10. Barrow-upon-Humber
       Private site
       27th-29^th March

60 mile drive up the A15 from Lincoln. The road, which was dead-straight, was the Roman Ermine Street, which went from London to Lincoln, the Humber and York. The only noteworthy feature was the number of places ending in “-by”, one of the Danish/Viking place name endings. Among them were several entries in The Meaning of Liffe, including:-

CLIXBY (adj.): Politely rude. Briskly vague. Firmly uninformative

Talking of “-by”, I've been listening to Radio 4 and Simon Russell Beale reading Ben McIntyre's latest book, “A Spy Among Friends” about Kim Philby. As with all McIntyre's books, it's fascinating; he really is the master of studies of espionage, a subject which I find absolutely absorbing. In hindsight it's difficult to understand how members of a privileged middle-class elite like Burgess, McLean, Philby and Blunt could have been so utterly captivated by communism. There was, of course, idealism (Philby is quoted as saying “the rich have oppressed the poor for too long”) but they must have seen the monster's true colours when Stalin's Five Year Plan and his purges killed millions in the Twenties and Thirties and when he signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler in 1939. Of course there was “the end justifies the means” school of thought, but so many others left the party after these revelations that it's impossible to understand how these golden children could have overlooked such horrors. And then there was the personal betrayal of friends and family and the terrible fate of hundreds of agents throughout Europe as a result of the treachery of Philby in particular. I suppose he was Bill Haydon in le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. At the end, Smiley's wife says something along the lines of “Bill betrayed totally, absolutely, didn't he?” and it's easy to imagine, for example, Philby's loyal friend and disciple Nicholas Elliott uttering this terribly sad postscript. Simon Russell Beale is a wonderful reader, by the way.

I've just noticed there's a place called Bessacarr on the outskirts of Doncaster. There's a caravan and motorhome manufacturer called Bessacarr. For some obscure reason I had always thought these were French but now I see they are much more exotic.

Radio Four Extra is broadcasting some old 1970's issues of Alastair Cooke's Letter from America starting on Sunday morning. The preview has him reviewing Watergate and Nixon. Should be fascinating.

Blimey, I've just heard on the radio that cats have been giving people the strain of TB found in cattle. Perhaps the badgers were innocent after all. Is a cull of cats next? There's a few votes down the drain if Dave goes for that.

I came to Barrow-upon-Humber in search of a particular story (more anon) and was unaware until I got here that the village had a connection with John Harrison, the man who solved the longitude problem. Until his super-accurate chronograph went into service, it had been possible for navigators to pinpoint a ship's position north-south (its latitude) but not its position east-west (its longitude). In 1707, 2,000 Royal Navy sailors under Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell were lost off the Scilly Isles because of this problem and Parliament offered a prize of £20,000 for a solution. Harrison's family moved to Barrow when he was seven and he worked as a carpenter and watchmaker there for 58 years in a workshop close to the market place, developing successively better chronometers. His last design (“H4”) came after his move to London. In a number of sea-trials it fulfilled Parliament's requirements but Harrison had to petition the King (George III) to get his money. (It seems that Parliament was a nest of vipers then, too. They probably wanted to spend the money on duck islands). The story of Harrison and the longitude problem is told in Dava Sobel's excellent book “Longitude”.

But now the main story. I'm a great admirer of Paul Theroux's travel books, written over, I guess, a thirty year period. I first read “The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train through Asia” in around 1980. In it he meets a man called Duffill whom he describes thus:-

“He was old and his clothes were far too big for him, so he might have left in a hurry and grabbed the wrong clothes, or perhaps he's just come out of the hospital. He walked treading his trouser cuffs to rags and carried many oddly shaped parcels wrapped in string and brown paper – more the luggage of an incautiously busy bomber than of an intrepid traveller. The tags were fluttering in the draught from the track, and each gave his name as R. Duffill and his address as Splendid Palas Hotel, Istanbul.”

(Now, before I go any further I'm going to tell you the lesson I learned from the story, so you can see what an important story it is and so that you continue right to the end, however distant and obscure that end might seem. The lesson is never to judge anyone by their appearance. It was wonderful to see the vile Simon Cowell learn this lesson when Susan Boyle began to sing).

They travel together as far as the French/Italian border, Theroux from time to time describing Duffill's frailty and advanced age. At Domodossola on the France/Italy border Duffill is left behind by the departing train after he has gone to get some food. With another passenger, Theroux does all he can for him, leaving his belongings with the station master at Venice, but he is not seen or heard from again in the book.

In 1982 Theroux undertook a journey around the coast of Britain, mainly by train, and wrote about it in “The Kingdom by the Sea”. It's a wonderful evocation of our strange country at the time of the Falklands War. At some point, Duffill had let slip that he came from Barrow-on-Humber in Lincolnshire, and Theroux goes there to find him. He finds that Duffill had died two years earlier, but he meets his brother Jack's wife and she tells him about him.

'His name was Richard Cuthbert Duffill. He was a most unusual man,' said his sister-in-law........................ He had been as old as the century – seventy-three the year he had stepped off the Orient Express at Domodossola. She asks 'Do you know about his adventurous life?'

I said 'I don't know anything about him.' All I knew was his name and his village.

'He was born right here in Barrow, in the Hall cottages. The Hall was one of the grand houses. Richard's father was the gardener and his mother was a housemaid. ….......of course the Duffills were rather poor.'

But Richard Duffill was brilliant. At the age of eleven he was encouraged by the headmaster of the village school to go to the Technical College in Hull. He excelled at Maths, but he was also a gifted linguist. He learned French, Latin, German, Russian and Spanish while still a teenager at Hull. But he had become somewhat introspective, for when he was twelve his father had died...................

His main recreation was swimming, and his skill in this resulted in his becoming a local hero. One summer day in 1917 he was on a swimming expedition with some friends at a quarry called the Brick Pits, near the Humber Bank. One of the boys, a certain Howson, began to struggle. He shouted, and then he disappeared beneath the murky water. Duffill dived repeatedly after him and finally surfaced with him and dragged him to shore, saving the boy's life. A few days later, the Hull newspaper reported the story under the headline “A Plucky Barrow Boy”.

For this, Duffill – a boy scout – was awarded the Silver Cross for Bravery. It was the first time this honour had ever come to a Lincolnshire scout. Some months afterwards, the Carnegie Heroes' Fund presented Duffill with a silver watch “for gallantry”, and they gave him a sum of money to help him in his education and future career“.  

In 1919, still young, and fluent in half a dozen languages, he joined the Inter-Allied Plebiscite Commission and was sent to Allenstein, in what was then East Prussia, to deal with the aftermath of World War One – sorting out prisoners and helping at the Special Court of Justice. In the following few years he did the same in Klagenfurt and Oppeln (Opole, Upper Silesia – now Poland). Berlin was next. Duffill got a job with the celebrated firm of Price, Waterhouse, the international accountants. He stayed in Berlin for ten years, abruptly resigning in 1935 and leaving – fleeing, some people said – for England.

Politically, he was of the Left. His friends in Berlin thought he might be gathering information for the British secret service. ('One felt he would have made the ideal agent', an old friend of Duffill's told me.) In any case, he left Germany so suddenly it was assumed that he was being pursued by Nazi agents................... He made it safely home, and he was also able to get all his money out of Germany. ('An exceedingly clever and daring feat,' another friend told me. 'His fortune was considerable.').

He may have had a nervous breakdown then; there was some speculation. He sank for a year, re-emerging in 1936 as a chief accountant for an American movie company..................In 1939 there was another gap, lasting until 1945: the war certainly – but where was Duffill? No one could tell me. His brother said, “Richard never discussed his working life or his world-travelling with us.”

In the late forties, he apparently rejoined Price, Waterhouse and travelled throughout Europe. He went to Egypt and Turkey; he returned to Germany; he went to Sweden and Russia, “for whose leaders he had the greatest admiration”.

After his retirement he continued to travel. He had never married. He was always alone. But the snapshots he kept showed him to be a very stylish dresser – waistcoat, plus-fours, cashmere overcoat, homburg, stick-pin............ He wore a rug-like wig.................... He had had brain surgery. He once played tennis in Cairo. He had gone on socialist holidays to eastern Europe. He hated Hitler”.

Theroux discovers that, after being left by the train he had collected his belongings and got to his goal, Istanbul. Mrs Jack had read Theroux's book and had put aside a copy to show Richard, but “ he had his stroke and just deteriorated. And he died. So he never saw it.”

“Thank God for that, I thought”, says Theroux.

I was moved and fascinated by this story and, in a lukewarm sort of way, decided to follow it up. I had been given “The Kingdom by the Sea” for my birthday in 1985, so my resolve was a bit of a slow-burner. But now here I was. The owner of the caravan-site where I stayed at Goxhill a mile or so from Barrow, Ian Briggs-Smith, referred me to a chap called Adrian, who apparently, was “a bit of an historian”. I went into Barrow and left my phone number with Steve, the landlord of the Six Bells, asking Adrian Rawnsley to call me. As I was waiting for the bus I saw Adrian stick his head out of his front door and I went across. He knew who I was because Steve had phoned him. We sat down in Adrian's back room and had a chat and a coffee. Adrian was fascinated by the story. When I said that it taught us not to judge by arrearances, he said something like “Angels walk among us”, which I thought was rather fine. He called another local, Charlie Denniff, who he thought might know more. Adrian, a former teacher who now makes terrariums on the site where John Harrison's workshop had stood, had lived in the village for four years, but Charlie had been born there. Charlie talked about Billy Duffill, who had kept an ironmongers shop in the village and mentioned “Dick Duffill”. Eureka! For some reason I had assumed that “Duffill” was a false name given to him by Theroux. So this was his real name. Both Adrian and Charlie thought that I should talk to Colin Heaton, who was also Barrow-born, and arranged for me to meet him at Charlie's house the following morning.

Colin knew quite a bit, and what he knew corroborated Theroux's story. “He was a small man with a very long coat trailing on the ground”. “When he came back from Istanbul he brought us some Turkish delight, but it was horrible”. The American film company was MGM. Colin also thought that Richard had worked, presumably as an interpreter, at the Nuremberg Trials, but wondered if he had mixed that story up with his work after the First World War. On Saturday nights he used to drink in the other pub, the Royal Oak, with his cronies, among them Sam Hall, the manager of Bentley's, the agricultural supplies company and major local employer, which had closed in 1992. Colin had inherited Richard's father's shotgun, but everything else had been left to his nephew, who had burned all his papers, including a number of pictures and what Colin described as a CV. My heart sank.

I took my leave of these kind, friendly and helpful gentlemen to look for his grave. When I had first got to Barrow I had met a lady in the churchyard who told me that the cemetery was just outside the village. No-one seemed to know where Richard was buried, but that was my only hope. I cycled down there and found quite a large cemetery, perhaps 300/400 graves, and a chapel. I quartered the graveyard in, for me, a surprisingly systematic way, watching in particular for more recent-looking headstones. Some went back to the early years of the last century. After an hour I had almost exhausted all my search areas when I came across a small, dingy rectangular stone, one probably of the last twenty to be examined. And here he was. I knew from the beginning that I would never meet him and I now suspected that I would never see a photograph of him, but at least now, after nearly thirty years, I had found his grave, a connection however tenuous. A simple inscription:-

Richard Cuthbert Duffill

1900 – 1980

 

 

(Cuthbert was his mother's maiden name). The simplicity of the stone and the inscription seemed entirely appropriate to what little I knew of him.

Theroux concludes his chapter on Barrow in “The Kingdom by the Sea” with a most wonderful paragraph.

“What an interesting man that stranger had been. He had seemed frail, elderly, a little crazy and suspicious on the Orient Express. Typical, I had thought. But now I knew how unusual he had been – brave, kind, secretive, resourceful, solitary, brilliant. He had slept and snored in the upper berth of my compartment. I had not known him at all, but the more I found out about him the more I missed him. It would have been a privilege to know him personally, and yet even in friendship he would never have confirmed what I strongly suspected – that he had almost certainly been a spy”.

Imagine being able to write like that. But, even better, imagine if someone had written that about you. I don't believe in the afterlife or ghosts or messages from the other side or any of that stuff but I stood at Richard Duffill's grave and read Theroux's moving tribute aloud just in case. And then I set off again on my travels.