A century on

One hundred years ago today, what a different place Britain was.

Only a few months earlier, in September 1923, when Britain officially took up a mandate from the League of Nations to govern Palestine, the British Empire reached its greatest ever extent. Which was odd, because Britain was already decidedly on the downward slope. It had been the banker to the world up to the First World War ten years earlier, but had emerged from that conflict a debtor nation, indebted above all to the United States. 

One of Britain’s allies, that had provided limited but valuable assistance in the war, had been Japan. But the US, worried about Japanese competition in the Pacific, put pressure on Britain to end the alliance. There had been a time when Britain would have firmly but politely – or perhaps not politely – rejected such interference in its affairs, but those days were gone, and it complied with the American demand.

So it was never truer than in the middle 1920s that the sun never set on the British Empire, but it was also true that the Empire’s sun was already setting.

Into that world, on the 11th of July 1924, a little girl her parents decided to call Leatrice was born into the Bannister family. Anyone who knows a little about British Jewish life knows that ‘Bannister’ was one of those give-away names: most people who held it had been called ‘Bernstein’ before they showed up in England.

Nat Bannister, Leatrice’s father, had been raised in back-breaking poverty in London’s East End. He’d left school at fourteen and taken work in the lithographic printing industry. He spent the First World War avoiding military service in what he saw as an indefensible conflict, and ended up spending two years in the harsh conditions of Dartmoor prison for his pacifist pains.

His wife, Yetta, came from a more comfortable family, of more recent refugees than Nat’s, who got out of the Russian Empire not long before Russia went to war with Japan. Her father had already spent seven years in the Tsarist army and could imagine what fate awaited him in the Far East if war broke out with Japan, as he was sure it would. He was a skilled craftsman, making the uppers of shoes for people with feet deformed from birth or as a result of accident, and could provide a better childhood for his Yetta than Nat enjoyed.

Yetta was a radical and an early member of the British Communist Party, though her flirtation with Communism didn’t last long. It was at a public meeting which she addressed that Nat, never a member himself, first saw her. She was recovering from the death of a fiancé who’d made it through the war but then succumbed to the so-called Spanish flu, and she resisted Nat’s courtship for quite a time. She apparently once lost her temper with him, broke off the engagement she’d finally agreed to and flung the ring at him before storming off into the night. Instead of going after her, he got down on his hands and knees hunting for the ring, which he eventually found and presented to her again when she was calmer.

Leatrice grew up in a North London suburb, in an atmosphere she described as stiff with anti-Semitism. She escaped from that when she took a job as secretary to a Labour Member of Parliament and Secretary of the reformist Fabian Society. That meant she spent the latter part of the Second World War close to the circles of power, a remarkable apprenticeship for someone in her late teens to early twenties.

What she didn’t get was a higher education, to her great regret. 

Leatrice in London’s Hyde Park in 1947

After the war, when travel became possible again, she made a beeline for Paris to a typist’s job at UNESCO. There she met Leonard Beeson. Apparently, what first attracted her were his silk socks, which she got to examine closely when sitting on the floor at a party, with her back to the couch on which he was sitting more comfortably. That, apparently, was as good a start as any to a relationship that led them into a marriage lasting from 1951 until his depressingly early death in 1983.

The marriage took her from Paris to Rome, where her two sons were born. From Rome, they moved to Kinshasa in what was then called the Democratic Republic of Congo and is called that again after spending some time as Zaïre, though its relationship to democracy has always been distant. In the last of Leonard’s professional moves, they travelled from Kinshasa to New York. There she was at last able to satisfy her desire for a university education, obtaining a degree from City University of New York, with the best class (Summa Cum Laude, with highest praise) and winning herself the prestigious Phi Beta Kappa key.

The couple enjoyed a brief retirement during which they split their time between France and England. When that was ended by her widowhood, she moved to Oxford, much to the astonishment of most people who knew her, since she’d had no previous connection with the city. It suited her well though, giving her a wide new circle of friends (including the local Labour MP) and the opportunity to serve as a City Guide, which she did with great enthusiasm, until infirmity at last forced her to stop.

Like her first quarter century, she lived her last in England. A profoundly different England, no longer the leading nation of a Britain that bestrode the world, but part of a middle-ranking power that was, at the time she moved back, at last building itself a future as a part of Europe. But then she was saddened, as I was, when it turned its back on that project, and on its neighbours, by voting to leave the EU, in what looked like nothing more than a last desperate grasp at global glory, something that was already slipping from its grip when Leatrice was born, and had long gone by the time she died.

Still, it was England, it was her home, she felt comfortable there, and that made it a good place to see out her last years.

She died on her 94th birthday, on 11 July 2018. So today I can raise a glass to her twice: once for the 100th anniversary of her birth, and once more to the way she managed, although unconscious at the time, to make it to one last birthday.

On my brother’s behalf and my own, that’ll be my salute to our mother Leatrice and the remarkable life she lived in some rapidly changing times.

Leatrice with Leonard in France in the 1980s