11

The Brothers Bastendorff

The Bastendorff children – all sixteen of them – had grown up on a farm amid the rich forests and rocky hills and castles of the Ardennes; in the mid-nineteenth century, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, under the wing of Belgium, was still largely untouched by the Industrial Revolution. It was only in later years that new forms of steel production suddenly made the country a viable prospect for manufactories. Indeed, Luxembourg only got its first railway line in 1859, some distance behind its neighbours in Belgium and France.

The Bastendorff family lived in a village called Berdorf, near the bustling town of Echternach, which stands very close to today’s German border. The area had its own, close dialect, and held tenaciously to its Catholicism; and the children who were later to emigrate to London – Joseph, Severin, Elizabeth, Anton and Peter – would have been brought up on local folktales¹ that blended religion and the lush wooded landscape with the faerie realm; there were the little people that dwelled under the hills, who aided virtuous farmers; a satanic fiddler who could possess people with his music; the chilling nocturnal chants of long-dead monks in the ruin of an abbey despoiled by invaders. There was nothing in this childhood that could have prepared them for life dwelling among millions in the fog of a vast city.

Perhaps it was the belated coming of the railway to the city of Luxembourg which opened up the possibilities of that new world. sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Bastendorff, was the first to leave her home; she was married to a young German called Wilhelm Hoerr. Their horizons were ambitious; rather than heading in the direction of Belgium, they were set on Paris. And they arrived there in the late 1860s. They were joined shortly afterwards by Elizabeth’s brother, Severin, released from his rural labour.

‘At the age of fifteen, I was hired to a farmer for one year,’ Severin later wrote, ‘… I remained with him the whole year, looking after the horses, and he maintained me. After that I went to Paris and learned the cabinet-making trade.’²

Of all the times to hope to make a new life in Paris, this was hardly ideal. Napoleon III was confident that France’s military skill and strength would act as deterrent to a newly unified Germany and its leader Bismarck. It did not. By 1870, there was war.

Elizabeth and Wilhelm Hoerr and Severin Bastendorff left just before the disaster overwhelmed Paris; the thunder of war made them think not of returning to Luxembourg, but venturing further. There had been a few instances of their young Berdorf neighbours sailing out to America. But they decided upon London.

And it was Severin, then 22-years old, who moved first. He set sail on a steam packet across the grey Channel and came into port at Southampton. ‘I knew no-one, and could not speak a word of English, only French and German,’ he later wrote.³

When Bastendorff arrived, there was no oppressive police presence at the docks to follow him; no officials to tell him that his time in the country was limited; no overbearing government departments insistent on monitoring his employment or housing. There was just a quick note on a register. (Indeed, it was only in the 1880s that official passenger disembarkation lists started to be kept; and the first serious efforts at controlling immigration came later yet at the turn of the century.)

On the other side of that, Bastendorff was left to make his own way in this alien realm. It must have been a tremendous adventure for the young man with no English; but the docks were very cosmopolitan. ‘A man at Southampton gave me the address of a hotel in Nassau Street,’ he wrote. ‘I went there and had some refreshment and he (the proprietor) sent a waiter with me to take a room at the tobacconist’s shop in Ryder’s Court, which I took for two shillings and six pence. The shopkeeper was a Pole.’ It seemed also that he was connected to a wider network of émigrés. ‘Next day, this Pole gave me addresses to look for work.’

One of those addresses was in the East End of London; using what remained of his money, Bastendorff caught the train from Southampton; here, in this swaying carriage amid fellow passengers, he will have had that exhilarating butterfly sensation of being a new arrival in a foreign land. He would have glanced around and wondered if the others could tell he was a foreigner.

His approach into London from the south took him past plump green hills dense with suburban villas, and thence more close-built yellow-brick terraces, and on from there towards the dense smoky clusters of tall chimneys and low roofs denoting riverside industry. The air of this new world – coal, chemicals, gusts from breweries, the close, fusty reek of others’ clothes – must have tasted extraordinary to him. His train arrived at Victoria station. And from here, there was what must have been the stomach-swooping prospect of the underground Metropolitan District Railway: the recently constructed ingenuity of which was described by some as ‘a descent into Hades’: again, we must imagine a young man from a rural land standing looking into the black mouth of the tunnel, cacophonous with the approach of the deep green steam engine; then, the yellow gaslight in the swaying brown-painted wooden carriages, the rich darkness out of the windows, punctuated with gas-lit stations, until reaching the terminus at Mansion House. However he did it, Bastendorff eventually made his way east to Union Street in Whitechapel.

There he met ‘a German, Mr Keller’, and immediately started working for him. Bastendorff’s skill sharpened; over the weeks, he began to acquire a little of the language, and then more. Though there were many other German speakers in Whitechapel, the area was in sloping decline; bitterly overcrowded housing, pervasive street violence, a labyrinth of close-built courts that reeked of dung and animal blood. For a young man who had come from wide-open country, it must have been bitterly unpleasant.

But as Bastendorff’s craftsmanship improved, so his ambitions rose. He took on another cabinet-making job, near Clerkenwell. This business was not so successful; he considered at one point returning to Paris. (This was commonly the case with numbers of French immigrants at this time, who for some reason, possibly to do with language, often found it harder than others to maintain their grip on the city.)

Instead, he found another position, this time closer to the centre of town, with ‘Mr Vortier, of St Martin’s Lane’; and his speciality was bamboo work. Bastendorff stayed with him for a year, ever more profitably; then decided to take his own workshop in Denmark Street, and go into business for himself. (Though the timings are unclear, his sister and brother-in-law must have arrived around this time and established themselves elsewhere; similarly, his other brothers, Anton and Joseph, came to London too; Peter followed later.)

Commercial success now came quickly for Severin: he started simply, making one table, a blend of timber and bamboo. He sold it to a large retailer on the nearby Tottenham Court Road. He recalled that by the time he had delivered this table, and returned to his workshop, there was already a messenger boy there to place an order from the retailers for more of his work.

Bastendorff had found a place, and a skill that was serendipitously in demand. For some decades out of fashion, ‘chinoiserie’ – furniture inspired by Chinese designs – was desirable once more. It was now blended with influences from Japan, and the art of working with bamboo as a material resulted in furniture – chairs, desks, firescreens, occasional tables – that could be relatively cheap, as well as light and durable. In the early 1870s, only a handful of manufacturers were specialising in it. Although not a part of the nascent Arts and Crafts movement, which focused on the aesthetics of handmade designs, this sort of furniture making – highly elaborate patterns, careful lacquers and varnishing – was in the same spirit. And as Bastendorff grew his new business, he entered into partnerships with English furniture makers. His assimilation was fast. It was natural for him to think soon of taking a wife.

By the 1860s and early 1870s, there was in a wider sense quite a degree of cultural fusion between the British and German people. The most obvious link – emotional, rather than constitutional – was the Royal Family, with its antecedents and branches reaching deep into Germany. Not only was German the first language of Queen Victoria, but many of the aristocrats who patronised the flourishing arts and sciences in London and throughout the land were very closely bonded with German landed power. Far from being either a suspicious or hostile environment, London was a very open city at this point. Continental Europe was more than neighbouring nations; it was a closely integrated part of the capital’s life.

Bastendorff had to continually move his work premises; for his growing success meant he had to hire more hands and rent yet more space. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the streets that ran north from Oxford Street towards Somers Town were filled with workshops specialising in everything from easy chairs to pianos. By the time Bastendorff’s brothers had arrived in London in the early 1870s, there were an estimated 6,000 people working in the furniture trade in the small area of London around Fitzroy Square alone. Filmer and Sons, for instance, produced ‘couches and chairs’ that were ‘celebrated … for their grace and comfort’. Oetzmann in the meantime took immense pride in the finish of its mahogany furnishings. C. Nosotti offered ‘a choice selection of dining room, bedroom and boudoir furniture’.⁴ For soft furnishings such as ‘Brussels Carpets’, Druce and Co. were advertising heavily.

And the busy thoroughfare of Tottenham Court Road was opening up yet more possibilities: furniture shops that had once been small and cramped were expanding, and blossoming in colour and style. John Maples had looked at his eponymous outlet and saw the wisdom in constructing a much larger store that could be divided into departments. In the 1860s, Maples was offering a shop which could offer everything from Jacobean-themed sideboards, blackened and elaborately carved, to more voguish Chinese lacquered cabinets.

Soon this approach was attracting a more upmarket sort of customer: there were ladies in Belgravia who would summon the brougham to take them to Tottenham Court Road. Heal and Son – which still stands on the Tottenham Court Road today – was reconstructed ‘in the Italian style’ with galleries and ‘a considerable amount of colour introduced in the pilasters and panels’.⁵

And the workshops that clustered around these smart emporia had for some decades seen a dazzling mix of European nationalities: French, Swedish and Dutch craftsmen had all, in time, come to own their own concerns. The working conditions were, for the time, very reasonable. This was not the case all over London. Cheaper, more basic furniture, manufactured on the fringes of the City and the Hackney Road, was a sweated enterprise; for less-skilled workers, the pay was very poor and the hours were debilitating. Here just off the Tottenham Court Road, however, the craftsmen were treated with respect.

The journalist and social observer Henry Mayhew visited The Woodcarver’s Society just off Charlotte Mews in 1861 and found ‘a fairly paid class of mechanics’ surrounded with proud examples of their work, ‘discussing the affairs of their trade’.⁶

Here was intelligence, and diligence, and also the prospect of social mobility. Severin Bastendorff – and brothers Joseph, Anton, and a little later, the young Peter – acquired skills and business acumen very quickly. The entire family went into the business of bamboo.

Working with bamboo was quite a different discipline to the more conventional forms of carpentry; it required an understanding of the unique nature of the reeds and patience when it came to moulding with flame the different elements of each furniture item, the varnishing required for lacquered cabinets and the production of a tortoise-shell finish on items such as chairs and sofas.

But, in the early 1870s, the time was perfect for hard-working young men from the continent; not least because, through contacts and assiduous research, they would have found very quickly a German-speaking market for their goods.

By this stage, the German-speakers in London congregated most around three areas: Bloomsbury (which seemed largely to attract the younger incomers who would live in the boarding houses); Camberwell, an increasingly prosperous suburb four miles south of the Thames; and Sydenham, some three or four miles further south yet, and sitting on the high wooded hill that was dominated with the vast glittering structure of Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace.

The composer Richard Wagner had spent a few months in the 1850s being ‘entertained by some of the wealthy Camberwell Germans’ as well becoming infuriated with ‘inattentive’ English audiences and having his Tannhauser overture performed before Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.⁷ But, by the 1870s, it was the native Germans in Sydenham who were the most well-to-do; these were families of merchants living in large, pretty villas, with pleasing views ranging from the City to the green fields of Kent; these were the sorts of customers that the Bastendorffs would seek out.

Many of the small furniture businesses clustered around Fitzroy Square and Charlotte Street were run as partnerships; skilled tradesmen joining forces and sharing their enterprises. Then, as the Bastendorffs grew in confidence, there was a move to start building a family-based business.

And as they did so, they also started to form romantic attachments that would come to give them even more permanent roots in this bright, exciting city. The eldest, Joseph, found himself a sweetheart who was a parlourmaid. And, in time, handsome young Severin, aged 25, began stepping out with a striking young lady whom he had met locally. It must have seemed for a time, to him and Mary Pearce, that the possibilities of this extraordinary time and city were endless.

Yet it might also be asked whether even at this early point Severin was finding it difficult to maintain his mental stability.