Published: 27 August 2019
Last updated: 5 March 2024
ABOUT FOUR YEARS AGO the writer Thomas Harding and his daughter Sam were walking around central London. Harding pointed out building after building — landmarks such as the Trocadero, hotels such as the Cumberland and the Strand Palace — which had once belonged to his family’s company, J Lyons and Co.
Lyons was once one of the most famous names in British food, spanning a vast empire which took in hotels, teashops, restaurants, catering, and iconic brands such as Lyons Maid ice cream, Tetley Tea, and ReadyBrek cereal.
And yet, its financial collapse and eventual disappearance as a company was painfully rapid in the 1970s, so that Lyons effectively vanished. Harding himself realised he knew almost nothing about his mother’s eclectic and extraordinary family who had built the J Lyons name — but he was determined to find out.
The result is his magnificent book, Legacy, winningly subtitled “One family, a cup of tea, and the company that took on the world”. In its pages we discover the endlessly fascinating lives of the Salmon and Gluckstein families, once primarily Orthodox Jews, and once, indeed, a sort of ring-fenced Jewish cousinhood who mainly married each other.
FULL STORY The family whose tea and cakes changed the world (Jewish Chronicle)
Photo: The Lyons' Teashop in Piccadilly, 1894
