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could not compete with the war. All men had to do something then. So what did Fraser do? According to the Uppingham School Roll, he joined the Stock Exchange. The Stock Exchange itself has no record of his membership. But my father remembered that Fraser had got a job with a shrewd German financier called Lowenfelt two or three years before the war. Lowenfelt started a firm called the Investment Registry in Waterloo Place. It was a lucrative business and Fraser made some money by taking Lowenfelt’s advice to invest in rubber shares. Unfortunately, he did not take Lowenfelt’s advice as to when he should sell the shares, and lost much of his gains after the development of synthetic rubber. Nevertheless he made some profit.
    It was probably a mistake for my grandfather to have left the Investment Registry – it was to carry on in Grafton Street and London Wall into the nineteen-sixties. That he did leave was partly due to the uncomfortable sensation of having a German as his partner during this war against the Germans. It had an unpatriotic air. Besides, Lowenfelt was also a Jew which in those blatant days was additionally unpopular in England, though it hadn’t told with Fraser before the war. In any event, listening to others, he seems to have persuaded himself that there was something ‘ungentlemanly’, if not actually illegal, about Lowenfelt’s manipulation of the share market. Lowenfelt was a man ahead of his times, and already Fraser was falling behind the times. My grandfather’s modest success at the Investment Registry persuaded him that he was ‘a safe pair of hands’ in business matters. He debated whether to pick up a more suitable business partner or go it alone, and then steered somewhere between these choices. In 1915 he decided to buy a patent cleaner from a naval captain he had recently met. It was a miraculous machine which, Captain Jennings assured him, would revolutionise the world of house decorating. There was nothing, not even the most dulled paintwork or delicate fabric, that this restorative device, filled with its fizzing formula, could not make new – and so quickly it took one’s breath away. My breathless grandfather wanted to call the new company he created round this machine ‘Brevis’, signifying its amazing speed, but this name had been taken by another company, and so he named it ‘Breves’ meaning nothing at all, which is what he got. He took premises at the Knightsbridge end of Sloane Street, employed some staff and, as company secretary, chose a charming and penniless old man who had been hammered on the Stock Exchange. He had a long white silky moustache, always dressed immaculately in spats, and was devoted to my grandfather for rescuing him from poverty. Like schoolboys, the two of them would disappear behind a locked door to mix buckets of the secret formula which were then reverently handed to the works manager. It took a year, following the unexplained disappearance of Captain Jennings, for them to conclude from the flaking paintwork and faded fabrics that their magic substance, known as ‘the Breves Process’, did rather more harm than good.
    My grandfather was determined to turn expensive failure into expansive success. He acted boldly, moving from 15 Sloane Street to larger premises, Imperial Court, between Harrods and Harvey Nichols, round the corner in Basil Street. Here he sought to develop the business. In the nineteen-twenties directories, Breves is listed as ‘builders, decorators, electrical, heating and sanitary engineers, furnishers, designers and manufacturers of panelling, parquet floors, upholstery, carpets, bedding, curtains, blinds, picture restorers, vacuum cleaners, removals’. In short, Breves did everything and, like a circus performer, did it all at once. It made a small loss each year.
    But my grandfather was still a man of wealth. Brocket, his home at Maidenhead, was an imposing, red-brick, Edwardian house with attics and cellars full of