Wartime story could rewrite key moment of history
A new book which draws on the memoirs of a former Cornish mayor not only chronicles his amazing tales of wartime adventure but also sheds new light on a ‘secret act of Balkan propaganda’ that may have helped end the Great War
FORTY years ago, the year 1981 saw the death of an elderly and much-respected resident of Lostwithiel, a small and pretty Cornish town near the mouth of the Fowey River.
The folk of Lostwithiel knew that Bob Howe had had a long career in the Foreign Office, and indeed had been no less than the last British governor-general of Sudan before its independence, receiving a knighthood with the same posting. But, given how understated and down-to-earth Howe was, they would have had no idea just how dangerous and adventurous his life was in the service of his country.
Khartoum, for instance, engulfed by tribal fighting in 1954 was a world away from the picturesque Fowey valley. There, standing within the compound of his governor’s palace, Howe watched as hundreds of rebel tribesmen, armed with swords, scaled its walls bent on his slaughter. It was not lost on him that he was standing on the same spot in the same palace where General Gordon had been beheaded in a similar incident 70 years before – only this time they were stopped and sent in reverse by a timely volley of shots from the palace guard. Howe’s chief of police was not so lucky; his throat was cut and his body thrown into the Nile.
Howe was by birth a most unlikely candidate for high office in the diplomatic service. His father was a semi-literate locomotive cleaner from Derby. Home (for five children) was a terrace, two-up-two-down “with all mod-cons out the back”. The key to young Howe’s stellar career success lay with education, something he described as the “Holy Grail of the working classes”. His primary teachers recognised his intelligence early, helping him win a school scholarship by providing him with a Latin grammar, from which he swotted while working as a latherboy in a barber shop. A later public grant of £105 enabled him to attend St Catherine’s College, Cambridge to study mathematics. But not for long, for in August 1914 he was persuaded by Lord Kitchener’s pointing finger to join his local regiment. Fortune smiled on him when his unit was temporarily billeted in Cornwall, at Lostwithiel, where he met a local girl, his soon-to-be fiancée.
The whirlwind romance had to be put on hold, when, in 1915, Howe was posted first to Gallipoli, and then to Macedonia in the Balkans, where he was shot in the chest and taken prisoner by the Bulgarians.
But at this point Howe’s dramas were only just beginning, as revealed in a new book by Graeme Sheppard, The Bulgarian Contract; the secret lie that ended the Great War. From prison-camps deep behind enemy lines, Howe and a fellow prisoner made two daring escape attempts involving nighttime climbs over mountain ranges, but were eventually caught on both occasions.
But then, in late September 1918, the friends’ luck changed. It’s at this point that the book picks up on their unsuspecting witness to momentous events. Hearing rumours that the Macedonian front had collapsed, on this occasion they simply announced to their resigned captors that they were leaving the camp. No one stopped them. The pair then spent several days travelling a hundred miles over chaotic roads and rail lines jammed with an enemy army in rebellious retreat. Largely ignored, they headed not south toward the advancing Allied forces, but instead west toward Sofia, the enemy’s capital, and a city engulfed in political turmoil.
Arriving at a frenzied rail station, they caught a horse-drawn cab to the nearly deserted Ministry of War building. There, despite their less-than-orderly attire, they brazenly announced to its staff that they were British officers and were taking control of the city in the name of His Majesty the King. No one raised an objection.
With their authority established, a ministry car and driver were summoned to take the pair to the city’s Grand Hotel, where they demanded and were provided with the best rooms the establishment possessed. An hour later, having washed and shaved, they entered the hotel restaurant, only to find it full of senior German officers gloomily eating their dinner. The hotel, it transpired, happened to serve as the German regional headquarters. Undeterred, the pair informed the maître d’ that they required the head table and would the two gentlemen seated there kindly vacate it, at which the German officers concerned rose wordlessly from their seats. Rubbing salt into the remaining diners’ wounds, one of the chums then raised a toast to the victorious Allies.
“It was a great moment,” remembered Howe. “One of the greatest moments of my life – perhaps never again one like it. One of those moments when you know there is nothing you cannot do, when no obstacles exist, when no one can touch you.”
A great moment, indeed. And yet, though they did not yet realise it, Howe and his colleague had so much more to relate. They had experienced a very peculiar captivity in Bulgaria, one of extremes, ranging from internment in the worst of punishment death-camps to that of living in virtual freedom among its peasant folk.
But their survival tale was merely a backdrop to their unique eye-witness accounts of a cunning act of Balkan propaganda, known as the Contract, one that triggered not only rebellion in Bulgaria and the collapse of the Macedonian front, but also acted as the catalyst for German defeat and the road to the armistice of November 11.
Fifty years later, Howe, by then a widower in his adopted home-town of Lostwithiel, recorded these tumultuous events in his memoirs. It was an account that went unpublished – until now.
After his death, local people unveiled a memorial to Howe on a wall of the parish church of St Bartholomew, where he worshiped. It lists his war and diplomatic service, his governorship of Sudan, and the fact that he was also their town mayor. Had it been known, it might also have included escapee and witness to the secret that ended the Great War. Read Bob Howe’s tale. Visit: www.thebulgariancontract.com/