‘WAR ROMANCE LEFT ME WITH NEW-FOUND FAMILY’
THE POSTCARDS that Michael Hassell discovered in a trunk belonging to his late mother have taken him on an overwhelming journey to meet Belgian relatives he did not even know he had.
Sent by a grandfather he never met, the collection of cards date back to the years immediately following the First World War and paint a picture of how a historic love story panned out in a time when conflict forced thousands of men, women and children to relocate, sparking new friendships and relationships among people whose paths would not normally have crossed.
Cyrille Desaeger was one of those. A Belgian soldier, Cyrille spent time in Britain recuperating from wounds in convalescent hospitals during the Great War. It was a period that led him to meet Elizabeth Wark – Michael’s grandmother, though exactly when and where remains unascertained. In 1918, Lizzie, as she was known, fell pregnant with Cyrille’s child. Unmarried, and fearful of telling her father, she was sent by her mother and sister to the family’s native Northern Ireland where she gave birth to Margaret, Michael’s mum, in Londonderry the following year, before returning to England.
“Cyrille never got to see Margaret because he’d gone by the time they came back, so he never saw his daughter,” Michael, who lives in Headingley, explains. He did keep in touch though, writing loving postcards to Margaret and Lizzie, whom it is believed he wanted to marry, until 1924. “When you read the cards, it seems he thought the relationship was ongoing. He was expecting them to go Belgium. The cards were saying ‘won’t it be great when you’re over here with me’ and ‘when are you coming?’ and ‘when you’re here next Christmas we will do this’, but Lizzie never went.
“I don’t know if she was as committed to the relationship as he was or whether she was just being practical, because in 1924 he was still in a (convalescent) home, he had no home, he had no job and he had only a meagre war pension to support them.”
Michael grew up knowing little about his maternal grandfather; he was aware his mother was illegitimate and that his grandfather was a Belgian soldier, who he was told had spent time recuperating from war wounds at Leeds’s Temple Newsam stately home, used as a convalescent hospital during the war. He discovered the postcards amongst his mother’s belongings following her death in 2008. “I might have seen them before, but I don’t remember there being a big thing made of them and I certainly hadn’t seen them for 20 or 30 years.”
In 2014, with the centenary of the start of the war, Michael began to think more about their significance.
He showed them to his neighbour, a historian, who passed them on to Professor Alison Fell at University of Leeds, who was advising on an exhibition on Temple Newsam and its history as a convalescent home, as part of university centenary project
The postcards, and what Michael knew of Cyrille’s story, became a central part of the display in 2015, though no more about his life was uncovered until January this year. During a trip to Belgium, Alison looked at Cyrille’s military file, revealing, amongst other details, that his hometown was Sint-Gillis-bijDendermonde in East Flanders.
She wrote to the area’s town hall to ask for information about Cyrille and his family and passed on a letter from Michael to give to relatives in Belgium that could be traced. In the end, six of his grandchildren made contact and Michael learnt that his grandfather, who died in 1982, returned to his hometown, married in 1927 and went on to have three more children.
Of Margaret and Lizzie, Cyrille’s grandchildren had no idea, though one relative said some members of the family were certainly aware. “She remembers the story coming out when his wife found out that he had another woman and a child in the UK and, to put it politely, the balloon went up... there was a big uproar and it was decided it would never be mentioned again.”
Michael visited Belgium to meet his long-lost relatives in July, a trip that was filmed by the BBC, who had been contacted about his story by the university, for a section due to feature on the
programme at 7.30pm tonight. “It was all very easy,” he says.
Born in September 1893, the son of a peasant farmer, Cyrille was one of nine siblings. At the outbreak of war, he was doing his compulsory military service and was drafted into the army in August 1914. The following month, he was wounded by shrapnel and was treated in hospitals in Belgium, before being evacuated to England in October for further medical care. From December, he is then listed as being on leave without pay.
In 1916 and 1917 he went to convalescent and training camps in France, before returning to England in June 1917. It is thought that this is when Cyrille meets Lizzie, a domestic servant working in Beeston.
Through meeting his relatives, Michael, 71, has discovered that at least two of Cyrille’s siblings were also in Leeds as refugees.
“Cyrille’s relatives are also in the UK, at least some of them for at least some of the time, and that might explain why he ends up in the Leeds area,” Alison says. “It’s not surprising that his other family members were in England because where he comes from in Belgium, it was absolutely the heart of devastation.”
After Margaret’s birth, Lizzie, who never married, resumed working as a live-in servant on her return to England, going off to Otley and into the Dales. “My grandmother in the end, my mother tells me, took to wearing a wedding ring and pretending to be a war widow,” Michael says. “But even so,