NATIONAL LIFE STORIES CITY LIVES Martin Gordon Interviewed

NATIONAL LIFE STORIES CITY LIVES Martin Gordon Interviewed by Louise Brodie C409/134 This interview and transcript is accessible via http://sounds.bl.uk. © The British Library Board. Please refer to the Oral History curators at the British Library prior to any publication or broadcast from this document. Oral History The British Library 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB United Kingdom +44 (0)20 7412 7404 [email protected] Every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript, however no transcript is an exact translation of the spoken word, and this document is intended to be a guide to the original recording, not replace it. Should you find any errors please inform the Oral History curators Martin Gordon C409/134/F5288-A/Part 1 F5288 Side A [This is the 8th of August 1996. Louise Brodie talking to Martin Gordon.] Could you tell me where and when you were born please? I was born on the 19th of July 1938, the year of the Tiger. I was born in Kensington, in St. Mary Abbot's Terrace. My father was an economist. And, my father had been born in Italy at the beginning of the century; my mother had been born in China in 1913, where her father had been practising as a doctor in Manchuria. Therefore I came from a very international background, albeit my family was a Scottish-English family and I was born in London, but I always had a very strong international inclination from my parents and from other members of my family around the world. [BREAK IN RECORDING] Tell me a bit more about your father. My father was born in Florence in 1903. His father was practising there as a doctor, and in fact both my grandfathers were doctors, and there was some pressure from my grandmothers that I should become a doctor myself. And, a doctor is a service industry, and investment banking is a service industry, and Siegmund Warburg often compared himself to a family doctor in the way he used to advise corporations, so maybe the fact that I went into banking was not so different from being a doctor. My father had gone to, well my father was born in Florence because his father had gone out there to practise as a doctor, and at that time there was a large English and American community in Florence and it was quite well known, including a lot of very artistic people. And it was said in Florence, the `Inglese Italianato e il Diavolo incarnato', and that was the Italian view I believe of the English and American community. You will have to translate that. It's the Devil incarnate. Yes. The English are... Yes, the Italianate English is the Devil incarnate. [LAUGHS] 1 Martin Gordon C409/134/F5288-A/Part 1 I see, lovely. At any rate, my grandfather was something of a lady's man, I am happy to say, and he appears to have been enjoying himself to some extent in Florence, and at some stage in, around sort of 1906, I'm not sure exactly what happened, but he abandoned my grandmother in Florence and left with some lady and went travelling with her. And my grandmother in her outraged abandonment was very upset about this, and one of her friends was a rich American lady called Mrs Dumauresque, and she financed the sending of Pinkerton's men, the detectives, around the world to pursue my grandfather to prove adultery. According to the family story adultery was proved in Tokyo. [LAUGHS] Hence another Far Eastern connection in my family. In those days of course divorce was very disgraceful, and my grandmother sued my grandfather for divorce after adultery had been proved, and this was quite a scandalous item for several weeks in the `Morning Post' and the `Times' and other newspapers of that period. And my grandfather eventually ended up, after various travels and various posts he ended up in Nairobi in the mid-Twenties, where he found and practised medicine and did research into prehistoric man in Kenya, and he lived in Nairobi during the last thirty-odd years of his life. Did you know him? I never knew my grandfather, my paternal grandfather, nor indeed did my father know him, and that's another of these sort of curious Victorian things at the beginning of the century. My grandmother brought up my father to believe that his father had died. The disgrace of the divorce was so great that it was...she pretended that her husband had died, and my father did not know of the existence of his father until some time in the second half of the 1930s when my father, who was then an economist and a statistician of some note attended a lecture given by the authoress Elspeth Huxley about some African things, and of course Elspeth Huxley is a very well-known Kenya name. And during this lecture Elspeth Huxley referred to the anthropological researches of Dr Harry Gordon of Nairobi, and my father thought this could possibly be a reference to his father, therefore after the lecture he sought out Elspeth Huxley, who had left the lecture rather quickly, and so my father couldn't catch her. He therefore traced her by contacting various London hotels and then went to see her, and got confirmation that this was indeed his father. And he immediately wrote to his father in Nairobi and they set up a correspondence, and as a result links with my grandfather's second family were made, but the war came and my grandfather died either during or soon after the war and so none of us met him. But there's a fair amount of correspondence and a fair amount of understanding of his rather lively character and his strong Scottish accent. 2 Martin Gordon C409/134/F5288-A/Part 1 You obviously think he was a great character, is that right? Yes, I think that like most Gordons he was quite impossible, so I am told by the women in the Gordon family, but he was obviously a tremendous character, and there was a wonderful obituary of him in the East African newspaper of the time which we keep in the family somewhere. But your father must have suspected that he had a father if he made that tremendous effort to follow Elspeth Huxley, is that right? I suppose lacking any conclusive proof as to what had happened to his father and where he had died and that sort of thing, he probably may have suspected things. But you know, this is all the sort of, sort of Victorian background, and he never confronted his mother about it, he considered it was going to be too difficult to do so. Any subsequent contacts we had with my grandfather's second family were never known to my grandmother, who died in her 100th year in 1966. So tell me about her. Her. Well, she was Maude Gates, a family which came from Steyning in Sussex. They were a family, a typical family that had risen to prominence during the Victorian period. I think her grandfather, or was it her father, I get the generations mixed up, had been a judge, and had done very well coming up from being sort of a country boy to being a judge on the County Court and was recommended for the High Court but then had deafness problems and never went to the High Court, but nevertheless had done very well. My grandmother was one of seven children and she had rather Victorian values, but considered herself to be in spite of that a rather advanced woman, and I remember she belonged to a club in London called the Sesame Club in Grosvenor Street, which was a ladies' club for very advanced women, and I used to go and stay there sometimes when I was a schoolboy and all the ladies there were very distinguished and advanced. I remember Edith Sitwell wandering around and all these sort of very, sort of advanced liberal women. [LAUGHS] That must have made a great impression on you as a boy, didn't it? Well, yes, yes, it was, again it was a vignette of old London and old attitudes towards women and that sort of thing which was quite interesting. 3 Martin Gordon C409/134/F5288-A/Part 1 And so, you've said already that it was a great decision for your grandmother to take this divorce through to its conclusion. Why did she do that, rather than just...was it a sort of feminist standing up for herself do you think? I think she had been egged on probably by some of the ladies in Florence, including the American lady who paid for Pinkerton's men, I think it sort of became a sort of logical conclusion, I don't know. But divorces were really relatively rare in those days, and I have the notorious distinction of being descended from two divorces, because on my mother's side there was also a divorce. In the case of my father's family it was a first marriage, in the case of my mother's family it was a second marriage. My mother's father was a Dr Harry Colman, C-O-L-M-A-N, who came from the mustard family, although the family was then known both for mustard and for textiles, because the firm of Selincourt and Colman was subsequently merged into Courtaulds, and the Colman family in those days was well known in both areas.

Load more