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Digging for Diamonds and other gems in the Garden

Rachel Lichtenstein delves deep into Hatton Garden

August 31, 2012 15:07
Hatton Garden in the 1800s

By

Natasha Lehrer,

Natasha Lehrer

2 min read

In June 1940, a small boy and several members of his extended family — parents, uncles, aunts and cousins —– were bound by ship for England, on the run from occupied Belgium. One night, in the shadowy darkness of the cabin, the boy awoke to the frantic whispering of his mother: “Shall we throw them overboard?” Barely more than a toddler then, it was several years before the boy confessed that he was certain that his parents were weighing up whether or not to drown him.

The small boy was my father, and the whispers did not concern the children of the party but the handful of diamonds that my grandmother had hidden in her underwear when she and my grandfather— a Polish-born diamond dealer who had been living for some years in Antwerp, the then centre of the international diamond trade — had left for the coast in advance of the Nazi invasion of Belgium.

This small package would prove to be the way in for my grandfather to become a member of Hatton Garden’s mysterious Diamond Club, founded by largely Orthodox Jews like him who were lucky enough to escape in the early part of the Second World War from Antwerp to London, location of the almost mythical heart of the diamond business to which Rachel Lichtenstein returns again and again in her delightful and absorbing book.

She delves deep into the geological and historical strata of Hatton Garden and her journey takes her back to the mythical King Lud (of Ludgate Circus and Hill) and his pig-herding son Bladud, to the great Ely Palace, and the estate of Sir Christopher Hatton (rumoured to have been Elizabeth I’s lover) where Hatton Garden now stands, its name testament to the wealth and aristocracy that marked the area before its decline into notoriety in the 17th century as the city of London expanded.