Matriarch’s amazing riches to rags story
The once-secret memoir of a Dutch woman who survived the Gestapo and went on to marry a penniless Welsh farmer has been published for the first time. Amanda Powell has been talking to her children about their mother’s extraordinary life
She’d been writing her memoirs for about 20 years but we didn’t know what they were like and we weren’t allowed to see them
JUST what was it that compelled a glamorous young woman from a grand house in Amsterdam to settle down with a hard-up Welsh farmer who preferred to take a bath only once a year? It’s a story which unravels in the once-secret memoir of the late Johanna Francis, who survived the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands and whose parents hid a Jewish family in their attic before later being held at gunpoint by the Gestapo.
Born Johanna Dooyeweerd, Hanny, as she was known, later came to Wales as a teenager to help a family member.
It was there that she met and instantly fell in love with a scruffy, handsome former rugby player called Robert Francis who scraped a living in an isolated 40-acre farm near Pontypool.
Almost two years after her death in 2020, the memoir she’d kept hidden from her children is now a book which throws new light on occupied
Amsterdam during the Second World War and post-war Welsh farming culture.
Hanny’s riches-to-rags life story was something her children knew something about, but they weren’t able to read the full memoir until it was almost ready for publication as a book.
“She’d been writing her memoirs for about 20 years but we didn’t know what they were like and we weren’t allowed to see them,” says Hanny’s daughter Jantien, speaking at the farm she and her brother Alan grew up on.
“We couldn’t see them until she was dead, she didn’t want us arguing with her,” laughs Jantien, who goes on to talk about her mother’s strength of character.
“To be honest, we kind of dismissed it,” adds Alan, “We didn’t think they would amount to anything.”
They thought she might have written just a few pages rather than enough material to make a compelling book, illustrated with vivid images from Hanny’s early life in Amsterdam, her husband’s army days and the often bleak surroundings of Persondy Farm.
It was only when Alan mentioned his mother’s note-keeping to his friend, the Sunday Times rugby correspondent Stephen Jones, that the book began to take shape.
Still without allowing her children to read it, Hanny agreed to pass her notes to Stephen, who became editor of the book, called Fields of Orange.
Hanny, a glamorous, creative and capable woman, had died by the time her children saw her writing in full.
“I was in absolute floods of tears when I read it,” says Jantien.
“It was curious because we’d heard quite a few of the stories before of course growing up, but one or two, I don’t recall ever hearing before. So, there was new stuff in there that we didn’t know.
“Although it’s incredibly emotional, it also painted just a nice picture of a simple life and a love story.”
It was a love story which at first didn’t look as though it would end as a long marriage.
Hanny’s parents in Amsterdam were understandably worried when they found out their teenage daughter had fallen in love in Wales and wanted to marry Robert Francis, who was 14 years older than her.
Her father, Professor Herman Dooyeweerd, was seen as the most important philosopher in
Holland’s history, renowned throughout Europe.
He was also, at Hanny’s admission, so unapproachable that his own young children had to set up appointments to see him.
Although her mother warmed to Bob, as he was known, Prof Dooyeweerd could never understand why Hanny wanted to marry a Welsh farmer.
Nevertheless, the couple had a lavish wedding in Amsterdam before returning to a bare existence together in Wales.
Life here could hardly have been more different to the wealth privately-educated Hanny had been born into in 1936.
She describes the family home in the book, a six-storey and expensively furnished house on a tree-lined avenue in central Amsterdam.
The house was big enough for several grand pianos with a large attic at the top where there was a full-sized table tennis table and a swing for the
nine Dooyeweerd children to enjoy.
But in 1940, “hellish neighbours” moved in across the road. Germany had invaded Holland and the Low Countries and the Gestapo set up their headquarters opposite them.
The Dooyeweerds’ attic and nooks and crannies around the house became hiding places for Jews and others sought by the Gestapo.
“Being so young, it is not so much the disturbing big picture that I remember, but the small things,” Hanny wrote.
“Why was my mother taping all the windows in the house with brown sticky tape, in a criss-cross pattern, leaving small squares? Clearly it was done to stop glass from shattering when the bombs started to fall...
“The Germans imposed a curfew at 8pm every evening. No lights on anywhere from that time on. All curtains had to be drawn. So no light came from any of the houses and other buildings, so as to obscure towns and cities from the ‘enemy’ planes.”
It went from bad to worse and from her childhood memories, Hanny paints a vivid and shocking picture of how Dutch people resorted to eating tulip bulbs to fend off starvation, bombs dropping, seeing a burning plane fall from the sky and Jewish people shot on the street.
Hanny and the younger siblings became evacuees in the Dutch countryside and her memories of the end of the war include seeing Field Marshal Montgomery standing in a military jeep when Amsterdam was liberated.
“I think it’s important that those things continue to come out,” says Alan.
He and Jantien pay tribute to the Dutch family’s bravery in hiding people from the Gestapo and keeping a banned radio which would have brought information on how the war was progressing.
Their mother writes about how her father was questioned by the Gestapo, and how both her parents were ordered into their garden at gunpoint looking for three men the family had hidden in their house.
“He was interviewed four times and still survived,” says Alan. “You wonder, ‘Why did he survive that? And what did he have?’
“He could speak fluent German, which must have helped, but what did he give away to the SS officers that kept him alive? He must have given them something, or they felt that he might be able to give them something.
“They [the family] were incredibly brave.” A decade after the war ended, Hanny’s life began in the farm near Pontypool where Bob scratched a living from a barely-furnished historic house and the 40-acre farm.
Hanny writes about how she set about making their home more comfortable, their debts, a constant battle against the elements and the ways they kept afloat, including running a pig-swill business and later setting up a bus company.
Some of the family pictures of Bob show a dishevelled character, and Hanny writes about how her husband would do his best to avoid washing, preferring to bath only once a year.
“Dad smelled of pig s*** and Woodbines,” Alan writes.
Bob had been a troop sergeant in the war, involved in battles in Italy and Yugoslavia.
But he barely ever talked about his army career. In the book, Alan recalls his father once coming across a dead pig on the farm “with its guts spewing out”.
“He turned away from Mam and threw up in the corner, though he had never been squeamish before. ‘Seen too much of that,’ was his only comment,” writes Alan.
Although they were very different personalities, the trauma of the war years had naturally made a deep impression, creating a shared bond and a life of isolation and hard work.
“Dad came home from the war and he didn’t want to mix with people again,” says Jantien.
“He wanted to be his own man, in his own place, and he didn’t particularly want the rest of the world coming in.
“Mam could do anything, but she didn’t like the rest of the world intruding either.
“She liked things to go her way. She was a bit of a matriarch and she liked the world to go her way.”
Alan adds: “They ran this kind of useless farm and apart from selling the stock or getting new stock in and the occasional visits from a few friends and the summers where all the Dutch family came over, there wasn’t much going on otherwise.
“So the two of them were very much on their own and they worked on the farm all day with very few other people involved.”
Hanny writes that she never once regretted marrying Bob and living in a way so different to the high society she had been born into.
After a series of strokes, Bob died in 2000 aged 78. It was 45 years after the couple had first met.
Hanny used to speak to her children in Dutch when they were small, but Bob was against this and Hanny stopped – meaning Alan and Jantien don’t speak the language.
“I go over [to Holland] about four times a year to see all my cousins but I hate the fact I can’t speak Dutch,” says Jantien. “I have tried, but it’s a really difficult language.”
Towards the very end of her life, Alan recalls how the family watched a subtitled Dutch TV programme with Hanny.
“I said to her, ‘Can you understand everything?’ and she said, ‘What? Of course I can’.”
Hanny’s children remember being in the grand house in Amsterdam when they were young and although it now doesn’t belong in the family, Jantien hopes to return something of her mother there.
“I kept a tiny amount of Mum’s ashes and once we’re free to go over properly again I’d like to write to the house and ask if I can put them in the garden.
“I’d like a little tiny bit of her to go back to Holland.”
■ Fields of Orange: A True Welsh Love Story, edited by Stephen Jones, is published by Y Lolfa, £9.99