HISTORY / OVERVIEW

THIS PAGE IS THE ANECDOTAL STUFF

Many people who worked at Berger use to think that the above image was a painting of the founder, Lewis Berger.  The portrait has appeared in many brochures, journals and a large reproduction was on the Ground floor of the No 2 Factory in Freshwater Road.

In the see FOTOPC Newsletter 2002 were given permission by the the  monthly magazine 'The Oldie' to reproduce one of the articles that Geoff Pink had published in that magazine. Geoff Pink was a personnel officer on the Homerton and Chadwell heath site and later moved on to work at Berkeley Square. The article was his reminiscences of one of the firms beanos to Southend-on Sea.

He mentioned in part of his correspondence was the Berger logo that we use [see above] was originally painted by an artist who went around many large companies in England offering to paint portraits of their founders. He never did any research into how the founders looked and just had a few stock ideas that he ‘tarted’ up for the relevant job.

From what I can gather the current MD at the time didn’t realise for some months that he had been conned and by the time the error was discovered 'Lewis Berger' had replaced the old Mercury logo and there was no going back. We are not certain how much the 20^th century artist was paid. From his style, his main work looks at though it was pub signs

Someone, whose name escapes me, enquired in the FOTOPC 2002 Newsletter that we might like to compare the portrait below of the original Lewis Berger against that of the portrait painted in the 1940’s painting and suggested that we had a competition asking how many Managing Directors have you known that you think might have been taken in by the 20^th Century painting ?

Additional anecdotes are most welcome.