Ah, the gentry….

While researching another project I came across the fascinating story of the Earl of Suffolk GC, killed defusing a German bomb – and an interesting back story about his role in WW2.

Here’s a quick summary:

Charles Howard, the 20th Earl of Suffolk was born in 1906. He was a “wild young man”, entering Dartmouth naval college as a naval cadet, but quit to sail around the world in a windjammer. On his return he was persuaded to join the Scots Guards as an officer but was shortly asked to resign for some misdemeanour or other. I think it didn’t help that he was by then covered with all the tattoos that a windjammer seaman would expect to have. So he hopped on a ship again and worked as a jackeroo in Australia for six years between 1928 and 1934.

He 1934 he married a dancing girl (as you do…..), before remarkably enrolling to study Chemistry at Edinburgh University. He passed with a first class honours degree and took a job at the Nuffield laboratory in Oxford working on “explosives and poisons”. At the start of WW2 he became a Liaison officer for the British with the French Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. His first job involved charging around France, as the Germans invaded to recover:

• Rare machine tools
• $10 Million worth of diamonds ($400 million at today’s value)
• Fifty key French scientists
• And a few bottles of heavy water that the Germans desperately wanted…

Not a bad shopping list, but he had to personally berate Marshal Petain himself to get his way. It is said he visited all the diamond merchants in Paris, ahead of the German’s arriving, persuading them to pass over the diamonds for the good of the war effort. Apparently he carried two revolvers on his person, named “Oscar” and “Genevieve” – which must have helped his argument.

He commandeered a truck and then a ship to recover the heavy water to Bordeaux. Whilst still loading in Bordeaux a Belgian banker named Paul Timbral arrived having been sent there by the British Embassy. Timbral brought two cases of industrial diamonds and found Lord Suffolk stripped to the waist, covered in tattoos from his time as a crewman on a sailing ship, looking like a pirate and speaking fluent French to give orders and crack jokes to keep everyone hard at work. As the Germans passed through France the steamer left for England, with Suffolk eventually arriving at Paddington station, unshaven, wearing a trenchcoat with his revolvers and 12 jerry cans of “special fluid”.

On his return to Britain, he worked as a researcher for the ministry of supply working on bomb disposal techniques, In a manner that only the English gentry could carry off he then assigned himself to bomb disposal units in London during the blitz, accompanied by his chauffeur and female assistant. His assistant would either stand next to him taking notes or run a wire to his limousine parked around the corner while the Earl discussed his bomb disposal techniques as he worked on the bomb over a field telephone. He successfully defused 34 German bombs but the 35th detonated and killed him.

The bomb that killed him had in fact been dropped 6 month earlier and recovered to Romney marshes. He was attempting to recover the fuses for research and training purposes. Suffolk was posthumously awarded the George Cross.