The Beloffs – history told from below

I arrived at the Psychology Department of Edinburgh University in 1975 to do a PhD in the psychology of language, supervised by Dr John C. Marshall. About a year later, Dr Marshall left for a Chair in Nijmegen. In my moment of need, Dr John Beloff, a distinguished Cartesian dualist philosopher and eminent para-psychologist, kindly offered to supervise my final two years. He was the perfect supervisor, the compleat, old-school, University academic. Brilliant but self-effacing; thorough but not pedantic; traditional in style but deeply innovative and radical in content; intellectually uncompromising regarding his own work but generously tolerant with the work of a fledgling academic. 

However, there were two Dr Beloffs in Edinburgh University's Department of Psychology. The other was eminent social psychologist and distinguished public intellectual, Dr Halla Beloff.

I regarded Dr Halla Beloff as fiercely intelligent, deeply civilised and radically innovative too, but more willing than John to wield her brilliance in public as a scalpel in the face of social injustice (or even humbug). Halla regularly gave impromptu master classes in progressive forensic critique in the Psychology Department common room during 'morning tea', which I frequented mostly to see her in action. She did not take prisoners. In my memory, Halla tackled with especial vigour what she would later describe as 'the promotion of crude biological assessments of group differences' by Chris Brand, a member of the Department who had gained media attention for making controversial statements on race and intelligence. Halla later discursively positioned him as a psychologist bringing 'the discipline and profession into ill-repute' and engaging in 'points scoring' in a way which 'not only lacks humanity but is bad science' (Beloff, 1998, p.232).

My mother taught me that we must make common cause with all victims of hate.

I was in awe of both Dr Beloffs. As students often do, I regarded them as having being in their post since time immemorial. At the time, I never asked myself or anyone else about their trajectories to Edinburgh University Department of Psychology.

Fast forward getting on for five decades and an extraordinary book has been published, Reminiscences of a Refugee Childhood by Halla Beloff as told to and with illustrations by Zoe Beloff (Halla and John's daughter). Whilst focusing on Halla's life as a child, this riveting book also reveals something of the family, social and historical background of both John and Halla Beloff.

A dark chapter

John Beloff (1920-2006) was a descendant of a prominent Russian Jewish family going back via St Petersburg to the 'Pale of Settlement', within which – from 1791 to 1917 – most Jewish people within the Russian Empire were required to live. John was himself, however, born in London into a family described by Halla as belonging to 'the Jewish aristocracy of Britain' (Beloff, 1992, p.425). One can see why. John's brother (Baron) Max Beloff became Professor of government and public administration at Oxford and Fellow of All Souls' College, then Principal of the private University College (later University) of Buckingham and a Conservative peer. John's sister Renee taught at the Royal Academy of Music, was proprietor of a coeducational independent school and managing director of a City of London finance house. John's sister Anne was a biochemist married to Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Ernst Boris Chain. John's sister Nora, following work in the British Foreign Office political intelligence department, worked for The Observer where she became the very first female political correspondent in a British newspaper.

Halla, by contrast, was an only child. Halla's father, William Parker (born Wilhelm Proskauer), a shoe salesman, was born into a Jewish family in what was then Breslau, the largest German city east of Berlin but became renamed Wroclaw in Poland as a result of the Potsdam Conference in 1945. Halla's mother, Ruth Proskauer nee Berndt hailed from Berlin. Halla and her parents arrived in London, England as refugees from a Germany then afflicted by Nazism and anti-Semitism but it was not long before Halla was evacuated to the countryside without her parents to escape the bombing of London.

Towards the end of Reminiscences of a Refugee Childhood (p.101-121), Halla (then Parker) recalls meeting John (Beloff) in her first year at Birkbeck College, attending lectures at University College with him, getting married in 1952 and then travelling together to Illinois to work as research assistants to Raymond Cattell doing factor analysis within Cattell's research programme on personality.

Reminiscences of a Refugee Childhood is an extraordinary artistic tribute from Zoe, a visual artist and film maker based in New York City.

However, most of the book affords the reader opportunities to access a treasure trove of Halla Beloff's personal reminiscences living through what Zoe Beloff insightfully summarises as 'a dark chapter in history through the eyes of a child'. The text bears this out again and again. On p.44, there is a heartbreakingly disarming photograph of Halla, aged 7, setting off for school in Leipzig in 1937 full of optimism, confidence and joie de vivre. On the opposite page, Halla tells us: 'But of course in 1938 the school was burnt down in the Kristallnacht, when the synagogues were burnt down along with all the Jewish department stores.' The voice of Halla, the child, is remembered by Halla, the adult, as remarking to her mother: 'That's awful. They should at least give the things to poor people.' In contrast, Halla, the measured adult, says: 'It wasn't good, it wasn't good at all after 1938', deploying understatement in a way of speaking entirely characteristic of the Edinburgh University Dr Halla Beloff talking about ideological oppression.

To give another example, on p.63 there is a photograph of Dola Schaffer, Halla's cousin, gathering flowers, perhaps poppies, by a cornfield, looking just as Halla had described her three pages earlier: 'She was a little girl about my age. She had naturally curly hair, very pretty . . . she was a sweet girl called Dola.' The photograph bears a brief, appalling, caption ending: 'Dola was murdered in a concentration camp' (p.60). Later, referring to the Sturmabteilung (SA) a Nazi Party paramilitary organisation, Halla tells us: 'where we lived you constantly saw these men who were called SA. They were a sort of militia: brown khaki uniforms they had, and the swastika armbands…'. Halla comments: 'we didn't like them. But you know', again combining characteristic understatement with acceptance that one must vigorously and uncompromisingly change what one can but accept what one cannot change.

Conjuring imaginative histories

Beyond the appalling memories, Reminiscences of a Refugee Childhood is an extraordinary artistic tribute from Zoe, a visual artist and film maker based in New York City, to her mother, a social psychologist who 'maintained a lifetime great interest in the arts'. Zoe notes that she has 'long been fascinated by history told from below, through the scraps and remains of everyday life, preserved through home movies, snap shots and stories' and describes the work that she does as the 'conjuring' of 'deeply researched yet imaginative histories' (find examples here).

Family albums are such crucial documents on the way we see ourselves that it is not surprising that historians, sociologists and psychologists are now beginning to pay close attention to them.

In Reminiscences of a Refugee Childhood, true to form, Zoe Beloff complemented Halla's recorded and transcribed personal testimonies with juxtapositions of family photographs and her own sensitive historically-informed art work. The three mutually complement and enhance each other. A pre-title page quotation by Halla from 2016, in which she declares her identity as a left-wing intellectual woman, is accompanied, on the same page, by a clearly recognisable photograph of Halla as a baby in a pram and a sketch by Zoe of Halla aged 90. The book's 'Contents', printed in a strong clear black upper-case font, are superimposed over artwork by Zoe depicting four individual ladies' shoes and the Salamander trademark in muted browns. Later we learn from Halla in the text that her father, Wilhelm Proskauer, later William Parker, was 'a commercial salesman for Salamander, a very good shoe company that still exists', that the company provided him with a chauffeur and Wilhelm, and his wife Ruth and daughter Halla, with an apartment in a block owned by the company.

As another example, Halla recalls moving to Leipzig, 'when I was old enough to be conscious of the world', where she lived at number 11 Fockestrasse and was looked after by Lotte, a nursemaid. Halla recalls Lotte sometimes meeting boyfriends when they were out together: 'They were very nice young men, and they used to ask me how old I was, and I used to say "three and a half". And I remember thinking, my goodness I've been three for ages.' On the previous page, Zoe displays a family photograph of Lotte holding Halla's hand, and then artwork showing Fockestrasse in 1934 with photographs of Halla and some of her friends superimposed.

Reminiscences of a Refugee Childhood also allows copious opportunities for recursive reflection. Halla wrote, in 1985 – in The Fairytale Album published in New Society – that: 'Family albums are such crucial documents on the way we see ourselves that it is not surprising that historians, sociologists and psychologists are now beginning to pay close attention to them' (Beloff, 1985b, p.226). If family photograph albums are crucial documents revealing how families see themselves, how much more crucial is this book, consisting not only of family photographs provided by grandparents, testimonies by a mother and related artwork by a daughter.

In On being ordinary, where Halla Beloff discussed her heterosexuality as a one of the many influences for her ideas and her work, Halla wrote: 'is it because of an implicit feeling that male chauvinism, anti-Semitism and ageism exist somewhere, that we in Britain never speak about personal issues, and that this is the first time that even some of my colleagues will see me naked like this?' (Beloff, 1992, p.426).

It is about the stoic and patient preparation, determination, resourcefulness – and sheer luck – of people who did what they had to do to survive and flourish.

How much more exposed to male chauvinism, anti-Semitism and ageism is Halla by and in her published reminiscences and how courageous to publish them as a component of this book? In chapter seven (Family Photography) of Camera Culture, after describing how Catherine Hanf Noren had recorded five generations of her family's history (Hanf Noren, 1976, cited in Beloff, 1995a) wrote: 'The particular interest of the saga lies in the fact that the family moves from assimilated Jewish subculture . . . through the Hitler devastation to new lives in Australia, England and the United States . . . The author's work was motivated by her personal sentiment for this remarkable group of industrious and cultured men and women, who exemplified so well what was good in German middle-class society, and who were disbanded and murdered by that society.' Given how similar what befell the family of Halla Beloff was to what befell the family of Catherine Hanf Noren, it is difficult to resist wondering whether Halla's personal sentiment was not dissimilar to that ascribed to Catherine Hanf Noren.

Common cause with all victims of hate

There is no doubt this book will fascinate former students of Halla and John, as it does me, as well as their surviving colleagues, perhaps because it is difficult to resist wondering whether it provides clues as to what lay behind Halla's uncompromising modes of intellectual engagement with social injustice. Halla described herself as an outsider who accepts 'Stalin's insult and anathema, "Rootless Cosmopolitan"', noting wryly: 'as a refugee, déclassé, atheist of Jewish background, highbrow woman with a career, perhaps it's my best claim" (Beloff, 1992, p.425) and that, 'as an outsider I have seen an obligation to ally myself with other outsiders' (Beloff, 1992, p.426). That Halla did ally herself with other outsiders is beyond doubt.

In her introduction, Zoe Beloff recalls: 'My mother taught me that we must make common cause with all victims of hate' (p.6), continuing: 'I remember when I was a child in the 1960s, my family visited the American South and my mother told me that when walking down the street, one must step aside for Black people because for hundreds of years they had to step aside for white people. To this day, every time she sees a Roma person begging on the street, she gives them money because, as she puts it, Hitler wanted to kill them all, and he didn't succeed.'

Zoe insightfully writes in Reminiscences of a Refugee Childhood: 'My mother and her parents were just some of the thousands of ordinary families who fled the Nazi terror and built new lives in countries around the world.  . . . It is not an account of extraordinary heroism or suffering. Rather it is about the stoic and patient preparation, determination, resourcefulness – and sheer luck – of people who did what they had to do to survive and flourish. It is this that connects their time to ours. I hope this book will inspire people to look forward and to ask what we can all do to help people fleeing persecution…'. Given that, according to the UN Refugee Agency, the number of people forced to flee conflict, violence, human rights violations and persecution has crossed the milestone of 100 million for the first time on record, such inspiration has never been more timely and apposite.

Get your copy

Reminiscences of a Refugee Childhood by Halla Beloff, as told to and with illustrations by Zoe Beloff, was published August 2021. In the USA, copies of the book can be bought from Booklyn.

Elsewhere in the world, copies can be bought by emailing Zoe Beloff at [email protected]

Learn more about the work and life of Halla Beloff by visiting the British Psychological Society History of Psychology Centre Archive for an interview with Halla (Beloff, 2008) conducted by Helen Ross in Edinburgh, where Halla still lives.

You can also read her British Psychological Society Presidential Address, 'a social psychologist in the camera culture', which is illustrated with copious photographs.

About the author

Dr David Fryer is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, and an activist scholar who retired from his position as Professor of Community Critical Psychology at Charles Sturt University, Australia in October 2011. [email protected]

Key sources

Beloff, H. (1984). A social psychologist in the camera culture. Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, 37, pp 287-296.

Beloff, H. (1985a). Camera Culture. Oxford, Basil Blackwell.

Beloff, H. (1985b). The Fairytale Album. New Society, vol 72, Issue 1168, May 16, pp.226-227.

Beloff, H. (1992). On being ordinary. Feminism and Psychology, Vol 2, Issue 3, pp. 424-426.

Beloff, H. (1998) Incivility and worse troubles: a footnote to the Billig comments on C.R. Brand. Feminism and Psychology, Vol 8, Issue 2, pp. 321-235.

Beloff, H. (2008). Halla Beloff interviewed by Helen Ross on 24th June. The British Psychological Society History of Psychology Centre Archive Catalogue AUD/002/OHP 32.

Hanf Noren, C. (1976). The Camera of my Family. NY: Alfred A. Knopf.

A memory of Halla Beloff sparked by the article

David Fryer prompts me to write regarding a memory I have of Halla Beloff which for me captures the spirit and the woman who is, in my mind, the essence of the social psychologist who understood not only the discipline itself but also the cultural, aesthetic and political context within which the discipline could be practiced. There will be many memories of Halla. This is but one that may be worth sharing, as it demonstrates her quest for knowledge and her ability to use various methods to understand people and their motivations.

I was for a time in the early 1970s a colleague of Halla in the Psychology Department of the University of Edinburgh. In her office she had a photograph placed behind her, to be viewed by a person sitting across her desk. This was a photograph of a distinguished woman. Halla told me, at one point in our time together, that visitors to her office invariably fell into two categories. The first comprised those who did not ask who was in the photograph. To my chagrin after being told her story, I fell into this category. I was too timid and insufficiently interested to ask. The other group comprised those who assumed that the photograph was that of her mother.

The photograph was, however, that of Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish/German activist and revolutionary who was assassinated at the age of 47, a hero of Halla's and a symbol of her own character and ambitions. The assumption was made that a person, especially a woman, would be unlikely to post a photograph of a woman who was anything other than one's mother. This provided for Halla a passageway into an understanding further the assumptions and the schema that that person held.

Halla opened my eyes to the vital need to appreciate the broader history and culture that was required of the social psychologist in trying to understand human behaviour. Her class would spend time in applauding the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Solzhenitsyn, rather than time on group behaviour, as that event was seen as more pertinent and relevant to what we should be trying to understand, rather than to fossick about in the published literature on small experiments performed in small universities outside our own culture. Fryer's account captures this intensity and quest that was Halla's. And her own contributions to the discipline, the book on Camera Culture and the analysis of the portraiture styles of European artists, are more long lasting than most of the artificial experiments published, even in her own time as the Editor of the British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology. It was a delight to read Fryer's account of the book and to recognize the contribution that Halla Beloff made to British psychology.

A final note. As a result of my encounter with Halla, after I left Edinburgh, I placed in a prominent place in my office a photograph of a famous person who I admired, that of H.G. Wells. Sure enough, most people never asked and those who commented assumed that the picture was that of my father.

J Michael Innes FBPsS
Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence
University of South Australia