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| Across the bridge of time to
solve Frank’s mystery |
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Cllr Flick Rea, deputy mayor Abdul Quadir, Frances Jolly
and Revd Alistair Tresidder from St Luke’s Church,
West Hampstead
Tom, left, and Frank Jolly
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FOR several years I have stood in Hampstead cemetery on Remembrance
Sunday in quiet awe before the headstones of those who died in the
last war and wondered who they were and what happened to their families
when the dreaded news of their death came.
It always did in the shape of a telegram. A knock at the door and
the appearance of an embarrassed postman with a buff-coloured telegram
in his hands and the wife, brother or son guessed this was it –
the moment they all feared had arrived.
All the headstones seemed untended save one, a headstone for a young
man called Frank Jolly, where each year I would notice a sprig of
fresh poppies.
Who had laid the poppies in the cemetery in Fortune Green Road,
West Hampstead? Relatives? Obviously. But
where did they live? There are no Jollys in West Hampstead now.
But at the service on the green before the Cenotaph on Friday to
mark Remembrance Day I met one of the Jollys at last – Mrs
Frances Jolly, the 88-year-old sister-in-law of Frank Jolly. She
and her niece Jackie had paid their annual visit to her husband
Tom’s grave and walking back had noticed the first ceremony
in years taking place before the Cenotaph.
A remarkably fit looking woman Mrs Jolly, who now lives in Borehamwood,
had met her husband Tom while walking along Kilburn High Road in
the 1930s. Her eyes sparkled as she told me she had had ten children.
Once, the Jollys were clearly a well known family in West Hampstead.
Her husband Tom was one of five brothers who fought in the war –
the youngest William is still alive and lives in Norfolk.
Then in 1942 her brother-in-law Frank died at 27. She vividly remembered
the day the telegram arrived. It was inevitably frozen in time.
As soon as I mentioned it, you could sense her rush of memories.
The telegram arrived at her home in Achilles Road where Frank’s
mother was staying at the time. She was the only one in the house
looking after her new born baby Rosemary. When she opened the door
the messenger – a postman in a special uniform with a navy
blue cap – stood in the porch.
“I knew immediately what it was all about,” she told me.
“I was terribly upset, and I knew Frank’s mother, who
was shopping at the time with her daughter, would be terribly shaken
up when she returned. I gave the telegram to the daughter –
and it was awful. Frank was such a bright young man, full of life,
and happy about his newly born son, Alan.”
I spoke this week to Mrs Jolly’s son Peter who has become a
kind of archivist tracing the family tree back to the 1600s.
He told me Frank drowned in October, 1942 while stationed as a Royal
Engineer in Yorkshire. A bridge had collapsed while he was marching
across it and he couldn’t swim.
His coffin arrived back in King’s Cross with a Union Jack draped
over it.
Local Lib-Dem councillor Flick Rea had read my pieces in this column
over the years asking why no Remembrance service was being held
on the green , and had persuaded the Town Hall to organise one.
After the service I asked Flick Rea to take a look at the headstones
behind the Cenotaph, especially one for Frank Jolly.
It was there we met Frances Jolly and her niece. Cllr Rea, who had
heard of the Jollys, was delighted.
As we talked a bridge was crossed between the past and the present,
a completion of a circle of history. That’s how it should be
– the past is forgotten or ignored at our peril.
‘Hello Boris? This is Uncle Joe
here...’
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Professor Robert Service
Boris Efimov
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‘STEVE – this is Tony here!”
“Tony? Tony, who?”
“Ouch, you silly – Tony Blair, of course.
“Look, I hear you are working on a cartoon of me for tomorrow’s
edition, would you please make sure you tone down my ears!”
The rest of the conversation became embedded with unprintable expletives
from the cartoonist Steve Bell.
Now, that two-way discourse is a pure flight of fancy from myself,
because it’s never been known for a Prime Minister to ring
up a well-known cartoonist to instruct him in his arts.
But it has happened. Not here. But in the old Soviet Union when
Joe Stalin used to ring up the great cartoonist of the day, Boris
Efimov to make sure he followed party policy. Astonishingly, Efimov
is still alive and active at the great age of 105.
And you can see some of his collection at the Political Cartoon
Gallery in Store Street, Bloomsbury when it opens tomorrow (Friday).
The Efimov show is being opened by Robert Service, an eminent Oxford
don who made his reputation as a Kremlin-watcher pouring out books
on the life and death of the Soviet Union.
“Boris is an amazing man,” said Service who lives in Stoke
Newington.
“He is so old his first cartoon was published in Petrograd
before the revolution of 1917.”
His career flourished during the 1930s and he was syndicated in
all the major Soviet newspapers including Pravda.
And as Stalin’s favourite cartoonist, he also found himself
attacking fellow revolutionary Leon Trotsky.
He had to do Stalin’s bidding, according to Service, and caricature
Trotsky.
“Stalin would ring him up and tell him what he wanted to see,”
said Service. He produced vicious cartoons of the Nazis, especially
Goebbels and Goering. Unfortunately, the great cartoonist isn’t
quite up to visiting this unique exhibition.
Figleaf Frank
THE Guardian political columnist Polly Toynbee is in a bit
of a tizzy following Blair’s downfall last week over the
Terrorism Bill.
Afraid that rebel MPs are behaving like “Lemmings” determined
to bring the government down, she dismissed Hampstead MP Glenda
Jackson, Islington MP Jeremy Corbyn and ex-minister Clare Short,
as a “self-important” group that knows no bounds.
But she reserved her real bite in the Guardian on Tuesday for
Holborn MP Frank Dobson whom she dismissed as a “semi-respectable
old figleaf”.
When I rang Dobbo yesterday (Wednesday) he seemed relaxed about
it all. I couldn’t quite work out what Ms Toynbee meant by
“figleaf” but all Dobbo would say was:
“I’m just trying to stand up for what I believe in, if
the Guardian doesn’t like it then that’s up to them.”
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