The Speedicut Memoirs: Book 2 (1918–1923): Fallen Eagles

By Christopher Joll

Book 2 of The Speedicut Memoirs picks up
Charles Speedicut’s story from the point in 1918 at which he
is about to leave for the Crimea to rescue the Dowager
Empress of Russia, a mission which he foresees will be the most
dangerous of his life to date. But Fate intervenes and sends
him back to the Middle East, where he has a hand in the end of
the war in Syria, followed by a series of adventures
rescuing members of deposed European royal families
that ends, with perfect symmetry,
in the Valley of the Kings …
“Speedicut, Lawrence and the Turks: the unspeakable
in pursuit of the uneatable.”
Field Marshal Viscount Allenby
“I am deeply indebted to Charles Speedicut for giving me
the idea for Ninotchka.”
Ernst Lubitsch
“I should have killed Speedicut when I had the chance.”
Marguerite, Princess Ali Fahmy

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jan 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781728382586

Christopher Joll

After serving time at Oxford University and the RMA Sandhurst, Christopher Joll spent his formative years as an officer in The Life Guards. On leaving the Army, Joll worked first in investment banking, then as an arms salesman before moving into public relations. From his earliest days Joll has written articles, features, short stories and reportage. In addition to the Speedicut books, in 2014, Joll wrote the text for Uniquely British: A Year in the Life of the Household Cavalry, in late 2018 he published The Drum Horse in the Fountain & Other Tales of the Heroes & Rogue in the Guards and in early 2020 he will publish Spoils of War: The Treasures, Trophies & Trivia of the British Empire. Since leaving the Army in 1975, Joll has also been involved in devising and managing major charity fund-raising events including the Household Cavalry Pageant, the Royal Hospital Chelsea Pageant, the acclaimed British Military Tournament, a military tattoo in Hyde Park for the Diamond Jubilee, the Gurkha 200 Pageant, the Waterloo 200 Commemoration at St Paul’s Cathedral, the Shakespeare 400 Gala Concert and The Great War Symphony at the Royal Albert Hall for which he wrote, researched and directed the 60-minute film that accompanied the symphony. In 2019, this led to a commission to write, present and direct five short films for the Museum Prize Trust. When not writing, directing or lifting the lid on the cess pits of British history, Joll publishes a weekly Speedicut podcast and gives lectures at literary festivals, museums, clubs and on cruise ships on topics related to his books and the British Empire. www.christopherjoll.com

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© 2019 Christopher Joll. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 12/17/2018

ISBN: 978-1-7283-8259-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-8260-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-8258-6 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Notes On The Editor

Introduction

The Speedicut Family Tree

Foreword

Chapter One: An Englishman Abroad

Chapter Two: Bombs In Belgravia

Chapter Three: A Battenberg Trifle

Chapter Four: Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

Chapter Five: Camels, Sodomy & The Lash

Chapter Six: Turks & Kaisers

Chapter Seven: Bad News

Chapter Eight: The Joys Of Austrian Dumplings

Chapter Nine: Out Of The Woods

Chapter Ten: Baggage De Luxe

Chapter Eleven: Blue Murder On The Orient Express

Chapter Twelve: As Stubborn As A Mule

Chapter Thirteen: Imperial Treasures

Chapter Fourteen: Ninotchka

Chapter Fifteen: Square Cut & Pear Shaped

Chapter Sixteen: Peter Pan

Chapter Seventeen: In The Arms Of Immorality

Chapter Eighteen: Port Limpwrist

Chapter Nineteen: Ermine For Sale

Chapter Twenty: The Valley Of The Kings

Chapter Twenty-One: The Road To The Savoy

Appendix

For

Charlotte-Georgina Speedicut

NOTES ON THE EDITOR

After serving time at Oxford University and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, Christopher Joll spent his formative years as an officer in The Life Guards, an experience from which he has never really recovered.

On leaving the Army, Joll worked first in investment banking, but the boredom of City life led him to switch careers and become an arms salesman. After ten years of dealing with tin pot dictators in faraway countries, he moved perhaps appropriately into public relations where, in this new incarnation, he had to deal with dictators of an altogether different type.

From his earliest days, Joll has written articles, features, short stories and reportage. One such piece of writing led to an early brush with notoriety when an article he had penned anonymously in 1974 for a political journal ended up as front page national news and resulted in a Ministerial inquiry. In 2012 Joll wrote the text for Uniquely British: A Year in the Life of the Household Cavalry, an illustrated account of the Household Cavalry from the Royal Wedding to the Diamond Jubilee, and in 2018 he published The Drum Horse in the Fountain, an illustrated history of the heroes and rogues of the Guards

Since leaving the Army in 1975, Joll has been involved in devising and managing charity fund-raising events. This interest started in 1977 with The Silver Jubilee Royal Gifts Exhibition at St James’s Palace and The Royal Cartoons Exhibition at the Press Club. In subsequent years, he co-produced ‘José Carreras & Friends’, a one-night Royal Gala Concert at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane; ‘Serenade for a Princess’, a Royal Gala Concert at the Banqueting House, Whitehall; and ‘Concert for a Prince’, a Royal Gala Concert staged at Windsor Castle (the first such event to be held there following the post-fire restoration).

More recently, Joll has focused on devising, writing, directing and sometimes producing events for military and other charities. These include the Household Cavalry Pageant (2007), the Chelsea Pageant (2008), the Diamond Jubilee Parade in the Park (2012), the British Military Tournament (2010-2013), the Gurkha Bicentenary Pageant (2015), the Waterloo Bicentenary National Service of Commemoration & Parade at St Paul’s Cathedral (2015), the Shakespeare 400 Memorial Concert (2016), The Patron’s Lunch (2016), the official London event to mark The Queen’s 90th Birthday, and the premiere of The Great War Symphony at the Royal Albert Hall (2018).

When not writing and directing ‘military theatre’ or editing Speedicut family papers, Joll is a Trustee of The Great War Symphony and The Art Fund Prize for Museums. He is also the Regimental Historian of the Household Cavalry and has written his yet to be published memoires, Anecdotal Evidence, an account which promises to cause considerable consternation in certain quarters.

www.christopherjoll.com

INTRODUCTION

The chance discovery in 2010 of a cache of letters written during his lifetime by Colonel Sir Jasper Speedicut to his friend Harry Flashman, led to my having the privilege of editing and then publishing The Speedicut Papers.

When I sent the last manuscript of the series to my publishers, I thought that would be the end of my involvement with Speedicut. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when shortly afterwards I received through the post the following letter and a bulky, typed manuscript:

Villa Larmes des Russes, Cimier, France, 1st April 2016

Dear Mr Joll

It has come to my attention that you are the editor of the letters of my great-grandfather, Colonel Sir Jasper Speedicut. Consequently, I thought that you might be interested to have sight of the enclosed typescript which is a salacious, probably libellous and hitherto unpublished autobiography written by his late (and illegitimate) son, Charles Speedicut, who was, by coincidence, a close friend of my father.

I inherited the enclosed document on Charles’ death in 1980 and, as he was something of a black sheep and not spoken of in my family, it has remained unread by me until recently. If you find that it is of interest to you, I might be willing to discuss the terms under which a suitably expurgated edition might be published.

Yours sincerely

Olga Lieven-Beaujambe, Duchess of Whitehall

A cursory glance at the manuscript was enough to show me that, despite the date on the letter, the covering note stated nothing less than the truth. On further reading, it quickly became clear that Charles Speedicut had been involved in as many of the intrigues and scandals of the twentieth century as had his father in the nineteenth…

Despite the Duchess’s strictures, I have limited my editing to the correction of Charles Speedicut’s grammar and spelling, and the addition of historical or explanatory footnotes.

CHRISTOPHER JOLL

www.christopherjoll.com

THE SPEEDICUT FAMILY TREE

Colonel Sir Jasper Speedicut, 1st Baronet (1821-1915) m. (1) Lady Mary Steyne (1828-1855), only daughter of 3rd Marquess of Steyne; (2) Lady Charlotte-Georgina FitzCharles (1825-1917), younger daughter of the 8th Duke of Whitehall

had legitimate issue

Dorothea Charlotte Speedicut (1865-1919) m. Prince Dimitri Lieven (1866-1919)

had legitimate issue

Princess Anastasia Lieven (1896-1919)

&

Princess Tatiana Lieven, 11th Duchess of Whitehall (1896-1955) m. Lord Tertius Beaujambe (1898-1939)

had legitimate issue

Olga Lieven-Beaujambe, 12th Duchess of Whitehall (1938-)

…

Colonel Sir Jasper Speedicut, 1st Baronet (1821-1915)

&

Sibella Halwood (1875-1941) from 1898-1910, Mrs Lionel Holland

had illegitimate issue

Charles Lionel Jasper Holland (28th February 1899-1980)

from 28th February 1916 known as

Charles Lionel Jasper SPEEDICUT

later Major C L J Speedicut MC & Bar, Order of St Stanislaus (2nd Class), Order of Franz Josef (4th Class)

FOREWORD

I barely learned to read at Eton, which is why I’m not much of a books man. So, it’s not surprising that I’d never heard of The Flashman Papers or Tom Brown’s School Days. But there’s bugger-all else to do in this dump except toss-off or read and as, at my age, the former holds few pleasures I asked the way to the library.

Once there I realised that I had a problem: where the hell was I going to start? Most of the library sections’ labels looked as though the contents of their shelves would be better than a sleeping pill: who the fuck wants to read about Philosophy, Law, Economics, Geography, Needlework or Home Improvement? I was about to give up the whole idea of whiling away my time with an intellectual pursuit when my eye caught a sign saying Biography.

As there was a sporting chance that on these shelves there would be a book or two about some of the people I’ve known - such as Philip ‘his baroque’s worse than his bite’ Sassoon, Dickie the upwardly mobile semi-royal Mountbatten, his millionaire bisexual wife Eddie, or David ‘suck my dick’ Windsor - I sauntered over for a closer look. What I found was shelf after shelf of unread tomes about people I’d never heard of who’d probably led worthy but infinitely dull lives: a bulky biography of someone called Benjamin Britten being a case in point.¹

Then my eye caught a gaudy set of spines. I pulled out the first book on the left, which was entitled Flashman. I confess that I chose it because I assumed it was about a fellow who exposed himself: it wasn’t, as I quickly discovered when I leafed through it. What it was, in fact, was the memoirs of an elderly Victorian General with a vivid imagination and a perpetually restless middle leg. I was about to put the book back on the shelf and head for the section that was sign-posted Adult Fiction when I tripped over the name Jack Speedicut.

Well, I knew I didn’t have any relations called Jack, but ours is an unusual surname so I started to read - and I carried on reading for the next half-dozen or so weeks until I’d finished the sixth and last book on the shelf.² It was good stuff and a lot of it had the ring of truth; it was even possible that the Jack Speedicut mentioned from time-to-time in the books was my Papa, thinly disguised with a new Christian name. This was a possibility that turned to a certainty when I glanced briefly through the utterly unreadable pages of Tom Brown’s School Days. However, from what I have gleaned over the years about my Papa, many of the events Flashman credited to himself were actually those of my forebear.

With the six volumes of The Flashman Papers under my belt, so to speak, I then searched for something else to while away the time but, unless one enjoyed reading about hypocritical parlour-pink Socialists or transvestite Tories, which I don’t, there was nothing further of interest under Biography. So, I turned to the Fiction section and there I found a series of books about carryings-on in high places called Alms for Oblivion by a disgraced ex-soldier called Simon Raven.³ It was clearly fact disguised as fiction and I even recognised several of the coves in it.

Anyway, the whole experience set me to thinking that my own adult experiences might make interesting reading, so I started to write. God knows if what follows will ever be published or if I’ll live to finish it. One thing is certain, however: thanks to the libel laws it won’t reach the reading public whilst any of those I’ve portrayed remain ‘above the sod’ – and there’s an appropriate turn of phrase if ever there was one…

Charles Speedicut

HM Prison Ford

CHAPTER ONE: AN ENGLISHMAN ABROAD

In the unlikely event that these memoirs are ever published it is, I suppose, possible – no probable – that some if not all of my readers will have been too mean or too lazy to read the first instalment. My heart tells me that such parsimonious slouches should not be indulged with a brief summary of what has gone before, but my head tells me that it could be a way to encourage sales. So here goes.

My scribblings started with my discovery that I was the illegitimate son of the late Colonel Sir Jasper Speedicut Bart, a Victorian soldier and courtier who had gone to his Maker in 1915 under circumstances which his loyal servants who I inherited, Atash and Fahran Khazi and Ivan Searcy, believed were distinctly fishy.

Fortunately for me, in a fit of conscience sometime after my birth, my real Papa had established a large trust fund of which, on my seventeenth birthday, I was the lucky beneficiary on the condition that I changed my name to Speedicut. I also discovered, through one of my trustees – the fabulously wealthy and confirmed bachelor, Sir Philip Sassoon - that the old boy had been a member of a secret society called the Brotherhood of the Sons of Thunder into which I was duly inducted.⁴

As a newly hatched member, I was sent by Lord Esher,⁵ the incestuous paedophile who was then head of the organisation, on a suicidal mission to Russia to help another old queen, Bertie Stopford,⁶ (readers should be warned that the book is peopled by rather a lot of old perverts) to eliminate the mad monk, Rasputin. En route my Russian servant, Ivan Searcy, and I were damned nearly drowned, along with that rampant bugger, Lord Kitchener,⁷ when the naval tub we were travelling on was sunk.

Fortunately, we were rescued by a German submarine; less fortunately, I was blackmailed into becoming a spy for the Krauts and helped by them on my way to Russia where I duly completed my mission for the Brotherhood, but not – please note - the sausage-eaters. In the meantime, Esher – on my evidence – had been side-lined for his treachery to a member of Brotherhood (me) and Sassoon made head of the organisation in his place. In that capacity, he arranged for me to be commissioned into my Papa’s old regiment, the Tenth Hussars, and then sent me to the Middle East to join Ned Lawrence,⁸ the masochistic lover of handsome camel-boys, who was leading the Arab Revolt; together we took Aqaba. This resulted in my collaring a Military Cross and being posted by the Brotherhood not to the trenches of the Western Front but back to Russia to secure the Grand Duchess Vladimir’s vast jewellery collection for that ruthless collector of diamonds and other trinkets, our very own Queen Mary.⁹

Whilst in Russia, which towards the end of my second stay there was in the grip of the Bolshevik Revolution, I managed to effect the escape to London of my half-niece, Princess Tatiana Lieven (the twin daughter of my half-sister Dorothea Lieven née Speedicut) who was duly swept up in the direction of the altar by my best friend, Lord Tertius Beaujambe. Meanwhile, I was dispatched to Paris to prise Marguerite Meller,¹⁰ an upwardly mobile French tart, off the tiny wedding tackle of the Heir to the British Throne.

The first book ended in March 1918 with the news that I was to return to Russia once more, this time to rescue the ex-Dowager Tsarina from her palace in the Crimea. At least that is what I was supposed to do…

However, for those of you expecting to read of my adventuring in Red-ruled Russia in a hopeless (or should that be pointless?) quest to rescue la famille Romanov in a bid to salve the British royal conscience, I have to tell you that, at the last minute, there was a further change of plan. I discovered this when Ivan brought me a telegram from Philip Sassoon at GHQ in France:

MISSION TO LIVADIA STOPPED BY BREST LITOVSK STOP YOUR PRESENCE REQUIRED IN MIDDLE EAST STOP WILL BRIEF ON MY RETURN STOP MEANWHILE REMAIN MOUNT STREET STOP GB

At the time, I hadn’t a clue as to who or what was Brest-Litovsk, although it sounded faintly disgusting. Nor did I know to which insanitary part of the Middle East I was to be sent or why, unless it was to recover the Prince of Wales’s letters from Marguerite Meller who was by then – so I believed at the time - resident in Egypt and about to be married to my friend-in-fornication, Ali Fahmy Bey.¹¹ I was, however, considerably relieved that I would not have to sneak out from the Crimea the bewigged old Danish trot who was masquerading as the ex-Dowager Empress of All the Russias, her daughters and the Yusupovs, as that would have been only the start of it.¹² You see, no sooner would I have beached the old girl at Buck House than some damned fool courtier would have said: ‘Well done, Speedifart, here’s the Victowian Order 5th Class - now please bugger orf back to Wussia and bwing out the west of the Womanovs. If you’re successful, I’m sure that His Majesty will advance you to the 4th Class; if not, well dulce et decorum est and all that…’

Fortunately, that was now not to be and, instead, I was headed back to the land of camels, caravanserais and circumcision. However, before I relate the tale of a damnably dangerous journey that eventually brought me to the tomb of Saladin, I should satisfy the curiosity of those of you who were hoping to read a first-hand account of the gruesome deaths of those members of the Russian Imperial Family who had not managed to make it to the Côte d’Azur, there to reinvent themselves as shop assistants and gigolos.

For the benefit of those of you who are of a squeamish turn, I will be as brief as possible or you can jump to the start of the next chapter; for the doubters amongst you who have the stomach for the tale, I hereby swear to the veracity of what follows. I can do this because I heard it from ‘you-pissed-in-our-soup-and-we-drank-it’ Guy Burgess,¹³ when – accompanied by Coral Browne - I paid him a visit in Moscow in ’58.¹⁴ The whole story must wait until its proper point in the chronology but, at this point, I can tell you that Burgess said he’d heard it (or, more likely knowing bugger-Burgess, sucked it) from the lips of a Commissar who had been present at all the executions.

More than fifty years after the event it is hard to believe that, through 1918 and 1919, the Communists’ grip on what was to become the Soviet Union was by no means secure and there remained the possibility that the Bolsheviks might be overthrown by the combined weight of the White Russian Army and their Western Allies, including a large British contingent. That is certainly what the Dowager Empress firmly believed, which is why she refused to leave her palace in the Crimea until April 1919. Indeed, as late as October of that year, White forces were only three hundred miles from Moscow and were knocking on the doors of Petrograd. However, for reasons of real politik or, perhaps, just the sheer perfidy of international politics, a mere month later the Western Allies withdrew their military support. This brought the White counter-revolution virtually to an end with only residual, and entirely hopeless, resistance continuing into 1922.

But even as late as the autumn of 1919 this outcome could not have been foreseen and a decision was taken by the Reds’ leaders, and that utterly ruthless bastard Lenin in particular,¹⁵ to eliminate all of those members of the Imperial Family who they held in captivity and whose rescue could become a rallying cause for the Whites; the manner of their elimination and the disposal of the evidence were, with appalling results, left to local commanders.

That the restoration of the Romanovs was not the Whites’ principal counter-revolutionary motivation is irrelevant to the fate of the captive members of the Imperial Family who were: the Tsar’s brother held in Perm with his secretary;¹⁶ the Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, along with four minor Imperial princelings and a Grand Ducal self-appointed nun, all held in custody in Alapayevsk;¹⁷ the Tsar, his wife and five children, confined with some hangers-on at Ekaterinburg;¹⁸ and four Grand Dukes incarcerated in Petrograd.¹⁹

The first to be topped was the Grand Duke Michael, in whose favour the Tsar had abdicated on 15th March 1917; it wasn’t long, however, before Michael abandoned the powerless position and a throne he had probably never legally occupied in favour of a quiet life with his morganatic wife. Despite this selfless act, by August he was ‘confined to quarters’, first by the Provisional Government and then by the Reds; he was never again to be at full liberty. By comparison with what was to happen to his relations, however, Michael’s execution on 13th June 1918 was relatively quick and straightforward, as Burgess told me whilst downing a crate of vodka in his dingy Moscow flat:

"Four Comrades burst into the former-Grand Duke’s hotel room in Perm, where he was being held under house arrest, just before midnight on 12th. At first, Michael refused to accompany them but then, with considerable reluctance, he got dressed; out of misplaced loyalty – or, perhaps, they were ‘closer’ than anyone thought at the time - his English secretary, Johnson, insisted on going with him.

"Once the men were dressed, the Comrades then bundled their prisoners into two horse-drawn traps which they drove to a forest near Motovilikha. When Michael asked where they were going, he was told it was to a remote railway crossing to catch a train. By now it was the early hours of 13th June. Once in the wood, the Comrades ordered Michael and Johnson to get out and take a leak. The two of them made no attempt to escape into the surrounding trees and, anyway, before they could have done so they were both shot in the back, but only wounded. Michael crawled towards the wounded Johnson with arms outstretched, but was shot again, this time at point-blank range in the head; Johnson was then dispatched in the same way. Their bodies were stripped and buried, anything of value was confiscated and their clothes were taken back to Perm and burned. Neither the former-Grand Duke’s nor his secretary’s remains have ever been found."

Next for the chop, on 17th July, were the Tsar, his immediate family and some loyal retainers who were executed by a firing squad in the basement of the Ipatiev House, then bayonetted and shot in the head for good measure (the girls’ concealed diamonds had, unfortunately for them, acted as bullet-proof vests). The bodies were then stripped, burned and their remains buried in a shallow mass grave. Sic transit the Imperial Family. What about the remaining Romanovs? I – or rather the sodden Soviet spy - will now tell you what happened to them. It’s not a pretty tale.

The day after Nicholas Romanov and his brood were executed, Burgess went on, "word was sent to the Comrades at Alapayevsk to liquidate the six Romanovs held there. Principal amongst these was the ex-Tsarina’s saintly older sister, Elizabeth. Her sadistic sod of a husband, the Grand Duke Sergei,²⁰ had been blown to bits by the Comrades in 1905 following which this German-Lutheran-turned-Orthodox-Russian-Princess had established her own order of nuns. Quite why she had been rounded up with a minor Grand Duke and some junior Romanov Princes is a mystery, but Russians have long memories and her late husband’s atrocities whilst Governor of Moscow had probably not been forgiven, besides which she was the hated Alix’s sibling. Thinking about it, the latter qualification was probably the justification for what happened to her.

"Whatever the reason, Comrade Lenin had ordered his secret police to arrest Elisabeth or Ella as she was known. She was taken first to Perm, where the ex-Tsar’s brother was being held, then to Yekaterinburg, where she spent a few days with Mr Romanov and his brood, before being joined by yet more Romanovs and taken to Alapayevsk on 20th May. Here the prisoners were held in the Napolnaya School along with Grand Duke Sergei’s secretary, Fyodor Remez, and Sister Yakovleva, from Elizabeth’s convent.

At noon on 17th July, the Cheka told the Red Army guards to leave the school and the Comrades then confiscated whatever money the prisoners had left and told them that they would be transferred that night to the Upper Siniachikhensky factory compound. In due course, the six Romanovs and their lackeys were woken and driven in carts about ten miles or so to an abandoned iron mine that had a seventy foot deep shaft. Here they were turfed off the carts, severely beaten and, one-by-one, thrown down the mine. Sister Ella was first into the void. A hand grenade was then lobbed after them to finish off those who had not been killed by the fall. Actually, only Fyodor Remez died as a result of his descent into the abyss or the Bolshevik petard.

How on earth does anyone know? I asked.

We know this because, according to my informant who was there, following the grenade blast, Elisabeth and the others started singing an Orthodox hymn from the bottom of the shaft. The Cheka boss then threw down a second grenade but to no avail as the singing continued! I was once stuck in a lift with my aunt during the Royal Meeting at Ascot, he added inconsequentially.

What’s that got to do with anything? Coral asked as my stomach started churning uncomfortably.

Only that my aunt suggested that we sing until we were rescued. Perhaps it’s what you women do in a crisis? Anyway, to finish them off, a large quantity of firewood was piled over and into the mine head and set alight. But this didn’t do the trick either as the Whites found out when they discovered the bodies three months later.

They can’t have been in much of a state, I interjected.

Actually, although they’d been at the bottom of the mine for three months – or possibly because of that fact - the bodies were in good condition. After examining the corpses, a doctor attached to the White Army’s HQ concluded that most of those tossed into the mine had died slowly from injuries or starvation, rather than the grenades or the fire. He reckoned that some of them had survived for a week or more. I was now starting to feel distinctly sick.

Elisabeth, it seems, had died of the wounds she’d sustained in her fall into the mine, but before dying she’d still found the strength to bandage the head of Prince Ioann with her wimple; they know that, because he was still wearing it when they dragged him to the surface. It’s the sort of story you couldn’t make up…, he added, as I headed to his primitive bog to throw up the borsch that Burgess had served earlier in the evening. He was still rabbiting on about the bodies when I returned a minute or two later to his tiny sitting room.

"… with the Red Army approaching, the Whites moved the remains further east and buried them in the cemetery of the Russian Orthodox Mission in Peking. At some point later they were removed to Jerusalem, where they were finally buried in the Church of Mary Magdalene."

What happened to the rest of the Romanovs? Coral asked as, to steady my nerves, I took a pull on the vodka in front of me. However, as his answer is part of my story it will have to await its proper place in the narrative. As far as the Romanovs were concerned, that should have been ‘it’, had it not been for the fact that it wasn’t long before various claimants to be the ex-Grand Duchess Anastasia started to emerge from the woodwork – or should that be mineshafts? One in particular gained considerable credibility for her claim, largely because of her detailed knowledge of the inner-workings of the Russian Court and her resemblance to the late Tsar Nicky’s youngest daughter, attributes which, as I’ve already remarked, she shared with my half-niece, Anastasia. And what had the soit disant ex- and officially late Grand Duchess got to do with my story? I’m afraid that you will also have to wait for me to relate it in its chronological place… In the meantime, we must return to late March 1918 and Philip’s telegram cancelling my Romanov rescue mission.

Enforced idleness, whether or not in the considerable comfort of my own home, has never been to my liking even – as it was - enhanced by a bulging bank balance, a well-stock wardrobe and the presence of three loyal and extremely efficient servants. That said, London during the Great War was not a bad place to be. It is true that Zeppelin raids were rather a nuisance, but I quickly found that, after the first couple of evenings trying to dodge the bombing, I - along with virtually every other Londoner - simply got on with life on the basis of carpe diem and a certain faith in the Germans’ rotten aim. Actually, I think it was more hazardous to try and cross Piccadilly in the rush-hour in 1918 than to brave the Kraut’s bombs; consequently, I never availed myself of the dank delights of the public shelters, despite reports that they were hotbeds of illicit fumblings.

Although I’d lived north of the Park with my dratted mother until 1915, in the intervening years I had spent little time in the metropolis. In consequence, I did