The end of the skin game

THERE ARE ARE CREDIBLE REPORTS that Carrie Symonds, Boris Johnson’s partner, and her friend Zac — now Lord — Goldsmith, his animal welfare minister, have been in cahoots to ban the retail fur trade, and seem to have gained the support of the prime minister. So it’s timely to record that it wasn’t hostility, however vociferous and sometimes vicious, and possibly now victorious, that killed off the ancient connection between Jews and the fur trade. These events just happened to coincide.

The story of the fur trade in the UK is barely known to the fellow Britons of the men, mostly Londoners, who have been its heart and soul for generations. They are mostly the descendents of Jews from all over continental Europe. The most colourful of them that I ever met, Jack Zwirn, made flying suits for the RAF in the Second World War, and later ran a succession of fashionable West End fur shops with, serially, his first, second and third wives, only one of them Jewish. He joked that at least he was a better class of Jew than those descended from Bessarabian horse thieves.

My flirtation with their product goes way back. As a boy in the early 1950s, I often read (1856) by R. M. Ballantyne, who knew whereof he spoke. We had Davy Crockett hats, with a little tail, originally in raccoon. Ours were from Woolworth’s, and in rabbit (possibly from Jack, then “The King of the Rabbits”). A little later, I thrilled to the City and the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), as it brought the far north to foggy London. Only when I got to the Arctic on a couple of visits (one sponsored by the fur trade) did I appreciate how rich that end of the fur story was. And I was nearly 70 before I got a picture of the mostly Jewish family