The Izzards – a family biography
Biographical afterword for the new Eland edition of SMELLING THE BREEZES, published by Eland, 2022

Jan Morris described Ralph Izzard as ‘the beau ideal of the old-school foreign correspondent … not only brave and resourceful, but also gentlemanly, widely read, kind, a bit raffish, excellent to drink with, fun to travel with, handsome but louche, honourable but thoroughly disrespectful. He was old Fleet Street personified. Not only did everyone in the business know him, but they had also known his father, Percy Izzard, the Mail's highly respected gardening correspondent who was the inspiration behind William Boot in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop.’

Ralph himself was one of three role models from which Ian Fleming created the fictional James Bond. If you have ever wondered what James Bond, having settled down with Miss Moneypenny, might have been like as a father, then you need look no further. Ralph William Burdick Izzard was born in Billericay on 27 August 1910, educated at Caldicott Prep and The Leys School, where he played water polo, and went on to Queens' College, Cambridge (1928-31). Over the long, summer holidays he worked as a steward on Atlantic liners, alongside his chum from school and university, Malcolm Lowry. After graduation he was employed by the Daily Mail which sent him to Germany where he rose to become Berlin bureau chief. He was tall, handsome and energetic, spoke very good German, loved to swim and to ride through the forests and delighted in the company of women. In 1931 he married Ellen Schmidt-Klewitz, the daughter of a German general, with whom he had a daughter, Christina, and amicably divorced in 1946. He also fathered a son, Benedict, with Marianna Hoppe, one of the great film stars of her generation. Her role in Der Schimmelreiter (The Rider of the White Horse (1934)) made her famous overnight and gave her access to the top brass of the Nazi regime.

Ralph reported on the Spanish Civil War, Italy’s Abyssinia campaign, the 1936 Munich Olympics and other international stories from Berlin, but returned to England via Denmark and Holland once war broke out, where he joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. He chose to serve as an ordinary seamen and rose to the rank of gunner on ships protecting the Atlantic convoys, but his linguistic skills soon caught up with him and he was transferred to Naval Intelligence. By the end of the war, he had been mentioned in despatches, awarded an OBE and had risen to the rank of Lieutenant-Commander. Ralph worked alongside Ian Fleming and the future journalist Charles Wheeler in the assessment and acquisition of German technical equipment, especially to do with code-encryption and deciphering. They were affiliated with 30 Commando whose task was to capture scientific equipment and scoop up useful-looking German scientists, using HMS Ferret in Derry as their shore base. There were all sorts of covert operations, decoys and risky landings on the occupied coast, such as the Dieppe Raid and Walcheren landings which, although disasters, were all designed with some intelligence gathering in mind. After D-Day they specialised in battlefield intelligence, raiding field-headquarters, securing prisoners and picking up dossiers.

Ralph’s other wartime skill was as an interrogator of German prisoners of war. He worked in MI9’s ‘London Cage’ at 6, 7 and 8 Kensington Palace Gardens. While other interrogators made use of sleep deprivation, and maybe towels and water buckets, Ralph was the ‘good cop’, using his infectious delight in life and his knowledge of German dialects, nightlife and restaurants to build up a conversational relationship with the prisoners. They were often impressed when they discovered that despite the war, the charming British naval officer had not become anti-German, and indeed refused to divorce his German wife. One of his German prisoners, Baron Burkard von Müllenheim-Rechberg, became a lifelong friend.

From these interrogations, Ralph was able to build a detailed picture of morale across the German armed forces and in the bombed-out cities, as well as catching hold of the current German slang, derogatory nicknames, popular songs and films, and the current favourite drinks and cigarette brands. This information was used to brief the British propaganda radio broadcasts that were beamed into Europe and became ever more trusted as they revealed such a finely tuned awareness of their listeners’ real lives. Ralph was such a master of the art of subtle interrogation that he was seconded to the United States Navy, helping establish systems that were both humane and efficient. Some of his work also touched on immediate tactical targets, such as the hunt for the Bismark and locating V1 and V2 missile bases. His last task in the navy, after victory, was identifying and interviewing German naval officers in prison camps before they were moved to the British zone and released. For at the end of the war, the Royal Navy took an almost fraternal interest in the fate of their old adversaries, which was not the case with the Russian army, then in triumphant occupation of Berlin.

The moment he was demobbed, the Daily Mail packed Ralph off as their India correspondent. Here, the run-up to independence and the partition of India was his main story. Molly, who knew India as a child, joined him and they were married in Delhi in January 1947. Over the next twenty years he reported from most of the hotspots of the Cold War: Korea, Suez, Algeria, Aden, Lebanon, Malaysia and Kenya. He was never part of the brat pack of journalists living together in an international hotel, but preferred to base himself in an ordinary house, be it an old Arab house in the centre of Beirut, a fisherman’s cottage in the walls of Famagusta or an old courtyard house with a wind-tower in the Manama quarter of Bahrain. In London he stayed in the raffish old Cavendish Hotel.

Ralph always balanced the serious salaried work of a foreign correspondent with quixotic scientific expeditions. He was a recognized authority on lichens, and by nature an observer, an expert witness, not a political analyst. In 1945 he and the naturalist C. R. Stoner went off in search of a lost, dinosaur-like lizard that had reportedly been seen in a remote highland valley of Assam. Izzard’s subsequent account, The Hunt for the Buru, concluded that the last of these four-metre lizards had died in 1940, though others continued to think they had been extinct for 66 million years. Another madcap exploit was pursuing John Hunt’s 1953 Everest Expedition all the way to base camp at 18,000 feet, without compass or map and wearing a pair of gym shoes. His book The Innocent on Everest was translated into nine different languages. The following year he set off to find the Yeti in the remote valleys of the Himalaya. Recounted in The Abominable Snowman Adventure, the story was worthy of Hergé’s Tintin.

Such was the unusual stamp of the man who took his four young children off to walk the spine of the Lebanese mountains in 1957. Although his name is on the cover of Smelling the Breezes, it is mostly written by his wife, whose literary ambitions Ralph always supported and encouraged. Smelling the Breezes was Molly’s first book and was published in 1959. Moll

y Crutchleigh-FitzPatrick had first met Ralph at Bletchley Park during the war. She had joined the FANY in 1939 and worked as a driver, at one point chauffeuring Duff Cooper, who introduced her to Sefton Delmer, who recruited her to the nascent Political Warfare Executive, a clandestine body set up to produce and disseminate both ‘white’ and ‘black’ propaganda. The propaganda staff were a talented lot, many seconded from the SOE, the BBC and the Ministry of Information. Molly learned script writing, music recording, interrogation techniques and how to analyse reconnaissance photography. She thrived in this environment, which was, in effect, her university and quickly rose through the ranks to become a Major. After the propaganda radio stations were closed in April 1945, their bilingual staff were retrained to interview and categorise prisoners of war.

Outwardly Major Molly Patricia Crutchely-Fitzpatrick must have appeared a very respectable figure at the end of the war, with her double-barrelled surname and her rank. Five generations of Molly’s paternal family had lived in India, working as tea planters in the highlands of Assam and indigo planters in Bengal. Exotic when viewed at a distance, and shot through with Irish spirit, the immediate emotional details of her childhood were in fact not quite so secure.

Molly’s father, Vere Fitzpatrick, had volunteered from India to serve in the First World War. He fought in the East African Rifles, was disabled by blackwater fever and was sent ‘home’ to England to recuperate. There he met Alice, with whom he had two children, Denis (1916) and Molly, born in St Ives in 1919. As a young man he tried a lot of different jobs while travelling the world, including a stint at the Ford factory in Chicago, studying modern mass production. He was a competent manager with a good grasp of accounts and labour relations. After his marriage and the birth of Denis, he took a job as manager of a sugarcane plantation in British Guyana and the young family settled near Georgetown. The heat and humidity of the country did not agree with Alice, and she returned to England for the birth of Molly. After Guyana he moved the family to India, where the children spent their early years. Their early childhood was spent surrounded by dogs, ponies and their father teaching them fishing and hunting. Molly shot her first and only crocodile under her father’s guidance. It was subsequently made into a small attaché case and given to her on her eighth birthday. First Denis and then Molly were sent back to boarding schools in the United Kingdom. Molly found the transition to British school life difficult, and her parents eventually sent her to join Denis in Scotland at the Dollar Academy. Alice made regular trips back to England and Vere less frequently.

The marriage broke up in the 1930s, with Molly sent out to live with her father. Following his death in a car accident in 1937, she returned to England and was promptly sent to colleges in France (Cherbourg) and in Italy (Genoa) and then to friends in Hungary by her mother. This must have been a very difficult period, but it did equip her with languages.

The war had been a liberation for both Molly and her elder brother, Denis. It gave them both a sense of purpose that the confusing emotional environment of their childhood had failed to deliver. After the war, Dennis stayed on in the Middle East working for Shell. He did well for himself and generously provided for his mother financially, sending her hampers from Fortnum & Mason to mark all the important holidays. He was able to afford a flat in London and later acquired a house in Dorset where he spent his holidays fishing.

From Germany, as we have already heard, Ralph had exchanged his naval uniform for the linen suit of a foreign correspondent. His initial posting was to India, where Molly gave birth to Miles in September 1947. Ralph was always supportive of Molly’s work and helped her first break into print journalism with a scoop reporting the funeral of Gandhi. Anthea was born during their next posting in Washington D.C. in March 1949. Their third child, Sabrina, was born in Cairo in September 1950, though her father was away at the Korean War at the time. Sebastian was born in Nicosia, Cyprus in October 1952. Earlier in 1952 on ‘Black Saturday’, the Egyptians had decided to burn out the hated British colonial presence from the city of Cairo and the Izzard family chose to buy a home in peaceful Cyprus to use over the long summers.

This was a halcyon time for Molly, surrounded by an intelligent group of expatriates in Cyprus including the historian Rupert Gunnis and the writer Lawrence Durrell. Her paternal cousin, Alan Ross (born in Calcutta 1922), was also making a name for himself as a writer at this time. The children played in the old harbour of Famagusta, swam off the empty sandy beaches or joined in the games of their boisterous Turkish-Cypriot neighbours. The house provided continuity, until they moved with their father to Beirut. Here they made friends with John Carswell (the art historian) and his American Peace Corps wife Peggy with her three children. There was also Kathleen Kenyon digging at Jericho, and a cheerful, life-enhancing colleague of Ralph’s, Kim Philby, who made everyone laugh, and who kept in touch with his distinguished old father, the Hadji, St John Philby. St John had explored Arabia, served as an advisor to the Saudi Kings, converted to Islam and written half a dozen books. Just then he was in retirement, living in the hills above Beirut with his young Palestinian wife and their two young boys. It was a complex world with many loyalties, but life in Beirut was very good. The family swam in the sea-pool beside the St George’s hotel and the children went to a little convent school, from which Miles moved at nine to be taught by the Jesuits.

This was the mood, the very full life, that Molly and Ralph wished to celebrate on their final exploration of Lebanon, walking the spine of the mountains with their four children. But Smelling the Breezes was a watershed moment. After the book was published, life was never quite so carefree and easy again. Traumatic political events in the Middle East encouraged the Daily Mail to cut down its permanent overseas staff, sending them out instead from London when needed to the current crisis zone. The Izzard family, used to the physical and emotional warmth of the Levant, were sent home. They endured a series of freezing farmhouses, lent to them by concerned friends, including Kim Philby, who sent them to stay with his aunt in Crowborough. Eventually, much more out of accident than design, they settled in Tunbridge Wells in Kent. Ralph reluctantly cut his ties with the Daily Mail, immersed himself in making adventure travel films with Tom Stobart and David Attenborough for the BBC and then established himself as a freelancer for Reuters, living in an old courtyard house in Bahrain. The life was good, but his earnings were erratic. He was always back home for the summer holidays, but in terms of family life his wife Molly upheld the show. In the words of her daughter, she was ‘strong’ and a ‘survivor’. But she was also talented. She wrote an evocative memoir, A Private Life (1963), a biography of Dame Helen Gywnn-Vaughn of the ATS, a history of the mercantile culture of the Gulf, The Gulf: Arabian Western Approaches (1979) and a controversial biography of Freya Stark, published in 1993.

Her four children all went off in their own directions, like the four points of the compass.

Miles was nicknamed ‘Bo’ (shortened from ‘Bebop’) by his nanny in Washington. He grew up recklessly handsome, with an imaginative sense of style and great elan. Although ‘perfectly bright and intelligent’, the constant movements of his childhood – ‘off every three years’ – meant that in later life he never settled nor found his way. He tried his hand at journalism, but it did not take, and his enigmatic, aloof nature made it difficult for him to form lasting relationships. He was never short of company, however, and as many of his friends remarked, he was well-read, had interesting views, a sardonic wit and a sharp repartee; it made him an endearing and amusing companion, much beloved by the women who nurtured and surrounded him.

Anthea (nicknamed Pampi) was another beauty but a restless spirit, by turns an actress, a hippy, a traveller, a radical protestor, a searcher after enlightenment and a mother of two daughters. Anthea lived at various times of her life in a squat on Eel Pie Island, on a farm in Wales, in an ashram in India and then followed her guru to Texas. But her interest in the Kabbalah finally led her towards California and conversion to Judaism.

Sabrina, the third child, did not much care for any of her schools, but was always passionate about books. She made her own way through life, working for the World of Islam Festival Trust, and then for ten years in the antiquarian book trade before becoming the owner of Hall’s bookshop in Tunbridge Wells – one of England’s most revered antiquarian bookshops. This also allowed Sabrina to keep an eye on her parents, to help them through their last years and to become the stable rock for the family. Ralph died in 1992 and Molly in 2004.

Sebastian, the youngest ‘was different from all the others’ and made himself self-reliant from an early age, earning his own pocket money from a paper round (aged 12), and holiday jobs as a hotel bell hop (aged 13). Bored by the lack of intellectual structure at his Steiner school in Forest Row, Sussex, he left to go to art school, graduating with a degree in Graphic Design from Chelsea School of Art. Here he developed a passionate interest in Japanese prints, and went on to study them at SOAS, successfully emerging with a Phd dissertation on the work of the print artist Utagawa Kunisada in 1980. From there he joined Christie’s, who posted him to New York, where he remains. Leaving the auction world in 1997, he set up his own gallery specialized in Japanese Art, holding bi-annual exhibits accompanied by scholarly catalogues. He is a recognized authority on Ukiyo-e, ‘the art of the floating world’.

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