Lily Mathé, the Gypsy Violinist of Kilburn

Lily Mathé was born in the town of Eger Hungary, in 1910 as Lily Markstein. She began attending a teacher training college but dropped out and went to Budapest to study violin. In 1932 she adopted the stage name Lily Mathé and set up a gypsy band. She first played in Hungary with the group and then settled in Paris for a few years. Here they performed at the restaurant Hungaria, in the Cirque Medrano, and on the radio. The band also toured in Germany, Belgium, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Scandinavia.

In 1939, Lily moved to the Netherlands after the beginning of WWII, returning to live with her family in Budapest two years later. Following the German occupation of Budapest in the spring of 1944, Lily was arrested with her parents and other family members and deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Her parents were gassed soon after their arrival. Lily however, became a member of the women’s orchestra and in the autumn of 1944 they were transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. There she worked in the weaving mill and had to play music for the camp commandant Josef Kramer.

Badly ill, she was freed on 15 April 1945 by the British army when they took Bergen-Belsen. Shortly after emigrating to Britain in February 1947, she married Edward Bernstein, a Viennese member of the British army who had participated in the liberation of the camp.

Edward and Lily lived quietly at No.3 Douglas Road in Kilburn (off Willesden Lane). During the 1950s and 60s Lily worked as the leader of a gypsy group in the Aldwych Brasserie restaurant.

After the War Adolf Eichmann managed to escape to Argentina under a false identity. Simon Wiesenthal spent years tracking him down. In May 1960 he was captured by Mossad agents in Buenos Aires and taken to Israel. Lily gave evidence against him during his trial. Eichmann was convicted in December 1961 and hanged in June 1962.

In February 1961 Lily appeared in an ITV film about Eichmann and Bergen-Belsen where she said that when Josef Kramer met her he had hummed a tune and asked her to play it on a violin he gave her. He said, ‘If you can’t, you will die’. She made an effort which seemed to please him and he told her, ‘You have saved your life’. She was taken to Eichmann who said, ‘You will lead a camp orchestra to welcome the new inmates and play at the officers’ mess every evening.’

Kramer, known by the press as ‘The Butcher of Belsen’, was arrested at the camp in April 1945 and following his trial he was executed.

Josef Kramer arrested by British Troops at Belsen, April 1945

Lily survived the horror of the camps and died on 16 Dec 1985 at 17 Kenilworth Road in Edgware.

She was not the only woman involved in the death camp orchestras. In 1980 Vanessa Redgrave played Fania Fénelon in the film Playing for Time which was based on her experience in Auschwitz, where she and a group of classical musicians were spared in return for performing music for the Nazis.

False Arrest: the Allum and Hislop Case

Trinidadian Desmond Allum came to London to study law in 1958. He worked in hotel kitchens and the Post Office and studied law at night. He qualified and was called to the Bar in the summer of 1962 and then got a job with the Inland Revenue. In 1964 and 1965 he lived at 116 Greencroft Gardens in West Hampstead. His friend George Hislop was born in Tobago. He played cricket for Trinidad and represented the West Indies at the Empire Games held in Cardiff in 1958. The following year he came to London to train as a teacher. In September 1962 he started work as a PE teacher at the Hillcroft Secondary School in Tooting Bec. The Incident On the evening of 31 January 1963 Allum and Hislop had visited friends at 351b Finchley Road (now redeveloped as part of the JW3 Centre). They left and were walking down Finchley Road towards the underground station on their way to Balham. At 9.25pm they were stopped and questioned by two plain clothes detectives who asked them to turn out their po...

Kilburn National Club

This popular music venue was at 234 Kilburn High Road, on the corner of Messina Avenue. Many famous musicians including Johnny Cash and David Bowie played there. We look at the original building which was the Grange Cinema, and what happened when the National closed and was taken over by two different church groups. Grange Cinema The Grange was a large mansion standing in grounds of nine and a half acres and with a frontage to Kilburn High Road. It was the home of Ada Peters the widow of a wealthy coach builder who made coaches for Queen Victoria . Following Ada ’s death in 1910, the property was sold. The new owner was Oswald Stoll, a major name in the entertainment world who had already built the London Coliseum in St Martin ’s Lane, near Leicester Square . Stoll wanted to erect another Coliseum theatre in Kilburn. In fact, progress overtook him and instead of a theatre, the 2,028 seat Grange cinema opened on 30 July 1914 . This remained the biggest cinema in Kilburn until th...

Smith’s Crisps

This is the story of how Frank Smith and his friend Jim Viney, began in a small way in Cricklewood and built the large and successful company of Smith’s Crisps. Early years Frank was born in 1875, in Hackney. His parents had left their native Suffolk by the mid-1860s for London, where his father ran a fruiterer and florist business. By 1881 the family were living over their corner shop at 128 Stoke Newington High Street, moving to Kingsland Road by 1891. Frank started working when he was 10-years old and went with his father to Covent Garden each morning to buy produce for their shop. Frank married Jessie Minnie Ramplin in Southwark in 1902. The couple and their six-year old daughter Laura were living in Mona Road Deptford in 1911, when Frank gave his occupation as ‘commercial traveller, confectionery’. Soon after this he went to work for a wholesale grocer by the name of Carter, in Smithfield. Carter had a side-line making potato crisps and Frank saw great potential in the product and...

History of Kilburn and West Hampstead

Search This Blog