Old Shanghai, Old Bond Street and the Maharaja of Kapurthala

I blogged a relocation ad from 1940 for Shanghai tailors Old Bond Street quite a while ago. And now my thanks to Bill Savadove in Shanghai who unearthed this ad of theirs from 1939.

There’s a few interesting things about this ad. Old Bond Street was run by Erwin Leschziner, a Jewish refugee tailor and dress designer, who came to Shanghai to escape the rise of the fascism. He employed some other Jewish tailors in the business – so his claim to branches in Berlin and Wien (Vienna) are more sort of where they came from than where they had stores (Jewish stores not being too popular in 1939 in either of those cities!!). He did have a store in Shanghai and they did do fittings in the Cathay Hotel though.

Next, His Highness the Maharaja of Kapurthala (in the Punjab), better known perhaps as Jagatjit Singh (1872-1949). He became the Maharaja as a young boy, in 1877 (assuming full ruling powers in 1890) and ruled till the end of his life. He was a Francophile and constructed palaces and gardens in Kapurthala based on Versailles. Despite this he was a serious man, acting as the Indian representative at the League of Nations in the 1920s and becoming a hard core world traveller. He also did visit Shanghai – there’s pic here of him with the local Sikh community in the 1930s. One presumes the ‘ladies dresses’ were not for him but for his retinue (the Maharaja of Kapurthala travelled with a large female retinue apparently – back in the early 1900s he’d managed to annoy the Japanese by visiting Tokyo and “adding” two Japanese women to his travelling party).

In 1939 by the way the Maharaja was 67. He was also preparing for war and had publicly offered all his troops and resources to the service of the British Empire. He had assumed the rank of Colonel. He passed through Shanghai (and Singapore) on his way to visit the Golden Gate Exposition in San Francisco, travelling on the rather luxurious Lloyd-Triestino line the Conte Biancamano. He visited Shanghai with his second son, Prince Amarjit Singh, who was at the time the officer in charge of all Punjab armed forces.