repaid at the commencement of June.
Total number of shares
1,752
All the family were required to sign this new Deed, Basil getting as his witness the British Consul in Venice where he happened to find himself in the early summer of 1932.
But he was back in England that July and accompanied Fraser to a nursing home near Blandford in Wiltshire where his Uncle Pat had gone following an operation. My father hardly knew his uncle, beyond recognising him as a handsome, mild-mannered man with a liking for drink. In the account he wrote for me almost fifty years later, he recalled ‘finding my Uncle Pat tiptoeing down the stairs at Brocket when he was staying a few days with us. It was one o’clock in the morning and he was on his way to the dining-room for one more whisky.’ According to my father it was whisky that killed him at the age of fifty-eight. He was suffering from a duodenal ulcer, an infected appendix, a blockage of the intestinal canal and chronic constipation. That was how Fraser found him at the nursing home. As with their father, and with his son who died in infancy, Fraser is again ‘present at the death’ on 15 July 1932. Even Basil’s regular high spirits temporarily drooped, those high spirits on which he depended to overcome his sense of being unwanted, ‘an evident mishap’. He never forgot that awful white room in the nursing home and ‘my father’s great distress at his brother’s death’.
On the death certificate issued three days later, Fraser gave his address as Brocket, Maidenhead. The signing of the Supplemental Deed that summer of 1932 had been his act of negotiation back home. But it cannot have been a happy return. His two sons lived mostly in London, and Brocket was a household of squabbling women – even their dogs quarrelled. Yolande by now hated her mother, and her mother hated Nan who had stayed on after the children grew up despite Adeline’s many high-pitched invitations for her to leave. All Yolande’s filial affections seemed to have been transferred to Nan. Between the three of them there were incessant plots and counter-plots, and much yapping at the ankles.
But Fraser was a man of illusions. It was to these illusions we were responding when retrospectively we pictured him as a brilliant mathematician, barrister, athlete and so on. Though his romantic illusions might be shattered, his financial illusions still glimmered in the city of glass he had attempted to create in the West End of London. His optimism shone blindingly forth. Were there moments of panic and doubt? In any event, there was nothing for it but to go on and hope for the best.
When my father had his signature witnessed by the British Consul in Venice on 18 May 1932, he was endeavouring to sell glass to the Venetians. Over the next couple of years he talked Fraser into forming a new department for glass light fittings: table-lights, wall-lights and hanging lights which were sometimes inverted fruit bowls suspended from the ceiling by ropes, decorated with opalescent shells, and fitted with flared flames of frosted or tinted glass. These had several seasons of popularity and were installed by some famous restaurants including Quaglino’s and Claridge’s. But they were not profitable because of the breakage when drilling the glass to the metalwork. One of his designs appears on the title page of this book.
But Basil was keen to develop this side of the business and made contact with a German glass manufacturer called Stensch which, following the Anglo-German trade agreement of April 1933, appointed Breves Lalique as its British agents. Early in 1934 Basil went over to Berlin to meet the Stensch family, and made friends with their twenty-year-old son Rudi, who had been sent down from Bonn University. Being a Jew, he explained to Basil, he had been ‘retired’ from Bonn as a result of the national boycott on Jewish professions introduced by the new Chancellor, Adolf Hitler. Possibly the non-completion of a
Total number of shares
1,752
All the family were required to sign this new Deed, Basil getting as his witness the British Consul in Venice where he happened to find himself in the early summer of 1932.
But he was back in England that July and accompanied Fraser to a nursing home near Blandford in Wiltshire where his Uncle Pat had gone following an operation. My father hardly knew his uncle, beyond recognising him as a handsome, mild-mannered man with a liking for drink. In the account he wrote for me almost fifty years later, he recalled ‘finding my Uncle Pat tiptoeing down the stairs at Brocket when he was staying a few days with us. It was one o’clock in the morning and he was on his way to the dining-room for one more whisky.’ According to my father it was whisky that killed him at the age of fifty-eight. He was suffering from a duodenal ulcer, an infected appendix, a blockage of the intestinal canal and chronic constipation. That was how Fraser found him at the nursing home. As with their father, and with his son who died in infancy, Fraser is again ‘present at the death’ on 15 July 1932. Even Basil’s regular high spirits temporarily drooped, those high spirits on which he depended to overcome his sense of being unwanted, ‘an evident mishap’. He never forgot that awful white room in the nursing home and ‘my father’s great distress at his brother’s death’.
On the death certificate issued three days later, Fraser gave his address as Brocket, Maidenhead. The signing of the Supplemental Deed that summer of 1932 had been his act of negotiation back home. But it cannot have been a happy return. His two sons lived mostly in London, and Brocket was a household of squabbling women – even their dogs quarrelled. Yolande by now hated her mother, and her mother hated Nan who had stayed on after the children grew up despite Adeline’s many high-pitched invitations for her to leave. All Yolande’s filial affections seemed to have been transferred to Nan. Between the three of them there were incessant plots and counter-plots, and much yapping at the ankles.
But Fraser was a man of illusions. It was to these illusions we were responding when retrospectively we pictured him as a brilliant mathematician, barrister, athlete and so on. Though his romantic illusions might be shattered, his financial illusions still glimmered in the city of glass he had attempted to create in the West End of London. His optimism shone blindingly forth. Were there moments of panic and doubt? In any event, there was nothing for it but to go on and hope for the best.
When my father had his signature witnessed by the British Consul in Venice on 18 May 1932, he was endeavouring to sell glass to the Venetians. Over the next couple of years he talked Fraser into forming a new department for glass light fittings: table-lights, wall-lights and hanging lights which were sometimes inverted fruit bowls suspended from the ceiling by ropes, decorated with opalescent shells, and fitted with flared flames of frosted or tinted glass. These had several seasons of popularity and were installed by some famous restaurants including Quaglino’s and Claridge’s. But they were not profitable because of the breakage when drilling the glass to the metalwork. One of his designs appears on the title page of this book.
But Basil was keen to develop this side of the business and made contact with a German glass manufacturer called Stensch which, following the Anglo-German trade agreement of April 1933, appointed Breves Lalique as its British agents. Early in 1934 Basil went over to Berlin to meet the Stensch family, and made friends with their twenty-year-old son Rudi, who had been sent down from Bonn University. Being a Jew, he explained to Basil, he had been ‘retired’ from Bonn as a result of the national boycott on Jewish professions introduced by the new Chancellor, Adolf Hitler. Possibly the non-completion of a
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