Manchester's Armenian past‏

Manchester's Armenian past
Neil Roland
October 08, 2009


OUR house was built in the final years of Victoria’s reign, and until I bought it almost 20 ago, only one family had lived in it.

Four children have been born here in total. The most recent, our son, was actually born at St Mary’s but was returned here

shortly afterwards, so the romantic in me is happy to glide over such precision of fact.

The other three were named Arto, Adrine and Ara Arschavir (could some subconscious desire to continue this chain of first

vowel naming have nudged me to give my son Asher as a middle name?) Even now, 98 years after the birth of Arto and just

three weeks since his death, this house is still offering up secrets and signs of their long and happy tenure here.

On the third morning of the Didsbury Arts Festival, two elegant ladies arrived at my home studio. They could well have been

Sephardic Jewish in appearance, but were in fact Armenian – two of the last members of their generation to still live in

Manchester, the city where this most fascinating and attractive immigrant culture made its home.

Armenia has threaded links with Britain since the 13th century, when Henry III exchanged letters with King Hetoum in which

the Armenian monarch appealled for help from the Crusaders. But it was from the middle of the 19th century that Armenians

started to settle here as merchants. It was to Manchester that they came first, the earliest silk merchants arriving in 1835.

Hovsep Capamagian became the first Armenian British national in 1847.

By the 1860s, there were some 30 Armenian merchants in business in Manchester and a new influx escalated after the first

wave of Armenian persecutions in Ottoman Turkey in the 1880s. This culminated in the Armenian genocide of 1915, which

saw, over the following decade, the deportation and murder of more than one and a half million Armenians living within the

Ottoman Empire – an event which the Armenian diaspora has sought keenly to have recognised in the face of Turkish

reluctance ever since.

The ladies who arrived that morning, with Guessarian and Doudian, reminded me of Adrine Arschavir, known to all as Kitty.

It is something in the eyes – a lively, warm, dark intelligence and quite distinct from any other group. They of course had

known the Arschavirs for many decades, and knew the house well – recalling with fondness the delicious meals prepared

by Harriet, the family's maid, who had lived here in what is now our bedroom, and of the Arschavir parents, Madeleine and

Levon, and Auntie Eugenie Gurdjikian – who had lived for some 80 years in the attic bedroom now occupied by our son.

Just like Didsbury’s Sephardic Jewish community, which settled here from the countries of the Middle East in the 19th and

early 20th century as merchants, they were fortunate to find a haven here. While co-religionists in Europe were persecuted,

the Armenian community in Manchester set about establishing an admirable infrastructure of support for their compatriots

suffering abroad. In 1920, the Manchester Armenians chartered three ships filled with clothing and medical supplies for those

attempting to survive in the short-lived Republic of Armenia, while the Armenian Ladies Association (1907) sought to help

those abroad and integrate Armenians into local British society.

The Manchester community’s first spiritual leader was Rev Father Garabed Shahnazarian, who celebrated the first Armenian

Holy Mass in a rented chapel in 1863 and presided over the establishment of the Holy Trinity Apostolic Church – Britain’s

first Armenian Church – seven years later. The church, on Upper Brook Street, continues to serve the community today,

though no longer has its own priest.

The parallels with the Jewish community seem apparent. So much so, that when former Manchester High School pupil Adrine

Yegwart of Withington met her future husband, Mancunian Lance Middleton, his way of describing what Armenians were like

to his parents was like Jews, but Christian.

Seeing Adrine Middleton at the studio the day after the first Armenian visitors also brought back memories of Kitty Arschavir,

who until retirement taught in Northenden at Bazeley Road Primary School. Bursting with life, twinkling with affection and keenly

interested in the fascinations of the world around them.

The local Armenian community is dwindling now. As Joan George, author of the fascinating seminal work on Manchester’s

Armenians, ‘Merchants In Exile 1835-1935’ acknowledged, like every community the first generation often absorbs itself in its

new surroundings. There is assimilation and it is up to the second generation to rediscover the past. There are an estimated

15,000 to 18,000 Armenians living in the UK today, but Manchester’s have all but disappeared to assimilation to London and

beyond.

The inspirational cookery writer and excellent abstract artist Arto der Haroutunian, who died aged 47 just over 20 years ago,

founded with his brother in 1970 what most Mancunians think of when they think of Armenia – the original Armenian Taverna

in Albert Square. It is still a real, if time-warped, gastronomic gem. David Dickinson, who was adopted by a couple in Cheadle

Heath, discovered that his natural grandfather was an Armenian silk merchant who traded on the same Manchester streets in

1910 as David did half a century later.

As for the Arschavirs – Ara and Arto (Archie) – both became architects (try saying Archie Arschavir the architect!). Ara moved

to Oxford and Archie to Hull, before returning to Didsbury. I feel privileged to have met Archie on several occasions. He reminded

me of Picasso with his glossy, clever eyes and look of mischief. And even now, 20 years after moving into the house in which

they were all born, I am discovering evidence of that mischief. Arto scratched into the odd brick and door frame and just last

week, the sun glinting on a bedroom window, I saw an intriguingly provocative comment scratched in the glass three quarters

of a century ago.
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