IN CONVERSATION
Refugees at St Paul’s David Herman (1973-75) records the influence of 20th Century Pauline refugee families. Both his parents were Jewish refugees from central Europe.
T
he story of the European refugee artists and thinkers who came to Britain between the Russian Revolution and the end of the Second World War is extraordinary. Thinkers like Ernst Gombrich, George Steiner and Karl Popper, writers like Koestler, Canetti and Stoppard, historians like Lewis Namier, EJ Hobsbawm and GR Elton, filmmakers like Korda, Pressburger and Reisz, psychologists like Freud, Klein and Eysenck, scientists like Bondi and Perutz, Krebs, Born and Chain. In science they revolutionised physics and biology, physiology and medicine. Bondi wrote about the ‘steady-state’ theory of the universe and Leslie Brent’s work with Medawar on immunological tolerance, was the basis of transplantation biology. Fritsch and Peierls worked out how much uranium it took to make an atomic bomb and Chain was one of the scientists who discovered penicillin. Decisive moments in the three great scientific stories of the mid-20th century – the making of the atomic bomb, the revolution in molecular biology and the discovery of penicillin – happened in Britain, and in each case, refugees were key figures. Refugees and émigrés founded the Edinburgh Festival and Wolfson 26
ATRIUM
SPRING / SUMMER 2022
College in Oxford, the Warburg Institute and Glyndebourne, Thames and Hudson and the Ballet Rambert. They ran world-famous labs and built some of the landmarks of 20th century British architecture. And they transformed our everyday world: Fritz Landauer’s shopfronts for Boots and Burtons, ‘Vicky’s newspaper cartoons of ‘Supermac’ and Hans Schleger’s advertisements for MacFisheries. They changed the way we think about Englishness and they re-wrote the British past, from GR Elton’s revolution in Tudor government to the 19th century social history of Hobsbawm. They opened British eyes to European culture and ideas, and they played a crucial role in the Cold War. The impact of European refugees, of Jewish refugees on almost every aspect of British life, was enormous. What does this have to do with St Paul’s? Numerous refugees and the sons of refugees came to St Paul’s during the 20th century. Some are well-known, others less familiar, but their impact is undeniable. First, there were the refugees who fled from the Russian Revolution, including the political philosopher, Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909-97), the historian, Leonard Schapiro (1908-83) and George Ignatieff (1913-89), a leading Russian-Canadian diplomat, son of the last Minister of Education of Tsar Nicholas II. All three
