Benjamin Disraeli

Benjamin Disraeli, one of the great Prime Ministers of the 19th century, is usually said to have been born in Theobalds Road, Bloomsbury. This is but a few metres from Islington’s border, but an alternative narrative tells us that, though he may have lived in Bloomsbury as a newborn, his actual birth was in a doctor’s surgery in Upper Street, Islington – where Budgens have their shop today. Neither contention can be proved or disproved, but there is much else to link him with Islington.

His grandfather, Benjamin d’Israel (1730-1816) had a house on what was then Lower Street, now Essex Road, for most of the 1760s. Its exact location has not been established, but records suggest it was between Islington Green and Cross Street; it perhaps no longer exists. Benjamin snr also had a property in Great St Helens in the City, which would be where he worked as well as lived. The Islington property may have been mainly a weekend retreat, but his son, the future writer and father of the Prime minister, Isaac D’Israeli, doubtless spent much of his childhood there before the family moved to Enfield.

By the turn of the 18th/19th centuries, a substantial network of Sephardi-Jewish cousins was living in Islington – the Basevis, d’Aguilars, Furtados, Lindos, Ricardos, Samudas and more – so when Isaac married Maria Basevi, he would be drawn into the Islington set. In particular, they would have been close to Maria’s brother George Joshua (father of the architect George Elias), who married Bathsheba Lindo and lived in Highbury Place; and to Maria’s sister Bathsheba, who married Edward Lindo, and brought up their family in what is now Alwyne Place in Canonbury.

The Basevi and Lindo children being the future Prime Minister’s first cousins, and about the same age, it is likely that the young Benjamin spent quite a lot of time with them in Islington. Some of them may have attended, as Disraeli is said to have done, Mrs Roper’s Academy in Colebrook Row for their early schooling. Some, later on, may have enjoyed a pint at the Canonbury Tavern, as Disraeli surely did, given the way he describes it in his novel Endymion. Very little of this can be proved, but he clearly had many Islington connections.