I haven’t found anyone in Rolleston who has heard of this woman. Neither had I before 2017.
Since then I have learned a lot about her using the internet and Burton Library. There is still a bit of a mystery about her.
In Autumn 2017 I was browsing online for a historical topic to study in the long winter evenings. There was a knock at the door and, knowing that I was interested in the history of the village, one of the long-established villagers had called to show me some photographs recently converted from slides. Treasure Trove! One of them caught my eye particularly because it showed an old picture of a house called, in those days, Oak House, (later Oak Cottage and later still Apple Acres). Somewhere in my memory I had heard the name before but not connected to the people we had been talking about…
After my visitor left, I set to work. I scoured my notes, newspaper clippings and books and I racked my brains. Something was nagging away that I just couldn’t put my finger on. A cup of strong coffee was needed. Then something just clicked. Some time ago I had been sent an article about treehouses and it was in my “pending” file (a heap really that I must get around to filing some day). Scrabbling through the unsorted pile I eventually found what I was looking for. I had been sent an extract from a book about notable tree houses in England.
A tree house had been built in an oak tree in the garden of one Oak Cottage in the village of Rolleston. It informed me that the girl it was built for was Josie Shercliff, and she kept a diary. One of the entries reads, “One day I came home from boarding school to find that Father had built me a little hut in the fork of one of the giant oaks which gave our home its name. It commanded from its four windows a large stretch of the garden, paddock and house and made an excellent lookout for the arrival and departure of visitors. . . (The access) leading to my airy hideout prevented intrusion from even the hardiest family visitors. An elaborate spiral stairway – part of an old debt to Father paid in scrap-iron – proved to be a barrier against most intruders. I was relatively safe. I spent most of my school holidays entirely in the hut only creeping into the house for an early morning shower and breakfast. I slept there on a roll-up canvas bed and cooked or warmed up meals over a perilous oil stove. I was supposed to be studying but in fact, was reading, writing, dreaming and turning a deaf ear to all cries from the house for me to come for dull meat and vegetables. From an early age I had been privileged to listen to poetry and prose read by my father. . . By the age of six I was already writing lyrics in a hymn-like rhythm, and by eleven I was pouring out screeds of longer poems. In the “skyey” freedom of the hut I became more and more prolific. Some of these passionate outpourings survive. Now they evoke nostalgia for vanished happiness in my Oak Tree hut.”
This tree was so notable that a black and white postcard of it had been produced and this is my photocopy of it.
Pic
Who was this girl and what became of her?
I began by asking the older villagers. One or two vaguely recall a Mr. and Mrs. Shercliff living at “Cornerways” on the corner of Anslow Lane and Knowles Hill around the time of the Second World War. They especially remember Mrs. Shercliff who cut an elegant and imposing figure always in a long flowing dress. Not one of them remembers a daughter.
(I know quite a bit about this couple – remarkable in their own ways both in the village and surrounding area, but that is for another time. That Mrs. Shercliff did not have any children, but she was the second wife and her husband had children from his first marriage. The youngest was named Josephine, a name she did not like and soon shortened it to “Josie”)
Josie was born in Burton in 1902. The family lived in Shobnall Road. Later they moved to Blackpool Street and in 1915 moved to Rolleston where her father leased a house at the bottom of Knowles Hill from Sir Oswald Mosley. In those days it was called “Oak House” or “Oak Cottage”. Nowadays it is “Appleacres”. He bought it at the 1919 sale of the Rolleston Estate.
Josie went to Guild Street School where I found she represented the school in the Town Swimming Gala. By the time they lived in Rolleston she was a boarder at Lincoln Girls’ High School
In the Burton Mail Archive I found Josie taking part in several charity events during WW1 singing, dancing “Jockey”, and performing in sketches such as “Matches”, “Santa Claus” and “Aunt Mary’s nerve cure,” often with a small group of friends. At these events she was usually accompanied by Mrs. Shercliff who wrote and performed in many of the sketches.
(In her later years Josie confided to relatives in Australia that during the First War she had fallen madly in love with an Australian soldier who was killed during the conflict and buried in France and revealed a moving poem she had written when he died in 1919.)
She told people that she had been to Oxford University and been awarded “a not very good degree”. You might have thought that would be recorded somewhere. Maybe these days lists would be published online. No such luck but, I had an online subscription to britishnewspapersarchive.co.uk and found her in a range of newspapers, anywhere but Derby and Burton it seemed. In December 1921 there was list of those who had been successful in the Oxford and Cambridge Higher Certificate examinations which included a J. Shercliff as one of five girls in the Upper Sixth at Lincoln Girls’ High School. The Bodleian Library Oxford which holds the University Archives provided more information. She had indeed attended Lincoln Girls’ High School and that she matriculated on 19th October 1921 but not in a college – She was a member of The Society of Oxford Home Students, who lived in private houses and attended lectures. In due course they took examinations and were awarded degrees. The first women graduated in 1920 so this was all very new, pioneering in fact.
The degree of BA was conferred on her on 16th October 1924 having studied English Language and Literature in the Final Honour School.
I have been unable to trace any woman from Rolleston who became a graduate before this date. Surely, José deserves to be celebrated and remembered for that alone, but there is much more to follow.
In her own words she claimed to have become a journalist “by the back stairs” after starting as a secretary at the Daily Express. In their archives I found what are possibly her first published articles under her own by-line in 1931. She used the name José. Was that to sound more masculine, perhaps making it easier to get published, or to appear more “foreign” and mysterious? She was writing about fashion and from a male point of view. She imagined exchanges between a girl called Daphne and her uncle.
This is the earliest found so far is from Wednesday December 23rd. 1931.
Twenty years ago, when I first met Daphne, two plump, corn-gold pigtails danced over her shoulders, tied with scarlet bows.
“I wish I were a boy,” she said, “then I could have short hair.”
“Nonsense,” I said like a true bachelor uncle. “Woman’s crowning glory …”
In 1915 women began to “bob”. “How horrid,” said schoolgirl Daphne tying up her tresses in one thick plait. “I shan’t ever cut mine.”
In 1917 she had forgotten that, and a bob of short golden tendrils curled round the nape of her white neck.
“My dear, look at that woman!” said the 1921 Daphne, pointing to the first shingle. “Isn’t she just too quaint?”
Nevertheless, a couple of months later Daphne’s head was the slickest Eton crop.
Of course, that didn’t last. Curves came in, and a strange combination half curl, half bun, evolved in the nape of Daphne’s neck.
Came the beret, a spot of crochet perched precariously at the back of a riot of curls.
“Desperate, my dear,” she cried, as she flashed into my office on the way to the hairdressers. “Quite impossible with this, don’t you think? “Must have it off.”
For quite six months she varied between a curve, a wave and a wave and a curl – and then she bought a Eugenie hat.
“No good, my dear, must have a couple of inches off. Can’t bear a girl to look untidy, can you?”
That was six months ago.
Yesterday I met Daphne looking rather like a naughty small boy who had been drawn through a hedge backwards.
“Feathers in the wind, darling,” she cooed angelically, patting the latest coiffure. “Isn’t it fun?”
I wonder if this was autobiographical or at least comment on the changes she had seen as she emerged from school to Oxford University to working in London over a space of fifteen years. Maybe she really felt like Daphne, or, perhaps, coming from rural Staffordshire, was aware how trivial and superficial this was. In any case she progressed to writing short articles for the Daily Express on the season’s fashions. such as.
A year later she had abandoned the idea of a conversation in favour of an objective description of the fashions for the summer. In 1932, she wrote,
PLAIN swimming suits for the bather who is business-like. The plain dark suit however, has a brightly coloured belt of the same wool, which matches a beret that can be slipped on over untidy, straggling locks.
The latest fad is a lace or embroidered pique collar on a bathing suit. This is not for the serious swimmer.
A STRIPED gipsy sash is tied round the waist and a similar one knotted round the head, while idling on the beach.
Some bathing suits have a little gaily coloured woollen bolero or triangular- shaped scarf to slip on while waiting to bathe. Others rely on a vivid square of silk or spotted shantung for their colour effect.
The bathing cap takes on every hue under the sun. Some resemble a big sunflower, some a whole nosegay; while the most amusing are those made to look like a wig.
Wide, floppy straw hats with red and blue stripes running round the brim. Coloured linen hats that shade the back of the neck. Chinese coolie hats or tasselled pirate caps in brightly coloured silk.
Sandals of coarse linen brightly coloured spotted or striped that can either be removed when bathing or kept on in the water.
THE bather’s jewellery consists of necklaces of flowers made in strands of rubber, painted cork beads and bracelets; and flowers made very realistically out of rubber are pinned on the shoulder of the bathing suit.
BEACH pyjamas are more and more nautical in self coloured linen with red and blue stripes worn with an American sailor’s linen cap perched on Theron back of the head. Big silver and gold buttons on little jackets. Trousers rather like workmen’s “blues” which slip s over the bathing suit.
Bathing wraps in every variety of towelling in flowery coloured designs or the popular season’s multi-coloured stripes.
This was followed, at roughly weekly intervals, by other articles about the current fashions.
(Slide 10)
Change came by the middle of 1933. She was writing in similar vein now for the Daily Herald, which at the time was the world’s best selling daily newspaper, selling over 2 million copies daily. And she was writing from Paris. and her articles were no longer confined to what was clearly a women’s page in the Express.
By 1935 she also published occasional short stories in the same newspaper.
I thought that was it. She was a successful newspaper fashion reporter, now in her thirties. No doubt she would go on to lead a pleasant, comfortable life. To be honest I was a bit disappointed. Fashion is not really my thing, so I thought I would leave her and look for another subject to study. I would just check her next article. I was pleased and surprised with what I found.
(Slide 10)
1936 saw a complete change. The Daily Herald had sent her to Barcelona to report on the People’s Olympiad (a planned international cultural and multi-sport event that was intended to take place in Barcelona, the capital of the autonomous region of Catalonia within the Spanish Republic, which was conceived as a protest event against the 1936 Summer Olympics being held in Berlin, which was then under Hitler’s rule. It never took place because the Spanish Civil War broke out). José was on the spot. She had a “scoop” especially writing from the republican side with its left wing government fighting General Franco’s Fascist rebellion.
Friday July 24, 1936
Here is what has happened in Barcelona during the fateful days since last weekend.
On Sunday I was awakened by the crack of rifle fire. From my hotel I saw people running across the square. Behind a tram, police and red-armletted workmen were kneeling and firing.
During the intervals of the fighting the marksmen would rush to a coffee-stall across the avenue, hastily swallow a cup of coffee and a sandwich, and rush back to their posts.
From behind every tree in the avenue was posted a workman with a rifle, while snipers from a roof kept up a continuous barrage.
Presently came the boom of heavy guns.
In the main telephone exchange, the workers stood at bay, desperately trying to save the plant from falling into Fascist’s hands.
The roof of the building was wrecked, and the windows riddled with bullets, but the workers held firm.
I saw a man fall in the middle of the square and lie horribly still.
A policeman shot down in the front of my hotel lay grotesquely on his back for hours before an ambulance came.
Private cars – all commandeered – raced through the city, bristling with guns. Others had been fitted out as ambulances.
In the late afternoon there was a concentrated attack. The hotel shook, and the terrified guests kept huddled in their rooms, barricaded with mattresses.
Just opposite the hotel I saw a young workman, with a rifle, crouched behind a tree. He had been marked by snipers. He could not move, but he kept up a desperate volley of shots. We could do nothing to help him.
On Monday morning I awoke to the sound of a plane circling round the hotel. Suddenly there was a burst of gunfire, and the machine flew away.
Many centres of the rebellion had by now surrendered. Several regiments had been disbanded and the officers imprisoned.
I wanted to send a cable. A Socialist with a gun offered to escort me to the post office.
We set off, a strange procession, creeping along the streets close to the houses.
Each time a patrol car passed we gave the clenched fist salute.
My escort, who carried his gun cocked at a dangerous angle, inspired more anxiety than the possibility of gunfire from around.
We were given the number of a rebel car, which had just been sighted, and were ordered to pass the word along that it should be fired on at sight.
Many lorries and cars passed, barricaded all around with mattresses to make them safe from ambush. In many streets workers lay in wait behind barricades of stones and sandbags.
We saw women fighting side by side with men. I noticed a girl who could not be more than 16 standing ready to operate a machine gun on a lorry.
Girls with guns slung over their shoulders patrolled the streets.
In the Plaza Espana, where 2000 of the Olympic entrants were staying, a shell dropped and killed 20 passers-by.
A white-haired woman Communist leader, told me a heroic story of how she saved the life of a rebel general after the siege of the police headquarters.
So furious were the Loyalist fighters with the general that they wanted to shoot him immediately.
The authorities therefore sent her to save him so that he might be given fair trial before a court-martial.
Followed by the crowd, who stormed round the car shouting “Death to The general,” the courageous woman leader made her way. She spoke to the fighters, begging them to spare the General’s life.
…
She told me of places where the rebels had put up white flags – indicating surrender – and had then turned machine-guns on the people as they approached.
On Tuesday orders were given for all shutters to be left open since a round-up of rebel snipers was to begin, any house with closed shutters would be fired on at sight.
There was some burning and pillaging by desperadoes not under the control of the People’s Front.
Ships in the ports were looted. I saw furniture and valuables thrown out of the windows of a burning convent.
A palatial mansion was seized by Communists as their headquarters. The luxuriously furnished rooms were full of fighters, asleep on deep divans, resting on gold chairs
I was caught in a shooting affair in the streets.
Rebel snipers on the roofs started a concerted attack and for hours we had to wander in narrow thoroughfares, dodging as bullets were fired behind us.
Shops which refused to give goods to fighters were pasted with notices threatening looting.
Yesterday, the head of the Catalan Government, paraded through the town in an open car, greeted with wild cheers.
The Italian Consulate was burned yesterday.
A Public Safety Committee was set up to protect citizens in the event of looting.
British warships have evacuated citizens from Malaga and Alicante, we hear.
British bank managers are spending all night guarding bank buildings.
There has been no shooting so far today, but armed patrols are still dominating the streets.
In the next day’s paper came another despatch.
Daily Herald Saturday July 25, 1936
As far as Catalonia is concerned, the trouble is over.
Life here is becoming normal. Shops, cafes and restaurants are open, following a manifesto of the Trade Unions calling on their members to resume work.
Railways, telephones and postal services are all working.
The recruiting of the Workers’ Army is being carried out with enthusiasm.
I was at the recruiting office this morning and helped the soldiers in fitting their armlets.
I saw how the newcomers were taught to wear their uniforms, which consist of a black or blue smock, fibre sandals and steel helmet There are many women soldiers, while thousands more women have volunteered as nurses.
The members of the new militia are officered by members of the army loyal to the Government, by Civil Guards and Storm Troopers.
A “heroic” detachment led by a woman Communist leader, left today for the front.
Civilians bring bread and meat to the men leaving for battle.
Many foreigners who came to the People’s Olympiad have enrolled in the Workers’ Army. Others will organise, tomorrow, a big international demonstration against Fascism.
Many cars and motor-coaches have been commandeered for the transport of the Workers’ Army to the front.
It is reported here that Fascists have killed scores of workers in Saragoza.
Free meals are being distributed to the workers. Municipal pawnshops have returned pawned goods to the owners free of cost.
All the Left Parties have practically merged.
The prisons have opened to let out men who are prepared to fight.
The various bullfighters’ unions have offered their services unconditionally to the Government.
Three weeks later
Then we heard that the British warship, the London, was hurrying from Malta to stand by. A French boat was in port to take off its nationals.
Already the Consul was ordering all British subjects to leave. Every car that had not been commandeered by the militia was commandeered by the consulates for the evacuation of foreigners.
Voluntary drivers worked devotedly day and night. Every consulate was mobbed by a hysterical crowd of men and women anxious to leave. Many who did not wish to go were warned that it was in their own interest to do so.
Two days before my departure I was thrown out of militia headquarters as a spy!
I had merely asked a few straight questions about the actual situation when a young commander, excitable no doubt after days and nights of fatigue, suddenly turned on me and accused me of being a foreign agent. It took all the tact of which my companion and I were capable to persuade them of our good intentions.
After nearly three weeks in Barcelona there came the moment when I had finished my work and must return home. (Slide)
The (destroyer) London was still in the bay. I decided to take advantage of it.
So, we left Barcelona after nearly three weeks’ vivid intense living in the heart of its struggle for liberty.
We left it outwardly tranquil making every effort to resume the normal way of life.
But underneath surged unrest. The Government, newly formed, was already tottering. Growing tension between political factions in Catalonia increased the revolutionary aftermath in the victorious left-wing citadel.
As we left in the grey morning mist, a splendid dawn was breaking over Barcelona.
May it be symbolical of the dawn of an era of peace for the people of Catalonia.
As the world soon knew that era of peace never came. Franco’s Fascists eventually prevailed after much bloody fighting. The left wing dream was crushed.
(Slide 10)
Back in London in 1938 she was once again reporting on topics of interest to women including fashion before later that year she returned to Paris where similar light pieces were produced. She produced longer pieces about adventures during her recent times; “Café Drama,” and, “Meet the Lebruns of France,” All these light articles about the fashion scene in Paris for the Daily Herald to lighten the mood as the city struggled to give an appearance of normality in troubled times culminating in this one.
(Slide 10)
Thursday 14th. September 1939
PARIS (blacked out) is Still gay
PARIS, City of Light has become just one more of today’s cities of darkness. But there is no darkness of the spirit here.
Maybe, it is a little queer for us, as night falls, not to see the city picked out with gaily lighted café terraces, the Place de la Concorde ablaze with its old-fashioned lamps, the Champs Elysses looping up to the Unknown Soldier’s tomb like a necklace of gleaming jewels.
But the café terraces are still crowded. There are laughter and music. People still stroll up and down the Boulevards and wide avenues in the warm summer air. And if there is sadness in many hearts there is no gloom.
The citizens of Paris have excelled themselves. Life is going on normally, even if officials patrol with gas masks and tin helmets slung over their shoulders: even if our gay curtains have been replaced by black blinds.
The spirit of the streets is the same. The big stores are still gay, their outside counters piled with summer materials, with shoes and parasols and bottles of scent.
Restaurant are in full swing, although in many of them two-thirds of the staff have already been mobilised.
Many of the small shops, family affairs for the most part, are closed today, for out of many families, father and son have both left together for their posts.
The largest sales are, of course, all sorts of A.R.P. materials.
But beauty products, too, are finding a rush sale. The Parisienne, true to tradition, is determined to look her best, come what may.
Out of the forty-six tenants in my block of modern ferro-concrete flats, only three of us are remaining. But the concierge, a large, jolly woman whose husband left today to join his regiment, is staying on to look after us.
“Someone has got to see that you’re comfortable,” she said. “And it’s nice to know you’re here.”
Paris, like London is just determined to “carry on”.
However, on Saturday 16th October 1939 she filed a report from the French front line, With a very small blurry picture of her. The first I had seen.
(Slide )
I have just visited an advanced French outpost “Somewhere in Germany”, one of France’s typical detachments on the further side of the Maginot Line.
It was a strange journey to this lonely spot, only 300 yards from the German line.
But the outpost was lonely in appearance only, for every mile of wood was packed with hidden men and weapons.
As we approached the front we began to overtake convoys going up.
We passed columns of men. Some bearded and mud-splashed were returning from three weeks in action.
Others, grim faced and silent, were entering the line.
Long before we reached the Maginot Line strong defence centres were pointed out to me.
There were underground fortresses and cunningly camouflaged batteries of heavy guns.
There were invisible munition dumps, networks of anti-aircraft guns, parks of armoured cars and fields of barbed wire entanglements.
“My men have to be navvies as well as soldier,” said one captain.
The men hidden in their battery so well that peasants passing along the road did not know that it was there.
As we stopped to speak with the captain, a leafy wood moved slowly towards us.
I thought of Macbeth and Birnam Wood, for it was a detachment of men moving slowly over the landscape under the cover of green branches held over their heads.
Everywhere were underground shelters for the men, one of them with a group of cheery Privates sitting beside it eating their lunch.
The had christened it “Nid d’amour” – “Love Nest”. Now we had passed the last inhabited village. From here on the grimness of war grew with every mile.
We sped through hamlets which the peasants had to leave at two hours’ notice.
All they could take was a bundle of personal belongings, or perhaps a horse and cart.
I saw a child’s rusting bicycle parked between two military lorries.
Pigs wandered at will in the empty village streets.
Now we were near the region of “asparagus beds.”
These are the rows of railway lines dug in the ground and sticking up unevenly so that tanks trying to pass over them would have their caterpillars stripped.
Finally, we were beyond the Maginot Line. As we rose over the crest of a hill Germany lay spread before us,
Here was the region where batteries change their stations every day so that the enemy cannot trace them.
Guns were trained on all bridges, ready to blow them up at a moment’s notice if necessary.
Every yard of the roads was covered by the guns of the Maginot Line.
When our car stopped on the edge of a wood I was warned to move silently as we crossed into the eerie silence of the thick trees which hid the French outposts in Germany.
Here I found a gallant little band of men – only one of hundreds – who sleep by day in underground dug-outs and work by night entrenching and wiring.
At the slightest sign of activity on the other side of No Man’s Land they sound the alarm which brings machine guns and artillery crashing into immediate action.
I peered in the gathering dusk over this no man’s land. There was no sign or movement.
But, in the distance, I could hear the sound of shelling from the French side.
By 1940 the mood was more sombre. She wrote a brief article about preparations for war. But the French government was confident that the Maginot Line would protect them.
As we now know, it did NOT. The German Army did not try to break through the heavily fortified Maginot Line they went through Belgium, Luxembourg and Holland and drove around it and France surrendered. Jose had to make a dash across the channel.
(Slide 10)
She described her feelings and actions.
The queer things that people collect from their possessions when they flee their homes.
When I was given only a few hours’ notice to leave Paris – after having made it my home for thirteen years – I was able to take with me only one suitcase.
When I unpacked it in London I was surprised to see what unsuitable trifles I had salvaged from my simple but adequately equipped existence. Here is my list.
One suit, one frock, a handful of underwear, a pair of roped-soled sandals that don’t fit, two chiffon nightgowns, a beach robe, six stuffed monkeys, camera, a portable typewriter, Shakespeare’s sonnets, Browne’s Religio Medici, Humbert Wolfe’s poems, air raid kit, the office petty cash book and a lace handkerchief.
Not much with which to start life afresh.
Others had provided more adequately for the future.
On the roads out of Paris you could tell the people who had prepared for flight with more foresight and those who had bundled their goods in at the last minute.
You could tell too which possessions had been deliberately packed and the trifles rammed hugger-mugger into odd corners.
The beady eye of a teddy bear peeping from between two suitcases, an aspidistra wedged into a roll of blankets, a scattering of books, a cherished piece of crockery tucked into a coat pocket.
One couple had entirely filled the back of their car with clothes thrown pell-mell and stacked to the roof. A grey-haired woman clutched a caged canary, hens in perforated cardboard boxes were securely tied to the wings of another car.
Some had taken so little and some had taken much. Many had only a bicycle or a perambulator with which to flee and carry their all. One party in a Hispano towed a smaller car carrying all their baggage.
Most pathetic of all were the peasants in their carts, the man leading his horses, his dog walking to heel.
On a pile of blankets sat the family, their household goods stacked round them – tables, chairs, old-fashioned lamps, cooking utensils, pots and pans.
Some farmers had salvaged their tractors, harnessed huge haycarts to them, and removed their household goods and farm implements bodily.
Well, the irrevocable choice has been made the key turned in the lock.
“On a les fermes aux veux en fermant sa porte,” said an old peasant, a fellow refugee as we sat munching a sandwich at the roadside, “We can’t help weeping as the door is closed…”
When the tears have been smudges away, there remains only in the mind’s eye a picture of what was home.
To me it is a tiny, airy flat among the roofs of Paris, a kitchen gay with blue and white spotted crockery and scarlet saucepans, a bathroom hung with curtains of striped Basque linen.
There was a room with a divan, a desk and a scarlet table, with green bookshelves crammed with books, a bunch of roses from the Maginot Line, …
There were few but much-loved things in that room whose beauty was precious to me.
After all, maybe this is the best way to hold one’s precious things – in the mind’s eye.
Jose had made it to London, safely, but, this was WAR.
(Slide 10)
She didn’t stay long. The Daily Herald sent her to Portugal which was a hotbed of intrigue but not involved in the war. This was her departing article which is both encouraging to and admiring of the Londoners she has lived amongst and was leaving.
24th October 1940
I set out for Lisbon on a real London autumn day … grey sky, soft, misted outlines; the yellow leaves thick upon the grass.
Those leaves were brilliant green when I arrived – for this has been no flying visit – no quick week-end dash from Paris. And this time there have been no pleasant theatres and dinners and family gossip; no loitering before the brightly lighted shops.
Yet, for the first time, I, an inveterate Parisienne, have been happy in London. Because of you Londoners … you, who upon bomb-scarred London, are building something so high, so fine, so permanent, that it must be the rampart of the future against the destructive forces of evil.
Even as I left London, the sirens were wailing their warning. Here and there among the penultimate suburban high road I saw the rescue squads at work on a bombed building, victim of the previous night’s raid.
But round them, Londoners were calmly going about their daily work. Women were shopping, clerks in offices were bending over their books, factories were carrying on.
Only the children, our guardians of the future, had been hurried into shelters by parents and teachers.
Now when I arrived four months ago as a refugee from France the London Blitzkreig had not begun. Everybody was kind to me as they were to the thousands of English and French soldiers and civilians who arrived harassed and destitute.
I was struck by the Londoner’s calm – I might even say apathy. After months of war in France, with the enemy advancing ever nearer to the gates until night brought the steady roar of cannon and the acrid fumes of explosives and burning forest; after days of following a fugitive Government, the enemy hard upon our heels, it was strange to step into your atmosphere of seeming indifference to active warfare.
I thought you were all half-asleep. Perhaps you were. But never was there so grand an awakening!
Today you have your own days and nights of horror, your own refugees – homeless and grief-stricken but by no means intimidated.
For weeks I have been living among you. I have toured your devastated areas, your bombed hospitals and schools, talked with your homeless.
I have seen grief and anger, strain and anxiety. But no panic or wavering.
Everywhere I have met courtesy and cheerfulness. Certainly, the renowned phlegmatic character of the British is standing them in good stead today.
George is typical of it. George is the taxi driver who came each night to collect the helpers at the French soldiers’ club where I have spent my spare time.
However murderous conditions were in the streets, George was never late – and he always has a cheerful smile.
His house has no windows any more. One wall of it is cracked and a shell cap came through the roof the other day.
But, “They’re not going to get me out like that,” is all he says. Thank you for that, George. I’ll never forget it.
And London, I shall tell Lisbon, is full of people like George – people to whom the slogan “Carry on,” is more than an idle phrase.
Look at the doctors and nurses – magnificent examples of devotion and courage.
Look at the A.R.P. workers, the firemen, the ambulance drivers, the engineers who kill death itself as they render live bombs harmless.
Look at the factory and office workers just carrying on with their jobs.
I am sincere when I say that I was sorry to be leaving London under Blackout and the Blitzkreig.
I have come to a country where, for a moment at least, there is peace. I have exchanged grey skies for blue.
But my thoughts will be constantly in London – with the people I am honoured to have met.
Her first article from Lisbon on 31st July 1941 described conditions in Spain being reported to her by refugees fleeing to Portugal.
A Spanish worker gets 5 shillings a day …A cabbage cost half-a-crown.
These two facts explain why urgent efforts are being made in Madrid by a Government Committee to deal with wages and prices.
Spanish papers declare the situation as “painful” but travellers reaching Lisbon say that it is “desperate.”
One told me today that food is scarcer in Madrid than anywhere in Europe and all the workers are terribly underfed.
“They cannot afford to buy the small meat ration,” he said. “There are few potatoes and no cheese. They exist on the very meagre bread ration.
There are thousands of unemployed in Madrid. They get no assistance from the State and are forbidden to beg by law.”
Throughout the war she continued to send reports on the situation in Spain, Portugal and elsewhere often with more eye-witness accounts from those arriving in Lisbon as refugees or injured servicemen evacuated from the fighting in Italy.
British War Prisoners Saw Raid on Spezia
FLOOD OF DUD ‘FIVERS’ IN LISBON
Gangsters Of Chicago Ran Black Market
She even used one of her articles to send a reassuring message to the mother of two refugee children. She then arranged for them to join their mother in England.
As the war was coming to a close in March 1945 she was back in Paris where she produced several articles until the end of June.
Despite all the confusion going on around her, another of Josie’s relatives told me recently that she still managed to get a young French woman on to a troopship to England so that she could marry her English sweetheart. They had been waiting years to be reunited.
And back in Lisbon by September 1945 more informative accounts on events in Spain and Portugal.
Then Four Men Sail For Victory. QUOTE FROM IT. Published in 1947 by which time she had set up her home in Portugal where she remained for the rest of her life. But, she was still active and becoming an expert on Portugal and its politics.
She visited Rolleston in 1946, just before her father died and this photograph has kindly been supplied by one of her relatives.
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In Lisbon in 1952, using her experiences in Paris from 1943, when she met a very famous night club dancer long after the dancer had retired, she published her biography of, “Jane Avril of the Moulin Rouge”. I have a copy.
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This is the book she is best known for and is mentioned in most of the google searches for either her or Jane Avril. Her subject had been the muse of the painter Toulouse Lautrec and several examples of his work illustrated the book. Some extracts from the book give a flavour of the dancer’s life and Josie’s writing skill in capturing it…I don’t think quoting them will spoil the story.
“With the child, however it was different. She had grace, poise, even aristocratic fineness of feature and limb. You could not help loving her and falling under the spell of her wavering smile that was so rare, and lit the green eyes like sunshine over turf.”
“In the other portrait she appears front-faced with full, lacy sleeves to her gown and a tiny black toque perched on her fair hair. She is holding up her full skirt and twirling a slim, black leg. She is absorbed in her dance, serious and aloof from the spectators”
Jose described when she first met Jane Avril.
“It was one of those late November days that seem to have recaptured the deep glow of summer when I set out …to interview Jane Avril…
I should have recognized her even from Toulouse Lautrec’s portraits of the young Jane Avril , although the mass of red-gold curls was a cropped aureole of spun silver and the long, narrow face was sunken, the skin drawn more tightly across the bones. The eyes had not changed. They were deep set and of the deepest green, with sometimes an almost impish expression. The tip of her fine nose twitched like the nostrils of a delicate rabbit and her smile was the smile of the young girl …seen in.. the reviews.”
FIND ANOTHER QUOTE ABOUT JANE’S DANCING.
I found it an interesting read. You can occasionally find copies of the book on eBay. I can’t lend you mine because it is coming to pieces
In 1960 she was commissioned to produce her translation of Nita Lupi’s book, “The music and spirit of Portuguese India”. QUOTE
The Daily Herald closed down in 1964 and she then continued to send thoughtful and well-researched articles about Portugal to the Times which were published roughly once a week from September 1967 to June 1980 throughout the Salazar regime and the 1974 revolution and she contributed to several periodicals and journals and the BBC.
QUOTES
She visited Rolleston not long before she died and was not impressed.
“Alas the great oak has vanished and with it my hut. Oak Cottage is inhabited by strangers and the orchard is buried under a rash of bungalows.”
As we know this was not strictly true, because the Oak tree still stands today
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and if you could look really closely you might find the remains of one of the metal supports of the spiral staircase still embedded in the trunk.
But the village had obviously changed a lot since her last visit. As many of us know re-visiting childhood haunts in later life is often a disappointment. They have never stayed the same. Neither have we.
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Her obituary was published on Page 14 of The Times, Thursday, 24th January 1985. Here are some extracts from it.
“Miss José Shercliff, who was The Times correspondent in Lisbon for 20 years, died in Cascais on January 21st1985 at the age of 82. A journalist of the old school, she was a leading figure for many years in the British community in Portugal, where she was known for her sense of humour and humanity.
She had first arrived in Lisbon in 1940… but was taken with the country and remained there for the rest of her life… She found the local scene an absorbing one, not least because of the activities of rival spies, working either for the Allies or the Axis, and decided to stay on. She cared for sick refugees, and in subsequent years helped the activities of the Special Operations Executive.
While in Paris during the War she tracked down Jane Avril, the cabaret star of the Belle Époque, who was living in poverty and oblivion; and, on the basis of conversations with her, published a lively book in the 1950’s.
José Shercliff worked for some years with the Associated Press, and in 1961 began writing for The Times. When the 1974 revolution came, she was sympathetic to the sense of deep social injustices which inspired it, but was disappointed by what the politicians made of it.
She lived for many years in the tiny cottage in Estoril, filled with books, pictures and innumerable mementoes, where she was enormously hospitable.
José Shercliff retired in 1981. She was unmarried.”
Other obituaries said,
“Over the years Miss Shercliff became a kind of well-informed aunt to foreign reporters who moved in and out of Portugal cheerfully dispensing advice to the dozens who made their way to her vine-covered suburban home.”
In another, Chapman Pincher hinted that she may have been a spy.
Yet another obituary claimed that she had been asked to keep searching eye on the Duke and Duchess of Windsor as they were preparing to leave Lisbon to begin abdication in the United States.
In any case Jose went a long way from “reading, writing and, dreaming” in her “airy hideout” in the tree house in Rolleston and singing and dancing to raise money for soldiers’ comforts in the First World War. Her achievements deserve to be recognized more widely.
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Her house in Estoril today
Rolleston on Dove History 