Dear Readers,
Good afternoon, and welcome to another bumper edition of the weekly newsletter, Off The Fence, which now has 5,000 subscribers – a landmark number, we can all agree. A subscription to the quarterly print magazine is staying at the ridiculously low sum of £25 for the year for only a few moments more: if you haven’t yet signed up, then you should do so today, and save yourself at least a fiver, and we have a webstore right here where you can do exactly that.
Issue 13 will be landing at the beginning of October – we’re going to give some ‘sneak peeks’ at the content next week, but it’s the broadest and kookiest issue that’s been put together so far, and everyone is extremely proud of it. Issue 12 is sold out on the website and at many retailers, but there are still a few copies available with La Biblioteka, who ship worldwide through their online store.
The death of Andrew Edmunds, whose eponymous restaurant was the office favourite, sparked many online memorials for the ‘death’ of ‘old Soho’. But you should ignore the obituarists: there are mottled corners of Soho, operating in much the same way as they have done for generations. One such establishment is I Camisa, the Italian store on Old Compton Street – a delicatessen which, unsurprisingly, sells delicious sandwiches that you can take to go, but also has a peculiar, tragic history.
Bombs and Bohemians
Soho mythology during World War Two is surprisingly well-known – whether it’s Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt sharing gin and tonics at the Gargoyle Club as the Blitz raged, or Mrs Henderson seeing off the Luftwaffe with her ‘living pictures’/ strippers at the Windmill Club. Most of us have seen the films and TV shows portraying the drunken, corrupt but somehow proudly patriotic resistance offered up by the denizens of London’s ‘naughty square mile’, but the tale of the Camisa brothers has yet to be adapted for the screens.
In 1929, Ennio and Isidoro Camisa opened London’s first real Italian food store at 66 Old Compton Street. Their sister, Fortunata, had married an Italian based in London, Severino Parmigiana, and they had emigrated from Parma to move to the capital, where thousands of their countrymen lived – principally in Clerkenwell and Soho.
Eleven years later, World War Two was in full swing, and anti-Italian sentiment was rife. An article in the Daily Mirror screamed that ‘every Italian colony in Great Britain and America is a seething cauldron of smoking Italian politics. Black fascism… we are nicely honeycombed with little cells of potential betrayal.’
On June 10, Mussolini declared war on Britain, and Churchill instructed the police with the phrase ‘collar the lot!’ to round up the men of London’s Italian community. Within four days, 1,600 of them had been rounded up, including the Camisa brothers.
Transported to a disused cotton factory in Lancashire, they waited while the Foreign Office chose what to do with them. Eventually it was decided most of them were to be transported to Canada aboard the Arandora Star, a converted cruise ship.
One morning, a list of names was read out of those due to leave. The list included many Italian Sohoites, but to their surprise the Camisa brothers were not included.
They had a lucky escape. The ship steamed out of Liverpool, and within three hours had been sunk by a U-boat. Of the 730 lives lost, 661 were internees, 486 of which were Italian – a huge and irreplaceable chunk of London’s Italian community.
Among the Sohoites, Alfredo Angelucci survived the freezing Atlantic, and returned to his family’s coffee store on Frith Street in 1944. And the Camisas returned four years later, and after running a shop on Berwick Street, Isidoro struck out by himself, and set up premises at 66 Old Compton Street, where the store still operates today, albeit outside family ownership.
There are memorials to the sinking of the Arandora Star in Bardi, hometown of 48 of the dead, and there are two wall memorials at St Peter’s Italian church in Clerkenwell, and in 2010, a memorial garden was unveiled at St Andrew’s cathedral in Glasgow.
But, in Soho, where so many of the Italian internees lived and worked, the only link to the pre-war Italian community is the storefront of I Camisa – Angelucci coffee moved to East Finchley in 2009. Maybe it’s time for a proper memorial.
Signs Taken for Londres
One of the lead features of Issue 12 is now on the website and free for all to read. Rosa Lyster writes about her move to London, which has been paired with some bonza illustrations by Nishant Choksi. It’s a witty and stylish piece – do give it a read.
Life on the Grid
We’ve been putting some choice cuts on the Instagram account lately – Oskar Oprey’s superb piece about his time as a property guardian, Séamas O’Reilly’s listicle of literary hatred – do follow the account here so you can enjoy more prime selections this week and beyond.
Let the Claret Flow
A few newsletters back, we said that we were keen to ‘extend our vinous tentacles’, which some of you understood to mean that we wanted pitches about wine. Which was the wrong end of the stick. If we wanted to write articles about wine, we’d write them ourselves, or ask the Fortnum and Mason Drink Writer of the Year, Henry Jeffreys, to write an article about wine. We didn’t want pitches about wine – we wanted free wine.
And the clever people at Grant Burge put two and two together, and dispatched a bottle of their new B.Ink shiraz. It really is very good – perfect Saturday sofa stuff – and priced very keenly at £7 at Waitrose.
We will be maintaining our wine coverage throughout the autumn months ahead. If you want to be a part of that, then do get in touch by replying to this email.
These New Puritans
After sharing former Prime Minister David Cameron’s passion for memes last week, we thought we might as well dig into the socials of current incumbent of Number 10 Downing Street, Liz Truss, and if you cycle back enough, you get to the years when she was running the account herself, replete with awkward selfies and terrible hashtags.
All very much to be expected, of course, but this particular snap stands out as proof of a clanging misunderstanding of one of the central moments of British history or, perhaps, as unwitting evidence that her youthful republican views linger on still.
The Mayfair Set
Vulpicidal barrister, Jolyon Maugham, posted an interesting link over the weekend, outlining Kwasi Kwarteng’s work for the hedge fund manager, Crispin Odey, and also screenshotting a Reuters report that details the ‘killing’ that Odey Asset Management has made by shorting UK long-dated UK debt.
Odey, who infamously made £220 million by betting on stock value falling on the evening of the Brexit vote, has spent the last six years in and out of the headlines – but here’s a story from a three years back that you all should read – on Odey employee, Henry Steel, who made big profits for his boss by betting against his former employer, Rio Tinto.
Paris Trance
Nina Ricci, the French fashion house, announced that they have appointed the 26-year-old British-American designer, Harris Reed, as creative designer.
Reed, who only graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2020, is the child of a film producer and a model-turned-candlestick maker, only offered 12 separate looks at his most recent London Fashion Week show – hardly the efforts of a designer ready to run a fashion house.
But then Reed is not famous for his clothes, but for his friends – and one particular pal: Cheshire’s finest, Harry Styles himself, as Harris boasts in this piece here, where he talks about working as an undergraduate at the Standard – a five-star hotel near his university campus.
Whether Reed has the chops to run Nina Ricci is a moot point: he’ll be helped along by les petites mains who keep the show on the road and are NDA’d up to the eyeballs, so there’ll be no scoops to be had here.
Locked and Loaded
Our long-awaited debut, Sh*t Literary Siblings, arrives this Friday, which is all very exciting – if you haven’t yet pre-ordered your copy, then you can do so at this link here, and ready yourself to bathe in what comic sage Ian Martin calls ‘a chuckling, baffling rollercoaster of glorious, criminal wordplay.’
Ian also said it’s the ‘ideal gift for someone who thinks you’re “clever”’ – and he’s dead right. It’s the perfect pick-me-up for the pretentious nephew, bookish goddaughter or eternal grad student in your life. Don’t hesitate, order your copy today.
Stunting in the Pando
Over a number of months that turned into a year, we created a fully functional and very cool board game called Pandemillions, which we made in collaboration with legendary Davey Jones – there’s a feature on the game here, and if you’d like to buy a copy, then do reply to this email and we will invoice you in turn. There are less than ten left, and this is a one-off thing, and it really does look – and play! – very nicely indeed.
In Case You Missed It
Lamorna Ash charts the progress of two former standups who’ve gone from comic to cleric after taking holy orders.
Amelia Tait reports on the YouTube baker who’s single-handedly taking on the scourge of ‘craft hacks’ over at MIT Technology Review.
Over at the New Yorker, Ed Caesar makes the unconvincing case that he has just ‘discovered’ dance music in an otherwise hugely enjoyable profile of Solomun.
Outside has one of the more beguiling pieces of the week, as Sean Williams profiles Kurt Steiner, the world’s greatest stone skipper.
Zadie Smith celebrates Gretchen Gerzina’s 1995 book, Black England, a book that looks at the complex and fascinating lives of black people in Britain before the abolition of slavery.
And Finally
Someone, somewhere, described indie music as the ‘sound of a young man addressing the world from the inside of his sleeping bag’ – and if someone can remember the genius who struck this immortal quip, we’d be delighted to hear from you.
Anyway, indie music’s most maudlin anthem, Radiohead’s Creep, celebrates its 30th birthday this week, and so we hand over to the late, great Patrice O’Neal, as he lays on a supremely funny skit about the song and the type of people who listen to it.
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That’s it for this week, and we look forward to joining you around the same time next week. As ever, you can talk to a member of the editorial team by replying to this email, and we do love to hear from our readers. If you’ve got a copy of Sh*t Literary Siblings arriving on Friday, please do share snaps of the book on socials – that sort of thing really does make us happy. Until next Monday!
All the best,
TF
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