HO 144/162/A41791 and HO 334/12/4447
Elia Behar was born in Constantinople on April 27, 1861. He arrived in England in 1880, first settling in London and at the end of the year relocating to Leeds, where he resided until at least 1884. In March of that year, he returned to London. He and his wife, to whom he was married by 1881, had no children by the time of his last naturalization application in 1885. In 1891, he lived with his servants Ernest and Ellen Clark and their two children, Maude and Ernest. It is possible that Behar left his wife behind in the Ottoman Empire, since censuses from 1881 and 1891 do not list her.
During his residence in Leeds, Behar worked as a cloth merchant. At the time of his naturalization application, he worked as a general import and export merchant, operating out of 6 New Street in East Central London. He informed the Home Office that he wished to apply for citizenship because he intended to reside permanently in England, “having established a good business…which is successful and of a lucrative character.” Obtaining the rights and capacities of a natural born British subject would allow him to “improve his several business relations and connections and further to acquire properties and investments within the United Kingdom and fully secure the same both now and in the future, …both for himself and family.” All of his referees resided in Leeds. They included two paper manufacturers, two woolen manufacturers, and a manager of the York City and County Bank in Leeds. He was 24 years old when he applied for naturalization for the final time and was naturalized in 1886.
During their inspection of his naturalization application in 1885, Home Office officials noticed that the blank space on Behar’s Memorial where he was supposed to fill in his age was erased and not filled in again. This deletion may have reflected Behar’s uncertainty about his precise birthdate, a common characteristic of people born in the Middle East in that era.[1] On the other hand, Behar’s edit may represent his strategic tampering of legal documents. This suspicion was raised in 1905, during the period when Behar was operating as a general import and export merchant at 28, 29 & 30 Cutler Street in London. By this time, he had already been granted passports for “Turkey and other countries…from time to time” with no obstacles. In 1905, however, the British consul in Constantinople informed him that his passport was irregular and had to be returned to the Foreign Office. The following January, he visited Constantinople on business and submitted an application for a fresh passport, but the Foreign Office refused the application and referred him to the Ottoman consul.
Behar found himself in his natal city with his old passport confiscated and a new one refused. The refusal of the British consul to issue him a new passport, he complained, caused him great embarrassment, particularly with his bankers through whom he had applied for the document. In 1906, during the months of May and June, Behar again approached the Foreign Office and the Home Office, both directly and through his agents, to inquire why his application for a passport had been refused, noting that he had been a naturalized British subject for over 20 years. The Foreign Office told him in person that in the passport granted to him in 1899, the “statement as to his country of origin which was inserted…was found to have been erased.” Persistently, Behar instructed his solicitors to direct this same inquiry to the Home Office, perhaps, officials suspected, in order to get a response in writing, which would enable Behar’s agents to bring “some test action.”
Both the Home Office and the Foreign Office demurred in their answer, informing Behar that he had already been orally informed of the reason for the confiscation and rejection by both the British consul in Constantinople and the Home Office in London. Behar now feared the worst. Through his agents, he asked if the Foreign Office would no longer recognize him as a British subject. The Home Office replied cannily that while Behar’s subjecthood was regulated by the statute known as 33 Vic. cap. 14, passport matters are “entirely within the discretion of the Secretary of State.”[2] The Home Office was referring to the Naturalization Act of 1870, which made British citizenship more tenuous by allowing subjects to renounce their citizenship, repealing citizenship from British women who married foreign nationals, and readmitting to citizenship British subjects who had adopted another nationality abroad. Like many Christian Armenians, Behar might have calculated it would be safer while doing business in his native land to erase any documented ties with the Ottoman Empire and instead highlight through his adopted citizenship the protection of the British government. If so, his plan backfired.
He died at the age of 69 in 1931.
Subfiles 2, 4, 6, 7, and 9 were destroyed. This file was classified until 1987.
[1] Taqui Altounyan, In Aleppo Once (London: John Murray, 1969), 84.
[2] The abbreviation refers to the 33rd reign of Queen Victoria, chapter 14.