By Nigel Walley - 19 Emlyn
Researching the history of 19 Emlyn Road, we went back to the documents we got given when we bought the house. We had bought it from the children of a lady called Lola LeWinter, who had recently moved into a nursing home. When we looked closer at the legal documents, it turned out her real name was Charlotte LeWinter. We knew she was a piano teacher, and had lived here with her sister 'Fela' but there was nothing else.
Then our neighbour sent us some things that he had found when doing the same searches about his house. These were the 1985 Electoral Register showing Charlotte Le Winter against our house. But more intriguingly he also enclosed a copy of a Vienna classical music magazine - Radio Vienna (Radio-Wien) from 1933 describing a concert featuring 'Felicitas Lewinter' a classical pianist. It was accompanied by a link to an article about an Irish Classical pianist Barry Douglas, who mentioned a Felicity Lewinter (also known as 'Fela') in his personal history. He went on to describe how influential she had been to him.
"My school music experience really helped my formative moves towards being a pianist. But I guess it was meeting, when I was 16, this incredible pianist teacher, Felicitas LeWinter. It was a chance meeting; my father met this old friend and he said, 'Felicitas is in town; you must introduce your son to Felicitias.'
"And she'd been a Jewish refugee from Austria, and she'd fled to Ireland, as many Jewish people did. Her family set up in Dublin and in Belfast. She went to London but she was coming back to visit her family. And the interesting thing about her, she was a great pianist and she had studied with Emil von Sauer who had been a pupil of Liszt, so she had this incredible connection to Liszt and therefore back to Beethoven, surely."
Bary Douglas' entry on the Royal College of Music web site (here) mentions Felicitas. Other web searches threw up references that describe Felicitas as an 'Austrian Pianist and Pedagogue (ie a teacher, especially a strict or pedantic one). One web biography of Felicitas (here) describes how the LeWinter family had to flee from Austria to Ireland from the National Socialists around 1942 settling in Dublin and Belfast . Until about 1954, the LeWinters offered their services as piano teachers in Belfast in newspaper advertisements. In addition, Felicitas occasionally appeared nationwide in concerts as a solo pianist and with orchestras.
Charlotte had moved to Emlyn Road in the late 1970s and was followed later by her sister. At some point in the early 80s the Lewinter sisters arranged a soiree at 19 Emlyn Road for a select audience, and Barry Douglas came and played for his old teacher. He very kindly sent us a note recounting "She was an amazing woman; she gave me 20 free lessons and lectured me on what I must do". He remembers to this day: “you don’t work hard enough and your technique and sound is no good”. He fondly recounted that "She turned him around…" and he gave up his plans to be a doctor to focus on being a concert pianist.
Felicitas Lewinter died in 1997 in a nursing home in Fulham. Charlotte lived at 19 Emlyn until 2005 when she sold the house to the Walley family and moved into a nursing home. She died in 2008.
Lola and Fela were part of an inward wave of Jewish refugees that came to West London in the lead up to the Second World War. They brought musical and artistic skills to the area and pop up in many of the Stamford Brook house histories running businesses in West London include music schoold, hair salons, piano tuning and tailoring. When I grew up in the area Shepherds Bush, and in particular Goldhawk Road, was full of Jewish shops that reflected this community. There were kosher butchers and delicatessans along the Goldhawk Road and some like Ashkins on the corner of Bamborough Gardens (now BrewDog) lasted until the 1980s. Many of the families that have appeared in the house histories had moved to East London and gradually moved west into suburbs like Stamford Brook. This flags up a common East to West pattern of migration in London and it has been wonderful to see it appear out of the house histories. Fela and Lola have claimed a place in the house history logbook we have created through the House History project. (See pic left).