The Abrahams House in Ramsgate

[Chris Scott]

Kosminski's brother, Isaac Abrahams, and his wife ran boarding houses at two locations in Ramsgate. The second was at Albion Place, and the house still exists. In Abrahams's day it was known as the Victoria Boarding House and the first pic below shows it still bearing the name. The house today is a private dwelling. In the first modern pic it is the house second from right, the one which still has exposed brickwork. I have checked this by placing myself in the exact position from which the older pic was taken. The gap in the houses just up from the Abrahams house is due to bomb damage in World war II which resulted in several houses beng demolished, the site of which is now a small car park
Two further pics which I wook this afternoon give slightly different views
Chris Scott

[robhouse]

Great photos Chris. Thanks for posting them. You didnt manage to get inside, did you?

Rob House

[Chris Scott]

Hi Rob
I didnt manage to get inside as it is a private residence (and there was no one home!)
By a happy coincidence the house right next door is up for sale (for a mere £595,000!) and on the agents website you can take a virtual tour and see plenty of pics inside
The layout of the two is identical
It is at

http://www.thinkproperty.com/property/13915958

Hope this helps
Chris

[Chris]

Kosminski's brother, Isaac Abrahams, and his wife ran boarding houses at two locations in Ramsgate. The second was at Albion Place, and the house still exists.

Unfortunately I had come to the opposite conclusion - that sadly the house is one of those that's been demolished. At any rate that seems to be the case when the photographs below are compared. They come from this website - http://oldramsgate.blogspot.com/2006/07/east-cliff.html

[Chris Scott]

Hi Chris
Many thanks for your post which has made me doubt the conclusion i had come to
What I will do is go back tomorrow and try to recreate the angle of the older shot and then compare
I'll let you know the results
Regards
Chris

[Natalie Severn]

Thanks for these fascinating pics Chris!
Norma

[Chris Scott]

Hi folks
Below is an aerial shot (courtesy of Virtual Earth) of Albion Place to show the layout
Just off out to check that alignment!
Chris

[Chris Scott]

Hi Chris P
I owe you a great debt of thanks as you have saved me from making an error!
I went back to Albion Place this morning to sort out the alignment in the old photo (the first one in my first post on this thread)
In that photo there are two stone walls which line up on the Abrahams property. On my visit today, after digging about in the undergrowth (and getting some strange looks!) I found that these walls are still here and they point unerringly at the gap in the houses caused by the bomb damage.
So Chris is absolutely right and what was Victoria House, run by Abrahams and his wife, was sadly one of the ones that is no longer in existence.
The gent in the photo asked me why I was interested in that particular house and this ended up with a 25 minutes chat about Jack!!!
The pic below shows the walls as they are now
Regards
Chris

[Chris Scott]

While I was out today I also got some pics of York Terrace, where the first Abrahams lodging house was located. All the houses here are of later date (Edwardian to 1930s) so we cannot identify the exact location
Below are the sign and the terrace from both directions
Chris

[Chris Scott]

Off topic but while out I thought I'd snap a couple of places in the town that, to my vivid imagination, have quite a "Ripperish" feel!

[Chris]

Chris

Thanks for checking that out.

Below is a nice picture of Albion Place in the early 1800s, from this website:

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/tol/albion_place_east_cliff_ramsgate_in_the_early_1800_s.htm

[Chris Scott]

As I said when I posted the pics of York Terrace, the houses now there postdate the Abrahams's lodging house. The illustration below is taken from a view of Ramsgate Harbour in the 1880s and shows York Terrace as it then was. It is in one of these houses that Abrahams would have run his business, but it is not possible to say precisely which.

[Chris]

On jtrforums.com, "Nemo" has posted a link to an online version of G. Eugene Harfield's "A Commercial Directory of the Jews of the United Kingdom" (1894):

http://www.archive.org/details/commercialdirect00harfiala

I was surprised to see that the listing for Ramsgate included an entry for J. Abrahams in respect of a boarding house at 11 York Terrace. I'm not sure how to interpret this. I don't know of a member of the family with the initial "J". I suppose it may be a misprint for "I", or it may just be that the boarding house was previously run by an unrelated person named Abrahams. This is four years before the first appearance I had noted of Isaac at this address.

[robhouse]

Ha! Interesting... Well Chris, as we both know, nothing is ever simple with the Kozminski family!

Rob H

[Robert]

Numbers 10 and 11 are uninhabited in the 91 census.