Often there is unfinished business in these posts. In September there was mention of five families from Chios, in A Greek Island. The greatest of these families was Ralli. The Ralli brothers, five of them, were probably the most successful Greek merchant-traders in the 19th century.
Their trading empire extended across Europe and the United States, employing at its height more than 40,000 people. Reading about them on Wiki I am reminded of the Ephrussi family – so well depicted by a scion of that once great family, Edmund de Waal, in The Hare with Amber Eyes. The Ralli business petered out in the 20th century. In 1961 Sir Isaac Wolfson bought Ralli Brothers, a merchant bank, for £5.5 million, in 1981 Cargill bought the commodities part of Ralli Brothers and in 2006 a part of the firm that managed funds became part of Rathbones. Their remaining business in the 21st century is in agricultural products in India. But we must turn the clock back a hundred years.
In 1910, Irene Ralli married Pandia Calvocoressi in London. The Calvocoressi’s were another of the great families that originated on Chios. He was working for her family business and they were posted to Karachi where, in 1912, their son, Peter, was born. Peter was largely brought up in England and after the humiliation of being called a greasy Greek at prep school, was a “tug” (scholar) at Eton and got a First in Modern History at Balliol. He wanted to join the Foreign Office but was discouraged by Anthony Eden who pointed out that he had two disadvantages: his father was French and he was called Calvocoressi. Instead he read for the Bar.
He was commissioned into RAF Intelligence in the war and spent four years at Bletchley. He describes his time there in Top Secret Ultra, published in 1980. It is well worth reading and is a marked contrast to The Imitation Game, a 2014 film based on the life of Alan Turing. That led him after the war to collect evidence to be used at the Nuremberg trials, where he was accredited to the four chief prosecutors. This picture shows him at Nuremberg, sitting in the centre with his head resting on his left hand.
His career after the war was in publishing and International Affairs. His distinguished jobs are in the public domain. What is not so widely known is that he was often called upon for advice. An instance was when the editor of The Times asked for guidance over letters that Sara Keays gave the paper and that were to ruin the career of Conservative politician, Cecil Parkinson. Another was when Margaret Thatcher summoned him to Chequers to advise on the position of small nation states in the wake of the American invasion of Grenada in 1983.
I knew him when he lived in Bath and London in the last thirty years of his life. The last time we met was at a party to launch the 9th edition of his World Politics since 1945. He was ninety-six and died aged ninety-seven in 2010.
Inousses (alternative spelling, Oinousses), a tiny island some five miles by two between the North East tip of Chios and Turkey produced some four or five great shipping families, the Pateras and Lemos families being the greatest and richest. They probably traded from an early date, but a big impulse to their fortunes was the Crimean war. At some point after WWII families from the island owned some 40% of the world’s tonnage. Although the bigger shipowners did migrate to London for the Baltic exchange they perhaps did not become quite so anglicised as the Chios merchant families, retaining strong connections to Greece. The families still go back to their ancestral island in the summer, the rich ones in their yachts, the poor relations in their villas or houses in the village. There are no hotels on the island and very little tourism apart from a few yachties.