Almost an Englishman
Anthony Quinton FOR HE IS AN ENGLISHMAN by Charles Arnold-Baker or Wolfgang von Blumenthal Jeremy Mills Publishing, 22 Occupation Road, Lindley, Huddersfield HD3 3BD, Tel: 01484 421674, wwwjeremymillspublishing.co.uk, £14.99, pp. 408, ISBN 9781905217441 Within this great mound of words (there are at least 200,000 of them) there is a rather good book lurking. Its first merit is that it is very well written. The style is easy, lively, fresh, vernacular. The writing is devoid of clichés and prefabricated prose. Secondly, the story it has to tell is pleasantly exotic. The author was born shortly after the end of the first world war in eastern Germany. His mother, Wilhelmine, was the daughter of a Yorkshire clothing manufacturer, memorably called Abimelech Wainwright, and his depressed wife Elizabeth, who appears to have said nothing during the later years of her life. His father, Albrecht von Blumenthal, was the youngest son of a minor noble family. These two divorced, for reasons that will become clear, when Charles (or Wolfgang) was about four.
The question occurs to one, not why Wolfgang should have changed his name to an English one in the late 1930s, but why he chose the particular names he did. Arnold-Baker seems right for a housemaster at some relatively obscure public school. One sees him as a regular attender at school rugby matches. As for 'Charles', in the upper reaches of the social system, as with Charles I, the Young Pretender and the Prince of Wales, it tends to indicate silliness. (Although Dickens and Chaplin were comic they were not silly.) As it turns out, Arnold-Baker was taken over from the somewhat mouse-like solicitor his mother married, and he was called Charles already.
His mother was a monster, whom Balzac would have been happy to appropriate: a termagant, a scold and a shrew, that is to say aggressive, nagging and unpleasantly malicious. What her husband saw in her is hard to fathom from the accompanying photographs. In an early one with Albrecht she looks like a domineering secretary. He is rather more unusual in appearance, very much like Buster Keaton with white face and strange hat, but smiling broadly. She cultivated the aggressiveness which people from Yorkshire so assiduously foster but without the basic good nature which usually accompanies it. Of her it might be said that under a rough exterior she had a heart of flint. Albrecht was by no means a straightforward member of the officer class. He had been a Rhodes scholar at Oxford in the 1900s. In so far as he had a profession it was that of classical scholar. But he does not seem to have risen higher than the rank of Privatdosent and the only published work mentioned is called Greek Examples, presumably some gobbets for school use. More interestingly, he was a hanger-on of the Stefan George circle.
The account of life in a German manor house is very lively and detailed. The author knew little of it directly, since he was about four when he left Germany. But he revisited it before the war and like Tristram Shandy this life-story takes a long time to get to its subject's conception. Wilhelmine stayed on in Germany unmolested. Perhaps her Christian name helped. Albrecht was taken prisoner by the French, incarcerated in Corsica, and after contracting TB was sent to Switzerland.
Around 1922 Wilhelmine, Wolfgang and his elder brother Werner left for England after Albrecht had been caught out in some brazen infidelity. He remarried, had four children and committed suicide with his new wife at the end of the second world war. Charles went to a series of prep schools, all dreadful. But things picked up at Winchester where he was from 1932 until 1937. He writes of it and its famous masters of the period with real affection. From Winchester he went to Magdalen, where he was by his own account, which is wholly credible, disgustingly lazy. But he did meet the wife whom he has been with for more than 60 years.
At this point, about half way through the book, the subject matter becomes much less interesting. After all, most autobiographies do tend to do that, and, in his case, there is the disappearance of the Anglo-German tension within him Thus he sympathises with the Germans' total repudiation, public and private, of the treaty of Versailles, but is in no doubt that the great mass of the German population was quite happy to bask in the sunshine of Hitler's triumphs.
Another relative weakness is although his war was not entirely conventional — serving with the Buffs in England and Ulster without much incident and then a bit more promisingly with 1V116 — he does not make all that much of it. After demobilisation he is called to the Bar, becomes a Traffic Commissioner, dealing with problems of parking and right of way in distant parts of the country and then, even less thrillingly, he sinks into the management of a series of local government associations. Could anyone have made much of such an immersion?
But he remains his lively and colloquial self throughout, even in the greyest environment. There is a a picture of him on the book's cover in a comfortable-looking dinner jacket with a large gin-like drink in his hand, all traces of his German origin finally obliterated, his wife looking on with proper affection.
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