The sad demise of Michael Mosley in Greece and of Jay Slater in Tenerife this summer naturally made me think of my great Uncle David Cochrane, not just the manner of his death in 1931 but also of the waiting that all three families endured. With Cochrane there is also a villain of the story, his uncle by marriage, and this is, in a way, a precursor to a very long article I am preparing on Operation Mincemeat, the underpants and my family. It all starts with the four young girls pictured below in, I suspect, the late 1890s.
These girls are four of the five daughters of Sir Courtenay Ilbert, of Ilbert Bill fame. One of them, Margaret, married Sir Arthur Cochrane and was the mother of poor David and my great grandmother. Another, Jessie, married the Baronet Sir George Young, a diplomat, a member of The Admiralty Intelligence in WW1 and a member of the establishment. His grandson, also called George, is the Tory Politician Lord Young.
If it does not overcomplicate matters, my father’s father briefly walked out with Joan, the daughter of Sir George. Grandpa’s socially ambitious, if humbly born out of wedlock, mum encouraged that relationship and was not pleased that instead my grandfather took a shine to Joan’s cousin, the daughter of Sir Arthur Cochrane. The Cochranes were landed gentry but not as posh as the Youngs who were baronets. So in the end John Winnifrith, my grandfather, married Lesbia Cochrane, the sister of David.
David Cochrane went missing in April 1931 while walking near Delphi in Greece on a holiday from Oxford. As the owner of a gold watch which David carried on that fateful day and a pencil portrait of David as a student, I have covered what happened extensively over the years, retracing his steps and trying to find out where his body was laid to rest. His body was not discovered for a year until villagers from Desfina searching for snails found it. Poor David had fallen off the mountain overlooking Delphi, a mountain now known as Kokranos though few folks in the town known why.
So my poor great grandparents just had to wait, knowing nothing. Into that vacuum hopped the “diplomat” Sir George Young who helpfully suggested that David had been murdered as that is what the Greeks do to foreigners whose possessions they wish to steal. The Greeks, rightly, took umbrage at what was a foul slur and when the body was found with David’s watch, money and traveler’s cheques intact, the Greek Ambassador wrote a long letter to the Times, a copy of which I have, pointing out what a scallywag Sir George had been.
I thought and prayed for the family of Mosley and Slater as they waited. They must have known just as my great grandparents knew. But when the bodies were found it will still have been a blow.
In the tale of Mincemeat and the underpants another Ilbert girl and her husband enter the picture as do the offspring of Sir George. That has taken a lot of piecing together but I have got there in the end and will be writing it up shortly.
The granddaughter of Sir George, Helen, was my father’s second cousin and also his second wife. I suppose that is called keeping it in the family.
