Notes
Ged Martin (see References) offers this brief biography: ‘Unlike St Catharine's, which commemorates a 'hostis amicus' on its War Memorial, no member of Magdalene is known to have fought for the Central Powers. However, for one undergraduate, the conflict highlighted a sense of national identity within a dual heritage. It was obvious from his name that Leslie Herman Berlein, who came up to read Law in 1912, had German family associations. Census returns show that his mother originated from Ireland, but his father, Julius Berlein, had been born in Germany and was a naturalised British subject. The father had come to Britain by way of South Africa, operating as a mining speculator first in Griqualand West, with its diamond centre of Kimberley, and later in the gold-rush city of Johannesburg: Leslie Berlein was born in the Transvaal in 1893. The eighteen-nineties were a turbulent time in South Africa, with the Transvaal Boers attempting to bar the incomers, or 'Uitlanders', from taking over their republic. At Christmas time in 1895, an associate of Cecil Rhodes, Dr L.S. Jameson, attempted to trigger an Uitlander revolt. Julius Berlein was prominent in pledging support for the President Paul Kruger's Afrikaner government, and was dismissed by a contemptuous correspondent of The Times as 'a typical representative of what we term in Johannesburg "the minor German crowd"', speculators who were 'as welcome as the flowers in May at Oom Paul's house at Pretoria.'[71] However, Berlein quickly changed sides and had relocated to London by 1899, where he pursued a career as a stockbroker.[72] The 1901 census shows that, of the five live-in servants employed by the family, one had been born in Germany and one in Switzerland, suggesting that Leslie Berlein probably grew up in a bilingual household. There is no suggestion that he was forced to make a choice of identities in 1914. Much of his life had been spent in England, and his education at two schools, Charterhouse and Berkhampsted, was quintessentially English. But the fact that he volunteered early suggests that he felt the need to demonstrate that a choice of loyalties had indeed been made. He was rejected in his attempt to join up as a despatch rider: officially there were no vacancies, but perhaps his German background was regarded as making him unsuitable to handle confidential orders. Berlein was killed serving with the Royal Berkshires in September 1915. Magdalene remembered him as 'a handsome figure and an attractive personality.'