John Collins, Antonin Besse’ oldest surviving grandchild, provides his personal thoughts and recollections about the Besse family. This was written as part of a booklet for his grandchildren to give them an insight into their ancestry. It relies on his own perception of facts and his opinions.
A biography of Antonin Besse exists, written by David Footman. It is now a rare and expensive book. It is also rather boring as the author was constrained by Antonin Besse’s widow to omit any bits which might reflect badly upon him. However, it does give some idea of the man and his achievements. From now on I will refer to Antonin Besse as AB.
AB was born in Carcassonne in 1877. When he was still a child, the family moved to Montpellier due to his father’s health. His father had a leather business, selling to local saddlers and shoemakers. AB had three brothers (Joseph, Marcel & Emile) and three sisters (Jeanne, Josephine & Marie-Louise).
The sisters
Jeanne married a Monsieur Selignac with whom she had five or six children. The eldest was a boy called Jean. Jean became managing director of a large insurance company in Paris and in order to maintain his position during the war, he had to go to Carcassonne to do research into the family’s origins to prove to the Vichy government and/or the Nazis that there was no Jewish blood! He died many years ago and, although married, had no children. He was a lovely old gentlemen who we used to see in the 1970s.
Of the other of Jeanne’s children I only know the names of two other boys: Pierre and André. Pierre had several children including a daughter who married a Monsieur Nungesser. He was a French politician and mayor of Nogent-sur-Marne. My maternal grandmother saw quite a lot of them but I have never had any contact.
Josephine seems to have been married quite late in life to a purser on board a French liner. I don’t think she had any children.
Marie-Louise, who was apparently not a beauty, seems to have got married and had a daughter but I know nothing more about her. Although David Footman states that all three sisters married well, I have a feeling that one of the younger ones became mad and had to be put into a home.
The brothers
Joseph, the eldest, according to my mother became a cook/chef for an English nobleman – I never met him. He was apparently married to a beautiful Italian called Elvire.
Marcel became a chemist. He looked very like his brother AB and when I knew him around 1950 he was very sweet. He was a communist all his life and my mother always referred to him as ‘Red Uncle’. He married quite young and had two children, a boy and a girl. However, the marriage failed (reading between the lines he was too interested in his work, she took a lover, divorce etc). I have no idea what became of the wife and children. By the time we knew him his ‘new’ wife was a dear old lady called, I think, Marianne.
Emile at some time worked for Antonin, but I believe that he was also at one time a miner in the bauxite mines in the south of France (or possibly it was one of his sons). Emile married a woman who AB detested and they had a number of children – at least two sons, Bernard and Georges, and a daughter who seems to have been called Wabby. Georges visited my mother in the south of France quite often in the 1950s. He was very charming, but a bit of a rogue and the relationship ended when he started asking my mother for money. I have no idea what became of any of them.
Antonin Besse
He grew up and was educated in Montpellier. Around 1895, probably to alleviate the family finances, he signed up for four years in the French army where he fell very ill. I am not sure what illness it was, but the military doctor, a certain Dr Bernard, told him that if he followed his instructions he would be cured – and added that if he did not follow them he was not worth curing! The instructions included a rigorous diet (involving eating raw liver daily) and advice that Antonin, when he left the army, should live his life in a hot climate. AB was quite in awe of Dr Bernard and followed his diet to the letter. Once cured and having finished his stint in the army, he set about finding work in a hot climate.
In 1899 he contracted for a three-year stint with a Monsieur Bardey, a Frenchman who had a business in the British colony of Aden. The business mainly involved the export of coffee (Yemen, next to Aden, was then a major producer of coffee), hides and skins (mostly goatskins), and incense. Monsieur Bardey is famous in France for having been the employer of the poet Rimbaud who held the same position that was taken up a few years later by AB.
When his contract ended, AB felt that he could do as well if not better than Monsieur Bardey and set up his own business. This prospered, particularly the sale of goatskins to Europe and the United States. In the late 19th century and up to the first World War, fashion required ladies to wear gloves – no self-respecting lady would leave the house without them. Not only did gloves wear out with use, but fashions in gloves changed regularly, so demand remained high and glove-making was a major industry. In France the industry was centred on Millau in the south-west. It was then a busy town but, since the collapse of the glove industry between the two World Wars, it is now a very sleepy place, although its name has come momentarily to the attention of the world through Norman Foster’s enormous Viaduct of Millau. AB would return to France annually to visit his clients, which involved travelling by train all over the country. On one of these journeys in early 1907 he made the acquaintance of a young Belgian woman named Marguerite Godefroid who was travelling down to the South of France for a holiday to recover from a nasty incident at home. They got on well; corresponded, a romance developed, and they married in April 1908.
Marguerite
Marguerite Hortense Eulalie Godefroid was the daughter of Jacques Godefroid who was a Belgian notaire and mayor (Bourgmestre) of a small town called Havelange. He married Maria Charlot and they had just the one child. Maria died about a year after giving birth, probably from some complication arising from that birth. Jacques lived on for another eight years and then he too died. We had always understood that he died from a broken heart, but reading some of the speeches made at his funeral it would appear that he died of a cancer. Anyhow, they left poor Marguerite an eight- or nine-year-old orphan. In his will, Jacques Godefroid named his late wife’s brother Ferdinand (known as Fernand) as Marguerite’s guardian, but gave the day-to-day upbringing to his sister, also called Marie. Marie turned out to be an impossible ‘parent’ and one summer, having spent time with her maternal grandmother (who she adored) Marguerite simply refused to go back to Marie. She therefore lived with her grandmother in her modest château, L’Ardoisière, outside the small town of Jodoigne and was educated with her cousins Emile and Alice, the children of Fernand Charlot who was notaire and mayor of the town. Unfortunately, a few years later her grandmother died. Fernand’s wife, Rose-Aye, did not want an additional child in the house so Marguerite was sent to boarding school. The school chosen was not a success and so it was decided to send her to the convent in which her aunt Marie lived and which had a convent school attached. Thus she completed her formal education. Marguerite was now a wealthy young woman, but at that time it would have been unseemly for her to live without a chaperone. Naturally, aunt Marie was chosen for the job and so a small house was rented and the two of them took up residence. All would have been well had it not been for the possessive jealousy of the aunt. Marguerite found herself almost a prisoner as, every time she wished to visit friends or relatives, Marie immediately fell ill. In fact she became increasingly unstable and eventually committed suicide. All the above is recounted in full, in French, in a most amusing history of Marguerite’s youth and it is published in my sister’s book.
To remove herself from the shock and drama of these events, Marguerite decided to take a holiday in the south of France and, when the train stopped in Lyon, a young Antonin Besse stepped into the carriage. She made a stopover in Montpellier, AB’s home town, and he showed her around. She was obviously struck by AB and it was she who started a correspondence which was to result in their marrying less than eighteen months later.
From Marguerite to Hilda
Marguerite was a wealthy orphan and her money allowed AB to build up his business considerably. In the fullness of time they had two children, a girl, Meryem, and a son, André.
AB and Marguerite lived partly in Brussels and partly in Aden and Ethiopia. Meryem was born in Brussels on 11 January 1909 and André about eighteen months later. AB could be very charming but, according to my mother, he turned out to be a rather cruel and sadistic father, often beating his children with a cane until the blood flowed. He was also very fond of the ladies. Marguerite seems to have tolerated his mistresses until the inevitable happened and a child, Ariane, was born out of wedlock to his then secretary, Hilda Crowther. This was the last straw and so, in 1922, Marguerite sued for divorce – something one simply did not do in the 1920s! Meryem, then at school in England, was asked to leave the school because her parents were divorcing! AB married Hilda with whom he had already fathered Ariane and they had four other children.
AB and Marguerite remained on speaking terms and Marguerite asked him why all his mistresses were so ugly. He replied, ‘But you don’t understand, my dear, I have a mission in life’. ‘Ah!’ says Marguerite, ‘What is your mission?’. ‘My mission is to bring the joys of life to nature’s disinherited!’ (D’apporter les joies de la vie aux déshéritées de la nature.)
Antonin and Hilda’s five children
Ariane, who became a nurse. She worked in England/Scotland for a while after qualifying, then in Kenya with Anne Spoerry (a flying doctor, sister of François – see ‘Joy’ below). After AB’s death she settled in Monaco and lived there the rest of her life. She never married and died in 2013/14.
Joy was a lovely woman and Meryem’s favourite of her half siblings. She didn’t like the atmosphere at home and escaped as soon as she could by marrying an architect – François Spoerry. I fear it was ‘out of the frying pan, into the fire’ as the atmosphere in the Spoerry household in Mulhouse was every bit as bad. She had two children: Yves and Bernard. She was pregnant with a third who apparently died in her womb and she died of the subsequent complications in 1952, leaving her two small boys without a mother. They were looked after by Miss Ogilvie, a lovely English woman from Jamaica who had been the governess of all Hilda’s children and was considered one of the family.
Peter was a charming person, a ‘big picture man’ who didn’t like the nitty-gritty of office work. He trained as an engineer and worked in the merchant navy. After AB’s death, André, Peter and his younger brother Tony ran the business for a while. This did not work for Peter and, with his love of nature and wide open spaces, he bought a farm in Tanganyika. While in Aden he had married Mary, an English nurse, with whom he had four children: Amanda, Christopher, Roxanne (Loula) and Richard. Apparently they had a wonderful time in Tanganyika, but the inevitable happened: Tanganyika became independent and he was expropriated. He retired with his family to the South of France. He died in 2014.
Tony was always considered a bit of a gangster by his father. Nevertheless, it was Tony who AB kept by his side in the late 1940s to teach him the business. After AB’s death and once André and Peter had abandoned running the business, Tony was in charge. He married a French journalist, Christiane Château, with whom he had two children: Antonin and Joy. He eventually retired to Paris with his family, but unfortunately developed dementia and died in 2017. His wife Christiane died in early 2021.
Monna married Ian Adie, a university professor, with whom she had four children: Chantal, Anthony, Alastair and Annabelle. She eventually divorced and, for a while, kept a print gallery in Paris. She also died in 2021.
Inheritance (or lack thereof)
The history of AB’s businesses are covered in David Footman’s book. Suffice it to say that by the beginning of the second World War he was prosperous and the war years were very profitable. I said above that AB was not a very good father, however, he did not appear to beat his new children and, even if he had been inclined to do so, he would have been prevented from doing so by the governess he and Hilda had hired to look after them: Miss Iris Ogilvie or IO as she was called. Hilda was not very motherly and any affection the five children experienced came from IO.
AB was also a man with theories about how to bring up children and one of these was that they should not inherit anything from their parents! By the end of the 1940s, as well as the continuing businesses, he had amassed a large sum of money. His idea was to use this money to set up a place of advanced learning concentrating on international relations, particularly with the Arab world. Being a Frenchman, he presented his thoughts to the French authorities in Paris. They were keen to benefit from the money but were rather less interested in his ideas as to how it should be spent. Dissatisfied with the results of his conversations, AB turned to England in general and Oxford in particular. There they listened to him and most of his money went to finance the founding of St Antony’s College, which is still a centre for international postgraduate studies. The rest was parcelled out to various other colleges to finance building works and a number of colleges have ‘Besse’ buildings.
As I said earlier, AB wished to disinherit his offspring but died before he could complete the task. His death in July 1951 therefore dramatically changed the circumstances of his children and of his ex-wife. Being a Frenchman with assets in many countries, the winding up of the estate was a nightmare. In particular only a very vague will was found, written in the early 1920s. Ariane was illegitimate in the eyes of French law and in those days illegitimate children could not inherit. Joy died about a year after AB and nobody wanted her husband to be involved. In addition, Oxford University (who had benefited from his gift) was particularly worried lest the children should challenge it. They therefore set in motion a search for a marriage contract between AB and Marguerite Godefroid. This was eventually found in Jodoigne, in Belgium. Madame Godefroid had completely forgotten its existence but it had been written by her guardian, Fernand Charlot (the notaire of Jodoigne) and, to everyone’s surprise and shock, it gave a life interest to the whole of the estate to Madame Godefroid! Naturally she was in no position to control all the businesses and indeed had no desire to do so, so a compromise was hammered out. As I said, the family did not want Joy’s husband François Spoerry interfering in the business (and I don’t think he was particularly keen to inherit interests in exotic places). He was bought out at an agreed sum and the balance of the estate was divided into seven parts, one part each for the remaining six children and half a part each for Mme Godefroid and AB’s widow, Hilda. It took about eight or nine years before the estate was finally settled!
