Reminders of a wedding, nearly a century on

As I keep going through old photos, in my long, slow task of getting them sorted and, eventually, digitised, I keep coming across some I’ve never seen before or, having seen them, have forgotten all about.

That was the case of some pictures of my grandparents’ wedding. That’s my maternal, Jewish grandparents.

My grandparents on their wedding day
8 September 1921

There’s the standard wedding photo, with the two of them in their finery. They’re looking a bit stern though. Might that be just the way people posed back then? Or Jews, at least, at their wedding? Or was there something to feel a little stern about?

Another photo shows the rest of my grandmother’s family (but I have no photo of his, or at least none I’ve found so far. I’ll keep looking). Shmuel, the paterfamilias, is seated. He was the shoemaker who specialised in making shoe uppers for damaged or deformed feet and could, apparently, make the right shape of upper for a foot that he'd merely felt with his hands. It was a valuable skill and it enabled him to make a home for his family in England, one in which they could live modestly but in comfort.

From left: Edie, Shmuel, Jonny, Blume

He was a smart character, who in 1902 had seen the Russo-Japanese war coming, as it did in 1905. He’d already served seven years in the Tsarist army and knew that, as with black Americans two or three generations later, Jews would be the first called up to fight and the first chosen as cannon fodder. So he left Vilnius for England.

To his far right was my great-grandmother, Bluma. Those who follow this blog may remember that she travelled to join him a year later. My grandmother remembered them standing on the dockside in St Petersburg. In Bluma’s arms was my great-uncle Jonny, who in the photo appears between his father and mother, while my grandmother, then three, was holding onto her with one hand and a potty for Jonny with the other. At far left of the photo is my great-aunt Edie, the youngest and the only one born in England.

Jonny later became a musician, composing a little and also producing arrangements of Jewish music. My last conversation with him was when he rang me at my grandmother’s to ask if I could help a young man he knew who was being charged with inciting British soldiers to mutiny. I forget what political cause he was trying to serve, but it was one I agreed with. Jonny knew I was with the radical left at that time and thought that would help, although I reckon a lawyer might have been more useful.

Emigrating saved the lives of the Sonnscheins. The relatives who stayed behind were all wiped out in the Holocaust.

As for the wedding itself, it nearly didn’t happen. I’ve already told how my grandmother had been engaged to a soldier who somehow managed to survive the First World War, only to be carried off by the flu epidemic of 1918 to 1919. That was a far worse pandemic than today’s.

My grandmother’s name was Yetta Johnson (properly Sonnschein). She may have been a founder member of the British Communist Party, or at least a member from its early days. She apparently became quite a fiery speaker on its platforms. One day, a young man – 28 or 29 – variously known as Nathan Bernstein, or Norman Bannister to anglicise both names, or Nat Bannister as I always think of him, who had recently been released from Dartmoor Prison where he had spent that last two years of the war as a Conscientious Objector, attended a meeting where Yetta was speaking.

He wasn’t inspired to join the Party though he was inspired to join her. She was less enthusiastic, and even broke off the engagement at one point, leading to one of the iconic scenes of our family history: she threw the ring on the ground in the street and Nat, rather than go after her, got down on his knees to find it.

Eventually, she let herself be persuaded to go through with the wedding, on 8 September 1921. Those were the photos I found.

The marriage lasted nearly 60 years, until his death in 1980. On the face of it, that’s a highly successful marriage. But the reality I think was less easy.

I remember him with great pleasure. An image that has stuck with me is of him running for a bus one morning, when he was already 70. He had a great shock of white hair, which I think I’ve inherited, and I remember seeing it stirred by the breeze of his run as he covered the ground like an athlete, calling to me, “you can get home alone all right, can’t you?” 

That trust in my ability to steer myself back, which was fully justified, appealed to me as much as the sight of his running.

However, I don’t think my grandfather can have been an easy man to be married to. He did well in his chosen profession of lithography, eventually becoming a salesman who could visit clients, such as London Underground, and tell them at a glance how many colours it would take to reproduce a picture as a publicity poster. So he was able to provide them with a reasonably comfortable life, but he never lost his instinct for economy. My mother remembered long arguments at home in which her mother had to plead for some small addition to the allowance he gave her for housekeeping, in weeks when she had run short.

He also had quite a temper, though when he died, my mother did admit that he may have been in some pain for the many years before, as the cancer that eventually killed him grew within his body. Still. Living with him can't have been easy.

Is the sternness in the photos perhaps a presentiment of that life to come? Certainly the bleak expression reappears in the picture of Yetta on her own in her bridal dress. Somehow, she doesn’t look over the moon, does she?

Yetta at her wedding
Somehow, not my picture of the ecstatic bride

Alongside the difficulty of life with Nat, I wonder how completely my grandmother recovered from the loss of her first fiancé. He died in 1919, I assume, and she was married in 1921, so she may have met my grandfather within a year or eighteen months of that loss. Did she settle for him on the rebound?

It’s all speculation now, of course. But I find it intriguing to think about. So it’s a pleasure to have the photos to remind me.