2/2The legacy De Gaulle left in London ? by Ann Mah Sept. 3 2018 ロンドンに遺るド・ゴールの遺跡?
In 1940, a small and motley group of volunteers worked at Carlton Gardens. Some were French soldiers who had been serving in Britain when France fell; others had heard de Gaulle’s radio appeal and braved incredible odds to join him. These men and women soon found themselves in the eye of the Blitz. “No one believed they would win the war in the beginning.” The near-daily air raid attacks ? which lasted eight months and killed 43,000 civilians ? drove people into shelters like the Down Street tube station at Down Street Mews. A brisk walk from Carlton Gardens, de Gaulle may have visited this disused Underground station, which was Churchill’s first bunker meeting room. Today, only a shiny, red-tiled fa軋de hints at its London Transport history.
But what of the general’s personal life? How, if at all, did he relax? I found my way to the French House in Soho, a former favorite pub of Free French Forces. One tall tale claims that de Gaulle wrote his famous June 18 appeal here and even though I knew that wasn’t true, the pub’s old-fashioned atmosphere ? with its wooden bar, paneled walls papered in black-and-white photos and low-wattage globe scones ? did make me feel like I had stepped into the 1940s. Still, as I sat at a sticky table sipping a kir amid a boisterous after-work crowd, I had a hard time picturing the general here. “He wasn’t really a pub man,” Mr. Rault had told me.
Presumably, he was more comfortable at Berry Bros. & Rudd, a London wine and spirits merchant, where he kept an account. Founded in 1898, the family business still occupies its original 17th-century storefront, a room with wide-planked floors and timber-framed walls that “looks very much like de Gaulle would have seen it,” said Maggie Huntingford, who was behind the front desk during my visit. Today this building is used as offices while, around the corner, a modern retail shop sells an impressive array of bottles. I looked for de Gaulle’s preferred tipple, Armagnac, and found a range spanning over a hundred years, beginning with 1897.
Back on Pall Mall, I strolled past some of de Gaulle’s frequent lunch spots: the Carlton Club, an exclusive establishment where Churchill was a member, the Ritz and the Cavalry and Guards Club. At the grand Connaught hotel he dined regularly on roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, which he referred to as “island specialties.”
De Gaulle’s wife and three children ? who had endured a harrowing escape across the English Channel in June 1940 ? spent long periods apart from him, tucked away in different corners of rural England. After the Blitz, they rejoined the general and moved to a house in the north London neighborhood of Hampstead.
Compared with Mayfair’s stately grandeur, Hampstead twinkles with village charm. Exiting the Underground station, I crossed a busy street and dove into a web of narrow lanes edges with trees, hedgerows and attached houses. The sound of rushing cars broke the birdsong, and I saw the general’s house standing before me: 99 Frognal Road, an elegant three-story brick villa adorned with tall French windows. A brick wall surrounded the garden where Yvonne de Gaulle kept chickens so that her youngest daughter, Anne, could have fresh eggs. Now called St. Dorothy’s Convent, the house is a residence for international women students.
A short stroll back through the leafy lanes brought me to St. Mary’s Hampstead, a slender white church established in 1816 by the Abbe Jean Jacques Morel, a priest who fled France after the 1789 revolution. A Roman Catholic, de Gaulle worshiped here regularly ? a sign near the door said “his tall and impressive figure was always to be seen in the front bench at the 11 o’clock Mass whenever he was home.”
By the time de Gaulle moved to Hampstead in September 1942, his relationship with the British government, and in particular, Winston Churchill, had grown dontentious. Though the two men shared a mutual respect, they clashed frequently. In May 1943, de Gaulle moved his headquarters to Algiers, ending his exile on British soil. In departure, he left a letter for Churchill, who was in Washington meeting President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in which he expressed no thanks for British help. (At the same time, Churchill was unsuccessfully lobbying the British cabinet to end their support of de Gaulle.) In the years since the liberation of Paris, the story of the Free Franch Forces in London has slipped away, and French gratitude to Britain has gone unmarked by an official monument.
Or has it?
On my last afternoon in London, I visited old Broadcasting House, the BBC’s original headquarters. Built in 1932, the building is an Art Deco icon, a round tower adorned with the works of the sculptor Eric Gill. But I was there for another reason: to see place where de Gaulle made his June 8 appeal.
Robert Seatter, the head of BBC history, led me to the Artists’ Lobby, once the green room for visiting performers. After showing me an enormous wartime microphone, we paused before a gold and black tapestry. Called “Le Poete,” the work was created by the French artist Jean Lurcat as homage to the Paul Eluard poem, “Liberte.”
“A lot of people don’t realize how important the BBC was to landlocked Europe,” Mr. Seatter said. At the beginning of the war, the BBC’s wartime foreign-language programming ? the only reliable news source for many in France and other countries of occupied Europe ? was broadcast in eight languages; by the end, it had grown to 48. “If you could only see us listening to your broadcasts,” wrote one French listener at the time. “We only live for that.” In 1949, “the French government gave the tapestry to the BBC as a thank-you for its service during the war,” Mr. Seatter said.
I gazed at the work, which depicts a male silhouette hidden behind a screen of leaves. It was a metaphor of liberty, a symbol of gratitude never forgotten.
