From Closed Circle to Fault Lines – A Life

Born in Vienna in 1936, David Pryce-Jones is the son of the well-known writer and editor of the Times Literary Supplement Alan Pryce-Jones and Therese “Poppy” Fould-Springer. He grew up in a cosmopolitan mix of industrialists, bankers, soldiers, and playboys on both sides of a family. Now, after a record number of fiction and non-fiction books, David Pryce-Jones has produced Fault Lines — a memoir that spans Europe, America, and the Middle East and encompasses figures ranging from Somerset Maugham to Svetlana Stalin to Elie de Rothschild. To elaborate on some of this broad church, David Pryce-Jones addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 20 September 2016.

FROM CLOSED CIRCLE TO FAULT LINES – A LIFE

DAVID PRYCE-JONES

It looks as if I’m going to have to talk about myself. I don’t think I know the subject too well, but I did do a very clever thing in choosing my parents. I chose two very remarkable people and I owe them a great deal. They came from very different backgrounds and, as I summed up my family in Fault Lines, they were, “not quite Jewish and not quite Christian. Not quite Austrian and not quite French or English. Not quite heterosexual and not quite homosexual.” Certainly conventional but not quite secure. Here were people not quite sure what their inheritance required of them.”

The Pryce-Jones side of my family came from Newtown, Montgomeryshire, which is a small place in the middle of Wales. If you were to go there, you would find an enormous building with “Pryce-Jones” written in letters twenty feet high on the top of it because there was a character with the first name Pryce and last name Jones. He was illegitimate and born around 1830. It says, in the Parish registry, “reputed father William Jones”. I once sat next to the local historian who said to me “Do you mind that your ancestor was illegitimate?” I said, “No, it seems a credit to him.” And he said, “Well I’m glad you said that because I’m illegitimate.”

We don’t know how Pryce Jones managed it, but by the time he was 20 he already ran a chemist shop. Pretty soon afterwards he started a cooperative marketing wool. He made a success of that and he grew larger and larger until, in the end, he pretty well had a monopoly on the wool trade in Wales. He employed 6,000 people in Newtown, an enormous number in those days. He was obviously very inventive; he invented the sleeping bag for the Russian army – which was a prototype of the sleeping bag – and he had the first mail order business in the world.

Pryce Jones became an MP and, extraordinary for that part of the world where on the whole people are on the left (today they’re all socialists), he was a Conservative member of parliament. Henry Pelling, a left wing historian, wrote an attack on him after he became Sir Pryce Pryce-Jones, saying he ran a Welsh mafia. He obviously did something pretty audacious to get the railway laid right up to the door of the Pryce-Jones Royal Welsh Warehouse. Henry Pelling claimed he went to parliament with 16 Welsh MPs in his pocket. It may be so. On one of his hustings, Pryce Jones was hit on the head by a brick, which had been thrown at him. He was knocked out on the platform. There followed a quite well known case in England. They arrested the man who threw the brick, who proved to be the paid bodyguard of the agent for the Liberals. Captain Lewis, who had ordered the brick to be thrown, was arrested and sent to prison. The judge said: “You would have heard the testimony of the scoundrel who threw the brick. On the other hand you would have heard the testimony of the honorable gentleman who has done more for this country than anyone else.” So Captain Lewis went to prison. I was walking in my local little Welsh town, Builth Wells, not so long ago when a very old man came out of a clothing shop and asked me why I wasn’t standing for parliament. He went on to muse how when my grandfather was the local MP he would pay the lads five shillings to smash the Liberals’ windows.

At the main entrance of that huge Pryce-Jones building in Wales there is an engraving in the brick wall that reads Gold Prize Vienna 1873. This is a rather surprising coincidence because another of my great grandfathers was in Vienna in 1873. My Viennese great grandfather, Gustav Springer, was the son of another illegitimate person, an orphan who, we think, as a 12 year old walked from Nuremburg to Vienna where he found employment.

Gustav inherited money from his father who worked in a bank. In 1873, there was the big crash of the Austrian stock exchange. Gustav went in to buy. Testimony from the time records that he was crazy to be buying stock that was falling so fast. But, of course, he was the only person buying on the Vienna stock exchange. And, a year later, what he bought for one was worth a hundred. He made an enormous fortune by speculating correctly on the stock exchange. Gustav Springer is responsible for a quite well known saying, which is “sell to the sound of violins, buy to the sound of cannons”.

Following powerful personalities like that is a very hard act. What generally happens is that the children of self-made people, like both these great grandfathers, try and hide – they go into the shadows. That is a partly what happened on the Pryce-Jones side. Pryce Jones’ son Harry became an English gentleman, which is a pretty fatal thing to do if you’re descended from a wealthy illegitimate child. Harry joined the British army and spent his life as a professional soldier. He was a very brave soldier; he was sent to the South African war and was awarded the DSO from a famous encounter at the Modder River, when the British Army had made a mess of it. They’d left their guns on one side of the Modder River, where the Boers were, when they were on the other side of the Modder River. My poor grandfather had to go and help rescue the guns and he got the DSO for it.

Eventually, when I did my military service, I joined my grandfather’s Coldstream Guards regiment. On one occasion, we were trooping the Queen’s colour. It was a very big ceremony and I was hidden at the back of it. Suddenly, I heard my name on the loudspeaker. It was terrifying – in front of 3000 guardsmen on parade. I froze. Everybody knew I was about to be arrested and sent to prison, the question was what had I done? Two drill sergeants marched me right across the parade ground to the general commanding the parade, General Sir Charles Lloyd. He leant forward and said, “I got my DSO with your grandfather, Harry. I’m so glad you’re here. We’ll have lunch together after this parade.” I was practically dying of fright and everybody knew that I’d had it, but all I actually had was lunch.

My grandpa Harry was a lieutenant in the Northern Nigeria Frontier Battalion. That meant he had to go to Nigeria – the only white man in hundreds of square miles. He set off on foot with 18 bearers from one particular tribe and 16 bearers from another particular tribe. There came a moment in the middle of nowhere where the people who lived in the middle of nowhere came out and made trouble. They fired arrows, and one went through Grandpa Harry’s servant’s hat. He wrote to his mother in Wales describing the scene. And there’s one sentence that reads, “I dropped a man at 80 yards.” I hesitated about putting that in. He could have been condemned as the usual imperialist criminal British murderer, etc. But, obviously, they’d been attacked and they had to defend themselves and that was what happened. During the First World War, he was in the trenches for two years.

My father Alan was a very gifted man. He wrote very well, he played the piano almost to professional standards and he lived a quite different life from his own father or his grandfather. He was cosmopolitan and not at all afraid to be himself. He went to Vienna for the music and the study and so on – in 1934, at around 26, he met my mother.

Gustav Springer, coming from an orphan and making so much money, founded, ran and financed the Springer Waisenhaus, a Jewish orphanage for boys. His daughter Mitzi, my grandmother, my mother and her two sisters and her brother thought of themselves as assimilated Jews. They were very confident that they were just like other people. They behaved like other people except that they used to go to the Jewish orphanage where there was a synagogue. On the whole, it was a light hearted thing. There was a story of my father going to a service there and forgetting to bring a hat. The hat that was offered to him was much too big and it kept on falling over his ears which caused laughter all round. It doesn’t suggest a very religious gathering, does it?

My parents married in 1934 and I was born in 1936. Alan was British and so my mother acquired British nationality. This was just as well as in March 1938 came the Anschluss. By then, my parents had moved to Mitzi’s house that you see on the cover of Fault Lines, which is in France. My grandmother Mitzi must have been one of the richest women in Europe and taxation and inflation weren’t quite so punishing as now. With Gustav, it’s hard to estimate his fortune. In modern terms it would have been hundreds of millions of euros and that’s only what you could see. He had property in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Austria. His view of investing was “land never flies away”.

Of course, Gustav was wrong. Property started flying away after 1938. They couldn’t have escaped history. The Gestapo arrived in the house in Vienna in January 1940. They took everything. There is a list of 52 pictures that the Gestapo took, on 15 January 1940. And on 16 January 1940, the head of the Art Commission in Austria, wrote to the Gestapo saying, “Where is the Van Dyke? We had it yesterday and it’s gone today.” One of the Gestapo had stolen the Van Dyke, which has never turned up.

In 1999, I got a letter from the Belvedere Museum in Vienna, because the law had changed and they were required to give back stolen property. The letter advised me that the museum had a picture from the Springer estate, which had been on exhibition there since 1943. The museum was now forced, by law, to return it. It took eleven years for them to do it. There was always some extra reason why they couldn’t quite return it. It turned up after eleven years, in 2010. The picture shows a Hungarian shepherd boy and is by an Austrian artist called Franz Alt. It’s not a valuable picture but it’s very charming. On the very day it arrived at my house, I got a letter from the director of the Belvedere Museum. He said the picture was important in the history of Austria because it was a Hungarian subject and was their equivalent of orientalism, etc. He asked would I like to return the picture. My answer was just two lines.

Adolf Eichmann was in charge of the deportation in Vienna. He rounded up all the orphanage staff and their families and the boys. Some were sent to Theresienstadt and some were sent to Auschwitz. The only one who came back was Frau Margulies, the daughter of the director. All the others were murdered. For a while, the Nazis turned the orphanage into an old people’s home for Jewish people too unwell to be deported but after a year they too were deported. Then it was considered an abandoned property and the municipality of Vienna, according to the law, appropriated the building, knocked it down and built housing on the site. There was no compensation of any kind – either to the Jewish community or the founders.

Frau Margulies had an extraordinary war. She had been in something like 13 concentration camps because they had had her down as a cook. She was put with a special SS detachment and that’s how she survived. She wrote a book which has not been published. It was a moving story, to describe how she’d been with the SS in the Yugoslavia camp, in Westerbork in Holland and in Drancy in Paris. It’s almost unthinkable.

My father spoke very good German, and he’d spent the last year of peace learning Czech. He joined the intelligence service. I always used to say to him, “Come on, you know perfectly well you were a spy.” And he would say, “I don’t remember.” I never could get him to tell me exactly what he was doing. In February 1940, he was sent to Cambridge to do an intelligence course and my mother went back to England with him. That left me in France in Mitzi’s house, Royaumont. It’s the most beautiful and wonderful house. I was looked after by my nanny.

My nanny was Jessie Wheeler. She was born in 1873 and was English. She’d been my mother’s nanny and, I can say straight away, I wouldn’t be here if she hadn’t looked after me. She was a wonderful figure. She came from very humble background. Her father was a carpenter in Oxford and she was one of seven children. They had three pairs of shoes between them. So Jessie and her siblings could only go to school when the shoes fitted their feet. She wasn’t really educated but she had, in her head, an enormous amount of Shakespeare, poetry and songs and quotations from one thing and another. She was the salt of the earth. In May 1940, the blitzkrieg started.

My grandfather had long since died and grandmother Mitzi was by then married to a man called Frank Wooster who was English and not Jewish. They made their way by car out of France while the going was good. They went to Lisbon. About two or three weeks after they’d left, my Uncle Max, my mother’s elder brother, came to the house saying we all had to go. The Germans were coming.

So, who was “we”? There was Max and his youngest sister Lily and my mother’s older sister Bubbles. Her real name was Hélène. There was also her husband Eduardo, was a Spanish diplomat, their two children and their nanny, and me and my nanny. We left in two cars from the Spanish embassy with the Spanish flag flying. Eduardo was then the Second Secretary in the Spanish Embassy. He was a very reactionary, conservative man. Not a fascist but a monarchist. My earliest memory is of being in a big black car, pressing through a throng of people staring in through the window and asking, “Who the hell are you?”

When we reach Bordeaux, Eduardo found that the Spanish consulate was shut and the Spanish consul had done a runner. There were about 1500 people begging for visas to go to Spain. You could only get a transit visa to go through Spain in Madrid. This was a Catch 22 situation. Eduardo sanctioned 1500 visas. The Spanish foreign minister, Serrano Suñer, was Franco’s brother-in-law and thought that Hitler should and would win the war. He immediately sacked Eduardo for giving out these visas. Eduardo’s name, by the way, is now at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. He’s one of the four Spanish righteous gentiles. So, now, Eduardo had charge of me. He must have given me false papers, which I don’t have today. I wish I did.

We spent some time in Cannes in the south of France, where Max had rented a house, and then we went to Spain. In Spain, I remember very clearly playing on a beach on the northern coast, and Jessie sitting on a bench next to me. I would run up and down a concrete ramp. Suddenly, there was a German soldier sitting next to her. German soldiers were allowed to wear uniform in Franco’s Spain but not allowed to carry side arms. Jessie turned to him and said, very, very loudly, “Do you think I’m going to sit on a bench next to you. Get off this bench.” And I’m sure he didn’t understand English but he saw a very angry old lady and thought it was probably a bench reserved for English nannies or some such. He saluted and went away and I knew we were going to win the war.

I’m going to read to you a tiny extract of a letter that Jess wrote to my mother. It gives you the whole character of Jess, a woman, as I told you, uneducated:

Hitler is neither master of the seas nor the skies b4ut until he is, invasion is bound to failure. The awe-inspiring courage of the British people, wrote W. Lippmann in the New York Herald Tribune in September could not be sustained if along with their brave hearts they did not also have clear heads, they fight on and are determined to fight back, not in the manner of men resisting blindly, but as men who know their position and odds and real alternatives. Only a great people could do this. The British are a great people and now they are led by a man who knows their history, and having the quality of greatness and being greatly led, their reason does not undermine but on the contrary, strengthens courage of their hearts.

My grandmother had to get papers for her properties in Hungary. She went to the German embassy where there was business to be done. It was very embarrassing to be a Jewish lady going to the German embassy. Then she went to the Hungarian Legation. On entering the office of the Minister at the Hungarian Legation, he stood up and gave her his congratulations. She asked why and he told her that her horse had just won the Budapest Derby. My grandmother couldn’t go to Hungary because she was Jewish but her horse could win the Derby. Mitzi described the sad end of that horse in her diary. Her stud in Hungary was a place called Lesvar. It was left all but a ruin by the war. When the Red Army came, a Russian major asked to ride the Derby winning horse. The workers told him that they only could fit it with a racing saddle, which was very uncomfortable to ride. Nonetheless, he got on the horse, which immediately threw him. The Russian major drew his revolver and shot it.

To survive the war, my grandmother Mitzi went off to Canada. My father, meanwhile, was stationed at Bletchley. At Bletchley, a clever collection of security people listened in to the German traffic. My father later characterised Bletchley in a memorable sentence: “Bletchley was a place where the office boys quoted T.S. Elliot and whistled themes from Bartók.”

I stayed with Eduardo and Bubbles and their two children, my cousins. Demoted because of the visas he had sanctioned, Eduardo was sent to a fishing village called Larache on the Moroccan coast. I have very happy memories of arriving in Morocco. In Cannes, we didn’t have papers. Jessie and I didn’t have food and had to rely on whatever Jessie could provide. Jessie and I became a good little team of thieves. We went into other people’s gardens and pulled up their vegetables. Jessie would find somewhere through the hedge or through the fence and say “Go on in there, go on. Get the carrots.” And I have nothing but happy memories of this; it seemed perfectly normal thing to do. But we were very hungry until we got to Morocco and then we could eat. I can remember the sensation of being hungry. It makes you want to cry and I hope never to have to feel it again.

We couldn’t live in Larache as there wasn’t any suitable housing, just shacks. Eduardo found a house in Tangier for us. A witch doctor often sat at the edge of the house. She had orange feet that were wonderfully exciting. She would bless and curse people. I played football with the Arab boys. When I went back with Clarissa, in 1968, we found was the same gardener, Muhammad Driss, who had been there when I was six. He would chase us out. He recognised me and started weeping, and I wept too. It was a very moving moment. And I think it governs my feelings about the Arabs. I owe Morocco a lot.

The house next door to us in Tangier belonged to a Berber chieftain, the Glaoui. I can remember the savage sound of music, this Arab-Berber music that would come from that house. I don’t have feelings of enmity towards the Arabs. On the contrary. I wanted to find out about the Arab world and my literary life, everything I’ve written, has been trying to get at why people believe the things they do believe. Rationality is obviously common to the human race. Logic is common to the human race. How come some people do irrational and illogical things? That’s what I was trying to answer when I wrote The Closed Circle. It’s not rational to know that you are destined to lose and then keep on repeating that. Having had it proved to them they were going to lose they do it again. I also couldn’t really believe that communists were the way they were. I could just understand that Nazis wanted a racial solution; they believed that they were racially superior to everybody else in spite of the fact that they obviously weren’t. How come people do believe the amazing things that they have in their heads? That’s what my novels are about and that’s really what The Closed Circle is about.

I went to live in Haifa in Israel in 1962 with Clarissa and our eldest daughter Jessica. I got to know Israel as what now seems a Garden of Eden, the paradise that it was then. Although, it was enclosed and you couldn’t easily travel into the Arab world. You had to go through Cyprus. But I’m glad I saw that because it was very Spartan and very cohesive. I got to know quite a lot of Arab people there as well. One of my close friends is a Christian-Arab, called Atallah Mansour. I also knew Rashid Hussein, quite a good Palestinian poet. I used to go to his house, which he shared with his mother. I never met the mother. You would see a little bony hand come around with a bowl of food at the level of the floor because she was in the kitchen cooking and she wouldn’t come and let us see her. Yet, Rashid was quite sophisticated. He read all the modern literature and yet he believed in living in this very antique manner. I wrote a book about my Israel experience.

In 1967, when Nasser moved into the Sinai Desert, I went so often to The Telegraph saying there would be a war that the editor John Anstey told me if I knew so much then I should go and report it. I arrived in time for the war and covered the Six Day War for The Telegraph. I had a kind of epiphany there. Driving in a hired car towards the Golan Heights, it was obvious that this was where the next Israeli assault would be. I passed a battery of heavy artillery hidden in a eucalyptus grove, huge guns capable of firing a shell 25 miles, big howitzers, and the ground was shaking. I got out of the car to look at it and thought to myself, if those little boys from the Springer Waisenhaus, the orphanage, had been able to call on such gunners, they wouldn’t have died. That remains with me, and has become an important element of my character.

I wrote a book about the Palestinians because it was obvious that no good was going to come from the PLO. I remember hearing Yasser Arafat make a speech on the West Bank, near Jenin. He was urging the people on to fight. Most of the people listening would lose their lives because it wouldn’t work. Yasser Arafat has been responsible for blackening the name of Israel and producing a lot of propaganda against Israel, all meaningless and bad. He was joined in that enterprise by others, notably Ayatollah Khomeini. I wrote The Closed Circle to put together my experiences of the Arabs. I’ve been to all the Arab countries except Saudi Arabia and Libya. When The Telegraph wanted to send me to Libya, the British officials advised against me saying David Pryce-Jones was a dangerous person. It’s not made me very fond of the Foreign Office I have to say.

I will close with this observation. Arabs have come to me and said, “You say very hard things about us, but you say them in a way which we can tell you wish us well, not that you wish us ill.”