Gandhi’s specs and car owned by Mussolini
YOU perhaps remember that a pair of spectacles once owned by Mahatma Gandhi sold at auction for £260,000 four years ago.
If you do, you’ll probably also recall that the glasses came from a supplier in Gloucester, an optician named H Cannam of 23, St Aldate Street.
If you’re of riper years and need to wear spectacles to read this, it just might be that the ones perched on the end of your nose at this very moment came from the same shop, as H Cannam was placing adverts for his services in The Citizen during the 1960s.
At first sight this county connection with one of the most significant figures of the last century might be dismissed as a one off curiosity. But delve a little deeper and you’ll discover many more instances of the part Gloucestershire has played in the lives of the great and good. And some not so good.
Falling into the latter category is the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. In February 2008 a car that once belonged to Il Duce arrived at Cheltenham Racecourse to be sold at auction.
The burgundy coloured 1935 Alpha Romeo Pescara Spyder was a handsome machine and a private buyer paid £550,000 for Mr Mussolini’s motor.
This was not the first car owned by a high profile fascist to be seen in Gloucestershire.
Soon after the Second World War a car that had belonged to Hermann Goering, Hitler’s deputy, reichsmarschall and commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, attracted intrigued crowds who’d gathered for the opening of the new St Aldate Garage, which stood in what is now King’s Square in Gloucester.
While in the city the car was also used in a photoshoot to raise publicity for a new film being screened at a local cinema. The Merc then moved on to its next location, stopping off in Shurdington, then on to Bishop’s Cleeve.
Goering’s car was a vehicle of striking proportions. To give it its full title, the Mercedes Benz type Grosser 770 K seven seater W150 pullman convertible was, according to one story, the car in which Goering and his family were captured in Austria in 1945.
Still on the subject of far right figures, in May 1936 Oswald Mosley gave a 90 minute speech at Shire Hall in Gloucester in his capacity as leader of the British Union of Fascists and told the audience that Britain had nothing to fear from Hitler.
He arrived for the engagement in a black MG SA sports saloon, with bodywork by the Coventry coach builder Charlesworth. By coincidence this firm moved to Gloucester a few years later having had its premises bombed by the Luftwaffe.
Within a short time of his visit to the city, Mosley married Diana Mitford of Batsford Park, Gloucestershire. Their wedding took place in the drawing room of Joseph Goebbels’s Berlin home. The only other guest, besides Goebbels, was Adolf Hitler, who presented the happy couple with a framed photograph of himself as a keepsake.
That’s enough about fascists, but it brings us to another Teutonic tyrant.
In summer 1914, with boiling unrest in the Balkans, lurking revolution in Russia, arch rivalry between Britain and the Fatherland, and Europe poised at the threshold of the most destructive conflict in the history of mankind, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, ordered and paid for two Gloucester Old Spots pigs from a farmer in Berkeley, Gloucestershire.
Events intervened and Wilhelm never did get his pigs. Neither did he get his money back. He abdicated and lived out the rest of his life in Holland where he passed his time cutting down trees.
On the subject of local livestock and autocratic leaders, a small flock of Cotswold Lions, the heavily fleeced breed of sheep indigenous to these parts, can be found in Iran. They were presented to the Shah of Persia in 1960 and survived, which of course he didn’t as he left his homeland in 1979.
Another exile, Haile Selassie the Emperor of Abyssinia, in September 1935 was booked as the guest speaker at the Connaught Rooms in Eastgate Street, Gloucester by the city’s Welsh Society.
Unfortunately, just days before his imperial highness was scheduled to arrive in Gloucester, Mussolini’s troops invaded Ethiopia and the talk was cancelled.
Forced into exile, Haile Selassie came to live in Britain and for a time stayed in the Abbey Hotel, Malvern, visiting Gloucester on a number of occasions. These were reported by The Citizen, which announced that the Emperor went to see a film at the Plaza (later the Odeon) in Barton Street and had tea in the cinema’s café.
In 1921 Crown Prince Hirohito became the first member of the Japanese royal family to travel abroad when he visited Britain. While here he stayed in Bibury and praised the village roundly.
A few years later he ascended his country’s Chrysanthemum throne to become Emperor and consequently Bibury assumed a spiritual status among his people, vast numbers of whom flock to Arlington Row to click away with their Pentaxes to this day.
Having mentioned tyrants, autocrats and emperors, let’s finish with a king. Michael Jackson, king of pop, started recording a song titled “Gloucestershire”, said to be inspired by a visit to the county with his brothers in the Jackson Five.
You can find the record on Youtube if you’re of a mind. It was never released and when you’ve listened to it you may think that’s for the best.
The picture of Oswald Mosely appears in “Stroud Streets and Shops” by Wilf Merrett, published by Tempus in 2004 and full of interest if you can find a copy.