This Much Is True

Last year I discovered beyond all reasonable doubt that Siggi had enjoyed an extramarital fling in 1918. This is how I found out: a man in Swindon, Derek Austin, wrote to me suggesting that we were pos-sibly first cousins: we had both shared our DNA on a genealogical website, and a match had shown up. At first, I was bewildered at this discovery of an unknown relative; I phoned and asked him if he was Jewish. He and his brother had talked and as far as they both knew, there was no Jewish blood in their family. We worked out that his grandmother had lived around the corner from my grandfather in south-east London. He had an affair with this woman, she had a child, and that child had grown up and got married and had two sons. So Derek and I are indeed half first cousins.

I invited him, his wife, Ingrid, and daughter to visit me in London; we had a wonderful day together, bonding and sharing. I am sad to say Derek died shortly afterwards, but I’m still in contact with his family and intend to remain so.

Of course, my dear grandfather could never have imagined that his peccadillo would be discovered over a hundred years later, long after his death in London in 1945 at the age of seventy-eight. Genealogy makes those kinds of family secrets much harder to hide.

There are more colourful characters in my maternal family line. I was in the General Register Office looking for my grandfather’s father, Simon Sandeman, on the 1881 census (the first indexed census) and when I found him, next to the name were the letters ‘CONV’, for ‘convict’. It turned out that Simon had a shop in Leicester. In the local directory of 1878 he was listed as a ‘wholesale retail jeweller and clock dealer’, but in the previous year he had been jailed for fraud and receiving stolen goods, and in the 1881 census, he was serving a seven-year sentence with hard labour, in Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight. Hard labour not only meant the treadmill, just like Oscar Wilde, but that Hanna had to bring up seven children all alone in London, far away from her husband. Grandpa Walters was only ten years old when his father went to prison.

When I first started tracing my family tree, my cousin Buffy, Auntie Gusta’s daughter, brought me a couple of photographs from a box she had found in her attic. One of them showed a man dressed in a smart coat, sporting a diamond tie pin and a fine Astrakhan fur hat. No one in my family could tell me anything about him, nor did we have a date, nor know where the photograph was taken. But when I saw my great-grandfather’s mugshot taken in jail before his sentence, I realised it was him.

Many of my ancestors emigrated to South Africa in the nineteenth century, so I got in touch with Paul Cheifitz, who comes from Cape Town and who is a specialist on South African Jews. Paul confirmed that shortly after his release from jail, Simon and his wife Hanna had emigrated to South Africa. Two of his daughters had also gone to live there with their husbands in the 1880s, and their families are still there. Presumably he’d had his portrait taken in a studio in Johannesburg and he had sent it home to England to show his family how well he had done for himself — finally. There is also a photograph of his wife, my great-grandmother Hanna, dressed equally elegantly in black silks, pearl earrings and a fine black hat with an ostrich feather.

Of course, some of my family were not thrilled to learn of our great-grandfather’s criminal history. I, however, am absolutely delighted. I am fascinated by the vagaries of my ancestors’ lives. I found out that great-grandfather Simon was not the only person with a dubious past. His son, my great-uncle Charles, a senior member of the Durban Synagogue Committee, received a summons for keeping whores in his room in a Johannesburg hotel, described as a ‘resort for thieves, drunkards and unsavoury clients’.

On a slightly less sleazy note, I also discovered that four granddaughters of ‘the criminal’ were music hall artists. The most successful was Bertha, who moved with her German husband, Max Otto Bierman, to Leipzig before the Second World War, where they performed acrobatics and comic songs in a troupe called The Three Ardos.

Doris, the second eldest of Flora’s children, was the angel of the family. She was brilliant at school and won a scholarship to Goldsmiths College. She would have been the first member of the family to go to university, but she developed meningitis during the First World War and died, aged just seventeen. Like her father, Mummy never got over it; she talked about her sister Doris often, with tears. It was the tragedy of the family. Her other sister, Auntie Gusta (cousin Buffy’s mother), was absolutely beautiful — auburn-haired, willowy, and elegantly sexy. Mummy loved her too, but she wasn’t special in the way that Doris had been.