Gluck, Diana Souhami [good novels to read in english txt] 📗

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