It began with a letter from Greville Janner, MP for Leicester West and the senior Jew in Parliament, several months before, asking if some of my students could take part as a choir. What more obscure event could be imagined - the dedication ceremony for a new road! And what an absurdity, what an anachronism - a teenage Jewish choir, all boys, singing Hebrew melodies by the side of the main road, in Burnham-upon-Sea, wherever that was! And who on Earth was Frank Foley, that the Jewish community should be invited to take part?
Still, we went, the boys en minibus, my wife and I rushing back from a Bar Mitzvah weekend in London with our daughters. Heat-wave. Dignitaries a-plenty. A Sea Cadet Guard of Honour. Our local Rabbi from Bristol leading the prayers alongside the Archdeacon of Wells and the Bishop of Clifton. Last Post and Reveille. Dipping of the British Legion flag. Marching bands. The full English, military, pomp and circumstance. But who was Frank Foley? Michael Smith, the man from the Daily Telegraph who had researched him, and just published a book about him, was there to tell us the whole tale.
He was, it transpired, the head of the British Passport office in Berlin during the 1930s; but that was just a cover for his real role - as Head of MI6. When Hitler began persecuting Jews, Foley turned them into British citizens and passported them to safety in Palestine or the British colonies. How many? No one knows, but a figure in the tens of thousands probably.
My wife had spent decades trying to figure out how, just three weeks before Kristallnacht, and after being turned down repeatedly for visas, her father (dead when she was nine, so she couldn't ask him) and her grandmother (died in Australia shortly after war's end, so she couldn't ask her), had mysteriously turned out to be distant relatives of the Australian Governor-General, Sir John Monash, which entitled them to a visa out of Germany, and another into Australia, and a British passport, and safety. As we stood at the roadside in Burnham-on-Sea, singing the Kaddish and the El Maleh Rachamim, while he got his statue in his home-town and his name on its new Parkway, Debbie finally got her answer.
And four years later, an email too, from one of her long-time friends who happened to be working at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw had also heard the tale of Frank Foley, and decided it was time to honour him, in more than just a statue and a Parkway. The email was in fact a copy of a press release, due to go out that day. It read:
Frank Foley (1884-1958) worked in Berlin from 1920 until 1939 as Passport Control Officer and as a member of the Secret Intelligence Service. However, it was Foley’s heroic efforts in saving thousands of Jews from Nazi persecution which led to the unveiling of a plaque in his honour at the British Embassy in Berlin on 24 November 2004, the 120th anniversary of his birth. Foley risked his own life to save Jews threatened with death in the Third Reich. He did not have diplomatic immunity and was liable to arrest but he still went into concentration camps to get Jews out, hid them in his home and helped them get forged passports.
The old Passport Control Office in Tiergarten Strasse no longer exists but Frank Foley is now honoured nearby. The Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, said: ‘Frank Foley risked his life to save the lives of thousands of German Jews. He was a true British hero. It is right that we should honour him at the British Embassy in Berlin, not far from where he once worked.’”
The illustration on the left completes the honouring: Prince William and Ian Austin MP in 2018, unveiling another statue of him, this time in Stourbridge. You can read a fuller account of Foley's life and heroism, where he most belongs, at the website of Yad VaShem, the home and especially the Garden of the Righteous Among the Gentiles, by clicking here.
Rose Marie de Freycinet (née Pinon) died of cholera, today in 1832, joining Jeanne Baret on Nov 15 as that rarity of the pre-modern world, a woman who not only circumnavigated the globe, but kept a full record of her and her husband's adventures.
Extraordinary couple they were too. He had already produced the first complete map of the coastline of New Holland (see below), when he travelled as cartographer on the Nicolas Baudin expedition of 1800 to 1803. But now he was himself a naval captain, commissioned to lead the Uranie expedition that would take three years to circumnavigate the globe (1817-1820), completing what is still regarded as one of the most significant scientific explorations of the Pacific ever carried out.
Extraordinary couple they were too. He had already produced the first complete map of the coastline of New Holland (see below), when he travelled as cartographer on the Nicolas Baudin expedition of 1800 to 1803. But now he was himself a naval captain, commissioned to lead the Uranie expedition that would take three years to circumnavigate the globe (1817-1820), completing what is still regarded as one of the most significant scientific explorations of the Pacific ever carried out.
Three years earlier Louis had met Rose, just nineteen when they married, fifteen years his junior, highly educated, fascinated less by his fame than by what he had done to achieve it, and not exactly keen to stay at home while he went off for another three years on the high sea.
So she stowed away. Her hair cut to military length, and dressed in men’s clothing, she simply wandered on board on the day before departure, with what she told the sailors was cargo for the captain's special cabin - they had been wondering why he had ordered a special cabin to be constructed adjacent to his own, but it would be a while before the hundred and twenty sailors even began to suspect that the young man drawing maps and logging the journey, or playing the guitar, but almost never stepping out of that double-cabin where he could be seen, was not quite what they thought he was. In fact the captain told his officers as soon as they were out of territorial waters, and the two artists on-board as well, Jacques Arago and Alphonse Pellion, who managed to produce two versions of any number of their drawn records of the expedition, one version with Rose in it, one without her.
The first two and a half years of the journey went extremely well. Rose's diary, written in the form of letters to her friend back home Caroline de Nanteuil, tell of confrontations with would-be pirates, of native tribesmen challenging them with spears on the shores of New Holland, of grand balls in the residences of governors, and mostly of life on board ship - at least two of the crew who wrote their versions later called her "an apple of discord", but probably they were just envious that the captain had a bed-companion, and they didn't - and most especially of the science being carried out.
But then, early in 1820, after rounding Cape Horn, the Uranie encountered a typical south Atlantic storm and suffered extensive damage. Louis headed for the Falkland Islands to undertake repairs and get their food-stores restocked, but they hit a subterranean rock not marked on their charts as they entered French Bay, and that was it for the Uranie. Everything salvageable was salvaged, people, paintings, writings, even guns and several barrels of brandy. Sails were converted into makeshift tents, food found to keep the crew alive, and two months later an American whaling boat came to their rescue, enabling them to complete the return to France in November 1820.
So she stowed away. Her hair cut to military length, and dressed in men’s clothing, she simply wandered on board on the day before departure, with what she told the sailors was cargo for the captain's special cabin - they had been wondering why he had ordered a special cabin to be constructed adjacent to his own, but it would be a while before the hundred and twenty sailors even began to suspect that the young man drawing maps and logging the journey, or playing the guitar, but almost never stepping out of that double-cabin where he could be seen, was not quite what they thought he was. In fact the captain told his officers as soon as they were out of territorial waters, and the two artists on-board as well, Jacques Arago and Alphonse Pellion, who managed to produce two versions of any number of their drawn records of the expedition, one version with Rose in it, one without her.
The first two and a half years of the journey went extremely well. Rose's diary, written in the form of letters to her friend back home Caroline de Nanteuil, tell of confrontations with would-be pirates, of native tribesmen challenging them with spears on the shores of New Holland, of grand balls in the residences of governors, and mostly of life on board ship - at least two of the crew who wrote their versions later called her "an apple of discord", but probably they were just envious that the captain had a bed-companion, and they didn't - and most especially of the science being carried out.
But then, early in 1820, after rounding Cape Horn, the Uranie encountered a typical south Atlantic storm and suffered extensive damage. Louis headed for the Falkland Islands to undertake repairs and get their food-stores restocked, but they hit a subterranean rock not marked on their charts as they entered French Bay, and that was it for the Uranie. Everything salvageable was salvaged, people, paintings, writings, even guns and several barrels of brandy. Sails were converted into makeshift tents, food found to keep the crew alive, and two months later an American whaling boat came to their rescue, enabling them to complete the return to France in November 1820.
Rose's notebooks also survived, though it
was not until 1927 that an account of her journey was published in France - heavily redacted it must be said - with the first English translation in 1962. You can read a full account of the journey, published by the Department of Maritime Archaeology at the Museum of Western Autralia, here.
Louis had been ill off-and-on throughout the voyage, treated with opiates to keep him going. But the two months in Las Malvinas added cholera and anxiety in about equal measures, and being court-martialled for losing his ship when he got back to France didn't exactly help his state-of-health. He was found to have done nothing wrong, and sent home, but by then Rose had contracted the cholera. She died, today in 1832; he lasted another ten years before the same disease killed him too.
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| The Freycinet Map of 1811 |
Amber pages
The English siege of Orléans was broken today in 1429, by a French army led by Jehanne Darc (see May 30)
The English siege of Orléans was broken today in 1429, by a French army led by Jehanne Darc (see May 30)
Robert Browning, English poet, born today in 1812.
and a triplet which my love of coincidence particularly enjoys:
a) Ludwig Van Beethoven made his last appearance on the concert stage, today in 1824
b) Beethoven's self-proclaimed heir and successor, Johannes Brahms, was born today in 1833
c) Brahms' greatest rival for that distinction, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, was born today in 1840.
Next, a story for the sentimentally-hearted and the sports-fanatical, Francis DeSales Ouimet, golf enthusiast, born today in 1893 (that's him above-right, and the story of the ten-year-old caddie is even better - Eddie Lowery the very grown-up young man's name). Read it here
And today in 1915, the RMS Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat off the Irish coast, 1,198 died, none of them famous, and so it never got the media coverage of the Titanic.
and a triplet which my love of coincidence particularly enjoys:
a) Ludwig Van Beethoven made his last appearance on the concert stage, today in 1824
b) Beethoven's self-proclaimed heir and successor, Johannes Brahms, was born today in 1833
c) Brahms' greatest rival for that distinction, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, was born today in 1840.
Next, a story for the sentimentally-hearted and the sports-fanatical, Francis DeSales Ouimet, golf enthusiast, born today in 1893 (that's him above-right, and the story of the ten-year-old caddie is even better - Eddie Lowery the very grown-up young man's name). Read it here
And today in 1915, the RMS Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat off the Irish coast, 1,198 died, none of them famous, and so it never got the media coverage of the Titanic.
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