteyn began her greatest artistic partnership. In 1961 Kirov Ballet star Rudolf Nureyev defect­ed in Paris and was invited to join the Royal Ballet. Fonteyn was given the opportunity to dance with him in his debut, but she was reluctant be­cause of the age gap. They first performed together in Gis­elle in Feb 1962 where Fonteyn dis­covered new energy, and thus the par­tner­­ship late in her car­­eer won them both worldwide fame. Her per­f­­ect line and lyricism were qualities evident in the roles created by Sir Frederick Ash­ton eg Ondine, Cind­er­ella, Chloë. Ashton created Marguerite and Arm­and for Nureyev and Font­eyn in 1963, a signature piece.

Nureyev said that they were lovers; Fonteyn said not. Nonetheless Margot wanted to divorce her fickle husband Arias in 1964, so she was happy to tour with Nureyev and The Australian Ballet in Stuttgart. Alas Margot learned that a Panam­anian politician had shot Arias. Fonteyn, though shaken, still dan­ced before going to Panama.

This was lucky because, despite planned retirement in her 40s, Arias was now quadriplegic and Margot had to keep earning. Luck­ily her part­ner­ship with Nureyev gave her a new lease of life and pro­longed her career by 18 years.

Fonteyn went into semi-retirement in 1972 with one-act per­f­ormances and she also mov­ed into modern ballet, dancing in 1975 with the Chi­c­­ago Ballet. She fully retired in 1979! For her 60th birthday, Fonteyn was feted by the Royal Ballet, dancing a duet with Ashton and a tango with Helpmann.

Fonteyn and Nureyev 

Pinterest

 In 1989, before Arias’ death, Font­eyn was diag­nosed with ovarian cancer. Having used all her savings to care for Arias and now retired, she had to move to a remote Panama cattle farm. But she st­ayed in touch with Nu­r­­eyev via tele­phone. By 1990, she’d had 3 oper­at­ions and had to sell her treasures to pay for her care; thankfully Nur­eyev helped. A Covent Gar­dens gala raised money for her where Placido Domingo sang & Nureyev danced. After her Feb 1991 death, Fonteyn and Arias were buried in Panama. A memorial ser­vice was held in Jul 1991 at Westminster Abbey.

lyrical Russian artist: Isaac Levitan

Lithuanian Isaac Ilyich Levitan (1860-1900) was born in Kovensky Province, into a poor but well-educated Jewish family. His fat­her was a rabbi and foreign language teacher, but financ­ially struggled to support his wife and four children. Thank you to Tretyakov Gallery Magazine for a series of excellent essays.

 Tsar Al­exander III (reigned 1881–1894) strengthened the Pale of Settlement Laws and en­sured the removal of all Jewish people living in large cities in Russia, especially Moscow, St Peters­burg and Kiev. Clearly life for many Russian Jews in the late 1800s was miserable, including for the Levitans. So the family wanted to move to Moscow… but Moscow was not within the Pale!!

Autumn Day Sokolniki 1879

Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Still, Isaac and his brother’s artistic interests were en­cour­ag­ed and both boys enrolled in Moscow’s School of Painting, Sculp­ture and Archit­ecture - Adolf in 1871 and Isaac in 1873. Sadly the children lost mum in 1875 and dad in 1877. Isaac was left penniless and homeless, sleeping either with relatives or in the Moscow Art School’s classrooms. Fortunately the School waived the rest of his tuit­ion fees.

His best teacher took him on as an apprent­ice, to provide monetary aid. Alexei Savrasov (1830–1897) was a patient teacher who headed the Landscape Dept at the Moscow School of Painting. He was also arguably the most expressive of the Russian landscape painters of the later C19th.

Another inspiration was Savrasov’s suc­cess­or Vasily Polen­ov (1844-1927), whose serene lyrical land­scapes rubbed off on the young Levitan. During his ten years at the Art School, Lev­itan was a regular visitor at Polenov’s country house. There he drew, painted and developed warm friendships.

Golden Autumn Slobodka, 1889
State Russian Museum, St Petersburg

Other key influences on Levitan’s style included the Rus­sian teacher Vasily Perov (1834–82), French painters of the Bar­b­­izon school of landscape painting, and poetic classical real­ist Camille Corot (1796-1875).  Examine eg Autumn Day Sokolniki 1879 where a woman was walking care­free in the country side near Moscow. Levitan’s attitude towards nature was akin to the works of Anton Chekhov, who had become his friend. Autumn Day Sokolniki, painted at 19, was bought by famous philanthropist-art coll­ector Pavel Tretyakov.

Autumn Landscape with Church, 1890
State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

One of Levitan’s pastels featured beautiful autumn yellows against a dull backdrop of greys and other weak colours. The Autumn Landscape, painted in 1890, showed the church in the background. It was bought by Pavel Tretyakov.

Of course Levitan’s passion for poetry and music were very important. Plus throughout his short life he was prone to depression. Out of these complex ex­periences, Levit­an’s "mood landscapes" took on a poetic and em­otional quality. 

Levitan first showed his work at an exhibition with Moscow’s Itinerant Wanderers, re­ceiving his first recognit­ion from the press. By 1884 the Wander­ers had offered Levitan full membership in their group, so he could exhibit regularly.

Even though Savrasov was fired as a lecturer due to his alcoh­ol­ism, Levitan continued to seek his advice. In 1883, Levitan was ready to graduate and expected to receive a first-class hon­our for one of his best landscape paintings. The diploma did not come but later Levitan began teaching landscape painting at the Moscow School of Painting.

 

Evening Church Bells 1892
Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

In the mid 1880s Levitan’s finances improved. One of the best landscape artists among the progressive Itinerant Wand­erers, his main contribution to Russian art was atmos­pheric landscape, mastering colour and shade. Although the depiction of light was crucial to his com­pos­itions, Levitan was a realist rather than an Impress­ion­ist. 

Pastoral landscapes, human-free, were ch­aracteristic of his work. Though his late work displayed Impress­ionist elements, his palette was generally muted and Savrasovian. For examples of his landscapes, see Secluded Monastery 1890. The Road to Vladimir 1892 was a rare example of social hist­or­ical landscape and see evocative works like Evening Church Bells 1892, Golden Autumn 1895, Spring Flood 1897 and the small painting Reindeer 1895. All were bought by Pavel Tretyakov and are in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, a treasury of Russian fine art.

Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, 

GW2RU

Levit­an was interested in the writings of the new intellectual lumin­ar­ies, writing to Sergei Diaghilev that he lay for days in a forest and read pessimistic German philosopher Schopen­hauer. So we might have expected a hushed, almost melanch­olic reverie. Above the Eternal Peace 1894 showed the artist’s meditations about the transience of human being. Levit­an painted the infamous road, along which convicts were marched to Siberia.

Above Eternal Peace 1894
Tret­yakov Gal­lery

Levitan was an active participant in artistic life; he taught at the Moscow School of Painting, where had trained, was actively involved the Moscow Club of Lit­er­ature and Art, and exhibited regularly with the Munich Secession (1892).

Isaac Levitan’s career lasted for c20 years only, but within this short time he created more than other Rus­sian landscape painters. Levitan’s most famous late 1890s paint­ings include Even­ing on Volga, Spring High Water and others. Levitan did not join modern art and remained true to realism. See his quiet twi­lights, moon lit nights and sleeping villages eg Haystacks Twilight 1899 and Sunny Day 1898.

If his earlier works were intimate and lyrical, his mature art became philosophical, expressing his med­it­ation about man and the world. His last works were increas­ingly filled with light, reflecting tranquillity and the eternal beauty of his beloved Russian Motherland. These pictures were loved by the intellectuals of the time, for they rep­resented the purest specimen of the Russian mood landscape.

Levitan was single, though many women liked him. In 1900 he died at 39 and was buried in Moscow's old Jewish cemetery. He left 40 unfin­ished paintings and 300 sketches.

 

Reindeer 1895
Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

The Jewish population in Russia had grown to 5.6 million by the turn of the century, home of my own family. So I was always a Rus­s­ian tragic, now even more so. The work of Isaac Levitan belonged to the Golden Age of Russian culture, comparable with the works of such classics like Anton Chekhov, Pyotr Tchaik­ovsky and Kon­st­antin Stanislavsky. A Tel Aviv street was named after Isaac Lev­itan. Lots of his works, less known in Russia today, are now displayed in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

 

Isaac Levitan, photographed 1880s.

Myer: great Russian-Australian retailers

Russian Elcon Baevski (1875-1938) was born in Krichev to Hebrew scholar Ezekiel Baevski, went to a Jewish primary school, then high school and later managed his mother's drapery business. In 1896 Elcon migrated to Australia, working in Melbourne with a relative, Lazer Slutzkin. Simcha Myer Baevski (1878-1934), the youngest of the 11 siblings, attended the same schools as his brother, then he too managed his mother's store. Simcha fled poverty in Belarus and joined Slutzkin's business.

Sidney and Elcon took the family name Myer, moved to rural Bendigo and in 1901 established their drapery store. Sidney ran a rural trade in fabrics, on foot then on horse-cart. The brothers formally became partners in new premises in Pall Mall Bendigo, and in Mar 1902 Elcon married Rose Marks. 

Myer evolved from a drapery to a Bendigo department store

ABC News

Bendigo’s 1856 synagogue was replaced later by a larger, solid brick synagogue, so families had a religious centre. But the brothers’ partnership struggled because Elcon opposed Sabbath trading. He returned to Melbourne, opening clothes production in Flinders Lane. Sidney bought him out and remained in Bendigo, but they were still close. In 1905 Sidney married Hannah Flegeltaub at Ballarat.

In the Bendigo drapery, Sidney followed new fashion trends and presented stock attractively. He also advertised boldly, appealing to women's shopping habits. By 1907 Bendigo's busiest drapers had 60+ staff and expanded its premises. In 1908 Sidney bought Craig Williamson Drapery for £22,000, and a fast sale of its stock repaid his creditors.

Late 1909 Sidney travelled overseas to study British and European merchandising methods and to establish contact with exporters. In 1911 he purchased Wright & Neil, a Bourke St drapery, paying £91,450. He raised staff wages and closed up for a fortnight's stocktaking and ordering! In June, full-page newspaper ads promoted the long Myer sale.

Soon Sidney took over more Bendigo shops, then opened other Melbourne and Adelaide shops. Then Elcon rejoined his brother and managed 2 Bendigo shops. Modelled on San Francisco's Emporium, the new £70,000, 8-storey building opened in July 1914 with a popular gala sale. Myer grew the business, occupying a broad City area between Bourke and Lonsdale Sts. The area included 10 buildings built by Sidney, designed by commercial architects HW & FB Tompkins.

When war tragically erupted in 1914 and damaged trade, Myer opened a London office to deal with suppliers, sourcing more products locally and even manufacturing. It aided Sidney's plan to maintain imports in WW1. Elcon travelled to London again, to organise shipments of cloth. He joined the Army Service Corps, serving in UK and then at the front. In 1915 he built a clothing factory and bought Doveton Woollen Mills in rural Ballarat in 1918.

Myer Emporium, Bourke St, 2007

The retailer evolved from being a drapery into a department store in Bendigo, Wiki

The success of their retailing was also due to their classy window displays. The new Bourke St windows attracted customers, using theatrical sets and models to display goods. Designed by famous commercial buildings architect Nahum Barnet in 1892, two extra buildings were bought by Myer.

In mid-1919 Sidney visited U.S, getting divorced in Nevada and converting to Christianity. In Jan 1920 he married young Margery Merlyn Baillieu and had 4 happy children.

By 1920 Myer Emporium had 200 departments, famous for its motorised delivery vans! Myer's Australia Ltd brought together all firms solely owned by Sidney, with a capital of £2 million; and the London subsidiary was unified. In 1921 warnings of a post-war slump overseas prompted Sidney to predict the collapse of import prices and cut his losses with a Million Pound Master Sale. It cost £500,000+ but, by restocking the cheaper imports, he traded out of crisis.

Sidney offered 73,000 staff shares of £1 each, and 200,000+ shares among his managers (plus paid vacations, access to a sick fund, holiday homes were built) and a free hospital went in-store. He ran annual staff balls, football & cricket matches, a Christian Fellowship and choral society shows.

 

From 1925, a separate section was devoted to display design and installation. The Lonsdale and Little Bourke St building facades showed Classical and Beaux Arts styles while the Bourke St facade had an Inter-war Art Deco style. The present Bourke St façade (8 storeys) was completed in 1933. By 1925 the Bourke St front increased with the first section of an 11-storey Lonsdale St store opened with £3 million capital. In 1926 Myer opened Melbourne's first Cash and Carry grocery, plus self-service cafeterias.

Sidney was managing director, with a large committee. In 1927 the Co's net profit was £328,000 and shareholders received dividends of 17%. In 1928 Myer took James Marshall department store of Adelaide, placing Myer Emporium SA Ltd under his nephew Norman. Furthermore Myer bought out Webb Table Ware Merchants 1930, then WH Rocke smart furniture dealers 1931!

Sidney had ethical employment beliefs, and in times of financial strain here, instead of reducing worker numbers, he lowered wages and increased worker numbers! With the terrible Depression, he launched a £250,000 rebuild of his Bourke St shop in 1931, to increase employment. He’d already anticipated Scullin government's tariff embargoes and import restrictions, so reduced his overseas buying and started a Made in Australia Week. He limited profits to 5% so no retrenchments were needed!

The objects of his philanthropy were sometimes cultural, rather than charity. In 1926 he gave 25,000 Myer shares worth £50,000 to Melbourne Uni! Then he formed the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in 1932, and created a trust fund for them with 10,000 Myer shares. Sidney was on Royal Melbourne Hospital’s management committee; in 1933 he was chosen for the executive committee of Victoria's Centenary Council and raised £20,000+; and he gave an ambulance to the Victorian Civil Ambulance Service. What a great man.

Sidney died of cardiac failure in Sept 1934 and his will placed 1/10 of his wealth in trust for the charitable, philanthropic and educational needs of his community. The business was left to nephew Sir Norman Myer and Baillieu Bails Myer’s brother Ken Myer.

New windows were installed to Bourke St in 1955, the Myer Christmas windows commencing with 1956’s Olympic Games, and each year, a new theme was created. The Bourke St Myer Christmas window displays were visited by generations of children as their Christmas holiday ritual.

One of the Christmas windows for children after 1956

Mother's Little Explorers

 

Myer Mural Hall used a Streamline Moderne dining room for 1000 people, completed in 1933 on the 6th floor. It is a large space with a décorative plaster ceiling, balconies and wall panels. At one end the mannequin stairs led down from 2 balconies to the landing for fashion parades. The Hall was decorated with 10 murals by famous neo-classical artist Napier Waller (1893-1972)

half the Myer Mural Hall, completed in 1933 on the 6th floor

wedding reception, Tripadvisor

He donated to: Shrine of Remembrance, Melbourne Uni and Yarra Boulevard, roadwork for unemployed men. And when the Children's Hospital had to close wards, he donated £8000. His love of classical music meant he gave £1000 annually to concerts by Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.

He was succeeded by Elcon, with Norman Myer as managing director. Elcon presided over the completion of the modern Bourke St shop. Elcon was also active in many charitable causes eg the Alfred Hospital board and St Kilda Synagogue Board. Alas Elcon died in 1938 of cancer, and was buried with Jewish rites in Boxhill cemetery. His estate was probated at £114,353. Elcon left 2 sons of his first marriage and by his 2nd wife Myrtle Fisher (married 1929).

Bails Myer, born in San Francisco in 1926, was Sidney and Merlyn’s youngest of four children. Bails followed dad in the retail trade, after being a WW2 officer in Royal Navy. When Sir Norman died in 1956, Bails and brother Ken started an ambitious expansion strategy for the company. In 1960 they set up in a giant shopping centre, Chadstone. The brothers believed that the future of retail depended on bringing shopping to the masses, in the suburbs. Correct! Myer store became the retail heart of country’s largest mall!

Myer Chadstone, 2025

Tripadvisor

Bails was also involved in Myer Emporium’s acquisition of the Lindsay’s retail chain in Geelong. That business re-emerged as Target under Myer’s ownership and became another famous Australian retail brand. But in 1983, Bails went back into Myer’s management as a recession strangled Melbourne’s retail trade. This was just when Myer was in a corporate tussle with Grace Brothers. Myer won, securing ownership of the significant NSW department store owner in 1983. Bails led the group’s merger with GJ Coles and Myer Emporium, to create Coles Myer in 1983-5, the ?biggest deals in Australian corporate  history.

In 1994 Bails retired to focus on his interests in the arts and philanthropy, as a trustee of Victoria’s National Gallery. He also worked with the Myer Foundation, a trust that had started in 1959 by Sidney’s sons; it had distributed $300+ million since then. Re scientific studies, Bails became president of Howard Florey Institute and executive member of CSIRO. He also played a key role in the early 2000s in the refurbishment of the Sidney Music Bowl, built to honour dad’s legacy. He died (96) at home in 2022. My grandfather was correct; of all immigrants, Russians added the most to Australian culture.

Sidney Myer Music Bowl summertime venue

has been wowing crowds opened 1959.

Visit Victoria

Isaiah Berlin philosopher: Riga->Oxford

Isaiah Berlin

1991, Independent

Isaiah Berlin (1909-97) was born to Russian-speaking Jewish parents in Riga. His father Mendel owned a timber business providing material to the Russian railways; he and his wife Marie were very cultured people. Their only child developed a passion for music. In 1915 the family moved St Petersburg, staying during the revolut­ions. The Russian Rev­ol­ut­ion was a period of great hope for the future but one that also opened up the risk of anti Semitism. So after the violence, the Berl­ins returned to the most beautiful street in Ri­ga. Eventually they decided to move to Britain where Mendel had friends and business ties.

From 1921 the clever lad was educated at St Paul's School London, then at Oxford to study Classics. Isaiah was thrust into the excite­ment of 1930s Oxford, becoming part of the British intell­ect­ual estab­lish­ment. Not bad for a foreigner who had once spoken Yiddish, Ger­man, Russian and Latvian at home, but had to learn English and French from scratch.

With war coming to Europe, Berlin welcomed a chance to work for the British Ministry of Information, firstly in Washington where his bril­liant wartime dispatches were read by Churchill (1940-2). Then he bec­ame part of the British Foreign Office team that lived and worked in Moscow and in St Petersburg (1942-6). 

 Isaiah and Aline

Isaiah Berlin certainly did not live in an ivory tower; like many ot­her academics, he became engaged in the outside world. Through­­out his career, Berlin’s personality and contact skills saw him actively welc­om­ed by a great range of polit­ic­ians, businessmen and ac­ademics. Ber­lin did not like making enemies; he was uncomfort­ably aw­are of his dual allegiance when working for a British government which was unsym­pathetic to to Jewish dreams for a safe haven. But as a loyal Zion­ist, he was keen to play a role as a contact bet­ween his friend Chaim Weiz­mann and some American polit­ic­ians, bef­ore the State of Israel was established. Only when David Ben Gurion asked him to move to Israel, to play a part in shaping the new state, did Berlin decline.

In 1950, Berlin returned to All Souls, where he became Chair of Social and Political Theory. He was often heard on the radio, the broadcasts and lectures now available in the Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library. 

Because I knew even less about philosophy even than I knew about physics, I was excited to read Isaiah Berlin; A Life by Michael Ignatieff 1998. The author noted several times that Berlin was Russian by bir­th, Jewish by family and English by choice. So he knitted together the three ident­ities into a cosmopolitan awareness that informed his career.

Berlin affirmed the importance of individual freedom. Yet he was clear that the ideals of liberty, equality and social justice inevitably con­flicted and required negotiation. Even his liberal friends argued that indiv­id­ual freedom had to be limit­less. Berlin had absorbed British values: 1. decency, 2. tol­eration of dissent and 3. Import­ance of liberty over effic­iency. In his view, thinking society members had to embrace contra­dictory values. Britain's open political system had to be an embodiment of pluralism at its best.

When seeing so many important conflicts, Berlin felt there was much to be said for each side i.e his commitment to pluralism. If free­dom, jus­t­ice, equality, tolerance, loyalty and compassion and coll­ided, they could be rightly sought after; but equality could be achieved by curt­ail­ing the liberty of some.

In 1956, middle-aged Berlin married Aline de Gunzbourg Halban (1915-2014). He had found the brill­iant Paris-raised wife and stepsons who would be the centre of his life from then on. He was a director of Covent Garden, opera pat­ron and trustee of the National Gallery. A grateful nation was pleased to see Berlin knighted in 1957.

The Berlin house at Oxford

 
This philosopher’s most important stance was that there could never be any single, universal, complete and demonstrable answer to the most moral qiestions of all: how should we live? Contrary to C18th Fr­en­ch Enlightenment visions of an orderly synthesis of all objectives, Ber­l­in showed there was a huge number of competing, irreconcilable ul­timate values; humans had to make choices.

Pluralism meant every family and every society had to accept that there was never one absolute value to which other values had to be sub­­ordinated. There were many values in life that commanded resp­ect, but what if freedom, justice, equality, tolerance, com[assion and loyalty collided? Berlin thought no amount of rational discussion could resolve these conflicting values. So his solution was not to give any one value absolute priority over the others. We have to res­ol­ve the tensions between values by keeping them in pragmatic balance. We have to accept trade-offs, even if people make choices that are less than 100% satisfactory.

Isaiah Berlin; A Life
by Michael Ignatieff, 1998

Conclusion

Ignatieff’s interviews captured one of Oxford's most pop­ular professors, the most humane of modern philosoph­ers. He was a historian of the Russian intelligentsia, biographer of Marx, pioneer­ing scholar of the Romantic movement and defender of proper, positive English freedoms. Just as well for posterity that Ignat­ieff managed to question and tape Berlin for 10 productive years, before Berlin died. Then Ignatieff interviewed Berlin's widow, friends, students and colleagues.