In 1941 he was commissioned into the Royal Engineers. During the fall of Greece his armoured brigade lost all its equipment, and while waiting for it to be re-equipped he served on the staff of the British legation in Cairo. He then worked on the staff of General Spears, in the political mission to Syria and Lebanon.
On his return to military duties he was posted to Safad in Palestine. His work brought him into close contact with the local people and he started to learn Arabic. Although he had enjoyed the cosmopolitan society of Cairo and Beirut, Oxford warmed to the wisdom of the village doctor. When Sir John Macpherson, the Administrative Secretary, invited him to join the Colonial Service, he accepted. He later said that he never regretted this decision.
After a year in Gaza he was posted to Beersheba, where he held a high degree of responsibility in an area half the size of Palestine. He was proud that the Colonial Service provided internal security for the Beduin. It did so partly by establishing courts that could administer humanely the type of justice which they could understand. He believed that Britain failed in Palestine partly because of the promises it had made to the Jews and the Arabs; but also because of subsequent political mistakes, and Nazi racial policies, which drove so many Jews to emigrate to Palestine.
After Palestine had been handed over to the UN, he served as deputy chief secretary in Tripolitania, which later became one of the provinces of Libya. There was widespread undernourishment in the former Italian colony, which had suffered successive seasons of drought. He played a part in organising the relief services that saved many lives. In 1952 he served as adviser to the Libyan Prime Minister. In the following year he transferred to Zanzibar. After the wide, empty lands on the edge of the Sahara, he felt as if he was in the Palm House at Kew.
The country was divided between Arabs and Africans, who were in the majority. Oxford later said that it was a mistake to give Zanzibar independence in 1963. It was clear at the time that the country suffered from underlying instability due to its racial antipathies. It was also clear that the Arab politicians were unreliable both in judgment and in action. There was a revolution shortly after independence. On one occasion Oxford is said to have pacified a crowd bent on riot, who had been incensed by a newspaper editorial. He got them to sit down and offered them coffee. But a friend of Oxford who met the Zanzibari Chief Justice was told: “This man is wasted here. Can’t something be done?”
In 1958 he was appointed Administrator of St Lucia, where his responsibilities were greater than his powers. The elected members, who had majorities on the Executive and Legislative Councils, had little administrative experience. He had to display tact and toughness at the appropriate moments.
Near the end of his time in St Lucia, the loyalty of the police force wavered briefly. There was discontent about pay. Oxford had been away on leave and the Chief Police Officer had been absent due to sickness. But the loyalty of the police was rapidly restored.
In 1962 he was posted to the Seychelles as Governor and Commander-in-Chief. At that time there was no regular air service, and the journey by sea from Mombasa took several days. About 50,000 people lived on the islands, and the main economic problems were overpopulation and a shortage of land. He made 300 acres of Crown land available to tea planters. Tea could support more people to the acre than coconuts, the principal export. The project began amid much head-shaking from local experts, and was showing signs of success when he retired in 1967.
In 1971 he was asked to write a report on the constitutional future of the Cayman Islands. The Caymans had undergone an economic revolution in the preceding years, due to the coming of air travel and their status as a tax haven. The growth rate had been estimated at 29 per cent between 1967 and 1969, and the colony’s administrative framework had not been able to keep up with its rapid economic development. His report to Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the Foreign Secretary, combined sensitivity to public opinion with realism. The Constitution was working, with minor alterations, in the late 1990s. He later wrote a similar report on the Turks and Caicos Islands. He was appointed CMG in 1961 and KCMG in 1964.
Terry Seabrooke
Magician who performed for royalty and for British troops in the Falklands
British nurse who volunteered to go to Spain and work in frontline hospitals shortly after the outbreak of civil war in 1936. Unlike some of the other nurses who were more politically aware, she always insisted that her motives for doing so were purely humanitarian. But although never a member of a political party, she was soon to find herself deeply committed to the cause of the Spanish people who were fighting to defend the Republican Government against General Franco’s right-wing forces.
She was born in Tottenham, North London, in 1909. Her father, a casual labourer, was the black sheep of his Quaker family and often unemployed. Her mother fought bouts of depression, trying to meet the challenges of a working-class woman with a large family and next to no income. As the fifth child in a family of ten, Phelps experienced many of the humiliations that can accompany extreme poverty.
In her early years, she had to stand in the street selling mint grown by her father for a penny a bunch, dreading the approach of pupils at her school who jeered at her misfortune. A spirited and rather rebellious child, she resented the onerous duties of looking after younger siblings that caused her to miss school or fall asleep in class. Aged only 13, she left school to work in a factory, then spent a brief and unhappy time in domestic service before taking a low-paid job with a dressmaker.
Determined to escape from her background of enforced moonlight flits from one bug-infested house to another and weekly visits to the pawn shop, she joined the Plymouth Brethren and started to attend evening classes to continue her education. In 1927 she began nursing training in the Eastern Fever Hospital in Homerton, East London, eventually becoming a state registered nurse at Charing Cross Hospital.
In 1934, she spent a year at Hillcroft College studying on a course designed to help girls from poor educational backgrounds. During this time she formed friendships with several Jewish students and, through them, became aware of the growing threat of fascism.
At the time of the outbreak of war in Spain, Phelps was working in Hertfordshire. This was the time of hunger marches in Britain and, at a friend’s request, she went to help to treat the blistered feet of the unemployed marchers during their overnight rest in Hertford. The severe admonishment she received from matron for her involvement in this “political” action was the trigger that led her to volunteer for Spain.
At the offices of the Spanish Medical Aid committee in London she was accepted immediately, arriving at the headquarters of the International Brigades in Albacete early in 1937. “English Penny”, as she was soon nicknamed, was first sent to the Jarama Valley, not far from Madrid, where International Brigade volunteers from all over the world were fighting side by side with Republican forces against the regular soldiers and Moorish troops of Franco’s Nationalist army.
In her memoirs, English Penny, written under the pen-name of Penny Fyvel, in 1992 and later interviews, she described the difficult conditions under which she worked throughout her time in Spain; the setting-up of makeshift hospitals as close to the front as possible and, when the wounded poured in, days and nights without rest, coping with constant shortages of medical supplies.
As new fronts opened up, she often helped to treat civilians injured in bombing raids carried out by German and Italian planes sent to help Franco in contravention of the non-intervention policy. Because of her training as a fever nurse, she soon found herself bearing responsibilities beyond her wildest dreams when she was put in charge of controlling an epidemic among the Italian International Brigaders of the Garibaldi Battalion.
She arrived in the village of Quintanar to find a ward overflowing with desperately ill and dying patients and no doctor. Realising that some of the men were not suffering from scarlet fever as had been thought, but from typhoid, she organised staff to carry out a successful programme of thorough disinfection, fumigation and inoculation for the entire battalion of 600 men. Just before Christmas 1937, she travelled to Madrid from where she made a moving broadcast on behalf of Spanish medical aid. She appealed to nurses directly: “We are fighting here for the democratic rights of a brave and courageous people. Can’t you come and give us a hand?”
During brief periods of leave back in England, on one occasion as a result of having contracted typhoid herself, she spoke at fundraising meetings for medical aid. Concerned that the Republic was under communist influence, someone once said to her: “But Spain is Red”, and she replied, “Yes, it is: red with blood. The blood is splashed over the streets, and the gutters often run with it. For weeks my fingernails were blocked up with clotted blood, and my arms were splashed up to the elbows with it.”
In 1938 she was sent back to England for the last time after being severely wounded in an air raid on the medical unit where she was working near Castellón. As defeat loomed for the Republic and soldiers and civilian refugees flooded across the border into France, she lost touch with the Italian brigader who loved her, Roberto Vincenzi, and believed that he had been killed. During her slow convalescence, she met a British doctor, Dr Michael Feiwel, and married him in late 1938.
Meanwhile, Vincenzi had crossed the border into France and, unable to return to Fascist Italy, was being held in an internment camp near Gurs. Penny was eventually told of his whereabouts and wrote to him of her difficult road to recovery, and of her marriage, asking if there was anything she and her husband could do to help him. In his reply, an eloquent expression of unselfish love, he assured her that she was right to marry someone else. He told her of his situation, explaining that he was now stateless, kept behind barbed wire with no prospect of freedom. Despite repeated attempts over the years, no more could ever be found out about what had happened to him after the German occupation of France.
During the Second World War, Penny Feiwel worked at a first-aid post and as a social worker for physically handicapped youth. The need for several further surgical interventions as a result of the injuries she suffered in Spain prevented her from returning to full-time nursing and from having children. For many years she helped her husband in the running of his medical practice in Harley Street. Before his death in 1999 she nursed him devotedly throughout a long period of illness.
In her later years, she made several return visits to Spain, most memorably in 2001 to a commemorative ceremony in a cave that had been used as a hospital during the Battle of the Ebro, near the village of La Bisbal de Falset in Catalonia. After a few words about the work of nurses during the civil war, she ended by saying that the horrors she saw then were now less vivid in her mind than the moments of wonderful happiness she had known in Spain. Her memories were of the sunshine, the colours, songs and laughter, and above all, of the Spanish people themselves.
When the International Brigade Memorial Trust was formed in 2001, she became a member and often attended its events. In 2009 the Spanish Government at last fulfilled a promise that had been made in 1938 and awarded citizenship to the International Brigaders in recognition of the role they had played in defence of the Republic. Penny Feiwel, the last of the British nurses who served in the civil war, attended the ceremony at the Spanish Embassy in London with several other veterans and received her award from the ambassador with considerable pride.
Penny Feiwel, nursing volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, was born on April 24, 1909. She died on January 6, 2011, aged 101