Back in 2017, I wrote about my grandfather Louis, and the first part of his story went up to 1919, when he was nineteen. Since then, I have managed to get hold of a complete copy of his military records from the South African archives.
The next big thing that happened in Louis’ life was meeting his future wife, Rose, at a party in 1926 (see https://www.roserootsresearch.co.uk/post/it-s-not-all-about-long-ago-ancestors-writing-about-rose).
This photo also shows Louis at about that time:
This is his naturalization document from 1929.
Just before Rose and Louis got married, Louis’ father, Charles, was attacked in his grocery shop in Green Street, Jeppestown (a suburb of Johannesburg), and died as a result of his injuries. See the story at https://www.roserootsresearch.co.uk/post/family-stories-murdered-for-a-wedding-suit.
My father Charles was born in 1932 and named after his grandfather.
Charles’s cousins Myrna and Yvonne were very close to him in age.
Louis Fridjhon and Myrna, Louis Feinstein and Charles
Louis with Yvonne and Charles
Charles's sister Barbara was born in 1938.
A passenger record from 1945 shows Louis (listed as Ludwig), sailing from Port Elizabeth to Boston. He had a temporary visitor’s visa and described himself as Director of Zyp Products. (His marriage certificate had shown Louis as a manufacturer.) His home address was 220 Jan Smuts Avenue, Johannesburg.
The London Daily Telegraph of 6 Feb 1947 has this mention of the company’s shares:
I like this photo of Louis with his sisters Sarah, Mary and Bessie, and brother Sam, which must have been taken in the 1940s because Sam died in 1950.
By 1952, when Louis and Rose sailed from Durban to Southampton on the Edinburgh Castle, Louis had become a stockbroker.
(Rose's diary says that Louis sold Zyp Products in 1947, to Woolf Heller Standard Canners, and he then joined Frank on the Stock Exchange, trading as Dalrymple & Frank in Bristol Buildings until 1959 when they moved into the new buildings of the Stock Exchange in Holland Street.)
Rose kept these clippings from the Durban Natal Daily News of 15 January 1954 showing Louis on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.
I have a few photos and ciné films taken with Louis from his visits to us in Cambridge or our holidays with our grandparents in South Africa in the 1960s. I remember putting bows in my grandfather’s hair when he was (pretending to be?) asleep, impressing him by reading his newspaper upside down, and having to eat cereal very quietly while he had his breakfast. We also used to do a lot of swimming, singing, and performing. He played us his records of Max Bygraves singing “Tulips from Amsterdam” and “Gilly Gilly Ossenfeffer Katzenellen Bogen By The Sea”, and we sang along.
Louis holding me at Barbara's wedding in 1961
Louis holding Leon, in Shelford in 1965
Swimming in the Kantors' pool, Johannesburg 1968
Johannesburg 1970
I vividly remember being told when Louis died (on 15 September 1972), and it is still hard to write about that, even after all this time.
Comments