A new exhibition in Kendal celebrates the contribution incomers have made to British art

As the 14-year-old Dorothea Israelit boarded the train in 1939 that would take her away from Nazism to the safety of England, her Lithuanian-Jewish father pressed his Leica camera into her hand. He little knew that in her adoptive country his teenage daughter would grow into the doyenne of British photography, Dorothy Bohm, whose pictures of children are currently the subject of the exhibition, “Little Happenings”, at the V&A Museum of Childhood (until 17 March).

But the story doesn’t end there. In Manchester in 1945 Dorothea met and later married Louis Bohm, a Jewish refugee from Poland; their daughter, Monica Bohm-Duchen, would become an art historian and the curator in 1986 of the trailblazing exhibition, “Art in Exile in Great Britain 1933-1945”, highlighting the contributions of refugees from Nazi Europe to British art.