An investigation into our hidden histories. This week: Nick Clegg. Nick Barratt reports
Nick Clegg won a closely fought contest this week to be the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, beating Chris Huhne to be the party's third leader in two years. Clegg's career in politics is relatively short-lived: he was elected Euro-MP for East Midlands in 1999 and then became MP for Sheffield Hallam in 2005. Prior to front-line politics, he worked for the European Commission from 1994, latterly with former EU Commissioner Leon Brittan, and was previously a Financial Times reporter. His candidacy is not uncontroversial given his part in the downfall of both Campbell and his predecessor, Charles Kennedy.
Who is he related to?
Nicholas Peter William Clegg was born in Chalfont St Giles in 1967 and is only one-quarter English. His mother, Eulalie Hermance van den Wall Bake, is Dutch but was born in Indonesia in 1936. When the Japanese army invaded in 1942, she was sent to a concentration camp with her parents, Hemmy and Louise, and two sisters. They were separated and spent the next three years in terrible conditions. On liberation, the family returned to Holland, but in 1956 Hermance travelled to England, where she met and later married Nick's father, also called Nick.
Nick senior is half-English. His parents, who married in 1932, were Hugh Anthony Clegg, who at the time of his wedding was a sub-editor on British Medical Journal (a title he eventually edited for the best part of 35 years), and Kira Engelhardt. Rather disingenuously, the marriage certificate describes her father, Arthur von Engelhardt, as a "landowner". This may have been true, but Kira's lineage is far nobler than that - she was Baroness Kira von Engelhardt, whose mother, Alexandra Moullen, was the daughter of the former Attorney General of the Imperial Russian senate, Ignaty Zakrevsky.
Through this impressive lineage, there is a connection to Baroness Moura Budberg, Nick Clegg senior's great aunt. This Russian writer was strongly suspected of spying for both British Intelligence and the Soviet Union after the fall of Tsar Nicholas II. Apart from being described by the British Embassy in Moscow as "a very dangerous woman", she was also the mistress of HG Wells, Maxim Gorky and Robert Bruce Lockhart, a famous British spy working in Moscow. Perhaps this is where Nick Clegg junior's political ambitious came from.
The Clegg side of the family is positively respectable, by contrast. Hugh Anthony Clegg's father, John, was a clergyman from Yorkshire, who married Gertrude Wilson in 1892 and settled down to running a school in Lowestoft. His father, Simeon, worked as an engineer's chief clerk in Kingston upon Hull, though his origins were slightly more humble. Simeon was brought up in Adwalton, Yorkshire, where his father, John Clegg, spent most of his life making cabinets and other pieces that made use of his skills as a master joiner, although by the time he reached his mid-50s he was also running a grocer's shop with the help of his wife and daughter, Elizabeth. Simeon trained as a railway porter before moving into engineering.
One final touch of colour in an already lively family tree is that Gertrude Wilson's father, John, spent most of his life at sea as a master mariner and had children quite late in life. His wife, Jane, was at least 20 years his junior; Gertrude was born when he was already 54. The age gap between husband and wife could be even greater, as Jane's age in the 1891 census, 48, curiously remains the same in 1901.
