Communists in Hampstead
I have already mentioned the Soviet Union’s Ambassador, Ivan Maisky, visiting Williams-Ellis in his house on Holly Hill. This steeply inclined lane meets Heath Street near to Hampstead Underground station not far from Café Louis. One day in 2020, after having been confined to our locality (Kensington) for three months by strict ‘lockdown’ rules, we drove to Hampstead, and enjoyed cups of coffee at a tiny outdoor table at Louis. I looked across Heath Street from where we were sitting and stared at the Hampstead branch of Tesco’s. This run-of-the-mill supermarket, rather surprising for upmarket Hampstead, is housed in a building with light red tiling and brickwork with stone window settings. Above Tesco’s, there is an old sign in bas-relief that reads “EXPRESS DAIRY COMPANY LTD” and next to that, there is a plaque with the date “AD 1889”.
The year 1889 has had a special significance for me ever since I attended the Hall School, a prestigious preparatory school for boys near Swiss Cottage. The school was founded in 1889 and celebrated its 75th anniversary in 1964, while I was still studying there. Maybe because of this, my mind is always alert to that year. The founding of a preparatory school in 1889 is a relatively insignificant reason to remember the year. More importantly it was the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution and the year of the completion of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Before sitting at that outdoor table at Louis in 2020, I knew about 1889 in connection with what I have mentioned already, but nothing about the former Express Dairy in Hampstead bearing the plaque with the date 1889. The other buildings on that stretch of Heath Street, which was built-up in the Victorian era, were, like the dairy, mostly constructed in the late 1880s.
For many centuries, Hampstead has been the haunt of people involved in creative pursuits. So, it was no surprise that the former Express Dairy opposite Louis had at least one interesting cultural connection. In February 1916, the Bolshevik revolutionary Maxim Litvinov (1856-1951) proposed to his future wife Ivy Low in the café inside that branch of Express Dairy. Ivy, a novelist, was born, please note, in 1889 (she died in 1977). At the time he became acquainted with Ivy, Litvinov was with Lenin in London. Ivy did occasional typing for Maxim, and it was not long before they were attracted to one another. Passionate about cinema, he took her to watch films with him and one day he ‘popped the question’ in the Express Dairy. After they married, they lived in Hampstead until the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in October 1917. They did not return to Russia immediately because in January 1918 Maxim Litvinoff was made First Proletarian Envoy to the Court of St. James’s.
According to Zinovy Sheinis in his biography of Maxim first published in 1988, Maxim often went to Hampstead to meet his friends the Klyshkos, who lived on Hampstead High Street. Nikolai Klyshko (1880-1937) was a Bolshevik revolutionary of Polish parentage, who had settled in London and was a fluent Russian speaker. For a brief period, Litvinov lived in Hampstead with Klyshko and his English wife. Sheinis wrote about Maxim’s meeting with Ivy:
“They had met at a friend’s house. Then at a gathering of the Fabian Society. Litvinov was impressed by her knowledge of Tolstoy and Chekhov. Putting on weight, red-haired, of average height, well-mannered, and not very talkative, he made a big impression on the young writer. Her mother, the daughter of a colonel in the British Army, naturally wanted a different match for her daughter and certainly did not want to see her married to an insecure emigre from Russia. As for his religious background, Ivy Lowe simply never gave it a thought. She was herself from a family of Hungarian Jews who had taken part in the Kossuth uprising; in her girlhood she had been a Protestant, then had been converted to Catholicism. The choice of religion was her private affair and concerned no one else.”
After their marriage, they lived in a house, owned by Belgian refugees, in Hampstead’s South Hill Park (number 86). While there, Sheinis related:
“Friends sometimes gathered there in the evenings to discuss the political news; then an argument would flare up, developing into a fierce squabble. It always seemed to Ivy that her husband and his guests would any moment start flinging chairs at one another. At the very height of the dispute, when it was almost at boiling-point, she would leave the kitchen, go into the room, and announce that tea or coffee was ready. The disputants would calm down and drink their tea in peace.”
He also wrote that Ivy:
“… was not interested in and did not understand the political activities of her husband and his friends. To her, it was an alien world. In London, after the October Revolution, she asked her husband if he knew Lenin. Maxim replied that he had known Lenin for a long time. But she had no idea that letters from Lenin were coming to their house and that her flat was the headquarters of Bolshevik emigres.”
Later, they lived in a tiny house in West Hampstead. After that, Litvinov, having become a Soviet diplomat, moved from Hampstead. Despite not being officially accredited by the British, Sheinis noted:
“The Litvinovs were even invited to receptions. Though Soviet Russia was not yet recognised, its powerful influence reached standoffish London, Ivy Litvinova recollected.”
By 1921, the Litvinovs with their two young children, at least one of whom was born in Hampstead, settled in Moscow. Although Litvinov held high governmental posts in the Soviet Union and outside it (as a Soviet diplomat), he and Ivy, like so many other citizens in Stalin’s Russia, were constantly in fear of being arrested and/or killed.
Now, buy the Book:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/BENEATH-WIDE-SKY-HAMPSTEAD-ENVIRONS/dp/B09R2WRK92/
READ BOOKS BY ADAM YAMEY 