Between Britain and Europe

Ludwig Messel from Darmstadt typified the influx of foreign talent into the London Stock Exchange during the 1870s. He had a heavy accent and spoke little in company.

(Above) Ludwig Messel at Nymans. His brother Alfred, a famous Berlin architect, designed the German-looking house glimpsed in the
background. Ludwig married an English woman, but kept a German cook, butler and nurse. During World War One, the locals
spread rumours that he was a German agent, spying from the tower.  © National Trust

German high culture was valued in late-Victorian Britain. Sir Thomas Colyer-Fergusson of Ightham Mote married a daughter of the German-born “Orientalist” Friedrich Max Müller, whose ideas about race and religion influenced contemporary perceptions of Jews. Thomas’s second wife, Mary Cohen, was Jewish herself.

The German Room at Ightham Mote (right)  speaks to the family’s passion for German Romanticism and sense of connection to Europe. The Colyer-Fergussons were devotees of the music of Wagner and of the German-Jewish composer Mendelssohn. Thomas and his Jewish wife Mary supported German-Jewish musicians, emigres and intellectuals in the 1930s. © National Trust

Ludwig Mond was one of several immigrant German scientists to make their fortune in the chemicals industry. Winnington Hall in Cheshire was both a country home and base for the Brunner Mond industrial complex.

The Mond Nickel works at Clydach outside Swansea brought prosperity to a relatively deprived area. Alfred Mond provided workers with parks, bowling greens and even a golf course. In an atmosphere of anti-German hysteria - and even violence - he too was accused of spying from his garden. View of Mond Nickel Co., Clydach, oblique aerial view. The People’s Collection Wales.

Ludwig Mond’s son Alfred served as a liberal MP for Chester, and then in Wales. Here, he hosted important political functions at Fynone House. After World War One, Alfred was heckled in Swansea as a “German Jew”, and the Conservative Association declared him unfit to be an MP.

I am a collector of Old Engravings, Drawings of Old Masters, and Pictures of the Early Italian and Dutch Schools, also Chinese, Greek, Etruscan and Egyptian Antiquities, and I assisted my father with the formation of his collection of pictures, most of which he left to the National Gallery.
Robert Mond

The Monds were deeply engaged with European culture. In Rome, Ludwig and Frida Mond supported students, scientists and artists. They acquired Palazzo Zuccari for their friend Henrietta Herz, a German society hostess with a passion for Renaissance art. The art-history research institute she founded there survives to this day (right). Photo: Manfred Heyde, via Wikimedia Commons

 Exhibition continues: The Business of Empire