Introduction
A little while ago I was involved with trying to uncover the story of a set of photographs and materials that had been collected in Russia during the 1910s. Initially their provenance was unknown but slowly a story emerged.
It turned out that they had once belonged to a Mr Alfred Howarth who worked for F Reddaway & Co, a Manchester manufacturing company. In 1907, he was sent from Manchester to their Moscow factory as Chief Accountant. He and his newly married wife took a ship through the Baltic to Petrograd before taking the train to Moscow; several years later the family had grown to four as two children were born in Moscow: Ann and Albert (Jnr).
Reddaway had set up a factory in Russia to manufacture textile based webbing and hosing in 1894, a time when the Russian government was encouraging foreign companies to invest in the country; they built their factory just outside Moscow, and had offices and warehouses in the city itself. This was unusual in that most British manufacturing companies gravitated towards St Petersburg.
The company became a model for other enterprises not least because they were known for the welfare they showed towards their employees in stark contrast the working conditions of many workers elsewhere. They set up a school, paved roads, opened schools, provided subsidised food, and Alfred also set up a works football team. It was also a profitable company and at the turn of the century was making £4,000 profit annually, representing about 20 per cent of Reddaway’s total annual profit.
The family lived in Moscow itself, in an apartment building close to the office. They employed a housekeeper, Anna, and when the children were older they went to an international school. However, there was already increasing unrest in the country, and this was amplified in the early years of the 1st World War when Russia suffered humiliating losses, and living conditions in the country worsened significantly.
The Collection
The Howarth family brought back to England various items relating to their stay, and recently part of the collection reappeared and this was what I was asked to examine.
The material consists of original photographic prints ( I would think at least some were taken from glass negatives), and it is likely that a number were taken by photographers employed by Kodak who ran a business in Moscow as the family were friendly with the Kodak manager Mr Samuel Hopwood. It is also possible that at least some of the photographs were taken by Hopwood himself. Kodak had come into Russia at the turn of the 20th century, taking advantage of both a tourist boom to the country as well as selling the Brownie camera with the Tsar being one customer.
One of Kodak’s employees was Dmitri Wasserman (1878-1937), who took what would become a famous portrait of Rasputin.
Life Before The Revolution
The family lived in the centre of Moscow but they also had a datcha outside of the city at Losenastrofky or Lossenestroffka (this is how Ann Howarth calls it in a note but neither place can be found) and she retells several tales of life in the countryside.
The British community in Moscow was small and everyone knew everyone else not least because they all socialised at the British Club which could be found on 21 Tverskaya.
In 1913, Bruce Lockhart, Acting Consul-General in Moscow wrote this in a diary.
The day after my arrival was the Centenary of the Romanov Dynasty. The Emperor and Empress with all the Imperial family were in Moscow for the Celebrations.
From the windows of the British Club, we looked down on the tiny chapel which held Holy Moscow’s most sacred condone side only of the wide street was lined with soldiers. The Emperor had said that he wished to see his people. The gorgeous cortege of the Grand Dukes of Russia passed. The air was filled with the sound of the Military Bands playing Boje Tzarya Khranya. There was a great demonstration of loyalty as hundreds fell on their knees. The pilgrims prostrated themselves in the dust. The Emperor of all the Russians rode into sight at the head of his magnificent Cossack Guards.
I remember him as a slight bearded figure, very like the King, but with beautiful, mournful eyes. Hand in hand the Emperor and Empress entered the Shrine, closely followed by the Tzarevitch, carried by a huge sailor, his inseparable attendant. The Emperor looked pleased. The Empress, a graceful distinguished figure in gleaming white, kept her still rather anxious expression. She feared Moscow. The five beautiful daughters, also dressed in white, followed, and the great pageant passed on its way to the Kremlin.
I found it difficult to take seriously the warning note that sounded when I talked of my first impressions. All seemed loyalty and well being outwardly. Later, I knew that when the Emperor looked at his people, the apparently unguarded side of the route was lined with armed secret police; that 5,000 people had been deported from Moscow a fortnight before – all in fact who had the remotest connection with the revolutionaries of 1905.
At luncheon with Madame Katkova, a former lady in waiting to the Dowager Empress – Russia, France and England seemed to meet. Over coffee, we heard much Court gossip. A cold dislike to the Empress was apparent. The Dowager Empress was adored.
Moscow was a difficult time to live in the run up to the Revolution. Food prices were increasing significantly and, in some instances such as milk, were rising weekly primarily down to the economic affects of the First World War not least that so many men were sent to fight rather than harvest but also to issues such as the deteriorating state of the roads that was making it difficult to bring food into Moscow from the countryside. Long queues of people would wait all night in the cold and wet on the streets to buy a bottle of milk or a pound or two of flour.
Corruption was rife, and the government was beset by scandals involving ministers, and the Tsars family with Rasputin. Hence the Government was as unpopular as ever. The February Revolution was the precursor to what would happen later. It was all but bloodless. In March 1916 thirty-three thousand troops took part in the march past in the centre of Moscow. The discipline and the marching were said to be impressive. A few days later the Socialists held a huge demonstration in Moscow, and again the behaviour of the crowd was exemplary.
However, the extreme socialist groupings were becoming more vociferous and issued a considerable amount of anti-capitalist propaganda. Some of it was openly anti-British. One pamphlet that was popular at the time called ‘What Are We Fighting For?’ maintained that the war was actually a fight between British capitalism and German capitalism.
The Howarth family got to know Commander Oliver Locker-Lampson when he came to Moscow in 1916. He arrived in command of three squadrons of armoured cars that were sent to Russia by the British to support the demoralised Russian troops. It was also done to help counter anti-British sentiments that were rife in Russia: it was felt that Britain was not doing enough in the war and that financially she was exploiting the Russians.
Robert Bruce Lockhart, the British Vice Consul in Moscow had to make hasty preparations for the unit’s reception in the city, which he learned about only on the day they were due to arrive. Moscow residents, both English and Russian, were rounded up to provide tours of the city. The Unit were given lunches and dinners by the officers of the Moscow Automobile Section, and by the British Club. There were ‘a good many speeches in which both the English and the Russian officers expressed their firm belief in the Anglo-Russian entente and in the final triumph of the allies’.
On the third day the Unit, accompanied by a military band, marched from the Yaroslavl Station to the British Church: partly as a result of the good weather their procession through ‘the principal streets of Moscow’ was cheered and ‘pelted with flowers’ by a large crowd. The British Press Bureau in Moscow used their contacts to secure coverage of the visit by the local press.
Locker-Lampson was to later claim that he was asked to participate in the assassination of Rasputin.
When Frank Reddaway visited the Moscow operation (he was there – it is said – three times a year) he lived not in Moscow itself but in Spass Setum in a house called the White House. The Howarth family remembered it as a beautiful white house with a boathouse and boat on the river that ran through the grounds. Reddaway did a lot for their workers and also allowed the house to be used as a hospital for wounded soldiers. They grew crops for food and kept hens to supply eggs for the employees.
Back at the Howarth’s datcha…
‘I remember one day my brother and I wandered to the Lossenestroffka sation. We were intrigued at seeing a man balancing a large round basket on his head. We asked him what he had in the basket and he said he was selling chickens. We immediately replied that our mother wanted to buy some hens and would he bring her some. It was the last thing mother wanted but we probably wanted to see the balancing act as long as possible. She eventually said she would have four hens and asked him to put them in the shed. When dad arrived home, mother told him the tale and he went to look at the unwanted purchase. When he opened the shed door the first chicken to come out was lame, the second was blind etc etc. I think the old man came off best, probably our good deed for the day.
Next morning they had vanished. We said the gypsies must have stolen them in the night as we heard a lot of whistling. In actual fact dad had given them to the man whose job was to keep an eye on the five datchas. Actually we never had any burglaries excet that one loaf out of the early morning bread delivery was always missing but the thief was only a fox terrier belonging to a neighbour.’
Rasputin
The photograph of Rasputin in the collection was signed by Wasserman and dated 1917. I have seen other signed copies which look as if they date from 1916. Clearly as Rasputin was killed in 1916, the portrait was taken at an earlier date than the signed date. They were being sold at the time for the equivalent sum of £5, so not an inexpensive item but Howarth was given one by Mr Hopwood as a gift. The image itself is well-known now, in wide circulation and often crops up in articles. Getty Images have one that can be licensed from them. This too has been signed by Wasserman but in a different position, and the date is possibly 1916.
Life in Moscow
Among the items were notes describing what life was like in Moscow at the time of the Revolution, written by Mr Howarth’s daughter based on her families recollections.
‘When all the prisons were opened – I think by the then nervous Government with the idea of making things worse for the Bolshevicks – and few if any police about, Dad said the place was swarming with ex-convicts of all kinds. They came to his office in the centre of Moscow seeking work. Dad said some of them were almost blind after many years imprisonment probably in dark cells. Almost without exception when asked what their previous work had been, the answer was “in prison”. One day in the office, Dad noticed that the window cleaners were at work outside but seemed to be peering inside a lot. However he didn’t think anything more about it. After all, Russian winters were cold and probably the inside of the offices looked nice and warm to them. However that night there was a break-in. They had attempted to open the big safe but were unsuccessful. In the trying they had damaged the walls and the room was now filled with flaky asbestos like a snowstorm.
‘About the same time when trams were packed to bursting point, Dad was hanging on the outside with both hands. Suddenly he felt someone trying to get into his back pocket. He couldn’t let go but when he turned round he saw a young soldier (perhaps a deserter) trying to get at his wallet. Dad said ‘that’s my pocket, leave it alone.’ The soldier only laughed and said there might not be much in it if he got it and here he addressed Dad as Barin. This meant ‘my Lord’ and he was probably being sarcastic. He added ‘Well what’s your’s is mine now Barin,’ and hopped off the bus. But without the wallet.
‘During 1917 things were getting more difficult with lack of food. Our old faithfull Anna, the housekeeper, used to go out queuing for hours on end. Mother thought she had done very well by getting a leg of lamb until all her friends asked her if she had noticed the lack of St Bernard dogs in the town. We managed to get a whole sack of potatoes in exchange for a £500 American harmonium.’
Following the February 1917 revolution another British resident wrote about what was life. Ann Turner was the mother-in-law of the British ambassador.
We were curious but certainly not alarmed. The gates of the Kremlin were guarded by soldiers with fixed bayonets. There were dense crowds in the streets – all wearing red rosettes or ribbands. Many were singing the Marseillaise. The Revolutionary Hymn is heavy and menacing – it did not express the popular feeling of joyous deliverance. The crowds were good humoured and orderly. My friend and I walked on, thinking it safer than talking a droshki. We had to cross a market square where already Red Cross supplies from the Kremlin were being unloaded. On a raised platform a big peasant woman stood and warranted a small crowd. ‘Ah! the German woman, the Traitress. Those are the things that our husbands and our sons had to do without while she sent them to the Germans’. . .
My friend, could not endure this. She stopped and stepped forward. I felt nervous – one never knows when a Russian crowd would change its mood. ‘You say what is not true, you have been fed on lies. We have worked and packed for months to send these to our beloved men at the front. Here is my friend, and Englishwoman and the mother-in-law of the British Consul. She will tell you my words are true’.
However, I did not need to speak, for before I could get out Da Da Du the big woman’s eyes filled with tears ‘There, what did I tell you, I know the Empress was a good kind woman’ – and turning savagely to a big man near her ‘It is you, you scoundrel, who told me these lies’. The crowd had increased and we slipped away quietly.
By evening the Revolution at Petrograd was social news. The troops called out to quell a bread riot had gone over to the Revolutionaries also the famous Guards and garrison at TsarkoeSelo and, most astonishing of all, the Cossacks. It seemed incredible. These were terribly anxious hours. Moscow was so made more revolutionary than Petrograd and the H.Q. of the Social Democrats. The telephone went constantly. No one slept much. We played patience to rest our exhausted nerves. At last word was brought from Rodzianki telling of the new Provisional Government in Petrograd and appointing the Lord Mayor of Moscow as his Commissioner there.
Already the Social Democrats had begun to take a hand. The Kremlin had been taken, the arsenal opened and the students, men and women, were armed. The troops had all joined the Revolutionaries. There being no one to fight, there was no fighting.
Instead of Boje Tzarya Khranya we heard the Marseillaise and also the Revolutionary Hymn, so long forbidden. At each few yards near the Duma were posted, Revolutionary proclamations, surrounded by groups of the illiterate, which were being read aloud by some student. ‘Long Live Internationalism.’ The People is again the People. Strangers shook hands and even embraced. Russia felt free. The Revolution had come.
Return to England
‘In November 1917 things got impossible in Russia and my father reluctantly decided to get out and leave the flat, poor old Anna, our fathful dog Maragush, and the canaries. It was all handed over to her but I don’t know how long for!’
When the family fled the country they were searched by customs but as can be seen from the story below, the officials were quite happy for Rasputin to leave the country.
‘Father, mother my brother and I made our way to Voss in Norway where we waited for a boat to take us to Britain. After about a fortnight, a British captain told us and others that he would try and get us over to Scotland in a cattle boat – women and children below and men on deck. The day before we sailed the Captain said that someone had been talking and if we all got torpedoed it was our ow fault. We got to Aberdeen safely escorted all the way by a couple of small armed boats.’
Their friends the Hopwood family would not leave until 1920 to return to the US, while Frank Reddaway lost all his possessions that were kept in the White House.
‘Some years later, we once entertained Prince Andrew (the Czar’s nephew) and his wife (an Italian princess) to dinner at home in Eccles Manchester. During dinner, the Princess told how it was her brother Prince Felix who, with two others, killed Rasputin*. Not exactly dinner conversation but, at least, interesting. Mother, when we were in Russia, noticed us talking very seriously with lots of other young children in the garden of the flats where we lived. She asked “whatever were you talking about all the time?” Apparently we replied quite seriously “Oh we were saying that Rasputin should be hanged on a lamp post.”‘
*This was Prince Andrei Alexandrovich (1897 – 1981), and his wife Elisabetta Ruffo-Sasso (1886 – 1940) dei duchi di Sasso-Ruffo dei principi di Sant’ Antimo. They had fled Russia after the Revolution in 1917 and, after living in France for a number of years, settled in London. By strange co-incidence Wasserman also took a photograph of Prince Félix Youssoupov.
Return to Moscow
In 1924 Alfred Howarth returned to Russia to see whether Reddaway could continue to trade under Lenin’s New Economic Policy. In the end he found that restrictions imposed by the government made it impossible. He discovered that the government too had taken over and nationalised the factory, and had no intention of returning it. Factories such as Reddaway had been put into a Trust that was composed of one large works like Reddaway and several smaller unprofitable ones. He was told that to privatise Reddaway would mean these smaller ones suffering too much.
When there, Howarth wrote down his observations of life in these early years of the Revolution.
‘All the shops in Moscow have reopened and although there is undoubted shortage of all classes of goods there still appears to be quite suffficient for the needs of the people who are unable to buy anything in the nature of luxury. Provisions were reasonable and plentiful: best butter cost 90 copecks; ham R1.25; all the pre-Revolution bread was available from 5 copecks; milk, tea and other necessities of life also freely available. Beer and wine also available without restriction but still no vodka which has been banned since the War, not least officially but it is being made in the villages in their own samagoake or distillery, using potatoes as the base.
‘The large shops of Muir & Merrielees and Eliseevsky are doing business and seemed to be always full of people. Indeed Moscow looked very lively, and Eliseevsky could hold its own with the best stores we have in England. [Muir & Mirrielees was nationalised in 1918 and the name changed first to MosTorg in 1922 and later to TsUM. It still operates today as Moscow’s leading department store. Eliseevsky was a luxury grocery store, nationalised, renamed Gastronom №1 and again is still in operation.]
‘The streets are full of droshkeys and fares are very reasonable but the pavements and roads were in a terrible state of neglect but they were clean. They were also packed with hawkers all working under a Trust. It was noticable that the majority were of the better intelligent class of people, and also many young girls selling cigrattes and sweets. They seemed resigned to their fate but I could not help feeeling sorry to see them in that position. The comminists were noticeable by their caps, scarves and portfolios.
‘The Red Army seem to be well disciplined and certainly are smartly dressed and look well – much finer than the Polish Army. There were also mounted Militia on the street and also Night Dvorniks. I saw many batches of prisoners being taken through the streets guarded by policemen with revolvers in their hands. Also what he was told were deserters but generally there appeared to be perfect order everywhere.
‘All the local managers I worked with are now only allowed one room to live and sleep in. This means, for example that in a flat that once housed one family, three now live. Of course they pay very little for rent only perhaps 50 copecks to R2.50 a month according to how much wages they earn. Because food is reasonably priced it makes it possible for them to carry on without too much difficulty but in horrible conditions. Most of the furniture that the Europeans had in their flats was sold off.
‘There are 17 different wage classes under which people are paid. This varies from industry to industry but the more intellectual the work, the worse the payment.
‘Large paper money is gradually disappearing. In its place they now have 1,2 3, 5 and 50 copecks paper money and some silver coins.’
Howarth met the Director of the Hermitage museum and was told that all the works of art were intact. The Museum was proving to be more popular than ever among students, he was told. However the Director’s wages had been reduced significantly.
He also dined a few times in the similarly named Ermitage restaurant in Moscow but he wrote that ‘there were never more than two tables occupied each time, with more waiters than customers.’ He was told that very few people came there. ‘Of course it belongs to a Trust so no enterprise is neccessary. Another fact is that the hotels and restaurants are watched by the secret police and reckless spending means trouble and enquires as to how the money has been acquired. In every cafe, hotel or railway station there are notices warning the workers there not to accept tips. The wording ran something like this
“Do not be a slave and accept nachai from the slave driver. Consider yourself equal to him in every respect.”
‘This seemed to hit waiters and porters very hard and unless you did give them a tip on the quiet you would end up waiting until they decided to get round to you. Also waiters when presenting the bill would then keep you waiting for as long as possible so that diners would get fed-up and leave the money on the table not expecting any change.
‘The churches are more packed than ever I remember them and the religious feeling among the people seems very strong. Also theatres and cinemas are in full swing and now enjoyed by all classes.
‘The trains were running with two classes of travel with hard or soft seats on shorter journeys, and with Wagon-Lits coaches on long distance travel. In fact the stations and carriages were much cleaner than they used to be, and I didn’t see cigarette ends, sunflower seeds or rubbish lying about as fines are inflicted.
He visited Fred Reddaway’s White House and summarised what he found in a note:
‘There is nothing but a sad tale to tell here. Formerly used as a school it is now partly used as a works kontora. It was not heated for a year or two, the result being that all the stucco work on the ceilings has fallen away and in total it resembles a wilderness There is none or very little of the furniture left, with at least some of it being sold at auction such as your bed. Matka, the old black horse is still alive.’
The photographs of rural Russia I will display in a separate page.
Alfred Howarth was born 3rd February 1883 in Manchester and died in Llandudno on 22 April 1970 aged 87, leaving an estate worth £25,916. His wife was Alice and they had three children: Alfred born in 1909 in Moscow, Ann also born in Moscow, and Alice who was born back in England.
His father was a French polisher but Alfred had become an accountants clerk by 1901.
In 1939 they were recorded as living at 71 Snowdon Road, Eccles, and then by the mid-1950s they had moved to Claremont Road in Pendleton. Eventually Alfred Howarth moved to Hill Crest, 45 Maes-y- Castell, Llandudno. His death was announced in the North Wales Weekly News, and it was noted that his wife Alice Mary had pre-deceased him. From the material it would appear that Ann remained unmarried.
Most of the information comes from typed notes found within the collection. These are thought to date from the 1970s and are the memories of Ann Howarth plus what appears to be transcribed notes written by her father. Other online sources for background information include:
- ancestry.com
- British Library Newspapers
- The Times Digital Archive
- North Wales Weekly News
- Historytoday.com
- Northumbria Research from Northumbria University
- National Archives, Kew.
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Graham Thomas 
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