A rare meeting between my father, George Semmens, and his maternal grandfather, Isaac Hourwich.
This photo, by my grandfather Clive Semmens (father of George, son-in-law of Isaac) appears to have been taken in Kent in 1922 on what may have been Isaac's only visit to England.
Born in Vilnius, Lithuania (then part of Russia) in 1860, the Socialist Isaac fled to America in 1890, leaving a family in Moscow (including my grandmother) and soon establishing another in New York. A prominent lawyer and economist, his 1892 study of The Economics of a Russian Village, was said to have been influential on the future leaders of the Communist Revolution.
In 1905 he returned to Russia, briefly, in a failed bid for election to the Duma. Thereafter he remained most of his life in the USA, where his 1912 book Immigration and Labor was considered for many years a key study of the economic impact of European immigration into the States (an entirely beneficial impact, in his view). Isaac Hourwich died in New York aged 64, two years after this photo was taken.