A Doctor at War Read online

  The next day, he feigned illness and refused to get out of bed, certain that another beating was waiting for him at school. Eventually his mystified parents managed to drag the truth out of him and packed him off to school with a letter addressed to the headmaster. Miraculously, he wasn’t caned again.

  Worried by the overly punitive regime at Marlborough House, which had only served to instil in Martin a deep-seated mistrust for authority bordering on contempt, and concerned that Martin was becoming too dependent on his elder brother, his parents decided to send them to different schools at the start of the following term. Harold went to Wellington, a public school with strong military connections. He was not academically gifted, but in the physically rigorous environment of Wellington he would be able to hold his own. Martin, still only ten years old, was sent as a boarder to a small school at Bembridge on the Isle of Wight, recently formed by a group of Friends. Ethilda’s enduring interest in education led her later to become one of its school governors.

  Martin could not have hoped for a freer and more relaxed environment. The school was in a perfect position, situated opposite the steep, sloping Culver cliffs and looking out to sea. Outside lessons, the boys were free to scramble across the muddy cliffs and along the shore. They built dens in the dense masses of blackthorn bushes that grew behind the beaches, and formed themselves into opposing ‘gangs’, pelting each other with hard, sun-baked clay missiles and using dustbin lids ‘borrowed’ from neighbouring houses as shields. They made themselves thoroughly unpopular with some of the local residents, but enjoyed an almost blissful outdoor existence. The school’s liberal approach was extremely forward-looking for its time, and without the oppression of stifling authority Martin began to grow more self-assured. For the first time he began to read with great enthusiasm: there was even a joke amongst his friends that he managed to read under the shower. He was still small for his age, but Martin took to swimming, climbing on the cliffs and was as good as any of his contemporaries and many of the older boys on the tennis court, even though he had to manage with his father’s heavy, old-fashioned racquet.

  Success in individual sports did nothing to remedy the fact that by temperament he was not a team player. In later years Herford said that as a schoolboy he had a dislike of being in the lead. This may have been borne of a lack of self-confidence, or of the awe in which he held his older brother. It may simply have been due to the fact that he was a relatively immature adolescent who was more than usually sensitive to the jibes of others. Whatever the reason, he remained a relative outsider throughout his school career. His favourite pastimes were always solitary, and on moonlit summer nights he would sneak from the boarding house and walk down alone to the sea, either to fish for bass or just to watch the moonlight dancing on the water. These two brief years at Bembridge were among the happiest of his life.

  The end of ‘prep’ school signalled a return to Berkshire. This time, Martin was sent to Leighton Park School near Reading. His parents considered that he must live his school life to the full, so he was sent as a boarder, even though his home was less than half a mile away. Leighton Park was a Quaker school, attended by the sons of wealthy Quaker businessmen. Early Quakers were barred from joining the professions so they therefore became merchants, and often very successful and philanthropic ones with pioneering labour relations policies.

  Success in business brought with it social acceptance in the ‘best circles’. When Martin arrived at Leighton Park, one of a group of boys asked him whether he was related to the Duke of Hereford. When he replied that he wasn’t, he was immediately marked down as of little social significance and not useful to know. As one headmaster later wrote, this era was the ‘nadir’ of the school. The boys formed into tight impenetrable cliques, creating an unhealthy and often hostile atmosphere. For a natural loner like Martin, widespread acceptance by the others was almost an impossibility. He was not the subject of physical bullying, but he remained isolated and on the edge of the groups.

  His unhappiness at school was heightened by the financial difficulties at home. While the other boys were dressed in fine new clothes, Martin’s were worn and threadbare. Martin took himself out of his troubles by developing an intense interest in another solitary pastime, ornithology. Leighton Park’s greatest asset was its 100 acres of fine grounds, which boasted a rich and varied selection of wildlife. The headmaster, himself a keen ornithologist, allowed Martin to get up before dawn and go out with his binoculars to watch for the arrival of the spring migrants. To the headmaster this was no more than an innocent hobby, but already Martin was possessed of enormous self-discipline and an unswerving ability to pursue his own course despite the opinions of those around him. There was very little self-pity about the child, who seemed always to accept his current situation and succeed in turning it to his advantage.

  On his 16th birthday, Martin took the school matriculation, and unfortunately failed in one subject, chemistry. For a boy who was obviously bright and who was later to become a doctor it was an unexpected result, although of a class of 16, only one did pass the exam. Martin’s parents, who had made great sacrifices to pay his fees, simply could not afford to keep him at Leighton Park any longer. Instead, he went for the autumn term to Reading School where he sat the External Matric. To his parents’ great relief, this time he passed. Although the Quakers were ideological pacifists, Martin did not feel particularly bound by their injunctions or indeed by any political or religious creed; but he had made up his mind by his mid-teens that he was not capable of killing another human being. The accounts he had read of the mass slaughter in the Great War had made a profound impression, and helped formulate his ambition to follow his mother into medicine. It was the only profession in which he felt he could be of any real use to humanity.

  In the 1920s grants for university education were hard to obtain. Studying medicine meant many expensive years which his parents simply could not afford, so Martin opted to apply for a BSc course at Reading University. Studying there would allow him to remain living at home, and also to be with his beloved brother Harold, who was already there reading Agriculture.

  In the intervening ten months Martin was sent to stay with his German uncle and his family, the Haarbleichers, in Hamburg, for the express purpose of learning the language. Hampered initially by a reticence to speak at all, his hosts began to view him as mentally impaired. But he was thrown in at the deep end and made to attend a German school with his cousins. Gradually he began to pick up some ungrammatical but functional German.

  At that time Germany was suffering badly from economic recession and the after-effects of the Versailles Treaty. There was much popular bitterness directed towards the more affluent Jewish communities, amongst whom numbered Herford’s relations. The Haarbleichers were of Jewish descent, although no longer practising. There was talk at the dinner table of the rise of anti-Jewish sentiment, but in the 1920s there was still no hint of the horrors which were to follow. Martin was for the most part unaware of these undercurrents, and began to throw himself into the family life of his cousins.

  After the summer term each year, pupils were sent on extended trips to different parts of the country. The idea was to familiarize them with all parts of their nation, and to implant a degree of independence from the family. The children were moved around in railway trucks, sometimes with only straw over the bare boards to sit and sleep on, but it was a time of great excitement, and the children loved it. Martin and his cousins stayed in a number of youth hostels – an institution as yet unknown in Britain – and roamed the countryside.

  This informal introduction to Germany and its people was an invaluable experience. Apart from learning the language, Martin also gained a vital insight into the German temperament. When, during the war, he was called upon to cross enemy lines under the Red Cross flag, he could do so with a certain amount of faith that the men he would meet on the other side were not all evil, snarling monsters who would shoot him down with disregard for the rules of w
arfare. He learnt that for ordinary Germans at least, the concept of honour was paramount. The average German would no more debase himself through a needlessly callous act than an Englishman. It was therefore with great sadness and with a great deal of affection for the generous people who had welcomed him into their homes, that Martin left Hamburg to start his degree course in Reading. The general science degree upon which he embarked did not fill him with ambition and enthusiasm. He and his brother Harold stuck close together and in preference to their studies spent a relatively carefree year fishing, bird watching and playing tennis. Harold passed his examinations in agriculture, but Martin had studied so little that it was not even worthwhile for him to sit the intermediate science paper.

  Soon after completing his studies Harold enthusiastically accepted an offer from a friend of his father’s to take up a position on a sugar estate in India. Harold leapt at the chance, thrilled at the prospect of the shooting and pig-sticking – ‘sports’ which Martin found abhorrent – and left England with few regrets. Martin, on the other hand, was at a loose end. An old friend of his mother’s, his godmother, for whom he had great respect, was prepared to help finance him to study law as she was married to a barrister and enjoyed a comfortable living, but Martin was not attracted by the prospect. Eventually his father took the initiative and found him a job in Pulsometer, an engineering firm in Reading.

  Martin spent four years working in a company which held little interest for him. It was a period of his life during which he had neither drive nor a particular desire to achieve anything. He was trained in every department of the company and became secretary to the Managing Director, but he felt stifled, and soon realized that he would rather be working on a banana plantation in some far-flung corner of the Empire than be stuck in a factory.

  With encouragement from an aunt, who happened to be a founder of the Women’s Police and was responsible for their training, and who agreed to help him financially, and also from his mother, Martin eventually managed to secure a place to study medicine at Bristol University. He chose Bristol for the simple reason that his younger brother had already gone to work for Robinsons, a firm which had its headquarters there.

  The five years in Bristol were happy ones. Martin and George, his younger brother, shared a small flat, with a spare bedroom where a friend could stay, and enjoyed a simple lifestyle. As well as studying hard, Martin played a lot of sport, eventually playing hockey for Gloucester County and the Combined Universities. He became captain of tennis and badminton, and represented the university in athletics in 1936. Vacations were often spent walking in the Lake District or on the Yorkshire Moors. Evidencing considerable physical stamina, Martin made his journeys across country by bicycle or on foot, cycling over 150 miles in a day, carrying camping kit of 40–50lb, and sleeping in a small tent, many miles from human habitation.

  While at Bristol, Martin and George became very close. George, a thoughtful, quiet lad, in common with both his brothers, had an irresistible urge for adventure. Throughout the mid-1930s Martin had become convinced that war in Europe was inevitable. News from the family relations in Germany of the alarming political developments there served to intensify this belief. The Herford family were not political, but they were very disturbed by the tales emerging in the press and recounted by their German cousins of the burgeoning concentration camps. Hitler’s viciously anti-Semitic views had been quite clear since the publication of Mein Kampf in 1925, but even until 1945 the policy of mass destruction was hardly known about outside Germany. However, inside Germany the signs were clearly marked long before the war broke out. Martin’s cousin warned him that Hitler would be liquidating as many Jews as he could. Already fear of the Gestapo and SS had taken hold of the civilian population, and people would whisper fearfully to one another that they would ‘go up the chimney’ if accused of being subversives. The use of this expression was the first indication that ordinary Germans knew something about the existence of gas chambers, and would later be cited as evidence that the people acquiesced in the formation of the concentration camp system.

  Martin was determined to put his medical skills to good use and already had it in mind to become an army doctor. George joined the RAF, but had just qualified as a pilot at Montrose in 1936 when an untimely tragedy snatched away his life before war even started. On leave, two of his fellow officers egged him on to join them in hiring a sailing dinghy on the River Esk. George was reluctant as the weather was bitterly cold, and the river in flood and full of ice blocks. As well as this, only one man claimed to be an experienced sailor. It was a situation in which no sailing should have been allowed, but the three of them nevertheless set off for a trip out to sea. They quickly got into trouble as they hit a cross current where the river met the sea. As they attempted to turn back, the boat capsized, and only one of the young airmen survived – the man who had been most keen to go.

  George’s death had a profound effect on the entire family, especially Martin, who had become very close to his younger brother. Harold travelled back from India to attend the funeral. It was a time of immeasurable sadness. None of them could help feeling that the whole escapade had been a terrible and avoidable mistake.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Spanish Civil War

  On 18 July 1936 the Spanish Army began its rebellion against the Republican government. It was initially intended by General Franco and his rebel army officers to be a rapid seizure of key operational centres resulting in a successful coup within a few weeks. The reality was a bloody three-year civil war. A third political force, the anarchists, took the military uprising as their cue to launch a social revolution to overthrow the state and replace it with libertarian communism. Within days fighting had broken out across the length and breadth of the country between Franco’s military mutineers and the Republican army, and between Republicans and the anarchists, who were barricading the Barcelona streets. From the outset Italy and Germany lent military support to Franco’s nationalists, and used the conflict as a dress rehearsal for the saturation bombing of civilian populations which was the scourge of World War II.

  By November 1936 public opinion in Britain had been roused against Franco’s Fascists, and a broad-based campaign stretching across the political spectrum was organized to send medical and food aid to the beleaguered Spanish Republicans, who were seen to be in the forefront of the struggle against European fascism. On 30 November the Albert Hall was the scene of a massed rally organized to support the teams of British doctors and nurses being dispatched to Spain. The aid was exclusively funded by public collections and charitable organizations. Dr Charles Brook, Secretary of the Spanish Medical Aid Committee, shocked the Albert Hall audience by revealing that even the International and British Red Cross organizations had refused to help because this was not a war between nations, and how the British voluntary unit already in Spain had been forced to paint over its red crosses because Franco’s planes had made them a target, in total contravention of international law.

  The effect of the Spanish Civil War on the British population has been largely ignored by historians. Even A. J. P. Taylor wrote that the war ‘remained very much a question for the few, an episode in English intellectual history… Most English people displayed little concern. They wanted peace.’ This comment seems to have been made in almost total ignorance to the tens of thousands of ordinary people who organized marches, demonstrations, bazaars and appeals to raise more than £2 million for Spanish aid (more than £65 million in current terms). Millions of people attended fund-raising events. The result was the sending of more than 200 medical personnel with supplies, the setting up of many hospitals and ambulance services throughout Spain, the filling of 29 food ships from Britain and countless convoys of lorries filled by voluntary effort. Four thousand Basque children were brought by sea to Southampton and looked after in specially created homes, and more than 2,000 British volunteers took part in the fight to preserve democracy. Meanwhile, the British and French governments played no
part and pursued a policy of non-intervention. This stance was adopted in order not to fan the flames of a potentially wider conflict on the continent.

  Even as the Spanish Civil War progressed and the involvement of Hitler and Mussolini deepened, it was still hoped that a broader war could be avoided. This was not a view shared by many of the working class organizations in Britain, who were actively engaged in the propaganda war against fascism from the early 1930s. For the international volunteers who took up arms against Franco, Spain was the only place in which fascism could be directly fought. Bob Selkirk, an unemployed miner who in 1936 was organizing the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement in Fifeshire, wrote: ‘The Fife workers supported the righteous struggle of the Spanish workers because they understood the truth embodied in the slogans, “Bombs on Madrid mean bombs on London”, “Fascism is the enemy of humanity”.’ These sentiments were certainly far ahead of contemporary government thinking. The official line was reported by The Guardian’s diplomatic correspondent on 28 July 1936:

  There is every desire here to be on friendly terms with Spain, no matter what the complexion of the Spanish government might be. It is for these reasons – and one other – that strict neutrality is being observed. The other reason is that if some Powers, such as France or Great Britain, sells arms to one side, other Powers, such as Germany or Italy, may sell arms to the other. It is considered desirable that there shall be as few arms as possible in Spain and that there shall be no international complications.