My Tea Trolley "Op" (4 February 1977)

During the last war, Bletchley became a refuge not only for organised evacuee children, but also for a number of private people.  Some of these had been bombed out of the London area and remained here.  Others were so elderly or infirm or both that they judged it would be better for all concerned if they simply got out of the way.

One of these last was Mr Louis Isaac De Yong, who came to live in Tavistock Street in 1940.  He was a Dutchman, born at The Hague, and what interested me in him was that for 50 years he had travelled the world for Fleet Street newspapers and agencies.

Despite his somewhat exotic life, he was a nice, quiet little man.  He greeted me pleasantly enough – you could even say fraternally – but I never got round to really interviewing him.  What we had were just one or two conversations during which I found myself answering more questions than I asked.

I think his memory of times past was becoming vague.  Like many of us, he could remember his boyhood and schooldays better than all those comings and goings and great events that had happened since.  Nevertheless, he did derive some pleasure from the recollection that he had been a fellow war correspondent of the young Winston Churchill during the Boer War.

Mr De Yong was thought to be the oldest Dutchman living in this country.  I had just about got to know him when he left Bletchley for Southend to “settle down” as he called it, at the age of 89!  He was the only reporter I ever knew who lived that long.

Occasionally you meet an exceptional character when you are not actually on the job.  Some 15 to 20 years ago I had four to five days in Tindal Hospital for an operation so minor that I was able to take the tea trolley round the ward next morning.

I was in an end bed and in the next one along the line was a fine old man with whom I established instant rapport.  His home was in a village just outside Aylesbury and he had been an officer in the regular army – a major in the Lancers, no less.

He had a double-barrelled name, which I have forgotten, and everything else about him was also of double-barrelled dimensions.  He had a surgical cut all down his abdomen which was taking a long, long time to heal, but he still had more personality lying there in bed than most of us ever will have.  I sometimes detected him wincing, but I never heard him groan.

He told saucy stories to the nurses while they were tending him.  One of them expostulated:  “Really major, you shouldn’t make me laugh when I’m trying to patch you up, so stop it for just half a second, if you can.”

Right at the start he had turned me into an admiring and willing batman and accomplice.  He specially hated the bedpan and bottle business.  I told him I would help him to the thunderbox, and back if he wished.  He brightened considerably, though glancing doubtfully at my skinny frame.  Anyway, two or three times during the ensuing days we waited until the ward was clear of authority and then successfully accomplished our mission although, in fact, I could help him only a little because of his height and weight.

During our short association a former RAF officer was admitted to the connected private ward.  The major expressed surprise that he had not gone to Halton instead.  I asked why he himself was not in a private ward.  He said he had thought about it, but had decided he would rather be among other men.

He neither wrote nor received any letters while I was there.  On visiting day two people came to see him.  One was a housekeeper type of woman.  The other was a man from his local Legion branch.  There was little discourse between them.  It then occurred to me that they might well be the only sort of people he still had in the world.

And yet, as a young Lancers officer, he had escorted both the then Prince of Wales and his brother, the Duke of Gloucester, on their “nights out,” and later had been with Lawrence of Arabia!

Sic transit gloria mundi.