As we bumble Brexit-wards I worry about my friends with properties in France. How will they manage? We must look to history for guidance.
The Irish Free State through a Land Commission effectively seized properties in the 1920s, providing a blue-print for ex-President Mugabe to successfully copy; split infinitive, so what? Some day soon the sans-culottes will be marching up their avenues, wading through their wild flower meadows and helping themselves to fine wine from their cellars.
All too often I am a doom-monger projecting unhealthy negativity, unlike Ken Fisher. This sunny Sunday morning (in London at least) I, like St Christopher – after whom I am not named – who, digression, had his canonisation confiscated by an insensitive Pope – I can hold out a helping hand to my friends who for so many years have unstintingly put me up, put up with me, entertained me in their châteaux, around their swimming pools and at private operas in their beautiful auditoria (OK, I made that last bit up).
History always has something to teach us and this is not the first time that there have been desperately needy Brits living in penury in France. The British Charitable Fund was founded in 1823 by Lord Granville, our man in Paris then. Their history is put succinctly on their website and I can do no better than quote from it:
For many years the charity relied heavily on large-scale fundraising events held at the Embassy, including three highly successful public readings from ‘Little Dombey’ and ‘The Trial from Pickwick’ given in 1863 by Charles Dickens, and a magnificent ball attended by Emperor Napoleon III and Empress Eugenie in 1865.
Our principal benefactor in the 1870’s was Sir Richard Wallace, who was also Chairman for 20 years. During the Siege of 1870, he and a handful of trustees stayed in Paris to help thousands of British people stranded in the city, many on the verge of starvation. He donated vast sums of money to provide food, coal, clothing and shelter for them and by the end of the Commune the following year, 4,500 lives had been saved and 500 repatriations successfully organised. Severe winters and a cholera epidemic followed, and contributions poured in from donors in both France and the UK, including Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales.
In 1940, the trustees were obliged to leave Paris but throughout the war were able to get money through to 171 elderly pensioners left in the city, via the ‘Protecting Powers’. After the Liberation in 1944, three trustees returned to Paris and were attached to the Embassy Relief Department until September 1945. The British Red Cross was housed in the charity’s offices in the Avenue Hoche until 1947, when the trustees were able to resume their normal work in the community.
The trustees may be obliged to leave Paris again but be assured that somehow they will distribute funds to needy Brits in Brittany and all over France. Incidentally, the charity originally only distributed grants in Paris and now works throughout France. They distribute some £250,000 a year. Rather appropriately their Lloyds Bank branch is in Waterloo Place in London; appropriate but inaccurate as that branch has closed and is now an hotel.