2 September, 2015
For every exhibition that is put on, there is always another: the exhibition that could have been put on had there been world enough and time. When you’re trying to condense more than six hundred years of German–British history into 17 panels of information, there are bound to be omissions that haunt you. For Cathy Ross, the curator of our Germans in Britain exhibition, one such omission was the story of Sir Edgar Speyer. Speyer, born in the United States to German Jewish parents, was a British-naturalised merchant banker and philanthropist, who was unceremoniously drummed out of Britain in May 1915, almost exactly one hundred years ago. The only part of his story that is on show in the Germans in Britain exhibition is the quotation that tops the banner on the First World War – a quotation from Lord Charles Beresford, delivered at a women’s anti-German rally in the Mansion House: ‘The most dangerous enemies in our midst are the rich, independent, naturalised Germans in high social positions … still Germans at heart. [They are] not wanted here.’
It has long been accepted that Sir Edgar Speyer was the most obvious target for Beresford’s words. The guest blog that follows has been written by Tony Lentin, the author of a new book on Speyer. We should bear in mind that Sir Edgar Speyer was by no means the only German-born Briton to be treated in this way, though his profile was higher than most.
King of the Underground turned pariah
Without Sir Edgar Speyer, there would be no London Underground and no Proms, and there would have been no Captain Scott’s expeditions to the Antarctic.
Born in the United States to Jewish immigrant parents from Germany, Sir Edgar Speyer (1862–1932) was a celebrated figure in the financial, cultural and political life of England before 1914. A merchant banker, he headed the company which financed the construction of the deep-level ‘tubes’. He became known as ‘King of the Underground’, subsequently taking over London’s entire transport system.
![King of the Underground[1]](http://migrationmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/King-of-the-Underground1-e1441117688364.jpg)
It was his personal generosity in the 12 years before the war that alone saved the Proms from bankruptcy and extinction and guaranteed their accessibility to a popular audience. He was a patron of many early 20th-century composers, including Elgar, Richard Strauss, Debussy and Percy Grainger. A munificent donor to the King Edward VII hospital and many other medical and charitable causes, he co-founded the Whitechapel Art Gallery, and he raised funds for Scott’s expeditions to the Antarctic. He was a supporter of the Liberal Party, the friend of Winston Churchill and the then prime minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, and a regular guest at Downing Street – he was made a baronet in 1906 and a member of the Privy Council three years later.
Among the last letters written by Captain Scott was this letter to Sir Edgar Speyer, the honorary treasurer of the fundraising committee behind Scott’s trip. The letter, sold at auction in 2012 for £163,000, ends: ‘Goodbye to you and your dear kind wife’.
On the outbreak of war, however, as a result of his German parentage and connections this remarkable man became a pariah. He was hounded out of Britain in May 1915 by unscrupulous politicians and an irresponsible press. In 1921 (by which time Speyer was in the United States) he returned to face a judicial tribunal, under the newly enacted Aliens Act, and was found guilty of disloyalty and disaffection and of communicating and trading with Germany in wartime. In his foreword to my book, Banker, Traitor, Scapegoat, Spy? The Troublesome Case of Sir Edgar Speyer, the distinguished jurist Sir Louis Blom-Cooper, QC, comments that the procedure ‘reflected no credit on a legal system that had always prided itself on protecting the individual against the might of the state’.
Following the tribunal’s finding, however, Speyer was stripped of his British citizenship and membership of the Privy Council.
When he died in 1932, the Morning Post described his downfall as ‘a minor tragedy of the war’. My book is the first detailed account of this unsavoury episode in British–German relations. It re-examines Speyer’s case from documents newly released, presents the evidence and invites the reader to decide whether he was an innocent victim, a scapegoat, or a traitor to his adopted country.
Sir Edgar and Lady Leonora Speyer, photographed in the early 1920s, around the time of his appearance before the tribunal under the Aliens Act
I have campaigned for Speyer’s generous acts of philanthropy to be recognised today. I am not alone in seeking recognition for his critical support for so many British causes. In October 2014, a plaque was unveiled in Speyer’s honour at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge. Earlier this year, BBC 3 radio presenter Dr Kate Kennedy told listeners that she felt Speyer should be honoured with a statue for saving the Proms from collapse.
In November 2014, almost a hundred years after Lord Beresford’s inflammatory statement, Lord Black of Brentwood said in the House of Lords: ‘A century on, when we can look back with calm perspective on some of the events that happened in the heat of the moment, it would be right to ensure that the record is set straight and that the contribution to music, science and the arts of this man, who was so unfairly treated, is properly recognised with a fitting memorial.’
Postscript: On Saturday 12 September this year, the Last Night of the BBC Proms, the BBC will reflect Edgar Speyer’s contribution to the Proms in the presentation on BBC Radio and Television and in the printed programme. The BBC, which took over the financing and running of the Proms in 1927, has said that Edgar Speyer exemplified ‘a spirit of patronage and public service’ that it is proud to be continuing.
Tony Lentin has posted this further postscript on 15 September:
An e-mail to me from the BBC on 14 August said: ‘We will use this opportunity to reflect Edgar Speyer’s contribution to the Proms in the presentation on BBC Radio and Television and in the printed programme. Speyer’s is a very interesting story in the history of the Proms and we are pleased to be able mark his connection through this particular piece of repertoire.’
I have not seen the printed programme, but the BBC2 presentation consisted of the bare mention of ‘the philanthropist Sir Edgar Speyer’ in connection with Till Eulenspiegel. That was all. Rapid coverage of Proms history featured Newman, Henry Wood and the BBC. Nothing on ‘The Man Who Saved the Proms’.
My verdict, on pages 175–6 of my book, stands:
When the Promenaders join in ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ or Parry’s ‘Jerusalem’ on the last night of the Proms, they pay homage to the garlanded bust of Sir Henry Wood, but not to his indispensable patron. They will not know that Parry wrote to express to Edgar his shame at the outcry against him, that Elgar wrote to him of ‘the indebtedness of the English people to you “a great uplifting force” in the nation’s musical life.’
There will be a proper commemoration of Speyer’s contribution at two concerts this autumn: Hay Music on 10 October, and Chelsea Concerts on 9 November.
Professor Antony Lentin is a senior member of Wolfson College, Cambridge, a barrister and formerly a Professor of History and law tutor at the Open University.
Lentin, Antony (2013) Banker, Traitor, Scapegoat, Spy? The Troublesome Case of Sir Edgar Speyer. London: Haus Publishing.
Tony Lentin http://www.edgarspeyer.co.uk/index.php
26 August, 2015
A profile of Charlie Phillips, photographer and contributor to 100 Images of Migration
Charlie Phillips had never planned to be a photographer. When, in the standard career interview towards the end of his time at school, the youth employment officer asked him what he wanted to be, Charlie answered ‘A naval architect’. Even now, his eyes fire up more when he’s talking about ships or the Middle Passage (‘my favourite passion’) than about almost anything, except maybe Britain’s renunciation of its maritime past – one of the derelictions of duty he can’t quite forgive his adoptive country for. And, in fact, his passions are many: don’t get him started about Captain Bligh and the role that breadfruit played in the mutiny on the Bounty, or about Captain (as he then was) Nelson, who met his wife, the daughter of a plantation owner, in his service in Antigua – or, rather, do, because he talks about both with the eye-glistening enthusiasm that he brings to the many subjects that fascinate him.
Man in zoot suit, Great Western Road, 1968. One of the sharp dressers of the period. © Charlie Phillips/ww.akehurstcreativemanagement.com
But we’re here to talk about Charlie’s photographs, here being the Tabernacle in Notting Hill Gate, which Charlie has been visiting for a long time and where, seated outside in the bitter summer cold, he is warmly greeted by everyone going into and out of the building. His photographic career began by accident. A visiting GI left a Kodak Retina camera behind and Charlie instinctively took to it, photographing the people and places of Notting Hill, moving between 200 and 400 ASA black-and-white film and printing the results of his shoots in the family bathroom when his parents had gone to bed. Entirely self-taught, he continued to take photographs on and off for the next 30–40 years until the arrival of the digital camera put paid to his career (Charlie says that he ‘refused’ to make the move from analogue – stamping the act as the political statement he feels all our actions are). Sadly, all too few of his photographs have survived a life that started in Jamaica and which, from London, careened between Ireland, France, Italy, Switzerland, before pitching Charlie back in London.
Schoolgirls, Lancaster Road, 1970. © Charlie Phillips/ww.akehurstcreativemanagement.com
London had never been the long-term plan, either at the start of his stay there or with his return 25-odd years later. Charlie had left his native Jamaica in 1956, sailing to Britain on the Reina del Pacifico (he has perfect recall for all the ships he has been on or seen). The idea was to stay in London for something like five years and then to go on somewhere else, most probably America, which is where other members of his family went. Instead, after the ill-fated interview with the youth employment officer had quashed Charlie’s dreams of naval architecture (the officer had suggested he should try the postal service, the RAF or London Transport instead), he spent three years in the merchant navy, working mostly in catering. He had always been interested in running away (he cites Norman Rockwell’s painting ‘The Runaway’ as a source of inspiration) and when he left the navy he did just that, travelling to Paris and becoming embroiled in the events of 1968 – ‘the start of my revolutionary, my bohemian years’ – before hitch-hiking further south to Italy, where he spent a further ten years.
The Reina del Pacifico, the ship on which Charlie arrived in England.
Charlie feels his career as a photographer really took off only when he left England and, with slight bitterness, lists a number of other black British artists who had to go abroad to make their name. In Italy he worked for commercial gain as a paperazzo, living in a commune but hob-nobbing with the artistic cool set of the time. That’s him in the notorious banquet scene in Federico Fellini’s Satyricon, in which a whole cow is split open to reveal cooked meats inside – the only part of the film, I’m delighted to tell him, that I remember in vivid detail; he knew and admired Giorgio de Chirico and was respected and valued by the artists he associated with: ‘They called me “the black Cartier-Bresson, compared me to Fox Talbot and stuff’. And it was in Italy that he had his first major exhibition, in Milan. After a second, this time in Switzerland, he followed his heart back to London, where he has been based ever since and where he now spends his time tending his rose garden, looking after his tomato plants and trying yet again (this is now his eighth attempt) to read War and Peace.
Ledbury Road, 1968. © Charlie Phillips/ww.akehurstcreativemanagement.com
Too few of Charlie’s photographs have survived his European peregrinations: you sense that Charlie was often too interested in the present to concern himself with archiving his past achievements. All the photographs he took of Jimi Hendrix, for example, were lost in Charlie’s mid-period movement from squat to squat. Indeed, his recent exhibition, How Great Thou Art, a collection documenting 50 years of African Caribbean funerals in London, came about when two other photographic professionals Charlie knew took on the task of sifting through some of his old boxes in an attempt to help him de-clutter his life. The exhibition itself was then crowdfunded through Kickstarter.
Jennifer, Jamaica Independence Day, 1962. © Charlie Phillips/ww.akehurstcreativemanagement.com
We will have to content ourselves, then, with the few remaining photographs that Charlie can lay his hands on. But these still have a tremulous power and an immediacy and presence that mock the intervening years. When schools and colleges visit our 100 Images of Migration exhibition, Charlie’s photos are always among those cited as the visitors’ favourites – many of the younger people are shocked at ‘Room to Let’ or captivated by ‘Notting Hill Couple’, aware about how powerful that image must have been at the time but conscious now of the open ease of the subjects’ pose, the classical simplicity of the composition.
Belatedly, Charlie is getting something of the recognition he deserves. The fact that this has arrived decades after he stopped taking photographs doesn’t seem cause for regret. In fact, don’t mention ‘regret’. Among the many things that Charlie still feels passionately angry about – the fact that the ‘Arts establishment’ has no interest in community artists, that ‘the bureaucrats have taken over the asylum’, that London feels, to him, culturally demoralised – is the banalisation of the Caribbean funerals that were the subject of his recent exhibition. ‘Do you know what the most frequently requested song is now, for the moment when the coffin goes into the grave?’ he asks indignantly. ‘When it used to be “How Great Thou Art”’ – and for a moment he goes off piste and intones the start to the hymn – ‘it’s now “My Way”. Can you believe?’
The funeral of Cassidy, a motor mechanic. Before his death Cassidy had asked not to have a hearse and so his coffin was taken to the cemetery on his employer’s Land Rover, in honour of his trade. © Charlie Phillips/ww.akehurstcreativemanagement.com
It turns out that Charlie always fancied himself as a singer, too, even wanted to be an opera singer at one time. He’s off to the opera this evening, as it happens. Not the Royal Opera House, of course (he refuses to go to the fat-cat palace it has become), nor to the ENO (purist and revolutionary at the same time, he dislikes its failure to stick to the original librettos), but to Opera Holland Park, as ever supporting the local, the community. ‘Still the old revolutionary,’ he says – though his major concern, he tells me in the few minutes we have left, is the inability of grandchildren to communicate with their grandparents. He feels that somewhere between the late 1970s and the 1990s a cultural gap grew that hasn’t yet been filled, one which is full of stories still to be told.
Notting Hill Couple, 1967 – one of Charlie Phillips’s photos in the ‘100 Images of Migration’ exhibition that always attracts intense interest from visitors. © Charlie Phillips/ww.akehurstcreativemanagement.com
He might be right. But his photographs have bridged that gap a long time ago, and continue to do so for every person who comes across them for the first time.
19 August, 2015
This guest blog by Mihir Bose, a distinguished friend of the Migration Museum Project, was written shortly after his visit to Adopting Britain, the exhibition at the Southbank Centre to which the Migration Museum Project has been a proud contributor.
Migration is always presented as a story of numbers. It goes as follows: that this is a small island, hordes of people are always wanting to come here for its riches, and it just cannot take any more.
I have been hearing this story ever since I arrived here in January 1969. At that time, of course, immigration meant coloured immigration. Now that nobody in Britain is racist, or nobody admits to being a racist, people who talk about this overcrowded island being swamped with marauding migrants seeking benefits go to great lengths to say it is not about race, just numbers. How a country should regulate migration is a legitimate subject to debate, of course, but this obsession with numbers means we have missed out on one central fact: that at the end of the day migration is about people, not numbers – it is a series of short stories about individuals who come with their customs, styles, cuisine, beliefs and ideas, and about their often very varied interaction with the host community.
The starting point of the ‘Adopting Britain’ exhibition in the Spirit Level at the Royal Festival Hall, London. The exhibition, curated by the Southbank Centre and Counterpoint Arts, features many of the Migration Museum Project’s ‘100 Images of Migration’ and also its ‘Keepsakes’ project. This photo shows the starting point of the exhibition; it was taken a few days into the exhibition.
The same starting point to the exhibition, but several weeks later. The Southbank Centre printed 5,000 of the disks featured (colour coded depending on whether you migrated here from elsewhere, your parents did, your grandparents did, or nobody in your family did) – visitors are invited to fill them in before entering the exhibition.
And this is where the exhibition Adopting Britain: 70 Years of Migration, currently on show at the Southbank Centre, is so fascinating. Going round the exhibition was like a walk down memory lane for me. For example, there is a marvellous video which juxtaposes footage of immigrants from different countries with that of Enoch Powell delivering, and later reflecting on, his infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech.
How could I forget Enoch? I arrived little more than six months after that speech. In it the Conservative MP forecast bloodshed and ruin as a result of coloured immigrants flooding into the country, and quoted a constituent telling him that ‘In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man’. Many believed Powell was right. What is more, just days before I arrived, Powell had had a famous television duel with David Frost. The confident expectation was that Frost, the Jeremy Paxman of his age, would nail Powell. In fact, it was Powell who got the better of Frost and made sure the debate about immigration was conducted on his own terms.
Enoch Powell, the Conservative MP for Wolverhampton South West (a seat he held from 1950 to 1974). A brilliant orator, he gave his infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech in 1968 and was sacked from the cabinet as a result. Part of this speech is on display in ‘Adopting Britain’ in a video produced by students at the University of Leicester’s School of Museum Studies, where ‘100 Images of Migration’ was re-curated in 2014–15.
I was to realise how deeply he had influenced this country when, just over a decade later, I was returning home one dank winter evening from reporting a football match for The Sunday Times. I was taunted by young white football fans who were sharing my train carriage. They could not believe a ‘Paki’ like me was not managing the corner store and asked me what I thought of Powell – their taunting was followed by other football fans, who assaulted me. When I told them I thought Powell was a great Greek scholar, they found that difficult to believe. It was clear they only thought of him as the man who had first brought up the issue of coloured immigration. As it happened, I had a very pleasant interaction with Powell, persuading him to review a book for a magazine I edited.
Two schoolchildren reading the caption for ‘Yasser’, a photograph by Dharmendra Patel which is part of the Migration Museum Project’s ‘100 Images of Migration’.
Although it was hardly his intention, in a way Powell played a part in my adopting this country. I came not as an economic migrant – indeed, today I would be financially much better off in the land of my birth – but because I wanted to be a writer; and this country provided me with that opportunity. Others have come for very different reasons and some, such as the ones flooding in now from Libya, because they have no other choice. But, whatever the reason, they have adopted and also changed this country, and this exhibition provides a glimpse of what has happened in the last 70 years. It can only be a glimpse – for this is a vast, complex, story – but, because it moves the focus away from the constant obsession with numbers onto showing us how people live, it is both immensely educative and very reassuring.
Mihir Bose is a distinguished friend of the Migration Museum Project and an award-winning journalist and author. Adopting Britain was at the Southbank Centre from April until September 2015.
