Further memories

The following is an email that Jonathan wrote to David Hall in December 2021, in response to David’s questions soon after finding out that he was donor conceived (and our thanks to David for allowing this to be shared):

BPW was around 5' 7"/ 5'8" and of average build. He was neither a sportsman, nor an athlete, and neither am I. I only know of two hobbies he enjoyed when he was a young man, kayaking along Austria's faster rivers when he was a student in Vienna, and riding. Sometime in the thirties when he was living in Edinburgh, he had a bad fall. My mother said he suffered a bad concussion. Later on BPW told me that damage caused by the fall may have been a contributory factor to his subsequent Parkinsons. I can't remember that he had any particular hobbies during my lifetime, although by the early fifties, by which time I would have been more aware of his activities, his illness would have denied him the ability to ride or go kayaking. Unlike our dad, I positively dislike horses. I can stomach them (forgive the pun) on a dinner plate if some friend insists, but not otherwise. He didn't have any definitive musical interest, and certainly I never heard him play any instrument. And I don't ever remember him singing any time, any place. Like BPW, I have no musical talent either, cannot play an instrument, and can only sing flat. I can't tell you whether he was good or bad at recognising faces, but I can tell you that I am shamefully hopeless. If the recognition problem can be genetic, the genes must have come through BPW, as my Mother was very proficient in recalling who was who. In the not infrequent situations when I have met a female acquaintance who I don't recognise, I take a forlorn punt with 'that's because you have a new hairdo'. Brownie points if I'm right, scowls at a stupid excuse if I'm wrong.

BPW was a social democrat, and I assume he usually voted Labour, but his politics were not partisan. I am not sure how much you know about his early life. You are probably aware that when he was at Vienna University he witnessed street battles, frequently involving violence between Communists, Fascists, Socialists and other factions. I think that having experienced such bloody disturbances, he wanted no part in extremist politics. His first wife, the writer Anna Gmeyner was a communist, and an early feminist. When BPW applied for British nationality, and was still married and living and working in Edinburgh, the powers that be were positive about his application, but distinctly wary about Anna, who had been involved with the Scottish miners through their then communist union. I don't remember much about BPW until I was about 7 or 8. I had a happy childhood, spending all holidays at our house in the Isle of Skye, an earthly paradise for kids. Before that I have no recollection of missing his presence either there or in London. My mother was nearly always with us in Skye, she adored the place. BPW loved it too, for the walking, the mountains, and island going in our converted fishing boat, but I guess he was too involved in his research work to spend much time with us. Hugo Kohorn, BPW's uncle, was virtually a full time resident .My sister Ruth and I were very fond of him, a small bald figure who told us captivating bedtime stories. I became closer to BPW. When I was in my late teens/early twenties I looked after him when I could as he became more and more debilitated from Parkinsons, He needed assistance in bathing, dressing etc etc. He could grumble about none too serious ailments much like the rest of us, yet I never heard him once complain about the cruel progressive disease that had done him down. When he felt like sallying forth, I enjoyed taking him to meet his friends, or to toddle over to the pub for a beer, just the two of up. He was informative, stimulating and amusing, but never patronising. I was very fond of him and his company. He adored his sister Kitty, and she in turn loved him deeply. My mother and Kitty were not close to say the least. When BPW got into trouble with the IR over tax, Kitty and Otto rescued him and secured a settlement. BPW was easy going about money, and not always reliable in keeping track of his finances. Before I was born, my mother told me she had found that his secretary had been siphoning off quite large sums. She insisted that he take the woman to court, but BPW ignored her. He wasn't particularly upset about the theft, and didn't look for any retribution.

You probably know more than I do about his scientific work. We have a copy of the letter from the head of Edinburgh University's Obstetrics Dept asking the Home Office to grant him British nationality as he was absolutely essential to their research. His Bro-in-Law Otto Koblitz said that, had he continued to focus solely on the research, the fruition of his pioneering work (AI, early HRT etc) would have been recognised as being of immense importance, and he would have been honoured accordingly. I once read a biography of Isiah Berlin, who described himself as an 'intellectual taxi', that is, when he was hailed by colleagues to look at some new idea, off he would go. BPW was something of the same ilk. The appeal of hailing a 'taxi' to take him to another new and interesting scientific destination, was probably irresistible. I recall my irritation when, entirely ignoring their hero (that's me), the more brainy of my girlfriends would sit talking to him, enchanted by his genuine interest in their work, whatever that might have been. He was attractive to women of all ages, they clearly found him charismatic. At his funeral, an old lady came up to me and introduced herself. She had been BPW's lab assistant at the University, and they had become lovers. She said she had fallen in love with BPW and added "Do you know why? I'll tell you. Not only was he clever and amusing, he was also the only man who talked to me, not only before he made love, but afterwards as well!" But not everyone took to him initially. My Mother had two brothers. I asked one of them who farmed in Suffolk, what he thought of BPW when they first met. He said, "Along came this small dark man, very lively and talkative, and with me, curious about farming. My brother and I took him for a sail on the river Orwell. We had both been sailing since we were kids, but your father promptly started telling us how we might sail the boat more efficiently. The really annoying thing was that he was right about much of what he proposed. We wanted to throw the bugger overboard!"

When it became clear that BPW had been one of the main sperm donors, and the halfie offspring group was growing, some of them naturally asked me what BPW was like. One of the sisters had clearly decided in advance, and had in mind a Jewish intellectual, a brilliant scientist from mittel- Europa, boot-faced with concern over the issues of his day, and indifferent to the lure of capitalist luxuries. Not quite! He enjoyed good clothes and employed a first rate tailor in Oxford to make him well cut suits.He liked elegant English eateries As a kid I remember dining with my parents at Scotts, the fish restaurant in Mayfair, Bentleys oyster bar in Sackville street, and the Cafe Royal. He undoubtedly enjoyed the fruits that money could buy, but was not interested in the pursuit of making it for its own sake. He was very sociable, and given the eclectic background of his friends and colleagues, without any social prejudices. I recall him saying 'the sooner we are all coffee coloured the better'. I think I can say truthfully that socially I am from the same mould; but I have been told that I am more of a libertine than a liberal! That BPW was Jewish meant little to us, and he himself didn't seem to have any interest in his ethnicity either. But that is not to say it was a subject to be avoided, it simply meant no more to us than being aware that so and so was a catholic or a protestant. I regret that he never talked about rescuing his sister Kitty, bro-in-law Otto, and his uncle Hugo from Austria in 1939. I think he was an atheist. Me too. For some time he worked with the Cambridge psychologist Robert Thouless, who was then President of the Society for Psychical research. I don't know much about their work, but I do recall him saying that they never found any evidence of life after death. Sometimes we would go to a religious Service in Suffolk, but I suspect he just liked the tradition and the musty ambience of the ancient church. As far as I am aware he never attended Synagogue.

I can't think of any unappealing characteristics he had that affected me personally. In his field, I heard that professionally he could sometimes sail close to the wind. A close friend of my parents, another fertility specialist called Margaret Moore White rang me up when I was in my early twenties to say that she never wanted to speak to BPW again. I asked why. She wouldn't tell me, so I asked what was the point of her call. She merely responded that she wished to tell me as a family friend of long standing. I never found out her reason for calling. I suspect it might have concerned abortion at a time when I think it was semi illegal. I once happened to be with BPW when he called in to a clinic run by a Dr Bierer. BPW's sister later told me it was an abortion clinic. Some other comparisons .Firstly, and sadly for me, I didn't inherit his brain, and have little understanding of science. Like BPW, I am sociable, inquisitive and my friends are eclectic. According to my wife Judith, I never stop talking (a common trait in Halfies, I think).I too liked having enough money to indulge in my pleasures, but extraordinary though it seems for an old commercial property man, I disliked owning property of any sort. My fantasy was always to have a million in the bank and own nothing. I have succeeded in the latter case, but unfortunately not in the former! The only property my parents ever owned was their house in Skye. All the homes we had in London were rented. I have a similar sense of humour as BPW, but perhaps with an additional slant, one that I am not particularly proud of, in that I am a tease, good at keeping the required po face while telling an outlandish story that is pure nonsense. I have always loved the sea, whether I am beside it or on it. My passion was for traditional wooden working boats, beautiful but often impractical. BPW wasn't exactly a boating man but sometimes he liked to accompany me on trips around the Suffolk estuaries. Once, when sitting in the stern of my small fishing launch, with the weight of us aft and the bow consequently raised, I failed to see a large naval buoy, and rammed it full on as I approached my mooring. BPW fell out. I managed to drag him out of the water before he sank, plonked him down, and told him only a bloody fool falls out of a boat! He just laughed and said the water was cold. A mensch!

When he became seriously ill with advanced Parkinsons, my family, that is my mother and his sister Kitty arranged for him to be looked after in a Home run by Catholic monks in West London. Although he was in a very poor state physically, he still possessed full mental capacity, and I was against the move. I proposed that he live with me in my London flat, and that we all contributed to nursing help. I was persuaded against it because 'You are a young man and have your own life to lead'.True,enough but I didn't want him to end his days in an Institution, however compassionate the monks and nurses were. He died from a heart attack, a year or so after arriving at the Home .I shall forever rregret that he wasn't with me in his final years.

I am quite happy to answer any further questions you have about BPW, and I look forward to seeing you again

all the best , JW

This is a letter from Eva, regarding BPW, sent to a half sister and again, our thanks for permission to share it:

I'm afraid my reply will disappoint you because I too would like to know more about my father. There's a short story by Chekhov in which a woman wanders about her empty house after her husband has just died, and says "Missed him".

I feel like that about my father's life in many ways - that I missed him. He was a witty, complex and incredibly intelligent man but I saw too little of him. I was held back because my parent's divorce was far from amicable and my mother discouraged me from seeing him. Then there was the travelling to and fro all over Europe - from Vienna to Berlin to Paris to Edinburgh and London and back again - and he was too young and too preoccupied to be particularly paternal. Both my parents were entirely absorbed in their careers.

The person who knows most about my father's life is Jonathan who made my father's life tolerable in the last years of his illness. I think that Jonathan was the person who my father loved most - along with his (BPW's) sister Kitty and his mother who died young and thus was enshrined in legend. She was very beautiful. I remember Jonathan charging into restaurants with BPW's wheelchair when he was already very ill, and giving hell to anyone who made a fuss (being disabled in those days was not like it is now as I needn't tell you). Jonathan said he never minded doing anything for his father because he was such good company, and it's interesting as although according to my mother BPW was a hypochondriac when he was younger, he behaved through all those Parkinson years with incredible fortitude.

I know very little about the years during which you and your other siblings were conceived - and of course had no idea that his great breakthrough in pioneering AID involved his personal intervention! Those rather grand houses with laboratories on the lower floor were always a mystery to me, and once he married Mary Barton, who I found cold and hard (although now I am aware of her good qualities) I was with him only really when he was on holiday in Scotland - a place he loved far more deeply than his native Vienna of which he spoke with a certain detached cynicism. (My mother too... both of them got away as soon as they could.)

He was a good looking man with very dark, very expressive eyes, springy black curls, but none of the traditional Jewish features - hooked nose, huge ears etc. Yet there seems little doubt that the family was Jewish - the kind of Jews, mostly atheistic, and indifferent to their religion who didn't realise what they were until Hitler made it very clear.

He was born in a small village on the borders of Austria and Czechoslovakia - Marchegg. One of those villages you saw everywhere on the great plain stretching east from Vienna... a street of whitewashed ? winter and there were hares sitting up in the snow). No-one remembered much about the family - his father (your grandfather) was supposed to have been a small farmer but perhaps a pedlar and disappeared quite early. The heroine was BPW's mother, Paula, very beautiful and greatly loved by him and sister Kitty. Paula's brother, Hugo Kohorn, took the two children, Bertold and Kitty to Vienna after the mother's death and brought them up. A marvellous old man, bandy legged, a mountaineer; I remember him feeding hundreds of pigeons on his window sill of his office opposite the Stefansdom.

BPW studied biology in Vienna - a brilliant student. When my mother wanted to marry him, her father asked BPW's professor whether he would make a good husband and the professor said he had a great future as a scientist but as a husband was not to be recommended. However he married aged 24 - my mother said she fell in love with him when she found him crying because he had just eaten the last pot of jam made by his mother before she died.

The marriage went badly almost at once - I was born a year later, the wrong sex etc. Soon afterwards my father went to Edinburgh, not because of Hitler but because he was offered a job in the University which of course saved his life and the lives of his family. In Edinburgh he did the most prestigious part of his scientific research, publishing a classic monograph on The Maternal Behaviour of Rats. I remember bicycling up and down on my red tricyle between rows and rows of caged experimental rats but remember very little about him. My mother returned soon afterwards to Europe and took me with her and I think (but have no proof) that those years in Edinburgh, unattached and at the height of his powers as a scientist were probably the best of his life. He was inundated by interesting and attractive women - I think that the discovery of an attractive man who would talk to them even after the sexual act had been consummated blew the minds of the intelligentsia and aristocratic ladies of the north. Some of the women he had affairs with are household names even now.

He never returned to Vienna to live and when Hitler came to power I joined him in Edinburgh - my mother, remarried to a Russian, followed soon afterwards. What I remember about my time with him in Scotland is mostly his passion for the Scottish countryside and the islands (which Jonathan has inherited). There is an island called Ensay which he used to rent every summer and where he lived like a pasha with a wonderful bull terrier and a posse of women who squabbled over him. It was due to him that I was sent to boarding school at Dartington Hall, where I spent eight years of relative safety and tranquillity.

He moved to London to start the work which led to AID - and managed to save his sister Kitty and her husband Otto, and Onkel Hugo, whom he got out via Czechoslovakia more or less with minutes to spare. Kitty adored him and carried on a vendetta with both his first and his second wife till her dying day - no-one was good enough for him. After he married Mary Barton, whom it was said, doubtless by the women he had disappointed, he had married because he himself was not medically qualified, only a physiologist, and needed someone to enable him to practice on women. This is the period I know little about - Jonathan knows more but he was small at the beginning. Certainly this period gave BPW considerable financial success and status, and both AIH and AID in people as distinct from farm animals was a terrific breakthrough. My own attitude to the process was a mixture of curiosity, pride and amusement - it all seemed so strange. Mary Barton was utterly discreet, a woman of great integrity - by my father always kept a light touch.

During this time he also experimented as I'm sure you know on extra sensory perception and published papers with Robert Thouless, a Cambridge psychologist. In fact there were very few things he was not interested in, and in his youth being a friend of Freud, Wittgenstein and Schonberg he must have seen so many avenues which could be explored.

I think, as I probably said that his abiding and enduring passion (except perhaps for Jonathan) was his work. I remember meeting him when he was already very crippled and could hardly lift his head and as I wheeled him across the foyer of whatever hotel it was he opened one eye and said he was hoping to go to ????

It was because of him that I became, for a short time, a physiologist. I wanted to be like him, but I didn't make it. He was violently generous but could be financially unreliable... he was funny but not malicious, and curious about the world almost to his dying day. You couldn't have picked a better father. I remember once when I was asking him about life - as one does - and he said: "There's usually a flash of colour at the beginning but it always ends badly". He was already very ill when he said this - but I think he had more than his fair share of colour at the start.

If I can help anymore let me know - but I'm eighty and not well, and can't do meetings I'm afraid.

Best wishes
Eva

BPW died in London in 1972. His health had declined and for the last period of his life he was looked after in a nursing home. His funeral was at the All Souls Church in Langham Place, London and he is buried in the East Finchley Cemetery in London.

(PHOTO ref: Death certificate of Bertold Paul Wiesner)