Abstract
The primary aim of this contribution is to seek the traces of those not foremost in the plethora of texts published during and after the Second World War concerning key figures and political and military events of the period. Its focus is a range of French women living in wartime London. It takes in, therefore, the experiences and writings of female citizens of London's well-established ‘French Colony’, alongside those of some of the women belonging to the Free French Corps des Volontaires Françaises who joined de Gaulle in the city in 1940 and shortly afterwards. By working and thinking beyond established historical subjects and sources the aim is also, following Margaret Atack's own commitments and approaches, to construct other archives and different historical knowledge structures.
Introduction: Other voices and experiences
This contribution is framed by Margaret Atack's critical approaches across her career from Literature and the French Resistance: Cultural Politics and Narrative Forms 1940–1989 to the work undertaken on the ‘new readings’ which underpinned the FRAME research project and the publications to which it gave rise, for example Framing Narratives of the Second World War and Occupation in France, 1939–2009. That extensive project investigated fictional narratives of French experiences of the war and identified large numbers of novels which had disappeared from literary historical knowledge. It also embodied a commitment, underpinning all of Margaret's work, to the analysis of the relationship of fiction and témoignage to history and of assumptions concerning the (re)evaluation of varied types of sources to be found in a wide range of textual and visual repositories and archives. This commitment demanded close attention to the experiences of individuals and groups at that time less studied by historians. It also entailed the questioning of hierarchies in the construction of the knowledge structures used to research, document and analyse historical sources, engaging more broadly with historical contexts and experiences.
The context here moves from Occupied France to the London French and to Free France in London during the Second World War. Following Margaret's thinking and concerns, the often less heard voices of French women in the city at war are placed to the fore. In the plethora of texts published during and after the war, prominence has largely been given by historians to key figures and political and military events of the period. This is also a historical moment well-documented in memoirs, autobiographies and biographies, again usually concerning male protagonists. 1 This contribution, however, considers the place of more fragmentary everyday experiences and writings dispersed in fictions, autobiographical and semi-autobiographical narratives, letters, memoirs and diaries housed in varied public and private archives. The primary aim is to seek the traces of those not usually foremost in the subjects of historical research and its focus is a range of French women living in wartime London. It takes in, therefore, experiences of female citizens of London's ‘French Colony’, established since the nineteenth century, alongside those of some of the women belonging to the Free French Corps des Volontaires Françaises who had joined de Gaulle in the city in 1940 and shortly afterwards. It considers both public and private spaces and experiences, the ways in which ‘ordinary people of a great city live during momentous days’ inhabiting real places and spaces alongside the iconic accounts and images of wartime London. By working and thinking beyond established historical subjects and sources the aim is also, following Margaret's own commitments and approaches, to construct different knowledge structures and other archives.
It should finally be noted that what follows is not new research, but was mainly carried out while co-ordinating, researching, writing for and co-editing A History of the French in London. Liberty, Equality, Opportunity (2013). The reflective work of this special issue, and of the event which gave rise to it, provided an opportunity to revisit and rethink what it means to pay attention to other voices during wartime and other ‘momentous days’ in the work of history. There is, then, a refinement of that original research. 2
Constructing a different archive
One of the most engaging sources uncovered when working on the Free French in wartime London was a trilogy of lightly fictionalised narratives by a Frenchwoman who had been living in London since the early 1920s. Madeleine Gall, who married English journalist Robert Henrey, sometimes published under the name of (Mrs) Robert Henrey for the novels on which they worked together. She is, then, doubly hidden as the French wife of a professional Englishman and in the literary and historical archive. The confirmation that she was so little known came a decade after the original research when the writer and producer of the podcast ‘Soho Bites’, consisting of a discussion about a film set in Soho plus an extra, shorter item which is thematically connected to the film, contacted me concerning just such an accompanying item on Madeleine Henrey, but: ‘finding a guest who knows anything about her is proving to be very difficult’. 3 Her trilogy of novels, A Village in Piccadilly (1942), The Incredible City (1944) and The Siege of London (1946), provides the background here and a particular moment in The Incredible City inspired the subtitle of this article: ‘Books that record great events do not explain how ordinary people of a great city live during momentous days’ (Henrey, 1944: 148). Alongside the novelist herself and her trilogy, ‘a different archive’ would also contain the testimonies of other Frenchwomen belonging to London's ‘French Colony’, a community which underwent significant changes due to the war, such as Madame Simone Prunier of Prunier's fashionable seafood restaurant in St James's Street. It would then include the written traces of a range of women in the Free French Corps des Volontaires Françaises. These included, for example, Tereska Torrès with her memoir Une Française Libre. Journal 1939–1945 (not published until 2000) and her more infamous best-selling pulp novel Women's Barracks (1950; republished 2005); Jeanne Hart (née Ducruet), married to an Englishman like Madeleine Henrey, living in south-east London before the war, who worked as a telephonist at de Gaulle's headquarters and whose ‘Free French diary’ for 1944 gives her work address and phone number as ‘Fighting French Headquarters, 4 Carlton Gardens, Whitehall 5444’; Yvonne Salmon, General Secretary of the Alliance Française who worked both for the Société des Français de Grande Bretagne (the civil wing of the Free French) and in Carlton Gardens and who wrote an early biography of de Gaulle; and Lesley Boyde (née Gerrard) from Douglas in the Isle of Man who was nonetheless able to join the French female volunteers. Alongside photographs and other documentation pertaining to members of the Corps des Volontaires Françaises, the traces of people less prominent in historical research emerge and come into focus. A different archive can be created.
Madeleine Henrey and her wartime trilogy: A Village in Piccadilly (1942); The Incredible City (1944) and The Siege of London (1946)
Madeleine Gall (1906–2004) was born into a poor family in Clichy, northern Paris. Her father had been a miner and a First World War soldier and she and her seamstress mother moved to London shortly after his death. They lived in Soho and the young Madeleine worked in a newsagents there, in a City silk merchant's office, and then as a manicurist at the Savoy Hotel. She married one of her clients, Robert Henrey, an Etonian who became a journalist, and the marriage considerably elevated her social status. Her account of 1930s London The Foolish Decade (1945) is populated by a wide variety of ‘London French’ members of the French Colony established since the nineteenth century which numbered an estimated 30,000 people in 1901, according to La Chronique de Londres, a French newspaper published for a quarter of a century from 1899 (a higher figure than that provided in the census, but a convincing one given other accounts of London's French Colony in the period. The material is semi-autobiographical, lived experience transposed into narrative and she wrote a number of other autobiographical novels in English, the most widely read of which is The Little Madeleine (1955) concerning her childhood. During the war, Madeleine, her husband and young son lived in a flat in Shepherd's Market in Mayfair and she proves to be a vivid witness to life in London from 1940 onwards. At the time she published under the name Mrs Robert Henrey, although the early novels sometimes appear without the Mrs. Her son, Bobby, who appears in the war novels, confirmed in interview in 2023 (see note 3) the close writing collaboration between husband and wife, with Madeleine being the one who engaged, talked to and observed a whole range of people in the London around her which she knew so well, bringing home material for them to work on together. Despite this, the main narrator in the trilogy is a male, English newspaper columnist and it is also clear that Robert Henrey's own experiences form part of the material. In the first volume, A Village in Piccadilly, an evocative scene of the Savoy Hotel in June 1940 brings together social and cultural, as well as political in this case, observation and commentary: The restaurant overlooking the Thames and the Embankment remained open, but its normal atmosphere had gone. The city folk, who normally patronized it at lunchtime, spending their money lavishly on brandy and cigars, seemed to have faded away. In place of them, one met groups of Poles, Dutchmen, Belgians, Norwegians, and a few American newspapermen who had just crossed over from France. General de Gaulle, almost unknown as yet, held court at a large round table. French diplomats from the embassy and members of the various naval, military and economic missions who nearly all intended to obey the instructions of the Pétain government, kept as far from the new leader as possible, and even glared at him with undiplomatic rudeness. They intended to insist on their safe conduct home as soon as possible (Henrey, 1942: 7–8).
A little further on, again providing detailed description and insight, refugees from France are evoked: Passing through the foyer at about five o’clock one evening I saw a dozen shabby figures walking in Indian file into the reading room […]. Suddenly I recognised familiar faces in this little crowd. Yes, indeed, they were France's most famous war and political correspondents, men and women whose names were known throughout the world […]. But what an unbelievable change had come over them! […] Now they covered the greatest story of all; but the story was too big and had burned them up. They had no longer any papers in which to write what they had seen; they had no longer any country to call their own […]. They were exhausted and penniless. Their minds were reeling from incomprehension (Henrey, 1942: 8–9). […] suffered immeasurable hardship. The men, who were mostly cooks, were called up in 1939, and only came back to this country in transit after Dunkirk. They were then sent back to France to continue a war which for them was soon to stop, but by then they were unable to return to their country of adoption, and their families in Soho starved for want of breadwinners (Henrey, 1942: 50). Arguing strategy and politics over a restaurant table had proved the salt of their émigré existence. They liked the atmosphere of Soho […] the French sailors leaning up against the lamp-posts ogling the girls, they found an echo of home at Berlemont's where aperitifs were served, continental fashion, and afterwards they would go to their favourite restaurants to be greeted amicably by the patronne (Henrey, The Siege of London, 1946: 132).
A number of French personalities populate Henrey's novels, either fleetingly in single encounters or as recurring characters who provide a running thread throughout the narrative as the war progresses. These include well-known officials such as Charles Billecocq, the French consul, soon to be recalled by Vichy, encountered in a small Georgian house almost facing the consulate in Bedford Square; rich refugees such as the Paris industrialist calling himself Mr ‘James’ with his story of how he managed to join the last French nationals being evacuated by a British ship (Henrey, 1942: 21–22); and other citizens, for example the ticket collector for the deck-chairs in Green Park who in conversation turned out to be René Dijon, one of the most famous pastry cooks in Europe having worked with Escoffier at the turn of the century, now giving recipe advice to an increasing circle of ‘ladies’ who gathered there (Henrey, 1944: 100–103; 133).
One particular Frenchman and his family provide such a thread, first introduced to readers as ‘Lavoisier’ in the second novel of the trilogy The Incredible City (1944) written before the Liberation of France. This is the name given in the novels to a man eventually revealed as Pierre Brossolette (1903–1944), a French journalist, politician and Resistance leader who ran an intelligence hub in Paris and then served as a liaison officer in London where he also worked at the BBC radio service. He carried out clandestine missions between London and France before being arrested in Brittany on his way back to London by the SS and committing suicide at their Paris headquarters to avoid revealing information under further torture. Brossolette had arrived in London in September 1942 where he met de Gaulle, going on to create the civilian arm of the French intelligence service, the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action. His arrival was announced officially in the press and on the radio, but his final journey to France in autumn 1943 was necessarily kept secret. His real identity was not revealed in the novels until the final volume published after the war. A short preface to this novel reads: ‘For the sake of continuity the name of Lavoisier has been retained in the text of the “Siege of London”; it is to the memory of this man who died so gloriously that these pages are dedicated’ (Henrey, 1946: n. p.). At the beginning of the volume, the identity of the red-haired Frenchwoman in her mid-thirties first introduced in The Incredible City on a ship leaving Gibraltar and bound for England is revealed. She is the wife of Brosselette/Lavoisier travelling with her son and daughter, her husband having taken another route to leave France. While Brossolette's story is well-known to historians of the Second World War and the Free French, the lens through which it is observed in Madeleine Henrey's work is again personal, seen more often through the experiences and relationships of his wife, children and friends, very different to the types of observations and commentaries to be found in the accounts and memoirs of the Free French in London (see note 1). In The Incredible City, the narrator is invited to a dinner party in Mme Lavoisier's apartment at Grosvenor House where he meets her husband pre-occupied with the ‘routine of life’ and the schooling of his children in England (Henrey, 1944: 31–36). At a later gathering in her home now near Sloane Square her husband is there once again, just back from having been in Paris for three months, this time with stories of police sweeps checking identity cards and rounding up forced labour (Henrey, 1944: 76–81) as the personal story gradually darkens.
The narrator also lunches with Yvonne Salmon, General Secretary of the Alliance Française de Londres and an early biographer of de Gaulle, at the Free French headquarters in Carlton Gardens: The Free French occupied a modern building in old-fashioned and spacious Carlton Gardens, and Londoners who passed along this normally quiet backwater had become accustomed to seeing staff cars with French soldiers or sailors at the wheel, and the sentry marching back and forth below the tricolour above the entrance. The mess was on the top of the building, and through the wide windows one had a sweeping view over London […] The officers were served by women volunteers with the Cross of Lorraine pinned to their breasts […] There were strange moving stories to be heard here – escapes from France in home-made aeroplanes, in fishing boats, even in barrels (Henrey, 1942: 82).
Madame Simone Prunier and Prunier's seafood restaurant at war
Another, very different and prominent, Frenchwoman also provides a personal account of her experiences in wartime London within her wider memoir of Prunier's restaurants (Prunier, 1957). Madame Simone Barnagaud-Prunier was the grand-daughter of the founder of Prunier's in Paris and it was on her initiative that London Prunier's was established in early 1935 in St James's Street. Madame Prunier, cut-off from her family including her husband, kept the restaurant open throughout the war, despite bombing (the worst being on 16 April 1941 when considerable damage was done to the premises), meal prices fixed by the government (the famous ‘5 shilling meal’), temporary wage cuts, rationing and refusing to be involved in the black market. As war approaches, the first and then regular visits of von Ribbentrop, a long-time client of Prunier's in Paris, are noted as are the details of the Paris and London high society seasons of 1939. Then on Sunday morning, 3rd September: I went straight to St James's Street; the staff had gathered there too, and together we filled sandbags and erected barricades against bomb blast round the front of the restaurant. Those of the men who were French went off to the consulate to report for mobilization. The mobilization hit us hard. Three-quarters of the cooks were French, and all were called to the colours; my restaurant manager, Guyot, and my chef, Cochois, were both in their forties and fathers of families, but they, too, were ordered to leave at three days’ notice […]. The previous day a new French chef, M. Cadier, had reported for duty; it was only later that I learned that he had missed the wedding of his son, who was one of those called up, so as not to let the Maison down M. Cadier brought some of his team with him: older cooks had come out of retirement […] (Prunier, 1957: 254–255).
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The refugees, of course, flocked to St James's Street. Pierre Cot, the former Radical Air Minister, appeared for lunch one day; then it was Geneviève Tabouis, the diplomatic correspondent who set up to know the secrets of all the chancelleries; when the final boats arrived from Bordeaux, some of their passengers came straight to my office (Prunier, 1957: 258). I voted for the sending of a letter to Mr. Churchill thanking him for his proposal of an Anglo-French Union and placing ourselves at his disposal. And naturally I joined the Société des Français de Grande Bretagne, as soon as it was formed in July to support de Gaulle. A few days before, a French friend had rung up to say that a hundred members of the French colony in London, all good Frenchmen, were being invited to meet the General at the Y.M.C.A building in Great Russell Street. ‘In principle, it's for men only, but you’re a man in skirts’, he said. There was a platform in the room where the hundred of us gathered; the General mounted it with a certain reluctance and made a stiff little speech. Then we filed up to shake hands with him, naming ourselves as we reached him (Prunier, 1957: 259). I do not think I should be boasting if I said that Prunier's in St. James Street had become one of the favourite restaurants of the various European Resistance movements. General de Gaulle had been there, of course, so had André Diethelm, the Strasbourg professor of law, and André Philippe, the Lyons socialist and Jacques Soustelle, the young anthropologist, who were all to serve as Ministers under him; Pierre Mendès-France had eaten there in the R.A.F. uniform he wore as a member of the Free French squadron, before he became a Minister (Prunier, 1957: 273–274).
The Free French women volunteers
Analyses of the beginnings and evolution of ‘Free France’ show that in 1940 close to 60% of the Free French joined in Britain; by 1943 that had dropped to 10%, with over 75% engaging in North Africa (statistics used in Albertelli, 2010: 12). The composition of the Free French is also interesting. They were in general not politically active, but from conservative right backgrounds, two-thirds did not have the right to vote before the war (soldiers, women, foreigners, minors) and were motivated by the rejection of collaboration and attachment to de Gaulle. The social, professional and educational composition is also striking: 83% were young and urban (under 30); and amongst them just over a third were younger than 21 (then the age of majority) with large numbers of school and university students. Another third were military personnel. There were comparatively few industrial and farm workers (even though they made up almost two-thirds of the French population). Over half of the Free French had the baccalauréat, and 20% came from the Grandes Ecoles (Albertelli, 2010: 16).
Where, then, are the women volunteers to be found amongst these more general statistics? There are a few relatively better-known names, for example, the international tennis player Simonne Mathieu who first joined the British Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) and then headed the Corps de Volontaires Françaises created in November 1940, supported by the archaeologist Marie Hackin (killed in 1941) and then Hélène Terré, a literary publisher before the war and then a Red Cross official, who had travelled between France and London. And since the research here was first published, new work continues to emerge, notably that of Sébastien Albertelli (2020), following on from his ‘Atlas’ of Free France, with a focus on the women volunteers who ‘followed de Gaulle’.
There are a range of sources, both textual and visual, in which the accounts and experiences of a range of female members of London's Free French are to be found. Tereska Torrès (née Szwarc), the daughter of Polish Jews who had converted to Catholicism, fled Paris with her family at the outbreak of war. Separated from her parents, she arrived in London where she enlisted with the Free French forces and served as a secretary in the offices of de Gaulle. During the war she lived in the French women's barracks that became the setting for her thinly disguised autobiographical novel Women's Barracks (Torrès, 1950; 2005) which is much better known than her diary (Torres, 2000). As in the case of Madeleine Henrey, a husband was involved in the writing of the novel, less benignly, but more lucratively. The rather torrid account of the experiences of a young woman in the Corps des Volontaires Françaises, ‘the frank autobiography of a French girl soldier’, was written in French and translated into English by her second husband, Meyer Levin, the American writer. It became a best-seller, condemned in 1952 for its: ‘artful appeals to sensuality, immorality, filth, perversion and degeneracy’ by the House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials (Torrès, 2005: backcover) while its: ‘sympathetic portrayal of lesbian relationships among women soldiers in the Free French forces during World War II sold millions of copies in the United States as a pulp paperback original’ (Torrès, 2005: xiv).
The more dutiful Mlle. Claire Toutain (British-born of French parents with dual British/French nationality) is no less engaging, however, on everyday observations, even of the most revered amongst the Free French. In one entry in her private papers bequeathed to the Imperial War Museum, London, she records her delight at de Gaulle visiting the women volunteers at Moncorvo House (where they were lodged at the time) when the General ate ‘corned beef and chips, chocolate blancmange and coffee’ and thanked them ‘for a nice lunch!!!!’ (Toutain, 1st November 1941: n. p.; her four exclamation marks). Claire Toutains's written account also reveals how ordinary citizens interacted with historical and symbolic moments, and how these evolved during the war, such as the 10th May parades for the French National Day for Joan of Arc. She writes: ‘Today the 10th, the Free French Troops parade in London. The flags and troops march through streets where smoke from bombed buildings still burning, makes a sad picture’ (Toutain, 10th May 1941: n. p.). She is present again on the afternoon of 15th November that year when: ‘everybody went to the Albert Hall where the General and Mr Diethelm made speeches. Some of the girls sold programmes’; and on 14th July 1942: ‘Our troops march through London streets to the statue of Maréchal Foch, where General de Gaulle laid a wreath. The crowds in the street gave us a wonderful reception […]. In the evening, the band of the Fighting French Forces played in Hyde Park. French flags and coloured illuminated lamps were hung around the stand where the band played to make it look like streets in France on the 14th July’ (Toutain, 14th July 1942: n. p.). However, by 14th July 1945: ‘As usual we have our march in honour of Bastille Day. But there were not so many people watching the parade, the reason we believe is the absence of General de Gaulle’ (Toutain, 14th July 1945: n. p.).
The final voice heard here is that of the vivacious Lesley Gerrard who had spent time in France before the war and spoke French. She worked in various posts in the women's section of the Free French Army, including in the pay office and in provisions, much preferring life in the French women volunteers to the training in the British ATS. In her letters, also in the Imperial War Museum archives, Lesley notes many of her rather good meals, served with wine, at Montcorvo House and later in Hackin House, both in Ennismore Gardens, Kensington (the original Free French women's barracks were in Hill Street, Mayfair, until it was bombed in April 1941, the same year as Madame Prunier's restaurant, not far away). She delights in her ‘French’ status as she writes to her family in the Isle of Man: One thing I noticed wherever we [including with male companions] went in the restaurants, with my being in French uniform, it was me the waiters consulted for the choice of dish, wines, etc. Everyone seems fond of, and strives to emulate the French somehow. Their opinions as regards food, etc., are much respected. I have gained a good deal of assurance through this, and I’m glad (Boyde, 21st May 1945: n. p).
Names emerge from the archive: other voices to be heard, other experiences to be told.
Conclusion: Voices from a different archive
The (his)stories of the ordinary Free French men and women in London – and other French people in Britain during the war – are on the whole eclipsed and fragmented.
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There is still relatively little known about how the Free French settled in the British capital, just as it remains difficult to find information about the many French citizens who were already settled there. Published sources are limited; public and personal archive sources are scattered, often uncatalogued; the voices of women are often even more hidden. Once brought into focus, the accounts of Madeleine Henrey, Simone Prunier, Tereska Torrès, Claire Toutain and Lesley Gerrard are vivid, insightful and compelling. They lay a basis for a different archive which could be complemented by photographs of the Free French women volunteers to be found in the archives of the Imperial War Museum, and in personal archives, providing visual documentation of their presence on the streets of London and of their daily lives.
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These diverse, everyday narratives of ‘momentous events’ are framed by women at once ‘ordinary’ and extraordinary; brought together they create a different archive. The traces they left behind may be as ephemeral as the ‘Chant des Femmes de la France Libre’ (perhaps echoing the more famous ‘Chant des Partisans’), referenced Montcorvo House, 1942 as recorded by Claire Toutain: Partout dans la belle Angleterre On les reçoit à bras ouverts, les Volontaires Bien que sans fusil sur l’épaule Nous pensons avoir servi d’notre mieux de Gaulle Que l’on soit conductrice, infirmière, Téléphoniste ou cuisinière, Qu’est-ce que ça peut faire ? Oui, nous les femmes de la France Libre Nous r’tournons à nos marmites En disant ‘WE HAVE DONE OUR BIT’
Yet further investigation shows that not all of those ‘drivers, nurses, telephonists and cooks’ retuned to a life of domesticity as the ‘Chant’ infers. The first chapter of the final novel of Madeleine Henrey's trilogy reveals how Mme Lavoisier, herself also highly educated, in pre-war days polished her husband's speeches and articles: ‘This dual thinking, this co-operation of two active minds, was to achieve great results’ (Henrey, 1946: 3). After her husband's death and the Liberation of France, Mme Lavoisier/Brossolette returns to France, determined to take her husband's place and make politics her own career. Towards the end of the novel the narrator tells the reader: More and more of her countrywomen were beginning to understand what was needed of them at this time when so many men of the old school of politics had shown themselves unworthy of office. All over France women were determined to take an active part in running their country (Henrey, 1946: 197).
