George Clooney’s 2014 film, The Monuments Men, didn’t get a big hooray this side of the Atlantic, mostly because British participation was underplayed. Oh, it was a bad script too.
I’m going to stick my neck out. British armed forces destroyed monuments, Germans looted anything they could lay their hands on from countries they conquered. It was President Roosevelt who founded the “American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas” in June 1943. This reinforces my already highly favourable opinion of POTUS 32.
It was a huge undertaking. According to The Times today, the British MM were disparaging about their American counterparts; very likely. I want to tell you about one of those men, because The Times and The Monuments Men Foundation doesn’t tell the full story.
Humphrey Brooke was thirty when he was put in charge of preserving archive material in Italy and later Austria in 1944. He had a First in Modern History from Magdalen (no “e” so Oxford, as you know) and was Assistant Keeper at the Public Records’ Office before joining the King’s Royal Rifle Corps at the outbreak of war. When he was in Vienna he met a remarkable woman, whom he married.
She was born Nathalie Benckendorff, in Moscow, in 1923. Her mother Maria Korchinska, one of the finest harpists of the 20th century, was already a professor at the Conservatoire and lead harpist at the Bolshoi Theatre. Her father, Count Constantine Benckendorff, a former naval officer—in first the Imperial and then the Red navies—was descended from generations of military and political leaders under the Romanovs. He had been moved to the naval reserve and, since the family estates and industrial holdings had been forfeited after the Russian Revolution of 1917, was making a living as a flautist. Constantine’s father, Count Alexander Benckendorff, the last Imperial Russian ambassador to London, had died in January 1917, worn out by the strain of the war and the months leading up to its outbreak when he and the German ambassador, his first cousin Prince Karl Max Lichnowsky, found themselves powerless to calm Berlin’s obdurate sabre-rattling. (The Art Newspaper)
Nathalie did not sit on her aristocratic laurels. In a full and not entirely happy life she co-founded Venice in Peril which was how I met her. I sat beside her at Sunday lunch and, finding my small talk too small, she demanded to know about the other guests. I whispered details that I thought might interest her. “Speak up, I can’t hear. What did you just say about her” pointing. On another occasion I helped her out of the Royal Academy onto Piccadilly to get a taxi. After she was installed the driver asked her destination. “Fortnum & Mason” she snapped pointing across the street. A kind heart, I think, beat beneath her thick carapace. The last time i saw her was at lunch at the Hurlingham to hear her great friend John Julius Norwich speak. I regret not asking her about her husband but I was unaware of his war work.
Nathalie Brooke was the most aristocratically direct person I ever met. The first time I encountered her she informed me, in a voice which startled the whole room, that her late husband Humphrey had killed himself in a fit of depression. I once ran into her at the funeral of a concert pianist who had died of AIDS, a fact the poor man’s family was not keen to advertise. WHAT DID HE DIE OF?, she bellowed at me. Organ failure, I suggested. She was having none of that. I gather she regularly visited her family’s former estates in Russia, where they all worshipped her & dropped to their knees at the sight of her. A refreshing personality, and fundamentally kind.
My grandmother was Humphrey Brooke’s cousin and I vaguely recall meeting him, but the main connection was with his brother who ran John Brooke and Sons near Huddersfield – still there and either the oldest or second oldest business in the country (founded 1512). I’m sort of relieved never to have met Mrs B! Humphrey was, as it was then called, a manic depressive, which he was open about and indeed must have helped some with an understanding of the condition by writing a very good article on it in, I think, the Observer.