Though hostility had been building since the foundation of Bismarck's Reich, and many Germans had returned to a country which now had its own employment and business opportunities to offer, this cultural partnership worked for half a century, during which many Germans resident in London, Manchester and elsewhere, married Britons. 

The First World War was a terrible shock to these residual cultural bonds. After 1914 the whole common cultural area had to be redivided and renamed. The Hanoverian royal family became the House of Windsor and Count Battenberg translated himself into Mountbatten. The Coburg Hotel became the Connaught and the Bechstein Hall the Wigmore. During the Great War Germans resident in Britain were interned and many were expelled. A British schoolteacher, forbidden to teach "German gymnastics", hid the parallel bars under the stage. 

Gymnastics was the German community's other great influence on Victorian culture, thanks to Ravenstein. Under his presidency of the German Gymnastic Society, a German gymnasium at King's Cross flourished from 1860 both as a sports club open to all comers and also, inevitably, as a German cultural centre — for sport and culture alike were a matter of self-improvement. All over the country sports and athletics clubs were formed on the model of the Pancras Road Turnverein, and the Olympian movement began with a three-man committee, one of whom was Ravenstein.

But it was the music that really mattered. To draw a third British prime minister into the story, Arthur Balfour is reported to have said in 1922: "If the music of Germany were destroyed, we could not go on." 

It's a simple story, really. Germans came to this country out of admiration for our wealth and prosperity, and gave us their music as a leaving present. Albert helped to attract them. And then the theatre of war took the place of the symphony and the opera and nearly destroyed us both.