Norman Bentwich A lifelong Zionist, and an early admirer of Vicky Mosseri, the barrister and academic Norman Bentwich had spent much of his working life in British-controlled Palestine. During the Great War he had served in the Middle East with the Camel Transport, and in 1922 became the first attorney general in the mandatory government, earning the unusual distinction of inspiring Arab demonstrations against him for his Jewish sympathies and Zionist student protests for being too conciliatory to Arabs. Shot by an Arab and called home by his Colonial Office masters as an embarrassment, he returned to hold the chair in International Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Muriel Bradbrook Muriel Bradbrook was first a student and then a fellow of Girton College and Eileen’s tutor. A specialist in Shakespeare and Elizabethan literature, she gave up her teaching in 1941 for the duration of the war, before returning to Cambridge to end her career as the university’s first female Professor of English and the Mistress of her old college.
Mrs Crews An intrepid traveller in the Balkans, and a brilliant linguist with ‘the best legs in Cambridge’, Cynthia Crews provided Eileen with some of her most entertaining copy. Like Muriel Bradbrook she had taken a double first as a student at Girton, and returned as a research fellow before leaving to carry out war work in Turkey and London.
Aubrey Eban The son of a passionate Zionist mother, Alida Eban, and a figure of almost ‘Johnsonian’ stature, Aubrey Eban was the indisputable heavyweight among Eileen’s friends. It was as ‘Abba Eban’ that he would make a global reputation as the ‘Voice of Israel’ in the years after the war, but even as ‘Aubrey’, he had made national news with a brilliant triple first at Cambridge. A close friend of Gershon Ellenbogen’s, he would be a loyal correspondent of Eileen’s throughout the war.
Basil Ellenbogen The second of the three sons of Max Katzen Ellenbogen and his wife, Gertrude, Basil Ellenbogen would grow up as a child in the shadow of his older and more charismatic brother. Educated like Gershon at Liverpool Collegiate School, he studied medicine at Liverpool University, before becoming an army doctor and ended the war in Germany as a deeply committed adherent to all Jewish causes.
Hamish Falconer Scottish-born Pilot-Officer J. A. R. ‘Hamish’ Falconer was the brother of Sheila and perhaps the closest thing among Eileen’s friends to the ‘Happy Warrior’. On the outbreak of war, he was sent to Salisbury in Southern Africa for training, and returned in the aftermath of the Battle of Britain to marry his fiancée, Charlotte, in St Giles Cathedral and fly Spitfires with 603 (‘City of Edinburgh’) Squadron from their southern England base.
Sigmund Gestetner The son of David Gestetner, the inventor of the first office stencil copying machine and founder of the hugely successful Gestetner Cyclograph Company, Sigmund Gestetner combined the worlds of business, philanthropy and British Zionism.
Leslie Hore-Belisha Soldier, barrister, journalist, Liberal politician, and much-loved friend of the Alexanders, the flamboyant Clifton- and Oxford-educated Hore-Belisha first came to the public’s attention in the 1930s as an energetic Minister for Transport. In 1937 he was promoted by Chamberlain to the War Office, and in the months before the war pushed through a number of important reforms before being controversially sacked in January 1940, a victim – in just about equal measures – of his generals’ hostility, his own love of publicity and establishment anti-Semitism.
Hon. Nellie Ionides Nellie Ionides was an old friend of the Alexanders, a major benefactor of Britain’s museums, and a generous and important figure in Eileen’s life. The daughter of the 1st Viscount Bearsted, the founder of Shell, she was living with her husband, the architect Basil Ionides, in their Sussex country home, Buxted Park, surrounded by her art collection, when the house was gutted by fire in 1940.
Lord Lloyd It would be impossible to guess it from Eileen’s letters, but behind the figure of the 1st Baron Lloyd, lay a career of remarkable variety. Educated at Eton and Cambridge (where he coxed the Cambridge boat), George Lloyd was a veteran of both the Gallipoli landings and Lawrence of Arabia’s desert war, before becoming a deeply imperialist Governor of Bombay (who imprisoned Gandhi), a controversial and reactionary high commissioner in Egpyt (recalled), and head of the British Council, before finally dying in office from German measles – an irony not lost on Eileen – while Secretary of State for the Colonies in Churchill’s wartime government.
Lord Nathan A distinguished First World War soldier, solicitor, Labour politician, tireless public servant, Zionist and Eileen’s bête noire, ‘Harry Nathan’ was an old friend of the Alexander family. In the early days of the war he moved – or was moved – from the House of Commons to the Lords, and it was as the founder of an Army Welfare Department that he and his formidable Girtonian wife, Eleanor, would make their major contribution to the war effort.
David Rafilovitch A contemporary of Gershon Ellenbogen’s at Liverpool Collegiate School, David Raphael (as he became) and his wife Silvia, the daughter of a famous Edinburgh rabbi and sister of the literary critic, David Daiches, became crucial figures for Eileen at a particularly difficult time of her life. Both husband and wife went on to distinguished academic careers.
Horace Samuel Barrister, writer, financial advisor, and self-appointed scourge of Britain’s real and imaginary fifth columnists, Horace Barnett Samuel was one of the most colourful of the Alexander family friends. Educated – like Lord Nathan and Sidney Bentwich – at St Paul’s School and then at Cambridge, Samuel effortlessly combined his Soviet sympathies and anti-establishment suspicions with the plutocratic tastes of a member of the family whose musical instrument firm would eventually morph into Decca Gramophone.
Orde Wingate Orde Wingate was only a captain in the British Army when Eileen first met him, but clearly destined either for a court-martial or for the top. The son of Plymouth Brethren parents and a committed Zionist, he had made his name as a ruthless, eccentric and insubordinate guerrilla leader during the Arab rebellion in Palestine and went on to lead a brilliant campaign against the Italians in Abyssinia before famously taking the war to Japan in the Burmese jungle. He was killed in a plane crash in 1944 and he remains, now as then, a controversial figure.
Mr and Mrs Wright The Alexanders’ general handyman and cook. The Alexanders were only renting their house in Swiss Cottage, and Mrs Wright and her disgruntled husband had come with the property, leaving the distinct impression in Eileen’s mind that their loyalties were very much to their old employers.
Picture Section
A childhood in Cairo: Dicky, Lionel and Eileen. (Alexander Family Collection)
Eileen and Lionel, c.1931. (Alexander Family Collection)
Victoria ‘Vicky’ Mosseri, mother to Eileen, Lionel and Dicky, 1925. (Alexander Family Collection)
Vicky holding Eileen, c.1919. (Alexander Family Collection)
Alec Alexander, Eileen’s father, 1935. (Alexander Family Collection)
Lionel and Dicky playing in the garden in Cairo. (Alexander Family Collection)
Alec Alexander, Field Marshal Jan Smuts, and Sir Miles Lampson, the British Ambassador to Egypt. (Alexander Family Collection)
Félix Mosseri, Vicky’s brother and Eileen’s uncle, photographed in 1975. (Alexander Family Collection)
Victor Kanter, Eileen’s cousin. (Hannah Kanter)
Cairo, on camel back (Eileen top right, Lionel bottom right, Dicky bottom left). (Alexander Family Collection)
Lord and Lady Nathan.
Lord Lloyd, whose vast career ranged from serving as a deeply imperialist Governor of Bombay (and imprisoning Gandhi) to Leader of the House of Lords. (National Portrait Gallery, London)
Muriel Bradbrook, a fellow of Girton College and Eileen’s tutor, who after the war became Cambridge’s first female Professor of English. (National Portrait Gallery, London)
Nellie Ionides, an old friend of the Alexanders, was a major benefactor of Britain’s museums and the daughter of the founder of Shell.
One of
Eileen’s constant correspondents, Aubrey ‘Abba’ Eban.
Eban went on to make a global reputation as a diplomat and ‘Voice of Israel’. Pictured here with President Nixon. (Arnold Sachs/Getty Images)
Orde Wingate (right) with a Brigadier of the British Army and the Emperor of Ethiopia. (Popperfoto/Getty Images)
Major General Orde Wingate was leader of the Chindits, the largest force of the Allied Special Forces in the Second World War. (Popperfoto/Getty Images)
Eileen outside the post office, 1933, Drumnadrochit, Scotland. (Alexander Family Collection)
At 11 x 8¼ inches, an air letter demanded economical handwriting. Eileen regularly fitted 350 words to Gershon’s 200. (Alexander Family Collection)
Smoke billows beyond Tower Bridge after the first German air raid of the Blitz, 7th September 1940. (Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
St Paul’s Cathedral narrowly dodges destruction, 1941. (Keystone/Getty Images)
Eileen Alexander. (Alexander Family Collection)
Gershon Ellenbogen, c. 1947. (Alexander Family Collection)
London Underground escalators packed with people sheltering from an air raid, 1941. (Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Crowds of people sleep on the platform of Elephant and Castle London Underground Station, 1940. (Bill Brandt/Imperial War Museum via Getty Images)
The twin guns of the anti-aircraft battery at Primrose Hill that Eileen so often heard answering the German bombing ‘in no uncertain terms’. (Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Eileen and her father. (Alexander Family Collection)
Eileen. (Alexander Family Collection)
Oswyn Murray’s family (Oswyn left) around the time Eileen visited in summer 1943. (Murray Family Collection)
Eileen and Gershon’s wedding, 1944. (Alexander Family Collection)
Katherine ‘Kate’ Ellenbogen, Gershon and Eileen’s daughter, was born in January 1945. Pictured in 1951. (Alexander Family Collection)
Kate’s wedding to Peter Whiteman, 1971 (Gershon right, Eileen third from right). (Alexander Family Collection)
About the Author
Eileen Alexander was born in Cairo and grew up in a cosmopolitan Jewish family before moving to Cambridge as a student. She graduated from Girton College with a first-class degree in English in 1939, and worked during the Second World War for the civil service in the Air Ministry. Eileen went on to be a teacher, writer and translator, including translating some of Georges Simenon’s works. Her letters were discovered through a chance eBay purchase, and serve now as the best testament to Eileen’s extraordinary literary talent, which might otherwise have been forgotten.
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