Shell Marine Lubricants Sign

"For I cannot call back the ebbing tide,

And live again the seasons that are gone;

Those lazy, empty hours I cannot hide,

Nor fill them in with what I might have done."

- Gerald George Samuel, Lieutenant, Royal West Kent Regiment. 1917.¹

From "Lost Years"

1835 | The Dock

In 1835, Marcus Samuel nearly doubled his rent to get closer to the water. Twenty-six pounds a year became fifty, and the front of his new shop opened straight onto St. Katherine's Dock.²

He sold curios and bric-à-brac, one trader among hundreds scraping along the East End. The dock made him different. Ships came up the Thames day and night, out of Yokohama and Colombo and Singapore, and when their sailors came ashore with sea chests to empty, he was there at the dockside, buying. Shells, mostly - cowries, mop shells, bloodstones, the rare and the strange - bought by the crate, off vessels whose names still sit in the family ledger a century and a half later.³

The street did not make it easy to want anything. Fifteen people to a room in the courts behind; mud and sewage in the lanes; "the most squalid beastliness," one visitor called it, "oaths, quarrels, fights and drunkenness." Sailors came ashore for vice that was readily at hand, and there was blood in the street, close enough to hear from an upstairs window. And under all of it, day and night, the cargo-song of a working port: cranes creaking, winches whining, tugs on the water, foghorns finding their way to berth, and above everything, "the perpetual cry of seagulls and the slap of the river against the wharves."⁴

The shells became boxes. Little glued confections of the seaside trade - forty girls employed in the making of them, sold by the thousand in Brighton, in Scarborough, across the Channel in Paris. Box by box, they carried the family somewhere out of near-poverty, into servants, into school fees, into eleven children born above a shop that had started as almost nothing. In 1851, when the census taker knocked, the man did not call himself a dealer. He called himself a shell merchant. The clerk wrote it down, and that was that - the official record of what a Samuel was.⁵

His tenth child arrived over the shop in 1853, a boy named Marcus for his father. Sam came two years after. Then, in 1857, the shells bought their way out: the family left for Finsbury Square, a mile and a bit north - "almost a change of worlds."⁶

The older children remembered where they'd come from. Marcus was four; Sam was three.⁶ Too young to remember the courts, the brawls, how close to the bottom the family had lived. What the two of them kept instead was each other, and the sound of ships.

1870 | The Will

In August of 1870, at seventy-three, Marcus Samuel the elder sat down and wrote his Will. The shop, the stock, the trade - all of it to Joseph, the eldest, the one who remembered the worst years best. To Marcus and Sam he left twenty-five hundred pounds apiece, payable at twenty-five, and one line that mattered more than the money: that his sons remain "united, loving and considerate," and keep "the good name of Marcus Samuel" from reproach.⁷

Seven weeks later he was dead.⁸

Marcus was sixteen. Sam was fifteen.⁹

Their mother followed four years after, gone within weeks of calling Marcus home from the sea. Afterward, he and Sam took a single room at 14 Little Tower Street, a few minutes from the old office, and lived thin. Whether it was the estate settling slowly or Joseph deciding two loud boys needed the "discipline of short commons," nobody was ever quite sure. What's certain is the story the family told for the rest of their lives: one egg between two brothers, some mornings shared, some tossed for, some taken in turn. It gave Sam his first great pun, repeated at the family table for fifty years after: "Eggs for breakfast, eggs for breakfast, eggery morning."¹⁰

They had not inherited their father's business. What they'd been left with was an instruction, and two names that were also, unmistakably, their own - Marcus for the father, Samuel for the grandfather. So when M. Samuel & Co. opened in London and Samuel Samuel & Co. in Yokohama, the length of the world apart, there was no memorial to declare.¹¹ The name simply went where they went. Every letter, every contract, every crate that crossed between the two offices carried Samuel on the manifest, and for the rest of their lives, neither of them could have told you where keeping that name ended and building it began.

1881 | The Victoria

M. Samuel & Co. and Samuel Samuel & Co. worked. Two years in, the brothers measured their own rise the only way they knew how: from the one-egg breakfast to their father's table "at its most prosperous." A decade after that, the oldest houses in the Far East trade were recommending them to the Paris Rothschilds.¹²

One shared office, and by the terms of the partnership, neither brother could act without the other, which in practice meant daily war. The staff who worked there remembered the sound of "terrible combat" through the office door. A clerk sent in with papers would find the two of them at the window, backs to the room, "huddled together close, their arms round each other's shoulders," talking low, until without warning they burst apart again, Sam loud and furious, Marcus soft, both of them calling each other "fool, idiot, imbecile," until just as suddenly, for no reason the clerk could ever name, they were in agreement. Then Marcus, standing at his brother's shoulder: "Sam, speak to him on the telephone." Two men who had once tossed a coin for an egg, still splitting everything the same way.¹³

Marcus fell in love in 1880. Fanny Benjamin married him the following January in her parents' front room, the Chief Rabbi presiding. Most people who met her came away with the wrong idea entirely, "diffident, prim, and usually disapproving," people who never got past the "chilly" surface. What they missed was underneath: real intelligence, real perception, "the warm currents of her nature lay very deep," rarely surfacing. Marcus found the currents early, and built his life on top of them. He "never took any important step without asking her advice."¹⁴

In 1893, doctors gave him, wrongly, less than a year to live. He believed them, and put his affairs in order, and never quite went back to being the man who worked past dark. From then on, at four o'clock, the carriage waited outside his office with Fanny inside it. She'd sit there until he came out, and they'd drive off together into the evening.¹⁵

At the family table he told the same schoolboy riddles for half a century, tried on anyone who sat down. Fanny, at the other end, was "rarely seen to smile" at them.¹⁶ And there was one more at that table who didn't laugh either - the third child, who wandered into the kitchen some evenings and "ate cake standing up without a word to the cook," and who slipped away after dinner while the rest of the family sat together, to play the piano alone, to no one. His mother loved him especially.¹⁷

The brothers had watched the future of oil arrive in the shape of a ship. In 1892 they built one to match it - bulk oil carried in her own hull instead of tins in her hold, clean enough that the Canal authorities, who had refused every tanker before her, finally let one through. The Murex sailed from West Hartlepool that July and passed through Suez in August, the first of her kind ever given passage.¹⁸

Ten sisters followed within the year: Conch, Clam, Elax, Bullmouth, Volute, Turbo, Trocas, Spondilus, Cowrie, Nerite. Not one of them named for a person, a place, or a virtue. Eleven tankers, the most modern ships afloat, and every one of them named for a seashell, "as a tribute," the family's biographer wrote, "to the business of the elder Marcus and the beginnings of the younger." When the fleet needed a company behind it, in 1897, the tribute got its final shape and its final name: the "Shell" Transport and Trading Company.¹⁹

In February 1898, a British warship ran aground at the mouth of the Suez Canal. Tugs failed; for a moment the Navy weighed simply blowing HMS Victorious up where she sat. Marcus, reading about it in the London papers, cabled the Canal unasked and sent the Pectan, a tug named for a shell. She "stood by the Victorious for three and a half days and, after towing for twenty-one hours, succeeded in floating" the warship.²⁰

The Admiralty offered £5,000 in salvage. His own advisers told him to add a nought - it was only an opening bid. Marcus wrote back that he did not understand Their Lordships' proposition. He had, he said, "done for one of Her Majesty's ships no more than he would expect one of Her Majesty's ships to do for him." No such gesture had ever been made before. That August, at Osborne, Queen Victoria knighted the shell merchant's son with her own hand.²¹

The good name of Marcus Samuel, kept from reproach, and now with Sir in front of it.

1917 | Messines

He was, in his own family's word for him, strange - "a strange child and a strange man, the odd man out." He tried the family firm and was no good at it. The letters he sent home from the East were, from a business point of view, hopeless, so he gave it up, and gave himself instead to the working boys of Stepney: a trusteeship at the club his father and brother had helped found, then a house of his own building for boys who had nowhere else, where he moved in himself and gave up "all his West End luxury" to do it.²²

It was not, in this family, such an unusual instinct. Marcus's own rule was never to lend money, only to give it, if you could afford to. Sam's was gentler still: when you lend money, he liked to say, say goodbye to it, and mean it.²³ Gerald's own family loved him and did not much understand him, his uncle included. Sam had never married; for thirty years he had called his brother's children his own posterity, the family he would have instead of one of his own, and Gerald was one of the four.²⁴ He was twenty-nine when the war found the edge of what he would surrender.

Twice the Army turned him down. His eyes were bad. In October 1915 he got his commission anyway: 10th Battalion, Royal West Kent, his own county's regiment. France. Wounded twice, and sent back to the line both times. On the night of the 7th of June, 1917, at Messines, he was killed leading A Company against a strong position. He was thirty-one years old.²⁵ There was no body to bring home. His name is carved instead at the Menin Gate, among the missing.²⁶

His commanding officer wrote to Sir Marcus and Lady Samuel. "It is needless to say how very deeply all of us feel the loss of poor Sammie, myself in particular... His platoon adored him, highly so. He lived for them ever since the war. They have lost the best friend they had."²⁷

Sammie, a soldier's nickname, cut from the family name itself.

—

Wood-panelled halls, varnished benches, the smell of soap and lamp oil, the evening noise of the East End coming through the open windows. It came to the Club in the summer of 1917, written in April 1916, to be given to the boys only if Gerald did not come back.²⁸

A boy of fifteen broke the seal, hands too big for him yet, the way hands are at that age, boots gone soft at the toes, his hair combed flat and careful for whatever this was going to be. Everyone in the room knew the hand, it had come to the Club before, hurried, scrawled between marches. This time, however: Neat. Deliberate. Every letter formed like it mattered.

“My dear Boys. I shall be going away shortly to the front, and am going to say a few words of farewell to you in case I should not return.”²⁹

The page grew heavier the further down it went. It told them the happiest hours of his life had been spent among them. It asked them to grow up honest and manly, Jews and Englishmen both, unafraid of what might befall them. Near the end, it gave them a final instruction:

"...perhaps you may miss me for a time, but after all life is for the living, and you must forget me quickly and live on merrily and bravely. Your very sincere friend, Gerald G. Samuel."³⁰

A boy that age can hold almost anything except kindness. Somewhere past the happiest hours of my life, his eyes went.

—

In a house across London, a bundle came out from among the things he'd left behind, tied in soft white string, its pages worn soft at the edges, carried at some point from notebook to drawer to pile, somewhere between cared-for and never fully owned. Handwritten. Secret. No one in the family had known it existed.³¹

His mother untied the string.

Tall windows. The curtains still. The afternoon light lying across the floorboards, the far-off sound of Piccadilly reduced to a murmur. The room was quiet the way the house was quiet now.

She lifted one page, then the next, whichever came to hand. A different hand than the one at the Club: quicker, less careful, pressed hard enough in places to show through to the next page. Her eye caught a word, then a line, before her mind could take hold of what her hands were holding.

For I cannot call back the ebbing tide,

And live again the seasons that are gone.³²

Further down the same page:

And if my way of life can plead for me,

I shall not shrink from any sacrifice.³³

At some point she stopped feeling the weight of her shoulders in her feet. Her feet were still heavy; she was no longer standing. Time had let go of its laws somewhere between one page and the next, and she was alone in that room the way Gerald had been alone in his, after dinner, all those years.

Another page, another piece.

But I would not forgotten be,

When only dust is left of me.³⁴

Page after page, in that same unpracticed hand, the strange, silent boy began to speak.

Gentle. Hopeful.

Her fingers traced the letters as she read, the way you touch a thing to be sure of it. Finally connecting. Finally seeing. Twenty years of silence at her table, and the whole time there had been words.

—

The piano sat closed. Those still living, years later, put it simply: she "never quite recovered." Not from the death alone, from what the bundle taught her, that she "had never really known her younger son, nor understood him."³⁵

August 1917 | The Answer

She had the poems published, a printer a few minutes' walk from the house, on streets Gerald himself had grown up walking. Forty-three pages. A photograph of him at the front. The farewell letter to the boys, printed whole, so that whoever bought the book would read it too. The secret writing, made permanent. The private man, made public.³⁶

Five weeks after Messines, at Shell's Annual General Meeting, Marcus stood and gave his report the way he always did: what the company had supplied that year, what it had cost, what was still owed to the war effort. He said nothing about his son. He had his own way of keeping people.³⁷

Then he sat down and wrote the introduction. Two months a bereaved father, sixty-three years old, and the page runs barely three hundred words - the facts, plain and dated: born London, May 6th, 1886; Eton; twice rejected for sight; commissioned; twice wounded; killed leading his Company. One sentence in it carries any heat at all, aimed past the reader at an England that had questioned men exactly like his son - the book, he wrote, should be read by "those who falsely proclaim that a man cannot be a Jew and also a loyal Englishman." Beneath it: MARCUS SAMUEL, August, 1917.³⁸

Forget me quickly, the letter had asked. Her act. His words. Between the two of them, not a single sentence of forgetting.

Sam watched his brother go gray in the space of a season, watched Fanny go somewhere inside herself for months.

January 1927 | The Fog

Some years later, the eminence long arrived, a Viscountess now, Fanny sat at her dressing-table one night while her hair was brushed down, and without warning she began to laugh. She laughed until the tears ran down her face - no hysteria in it, her maid remembered - at her husband's jokes, forty years of them, worn smooth by repetition and never once funny before that night. Then she went happily to sleep.³⁹

After Christmas 1926 they were both failing in earnest. The house on Hamilton Place became two sickrooms - Marcus on one floor with three nurses, Fanny below him with two, the house too full of illness to hold them on the same landing. On the 16th of January she wanted, suddenly, to go up and see him. Her daughter Nellie was there, and her daughter-in-law Dorothy. Together, they persuaded her back to bed. The distress of it brought on a stroke that same night, and she died. One floor above, Marcus never knew: he had already fallen into the coma from which, less than a day later, he followed her. They had lived together, cherished each other, "scarcely without a quarrel," utterly faithful to one another for almost forty-six years.⁴⁰

The double funeral fell on the 20th of January, the day after what would have been their 46th anniversary, in a fog so deep the mourners could barely see the grave. The East End crowds had been standing since early morning, most of them Jews from the poorest streets, there for a couple who had never lived among them. Lilac and roses on his coffin; daffodils and mauve tulips on hers. The Chief Rabbi gave them the old words: in their deaths they were not divided.⁴¹

Sam stood in it, an old man now, and felt the years fold into the fog.

He had stood in this same cold before, at a stone with a name on it and no one underneath. Two coffins now, where there should have been decades still owed. Somewhere under all that fog was the office window he and Marcus had stood at for fifty years - backs to the room, arguing themselves hoarse and then, in the space of a breath, quiet again. Sam could still hear his own voice going, fool, idiot, imbecile, and his brother's underneath it, soft, patient, undefeated. Then, always, the same four words: Sam, speak to him on the telephone.

There was no one left to telephone. No one left to argue with, and make it up with, and be forgiven by, fifty times a year for fifty years. Sam stood in the fog a long time.

They were buried at Willesden, beside the stone that bears Gerald's name.

—

For I cannot call back the ebbing tide.