Two Jewish Londoners:
Harry Harris and Lazarus Shrensky

It is hard to imagine researching the history of our great city without coming across the works of Walter Besant sooner or later. Besant, whose writing career spanned the second half of the nineteenth century, and embraced novels as well as histories, published a number of London titles, some focusing on well-defined historical eras and others on broad swathes of the capital, such as East London, and London north of the Thames, and, yes, London south of the Thames. They are worth looking at not only for their antiquarian offerings but also for their countless illustrations.

A while ago I bought a second-hand copy of Besant’s earliest London history, which was first published in 1892, and paved the way for the later, more specialised volumes. It compresses its vast subject into a mere 335 pages, starting with the post-Roman period, then visiting some major dynasties, such as the Plantagenets and the Tudors, before bowing out in the reign of George II. Even more fascinating than the contents, though, is the bookplate on the inside front cover. I am using a photograph of the bookplate towards the end of the article, and for reasons that will become clear in due course, I would urge you not to scroll down to it in advance!

Even so I can divulge that it identifies two individuals by the name of Harry Harris and Lazarus Shrensky. They were Jews, and indeed the bookplate was printed for the Jews’ Free School, which is now in Kenton in North London, but at the time of my story was in Bell Lane in Whitechapel. By accident of birth Harris and Shrensky, though both Londoners, could not have been less alike. Still, they were connected, unwittingly, and not only by the book and the school, but also by the strange irony that one came into this world at almost exactly the time that the other left it in the most tragic of circumstances.

An East End boy

Lazarus or Laza Shrensky was a rather remarkable man. He was born on 9 December 1916 to parents who had emigrated from Płock in central Poland and settled in the East End of London. His father, Solomon, worked in the rag trade, while his mother, Rebeckah, brought up three sons and three daughters. Of these six children two were born in Poland and the other four in their adopted country. There was in fact a seventh child, who was born the year before Lazarus, but she died of bronchitis at the age of eighteen months. Solomon was present at his little daughter’s death, but, unable to write his name, he had to sign the death certificate with a simple X. 

Young Lazarus went to the Jews’ Free School, where he must have shown academic promise as the Besant history book was presented to him in 1930 as a prize for outstanding work, although soon after, at the age of fourteen, he left to take up a job as lather boy in a local barber’s shop. There is a fine studio portrait photograph of the youthful Lazarus, which can be accessed on Ancestry by following this link. He is dressed smartly in jacket and tie and directs an open and intelligent gaze at the camera. He seems to have a future ahead of him.

Tunstill’s men

Harry Harris — officially Henry Harris — had a very different start in life. His father, Samuel, was a dealer in jewellery, and at the time of his birth, in 1895, the family lived near Seven Dials in upper St Martin’s Lane. But by the time Harry was an adolescent they had moved to Bloomsbury and settled in a large house in Tavistock Square. He had a brother and two sisters, all younger than him, and his parents had sufficient resources to employ a cook, two housemaids and a nursery governess.

At the time Harry was working as assistant to his father, who had business premises in Hatton Garden, but he had received a good education at University College School in Hampstead, and when war broke out in 1914, he promptly enlisted as a private in the Public Schools Battalion. This was early in September, but in a little over two months he received a commission as a Temporary Second Lieutenant in the Duke of Wellington’s West Riding Regiment, a Yorkshire outfit with its home barracks in Halifax, following which he made the fateful decision to volunteer for service with Tunstill’s men.

Harry Gilbert Tunstill was a North Yorkshire businessman and local councillor in his early thirties who in September 1814 created a company of a hundred volunteers ready to join the New Army. They were given a heroes’ send-off, complete with brass band and fog signals, and travelled by rail from Halifax down to Aldershot, where they were to be trained. By late summer in the following year they were installed at Nort-Leulinghem on the Western Front. They were billeted in a farmyard, and the twenty-year-old Harry Harris, climbing a rickety ladder to his makeshift bed in a barn, must have wondered at the transformation his life had undergone.

A full life

At much the same age as 2nd Lt. Harris, the young Lazarus Shrensky would also see his life change, but in stark contrast to the men in Tunstill’s company he would only experience change for the better. He had found employment in a jewellery workshop in the East End — another intriguing connection with Harry Harris, whose father, as we have seen, was a Hatton Garden jeweller — but a more significant development was the emergence of his literary ability. When he was still only twenty-three he had a novel, King Sol, published by Chatto & Windus, in which such contemporary realities as the fight against Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists were reflected. Other publications appeared at intervals throughout his life.

Interestingly, at the time of King Sol Shrensky adopted a nom de plume, which stuck, so that when in 1947 he went into teaching, he did so as Lazarus Sheridan. He initially taught English and Physical Education at Elliott School in Southfields, but his professional practice was not confined to the classroom, and in later years he was head of primary schools in Stoke Newington and St John’s Wood. He supported the musical education of the children and encouraged those with an aptitude for poetry, but above all he fostered the talents of young actors and was closely associated with the founding of the London Schools’ Drama Association, a teachers’ organisation that later became London Drama.

And so it was entirely fitting that in 1998, in old age, he was interviewed on the subject of his remarkable career by the Stage, the newspaper dedicated to theatre and the performing arts. The interviewer, Simon Blumenfeld, the son of Sicilian refugees, was himself a writer who had been brought up in the East End of London. He must have had a sympathetic understanding of Shrensky’s background as well as his ambitions, and he described as ‘an amazing performance’ the trajectory of this child of Polish Jewish immigrants. It would seem, then, that the award of Besant’s book, bearing not only Shrensky’s name but also that of Harry Harris, was indeed an early triumph in what was to be a full and significant life.

In the danger zone

At the beginning of October 1916 — three months into the Battle of the Somme — Tunstill’s men were at the village of Le Sars on the Albert-Bapaume Road. They were ready to join an attack on German positions, and at dawn on the 4th two bombing parties advanced through shallow trenches close to the enemy line, but were spotted, and heavy machine gun fire and bombing attacks forced them back. A third party went over the top, but these men also met with fierce resistance, and the attack ended in failure.

Since it had now become apparent that the Germans were well-protected by deep trenches and barbed wire, and that snipers and a machine gun team were operating from the ruins of the village, it was decided that any further assault had to be preceded by artillery bombardment. Bombs accordingly fell in a sustained barrage on the enemy position, providing the cover needed for two companies, one of which was commanded by Harry Harris, to climb out of their trenches and over the parapet and move in three waves into the danger zone. It was just past six o’clock in the evening, and the ground was so muddy, and the enemy fire so intense, that progress was all but impossible.

Although the Germans would lose Le Sars after another few days of fighting, they managed to hold their position on the night of the 4th, forcing the men from Tunstill’s company to withdraw to safety. Many of these died. One was a young sergeant by the name of John Hartley. He was twenty-one — the only son of a Methodist family from Keighley in Yorkshire — and he was killed near the enemy parapet. And near him, in the same terrible mud, lay the dead body of his commander, 2nd Lt. Harry Harris.

A glorious cause

It was a costly episode, with over forty men killed, but it saw examples of great bravery in the most hazardous circumstances. The letters sent home to the families of the dead men, unwavering in their insistence on the selflessness of those who made the ultimate sacrifice, make poignant reading. One of these, from 2nd Lt. Philip Morris, paid tribute to John Hartley as a ‘cheerful and willing’ sergeant, who at the time of his death had been awaiting a commission. Even more moving is a letter written to the family by a fellow N.C.O., William Oldfield, which arrived in the same post:

It almost breaks my heart to have to convey to you the sad news of the death in action of your son, John. In the first place we had to report him as missing, but his body has now been found. He fell along with many others of our company in a charge we made on the enemy lines on the evening of October 4th, 1916, and really it was a wonder how some of us did get back. His body was found alongside of Mr. Harris, our company commander. It feels cruel to me to have to write this but I should consider I had failed in my promise to one of the best of friends had I not done so. I saw him a minute before we went over the top of the trench, and he said, ‘Write and give my love to all at home if anything happens to me.’ I replied, ‘All right, John, cheer-oh!’ That was the last I saw of him. He fell leading his men, for his body was found on the German parapet, death being instantaneous, being shot through the head with a bullet.

The letter is an unadorned and sincere expression of loss and grief. The writer had been a friend as well as a comrade, and although Sergeant Hartley had been ‘fighting for the glorious cause of Freedom’, and had died heroically, he felt all too keenly the impact the sad tidings would have on the young man’s mother and father — he was their only son — and on his eighteen-year-old sister.

At much the same time Samuel and Lily Harris were informed of their son’s death in a War Office telegram that was despatched a few days after the attack on Le Sars. It was the moment countless families would have dreaded, when their world would change, irreversibly and forever. Brave Harry had gone to fight, like John Hartley, for the glorious cause of freedom, and would never come home.

Memorialising Harry

Even as the house in Tavistock Square fell silent, mourning its fallen hero, tribute was paid with quiet dignity by a fellow officer of Harry’s regiment, who had written to his parents and whose words were published in the Holborn and Finsbury Guardian late in October:

He was killed whilst most gallantly leading his company in an attack. I can assure you the death of your son is a great blow to the battalion. He was beloved by us all. He died as he lived — a gallant and true gentleman.

But, as is so often the case, with grief came compassion, and the Harris family memorialised Harry’s noble sense of duty in generous acts of their own. So in June 1917 a Harry Harris Ward was opened at the Jewish Home and Hospital for Incurables in South Tottenham. On the occasion of its consecration the president, Sir Stuart Samuel, gave thanks for an act of personal remembrance that was also ‘a means of alleviating the sufferings of the helpless poor’.

A week later a similar gesture — the consecration of a bed named in Harry’s memory — was made at the Jews’ Hospital and Orphan Asylum in Lower Norwood. The hospital, or hostel, had originally operated in the East End, providing shelter and support for a small number of impoverished individuals. But in its later location, and after its merger with the Jewish orphanage, it was able to cater for several hundred workhouse children.

A third act of benevolent memorialisation, and the one that explains so much in this article, was to establish a Lieutenant Harry Harris Memorial Prize at the Jews’ Free School, and it was under this heading that Walter Besant’s London was awarded to young Lazarus Shrensky in July 1930. It would be interesting to know — though we never will know — if Lazarus chose it himself or it was chosen for him. But it is a moving point of contact between two Jewish Londoners whose life experiences were so very different.