Joseph Gluckstein Links was born in 1904 and was a longstanding client of the accountancy firm Morgan Back and Co and its successors.
Joe Links
His father, a Jewish emigre from Hungary had founded Calman Links an eponymous fur trading business. Calman, already a widower in 1917, himself died in 1925 when Joe was only 21. Calman had possibly been an original client of John R Woodley Morgan and Co immediately after World War 1. If so, he would fit a pattern of Jewish east end businesses that formed the backbone of the accountancy practice in the 1920’s
The letter of William Back to William Morgan in 1947 shows that Joe Links was keen to snap up accountancy staff to help in his fur business.
Joe married Mary Lutyens daughter of the architect Edwin Lutyens in 1945. She too remained a client of Donald Morgan to handle her own widespread literary earnings around the world.
Example of Correspondence between JG Links and DC Morgan
Increasingly Joe Links, the furrier, expanded his extensive interests and wrote books on the fur trade, Venice and even murder mysteries. Ultimately though his passion and expertise was for the artist Canaletto and by the 1980’s he was recognised as one of the leading world experts on the painter.
A small collection of personal notes and bugbears with the tax man have been kept in our archive. These include a number of hand written humorous notes (and one poem!) from him and Mary.
Joe Links died a few weeks before Donald Morgan in Oct 1997. A handwritten note dated 4 Sep 1997 hoping to meet up when both were out of hospital and fully recovered is rather poignant.
There exist a number of long obituaries in the major national newspapers that bear witness to the breadth of his polymath career.