Page 24 - Joseph Wright of Derby: Virgils's Tomb & The Grand Tour.

their immediate release. Classes were held and if one was so

inclined one could get a free education on any subject under

the sun with a published timetable of lectures and classes
morning and afternoon.14

As I have said, my father used the war years to travel round the

UK and made many friends among the aristocracy since he was

cut off from his normal contacts on the Continent.Apart from

his close contacts with Colnaghi’s, where he had rescued the

possessions of Gus Mayer from a spectacular bankruptcy15

which decimated the old firm and caused a withdrawal from its

prestige premises in New Bond Street to the shared premises

with Knoedler’s at number 14 Old Bond Street, he made new

friends with some of the London dealers.These were mainly, I

believe, in the more modern end of the market, but also with

WalterTarrash c.1958 Leggat’s. Much later when I was thirteen he took particular
pride in introducing me to Hugh and then taking me down the

street to Berry Bros. to be weighed in and registered as a potential future client. We progressed as well toTeltscher’s

for a supply of inimitable pre-war vintage slivovitz to which I rapidly became addicted! My father was sufficiently far

seeing to start me off with my own wine cellar in Elbridge when I was 14 years old and I have never looked back, his

favourite being also then my favourite – Chateau Cheval Blanc 1953. However, this ‘education’ had its downside as

I transferred this practice to Harrow.This led to a sound beating, one of several for ‘independence of spirit’.

My father had ample charisma and was an irresistible attraction to women who often schemed over him. He has
been described as ‘dapper’, which I could vouch for, charming and urbane and also an inimitable, but slightly shy
raconteur. He loved women but equally valued his privacy and independence. He could not, for instance, bear to
be chained to on-going family commitments finding any excuse to travel abroad after a fortnight of‘domestic bliss’
coddled by my mother.Thus to me he often seemed very distant though at times, such as bed time stories in Italy,
very human. Both my father and my mother were married three times with children by each union. In 1942 my
mother, married to Walter Tarrash, a friend of my father’s, also Jewish, who had been dispossessed by the Nazis
of his leather tanning factories in Braunschweig, met my father and fell under his spell16. I was born in 1943 ‘out

14. See Ronald Stent, A Bespattered page –The Internment of ‘His Majesty’s Most Loyal Enemy Aliens’,Andre Deutsch 1980, pp. 156-79.The Daily Mail led the
outcry over the internment of Jewish prisoners which led to their release

15. Gus had developed a passion for ‘Model Farming’ and lost a fortune.
16. They had in fact first met in Berlin in my father’s heyday in the 1920s or 30s when my mother was married to her first husband the German aviation

manufacturer Hanns Klemm (Klemm Leichtflugzeugbau GmbH) whose KL20 and 25 models were highly successful sports competition aircraft and
trainers which begat a British variant the B.A.Swallow. My mother had also spent a year with her then husband in the Kremlin when he was adviser to
the nascent Russian Soviet airforce.

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