Recollection of Sir Nicholas

The obituary of Sir Nicholas Winton in the August issue of the AJR Journal reminded me of a meeting my colleague Felicity Griffiths and I had with him at his home in Maidenhead on 28 February 2005. In the meeting, which took place on behalf of the Elmbridge and Runnymede Talking News for the blind, he modestly elaborated on that initial visit of his to Prague following the notorious Munich annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland by Nazi Germany. Speaking of Martin Blake, Sir Nicholas explained how he and Martin were deeply involved in left-wing politics of the time and he knew that Martin was in touch with the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia (BCRC), whose agent in Prague was Doreen Warriner. It was a complete surprise, however, that directly he arrived in Prague, Martin said to him: ‘The first thing you are going to do is to be introduced to Eleanor Rathbone MP and I want you to take her to the camps.’ ‘These camps,’ he explained, ‘were for people who fled into Czechoslovakia from the Sudetenland and had no relatives or friends with whom they could stay. The camps were pretty bleak and pretty horrible. So I went round and took Eleanor Rathbone in and around the camps. I think my chief reason for escorting her was that … when she sat down, or did anything, she always left something behind, so my real reason for escorting her was to collect all her belongings she left along her path as she went. She wasn’t forgetful in that way – she was absent-minded. She was a remarkable lady and, of course, very well known.’ When he met up with Doreen Warriner, who had the job of bringing out elderly people who were endangered – who were on Hitler’s black list – Sir Nicholas said to her: ‘What about all these kids?’ She replied that the BCRC had neither the money nor the energy or facilities to do anything and that, in any case, they wouldn’t be allowed into England on their own. While in Prague Sir Nicholas also met Trevor Chadwick, who had been a master at a school in Swanage, and said to him: ‘We’ve got to list these children who need to get out. I’ll go back to England to see what can be done. If I’m successful, will you run the office in Prague? I left all the organising to Trevor. All I said to him and the children was: “Look, don’t be so excited. I want to do this – everybody says it’s impossible. Until I get back to England and find out whether it can be done, all this is completely academic … Well, my motto is like Sherlock Holmes’s “If something is not blatantly impossible, there must be a way of doing it.”’ Back in England at the Home Office, Sir Nicholas was told that all he had to do was to find a home that would look after every child until the crisis was over and that every child would need a guarantor to provide £50. To do this, he explained, he had to call himself something! So he had a letterhead printed as ‘The Children’s Section of the BCRC’. It was official in the sense that everybody who read it thought it was official. The only people who knew it wasn’t were the BCRC and they couldn’t say anything! That was the beginning – the rest is history. There is one other part of the story related to us by Sir Nicholas which well illustrates his character. With the outbreak of war, as a pacifist he joined the Red Cross and went over to France. Having been evacuated from Dunkirk, he returned to the City, where he had ‘quite an important job’, to meet his boss, ‘who was very right-wing.’ His boss turned round to him and said: ‘It’s no use going on fighting this chap – we might just as well make the best peace terms we can now!’ That, Sir Nicholas said, was one of the main things that changed his life. He never went back to the City again even though he was a member of the Stock Exchange. In conclusion, it must be said that finding families in England for the children was the most difficult part of the job for Sir Nicholas. He managed to persuade Picture Post magazine to help by running weekly articles for him. Heinz Vogel