Gluck Read online

  This was the business and family ethos into which Gluck was born. Her father, Joseph, with his two elder brothers Isidore and Montague, were the backbone of the business, The Family and The Fund. ‘We pride ourselves on being the most united family in the whole world’, Joseph wrote to his prospective in-laws in August 1894, when asking permission to marry their daughter. He conformed entirely to the values of hard work, family unity, loyalty and correct social behaviour. He was a good-looking fellow with dark, bright eyes and a dimple in his chin. He was serious-minded, mild-tempered for the most part, and conservative in dress, politics and outlook. He allowed himself a number of fanciful flights: when eighteen, he wrote a drama in four acts called Leila, an extravagant Old Testament saga of filial piety, privately printed. (A copy is lodged in the British Library.) As director of the firm’s advertising campaigns, he indulged in a few theatrical flings: he once hired four horse buses, had them painted silver, filled them with actors dressed in different national costumes, all smoking cigars or pipes, or chewing tobacco; they went round and round Piccadilly Circus puffing smoke and holding up the traffic until the police intervened. And, as his perhaps most impulsive move, he married Gluck’s mother, Francesca Hallé, who was not of the Gluckstein mould.

  She was his second wife. His first, Kate Joseph, was, predictably, his cousin, his mother’s brother’s child. (Five of the seven Joseph children married their Gluckstein cousins.) She was nearly thirty when she married him, perilously close in the mores of the day to old-maid status. She died, childless, after seven years of marriage.

  During my married life I was the happiest man in the world and thought I was a favoured mortal in having been blessed with such a treasure. I decided never to marry again, thinking I could not settle down, but my dear Family have for years urged me to remarry as they pointed out that my life was not a correct one, being the only unmarried one of the elder members. I believed them, but could not afford to risk being badly mated.2

  The Family rather expected him to settle for another cousin. However, when nearly forty, at a ball given by Joe Lyons in March 1894, he met Francesca Hallé. Though an indifferent dancer, and consigned to being a spectator, it seems he suffered the coup de foudre when he saw her and said to himself, ‘That’s the girl I’m going to marry.’3 According to Francesca’s account of events she took little notice of him. She was nineteen, tall, extrovert, with copper-red hair and blue eyes and thought to be beautiful, vivacious and talented. She was American. Her family lived first in St Louis, then moved to Chicago. Her father was a whisky salesman with a strong sense of moral rectitude, a love of travel and adventure, six daughters, a frail son and no particular wealth. Francesca had a fine soprano voice and was training to be a professional singer. She was in Europe principally to study music in Berlin and had gone to London to visit cousins.

  In August 1894 she and Joseph met again. Both were holidaying with their respective relatives in Margate:

  Joseph was with us a lot, but I did not think very much about it. One day he asked me to walk with him on the cliffs. I suggested that the others came with us, but he said he did not want them.… He was very quiet and out of the blue he proposed. I was amazed and said ‘I thought you were in love with Miriam!’.… I protested that I was too young to get married and had my career to think of.… The sudden proposal and his determination not to be refused overwhelmed me as I was very young and had no thoughts of marriage but only of my career … I capitulated, but only on the condition that my parents consented.4

  That same afternoon he wired to her parents in Chicago: ‘Will you consent to my engagement to your daughter Frances? Can offer her good home and will be true yiddisher husband, at any rate will try. My family are well known and respected in England …’ The same night, in the middle of the night, without stopping to look through it for correction and in an excited state of mind, he wrote them a six-page letter about himself, his business situation, finances, his family, a referee on his behalf they might consult in New York and his confidence that he and Francesca would be very happy together. ‘I am only at present able to picture you in my mind’s eye as the Parents of a most charming, darling and good Jewish girl,’ he told them and explained, ‘I am not given to what is known as gush, having been trained simply as a commercial man.’ He finished the letter with an exhortation to them to answer promptly, and a hint at the new status their daughter, if married to him, would acquire: ‘I have explained to Frances that it will be necessary for her to give up all ideas of musical study as I could not allow my wife to work for her living …’5

  Six weeks later the couple married. On her own admission Francesca had not, prior to those six weeks, even considered Joseph Gluckstein in an amorous light. But she did not hesitate, and her parents were keen. For the Gluckstein family, after so much intermarrying, the arrival of this nineteen-year-old, redheaded American singer, of unknown family and with no dowry, was something of a shock. But it was not viewed as so perilous an aberration as if one of their daughters were to have taken a shine to an unknown artist of modest means. Such a romance would have been strongly opposed. And when Gluck followed her own unorthodox heart, her behaviour, unsurprisingly, was thought to be beyond the pale. But Joseph Gluckstein was old enough, senior enough and man enough to be allowed to know his mind. In adult life Gluck saw her mother’s truncated career and marriage into The Family as the sacrifice of Art to Money and the coercion of woman to a subordinate status. She thought of her mother as a beautiful opera singer and saw her as a captive spirit. Gluck defined honesty and truth as the following of desire and the fulfilment of talent. When her mother was widowed and in her sixties, she urged her to recapture her adolescent self, ‘the real you, what you were before you married’.

  The Gluckstein wedding reception was a grand affair at Olympia where J. Lyons & Co. had the catering rights. The Hallés, who still had small children to look after, could not be there, but the bride wore her mother’s wedding veil of Brussels lace handed down, mother to daughter, for generations. The married pair sailed to the States to honeymoon and for the new relatives to get acquainted. Meanwhile a house in West Hampstead, with two bathrooms on the insistence of Francesca, was built for the couple to live in on their return.

  In this house Gluck was born, eleven months after the marriage, on 13 August 1895. Her father would have preferred a boy – firstborn sons were highly valued for their potential as directors of the business – but her father’s hopes for her were that she should grow up as beautiful as his wife, as devoted as his mother and as conscious of family loyalties and responsibilities as them all. She was given the name Hannah, like her grandmother and not a few of her cousins and aunts. His son and heir, Louis Hallé, was born, to his great joy, eighteen months later. Gluck was a small baby, her brother, large. At birth, the doctor remarked that he was the size of a three-month child. He grew to two metres, or six foot seven-and-a-half inches. Gluck reached five foot six. At no point in her childhood was she taller than her younger brother, a provoking state of affairs for a small girl. And she was to learn through The Family’s patriarchal focus that being born a girl was a handicap when it came to questions of power, work, and control of money.

  The children had everything money could buy and everything their ancestors had been denied. They wore fine clothes, had seaside holidays and on Sundays went for drives to Hyde Park in the family carriage. They had singing lessons and piano lessons. The Lyons caterers created for them birthday cakes of extravagance and ingenuity – trains, with chocolate engines, carriages and the like. From their nursery window they saw a performing bear, pavement artists, and barrel organs playing ‘Dolly Gray’ and ‘Soldiers of the Queen’. There were outings and treats galore. In their parents’ box at the Royal Opera House they saw Melba in Rigoletto, and Caruso and Tettrazzini in La Bohème, which made them giggle. They went to the Hippodrome and the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. They saw The Waltz Dream, The Merry Widow, The Dollar Princess, The Arcadians, Pelissier’s F
ollies, the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and Alexander’s Ragtime Band. But pleasure had its place. There was a strong emphasis on education, virtue and correct behaviour. They were made aware that they had not only The Family’s traditions to live up to, but the added responsibilities of opportunity and wealth. Louis fulfilled all that was expected of him and more. In adult life he became a formidable public figure and was knighted for his services to the community. Gluck went another way.

  In their early years they were educated at home in the schoolroom. The only other children they mixed with were their multitudinous cousins. Gluck and her brother were extremely close, and remained so until their father’s death, but they were strong rivals and, according to their mother, quarrelsome and naughty. A Swiss governess taught them French and a Sarah Solomons indoctrinated them in the tenets of the Jewish faith from a red-bound book by Mrs Philip Cohen called Bible Readings with My Children, inscribed with the epigraph ‘Even a child is known by his doings, whether his work be pure, whether it be right.’

  Gluck described the family home as full of blue ornaments, diarrhoeacoloured oak, endless games of bridge and her father cheating at patience. She did, though, regard her childhood as happy. As for her latent taste for crossdressing, her brother remembered her intense annoyance at being given a Red Cross nurse’s outfit at the time of the Boer War, when he got a City Imperial Volunteers uniform with slouch hat, bandolier, leather leggings and gun. She freely admitted to a preference for games where she was Napoleon, and in her teens was commended in the Hampstead and St John’s Wood Advertiser for her ‘dignified and impressive’ performance as Cardinal Wolsey in scenes from Henry VIII at Miss Mathilde Ellis’s Pupils’ Recital at the Hampstead Conservatoire. As that same evening Ruby Greenop played Romeo, and Beatrice Cohen was William III, gender crossing probably reflects more on the surfeit of girls at Miss Ellis’s dramatic society, than as a reliable indicator of androgyny. Two years later, a play Gluck wrote called King and Pope was produced at the same Conservatoire. It ran to three mercifully short acts and a prologue and was set in eleventh-century Germany. She played Henry IV, her brother the Prince, her cousins Isidore and Barnett the Pope and the Bishop, and Sadie Cohen the lady-in-waiting.

  The role of lady of the house was not enough for Francesca Gluckstein. She was an ambitious, energetic woman with little interest in home crafts, fashion, or the restricting demands of infant nurture. Anyway there were domestic staff in abundance: parlour maids, cooks, a nanny, a governess, a butler, a coachman, a groom. In adult life Gluck’s relationship with her servants was frequently terrible. She hired and fired legions of them, with repeated emotional showdowns, until she found a few, prepared out of loyalty and affection to go beyond any job description and cater to her demands.

  Because Mrs Gluckstein, The Meteor, could not, given the status of her marriage, do paid work, she channelled her formidable energy into ‘the service of the poor’. An article about her in a Belgian paper in 1930 called her ‘La Reine des Mendiants’ – the Queen of the Beggars. ‘My husband and family lectured me on the subject of overwork continually. They said I was never to be found when wanted as I worked in the East End and slept in the West.’6 Her persistence in the art of extracting money for charitable causes became a family joke. The rich were said to reach for their cheque books with a sigh when they saw her coming.

  Her main activity was fund-raising. She worked for the Jewish Board of Guardians, The Home for the Deaf, The Home for Incurables, The National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child, the Young Women’s Christian Association, the Jewish Society for the Protection of Women and Girls, the City of London Maternity Hospital, the Deaf and Dumb Home, Wandsworth, the Roseneath Home for Women and Girls at Broadstairs. During the First World War, while her son was serving as an officer in Italy and Gluck was causing utter consternation, particularly to her father, by dressing in men’s clothes, living with her lesbian lover and painting portraits in a damp studio in Earl’s Court, The Meteor worked tirelessly for Belgian refugees. She arranged the furnishing of houses for them and the buying and distribution of clothing. She was awarded both an MBE and the Order of Queen Elizabeth of Belgium for this work. After the war she became a Justice of the Peace and was one of the first women magistrates. Yvonne Mitchell, in The Family, suggested that in later life she became so garrulous that a full day’s business could not be got through when she was in court. Perhaps that was fiction. Certainly she was talkative. And both of her children inherited her daunting energy and quality of persistence for the sake of a cause.

  She had little interest in spending the money her husband’s family so energetically accumulated – except for the benefit of the poor. The Family code dictated with rigid fairness that all wives, after twenty-five years of marriage, should receive a necklace of pearls. The Meteor thought the extravagance needless and wanted the money diverted to something nobler. As flouting family convention was frowned on, she agreed to wear a string of imitation pearls. These broke at a casino in Monte Carlo and, as staff grovelled the floor and asked how many there were, she said she did not know and that anyway they were false – a statement which was not believed. She gave the money meant for the real pearls, a thousand pounds, to Queen Mary’s Maternity Home and earned herself Royal gratitude that was beyond price:

  After I had the pleasure of seeing you this morning I at once handed to The Queen the magnificent donation.… Her Majesty desires me to tell you how keenly she appreciates the great interest you have taken in the welfare of her Maternity Home.… I need not assure you what great pleasure this large donation to her Home has given to The Queen.7

  After five years of marriage The Meteor endured the first of a series of what were diagnosed as nervous breakdowns.

  I never believed that I should actually break down. Suddenly I found that everything was too much for me and my doctors ordered me to a nursing home which was not a very usual thing in those days. People were usually ill in their own homes, but the doctors thought I would be tempted to work and worry if I was at home.8

  After three weeks’ treatment she had made no progress. Moreover she was homesick for America and her own family in Chicago. So with her husband and children she sailed to the States for the best part of a year in the hope this would restore her health:

  being ill, I thought that the maid I engaged would be able to cope with everything on the journey, but she was seasick all the time and could do nothing for the children. They got completely out of hand.… They used to climb every ladder they could see, climb on the Bridge and bother the captain. Then they would overeat and be sick all over me.9

  In Chicago, the children were looked after by their grandmother while their parents toured America. The trip helped The Meteor and when she returned to London she resumed her charitable works. ‘I did much more than before,’ she ominously recorded.

  She suffered a more serious and protracted breakdown in 1903, when Gluck was eight and her brother seven. Of this attack Gluck’s brother wrote:

  Of the nature of the illness which struck my mother when I was seven I was never given any details, but I think it must have been some kind of nervous breakdown. It necessitated her entry into a nursing home and that was followed by a very long convalescence abroad and our removal from the house in Compayne Gardens, to which we never returned. The pilgrimage in search of her recovery involved much travelling in France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy and of course it precluded the possibility of my sister and me having any early education in England.10

  The ‘pilgrimage’ for health, which lasted some years, took them to Heidelberg, where The Meteor was nursed in a convent. The children lived in a villa in the grounds of the Europäischerhof Hotel, were cared for by their maternal grandparents and went to school in the town. Already fluent in French, from having been taught by a Swiss governess in London, there they learned German too. But it must have been disconcerting for small children, coming from a close-knit Jewish family, to have their home closed
up, be separated from their father, see their mother languishing in a convent with some strange affliction of the spirit and have a new language and customs to learn.

  When they returned to London the family moved to a large house in Avenue Road, in St John’s Wood, on the edge of Regent’s Park. This was to become their settled family home. The years from 1908 saw the consolidation of The Family’s business success. Gluck went to a Dame School in Swiss Cottage and in 1910, when she was fifteen, to St Paul’s Girls’ School, in Hammersmith. She maintained that she learned nothing worthwhile and that her only education came from ‘omnivorous reading’. None the less she got form prizes and special prizes for drawing and painting each year she was there. She was described as ‘a most energetic member’ of the Drawing Club. Her work was included in a Royal Drawing Society exhibition in 1913 – she was awarded a silver star – and in a Congress on the Teaching of Drawing at Dresden. She was commended by her form mistress Miss Volkhovsky for her ‘extremely good work in all subjects’, and described as ‘a responsible and very reliable member of her Form’.

  Five years later, in 1918, when she was calling herself ‘Peter’, smoking a pipe given to her by her brother who was serving as an army officer in Italy, living with the first of her lady loves and wearing outlandish clothes, the Paulinas had their eyes opened as to whom she more truthfully felt herself to be. She wrote to Louis:

  Tonight I got into the train with about a million St Paul’s girls. One or two knew me by sight.… Those who didn’t know were not long left in doubt and the result was such a babble that I was glad to leave the train …