Tag Archives: Songs of Seven Dials

London Calling Part 2

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A Question of Identity

In my last post, I spent quite a lot of time thinking about the word ‘intimacy’ as use by Matt Houlbrook in Songs of Seven Dials, and how this use might apply to one of my own current projects. In this post, I want to focus on another word that Houlbrook uses, namely ‘cosmopolitan’, this time not in relation to anything I am currently writing, but rather in relation to a piece of historical work that I am still, largely, trying to avoid.

Houlbrook uses ‘cosmopolitan’ frequently to describe the population of Seven Dials. By applying it to this working-class neighbourhood in place of the perhaps more easily parsed ‘diverse’, Houlbrook highlights a central element of his argument about the racial makeup of the area as exemplified by one of his protagonists, Jim Kitten. Kitten, originally from Sierra Leone, was, as Houlbrook notes on a number of occasions, both Black and a British imperial subject. This duality appears to have been common among the denizens of the Kittens’ café, as well as some of the legal team who helped bring their libel case.

In demonstrating how Seven Dials was, however briefly, a ‘Black Colony’, in which interracial marriage and trans-imperial sociability were both accepted facts of daily life, Houlbrook offers an important corrective to the dominant image of Britain in general and London in particular in the 1920s and 1930s as white. Imperial migration in the period meant that any major city in Britain had its share of non-white residents seeking to make successful lives, including regular work, domestic security and the enjoyment of leisure. While the story Houlbrook tells is one of dreams thwarted by vested commercial interests, problematic local politics and a vituperative press, his depiction of the Kittens’ café points to the ways in which these aspirations were as important to the shaping of British society and culture in the first half of the twentieth century as the political rise of a self-made Yorkshireman like Bracewell Smith or the avant-garde experiments of the Cave club.

However, in the period that is Houlbrook’s focus, cosmopolitanism was about more than diversity of skin colour and class. It was also a term of disparagement, one with implicitly antisemitic overtones. It was used in popular culture to signify a rootlessness defined by the figure of ‘the Jew’, whose loyalty was deemed to lie with their co-religionists, rather than then nation. The Jewish capitalist with ‘no conscience and no fatherland’, [1] as evoked by John Buchan in The Thirty-Nine Steps, haunted the imagination of the 1920s and 1930s and shaped the politics of antisemites such as Sir William Joynson-Hicks, who served as Home Secretary from 1924 to 1929. Joynson-Hicks’ policies on migration were, as George Monbiot has recently pointed out, were designed to exclude Jewish refugees who, he believed, ‘put their Jewish or foreign nationality before their English nationality’.

Which brings me, in a rather roundabout way, to the history of my own family. Because, like Monbiot, I am a descendant of Samuel and Anne Glückstein, whose son Monte and son-in-law Barnett Salmon, founded Lyons & Co. in 1887. And Jim Kitten worked, at least for a short period, at Cadby Hall, the four-hectare complex that formed the company’s headquarters in Hammersmith, where baked goods were made overnight to be shipped out in liveried trucks across the city. Houlbrook uses this association to set the Kittens’ café in counterpoint to Lyons Corner House, the most visible symbol of a firm that, in the first half of the twentieth century, ‘was woven into the fabric of British life’.[2]  He describes Lyons’ teashops as ‘resolutely middlebrow’, ‘exemplify[ing] an increasingly demotic culture of dining out’ but still ‘underpinned by the unseen labour of a cosmopolitan workforce’. (20-21) All of which is undoubtedly true, but rather overlooks the history of Lyons’ itself as an business founded by those who might be considered members of that cosmopolitan workforce, not so very different from the ‘Italian, Belgian, Greek or Jewish entrepreneurs’ who set up shops and eating-houses in Seven Dials to provide for the area’s residence.(30) They were, after all, also migrants from overseas, looking to find stability and a better life in London. Lehmann Glückstein, Samuel’s father, was born in Jever in what is now north Germany; Samuel in Rheinberg, near the border with the Netherlands. The family arrived in London in 1843, via the Netherlands and Belgium, fleeing religious persecution, debt and accusations of fraud. Initially establishing themselves in Whitechapel, then ‘fast becoming a Jewish ghetto’ [3] and with a reputation for poverty and crime not unlike that of Seven Dials, it would be another half century before the first tea shop opened, on the back of a successful sweetshop and tobacconist business.

For me, these similarities between the Kittens and the Glücksteins raises complex and sometimes uncomfortable questions about how and why one family were able to succeed in their entrepreneurial efforts where the other ultimately failed. Because succeed the Glücksteins did, amassing business empire that, at its height, included the Strand Palace Hotel, the Trocadero and the Wimpy Bar chain, as well as the Lyons’ tea shops and food brand. Today the descendants of Lehmann and his wife Helena include chefs and television personalities, lawyers, bankers, journalists, artists, playwrights, doctors, entrepreneurs and at least two historians. The family’s success both derives from and reflects integration with British culture and identity, even as the many in the family held on to their Jewish faith. As Thomas Harding notes of descendants he spoke to when research his history of the family, ‘they all came across as confident, secure and possessing a profound sense of belonging.’ (my emphasis) [4].

Integration was important to the Glucksteins (as they became) because, unlike Jim Kitten, they arrived in Britain as migrants without claim to a British imperial identity. Samuel, the family’s vanguard, spoke no English and had no service to the British state in a world war to present as credentials for acceptance. Their claim to a sense of Britishness was far more fragile and needed to be constructed in large part through a corporate identity that deliberately adopted the name of its junior partner because it did not sound Jewish or German. Jim and Emily Kitten’s business, by comparison, appears to have been able to define itself as a meeting place for the Black community in Seven Dials because the Kittens felt able to lay claim to a British identity separate from their work, Jim through imperial subjecthood, Emily as a white native. Their decision to challenge John Bull in court over its characterisation of their café as a criminal hub suggests not simply an unwillingness but an outright refusal to mask their identity as a Black business for commercial ends.

At one level, it might seem simply a matter of racism that ensured the success of one and the failure of another. The Glucksteins could mask their origins and present as white Europeans in a way that Kitten could not. Yet antisemitic prejudice in Britain throughout this period was as vicious as anti-Black racism in this period. Comparing Lyons and Co. and the Kittens’ café brings to the fore the extent to which choices about whether to accommodate or resist prejudice played a role. Such choices, I would argue, were conditioned by the extent to which the Glucksteins and the Kittens felt themselves to be British. This in turn suggests that the barriers to success in the British imperial context of the early twentieth century were more complicated than simply a question of skin colour.

There is also question of timing and economics. There were more opportunities available to economic migrants in the nineteenth century than in the leaner years after the First World War, although the ease of movement of people increased in the later period. Whatever the reason for the different outcomes for the businesses, what struck me reading Songs of Seven Dials is the ways in which the Kittens’ café and Lyons are not simply examples of social hierarchy in London hospitality of the 1920s and ‘30s, but rather two sides of a coin. Both are stories of migrants using the sociability of hospitality to anchor themselves in the metropole. Both are stories of the negotiation of prejudice, not necessarily successfully. Above all, both are stories of what it meant to be British in the 19th and 20th centuries, who belonged, in what spaces and on what terms.

This last is, of course, a central question motivating Houlbrook’s work in Songs of Seven Dials. Bringing the Kittens’ café more directly into conversation with Lyons’ has the potential, I think, to push his arguments beyond the boundaries of the district, or even London, and to think more granularly about the definitions of the ‘Black Colony’ as part of a modern cosmopolitan culture. It also, of course, has the potential to speak, as Houlbrook suggests, to questions – about migration and belonging, sociability and identity – that are central to contemporary political debates.

I am still resisting getting drawn into more work relating to my family history, mainly because I already have too many projects on the go. But reading Songs of Seven Dials has given me all sorts of ideas about the social significance of that history and directions I might take any future research. In other words, it is a book that made me think and will, I predict, continue to do so for a long time to come.

[1] John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps (Richmond, Surrey: Alma Classics, 2017; first published Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1915), p.10

[2] Thomas Harding, Legacy: One Family, a Cup of Tea, and the Company That Took on the World  (London: William Heinemann, 2019), p.xxi.

[3] Harding, Legacy, p.25.

[4] Ibid., p.471.

London Calling Part 1

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Welcome to Seven Dials

This review has taken me a while to write. Matt Houlbrook’s Songs of Seven Dials: An intimate history of 1920s and 1930s London turns out to be so rich that I have had to split my responses to it into two posts. This first post will be a slightly more formal review alongside a discussion of the ways in which the book is shaping my thinking about The Return of the Soldier, my own tilt at a broad social and cultural history of the legacy of the First World War in Britain. The second, which I will publish in the next couple of weeks, half term permitting, will focus on how the book intersects with my own family history.

In Songs of Seven Dials, Matt Houlbrook sets out to write a social and cultural history of the tiny neighbourhood of Seven Dials which lies between Shaftsbury Avenue, Charing Cross Road and Covent Garden produce market.  Originally defined as a neighbourhood in the seventeenth century, Houlbrook focusses on this ‘shabby cosmopolitan working-class neighbourhood’ (p.3) in the 1920s and ‘30s, a period in which the area was represented as, variously, a crime-ridden slum, London’s ‘Black Colony’, an artistic Bohemia and an opportunity ripe for commercial development. Subtitled an intimate history, the book attempts to focus on the lives of those who actually lived in Seven Dials, alongside those who attempted to impose their social, cultural or economic vision on the area from the outside. Unfortunately, this only has mixed success. The voices of the latter tend to be much louder in the archives than those of the former, and the extensive naming of names can’t always balance the narrative in favour of the historically marginalised who called Seven Dials their home. Even the use of the historic present, which allows Houlbrook to tell the story of Jim and Emily Kitten’s libel case against John Bull with some immediacy, can only go so far in bringing the names of other Seven Dials residents to life, and, at least for this reader, too often got between me and the story being told.

The other stylistic technique that Houlbrook uses to support his analysis is the structure of the book through seven chapters, each one focussing on one or two of the streets radiating out from the central square which make up the district. This structure both emphasise the microhistorical approach that Houlbrook takes to the subject, as well as allowing him to employ circular imagery as a metaphor across the volume as  whole. While this is generally an effective strategy, the inclusion of Long Acre and the Strand in chapter four disrupts the pattern in problematic ways. Both these streets, chosen to represent the locations of the press and legal system that imposed an external narrative on Seven Dials through the Kittens’ libel trial, are not only outside the district itself, but aren’t even accessed directly by Shorts Gardens (Chapter 3) or Great Earl Street (Chapter 5). Subject-wise, the location of the chapter is equally confusing. Houlbrook begins his introduction with the statement ‘It starts with a libel trial, held over three days in the High Court of Justice in February 1927.’ (p.1) Yet it isn’t until Chapter 4 that the reader is given the story of the trial itself, making the background detail of the actors given in the preceding chapters somewhat hard to follow, not least because, while there is a very rough chronology at work, Houlbrook moves back and forth not only across the two decades between 1919 and 1939, but as far back as the 1890s and as far forward as the 1960s.

A key point that this chronological muddying underpins is that the ‘modernisation’ of London, so often associated with the 1920s and 1930s, was far from a tidy linear progress. Grand modernist visions, both economic and architectural, failed. Nostalgia for an imagined past and old stereotypes were evoked to dismantle progressive trends towards diversity and anti-colonialism. At the same time, ‘the foundations of the what would be called gentrification were laid in the 1920s and 1930s, when politicians, planners, and entrepreneurs tried and failed to raze Seve Dials an build a new city from the ground up.’ (p.12) The making of modern London was, as most history is, far more messy than all-too-often romanticised visions of the ‘interwar’ would suggest. Houlbrook makes a powerful case for the need to think about this period as more than just the clichés of ‘The Roaring Twenties’, ‘The Hungry Thirties’, ‘The Interwar’. Yet in titling this story as one primarily about the 1920s and 1930s, contradictions start to emerge. Whatever Houlbrook’s intentions, this categorisation marks the period as ‘a kind of caesura – space between, a time apart’ (p.10), implicitly reinforcing the First World War as a historic paradigm shift in the creation of modernity. At the same time, the war itself is only a tiny part of the story that Houlbrook is telling. Jim Kitten’s wartime internment at Ruhleben and the gunshot wound to his arm he received there echoed through his life and may even have contributed to his death in 1940 (p.230), but they are less important to the story of the years between than his place of birth in Sierra Leone, his marriage to a white Englishwoman and his work as a café owner.

This question of periodisation and the way in which historians use time spans to organise and contain their arguments, particularly as it relates to the early twentieth century, are central to my own thinking about the arguments I am making in The Return of the Soldier. The historiographic tendency to position the years between 1914 and 1918 as not simply a time apart but as a paradigm shift – the end of the long 19th century, the birth of the modern era – has been something that I have tried to resist in all the histories that I have written.  Almost without exception, the men that I wrote about in my first two books were born in the 19th century. The same is true of the men who are the subjects of The Return of the Soldier. They survived the war and went on to live and work throughout the twentieth century. On the one hand, there is a story of social and cultural continuity to be told through these survivals. On the other hand, the very premise of the book is based on these men’s status as having served in the war. The war years were undoubtedly significant in shaping men’s lives and, as a total war, the lives of those who made up the society in which they lived. Bodies and minds were altered by the experiences lived through during the war – by wounds and illness, by separation and deprivation, by unanticipated opportunities for travel and work. The story of social and cultural discontinuity that emerges is a powerful one. How to explore the nature and meaning of the ruptures that war created without isolating the years between 1914 and 1919 as a time apart or the sole defining event in the lives of those who lived through it is the challenge I have been wrestling with since I first began trying to shape my research into  a coherent argument. If individuals lived their lives across the temporal boundaries historians attempt to impose, writing histories that do honour to those lives, and which, as is Houlbrook’s ambition, inform our present, forces us to rethink comforting historic periodisations.

My way of addressing this problem has been to rethink the subtitle of The Return of the Soldier as ‘British First World War Ex-Servicemen and the Making of the Twentieth Century’. The intention is to focus on a discussion of continuity and discontinuity in which the war plays a defining but not an exclusive role, and on the particularity of the lives of these men and those around them, rather than the more abstract categories of ‘the war’, ‘demobilization’ and ‘legacy’. The previous subtitle, ‘The Intimate History of Demobilization in Britain After the First World War’ tried to make this point by invoking the concept of ‘the intimate’, an idea that Houlbrook also uses in his subtitle. Yet I soon discovered that the intimate is a slippery historical category. For Bruno Cabanes it is the study of ‘the relationship of individuals to their own body, to their familiar haunts, and to their family and friends’[1], combining the history of the body with the history of the domestic, an approach exemplified in Joanna Bourke’s Dismembering the Male. Yet Bourke, in her own An Intimate History of Killing, uses the term to indicate as study of subjectivities, the intimacy that of the individual psyche. [2]

In Songs of Seven Dials, intimacy appears to be two-fold. On the one hand, in support of his argument that Seven Dials in the 1920s and 30s was a place of residence and work rather than simply the opportunity for improvement, development or entertainment that many imagined and represented it as, Houlbrook peoples his history with named individuals, located in specific places of residence and types of work. This is the intimacy of the reader with the specific historical actors. It is enabled by the digitization of the 1911 and 1921 census records, which Houlbrook uses, alongside local newspaper records, to great effect. The problem is that the level of intimacy achieved remains limited. While Houlbrook can give names and occupations to the residents of Seven Dials, these records don’t give deeper insight into their lives. Naming is, of course, vital to the process of remembering, but the only way that Houlbrook can give us more than government records offer in relation to people about whom there are few reflexive records is through speculation. He does this with care, and it is here that the historic present is most effective, but it remains speculation nonetheless. Like the tense, I found it got between me and the story being told, making it more distant rather than more intimate.

Where Houlbrook does convince with his claims to writing an intimate history is through the physical intimacy he evokes. Even without reliable images of many of the places he writes about, he conjures the cramped, noisy, sometimes squalid, always vivid nature of the streets, houses and businesses that make up this tiny pocket of London. As becomes clear in the conclusion, these are streets that Houlbrook has walked himself many times as he sought to understand how it transformed from a place ill-repute to the gentrified site of up-market commerce that it is today. It is the place, not the people, which makes this history feel intimate, pointing to the many forms of intimacy that the historian might seek to explore.

This multiplicity in meanings of the intimate is important for my thinking about ex-servicemen’s return for at least one chapter of The Return of the Soldier. ‘Returning Home’, which I am currently working up into my sample chapter for agents and publishers, is divided into two sections, ‘People’ and ‘Places’. Thinking of each as facets of an intimate historical appraoch is proving extremely helpful for working out how the chapter functions as a whole and what sort of evidence I need to support my argument about the long-term significance of ex-service return. At the same time, it is helping me to understand that some of my other chapters may not be intimate histories. Trying to force the ‘Returning to Work’ chapter into this conceptual box may be why I have been struggling so hard to make it work for so long.

So I return to the redrafting process with a new sense of direction having read Songs of Seven Dials. But first I need to grapple with the relationship between Houlbrook’s text and my own family’s history, a question which has been haunting me almost since I first picked up the book and which will form the subject of my next post.

[1] Bruno Cabanes, ‘Negotiating Intimacy in the Shadow of War (France, 1914-1920s)’, French Politics, Culture & Society 31(1): Spring 2013, 13.

[2] Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion Books, 1996); Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare (London: Granta Books, 1999).