It has long been said that February with its commemoration of St Valentine’s Day has been the month for romantics and lovers. That didn’t change during World War Two. In fact, the fragility of life and the vagaries of war probably brought an intensity to relationships that is unknown in peacetime. You have only got to look at the lyrics of some of the romantic songs of the war. “How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky? How much do I love you? I tell you no lie,” sang Peggy Lee. Meanwhile Harry Roy and his Orchestra had a hit with “When we go strolling in the park at night, oh the darkness is a boon, who cares if we’re without a light, they can’t blackout the moon.” How many wartime couples sang to each other the words of the song written by Albert von Tilzer and Neville Fleeson and made popular by the Andrews Sisters “I’ll be with you in apple blossom time, I’ll be with you to change your name to mine, one day in May I’ll come and say, happy surprise that the sun shines on today. What a wonderful wedding there will be, what a wonderful day for you and me, church bells will chime, you will be mine, in apple blossom time.”
It was certainly wedding bells for Evelyn Archer in 1942. She had joined the staff of Lanhydrock House in 1928 at the age of 17 and two years later had become ladies maid to the Hon Everilda Agar Robartes and Hon Violet Agar Robartes, the sisters of his Lordship, Viscount Clifden. Downtown Abbey has glamorised the role but Evelyn said she thoroughly enjoyed her work. In a storyline that could have been taken from the hit TV show Evelyn fell in love with the chauffeur/valet Cecil George Arthur who had been working at Lanhydrock ten years by the time the young Evelyn arrived. She told my fellow historian and friend Mike England, “George had tried to go into the Air Force but they wouldn’t have him because he had bad veins. So he went into the Navy and was stationed at Sheerness but used to manage to get home frequently at weekends.”
They decided on a quiet wedding but the Robartes made it a big occasion. There were sixty guests including other gentry, the service was held in Lanhydrock Church with Canon Yarde-Buller taking the service assisted by Lanhydrock’s Reverend Woods. Viscount Clifden signed the certificate. Then the Robartes hosted a reception at the House before the happy couple enjoyed ten days honeymoon at Torquay. The Archers served the Robartes until the last of them had died and the House and Estate was handed over to the National Trust.
Not all wartime romances ended in such marital bliss. On Sunday 25th April 1943 an airman and his WAAF girlfriend out for an afternoon stroll along the coast at Church Cove, Gunwalloe, decided to take a short cut through the minefield on the beach. They climbed through the barbed wire near the warning notices and hadn’t gone far when they detonated a mine which killed them both. In July the following year two children, one local and one an evacuee, did the same thing with the same result.
The Lizard was the scene for another doomed wartime romance. Young 27 year old Welsh WAAF Corporal who was serving as a radar plotter at RAF Pen Olver where Flying Officer William James Croft was station commander struck up a relationship with the married 32 year old father of two, even though RAF regulations forbade such liaisons between officers and other ranks. The couple had commenced their liaison at a bathing party in July 1943. Croft wrote to Joan Nora Lewis, “You see Joan Lewis how you have me. I am dreadfully happy. I could sprout wings and fly about.” However, he was also in anguish. He wrote, “If only I were not married. Always that ‘if’. If only I had the courage to go through with a divorce.” Joan replied, “I feel as though you are holding a pistol at my head which could go off any moment. I love you so much. When this war is over there will be no more of us but just memories. Let us prolong this happiness as long as we can.”
The couple spent evenings off together which then moved on to staying together at hotels on odd nights during leaves. It wasn’t too long before the affair came to the attention of the officer in charge of the WAAFs on the station. Miss Freda Catlin heard what was happening between one of her corporals and Croft. As station commander Croft was Miss Catlin’s senior, but she tackled him. She said it was an intolerable situation for morale and discipline. The affair must stop, and to make it easier for both Croft and Lewis, she suggested one or the other should be posted away.
The chastened lovers reluctantly agreed and, when Croft’s superiors refused to listen to his request for a posting, the WAAF authorities, who had dealt with that kind of situation many time before, agreed that Miss Lewis should go to a station in Devon. She was sent on leave on 6th October with instruction to proceed to her new posting on 16th October. However, the couple were together in Taunton on the 7th and 8th October. On the 9th she travelled home to Porthcawl. On the 14th October she travelled back to Cornwall and the couple were seen in Helston on the 15th. They travelled back to the Lizard in a RAF truck at 10:55pm that evening and headed back to the Housel Bay Hotel which had been requisitioned by the RAF as billets for RAF Pen Olver, mainland Britain’s most southerly Chain Home Low radar station, which had opened in October 1940. The thought of parting had seemed feasible enough at first but now on the last night before Miss Lewis’ posting they had both realised it was impossible and had begun to talk of suicide, either by jumping off a cliff or by shooting. They decided on shooting and so Croft went to the mess for his loaded revolver, having arranged to meet at the summerhouse of the hotel, one of their favourite rendezvous spots, after ‘lights out’ which was at 11:30pm. Miss Lewis was there when Croft arrived and according to his account they sat on the settee, smoked and dozed a while until 4.30am. There was a moon, but the light was obscured by clouds. It was raining heavily and blowing a gale. The couple could just distinguish each other in the darkness.
Croft said, “I placed the gun on our laps and then clasped our hands together. We arranged that whoever felt like making the first move was to take the gun, use it, and the one left was to use it in turn.” Croft’s story was that Miss Lewis had made up her mind to die about five o’clock. He felt the weight of the gun taken away. A shot awakened him and he found the girl clasping her breast. ‘It is hurting me,’ she gasped, ‘go and get help.’ Croft climbed out of the window meaning to fetch help but almost immediately heard another shot. The girl was dead on the floor when he returned. He said he did not look at the girl again but picked up the revolver, put it to his head and tried to pull the trigger. ‘I could not,’ he told the police later. He said he went to the window, looked out at the cloud and thought ‘This is the last time I shall see this.’ He then lay on the floor alongside the windows thinking that if he shot himself standing up he should hurt himself in falling. Lying on the floor he put the revolver to his head again and tried to pull the trigger but could not. He said he lay on the floor for some time before getting up, putting the revolver on the table and went and phoned a fellow officer, Flying Officer Page, the duty officer, and told him he had killed the girl.
RAF personnel attended the scene, found four live rounds in the revolver and two empty cartridges and called the police. Croft was arrested and taken to Helston Police Station where he was charged with the murder of Miss Lewis. Dr Frederick Denis Hocking, the county pathologist, was roused from his bed by a phone call from the police. He arrived at the hotel at dawn and was led to the summer house. Lifting an officer’s greatcoat he found Joan Lewis dead on the floor. Blood spots showed that she had been sitting on a leather upholstered couch in the corner. Her face and her hair were covered in blood and a dark stain above her left breast had already discoloured her pullover and tunic. On a table near her was a heavy Webley revolver. At an inquest at Lizard on Tuesday 19th October Dr Hocking said the cause of death was the bullet wound to the head. The inquest was adjourned as the case was going to trial.
On Tuesday 16th November Croft was committed to trial at Winchester Assizes on a charge of murder. The trial took place over two days on Monday 13th and Tuesday 14th December 1943. The prosecution alleged that Croft had fired the shots claiming in court that the wounds could not have been self-inflicted. Dr Hocking’s evidence showed that his first step had been to decide which of the two bullets had killed the girl. The bullet through her head had gone in above her left eye and out above the right ear. It had caused dreadful damage. Dr Hocking had decided she had been alive when that second shot was fired. He explained that when a bullet enters a body, ordinary pressure of blood pumps out blood from a wound as long as the person is alive. He had found the bullet in Miss Lewis’ breast had torn the muscles of her shoulder and must have caused her considerable pain. But the amount of blood she had lost and surrounding bruising meant she had lived for a few minutes after the shot was fired. This tallied with Croft’s evidence.
There was much discussion in the trial as to whether she could have fired the shots herself. The defence counsel, Mr Humphrey Edwards, a firearms expert himself, went to great lengths to show it was plausible she had held the pistol two handedly to fire the shot into her chest and then as she had slumped forward onto the floor the pistol fell, discharging as it hit the floor sending the second bullet into her head. However, the medical evidence suggested that the muzzle of the revolver was between 12 and 18 inches from the head when the second shot was fired to the left side of her body given the entry and exit wounds. Dr Hocking explained, “Even a contortionist couldn’t have got the gun round to fire such a shot with her right hand. The reason I am sure the girl didn’t fire it with her left hand was that the first shot wouldn’t have killed her, but it tore her shoulder muscles so much that she couldn’t have lifted the gun high enough to fire from a downward position. Besides, when she was found, the girl was clutching her left breast with her left hand as would be natural. In such an attitude the left hand could not have held the revolver to fire a shot which caused instantaneous death.”
The Crown prosecutor pressed home the case against Croft. “You provided the revolver. You provided the ammunition. You agreed with her that she should die. I suggest that you did everything to procure this young woman’s death,” said prosecutor Mr John Maude.
The jury took 20 minutes to find Croft guilty of murder. Mr Justice Humphreys in pronouncing the death sentence declared, “The jury have convicted you on evidence which in my opinion leaves no room for doubt.” Under appeal the sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life. This sentence was later reduced greatly so that Croft was released from prison in 1949 having served less than six years. This was quite a remarkable turnaround for a man sentenced to hang and it would suggest that once the war was over the authorities became more sympathetic to the idea of a suicide pact gone wrong although at one hearing it was suggested that Croft’s good behaviour behind bars helped speed his release. It seems his wife had stood by him while he was in prison. On release there was talk of divorce but the couple resumed marital relations, though not co-habitation. At a divorce hearing in January 1950 it was claimed the wife had submitted to this out of fear of violence if she refused given his actions in Cornwall. The divorce was granted along with custody of a 13 year old child. Presumably the second child was older and so not subject to a court order.
In his autobiography “Bodies and Crimes: A Pathologist Speaks” first published in 1992 with a new edition two years later, Dr Hocking revealed that the third bullet in the gun's chamber had marks that showed two attempts were made to fire it and the bullet had jammed. This evidence ties in with Croft’s account of being unable to carry out his own part of the pact. The pathologist came to the conclusion that the killing of Joan Lewis was probably a "suicide pact gone wrong" after all.
The summerhouse was boarded up and out of bounds and WAAFs arriving at Pen Olver in the later stages of the war found no one wanted to talk about the tragic tale. As the war ended the RAF closed down the billets in the Housel Bay Hotel and moved the WAAFs to huts at RAF Drytree, the Chain Home radar station on Goonhilly Downs. RAF Pen Olver itself was shut down in June 1946. Today the Hotel runs murder mystery events and the local press has reported that guests have made claims to have seen Joan’s ghost at the hotel. But the Station Commander’s brief impassioned liaison with a WAAF Corporal is a sad example of the intense wartime romances that didn’t end well. Sadly WAAF Joan Lewis’ death wasn’t the only WAAF
suicide connected to romance in Cornwall during the war.
A far happier story is the wartime romance of NAAFI girl Violet Lean. Born in November 1922 at Greensplatt on Hensbarrow Downs overlooking St Austell, Vi went into service at the age of 14 when she left school into a large house at Port Isaac. After a while she was joined by one of her sisters who also became a maid. Vi then moved, still working as a maid, to 73 Mount Wise in Newquay. It was while working here and being aware there was talk of women being made to do some form of war service and being fearful of having to go away, that she saw an advert for NAAFI girls. The pay was way much better than any money she got as a maid, so she joined the NAAFI at the age of 19 early in 1942. After an initial time at the NAAFI in Newquay she was sent to RAF Portreath in 1942. She also worked in the NAAFI at Bodmin Barracks and was at Camp Cameron, the Anti-Aircraft Gunnery Practice Camp at St Agnes.
Stan Burton was from Fovant near Salisbury in Wiltshire. He had joined the Home Guard as a teenager serving with 7th Wilts Battalion (22 Section) issued with Remington Rifle No. 279152 and then when eventually called up was assigned to the 255th Light Anti-Aircraft Training Regiment, Royal Artillery. They were sent to Newquay for their training.
Of the NAAFI in Newquay Vi said, “The RAF were all up the east side of town as you go into Newquay, the Army had places down towards the gardens. We had all sorts come in to the NAAFI, including convalescing servicemen in their blue uniforms. I remember the Atlantic Hotel was a hospital.”
She met Stan in the NAAFI. “He was one of the quiet ones,” she told me. “I always talked to the quiet ones. They seemed to be a nicer cut of chap, more upright and moral.” They started walking out and romance soon blossomed. Stan finished his training and was posted elsewhere so they wrote to each other frequently and he would visit Cornwall when he had leave. They married in 1943 but she only saw Stan for a few days before he went off to war. Fortunately he survived and ended up building a new bridge over the river in Kiel in 1945 as the Allies had bombed the original one. It was 1947 before Stan was demobbed and the couple moved to Duke Street in St Austell to begin married life four years after they had tied the knot.
Theirs was a romance that lasted a lifetime and saw them raise two children. This Christian couple gave a lifetime of service to the church, first at the Congregational Chapel in Duke Street where they acted as caretakers until the church closed and was demolished in the 1970s as part of a road widening scheme, and then at the Baptist Church helping with youth work, the Men’s Own and a myriad of other tasks. It was Stan who first painted the huge cross on the church wall visible as you go up Trinity Street. Stan worked for the Co-op until retirement. Vi nursed him through his illness until he died aged 70 in 1991. Vi lived until she was 98 dying in 2021 and became a fantastic source of titbits of information that I have woven into my historical novels, such as when Elizabeth washes her hair in the barracks in A Place And A Name. The 1945 popular song performed by Dick Haymes and written by Buddy Kaye with a melody based on a Chopin Polinaise sums up the romance of this devoted couple.
Till the end of time,
Long as stars are in the blue,
Long as there's a spring, a bird to sing,
I'll go on loving you.
Till the end of time,
Long as roses bloom in May,
My love for you will grow deeper,
With every passing day.
Till the wells run dry,
And each mountain disappears,
I'll be there for you, to care for you,
Through laughter and through tears.
So, take my heart in sweet surrender,
And tenderly say that I'm,
The one you love and live for,
Till the end of time.
If you’ve not yet read the story of Major Isaac Trevennel and Elizabeth Treluckey of the ATS set in wartime Cornwall then you’ll need to purchase the first two books of my fictional trilogy - No Small Stir and A Place & A Name. If you fancy listening to a playlist of wartime romantic songs then click on the link below. Until next month may I wish you love and happiness this Valentine’s Day.
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