Poor old thing

The fascinating story was told by the composer’s great-great-great-great niece Sheila Hayman in Mendelssohn, The Nazis and Me (BBC4 last week, but you can still watch at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00l7rg2). Imagine the anxiety of having to trawl the archives (and the Nazis published lots of helpful books for families in just this situation) not for the pleasure of discovering you are distantly related to the Dukes of Richmond or Mary Queen of Scots, but merely for the privilege of not being carted off to an extermination camp and gassed.

This is just what Hayman’s Berlin relatives had to do. It all swung on an illegitimate great-grandmother: was she or was she not of Jewish ancestry? After months of desperate research they had a brainwave and gave up looking. If they didn’t know the answer, they realised, then neither would the Nazis.

Finally, Wimbledon. I caught the new floodlit roof over centre court being used for the first time in the nailbiting match between Murray and Wawrinka and it occurred to me that future generations are going to laugh at us in much the same way we laugh at previous generations for their creaky, Mr Cholmondley-Warner-style broadcasts or their baggy football shorts or their idiotic failure to have discovered penicillin. ‘What, you mean right up till as late as 2009, they had to stop play at Wimbledon if it got too dark or it, like, rained?’

Murray, I realised, is the perfect British Wimbledon contender. He’s good enough to win, which means you’re not wasting your emotional energy on him like you were on Tim Henman. At the same time he’s so unlikeable (seriously, English fans: if you think your affection is remotely reciprocated you’re living in cloud-cuckoo-land) that if some foreigner beats him you won’t be too upset. So watching Murray really is a case of: ‘May the best man win!’ Which is just as English sport should be, is it not?