Note - when the author of ' My Cousin Nancy Gaubert 1888 - 19 ' - N.E.A. Hall - talks of 'Nancy', she is referring to Robert Gabriel GAUBERT's daughter Ann 'Nancy ' born in 1888 ie the half sister of Tania. The woman referred to as 'Mother' throughout the story is Elizabeth Gaubert, nee Kroukenoffsky. NEAH claims that it was Elizabeth and Nancy who 'found' Tania. (End).
She was the daughter of my mother's own brother, Robert. He was managing the Ouglitch paper mill when she was young. He had married a Russian lady Elizabeth Kroukenoffsky and they all had a very happy and comfortable life there until the Revolution in 1917. She had married a wealthy hotel owner in Yalta but had no children. Two or three years later they split up and she lived with her parents for a while. Later, she married again, an army officer, and they had a lovely house in Moscow I believe. Then the 1917 Revolution broke out and rioters besieged their house. Nancy's husband was shot dead before her eyes. She and her mother escaped and fled to the British Embassy where our Ambassador took charge of them and their safety. Her mother was a Russian lady and her father British. Later her father died and she wished to return to England. In the meantime they enlisted in the Tsarina's army of nurses, and were touring the battlefields and caring for the wounded and working hard under a very difficult regime. Once, when travelling and nursing, they passed a huge heap of dead and dying cholera victims and wounded civilians, and both heard the wails of a baby from the middle. So one, or both, climbed into the unsavoury bodies and found a newly born baby girl. They rescued her and took her home and brought her up as though she were Nancy's sister. They took her to live with them, in very poor quarters and brought her up as if she............
The conditions were terrible then; the Bolsheviks were very cruel people, and starvation was very imminent, but they managed to get enough to keep them alive... an occasional dead rat was considered a feast, and the only means of buying any food was by bartering and losing any precious possessions that they could save. About four families were housed in one room, with nothing but newspapers to hang up for privacy. Sometimes they took it in turns to go out and steal anything that could be sold for food. All their own possessions went one by one, for to try and get enough to keep themselves alive, and to eat anything, however bad, was necessary for life. Sir Basil?? (Sir George Buchanan) was a huge help and did all he could to help Nancy get a visa to get away from Russia. Eventually he managed to get her a passport or some permission to come to her father's relations in England, but he could not get permission for her mother (being a Russian) or the adopted baby, not knowing what her nationality was as a foundling. So Nancy was allowed to come over and she stayed with my parents in Watford. I had been married in 1919 and we lived a very short distance away. Nancy, a very lovely woman, asked my help to get some money. It was all very secret but somehow she managed to have smuggled some money or jewellery into England, and her great desire was to go to Paris and buy some good French clothes to sell in Russia when she got back, with a view to helping her mother and Tania to come over, by selling the clothes to some rich Russians.
She asked me to help her take off the French labels and replace them with any English ones we could find, as her permission to get out of Russia was for England only and not for France. So we both spent part of the day changing labels, so that the clothes might pass for English. All went well till her permit was ended and she took her bags and set off for Russia, again helped by Sir Basil (Sir George Buchanan), our Ambassador there.
On her arrival in Russia she was immediately arrested and imprisoned. Her mother wrote to my mother to tell her. She was bitterly unhappy about her daughter's condition in prison, and told my mother that Nancy had been beaten and tortured and starved for a few weeks, and then, before she died, the Bolsheviks not wanting enquiries to be made, put her dying body on her mother's doorstep to die. So all Nancy's trip was in vain. Her mother, being a British man's wife, was eventually, again through Sir Basil, able to reach England with her adopted daughter, and relations helped with money and clothes, and to find a small house or lodgings in south London.
My Aunt Bessie (Betsy), though very forlorn, managed to make a little money by working. She was still a very beautiful and cultured woman, and had a very composed nature considering how she had suffered, and her chief thought was for Tania, her adopted child. She begged us to keep the secret from Tania always, that they had saved her as a baby, so she had no known nationality. Tania had to go to a Bolshevik Russian school, and was about 13 or 14 when she arrived in England (1930?), and was full of very forceful antagonism against England. So far as I know, she never knew the truth.
Aunt Betsy died after a few years (1939) and Tania got married (1943). My brother Frank managed to track her down and visited her but she and her husband had left the village and no-one knew where, so that is all I know about Tania. Always a mystery from birth onwards. She was quite good - looking and had a nice figure when she and her mother were first staying with my parents which was the last that I saw of her, as they left to live in south London.
I often wondered where they went? back to Russia. My father helped them financially by sending her ten shillings a week pocket-money, and after he died ( 1936 ) my younger brother and I wrote to her to say that my mother's affairs were being settled up by his solicitors and that until we knew whether she would be able to continue doing so ( it would be suspended ). In reply we got the rudest letter I have ever had, calling us, and all English people, the most dreadful names and saying that she would never see us again ... all rather uncalled for, as we did not know my mother's circumstances. My father left no will and at the time we had not the slightest idea of his finances, but had to find out first if the cash was available.
