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.

The 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 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

were born before the First World War and went to St Paul’s after the Russian Revolution.

Berlin won admission to Westminster but was warned that with a name like Isaiah, he might have trouble fitting in. His tutor asked him, had he considered changing his name to James or Robert? So, he went to St Paul’s instead. According to his biographer, Michael Ignatieff (son of OP George Ignatieff), ‘in 1922 there were something like seventy Jewish boys out of a total of 500.’ Berlin attended St. Paul’s from 1922-27. Leonard Schapiro, with whom Berlin had once played in Pavlovsk, a resort south of Petrograd, in 1919, and whose family fled from Russia at the same time as the Berlins, also went to St Paul’s. Berlin was top of his form twice. According to one report, ‘he is sometimes inclined to write about ultimates, instead of addressing himself to the question in hand.’ Arthur Calder-Marshall, another contemporary at St Paul’s, remembered that Berlin talked ‘like playing an instrument – not in pursuit of truth or beauty or anything except sheer pleasure – like a fountain.’

One of Berlin’s closest friends from St Paul’s was Walter Ettinghausen (1910-2001), who was born in Munich. His family moved to Switzerland during World War I and then settled in England where Walter attended St Paul’s. He later taught at Oxford, was a codebreaker during the war, and in 1946 moved to Jerusalem, changed his name to Walter Eytan, and became one of Israel’s leading diplomats.

There was a small handful of Pauline refugees who came to Britain during the First World War, including Ettinghausen and Sefton Delmer (1904-79), who later became a famous journalist. Born in Berlin, Delmer was a British subject and came to London after his father was interned as an enemy alien. He was educated at St Paul’s and Oxford, and later worked as a foreign reporter for many years for The Daily Express. The largest group of Pauline refugees came from central Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. One of the first was Professor Karl Leyser (1920-92), one of the great medieval historians of his generation. Leyser was born in Düsseldorf, son of a Jewish manufacturer. Karl came to London in 1937 and studied at St Paul’s (1937-39), helped by voluntary agencies for refugees. The medieval historian, Henry Mayr-Harting (himself a refugee from Prague), wrote in a tribute to Leyser, ‘There is a story that because Karl would have exceeded the then quota of nonAnglicans at St Paul’s, he was at first smuggled by the charismatic Philip Whitting (History Department 1929-63) into his history class. In any event, Whitting was an inspiration from the start. Karl would later say that the most lasting and exhilarating trait of Whitting’s teaching for himself was his use of incident, an anecdote or a saying, to illuminate “as if by a flash” a whole historical landscape. He taught with verve and, “each essay was an event; he went through them with the writers individually, taking if anything more pains than would College tutors”.’

A contemporary of Leyser’s was Sir Kenneth Adam (1921-2016), born Klaus Hugo George Fritz Adam, in Berlin, to a secular Jewish family. The family fled Nazi Germany in 1934, arriving in England with nothing other than some gold coins his mother Lilli had smuggled out and settled in Hampstead in 1935, when Ken went to St Paul’s. He later became one of the greatest British film production designers, best known for his set designs for the James Bond films of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as for Dr. Strangelove. He won two Academy Awards for Best Art Direction.

Clement Freud (1924-2009) was a broadcaster, Liberal MP and one of the first celebrity chefs. Seven years after his death he was investigated for child abuse. He was the grandson of Sigmund Freud, the son of Ernst Freud, a Viennese Jew who left Berlin for London in 1933, and the brother of the artist Lucian Freud. Clement went to St Paul’s just before the Second World War. Klaus Friedrich Roth (1925-2015) was born to a Jewish family in Breslau, then in Germany. He 

Sefton Delmer (1904-79), who later became a famous journalist

Sir Kenneth Adams set

escaped to Britain with his family in 1933 and was educated at St Paul’s (1939-43), where he was a leading chess player, and then at Cambridge. He became a distinguished mathematician, taught at UCL and Imperial and was awarded the prestigious Fields Medal in 1958.

Edward Behr (1926-2007) was one of the most famous foreign correspondents of the second half of the 20th century. Born in Paris, the son of RussianJewish parents, the family escaped to London when the Germans invaded France and he was educated at St Paul’s before serving in India during the war and starting a long and distinguished career with Time and Newsweek.

Franz Daniel Kahn (1926-98) was born in Nuremberg and fled from Nazi Germany to London, where he attended St Paul’s from 1940-44. He later taught as a mathematician and astrophysicist at the University of Manchester for almost thirty years and was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Alexis Koerner (1928-84), later Korner, was a British blues musician and radio broadcaster. Like Clement Freud, he was the son of an Austrian Jewish father, and after an itinerant childhood came to London in 1940 and went to St Paul’s during the war.

Hans Werner “John” Weitz (1923-2002) was born to a Jewish family in Berlin. When he was 10 years old, Hitler came to power and Weitz was sent to boarding school in England. He attended St Paul’s from 1936-39 and later became a Vice-President of the Old Pauline Club. In 1938 his family left Berlin, lived in Paris and London and eventually settled in New York where Hans became a well-known menswear designer and later had a second career as a writer and historian. Professor Claus Michael Kauffmann (1931-), was born in Frankfurt, the son of Arthur and Tamara Kauffmann. In 1938 his family escaped to Burnley. He went to St Paul’s (1943-48) and Merton College, Oxford, then the Warburg Institute. He worked at the V&A for twenty-five years before becoming Professor of History of Art and Director of The Courtauld, Institute of Art.

In addition to Pauline refugees who fled to Britain, there were numerous second-generation refugees. Daniel Weissbort (1935-2013) was the son of Polish Jews who arrived in London in the 1930s. He was educated at St Paul’s after the war and then at Cambridge. In 1965, with Ted Hughes, Weissbort founded the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation which he edited for almost 40 years. In the early 1970s he went to the USA where he directed, for over thirty years, the Translation Workshop and MFA Program in Translation at the University of Iowa. He edited eight anthologies of Russian and East European poetry and translated more than twenty books of poetry and other works.

Richard Gombrich (1937-) was the son of the great Austrian refugee art historian, Sir Ernst Gombrich (1909-2001) and his wife Ilse. He was born in London the year after his parents fled from Vienna and just months before the Anschluss. Richard went to St Paul’s from 1950-55 and became a leading Indologist and scholar of Sanskrit, Pali and Buddhist studies. He was the Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford from 1976 to 2004.

Robin Hirsch’s parents escaped from Berlin at the last moment, his father in the wake of Kristallnacht in 1938, his mother at the beginning of 1939. Other members of his family were not so lucky. Both of his grandmothers were killed in Auschwitz, those members of his family who survived were scattered across the globe. As Robin wrote to me, ‘my sister and I grew up having to figure out an awful lot for ourselves.’

His parents married in London in February 1939. After war was declared, Robin’s father was interned on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien. Robin later wrote a book about growing up in the shadow of this history: Last Dance at The Hotel Kempinski. He writes about the hopeless prospect of ‘blending in’, ‘my floundering attempts to find my academic footing, my bewilderment at school and my overpowering confusion at home.’ It became the basis for a cycle of one-man shows called MOSAIC: Fragments of a Jewish Life.

Hirsch (1942-) studied at St Paul’s and Oxford and has taught, published, acted, directed and produced theatre on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1977 he founded the Cornelia Street Café in New York’s Greenwich Village which he ran for more than forty years. It was one of the most famous cafés in New York. Singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega sang there, Eve Ensler performed The Vagina Monologues there and Oliver Sacks (another Old Pauline) gave readings.

Hans Werner “John” Weitz (1923-2002) attended St Paul’s from 1936-39 and later became a Vice-President of the Old Pauline Club

John Reizenstein (1956-) is the son of the great German-Jewish composer, Franz Reizenstein (1911-68), who grew up in Nuremberg and emigrated to England in 1934 to escape the Nazis. In 1958 Franz became a professor of piano at the Royal Academy of Music and in 1964 at the Royal Manchester College of Music. Not only did his son John go on to have a distinguished career at St Paul’s but so did his three sons.

Oliver Musgrave (1958-), a Captain of School in 1976, is the son of Beatrice Musgrave (née Falkenstein, 1924-2017) who was born and grew up in Hamburg and escaped to London with her parents and younger sister in September 1937. She worked for 25 years as an editor and production manager for the German refugee publisher, Peter Owen.

Malcolm Miller (1958-) is also the son of a refugee publisher, Elly Miller (1928-2020). She was born in Vienna, the daughter of the famous publisher, Béla Horovitz (1898-1955), who co-founded Phaidon Verlag, one of the best-known art publishing houses in central Europe. The Horovitz family escaped from Vienna after the Anschluss in March 1938. Horovitz and his partner Ludwig Goldscheider re-founded Phaidon in England. Their greatest success after the war was The Story of Art (1950), by Ernst Gombrich, which became an international bestseller. It was one of the most famous art history books of the 20th century and established Phaidon’s reputation for publishing beautifully produced books of the highest scholarly standards, aimed at a popular audience. Elly’s son, Malcolm, went to St Paul’s in the 1970s and later became a musicologist.

Sir Simon Milton (19612011), a Conservative politician and leader of Westminster City Council, was the son of Clive Milton, one of the Jewish children who came to Britain with the Kindertransport in 1939.

The journalist Jonathan Foreman (1965-) is the son of a very different kind of refugee, the famous American screenwriter, Carl Foreman (1914-84), who wrote the awardwinning films The Bridge on the River Kwai and High Noon and was blacklisted by Hollywood and forced to leave for England, where Jonathan came to St Paul’s.

These are just a few of the refugees and sons of refugees who came to St Paul’s. There are many more, but several things are striking about these Pauline refugees. First, the range of careers they made for themselves, from philosophers and mathematicians to journalists, diplomats and celebrity chefs. Many became distinguished scholars – Berlin, Schapiro, Kaufmann, Leyser, Gombrich, Kahn and Roth, among them. Others had more

maverick careers, running a famous café in Greenwich Village, playing the Blues, advertising dog food on TV. In 1928, the young Isaiah Berlin wrote to GK Chesterton, ‘The boast and peculiarity of St Paul’s has for a long time been … that Paulines are totally unlike men from any other school, and totally unlike each other.’ Second, how many of them became itinerant in one way or another. John Weitz and Robin Hirsch settled in the United States, Walter Ettinghausen emigrated to Israel. Daniel Weissbort and Isaiah Berlin were itinerant in other ways: Weissbort became a worldfamous translator and Berlin helped introduce European thinkers, especially Russian writers and thinkers like Turgenev and Herzen, to British culture. Sefton Delmer and Edward Behr both became famous foreign correspondents. Richard Gombrich became a leading pioneer in Asian thought and languages. They added a new cosmopolitanism to British culture. It is also important to make distinctions between refugees from the Russian Revolution and from Nazism, between refugees and the children of refugees who came to St Paul’s after the war, and between refugees and the sons of immigrants, like Jonathan Miller and Oliver Sacks, both sons of medical fathers of Lithuanian Jewish descent, or EV Rieu, the famous publisher and classicist, who introduced a whole generation of British readers to the Classics, and was the son of a Swiss Orientalist. Finally, we should pay tribute to St Paul’s, as well as to these Paulines. The School welcomed so many refugees and sons of refugees at a time when many Simon Milton private schools did not want to take in Jews, refugees or otherwise. Germany’s loss, and Russia’s, was Britain’s gain, whether it was medieval history or the look of James Bond films. St Paul’s deserves enormous credit for taking in these refugees and their sons and grandsons. (Editor: Atrium usually includes the school dates of Paulines in articles. For David’s we are using the dates of the lives of the OPs and others mentioned.) 

The journalist Jonathan Foreman (1965-) is the son of the famous American screenwriter, Carl Foreman (1914-84), who wrote the award-winning film The Bridge on the River Kwai