Some local history

I must write this down before I forget it. Remember the old man I helped one day when he felt ill? His name is Robert and it’s quite a time since we had a talk of any length. Today we started to talk about the war. He was 14 when the Germans arrived and took over the village. He’d just finished school and had been awarded a new bicycle for being a good student. The Germans took all of the good bikes, so he dug a hole on the courtyard behind his house, wrapped up the bike and buried it so they couldn’t find it and take it. When the soldiers went to the beach for a swim (they used to skinny dip apparently), he and his friends used to go down and cut the tyres of the bikes so they would have to walk back to the village. I’m sure that they got up to other tricks too. To get to work at the boatyard Robert had to ride an old bike with hard tyres, sometimes he told me people used hose pipes wrapped around the wheels.

On the day that La Rochelle was liberated he heard the church bells ringing so he sneaked into the village church and rang the bell. The German HQ was only across the road so he disappeared pretty quickly after doing that.

Life was very hard for the villagers. The men were taken away to labour camps and the woman, children and elderly had to manage the best they could. There was hardly any food. As soon as he could, he joined the French Navy. He was in French waters for a year or so, which was a ‘comfortable’ job after the war and then they sent him to Indo China until he finished his five years duty. It was a much harder life and he was ill while he was there. On one of his train journeys from base to base he met the girl who was to become his wife, their first two years consisted of exchanging letters

Coming back to France in the early 50s wasn’t easy as there were no jobs, so he became a gendarme and worked his way up through the ranks to Major – he came back to the village to retire.

That’s what I remember from what he told me.

In which men step out of the postcard album and start doing things

Not literally but you’ll see what I mean in a second or two

Last week on French TV we were shown a documentary about the rounding up and detention at the Velodrome in Paris of the French Jews during the war. It was very moving, especially as there were survivors participating in the studio. The film about the ‘Vel' d'Hiv Roundup’ has just been released. A young Jewish boy Joseph Weismann, managed to escape. He went to see the making of the film at the Velodrome. He had to go outside at first because he could smell the stench of thousands of people in a confined place for 5 days – it was still on his mind nearly 70 years later! All of the young people that escaped were rebels; a psychologist explained that sometimes it’s good thing to be the one who misbehaves.

Anyway back to the postcard album. The documentary also told us about the people that helped; I know that a lot of people think that the French did nothing during the war, but I can assure you that there were quite a few people quietly making life very difficult for their occupiers. If you look around all over France you’ll see plaques on walls near to where men (and women) were shot during the war. I used to live a few yards away from one, just an ordinary place outside the shops – nothing spectacular. The French citizens who helped the Jews are mentioned on the Wall of Names at the Shoah memorial in Paris.

In my post 'A True Story' in January I mentioned the father of the little girl, Odette, helping Jews to escape from the town where he was mayor. Because of the program last week I wanted to see if I could find his name, Paul Legras de Grandcourt, on the wall. I couldn’t online so I’ll have to go there to look, but I did find this and it’s in English too.

The second man to come out and start doing ‘real' things is Odette’s Uncle Justinien, sorry; Count Justinien de Clary. He took part in the Olympics as a trap shooter back in 1900. He and one of his friends were partly responsible for strange idea of the 1924 Olympics for winter sports….

That was quite an album

All of this from one little postage stamp

This week I was in Seville( not really, but through my postcards). I wanted to date a card so I looked at the postage stamp, a boy king? Let me see…

Alfonso XIII of Spain was king from his birth until he was forced to leave Spain in 1931. The interesting bit was that, during the first world war, Spain was a neutral country because Alfonso had family on both sides. He caught flu in 1918 and became seriously ill. Spain was the only country that had news other than the war and that is why it became known as 'Spanish' flu.

Alfonso was married to Princess Victoria Eugenie of Battenburg, Named after her Grandmother, Queen Victoria and Godmother the Empress Eugénie. Her full name was Victoria Eugenie Julia Ena. The Ena part is interesting because her mother had chosen Eua (Gaelic form of Eve) which was misread and so she was Christened Ena as her last name. She was known as ‘Ena’ by the public after that. They were both destined to marry other people, but despite everything (haemophilia being one of the problems) they married in May 1906.

The stamp? Around 1901.

A true story

Perhaps I mentioned it here, perhaps on one of my other blogs. We bought some postcard albums in the autumn that came from a chateau. The albums belonged to a little girl and her mother. The little girl, Odette, used to stay with her Granny the countess when her parents were travelling. Because of the postcards we sold, the present owner of the countess’s chateau got in touch with us. Odette’s mother didn’t exist in any of the records he had!

This week I received a package in the post. With a little help from us and a lot from other places, he had pieced together the life of Odette’s mother. She wasn’t really the Countess’s daughter but the illegitimate child of a close relative (who died) and a nobleman (who acknowledged her as his daughter) Granny, the Countess brought her up as her own. There was a lot more in the document sent to me. Odette lived into her 80’s and died in 1983. Her only child, a daughter, died a year ago, unmarried and childless. This is how we came to buy the albums at auction. I’ve often pieced together the lives of the people whose postcards we’ve bought in the past, but never have I had anything confirmed like this. I think that you can imagine how pleased I am. Odette’s father, a Doctor, earned the legion d’honneur in the first world war and helped the Jews in the village where he was Mayor escape from the German army during WWII. I always knew he’d turn out to be a hero.

I’ve still got plenty of cards left in Odette’s album… and I’m still looking for more clues.


If you're interested, you can read here about the floods in Paris exactly 100 years ago.

Raymond Bergevin - Still looking

I was checking my visitor statistics the other morning as usual, when I saw that I’d had a visitor from France looking at my post on Raymond Bergevin. ‘Gosh’, I thought, ‘fame at last’. When I told Rob about it he laughed – it was him. At first he didn’t realise that it was my blog, he only knows about the other two. It didn’t even click when he saw that I was writing about someone called Rob. In fact he though that the post was very well written and was pleased when he finally realised it was me.

In search of Raymond Bergevin

Raymond Bergevin was the man who made postcards of La Rochelle and other local places of interest. He seems to have had his peak between the wars. For a few of years I’ve been meaning to check out the address where he operated from, a busy shopping street in town by the market. A couple of weeks ago Rob and I had a few jobs to do in town so we put “look up 66 Rue des Merciers” onto our list. Not an easy task as many of the buildings in the street are not clearly numbered. We started at the wrong end of the road so the excitement mounted as we neared our goal.

Number 66 is a narrow terraced building and today houses a cheap handbag shop (yes, in la Rochelle!). We stood across the road and scrutinised the building looking for clues. We were disappointed at first. Only the wooden beam over the door and window of the shop was of any interest. Looking up above the first floor windows I could just about make out some old faded lettering. So faint that if you didn’t know what it said you couldn’t guess: R Bergevin. It was like finding buried treasure.

If you want to see what we saw, start from the market, it’s a couple of buildings down on your left. Best viewed from across the road

1066 And All That

Every Tuesday afternoon I have an hour of conversation with my longest running student. She’s a retired history and geography teacher (history and geography are taught together in France). We always have plenty to talk about; the news, history, geography, Google, families, women, literature, religion… we discuss everything.

For several months now we have been reading '1066 And All That' when we’ve finished the round up of our weeks.. I’ve read it a couple of times in the past and now I have the insight of a history teacher and Latin scholar, who came first in her year at La Sorbonne (but there wasn’t another university in those days she modestly claims). She sees a lot of humour that I missed and sometimes I have to explain things to her. We’re on the War of the Roses* at the moment. Unfortunately I can never remmber which colour was which so I have homework to do before our next lesson….

If you’ve never read '1066 And All That' I strongly recommend it.

*The Wars of the Roses 1455 - 1487 : Lancaster; red. York; white

George Sand and the history of photography

I was preparing a semi-modern postcard the other day of La Vallée Noire, photographs of George Sand surrounded by some of the places she had written about. This got me wondering about the dates of the first photographs in existence. So with the help of Google and Wikipedia I did a little research and found this site, which shows several firsts in the history of photography. Images have been captured since as long ago as 965. The first photograph as we think of it required an 8 hour exposure back in 1826 (that would limit the admissions to flickr albums). Anyway back to George, her photograph was taken in 1864. Now I must start reading her books

Rob wondered about photographs of Charles Dickens a few days before. I found one taken in 1867/8