Gluck

by Diana Souhami

  he said very solemnly ‘You know why, don’t you?’ and I said ‘Oh yes, of course I do.’ He gave me a beady look and said, ‘the reason is a sexual one.’ I said, ‘I suppose so, the reason for creation is the same as for destruction.’ I like him despite the ‘camp’ of it all’. 9

  Into the flames went details of her attachments to and relationships with Craig, Sybil Cookson, Constance Spry. She burned several portraits of women whom she wanted to forget and most references to her childhood. ‘Anything even vaguely smelling of the past stinks in my nostrils’, she told her new, her true love.

  After 1936 her thoughts, feelings and daily affairs are more fully recorded. The years when she was consumed by Love, the ‘YouWe’ years, from 1936 until 1945, form the second part of her life. For the sake of Love she let go of her own career.

  The last period of her life was from 1945 until her death in 1978. She lived in the Chantry House, Steyning, with the journalist Edith Shackleton Heald, painted in a sporadic way, suffered from frustration about her work and her life – and made others suffer too – fought her grand campaign against the paint manufacturers and then mercifully pushed her way back to the limelight for one last bow when she was seventy-eight: ‘This will after all be my last one-man show and I would like to go out with a bang!’10

  In each phase a woman was central to her life. In the first it was her mother, whom she called ‘The Meteor’, a woman of talent, formidable energy, great kindness, moral strength and unsettling personality. ‘Everything the Meteor touches’, Gluck said of her, ‘always seems to lead to confusion – Even her kind acts. That’s what it is to have a disturbed and unbalanced aura or base – It communicates itself to everything.’11 In the second part it was Nesta Obermer, glittering, rich, adored by society and as elusive as the elegant women Gluck sought to capture in paint. And in the third it was Edith Shackleton Heald, clever, trustworthy, fairminded and loyal, who by her virtues seemed to create more problems for Gluck than she solved. Nor were the three women particularly separate in Gluck’s psyche. They merged, with other women, more peripheral to her life, in some unresolved desire for love and home.

  Gluck wanted to be remembered for her paintings, the investigation she instigated into the quality of artists’ materials and the setting of a British Standard for oil pigments, and the stepped frame she designed. She also wanted her life remembered, problematic though it was. She was, more than most, full of paradoxes and contradictions. ‘You couldn’t’, said Winifred Vye, her housekeeper in old age, ‘say anything absolutely bad about her because then she’d confound you and be nice.… She was just extremely difficult to live with.’

  She was proud, authoritative, obsessive and egotistical, yet dependent in every domestic sense and humble about her work. She was a romantic and yet spent years in an arid campaign about the quality of paint. She felt herself to be a visionary painter and yet some of the best of her work was done to commission for the walls of the sophisticated and rich. She claimed that she ran away from her family, but she kept half their name and was always dependent on them financially. She was a rebel, and a misfit, but staunchly patriotic, politically conservative and good friends with several high court judges including the Master of the Rolls. She was a Jew but wanted to paint the crucifixion of Christ. She was a woman but she dressed as a man. She would call the kitchen staff to account if the housekeeping was a halfpenny out, then give a mere acquaintance £500 to buy a new typewriter. She wanted for nothing in a material sense, and yet allowed herself to be consumed by material concerns. She was unafraid of death and yet hypochondriacal.

  Mercurial, maddening, conspicuous and rebellious, she inspired great love and profound dislike. Perhaps what she most feared was indifference – the coldest death. Her dedication to work was total, even through her fallow years. Her severance from gender, family and religion, her resistance to influence from any particular artist or school of painting, her refusal to exhibit her work except in ‘one-man’ shows were all ways of protecting her artistic integrity. She desired to earn her death through the quality of her work: ‘I do want to reach that haven having a prize in my hand.… Something worthy of the trust that was reposed in me when I was sent out …’12 In reaching her destination with her paintings as her prize, she took a circuitous path – unmapped, thorny and entirely her own.

  PART ONE

  REBELLION

  1895–1936

  TWO

  ‘THE FAMILY’

  No family could have been less attuned to rebellious displays of individualism than the Glucksteins. Patriarchal, dynastic, conformist, insular and proud, they took as their family motto the epigram ‘L’Union Fait La Force’ and featured in their family crest, as a metaphor for unity, a bundle of sticks – taken from a cautionary tract by Aesop on the perils of abandoning the group:

  A husbandman who had a quarrelsome family, after having tried in vain to reconcile them by words, thought he might more readily prevail by example. So he called his sons and bade them lay a bundle of sticks before him. Then having tied them up into a fagot, he told the lads, one after another, to take it up and break it. They all tried, but tried in vain. Then untying the fagot, he gave them sticks to break one by one. This they did with the greatest ease. Then said the father: ‘Thus, my sons, as long as you remain united, you are a match for all your enemies; but differ and separate and you are undone.’

  The Gluckstein family strength was based on shared business and financial interests and a profound belief in the family ideal. They clawed their way up from the East End of London by enterprise and hard work. They began in the tobacco trade and then, in the partnership of Salmon & Gluckstein, created J. Lyons & Company – the vast complex of teashops, Corner House restaurants, the Trocadero in Piccadilly Circus, ‘The Strand’, ‘Regent Palace’ and ‘Cumberland’ hotels and then later the huge food manufacturing and distributing business – Lyons ice-cream, cup-cakes and the rest. They married their cousins and second cousins the Salmons, the Josephs, the Abrahams, out of trust, loyalty and business acumen and because they hardly knew anyone else. They talked of The Family in its extended sense with a big F, the family in its nuclear sense with a little f and of the ‘outside world’, which was viewed with some suspicion. Male members of The Family met daily in business, socially all dined together, worshipped together, played bridge, attended each other’s bar mitzvahs, weddings and funerals. They lived in the same neighbourhood, often in the same street and even, in Canfield Gardens in West Hampstead, in adjacent houses with inter-connecting doors. They named sons and daughters in honour of their grandparents, which led to a bewildering plethora of Isidores, Montagues, Samuels, Josephs, Hannahs and Helenas.

  From the 1880s on they pooled their money in an entity they called The Fund, administered for the benefit of all The Family. It paid for everything: houses, health-care, education, holidays, carriages and cars. Wives and brothers-in-law put in their capital too. No one who participated in The Fund kept private wealth. Individual family members owned little but had all that money can buy. When they, their sons or unmarried daughters died, their capital and houses reverted to The Fund.

  Underpinning this orderly distribution of wealth was a stern moral code. Hard work, educational achievement, parental respect, obedience, family loyalty and above all conformity to the precepts laid down by their elders and learned in childhood – those were the guiding lights. Their civic, military and academic honours, and ever-growing family trees, were recorded in bound volumes and sent to each household. They earned knighthoods, CBEs, OBEs, MBEs, mayoralties and medals. They were QCs, MPs and Councillors. There was no gambling, drinking or philandering. Pleasure was to be found in family affairs, in the honourable wooing of a suitable partner, usually a cousin, or a family week in the Majestic Hotel Vichy, or the Metropole Brighton, or in a game of bridge. There was no place whatsoever for gender bending, or the quest for self-expression, or doomed and startling romantic love, or the company of raffish artists, or the w
earing of outlandish clothes. Such turbulent desires for self-expression, if felt, were no doubt promptly repressed.

  The pioneer of The Family fortunes was Gluck’s grandfather, Samuel Gluckstein. Born in Rheinberg, Prussia, he came to England when he was nineteen in 1840 and lodged with his aunt in Whitechapel in the East End, the ghetto for Jewish immigrants for a hundred years. He married her daughter, his cousin – Hannah Joseph, who had nursed him through a bad illness. She was illiterate and signed her marriage certificate with a mark. In the manner of the time children were born with predictable frequency. They had twelve of whom ten survived.

  To provide for them all he worked first as a cigar salesman then as a cigar manufacturer. When machine-made cigarettes became popular, he set up in partnership with his brother and cousin as general tobacconists. The partnership did not last. He was reputed to be ‘violent and overbearing’. There were rows and, when he wished to withdraw the £2000 capital he claimed to have invested in the business, these rows escalated into a Chancery Division suit for the dissolution of the partnership. The lawsuit lasted a year, involved sixty-nine sworn affidavits, lacerated family unity, broke his health and took them all to the brink of bankruptcy. The partnership was dissolved in 1870 and all the stock – tons of tobacco, cigars, utensils and effects – sold by auction and the assets divided between them.

  Though ill (he died three years later in 1873), he started up in the tobacco business once more, this time in partnership with his trusted son-in-law, Barnett Salmon, and with three of his sons, Isidore, Montague and Gluck’s father, Joseph. They traded under the name of Salmon & Gluckstein. The old man died without seeing the rise in the family fortunes. His sons, aged twenty-two, nineteen and seventeen at the time of his death, built the firm he had founded into an Empire.

  They had seen the internecine effect of family feuds and resolved to avoid them. Which was why they started The Fund. It was not intended primarily as a recipe for wealth, though that was what it became. It was a contract of mutual support, trust and interdependency. ‘L’Union Fait La Force’; ‘Differ and separate and you are undone.’ It was a declaration of responsibility. No member of The Family need struggle alone. In a microcosm they created a kind of socialist economy, a pooling of assets and a distribution of benefits according to what was deemed to be need. But there was nothing widely egalitarian about it. The tie was blood. Membership was through blood, thicker than water or anything else.

  The Fund, which continues in modified form to this day, defied legal definition. It was not a company, not a partnership, not a trust. Rather it was a contractual understanding, based on precedent and what was accepted as fair. Its precepts were not written down in a Constitution, but members took weekly drawings and shares of the profits according to a scale based on age, responsibilities, number of children. Unused drawings went back to The Fund and were divided up between the various capital accounts. Most of life’s contingencies were accounted for in a detailed way: widows were to have the same standard of living as provided by their husbands, boys who won scholarships to Oxford or Cambridge (and only those universities) would have their studies financed. No clause was included for daughters who ran away with their lesbian lovers to paint, smoke pipes and wear men’s clothes.

  Membership of The Fund was voluntary, but few in The Family contracted out, for the advantages were many. And only those in it could become directors of the business. Lineage dictated status when members came to appoint directors, or the Steward of the Fund – the key administrator. Eldest sons had the highest status. Wives and daughters belonged to a world elsewhere. They did no paid work, nor was business discussed in front of them. In the early days, when the going was hard, they rolled cigars in Whitechapel. With wealth, they were expected to supervise their children’s education and the running of the household, play bridge, do a little charitable work, wear elegant clothes and support their husbands at appropriate functions. None of which was very different from middle-class practice of the time.

  What was different was the bonding effect of The Fund. The actress Yvonne Mitchell was born a Joseph and so descended from Samuel Gluckstein’s wife Hannah. Like Gluck she shed the family name, made a bid for individual expression and took a career. She wrote a roman-à-clef, The Family, satirical, critical, affectionate, thinly-veiled in its reference to individuals and in its account of the extraordinary dynasty from which she came.

  their business cars though large and expensive were unostentatiously black or darkest green, and though the women at a certain age were bound to wear mink, it was always of a sober colour and cut and their pearls, though exquisitely matching were discreetly small …1

  Gluck figures in the novel as Frances

  who had run away from home to put on trousers and paint … signing her paintings ‘Frank’. She had always been a difficult daughter, but then [her mother] was never the most tactful of women and must in some measure have deserved what she got.

  Gluck, who extolled individualism, saw The Fund and The Family from which it was inseparable as stifling and claiming. In later years she was bitter and critical and at pains to dissociate herself from everything to do with the Gluckstein name – without ever freeing herself from economic dependency on it – a dependency she resented, for it made her feel powerless and beholden. ‘How I hate them with their money and general bloodiness!’ she wrote to her lover in 1936. And she implored her mother not to call her by the ‘dreaded name’ of Hannah.

  For those who conformed, as the firm’s business fortunes rose, The Fund acted like cement, underpinning The Family’s way of life. They moved from the East End to West Hampstead and then on to St John’s Wood. There were houses for the young men who married, dowries for the daughters, allowances for each newborn baby, the best specialists, the best hotels, the best wines for the table and tickets for the theatre. All became ‘carriage folk’ at precisely the same time – out of the meticulous sense of fairness that regulated The Fund’s dealings. A brand new carriage, with coachman and groom, was delivered to each family house at eleven a.m. on the same day. The carriages were green and black, the horses black and each coachman wore a black silk hat with a green cockade, long black boots, a black coat and a green-edged cape.

  Gluck was born in 1895 when The Family’s fortunes were rising. Salmon & Gluckstein Ltd advertised at that time as ‘The Largest Tobacconist in the World’ with over 120 branches. They ran subsidiary trades as goldsmiths and silversmiths, snuff-grinders, pipe-makers, importers of meerschaum and amber, and makers and mounters of walking sticks. Their declared capital was £400,000. But if tobacco made them rich, cups of tea made them richer. The Lyons business came about through several coincidental factors, not least The Family’s respectability. They had a horror of strong drink and its pernicious social effects and in England in the 1880s there was almost nowhere for ‘decent’ people, particularly women on their own or with children, to get a cup of tea and something to eat in safe, clean, predictable surroundings. There was the Ritz for the rich and for the rest, drinking dens, coffee houses and ‘slapbangs’, where waitresses served a variety of unreliable beverages with a slap and a bang.

  In the late 1880s, to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, trade exhibitions were held in various capital cities. At one, in Newcastle, Salmon & Gluckstein had a window display of young women hand-rolling cigars and cigarettes. Gluck’s uncle – one of the eponymous Montagues – thought it would be a lucrative service to sell foot-weary visitors to the exhibition a cup of tea. He opened the first of the teashops. Others followed in various major cities, all allied to exhibition catering. They proved popular and successful. The brothers opened their first London teashop, the Popular Café, an expensively built place, at 213 Piccadilly, near the Circus. The chain developed. They had a great reputation for their cup of tea only – the two top leaves of the Darjeeling crop were used. The shops were painted white and gold and served all manner of refreshments, but no alcohol. The fare was clean and cheap, any mot
her could take her children there and the waitresses were as pristine as their surroundings.

  None of the brothers wanted the family name above a teashop. Nor did they want this new enterprise confused with their tobacco business. They needed another name. Joe Lyons was the extrovert cousin of Gluck’s Uncle Isidore’s wife, Rose. He painted, he gave Gluck, when she was little, a miniature silver gilt paint-box of watercolours, hung on a silver chain, gave demonstrations at scientific exhibitions on the workings of the microscope, and was something of an entrepreneur and rolling stone. The brothers – with his approval – took his name to go above their shops.

  Expansion followed fast and J. Lyons & Co. opened a chain of teashops; there was one in every urban district. They always bought freehold shops, or very long leases and so had a farsighted hedge against inflation and an investment in property that itself proved lucrative. The Trocadero, adapted from a music hall, opened as a restaurant with a floorshow in 1896. The first of the Corner Houses, renowned for their good food and live orchestras, opened on the corner of Coventry Street, in 1908. Oliver P. Bernard, who worked for Covent Garden and the Boston Opera House, designed the interior. The walls had views of mountain scenery with pine forests and waterfalls carved in different coloured marbles. That same year the brothers built their first hotel, the Strand Palace, on the site of the Exeter Hall. The entrance staircase with its illuminated glass balustrades glittered like a set for the Folies Bergère or the Casino de Paris. There was running water in every room instead of a jug and basin and the rooms cost five shillings and sixpence a night – and no tips. Then followed the Regent Palace Hotel, the biggest hotel in London, and, in about 1930, the Cumberland, the first moderately priced London hotel, with a bathroom in every room. It cost eleven shillings and sixpence a night with full breakfast.