Living in Paris in the spring of 1925, my grandmother, Dorothy Hibbard, went to stay in the French countryside with her artist friend Jan Juta and his sister, Réné Hansard (born Henrietta Irene Louise Juta).
Rene invited me to go to stay at her little Provencale farm, Lou Miracle, at Mougins. Alan Bott was also there, an English writer who was helping Rene with some of her writing – at least that’s what I wrote to Papa. Alan had been in the R.A.F. and had been shot down in Palestine and made prisoner by the Turks; he wrote a book about it, Eastern Flights, which I still have, though only in a paper-back. At Rene’s I walked a lot while the others were working, and I did some work myself, though not much, I think. I also fell more or less in love with Alan.
By her account, she and Alan Bott saw a lot of each other, in Paris and in England, over the next year and a half, until they had a furious row when she wouldn’t wait for him while he was interviewing Rudyard Kipling, probably in September 1926. Less than a year later, she met and married my grandfather. Insert your own alternative history of my family here…
Alan Bott (1893-1952) is best remembered these days as the founder of Pan Books, the main paperback publishing rival to Penguin, and the first to publish James Bond, Modesty Blaise, and a bit later (long after he had died) The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He married Josephine Blumenfeld in 1930, and they had three children, the youngest of whom died in 2018.
However, he was also a British airman ace in the First World War, and shot down three German aircraft in France in September 1916 and then two more in the Sinai in April 1918, before being shot down and captured by Ottoman forces later that month. His book Eastern Nights – and Flights: A Record of Oriental Adventure is a record of his captivity and ultimate escape. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
“For a walk. I was upset by the air raid. My head has been very bad since the smash, and sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing. But I’m better now, and I give my word of honour that I will stay quietly in bed. Only say nothing to the Turks.”
It’s a thrilling tale, as Bott along with other Allied prisoners is transported from Palestine, to Damascus, to a dreadful prisoner-of-war camp in Afion-kara-Hissar in Anatolia, to Constantinople where, after some time faking mental illness, he escapes on a Ukrainian steamer to Odessa, and makes his way from there to Varna in Bulgaria, finally arriving at Thessalonica just as the Armistice is declared. The cultural history of the First World War, in the UK anyway, tends to concentrate on the Western Front, and it’s a useful reminder that there was a lot more going on elsewhere.
It’s also a healthy reminder that transport around that region, even in the late days of the war, was in some ways much easier in 1918 than it would be today. Bott’s observations on the cultural differences among the various cultures through which he travels are somewhat bigoted (there’s a horrible anti-Semitic passage about the Jews of Odessa) but still vivid and interesting. His favourite city is Damascus, which chimes with what I have heard from other Syria experts.
The whole book is online at Project Gutenberg, and you’ll read it very quickly, if you want. I do note that although my grandmother says that she had a copy, she doesn’t say whether or not she had actually read it.
