My grandfather and (maybe) a dark secret

Although I’ never seem to have any trouble writing the odd post about my maternal grandparents – especially about Yetta, my grandmother – I seem to have far less to say about my father’s side of the family.

This is sad but unsurprising. Although we lived in different countries – they in England, we in Italy – we visited my mother’s parents regularly, once or twice a year, and they would come and see us, until they grew too old for the journey. We knew them well, we were close to them, there were the bonds of love between us that make what we mean by family.

Eleanor and Leonard Beeson
My paternal grandparents, during WW2

My other grandparents, on the other hand, we rarely saw, and they remained kind but distant strangers to me until they died. The explanation may have been perfectly simple, even if it wasn’t particularly attractive to most people who cherish their grandchildren: my paternal grandfather Leonard and grandmother Eleanor may simply not have been that interested in being grandparents.

There may, however, have been another and far less creditable motive for their remoteness. I don’t know whether it’s the explanation or not, but Leonard was an intriguing man in any case and that, together with this obscure aspect of his character, strikes me as worth exploring.

Mary Ann and Alfred Beeson
Leonard’s parents, my great grandparents

He was the son of Alfred Beeson, who had a bright business idea. Britain did not allow the importation of live cattle during the dying decades of the nineteenth century. He decided to set up in Belgium, importing cattle from Argentina (the state of the cattle during that long crossing doesn’t bear thinking about), slaughtering them there and exporting the carcasses to the UK. 

On the fact of it, that seems like a good idea. Unfortunately, it would only work as long as the law remained the same in Britain, which of course in time it didn’t. Once cattle could be imported on the hoof directly into Britain, the business lost its basis for success.

My great grandfather Alfred died young, at 39. I don’t know whether the business was still a going concern then or not, but I do know that Leonard, only fifteen, suddenly found himself the head of the family and of the family business, at a time when that kind of position was taken seriously. His mother may still have been alive, but his word mattered. The family remained in Brussels and Leonard took responsibility for its wellbeing.

I remember by great Aunt Irene, Leonard’s sister, explaining to me many years later that she had wanted to study, but Leonard was adamant: the family simply couldn’t have that. So she never got to university.

Leonard wed Eleanor in his early twenties, so when World War One broke out, he was already a married man. He joined the British Royal Artillery and served on the Western Front, where he was gassed once and wounded by shrapnel on another occasion. Eleanor visited him in hospital after the gassing, but had it firmly in her mind that he’d lost a leg. He had to go so far as to pull the bed clothes off himself to show that he still had two legs, both of them functional.

The other wound left bits of shrapnel in a hand, in a position where surgeons felt they couldn’t operate. So the hand kept closing for the rest of his life and couldn’t be fully opened. A keen, perhaps even fanatical golfer, by the end of his life he had to force the club into his almost closed hand.

It was golf that meant that he was in England for a weekend of his favourite sport when the German army invaded Belgium in May 1940. He was stuck there with only the contents of his suitcase and the clothes he was wearing, while his wife frantically packed and closed the house in Brussels ready to flee to England. My father and one of his siblings was with them.

They caught the last train to France out of Brussels before the German army arrived, which was just as well, as the previous train was strafed by German fighters. 

Leonard decided that he owed it to his country to serve in the Second World War as he had in the First. By 1940 he was, however, already over fifty, so he didn’t go back into combat. Instead he joined, of all branches, the Fleet Air Arm, the air service attached to the Royal Navy. However, he didn’t go to sea, but was posted to an aerodrome in Scotland.

Leonard as a Volunteer lieutenant
in the Fleet Air Arm in World War 2

My father was astonished that, with no previous connection to the Navy or to military flying, Leonard was in the Fleet Air Arm at all. But he was amused when he visited him and discovered that Leonard had spotted a patch of unused land at the back of the base and obtained permission to build a golf course there. So when my father turned up, he found a nine-hole course available within the base itself. 

Which is one way, and certainly not the worst, of contributing to a war effort.

That frenetic departure of his wife from Brussels had, however, had one casualty. Leonard had completed the typescript of a major book. And Eleanor left it behind. It would be lost for ever: when they returned to the house after the war, they found it gutted with no trace of any of the belongings they’d left behind, including the book.

And what was the subject of the book? It was the ‘Jewish question’.

Now talking about the ‘Jewish Question’ then is like proclaiming today that ‘All Lives Matter’. It’s code. ‘All Lives Matter’ is a denial of the fact that Black lives are the targets of particular persecution in the world today. The ‘Jewish Question’ supposes that there is some specific problem concerning the presence of Jews in non-Jewish societies, and from there it’s generally a short step, taken by most authors on the subject, to blaming the Jews for the problem.

In other words, behind the code is the implication that the victims of anti-Semitism bear some or a great deal of the responsibility for their own suffering. Which rather suggests that Leonard’s book was likely to have been anti-Semitic in tone.

I don’t know how he reacted to the news that my father was marrying a Jew.

Did that make him less inclined to have much to do with us? I don’t know. On the few occasions we met, he was always pleasant and affable. So maybe anti-Semitism had nothing to do with his remoteness from us. I’d like to believe that it was just reticence to be a traditional grandparent and nothing more sinister.

On the other hand, I’m afraid I have no regret that his great book was lost to the world. I think it’s unlikely that it’s any the poorer for that loss…