How they got here
France signed an armistice with Germany in June 1940. Men who would not accept it made their way out, many of them across the Channel, to carry on fighting from Britain. Among them were boys young enough to need training before they could be commissioned, and de Gaulle created a military academy to do it. The Cadets de la France Libre were housed at Ribbesford House, a Grade II* mansion of twenty bedrooms set in its own grounds just outside Bewdley.
The cadets were a striking sight in the town, and they came into it often. One resident whose family later owned the house remembered the effect of the uniform: great coats that swept right the way round, and an observation that when the young men came back from town there were sometimes not only boots underneath but high heels, going click, click, click rather than boom, boom, boom.
Bewdley took to them. Local people made a point of making them welcome, and that welcome is the reason any of this is still remembered eighty years later.
De Gaulle
De Gaulle visited the cadets at Ribbesford, and among those he came to see was his own son. For a small Worcestershire town to have hosted the leader of the Free French, more than once, in a house on the Stourport road, is not something many places can claim.
There is proof of the connection hanging in the Guildhall. A studio photograph of de Gaulle, seated at his desk in uniform with a map of France behind him, carries a dedication written in his own hand: “Au Lord Maire de Bewdley”, dated in the spring of 1943, and signed C. de Gaulle. He gave it to the town’s mayor, and it is still here.
What happened to them
Fifty-four of the two hundred and eleven were later killed. That figure was recorded when wreaths were laid at Ribbesford House in 2012, at the fiftieth anniversary of the town’s twinning with Fort-Mahon-Plage, in the presence of veterans of the cadet school. They went from a house outside Bewdley to the campaigns that took the Allies back into France, and about a quarter of them did not come home from it. That is the reason the commemorations here have never been merely ceremonial.
The house since
In 1947 Ribbesford House was bought by Wing Commander Alfred John Howell, whose restoration of it became, in his daughter’s phrase, a labour of love after his RAF service. The Howell family held it for seventy-one years, letting parts of it to tenants and guests and filling it with parties, and two of them spent decades researching the thousand year history of the site. It was sold at auction in 2018, at the Crown and Sandys in Ombersley, for eight hundred and ten thousand pounds against a guide price of five hundred thousand, and it needed complete renovation.
The house has other associations. Stanley Baldwin, Bewdley’s own prime minister, and his cousin Rudyard Kipling were both visitors in earlier years.
The bond, kept up
In 1999 L’Amicale des Cadets de la France Libre presented Bewdley Museum with a casoar, the ceremonial plumed cap worn by French officer cadets, in a ceremony recognising the part the town had played. It is still in the museum’s collection.
On 15 April 2024, for the eightieth anniversary, a delegation from the Association du Souvenir des Cadets de la France Libre came to Bewdley, accompanied by the former Attorney General Dominic Grieve, who has kept the connection alive. The Mayor, Councillor Sarah Billett, received them, they ate at the Mug House on Severnside, and they laid a wreath at St Anne’s Church. Before they left they presented the town with a certificate of honorary membership of the association.
There is a further trace of the friendship in the Guildhall, a framed tricolour pennant from the town of Fort-Mahon-Plage on the Somme coast, which came to Bewdley through the same Free French connection.
Eighty years after a group of French teenagers arrived at a house on the edge of a Worcestershire town, their successors still come back to say thank you.