Legacy by Thomas Harding

Author:Thomas Harding
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473537606
Publisher: Random House

Like his father, Sam Salmon was becoming increasingly interested in the world beyond the family, though for different reasons. While Isidore was driven to improve the lot of those around him, and to give back, Sam was impacted more by curiosity; he wanted to explore the world, to find and enjoy the good things in life.

As part of his Lyons management training, and then later through his work in the bakery and ice-cream departments, Sam had traversed London and then travelled around Great Britain. As he went, he had been introduced to the company’s various restaurants and hotels, staff and tradesmen and customers, and he had noticed the differences in people’s health, education and wealth. All of this had come to a head during the general strike of 1926, when he had come face-to-face with organised labour and their legitimate complaints about inequality. Now aged twenty-eight, Sam wanted to travel overseas. Top of the list was the world’s first communist country: the Soviet Union.

Sam spoke with his uncle Harry and persuaded him that they should go together. The family might learn something from the socialist experiment. After all, large-scale catering enterprises should have much in common, irrespective of whether they were state or privately owned. The Soviet Union also offered hope of a different, perhaps even fairer, way of organising money and labour, which was of interest to Sam, for the socialist ideal of equitable distribution echoed many of the values he had learned from John Badley at Bedales. This ideal was also not so very different from that of the family’s Fund.

Only a decade after the October Revolution in which the Tsarist regime had been replaced by the Bolshevik government, the Soviet Union was still beset by instability and uncertainty. Vladimir Lenin had died four years earlier, and Joseph Stalin was attempting to consolidate his power. Just six months before Sam’s departure, Stalin had banished his main rival, Leon Trotsky, to Siberia. That very month, Sam had read in The Times about the ‘Donetz Trial’, in which a group of German engineers and fitters were accused of sabotaging a coal mine in the Donetz basin of the Ukraine by means of arson, flooding and explosion. This ‘Western plot’ had been uncovered by OGPU, the Soviet secret police, and five of the engineers had been found guilty and executed. ‘Stalin insists on a policy of violence,’ The Times had written, ‘in order to retain the sympathies of the extreme.’

If Sam was at all anxious about his travel plans, it was not recorded in the detailed diary he kept throughout his month-long trip. In his first entry, dated Friday, 20 July 1928, he noted that he and uncle Harry set out by train from Berlin at 7.30 p.m., heading for Riga, and then on to Moscow and ‘St Petersburg’ (he chose not to use the city’s new name, ‘Leningrad’). His hotel accommodations were ‘marvellous’, he noted, and of ‘great style’.

Arriving in St Petersburg, Sam and Harry visited the Hermitage museum and the opera.

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