by Gill Paul
BATTLEFIELD TOURISM
In the week of the 1918 Armistice, Thomas Cook & Son ran an ad in the newspapers promoting trips to the battlefields for those who had lost loved ones and wanted to see their graves. However, those who did rush out on tours were distressed to find the poor state of the graveyards, with little documentation to help them track down individual graves. By 1919, Thomas Cook offered two tours: a luxury option for £36.75, and a more basic option for about £10—this in an era when the average wage was £3 a week. The YMCA opened a 40-bed hostel in Ypres in August 1919, and the extended Dumortier family got involved in transporting tourists to the battlefields by taxi before going on to start their own local bus service. The industry grew over the decades and museums sprang up catering for those interested in the region’s history as well as those making a pilgrimage to the grave of a loved one or searching among the 54,896 names inscribed on the Menin Gate of casualties whose bodies have never been found.
A branch of the Dumortier family in Poperinghe opened a bus company after the war. Battlefield tourism made an important contribution to the post-war economy of the region.
Surviving Another War
In 1939, after war was declared yet again, most British citizens of Ypres remained where they were as no one could contemplate a repeat of the 1914–18 war when the town had been under siege. Less than a year later, however, in May 1940, Jack, Adrienne, and their children were forced to leave when the German Blitzkrieg quickly overran the Low Countries. They made a rapid cross-country escape along with 300 other British residents of Ypres, sleeping in barns by night while German bombs rained all around them, before finally getting on board a cargo ship, The City of Christchurch, at Calais on May 24, which took them to Southampton.
Adrienne holding her twin boys, Jimmy and John; John would die before his first birthday.
Jimmy and Jack Fox around 1950. Jimmy is wearing the Ypres British Memorial School cap.
The Fox family settled in Burnt Oak, North London, where Jack took a job delivering machine tools to factories on his motorbike, and also worked as a nightwatchman for a factory making aircraft parts. There was no question that they would stay in England after the war ended, though, because Adrienne missed her parents, brothers, and sisters, who were all still in Belgium. The family returned early in 1946, and Jack went back to his work in the war cemeteries.
In 1952, Adrienne died from complications resulting from diabetes and, as they followed her black horse-drawn hearse down the street, her daughter Betty remarked to her surviving son Jimmy, “It’s all over, thank God.” For decades their parents had endured a marriage they were forced into and their children had been witnesses to the tension this had caused. After Adrienne’s death, Jack brought Jimmy and Betty back to Burnt Oak, where he lived for the remainder of his life, working contentedly as a gardener at a hospital and nurses’ training school.
Jack was a good man and would never have left his wife. All the evidence is that their love for each other grew through the years of marriage and raising children, but Adrienne must always have resented the fact that he had loved her sister Rachel first and foremost. Their marriage, lived out among the graves of the war dead, was haunted by her memory.
A
Albright, Fred & Evelyn 1
Angel of Mons 1
Arp, Jean 1
artillery 1
B
Balfour, Arthur 1
battlefield tourism 1
Benison, Joseph 1
Bishop, Billy 1
Boitelle, Susanne 1, 2
Boucher, Charlie & Valentine 1
Brittain, Edward 1, 2, 3
Brittain, Vera 1
Brooke, Rupert 1
Brusilov, General Alexei 1
C
Caracciolo, Domenico 1
Carnegie, Andrew 1
Casement, Roger 1, 2
cemeteries 1
Cheesman, Rev. Alfred 1
Christie, Agatha 1
Christmas truce 1
Clemenceau, Georges 1
Connolly, James 1
conscientious objectors 1
conscription 1
Cook, Thomas 1
Cooper, George 1, 2
Cornaille, Hubert 1
D
Dadaist movement 1, 2
De Valera, Éamon 1
deserters 1
Dessenne, Claire 1
Dessenne, Florency 1, 2
Dessenne, Hélène see Digby, Hélène
Dessenne, Marie Coulette 1, 2, 3
Dessenne, Marie-Thérèse 1, 2
Digby, Ellen 1
Digby, Hélène (formerly Dessenne) 1, 2, 3
Digby, Robert 1
Digby, Thomas 1, 2
Donohoe, Thomas 1
Dooley, Private William 1
Drummond, Annie 1
Dumortier, Rachel 1
E
Earhart, Amelia 1
Easter Uprising (1916) 1
Elizabeth II, Queen 1
Elliott, Jack 1
Éluard, Paul 1
Ernst, Max 1
Ernst, Ulrich (“Jimmy”) 1, 2, 3
espionage 1
F
flying aces 1
Fonck, René 1
food shortages, Germany 1
Fowler, Captain Robert Henry 1
Fox, Jack & Adrienne 1
Franz Ferdinand, Archduke 1
G
Gallipoli 1, 2, 3, 4
Gardiner, Howard Preston 1
gas attacks 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
gas gangrene 1, 2
George V, King 1
Giorno, Jean 1
Givenwilson, Irene 1, 2, 3
Göring, Hermann 1
Grove, Jennie 1, 2
Gurney, Ivor 1
H
Haig, General 1
Heapes, Joseph & Mary 1
Heapes, Theresa 1, 2, 3
Hemingway, Ernest 1
Hitler, Adolf 1, 2
homing pigeons 1
howitzers 1, 2
J
Joffre, General Joseph 1
Joubaire, Albert 1
K
Keller, Otto 1
Kettle, Tom 1
Kitchener, Lord Herbert 1
Kurowsky, Agnes von 1
L
Leighton, Roland 1
Lelong, Léon 1
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 1
Lettow-Vorbeck, Colonel Paul von 1
Lloyd George, David 1
Lusitania 1, 2
M
Machen, Arthur 1
McAleese, Mary 1
McKay, Sgt. James 1
mail services 1
Mann, Duncan (“Mickey”) 1, 2, 3
Mann, Hugh & Jessie 1
Mannock, Edward 1
Marié, Emile 1, 2
Marié, Victor 1, 2, 3
Martin, David 1
medicine
advances in 1
diseases in trenches 1
facilities in France 1
see also specific conditions
Miller, George Maccullouch (“Cully”) 1
Moltke, General Helmuth von 1
Mons, Angel of 1
Morgan, Father Francis 1, 2, 3
N
Nicholas II, Tsar 1
O
Owen, Wilfred 1
P
Pattenden, Frank 1
Pearse, Patrick 1
Pégoud, Adolphe 1
Picasso, Pablo 1
plastic surgery 1
poetry 1
Poëtte, Achille 1
Princip, Gavrilo 1
public opinion, America 1
R
Rawlinson, General Sir Henry 1
Read, Herbert 1
Redmond, John 1
Richardson, Hadley 1
Richthofen, Manfred von 1
Rickenbacker, Eddie 1, 2
Robinson, William Leefe 1
rolling canteens 1
Roosevelt, Archie 1, 2, 3,
4
Roosevelt, Ethel 1, 2
Roosevelt, Kermit 1, 2, 3
Roosevelt, Quentin 1
Roosevelt, Ted 1, 2, 3
Roosevelt, Theodore 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
S
Sassoon, Siegfried 1
Schlieffen Plan 1
Schreiner, Olive 1
Scott, Marion 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Serena, Captain Enrico 1, 2
shell concussion 1
slang 1
Smythe, Bert 1, 2
Smythe, Percy & Dorothy 1
Spanish influenza 1
Staley, Lloyd & Mary 1
Stanfield, William 1
Stanford, Sir Charles Villiers 1
Stark, Freya 1
Straus-Ernst, Luise 1
Sweeney, Mary 1
T
tanks 1, 2
Tanning, Dorothea 1
Thorpe, William 1
Tolkien, J. R. R. & Edith 1
tourism 1
Tower, Roderick 1
trench fever 1, 2
trench foot 1
trenches 1, 2, 3
see also tunnels
Trotsky, Leon 1
tunnels 1
U
U-boats 1, 2
V
VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment) 1
Vanderbilt, Alfred Gwynne 1
Verdun 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Versailles, Treaty of 1
Villard, Henry 1
Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) 1
W
war cemeteries 1
war poets 1
Whitney, Flora Payne 1
Whitney, Gertrude Vanderbilt 1
Whitney, Harry Payne 1
Wilhelm II, Kaiser 1, 2, 3, 4
Wilson, Woodrow 1, 2
Y
Ypres 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Z
Zeppelins 1
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The account of Evelyn and Frederick Albright and extracts of their correspondence are from An Echo in my Heart: The Letters of Elnora Evelyn (Kelly) Albright and Frederick Stanley Albright, compiled and edited by Lorna Brooke. Many thanks to Lorna for permission to quote from them. You can read them at www.echoinmyheart.ca. Letters and material pertaining to the Albright collection are housed in The Archives and Research Collections Centre in the D.B. Weldon Library at Western University, London, Ontario, Canada.
Warm thanks to Charles Merrill, grandson of Charlie and Valentine Boucher, for allowing me to quote from his grandfather’s war memoirs and for answering my other questions about them as well as sending photographs. His website is www.luckycharlie.com
I heard Jack and Adrienne Fox’s story directly from their son Jimmy Fox and I am extremely grateful to him for all the time spent on the telephone with me and for the long emails full of information as well as dozens of photographs. I recommend his book The Children Who Fought Hitler (London: John Murray, 2010) for the compelling story of the British community in Ypres. Thanks also to Dominiek Dendhooven of the Flanders Field Museum in Ypres for putting us in touch and making many other helpful suggestions.
For information on Ivor Gurney’s romance with Annie Drummond, one of the best sources is Pamela Blevins’s excellent book Ivor Gurney and Marion Scott: Song of Pain and Beauty (Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2008).
The letters of Hugh Wallace and Jessie Mann are reproduced in Under the Shadow: Letters of Love and War 1911–1917, compiled and edited by Brid Hetherington (Dunfermline: Cuallan Press, 1999). I’m very grateful to her for permission to quote from them, for sending photographs, and for all her help. Letters and photographs of the Manns are housed in Glasgow University Archive, Glasgow, UK.
Grateful thanks to Máire Uí Éafa, daughter-in-law of Joseph and Mary Heapes, for answering my questions and digging out old family photographs. Thanks also to Eleanor Kenny at the British Library for putting us in touch.
Rebecca Cazares and Jeff Staley kindly gave me permission to quote from the letters of their grandfather Lloyd Maywood Staley to Mary Beatrice Gray. Their very interesting website is at www.u.arizona.edu/~rstaley/wwlettr1.htm
The story of Max Ernst’s relationship with Luise Straus is beautifully told in their son Jimmy Ernst’s book A Not-So-Still Life (New York: Pushcart Press, 1984). I’m grateful to Dr Jürgen Pech of the Max Ernst Museum in Brühl, Germany, for information on Max Ernst’s war career, and to Isabel Varea for help with German to English translation.
Jacqui Smythe kindly agreed to let me quote from Percy Smythe’s letters and diaries, which are reproduced on her very informative website about the whole Smythe family at www.smythe.id.au. It is well worth visiting as it also contains the love stories of Percy’s brothers Vern and Viv.
For more information on Agnes von Kurowsky’s relationship with Ernest Hemingway, I highly recommend Henry S. Villard and James Nagel’s Hemingway in Love and War (New York: Hyperion, 1989), which reproduces her diary and some of their letters to each other. They are now held in the archive Agnes von Kurowsky Personal Papers/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.
For more on Robert Digby and Claire Dessenne, and for a cracking good mystery story as well as a description of life in wartime France, see Ben Macintyre’s A Foreign Field (London: HarperPress, 2010).
Edward J. Renehan Jr.’s book The Lion’s Pride: Theodore Roosevelt and his Family in Peace and War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) was a useful source for the story of Quentin Roosevelt and Flora Payne Whitney.
Humphrey Carpenter’s J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000) provides a balanced, very readable look at the life of the Tolkiens.
D. Bruce Cherry gave me lots of leads when I was starting out on this book and Colin Salter helped me to track down some of the couples. Thanks, guys!
Huge thanks as always to the wonderful team at Ivy Press: Sophie Collins, Jayne Ansell, Katie Greenwood, Wayne Blades, and Andrew Milne.
And thanks to Karel for being Karel.
PICTURE CREDITS
Thank you to all of the individuals and collections who supplied images:
Albright and Kelly Family Fonds, Western Archives, Western University: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13.
The Art Archive: 1, 2; Archives Charmet: 1; Imperial War Museum: 1; Private Collection Newbury: 1; Amoret Tanner Collection: 1.
Birmingham Archives: 1, 2.
From the private collection of Pieter Collier, www.tolkienlibrary.com: 1, 2.
Corbis/American Red Cross/National Geographic Society: 1; Bettmann: 1.
John Fawkes, www.britishbattles.com: 1.
Fotolia: 1.
Courtesy of Jimmy Fox:1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.
Getty Images/Hulton Archive: 1, 2; Imperial War Museum: 1; Popperfoto: 1; Science & Society Picture Library: 1; Time & Life Pictures: 1, 2; Topical Press Agency: 1; Universal Images Group: 1.
Ivor Gurney Collection, Gloucestershire Archives © The Ivor Gurney Estate: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.
Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
Courtesy of Brid Hetherington: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.
Library and Archives Canada: 1, 2.
Library of Congress, Washington D.C: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38.
Mary Evans Picture Library/David Cohen Fine Art: 1; Epic: 1; Epic/Tallandier: 1, 2; The Everett Collection: 1; John Frost Newspapers: 1; Grenville Collins Postcard Collection: 1; Peter Higginbotham Collection: 1; Robert Hunt Collection/Imperial War Museum: 1; Robert Hunt Library: 1, 2, 3, 4; Interfoto: 1; Pump Park Photography: 1; Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo: 1; ©Thomas Cook Archive: 1; westernfrontphotography.com: 1.
Peggy Ann McKay Carter: 1.
Courtesy of Charles Merrill, www.luckycharlie.com: 1, 2, 3, 4.
National Media Museum/Frank Hurley/Australian War Records Section: 1.
Oakville Images
: 1.
Courtesy of Jürgen Pech/Max Ernst Museum Brühl des LVR/Foundation Max Ernst: 1, 2.
Maud Powell Society for Music and Education: Pamela Blevins: 1.
Rama: 1.
William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections, McMaster University Library, Hamilton, Canada: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library, Dickinson State University: 1, 2, 3, 4.
Shutterstock: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.
© Smythe Family, www.smythe.id.au. Courtesy of Jacqui Kennedy: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
Courtesy of Jeff Staley: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
Topfoto: 1, 2; Pamela Chandler/ArenaPAL: 1, 2; Charles Walker: 1.
Courtesy of Máire Uí Éafa: 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and acknowledge the pictures in this publication. We apologize if there are any unintentional omissions, and welcome information so that future editions can be updated.
For my wonderful mum and dad
First published in the UK in 2014 by
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