Fred Uhlman

In March 1933, two months after Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor, Uhlman moved to Paris to start a new life; but, as long as he had been living in France, he encountered many difficulties; foreigners were not permitted to take paid employment, and were immediately expelled from France if caught doing so. Uhlman supported himself by drawing and painting, and selling his work privately when he could. At one stage he supplemented his income by selling tropical fish. Uhlman's star as a painter was in the ascendant, but buyers were hard to come by.

In April 1936 he moved to Tossa de Mar, a small fishing village on the Costa Brava in Spain, but shortly thereafter the Spanish Civil War broke out, and in August he decided to return to Paris, via Marseille. Here, while making a telephone call from a café to Diana Croft, a friend in London whom he had met in Tossa de Mar, his wallet, containing most of his money and his passport, was stolen from his jacket left unattended at his table. A foreigner in France without a passport effectively became a stateless person and subject to official harassment, internment and possible expulsion. Demoralised and in despair, he gave the café proprietor his Paris telephone number and continued his journey to Paris. The next day he received a telephone call at his hotel; the caller informed him that he had the wallet and passport and would mail them to Uhlman the next day, because he was a co-réligionnaire of Uhlman's, but would retain ten percent of the money in the wallet 'to cover expenses'. The wallet and passport arrived the following day. On 3 September 1936, Fred Uhlman landed in England with no money and unable to speak the language. Two months later, on 4 November 1936, he married Diana Croft, daughter of the right wing Henry Page Croft (later Lord Croft), against her parents' strongest wishes.

They set up home on Downshire Hill, in London's Hampstead and it became a favourite cultural and artistic meeting place for the large group of refugees and exiles who, like Uhlman, had been forced to flee their homeland. He founded the Free German League of Culture, whose members included Oskar Kokoschka and Stefan Zweig, though he parted company with it when he felt it coming under communist domination.

Nine months after the outbreak of the Second World War, Uhlman, with thousands of other enemy aliens, was, in June 1940, interned by the British Government, in Hutchinson Camp on the Isle of Man. Here he met the artist Kurt Schwitters as fellow internee, who took his portrait. He was released six months later and reunited with his wife and with his daughter, Caroline, who was born while he was interned. ...

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