My involvement with Hampstead started in the 1890s.
My grandmother Lizzie Whittington, a London girl, and a talented pianist, ended up in a deeply unhappy marriage in South Africa.
She hated South Africa, not because of any awakening sensitivity about race but because it wasn't a patch on London or Paris. She negotiated a life where she could go back to get the children brought up in England; my grandfather sort of commuted. Two of her daughters were then remorselessly drilled in classical music as the core of a future string quartet – violin and viola – and later went off to London to study. And, inevitably, unstoppably, they migrated to Hampstead.
Hampstead in the late 1930s was the obvious place for young classical-music students who wanted to do the new things – play new work from new composers such as Elisabeth Lutyens, play difficult music from memory, go to music camp and meet Benjamin Britten.
England – accused of being ‘a land without music’ by the German critic Oscar Schmitz in 1904 – had been the recent beneficiary of a large group of German and Austrian composers and musicians, many of them leftists and many of them Jewish,.
