The bare bones. Married Anna in Vienna, had Eva, came to Britain in 1928. They separated and she went back to Berlin with Eva. He worked in Edinburgh, as shown in the chapter on career. Rented the farmhouse on the island of Ensay, fished, was very social in Edinburgh. Met Mary Barton but don’t know when. Lived in London, started being a ‘donor’ in at least 1943. During war, home office interested in what he was doing on Ensay. BBC work, briefly. Lab work with Rabinovitch. Married Mary B., had Jonathan 1944. House on Skye, Corry Lodge outside Broadford.
Parkinsons. Like boats, kayaking, dogs, never went back to Austria. Not observant Jewish. Sister Kitty very devoted. She and Oscar visited Jonathan at school and supported BPW.
He donated funds £1 1/- to the Spanish Workers' Fund in 1936. Quite probably many of his friends and colleagues were active, as documented in eg:
(PHOTO ref: BPW's contribution to Spanish Workers Fund)
Jonathan has very kindly shared some memories of his/our father during the course of two conversations (conducted, using Zencastr, between Sicily and Australia in May and June 2021), so that they could be recorded and transcribed. Any mistakes in transcribing are mine (Julia D-B), but my hope is that such recollections will give us all more of a feeling for the kind of man he was. May 2, 2021:
JDB. Thank you for taking the time to talk today. So, I’m wondering what are your earliest memories of your father, how far back can you go, and where?
JW. Not that far. I remember as a small child my first memories are almost exclusively from our time at Corry Lodge, which is the house my parents had on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. And the first memories would be I think were on the boat we had, an old converted fishing boat, going off on jaunts to some of the lovely sea lochs on the mainland, and I vaguely remember him there in the boat — I would have already been three or four years old if not older. Before that, frankly, I doh’t remember him at all in Skye at all mainly because I think we were there as a family without him i.e. my mother, my sister Ruth and BPW from time to time, but a lot of the time I think while were were there for long holidays he was absent in London doing his work. I think he was probably — a week or two was okay for him in Skye and generally he would rather be back doing his research and his medical work. I don’t remember his presence very strongly in Skye although as I say that is the place where I spent most of my childhood. I remember very clearly Uncle Hugo, his uncle, my great-uncle, who lived with us in Skye and often stayed on there when we went back to London. I remember my mother very well.
JDB. And then, later, do you remember doing things with him? JW. And yes, then the next thing I remember is he used to take me to Brighton, on the Brighton Belle which is a Pullman train and I remember that very well, having breakfast on the Pullman train. It was brown and white, I think, the carriages and he used to take me when he was doing some research with some people in a laboratory in Brighton. I can’t remember what I did while he was working, probably hung out with somebody, a friend of his because then he used to take me on a speedboat and we used to go round Brighton Bay. But it was an old-fashioned speedboat, made of wood and the driver sat in front and there were two bays where the two of you sat and you roared around Brighton Bay. I remember that very well and I remember the train very well and having breakfast. That’s the next thing I remember about him. I’m desperately trying to think just off the cuff just what else I can tell you. I don’t remember him as what I call a general presence in my life as a child, no - remember he was incredibly busy with his work and not only in the UK, I think you know he was visiting Canada giving lectures and up in Edinburgh and down in London again. He was working in his own laboratory and eventually other people’s laboratories, working with Rabinovitch, you know who I mean? Rabinovitch was a chemist, a Russian chemist, he’s on Barry’s video waving his hands with some wonderful editing, waving his hands to most of the questions that Barry asked him. I remember going with him to visit Rabinovitch who adored children, didn’t have any of his own, and he was always beetling around, zooming around, picking you up, giving you cakes and so on. So I remember him and I remember BPW there, I remember him in my mind’s eye. What else can I tell you? I don’t really remember much more of that because as a child at the age of, I guess I would have been seven and a half or something, they sent me to a boarding school, prep school in Hertfordshire and again, while I was there I don’t remember him a great deal because the people who usually took me out on the weekends, you were not allowed out in those days as you wished, there were probably four weekends per term, were usually Kitty and Otto, BPW’s sister and brother-in-law. I remember them very well coming and taking me out and going to have lunch in some sort of restaurant, you know, near the school in Hertfordshire so not far from London. I even remember Uncle Otto’s car, he adored cars so I remember him always talking about cars. I remember one visit from BPW to the school when I guess I would have been about seven or eight to pick me up to go up to Skye and I remember the car he came in, a grey one I’d never seen before, a grey Humber Super Snipe, with running boards which I remember very well. And that’s, I don’t generally remember him much as a child, as I say, my mother yes, my sister yes, Uncle Hugo, yes, Kitty and Otto, yes, but not him, not him. JDB. I wonder did you feel him to be a fond presence in your life, or was he in fact rather distant? JW. No, never distant, never. I remember him from the word go as being very fond of me, it’s just that I don’t remember a close physical relationship, cuddling and so on, and I don’t remember his presence until I was older, by older I mean probably when I was already 12 or 13; he was never anything but a pleasant part of my life as a child. It’s just not very often that I saw him I suppose. Or my mother in that sense, I mean the school in Hertfordshire, I don’t really remember her very often coming to the school to take me out. As I say, it was probably 90% Kitty and Otto. Both BPW and my mother were incredibly bound up in their work - I mean it was their life, it wasn’t a 9-5 job and especially in BPW’s case he had a very eclectic mix of colleagues as you know, not only in his field of genetics but in obstetrics, in para-psychology, in researching which turned out to be HRT and fertility matters, and he was beetling around here, there and everywhere. My mother was devoted to her work from morning to night. JDB. When you were older, did he talk to you about his work very much? When you went to school in Scotland and you were a teenager? JW. When I was at school in Scotland he didn’t talk about it, no, but I was fully aware of it in that they operated from consulting rooms. The first ones I remember were in Portland Place which is now the Chinese Embassy, and I remember very well what they were doing although I don’t remember them explaining except in the sense that I'd ask questions and so on. I don’t remember him sitting down and saying, look, you may be interested now you’re getting older, blah, blah, not at all. But the flat where the consulting rooms were also where we lived, we were in and out of the consulting rooms. We used to love seeing the foetus in a bottle, we loved looking at sperm under the microscope. We used to play, make catapults, mini catapults when we were kids with the intra uterine devices - they were made with blue plastic and you could make them with a rubber band and they made very good catapults. I remember he was also working with a Professor Yudkin who was a dietician and obviously a Russian immigrant, he was very well known and they had a laboratory in Queen Elizabeth College in Camden Hill, with hundreds of white rats and I remember going there. So I used to accompany him there, I remember him taking me there and going off to do his work while we played with the rats which we adored. JDB. “We” being you and Ruth? JW. No, I remember going there with a friend, one of my small friends - of course having a friend at that age and telling him, my Daddy has 500 rats, of course I was immensely popular. Why I am reminded of the story about the rats in Queen Elizabeth College is that he brought some home once for some reason, I can’t remember, probably he was going to another lab, and overnight he put them to keep them safe in the bath and for some reason, they all died in the night and the next morning there was a frightful scene with my mother, finding 50 dead rats in the bath. Of course we were thrilled to death but a bit upset about dead rats. But, there’s another anecdote about BPW - I’m jumping from age to age because as you can appreciate there wasn’t an ongoing thread. JDB. He obviously had many different interests, many different research interests and colleagues, so you were aware of that: there wasn’t one specific lab, one specific path of work? JW. I don’t know about his work in those days. He had many colleagues from all over. I remember Rabinovitch, Yudkin, who were both Russian, Thousless, a para-psychologist, he was English. I remember him going to see Franz Bierer, he was an abortionist. I didn’t know at the time, but I found out, in those days when abortion wasn’t entirely illegal, but there were certain criteria you had to meet, I think, for a girl to get an abortion, but Bierer, my guess is he sailed close to the wind and of course BPW know through his work with patients, he knew how to get things done, then he went to this Dr. Beara, somewhere in Regents Park. I remember again going in a taxi with him, I remember Beara because Beara was chomping on a bloody great apple and you know these are the sort of things you notice as a kid. He used to take me, as to Brighton, as to Rabinovitch, he’d take me meeting colleagues, but I don’t remember him domestically. JDB. At home, was your mother the main parent in terms of daily life or was there a housekeeper? JW. No, we had nannies. I mean, my mother was always there but they were always working, it was their life, there was no way they could have looked after children. So we had nannies. The first one had been my mother’s nurse before she married BPW. She was probably a GP before the war, after she divorced Barton. I guess she was a GP somewhere in Surrey and she ran a surgery and had a nurse, and she became our nanny when my mother married; I remember her very well. We visited her till she was 90, she had a daughter who adored Skye and used to come there as a kid with our nanny, and decided she wanted to live in Skye herself, and the old woman, our nanny, who didn’t want to live in Skye sacrificed her life in Bricket Wood to go and live in a cottage on the Isle of Skye. We used to visit her every time I was on my way to, firstly my mother’s cottage on Skye, this is a long time after Corry, or then on our way to our cottage on Scalpay in the Outer Hebrides. An amusing thing, it was actually my sister Ruth who insisted we go and see old Nan, as we called her, mainly because she had had a stroke and my sister said we must go in case it was goodbye, as she was already 80 something. The old lady, we went to say goodbye for the next 8 years, she had a stroke every year and in the end I said, I’m happy to go and see her but don’t want to say goodbye, and she died at 91 of a stroke. Anyway, I remember her. Going back to BPW, no, he doesn’t appear much in these stories, no. JDB. As you got older, were you interested in his work? you absorbed it over the dinner table, and around? JW. Not in detail, no, I was not interested. I had no interest in science or medicine. I was very like BPW but without the brain, I was very, difficult to concentrate on one thing, you know, I wanted to go off, do another thing, I wanted to join the navy, wanted to join the merchant navy, no, I wanted without question to join something like the National Trust and live on a Hebridean island and handle traditional wooden fishing boats, catch mackerel, lobsters and eat haggis, later drink whisky and live in wild country. So as it happened I did something quite the opposite, but I don’t think either BPW or my mother ever attempted to make me interested or for that matter Ruth, my sister. JDB. Where did your parents meet, and how did they meet? JW. God knows, I don’t know. No idea. I guess because of his scientific work, his research work, in that field, meeting my mother - whether she was at that stage a gynaecologist or a GP I can’t tell you, but if she wasn’t practicing as a gynaecologist she was certainly interested, it was her time in India that drove her to be interested in gynaecology and fertility so at some stage they met. I don’t remember them ever talking about it, I’ve no idea even where they got married or even if they were married! I’ve got a marriage certificate. But I mean, they didn’t talk about that; it brings me to Judaism. I was perfectly well aware that Kitty and Otto were strong, devout Jews, I was well aware of that as I saw a great deal of them as a child. When I was in London, I used to be with them a lot, as my parents were working, so I was well aware that BPW”s mother was Jewish, but it meant nothing, it was like looking at sperm, or foetuses, or seeing an abortionist, it didn’t arise, it just existed and we didn’t talk about it. It wasn’t hidden, either, it was just as though it was so obvious that no-one talked about it, but if you asked a question they’d answer. JDB. So he never talked about his Jewish ancestry? JW. No, he didn’t hide it either. I mean, I went with him to Kitty and Otto’s and they would talk in German and I knew very well that he’d rescued them from the Nazis in the late 30’s, and I knew all about the holocaust, and I knew that some of his colleagues who were refugees, were also Jewish, but you might as well say they had grey hair or were blond, as it didn’t signify in any manner that you think it could have done, no.. So that applies to his work as well, and hers for that matter, they didn’t talk to me about it or encourage me about it, or ask me if I was interested in any specifics, no. JDB. Did Kitty and Otto observe the Jewish sabbath and holidays? JW. Can’t remember, I don’t know. they certainly went to the synagogue, not every week but from time to time at St John’s Wood, where they lived and for instance when Kitty died, I took part in, what do they call it, a quorum, when they have to have 8 people, men, I was one of those. And that was what I expected, It wasn’t a surprise. Actually it was quite amusing, what I couldn’t get over was that the rabbi was a Glaswegian and somehow you know how a rabbi should sound (J. does a passable imitation of Dov Glickman playing the rabbi in Shtisel), but out came a broad Glaswegian accent and somehow that didn’t quite fit! Anyway, all that, going back, these were all parts of my life, but they were not in any way issues that were discussed or argued about, no. JDB. Did he talk about his earlier life, the reasons he came to Britain? what did he say about that? JW. Very little, except that he told me where his parents lived, or course I knew that through Eva, in Marchegg. About schooling, nothing, about university, I remember him telling me only that during his time there, there was a lot of insurrection and fighting between communists and fascists, liberals and so on, including shooting in the streets, police, riots and so on. He told me nothing about his work in the university and his research. He told me that then he went to Berlin, because he didn’t want to stay in Austria, I can hear him saying, “I don’t like the Austrians”; he went to work for Scheering, a big German chemical company. And then I think he was head-hunted by Edinburgh University, but again, I am not sure whether he was head-hunted or whether he applied for a job, I can’t tell you as he never told me. All I know is that he arrived in Edinburgh in 1928 so he would have been 27. He adored Scotland and Edinburgh particularly. He was a young man, but very clever, a bachelor. JDB. He was still married at that point, wasn’t he? JW. He’d left her, or they were separated, or legally separated, but they were no longer living together. That is why when Eva came to Edinburgh with BPW and Ana, his first wife, she went back to Vienna, I can’t tell you the chronological order. He stayed on in Edinburgh, so he led a bachelor life. He wasn’t ... I have told this to some of our brothers and sisters and I don’t think some of them were entirely pleased to hear, he liked the high life - he wasn’t a retiring central European bearded Professor at all! he liked very good clothes, he liked good food, and he did like hobnobbing with people who had lovely houses, because I know one or two. He liked that sort of life and was heartily welcomed and I suspect because he was a novelty.The upper class toffs, the Scottish toffs with lovely houses probably had never met a small, dark, determined, mercurial Jew with a brilliant mind, and I can see exactly why they took to him - he was always at ease, I never saw him ill at ease with anybody’s company. It didn’t matter whether it was the old crofter, our neighbour, who could hardly speak English or with the man whose wife became my godmother, who was Colonel John Kennedy. Hazel Kennedy was a sculptor, his wife, who was a beautiful woman - I think BPW was in love with her, and they used to invite him... she became my godmother: they had a beautiful house in Edinburgh with butler, chauffeur, everything. During my schooling we used to stay there probably once a year over five years. He loved it: we were met always at Waverley Station in a beautiful drop head Buick with Woodcock the chauffeur, ‘Good morning, Dr Wiesner’, and the butler was called MacIntosh. Of course in those days one never knew his first name and he always attended dinner: a real Edinburgh man: ‘that is not the way to do things, Mr Wiesner’... BPW loved all that. Col. Kennedy rented a house for grouse shooting every year in the Borders called Chester, which I’ve only seen photos of, but BPW went - a beautiful mansion house in glorious Border country and BPW used to go and stay there. He wouldn’t shoot anything, but he would have entertained the ladies while the men, Colonel this and General that, went off. I know what he would have done, entertained the ladies! You’ve got the picture of why some our sisters may be slightly disappointed - a bearded, brilliant left-wing central European Professor is not quite what he was: he was a social democrat but he wasn’t a communist like a lot of his colleagues, of course, in the university. His first wife, Ana was different. JDB. Yes, she went to visit the mines and there was a lot of discussion about her visits within the Home Office, I gather? JW. That’s right, that is one of the reasons they were a bit queasy about giving her British nationality, she’d been doing work with the Scottish miners which was a communist union. He was never, he had no side to him, I don’t think it mattered to him - if he was interested, he was interested, it didn’t matter whether you were a communist or what your religion or your politics were, or your race, your colour - it just didn’t exist so he would enjoy all the people I’m talking about - the rich toffs with lovely houses and the boatmen on the Isle of Ensay and the outer Hebrides, he treated them all the same. So, in Edinburgh he did some of his finest work, whereby the Dean of the Institute, when he applied for British nationality the Dean said, to the Home Office, ‘you’ve got to give it to this man, his work is absolutely essential here and if you don’t give it, this will be a serious loss to us and to science.’ So he obviously was doing very fine work, mostly I think at that stage on what we now call HRT. Because he was doing his finest work and enjoying life immensely, he always loved Edinburgh and he did live in a lovely part of it - I’ve been there later on, one of those lovely Georgian squares. At one stage, do you know where Compton Mackenzie lived? because I vaguely remember thinking that he lived in the same house where Compton Mackenzie had a flat, but that may be a nonsense. He adored that, and he adored Hazel Kennedy, Colonel Kennedy’s wife. Kennedy unfortunately was in a shooting accident and was blinded in both eyes and partly paralysed, that’s how I remember him in Edinburgh when I went to visit them with BPW. Hazel Kennedy, my godmother, I saw a great deal of all my life because she moved to Suffolk, so I remember her well, and I have one of her lovely sculptures here and some paintings. She was a lovely woman - I can see why BPW was in love with her. JDB. There was a letter in your family papers from a Colonel Douglas and he said that when BPW was on Ensay he had a lot of women visiting him... JW. Yes, that was the old boy network saying, who is this Austrian professor, do you know anything about him? This was the Colonel who wrote back saying, yes, he seems to have a lot of young foreign women visiting. BPW could have a witty tongue about his love affairs, but not in detail. You know the story about his research assistant who I met at his funeral? Well, BPW, his funeral service was at All Soul’s church in Portland Place, next to the BBC, and an old lady (actually my age now!) came up to me and said, ‘you don’t know me but my name is Vera Elkan and I was your father’s laboratory assistant in Edinburgh’. She said, ‘Actually the two of us were lovers for about a year and a half when he was living in Edinburgh’ (in fact Vera was a very well known photographer, whose work is in the Imperial War Museum). I said,’ How lovely, thank you for telling me’ - and ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘let me tell you one of the reasons I adored him, of course in those days we were all in our 20’s, and I’d had two or three boyfriends, Scots, so I wasn’t entirely innocent, but the reason I adored your father was that he was someone quite unique, because he talked to me not only before he made love to me but also afterwards’. JDB. You obviously learnt a lot from your father! JW. He made me laugh, you see, he made me laugh about that sort of subject. He was amusing, he took it as part of life’s amusements. He was the least pompous man I ever met. But it is difficult with your own father not to give a sort of hagiography. JDB. When he came to Edinburgh, did he speak fluent English by that stage? JW. He must have done, I don’t know. He always spoke with a German accent. JDB. Have you got any recordings of his voice? JW. No. Nowadays you can give a whole story, pass on your life history, but, no... JDB. He was applying for nationality in 1933. Was that because he really wanted to stay in the UK or because he saw the political situation, with Hitler becoming Chancellor in 1933? JW. I can’t tell you whether it was to do with Hitler or simply whether he loved living in Britain, especially Edinburgh. But he would still have been travelling abroad with his research and his lecturing and of course he would have also been in London. I don’t know that it was because of Hitler, no, it may have been a factor, but I doubt he would have decided to become a Brit because of Hitler becoming Chancellor in 33. Possibly I would guess because of his life in Edinburgh - his work was respected, the people he knew were quite different people from those he would have known had he stayed in Austria, completely different, and the Isle of Skye, Edinburgh, the lovely houses - I think all of that was the main contributing factor, at a guess. JDB. It’s interesting, as Vienna was also a wonderful city, but as you say it was pretty much torn apart, politically, in the 20’s, so it would not have been so wonderful... JW. Also before Hitler there was a great deal of anti-semitism. The mayor of Vienna was one, there was a lot of anti-semitism underlying if not overt, and that was a reason to leave, that continuous thread of anti-semitism that took place in that part of Europe. JDB. Did Kitty and Otto talk about it at all with you? because they got out just in time? JW. I remember one thing Kitty telling me - the worst people (in her mind, where she lived in Vienna), were the concierges, because the Viennese in those days like in France, the concierges sat in a little box and they were the worst informers. Funnily enough, the Czechs, when I worked in Prague in the 90’s, I heard that from Czechs under communism, the worst informers were the concierges.I remember nothing of them telling me about the journey. I remember very well certain things when they got to England, moving into a camp with Uncle Hugo (BPW got Uncle Hugo out) but being Britain and a camp for refugees, of course then aliens, he said what was lovely for him that as a countryman (he was a lawyer but he loved skiing, hiking and so on) they gave him a bloody great axe to chop firewood, which always amused him because he said, firstly I’m an enemy alien then they give me an axe! I don’t know what Kitty and Otto did in England during the war. I think they were released from the camp after 6 months. Uncle Hugo used to stay at Corry Lodge in Skye because he loved climbing, skiing and so on. JDB. . BPW worked through the war? What did he do during the war? JW. I remember two things him telling me about the war. At one stage he was asked to broadcast in German, propaganda, to Europe, Germany, by the BBC. I can’t remember if he gave it up or he was sacked - he said it was slightly ridiculous because you had to say that yesterday the Royal Navy had sunk a number of ships, shot down 45 planes, sunk 7 submarines, which was such obvious nonsense. That’s not the entire story but he said he wasn’t very good at sounding believable. Other than that I can’t tell you what he did in the war. I can tell you an anecdote, about his arrest in Scotland. My mother did a locum in the east, at Bonar Bridge while I suppose he continued his research in London. He was arrested in Glen Etive (??), near Dalwhinnie. In those days you could often stay as a B and B at the Post Office, which they did, and my mother said in the morning they had a good breakfast, and the postmistress kept saying, let me give you another cup of tea, and about 3 cups of tea later they were off (they were on a bicycling tour), and she wouldn’t let them go. Then there was a knock on the door and a policeman arrived and said,’ Good morning, and are you Dr Wiesner? I’m afraid I must detain you here for a bit.’ My mother, you know what she was like, no, you don’t know what she was like, said, ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ My father, I bet he would have enjoyed it - the policeman said,’ I have to detain you because you speak with a German accent, so we think you may be a spy’ . Imagine, the unarmed policeman telling someone that they were a spy! my mother was furious. They had to wait there till they brought some inspector and his colleague from Glasgow to interview him. And of course they checked up all his contacts and it was fine, but I bet he loved it all. I remember, when BBC Scotland came to interview him, because he would have been an interesting person, in Rodel, where you took the boat out to Ensay, they asked him a question - this was told to me by the people who still ran the hotel from the 20’s - when I was a young man, they had the same old hotel, same atmosphere, and they remembered BPW very well, they said, (in broad Hebridean accent) , It was just wonderful, “Dr Wiesner, what do you think of the Nazis?’ and he said right away ‘A lot of fucking bastards’. Old John McCallum told me that story, and you know very well that the old Gaelic speakers would never had said anything like that on the TV or the radio! Later on I was very close to him as a teenager. I cannot tell you exactly when, but as you know he had bad Parkinson’s and he had the operation which gave him a longer lease of activity, being half paralysed and so on. After this operation he became more mobile, but he couldn’t really look after himself, dressing and bathing, and I spent a lot of time looking after him - shaving him, bathing him, helping him dress, taking him on holidays. I must have been older, in my early 20’s; I was very fond of him, I got to know him, not because we talked about his work, but he was was very good company, never pompous, never patronising, often gave me some very good ideas which of course being a young man I immediately refuted, only to find out that he was dead right. I used to take him to the cinema, which drove me mad because he couldn’t open his eyes very well with the Parkinson’s (weak eye muscles) and I used to get furious as I’d paid half a crown for his seat, so I used to whop him, open your bloody eyes, I’ve paid half a crown, and he would just say, (German accent) “Jonathan, you’re a fool!”. So I got intimately involved with him, looking after him, which I didn’t do out of any sense of obligation, but because I was fond enough of him to help him. By that state he and my mother weren’t exactly the best of buddies, putting it in a very British way, in other words they didn’t get on too well. JDB. They were still together? JW. Yes, but I think understandably, like most women of that generation (even though she was perhaps unusual in becoming a doctor at the beginning of the 20th century), I think she resented a bit the fact that he never made any provision for the future. They had a beautiful house in Skye, they lived in London but they rented everything and didn’t own anything apart from Corry Lodge, because the rent was the same year after year. He never made provision, so she was now the breadwinner, because he was ill, and I think that caused resentment, yes. Sounds harsh, but I understand it. They had a good life, but he was a man who didn’t make good provision for the future in any way, she had to be the breadwinner and so it was rather sad. So I looked after him a lot and I didn’t mind a bit. I enjoyed it, actually. But I was quite tough, you know! JDB. When was he diagnosed with Parkinson’s? and did that stop him from working? it must have been very hard for such a bright and curious mind. JW. Somebody told me that he’d fallen from a horse. He liked riding, I think in his 40’s, maybe during the war. He had bad concussion for 3 or 4 days. Whoever told me this said that he, BPW, thought that his Parkinson’s was a secondary consequence of the fall and the bang on his head, that the concussion in some way damages the brain, not immediately but can come out eventually as Parkinson’s. But I’ve no idea whether that was a factor.This person also said that he shut himself in a room for a day when he had the diagnosis, and after that never referred to it again. And you know, I heard him complain about trivial things, like panicking when he drank some paraffin by mistake, but I never heard him once complain about Parkinson’s, and believe me, in the later days when I’d have to help him, in the loo, everything, he couldn’t do a lot of things, I never heard him complain. Never heard him say, ‘this fucking disease, I just want to kill myself’, which is extraordinary. I used to love taking him on holidays, too, we used to go to different places, I”d carry him around, and sometimes I carried him on piggyback! JDB. After his diagnosis, did he go on working for quite a while? JW. Yes, he worked perfectly well until the 60’s when it became almost impossible to work, but that’s when he had the operation, where they drill through the skull to the brain to destroy the damaged part of the brain which controls the motor skills, and another part of the brain takes over. It did give him a lot of relief. He had difficulty before then in getting out of a chair, and he had a tremor.But it was extraordinary that he never complained. He made a real fuss about drinking the paraffin and had his stomach pumped out. My mother had put paraffin in a wine bottle and he took a sip and then panicked, and this is a man who had Parkinson’s. JDB. Remarkable - such a strong mind and such a drive to curiosity and optimism and curiosity in the world. JW. Yes, exactly that, there was still much to be interested in despite the Parkinson’s, because thank God that didn’t affect his intellect and his mind. I don’t know if he was depressed about it, he must have been, but in general, as far as his work was concerned, it had no effect mentally. JDB. Do you know what he was doing in those later years? JW. Well, in those later years he had the consulting rooms, first in Welbeck Street, where I was born, then Portland Place. JDB. With your mother? JW. Not the same consulting rooms, they had separate rooms, separate secretaries, and after Portland Place they were in Wimpole Street where he didn’t have a consulting room. My mother had a room on the ground floor in this extraordinary house, owned by this old lady who was Queen Victoria’s physician’s daughter, with a lot of Old Masters hanging around everywhere, and there were two consulting rooms on the ground floor, one for an awful old Scots dentist who we had to go to, and one for my mother. We lived in the maisonette on the top. It was a six storey building and the old lady lived in the rest. BPW had an office in our flat. I’m talking about the 60’s now, but before that he always had a separate consulting room. JDB. So was he seeing patients? JW. He was the one who found the donors, including himself. I don’t know the exact dividing line of their work. I think my mother (of course he wasn’t a medical doctor but a doctor of science) was the one who carried out the actual treatment. He had nothing to do with the actual physical treatments, but I think he found the donors, had done all the research and he was the intellectual back-up, doing the science of the whole thing and they must have co-operated a lot. They wrote papers together. I used to go with him to the Royal Society of Medicine, and to the pub with him. I remember nice holidays in Italy, because my mother really didn't want to go with him anymore. She bought her cottage in Skye, in the 60’s, when they sold Corry Lodge. She used to go there: I went with them once but she didn’t want to go with him. He always had a good sense of humour. (on 8 June 2011) JDB. What do you know about his parents? JW. About Paula, Kohorn was her maiden name, and Hugo was the only relation I ever heard of. (She also had two sisters, Adele and Ida.) Heinrich was as far as I remember a farmer in what was Moravia or Bohemia in the Austro-Hungarian empire, in Marchegg near the border with Slovakia. I’ve been to the house in Marchegg, which is quite a large farmhouse. You go through the gate and into an inner courtyard where the stables were in the centre. I went there for the first time with Eva and we went and had lunch in the Golden Duck or whatever the local pub was called, and we asked the landlord was there anyone old enough who remembered pre-war times, the 30’s, and a family called Wiesner. He said that there was an old man who remembered Wiesner, but nothing happened and I don’t know if he made it up, and we never got to see anybody who remembered Wiesner. I know nothing about him except that according to BPW he went bankrupt and disappeared with one cow: sort of walked off with one cow. But Kitty said that was bullshit, an apocryphal story to amuse people, but she didn’t say what had happened to him. I have no idea when or where he died.That’s all I know about Heinrich. Of Paula I know even less. She was a pretty woman. Kitty said how BPW wept when he had finished the last pot of jam that his mother had made before she died. He would have been at university - she used to send him jam and he wept copiously when he finished the last one. Apart from that I know absolutely nothing about her. He never talked about his parents, nor did Kitty, never. Nor did Uncle Hugo - I never remember him talking about Paula. Maybe they just cut it out, I don’t know. JDB. He was 21 when she died? JW. He would have been at University. I don’t know what she died of, possibly of course it would have been at the time of the virulent flu that was rife in Europe at the time, with 3 million dead, but I have no idea. Marchegg is a nice place, normal, nothing special. There was a palace there with one of those aristocratic Austrian names, Palffy (NB known as the Schloss Marchegg now) . It is about 100 miles east of Vienna (JDB: NB Interestingly, Marchegg is considered to be the site of Central Europe’s largest colony of tree-nesting white storks). I don’t know anything more about Marchegg or Heinrich or Paula, apart from that story about him being bankrupt, because BPW said he was on the bottle, a gallon of schnapps or slivovitz every morning. Maybe he just didn’t like his father because he never mentioned him; mind you, he never mentioned his mother whom I know, from Kitty, he adored. It is odd that he never showed us a photograph. Although you may have seen the photograph of Heinrich from the first World War, when he was in a hospital. JDB. So, was Heinrich away in the first World War, fighting? JW. I don’t think so; there is a vague memory, something to do with driving trains to the front, but not in the infantry or artillery, fighting at the front. That may be a mixed up story and other than that, I have no idea. JDB. Was there a large Jewish community in Marchegg? JW. No, but having said that of course we know what happened to all the Jews. JDB. What do you know about BPW’s schooling in Marchegg? JW. Nothing at all until he was at University in Vienna. I don’t know much about his academic career apart from what he did for his PhD. He did tell us about the insurrection there, the fighting between the communists, fascists and the democrats in Vienna. Other than that he didn’t talk about it. He liked ski-ing and he liked kayaking, and told me about kayaking from Pasau to Linz or Innsbruck with folding kayaks. Klepper boats, beautiful boats, they still make them. We wrote to Austria to find out about doing that trip again, and I have a copy of the reply from the Paddle Sport Association. I haven’t heard about him camping as a young man: he much preferred to stay in a lovely house than in a tent. Roughing it in the Outer Hebrides, yes, with good company, good clothes and so on. JDB. What about his father’s siblings in Austria? Heinrich had quite a large family of course. Do you know much about them? JW. I’ve never heard of any of them. JDB. He had eight siblings according to Barbara’s research on Ancestry. JW. I never heard tell of any of them from Kitty, Hugo or BPW. Never heard of any relations at all, never. I wonder why? He did turn his back on Austria, that is true. He never talked about the Holocaust. Kitty was a practicing Jew, so was Otto. Uncle Hugo, I’ve no idea. I know nothing about their history. He never mentioned relations, he never talked about the Holocaust, Jews, Judaism. I think he felt totally assimilated and I don’t think he had any interest. He did get baptised in church before he had the operation on his brain. He had a great friend, Stephan Hopkinson, who was a priest, who admitted him to be baptised in the Anglican Church. I said, ‘what did you do that for? you’re an atheist or an agnostic’, and he said, ‘good to hedge your bets’. Quite right too. He did go to church in Suffolk, a lovely old Norman church. My mother used to go to church, and my sister, and sometimes I would go too. He took communion there. JDB. Is he buried in Suffolk? JW. No, he is buried in a ghastly place on the North Circular Road. I wanted to exhume him and take his remains to the Outer Hebrides, but it is terribly difficult to do that. (There is more conversation, about the difficulties of exhumation, visiting cake shops in St Johns Wood with Kitty, and Eva Ibbotson’s family, but nothing that is really relevant to BPW in this context.) The following excerpts are from emails to a couple of half siblings, generously shared by Jonathan, and giving us more information about BPW: "BPW and the Goya sketches: they were given to him, so my Mother told me, by the Spanish Republicans. BPW had been involved in, or had organised aid during the civil war. I am not very clear as to exactly what aid was involved. I do remember my Mother talking about the delivery of lorries; no doubt they would have been carrying cargo as well. In the documents concerning BPW’s application for British citizenship, there is a reference somewhere as to hearsay that BPW may have been gun-running! Presumably no proof existed, otherwise I guess his application might have been rejected. 16th January 2018 "I met BPW’s first wife, Anna Gmeyner, only once, when she was an old lady. When I was a small kid I went with BPW to see her in a charming old cottage somewhere in the home counties,. Frankly, I don’t remember her at all, although I do recall getting some nice cake for tea! I really don’t know much about her except for what I found in the National Archives about BPW’s application for British citizenship.The authorities (Home office, police etc) were like to grant him citizenship, but were equivocal about his wife as she had been involved in supporting? working with? the communist Scottish Miners Union. Presumably her general record as a communist activist didn’t help either. Eva Ibbotson, her daughter, hardly ever talked about her except to say she was a 'difficult woman’. I don’t think there was much love lost between them. Her great granddaughter, who calls herself Irya Gmeyner recently house sat for us for two weeks here in Sicily. Irya is the daughter of Eva Ibbotson’s oldest child, Toby, who lives in Sweden.Toby was a classics scholar at Cambridge, but after leaving , married a Swedish girl, and started a Steiner school 3 hrs drive north of Stockholm, a school which he still runs part time now.So Irya is really an Ibbotson, but admired her feminist Gr.Grandmother so much as to change her surname. You are right about the apparent broad brush of BPW’s “dislike of Austrians'. I guess he really meant that he disliked the disturbing political and social situation at the time, just as a very longstanding French friend told me recently that she ‘can’t stand the Brits’ because of Brexit. In fact, she and her husband lived in London for many years and loved it, and still have numerous close English friends they see regularly. See what I mean. BPW if not an atheist, was certainly an agnostic, and he didn’t appear to have any interest in Judaism. I don’t think he ever went to a synagogue, and we never celebrated any Jewish festival, nor, until I was an adult, did I even know of their existence! The whole Jewish ‘thing' was a rare starter in our household,. As a child it meant nothing to me. As I grew up and became aware that BPW’s parents had been Jewish, it still meant nothing more to me than the fact that my Mother’s family were protestants.As a child and later on I saw a lot of Kitty and Otto, who were observant Jews, but again it meant little to me. I suppose that being brought up in a family where both my parents had friends and acquaintances from very diverse racial or religious backgrounds, neither of these counted for much.I never heard comments from my parents that he/she is a Catholic, a Jew, or Moslem or even pointing out that a colleague of theirs was a refugee, that he/she was an Austrian, Hungarian or Russian (like Rabinovich). In respect of Jewishness, what may have been the case is that BPW, Kitty and Otto deliberately avoided much talk of it, perhaps because they wanted me to grow up without Angst, so in their minds sparing me the connection to the relatively recent horror of all horrors suffered by Jews. Who knows. It was only when I reached my thirties and forties, that I began to be interested in BPW’s and his family's history. It was clear to me by then that I had some Jewish and/or middle European characteristics. But was it clear to my friends? I had no idea, so I asked for their take: 'you may sound like an Englishman’ they said ', but you are certainly far from typical’ And then one ore two added ‘were your parents Jewish?' Knowledge of my Jewish blood didn’t figure much in my life, but then in late middle age I found myself deeply interested in books by Jewish authors such as Philip Roth, Bashevis Singer, Primo Levi, and so on, It is a cultural interest, in no way a religious one. When we had a holiday home in Suffolk, my mother sometimes went to Church, and once or twice BPW and I came too. Trouble was, on one of the rare occasions we were at a service he got the giggles about something or other and infected me too. The embarrassment!, So, although a good giggle as an adult is thoroughly enjoyable, I didn’t dare to go with him again for some time. This must have been after his baptism by his friend Stefan Hopkinson that I told you about - 'hedging his bets’ BPW said - before his dangerous operation on the brain. In spite of the flippant remark, I think he was probably happy to oblige Stefan since to BPW one belief was as good as another. I never saw him take any particular interest in Jewish culture and certainly he had no involvement in the religion."