Part 74
I’m not sure how many more stories about my life, largely but not entirely in South Africa, I can dredge up from the filing cabinet of my mind. So, I thought I’d go in a different direction this time.
I have probably mentioned my cousin Vera Atkins before, but the other day I was glancing in the window of the bookshop on the High Street in East Grinstead, when I saw two or three books that tell various aspects of the SOE (Special Operations Executive) during World War Two. Vera had risen to a prominent position in the SOE by the end of hostilities. I had previously found a book on Vera in a junkyard in Johannesburg of all places. I bought it and learned a whole lot more about her than I had during all the years I had known her. Sadly, I loaned the book to someone who never returned it and I can’t remember who it was.
I went into the bookshop and asked whether they had a biography of Vera. They did not have one in stock but offered to have it for me within two days. I was surprised to find that it was not the book I had found earlier; but, glancing through it, I was delighted to find more data on my great grandfather on my mother’s side, than in the previous book.
Let me digress for a moment. My family background is an incredible mixture of nationalities and religions.
Briefly, the Dresser name dates back to 1352 in the UK. We are descended from a Danish Sea Captain named Christopher Dresser. My paternal grandmother came from an illustrious Scottish heritage. I was told that my great grandfather was a papal ambassador representing the Vatican in the UK. I have no proof of this, but I was baptized in the Catholic Church. I later went to an Anglican school and was confirmed in the Protestant faith. I even had an American great grandmother.
Then to confuse my background even further, my mother’s father was of Ukrainian Jewish heritage and her mother a South African of Protestant Irish stock.
Add in my marriage to a South African of Greek Cypriot heritage in the Greek Orthodox Church and that makes my four children even more scrambled than I am. Although I have to say that they’ve all turned out very well. I’m very proud of them. Jason has added an Afrikaans wife to our collection and Gregori has increased the Irish percentage by marrying a Dublin girl. Tanya is with a South African partner of German ancestry. Xanthe is not yet married but her boyfriends have come in many shapes and sizes. We are a regular league of nations as a family.
Anyway, returning to Vera, she was incredibly secretive about her own life and her origins. To all intents and purposes, she came across as the epitome of an English lady. Thanks to Sarah Helms’ book ,I can now confirm that she was born in Crasna, Romania in 1908, the daughter of Max and Hilda Rosenberg. Max was a German Jew who spent some time in South Africa, where he met and eventually married Hilda Atkins, whose father Henry, a Ukrainian Jew, had changed his name from Etkind to Atkins and preferred to be thought of as an Englishman. Henry was a friend of Cecil John Rhodes and made his fortune by supplying mine props to the gold mines, importing goods from Europe and Australia as well as eventually owning the Lace Diamond mine outside of the Free State town of Kroonstad. Incidentally, he was also my great grandfather.
His son Arthur, whom I believe converted to Christianity at some stage, met and married Hilda Cross whose family had come from Ireland during the period of the 1820 settlers in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. Strange how both Hilda’s became Hilda Atkins! These were my grandparents. They had three children, Dennis, Patricia (my mother) and Diana. My mother, who was engaged to a Bowes-Lyon family member, a cousin of Queen Elizabeth, the wife of King George VI (later better known as the Queen Mum), was sent over to England to experience something of the world before getting married. Somehow, she met my dad Bob Dresser while he was working in the film industry as a sound engineer for Alfred Hitchcock (The original production of “39 Steps” with Robert Donat). They married two weeks later, and Bowes-Lyon bowed out. Just as well, he was later jailed for fraud.
So, Vera and I had Henry Atkins in common. I first met her during World War Two when I was a child. She was quite an intimidating lady, but she and I somehow hit it off. I met her many times over the years until her death at 91 in the year 2000.
Vera grew up in a wealthy, privileged family in Galati, Romania. In her early years she mixed with Romanian and other European aristocracy and royalty. The wealthy Jewish families did not initially suffer the same persecution as the poorer Jews in the shtetls and ghettos. Vera was taught to speak English from an early age as well as Romanian, German and French. Shortly before leaving Europe to settle in the UK while in her mid-twenties, just ahead of the major persecution of the Jews, she became friendly with some Englishmen in Bucharest, who were working in intelligence.
This resulted in her eventually finding a job in London with SOE for Maurice Buckmaster as an Intelligence officer in section F (the French section). She never worked in the field but coordinated the activities of over four hundred agents who were parachuted into France. She knew all the details of every mission and closely followed every move of these agents. She was particularly involved in the activities of the women whom she sent over. The most famous of these were Odette and Violet Szabo whose stories were both made into movies after the war. The English actress Virginia McKenna played the role of Violet who was sadly captured and shot by the Nazis. When I joined BBC TV in London in 1957, I was surprised to meet Odette who was also working for the BBC, or “The Beeb” as it was known.
Vera rose in the ranks and eventually took over when Maurice Buckmaster retired. So, in effect she was the head of the English-speaking section of Section F of the SOE, with General Charles de Gaulle as head of the French-speaking section. For her services, she was awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French, but it was only in 1997 that the British finally made her a CBE (Commander of the British Empire).
After the war, Vera became obsessed with tracing the fate of sixteen women that she had sent over to France and who had not returned. She single-handedly went to the remains of the concentration camps in Germany and Poland and even tracked down some of the Nazis who had captured and killed them. Vera also gave evidence at the Nuremberg Trials and was the official British Observer for the trials.
Because of Vera’s secretive nature she never really received the recognition that she deserved, although US President Bill Clinton did invite her to Washington to a dinner as the guest of honor in the 1990s.
Over the years, I visited Vera whenever I had time, both at her London flat and her house in Winchelsea where she lived out her later years. When I started to write, she was kind enough to refer me to a top literary agent in London. He had some positive words to say about my work but indicated that I needed to develop my writing more. He was quite right of course. Vera tried to help by getting me to read James Joyce and the Alexandrian Quartet of Lawrence Durrell. Unfortunately, it stopped me in my tracks. I figured that if writing involved the incredible style and vocabulary of Lawrence Durrell, then I was a non-starter. James Joyce was weird but interesting. I was less intimidated by him.
In any event, I got into television and spent some years concentrating on film and television as my preferred media before finally returning to writing in the 1990s. In recent years, I have turned more to writing novels and currently have a trilogy accepted by a publisher. The first novel “Pursuit of Treachery” is already on Amazon-Kindle with the hard copy due out in the next few weeks. The other two books will be published later in the year.
After the war, Vera started a business helping foreign students to study in Britain, but I’m pretty sure this was a cover for her continuing intelligence work. Six weeks before UK Prime Minister Harold McMillan made his now famous “Winds of Change” tour travelling down Africa, Vera just happened to travel exactly the same route ending up in South Africa. It seemed evident that Vera was checking out the security of the Prime Minister’s various destinations, but she would never admit to it.
Vera was one of the most interesting people I have ever met – as long as one didn’t ask her about her own background and activities. She was multi-lingual and could converse intelligently on almost any subject under the sun.
When ExoTech, through the MotherExoBrain, compiles truthful and accurate data on any conceivable subject, I would like to see Vera’s story available in our database. She was a fine example of a person with absolute integrity who never gossiped or spread any malicious rumors even about her sworn enemies. She has set an example to others that we at ExoBrain would do well to follow.
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.