Return to The Box – Three Imaginary Boys

The next handful of photos from The Box.

It’s certainly in Britain – it has postcard printing on the reverse including “British Made”. It has the feel of a South coast town – maybe Kent. Or perhaps further West. I don’t recognise the people – if anyone is related it’s the boy. It could be my grandfather, Ian, whose box this was. On the back of the photo in pencil is written I Harris in childish, non-joined-up handwriting.

The swimming costumes are old-fashionedly modest one-pieces. The man on the right’s has something written on it – tantalisingly all we can see under his folded arms is “S S”. His Chaplin (or perhaps slightly broader than Chaplin) moustache is of a time. The man on the left is pretty dench.

In the background are equally modestly dressed female bathers. The beach looks fairly rammed and tents or huts take up plenty of space. The scene is redolent of Victorian England though probably it is the early 20s (if that boy is my grandfather – who was born in 1915). The house on the right looks pre-Victorian, probably Georgian.

It’s striking that the photographer is in the water too, so presumably he’s using light-weight equipment without a tripod. His (I assume) composition is slightly eccentric with nearly half the shot made up of shallow sea.

In the sea is the number T668. It doesn’t feel like it’s on the surface of the print. There are tiny white dots in the figures as if it’s been scratched into something. No idea what T668 signifies.

This next one has also got postcard printing on the back but no handwriting: Post Card – For Correspondence – Address Only. There is just an inky fingerprint – adult – my grandfather’s I hope.

I don’t recognise the boy – he looks less like my family than the bathing boy above.

The sleeves of his knitted jumper are noticeably short – bad knitter or hand-me-down? He has leather boots, shorts, and that cap, so perfect for driving.

The cycleable car is very old fashioned – more carriage than automobile, with its carriage lantern, thin wheels and boxy body-work. It is nicely finished with its striping, detailed radiator and number plate. So quite a posh looking toy.

It looks like he’s in a front garden, with no fence between it and the street, US-style. No sign of big-boy cars in the road. An open, quiet corner of a bygone age.

These boys I do recognise for sure – and their parents. The taller boy is my grandfather so this must be around 1926/7. The shorter one is his brother Henry, born 1921. Henry became a gardener. He had a magical death – went to White Hart Lane with one of his sons for football and Spurs actually won; went home and did his garden; took a snooze in his favourite armchair – and never woke up again. Way to go. And a lovely man.

The father is Choc Harris (name origin was in The Box). He was a working class man from Dagenham, a cabinetmaker.

The mother, my great-grandmother Marie, was profoundly deaf. I believe this made Ian’s aka Pop’s upbringing difficult in some ways. I think she was quite angry. Her maiden name was Cohen which probably explains how come it is her line I can follow furthest back in the family tree I have been working on sporadically for some years. Her line currently goes back to 1544 in Prague. If she had a religious lineage, perhaps they keep much better records. Her antecedents founded both UCL (university, with Jeremy Bentham) and UCH (hospital) in London where both my boys were born.

Her face is very reminiscent of my grandfather as an adult. She looks slightly taller than my great-grandfather and fairly masculine. They were both born in 1886, making them about 40 in this photo. It looks like they are in a back garden, which may be in Becontree, Essex.

My grandfather, with a hand on both their shoulders, seems to be holding the family together. He’s the smartly dressed one in the group with a jacket and expansive wings-of-a-dove collar (ironic, as in later life he never gave a stuff about what he wore, in contrast to the other (German) grandpa who was positively dapper). He is the darker, solid centre among their pale clothes, the anchor.

Dispatch from The Box

The daily thing is not quite working for me, so for this dispatch from The Box I’ve selected the next two documents (a telegram and a hand-written letter) and the next two photographs to make up a bit for the inactivity of the last three days.

This one is 1963 or 1964. That’s me on the right, my dad on the left. It was taken at 2A Selvage Lane, Mill Hill, London NW7 (that was the full extent of the postcode back then), my childhood home. I remember those curtains from later but not the drawers. My dad’s haircut and glasses look pretty 60s to me, the vestiges of 50s quiff styles with regard to the hair, a predictive touch of the Ipcress File in those specs.

The second photo looks like a school assembly. The Post Card / Correspondence / Address print on the back doesn’t give too many clues as to the vintage. My grandfather Ian would have been this age in the early 20s but this has more the 40s feel about it so it’s possible it is my mum’s school (except she was at an all-girls school for most of her school career) or my uncle John’s. The Chinese lanterns are an odd touch – was the hall decorated specially or was this not a school hall? It looks like they may be watching a performance, with which several are clearly engaging emotionally and almost all are giving their attention. Standing adults punctuate the scene, they have the teacher vibe. The crowd is mixed boys and girls, though with big blocks of boys together. Many seem in school uniform of some kind; lots of hats are being worn indoors, especially by the girls. I can only see one child in glasses (John Lennon-style – extreme right, half-way up). There are no non-white kids in sight.

This is a telegram from my grandfather Ian (when he was still called Isadore in 1940 – he changed his name by deed poll on 14th October 1949 at a cost of ten shillings. His hit-rate on job applications immediately went up.) The off-the-shelf design of the celebratory telegram form is a bit more holiday than Watford. So this was sent from Watford where my mum was born (not sure why, I think they were still living in Dagenham – maybe the war-time demands on hospitals meant you had to travel further to give birth).

In March 1940 Hitler was planning the invasion of Norway and Denmark. Meat rationing had just started in Britain. A German air raid on Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands resulted in the first British civilian casualties of the war. Within two months Dunkirk will be under way and by September the Blitz will be unleashed.

On 26th March 1940, the day after my mother’s birth, this telegram is sent home to my great-grandmother in Dagenham, 30 miles away to the east. Is 6.54 the time? morning? how did he pull that off?

The concision is almost poetic: GIRL BOTH FINE

Now 79 years on there’s some irony and poignancy in the message. The younger is far from fine. She’s only a couple of days out of another hospital – UCH in London which two of said great-grandmother’s forebears were involved in founding in 1834, one of whom served as its treasurer for 18 years. Both my sons were born at University College Hospital.

This address in Paddington where my grandmother Rita lived was above A & J Falk, a tobacconist owned by her father (Jacob Falk).  This letter is written a month before her marriage – see wedding menu at Murray’s in first Box post. So by 1938 postcodes in London had evolved from London W to the likes to London W.2 but not yet added the next 3 characters of the modern postcode.

Although it is addressed to My Dear Ma I think this is to her prospective mother-in-law, the same as the telegram above. Her mother-in-law-to-be was profoundly deaf and that I believe made her life really difficult, and her children’s – Isadore and Henry referred to in this letter. Rita was born in June 1916 so had just turned 22 when she wrote this.

The fact that she is fantasising about having her own dressing table aligns well with the Rita I knew – she always had pretty objects on her dressing table, plenty of silver on the art deco wooden (walnut?) piece of mirrored furniture. She always used the acronym P.G. Cheerio I don’t recall her saying.

It was thoughtful of her to remember Henry, Ian’s younger brother. He was a lovely bloke and had one of the most splendid deaths I know. He goes to White Hart Lane with his son to watch a Spurs match and they win. He goes home and tinkers a bit in his garden – his profession was as a gardener. He goes in to have a rest in the armchair in front of the fireplace. He falls asleep. Forever. Way to go…

 

 

Dive into The Box

Here are the first three photos from The Box

The photos and documents in The Box seem to belong to both Ian Harris (my maternal grandfather) and Samuel ‘Choc’ Harris (his father). Ian was born in 1915. Choc in 1886. As a child, I did get to meet Choc and his wife, Marie. He died in 1977; Ian died in 2004.

Neither of the dapper young men in this photograph remind me facially of any family members. They are evidently on a camping trip, probably in England, given the tent is supplied by Smith & Co. They seem to be part of a club or team in light of the casual uniform they are sporting. I’m not sure when those huge collars, thin belts and high-waisted trousers were in vogue – I guess the interwar years. The shoes are similar to a rather eccentric pair of Adidas my younger son has just acquired online – that’s fashion for you, round and round.

This one has a hand-written note in ink on the reverse.

The 3rd Eleven football team. October 1930 – Ian would have been 15 so it could well be his team. U Coopers? There’s a school called The Coopers’ Company & Coborn School in St. Marys Lane, Upminster just 6 miles from where Ian grew up in Becontree or Dagenham, East London. However in 1930 it was still located at 86 Bow Road in the East End (Bow, London E3) which is 18 miles further into the city, due west. It’s possible Ian went to school there.

I’m pretty certain that is Ian front row, 2nd from right with his right foot almost touching the ball. The 1930s boots make a stark contrast with his great-grandson’s boots who plays for Fulham FC. The goalie’s polo-neck is also charmingly period. Choc must have trained Ian up although the 3rd Eleven status indicates football was not his passion – as an adult I only ever saw him swim to keep fit.

This is a curious find. On the back my grandfather has written his name in pencil in what looks like his childhood script:

So presumably he was given this around 1920 which makes sense, in the immediate aftermath of the Great War. Choc was 28 at the outbreak of the war – I’m not sure if he served. He was a cabinet maker and quite slight of build when I knew him in his old age. I guess somewhere among these 21 is a blood relative.

Why the two civilians at the heart of the military unit? Perhaps they were patrons or sponsors of some kind? Perhaps they headed an institution or school associated with the unit?

The man doesn’t look that much older than the soldiers. The pair of them have clearly dressed up for the occasion of a formal photograph session at Empire Studio(s).

There’s still an Empire Studio located between Hackney and Bethnal Green, East London, on the top floor of the Empire building. Both Empire Studio and Empire Studios are listed on this Photographers of Great Britain and Ireland (1840-1940) website.

Details that stand out include the cane or swagger stick (front, 2nd from L); the corporal with the darker complexion (front, 2nd from R); the uniform with the wide lapels and broad ties (front, far R); the jaunty angle a number of them wear their cap, something we tend to think of as American.

Family Tree

My engagement with the Family Tree began when I started to sketch it out based on a conversation with my paternal grandmother. Here is a picture of her that came to light just this weekend – being a rainy one, I spent much of it working on the online version of the Tree.

Dora

Originally I drew it out on an A1 piece of graph paper with a pencil. I went on to interview my maternal grandmother and grandfather, adding to the annotated freehand Tree. In time I added my wife’s Irish family, the backbone of that bit coming from a wander around an old Co. Louth cemetery with a notebook in hand.

In 2013, to enable me to share it with an older relative abroad I copied the handwritten diagram into a piece of easily accessible software. When I started the analogue Tree I expected to get back at best 3 or 4 generations based on living memory. As my family (to the best of my knowledge) were from – besides England – Germany, Poland, USA, Netherlands and possibly other bits of Eastern Europe, a peripatetic lot, I pictured lost and destroyed records where there even were records. These stones rolled and bureaucracy would probably not have been able to keep pace. However the advantage of the digital Tree is that it connects to other digital Trees. You can work your way back like a logic puzzle. I made my way back, obsessively working till the early hours, to 1730 …to 1544 …to 1499! 1499 in Prague.

I now have a Tree with 651 leaves (346 representing deceased family members). Exactly 50/50 male/female. The most common names: Patrick and Sarah. Birthplaces from Australia to Italy. Places of death from Kazakhstan to Israel. The highlights include finding…

• 5 Sirs
• 2 MPs
• 1 privy councillor
• a link to the Faroe Isles
• the founders of University College Hospital, London – where both my kids were born
• the co-founders of University College London – where I have been hanging out this very day
• the first Jew to become an English barrister
• the first Jew to become an English Baronet
• the founder of JFS (the Jewish Free School)
• a mysterious family branch in the USA
• and at the end of this weekend’s activities an international Communist leader…

Karl Radek , who crossed paths with the likes of Rosa Luxemburg and Walter Rathenau, travelled on the famous sealed train from Switzerland to Russia with Lenin (1917), and did time in Moabit prison in Berlin after the Spartacist Uprising in Germany (1919). An honest to goodness 100% bona fide revolutionary. He totally looks the part too…

Karl

A & M

I’ve been spending the weekend at the Krakow Film Festival in Poland. While I was in the hood I thought I’d have a go at finding my great-grandparents’ house which is somewhere in a town about 50km East of Krakow. My grand-mother died a few years ago in London and with her went the address. So all I had to go on, beside the name of the town, was a description, based on memories of 75 years ago, of how my distant cousin (of my father’s generation) used to get to the house from the train station with all the timings in horse and cart terms; a rough memory of a street name from the Communist era incorporating the glorious name of papa Stalin; and A&M – the letters of my great-grandparents’ first names which (the one concrete fact) were on a shield or crest high on the house.

So I set off, with my older son, at 10 this morning in some wheels organised by Adam, one of the friendly admins of the Dragonforum documentary workshop. You’re into rural Poland within minutes of leaving the city centre. I was nervous for some reason – I knew we had very little to go on and my phone research of the previous day had drawn blanks and stonewalling, I didn’t want to disappoint or be disappointed or lose the link with the family home where eggs were kept in sinks in the basement and from which my grandmother set off on rides on the first bicycle in the town. Scraps of stories, not quite accurate, Chinese whispered through the family, filtered by old age and post-war reticence.

I started with my Hamburg cousin’s three quarters of a century old description of the 15 minute cart ride from the nearest station (which bore another name than the town). We got out where my best guess was, combining the description (sent via Facebook, fairplay to Anni for being so wired at her age) and Googlemaps. I’d been told the crest was near a balcony and the building on a corner. The first corner looked promising but no initials. The diagonally opposite corner looked equally possible. More or less every balconied building felt warm – the right age of building, crying out for a crest. After 40 minutes of searching the confidence was ebbing. I rang my dad’s cousin who had found and visited the house in the mid 80s but didn’t know the address. Nor whether the house was in fact on a corner. And doubted there was a balcony as the owner had spotted him and called down from a window. So all I had left was the initialed crest. And the owner in the 80s’ name – which was not in the phonebook. And the Stalin street scrap.

We trawled every main street (three) of the sleepy Sunday town whilst the inhabitants stood around the church listening to the amplified service playing I imagine to a packed house of God-fearing Catholics inside. I know my great-grandmother was killed in this town in the view of others and I pictured it in the under-reconstruction main square with its piles of cobbles, mass drifting over and my strapping half Irish-Catholic son standing with unconscious strength on its new stones in his Leinster top, blue as the sky.

No joy. So we hit the back streets. Not a crest, shield or initialled plaque in the place. It was getting hotter. 26 degrees the day we arrived, 12 the next day, back over 20 today, fluctuating like my confidence in finding this link. We passed a corner shop. Junior needed a Coke (why do they mainly sell Pepsi in this country being one of his preoccupations of the weekend). My other half had given one piece of advice at the outset of the day by text – talk to people. I talked to the middle-aged female shop keeper, she had a bit of English (unlike the old lady on the corner I’d just tried). Do you know where there used to be a video sklep? (I’d heard that sometime in or after the 80s the ground floor had been turned into a video store). Or do you know where Stalingradska was in the Commiedays? She asked a local fella hanging out by her doorway. A contrary barman from the opposite corner approached. The shopkeeper urged them to help. They went off into Andrej’s bar to find an old map. We waited expectantly. A break? They failed to reappear, the shopkeeper chased, they reluctantly got their shit together, had a quick somewhat heated debate and eventually, again at the helpful shopkeeper’s urging, the hanging-in-the-shop fella started to lead us off to where they’d concluded the Stalin street used to be. We followed in silence, he spoke little English, we spoke less Polish (like not a single word except Sklep, Alkohole and Computery – this last and first turned out to be on the money). Down one of the three bigger streets we’d already tried then off to the left, pulling up on a three way junction, he indicated a not particularly old corner house. I asked him which of the three joining streets was the Stalin one, gave him a few zloty which he was reluctant to take, then walked the length of that street as well as exploring the junction. Nada. We found ourselves back behind the now deserted church. Mission failed. I’d sent some vibes to my grandmother looking for help (I was her favourite first-born after all) but to no avail. So, cut along the side of the church back to the rendez-vous with Machek our taxiguy? Or one last look at that Stalin junction? I dragged us back to the junction, then retraced our steps earlier with the shop-hanger guide… Then out the corner of my eye I spot the only crest in town. A. M. A swirly L for Laub conjoining them. What a moment of pure soaring joy. “That’s the first time I’ve seen a prayer answered” says A and L’s great-great-grandson.

We contemplate the letters. Look at the door (beside the Computery Sklep) but there’s no bell and it looks pretty unihabited. I spot something in the red brick beside the door – some scratched graffti dated June 1922. My grandmother’s childhood era. Any more? No, but high up, not easily noticed, a bell. I ring. Nothing. Then some movement. A boy the age of my son comes to the door. After a bit of explanation (and he had heard tell of the strange Englishman Marcel’s 1980s visit) he cautiously let us in, his parents weren’t around, and allowed us to get a feel for the place with its high but shallow rooms. I didn’t push to see the egg basement.

We headed back up the hill to the square. I now knew for sure Dora’s feet had pounded this trail. And I felt she’d be pleased we’d made the effort to see the place she spoke of with affection til her last days despite what had happened there. I was glad to have brought their great-great-grandson to be seen by A & M and to have joined that link.

Back to the Fatherland 2

…so I headed down to the city museum – nothing from the 20th century covered, they pointed me to the Zeitgeschichtliches Forum Leipzig (Forum of Contemporary History) – that covers from 1945 onwards focusing on the GDR. So by any standards a big gap in their city history, the 30s and 40s an official blank. But I had a break through. In the back of the museum shop I found a facsimile map of the city from 1938 – the year my grand-parents got the helloutta here and arrived in London. Promenadenstrasse wasn’t renamed after a Soviet leader but after an artist socialist by nature, Käthe Kollwitz, her inherent empathy for the less fortunate evident throughout her life’s work. As soon as I’d figured out how the old map mapped onto the new I headed over. The route took me from the old town hall past the famous Thomaskirche, last resting place of JS Bach, and then past the site of the Community Synagogue of Leipzig, burnt down on Kristallnacht in November 1938. They burnt the place down and then charged the Jews for the demolition costs. The lost 14,000 (not including never-to-be descendants) are commemorated by the empty chairs of the congregation in dull bronze set out on a flat blank concrete base. When I got to 16 Promenadenstrasse where my paternal grandparents lived from (I think) 1935 to 1938 that too was flat, blank, empty. A carpark, albeit a tranquil one shaded by trees and bathed in dappled autumnal light on my special visit. I can see from no. 14 the kind of building it probably was, a typically elegant Leipziger apartment in a tasteful neighbourhood. My grandfather was always a snappy dresser – like my youngest brother and my older son (that gene skipped me for better or worse) – so I can picture him easily in these streets.

The view from No. 1 Nordplatz

Next stop was Nordplatz, slightly further out from the centre, where he lived as a bachelor with his older sister’s family. No. 1 proved to be all present and correct, with a beautiful view over St. Michaelis church, a Gothicky affair built between 1901 and 1905, and the green beside it. Another smart apartment building where I stood on the threshold trodden by Nat Gewurtz (later Gee, 1938 was a good year for dumping German surnames) and his sister Else Wolf, peering in to the interior which has evidently been revamped in recent times. I was glad to see he’d enjoyed such a beautiful and calm home. From there to Promenadenstrasse – then next stop 5 Highbury Grove.

My next stop was the address on the Nazi birth certificate, 84 Biedermannstrasse, Sankt Elisabeth Krankenhaus, the Catholic hospital where my father was born. It was only a few blocks south of MDR (Mittel Deutsch Rundfunk), the main broadcaster in the region where I spoke yesterday on Crossmedia and Broadcaster Online Strategy to an audience primarily of factual film-makers which also included a State Minister of Saxony and the President of German/French broadcaster Arte. I spoke among other things about Surgery Live, which I reckon many of them thought had come from another planet. Seven Days was from another galaxy. From the feedback I received afterward it seems my passion for the possibilities of interactive, networked media and the boldness of our ambition at the very least landed home even if the out-thereness of Channel 4’s approach and the freedoms of British culture were somewhat alien to some of the Euros. I should have mentioned another of my projects which I also spoke about in my presentation, One Born Every Minute, because that would have given me an easier segue back to the maternity unit at Sankt Elisabeth Hospital. On arrival it was clear it has been recently refurbished so fear of disappearance returned. I found the maternity unit now in a clean modern block. A chat with the receptionist soon established that the original maternity block still stood and as I roamed the corridors of the art deco building I stumbled across the original foundation stone dated 1930. That meant when my father was born there it was an equally state of the art set-up. An irony of course was that he never got to see the place himself again after his blurry-eyed first days. He died a few years after the uprising that started in Leipzig and ended with the Fall of the Wall, never getting/taking the opportunity to come back.

I’ve enjoyed a couple of days with the presence of my grand-father and father around me. I see a tiny sticker on the wall of the hospital saying “I will wait for you” (in English). I spot a sparrow (my favourite bird, rather thin on the ground these days in England) hanging around. A warm autumn sunshine shines down from a perfect azure sky the whole weekend, contrary to the usually reliable information on my WeatherPro iPhone app, created by German-based MeteoGroup with a Teutonic regard for precision.

{2nd photo courtesy of Leipzigpost}

Back to the Fatherland

I’ve just arrived for the first time in Leipzig in Saxony in East Germany in Europe in the World in the Solar System (I remember doing those very long addresses looking up out of my bedroom window aged six or seven at 2A Selvage Lane, Mill Hill, London, England, UK, Europe, etc.) for Dok Leipzig, the 53rd of this documentary film festival making it (one of?) the oldest film fest(s) in Deutschland. I’m speaking tomorrow about multiplatform factual TV with some folk from Arte (one of the few Eurobroadcasters consistently exploring the space) and Finland’s YLE, as well as hooking up with various documentary-makers with eyes on the interactive and networked. There’s a few fellow Brits around like Andy Glynne of DFG and Mark Atkin of Documentary Campus. But that’s getting towards the point of my post. These memories of childhood, the home I shared with my father before The Big Split, reflections on Germany and especially Leipzig. Because in some ways I’m not a fellow Brit. My dad was born in this city. In 1937. His birth certificate says Biedermanstrasse 84 – thought that was his home, Google-mapped it last night, turned out to be the Catholic hospital where he was born. The certificate which I have at the back of my filing cabinet in a file called Odds & Sods has a little swastika on it. So I’m back in the Vaterland.

My plan – I’ve managed to track down the address where my grandparents lived until they hightailed it outta here in ’38. Got it from a cousin in Hamburg who was 13 at the time. Also got the address where my grandfather lived before he was married, with his older sister. The former doesn’t show up on Google maps – hoping the Commies changed the name to Leninstrasse or something, then it got changed back to a different name after the Fall of the Wall. Will investigate tomorrow at the city museum or find someone old enough to remember where Promenadenstrasse was. The latter I haven’t had a chance to check out yet online – I’m saving it up for later, delayed gratification of the old school.

So I’ll report back and continue later/tomorrow with how I’ve gotten on…

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