Two canoes
The monument commemorates five young men of Fort-Mahon-Plage who slipped past the German occupying forces, answered de Gaulle’s call, and crossed the Channel to England in two rickety canoes. They arrived exhausted. They were received, according to the inscription, by de Gaulle and by Churchill.
The names given are Reynold Lefèvre, Christian and Guy Richard, and Jean-Paul and Pierre Lavoix. Two pairs of brothers and a fifth man. The inscription records that they went on to the cadet school of a free France, and fought with the Allies until the liberation. Reynold Lefèvre was killed in January 1945, serving with the 1st Free French Division.
A word of caution about that list. The inscription reaches us through the volunteer war-memorial database TracesOfWar, and the English there is a translation with rough edges. The names and the January 1945 date should be checked against the monument itself or a French source before anybody carves them into anything.
The thing this does not quite prove
The obvious conclusion is that these five trained at Ribbesford House outside Bewdley, and that this is the whole explanation. It is very probably right, and it is not yet proved.
The monument says “the cadet school of a free France”. It does not say Ribbesford. The École des Cadets de la France Libre was not at Ribbesford for the whole of its existence, so depending on when these five arrived they could have been at an earlier site. The Association pour le Souvenir des Cadets de la France Libre, which has honoured Bewdley and the family who owned Ribbesford House, would be able to settle it in a sentence, and until somebody asks them we are going to say only what the evidence carries.
What is not in doubt is the shape of the thing. Fort-Mahon-Plage sent its own sons across the Channel into the Free French cadet school. Bewdley housed that school. The two towns are joined by the same young men.
1962, and how anybody knows
The date of the twinning was itself a research problem. Stuart Williams, chairman of the Bewdley twinning association, explained to the Kidderminster Shuttle in 2012 that when the association set out around 2009 to establish exactly when the towns had been twinned, they could not do it from the town’s own records, because “Bewdley archives ceased to exist before 1974”. They found the answer instead by searching the newspaper’s own archives, which gave them 1962.
That single remark explains a great deal about why the history of this town is harder to write than it should be. For the borough period there are no town archives to go to. There are newspapers, the county record office and whatever has survived in private hands.
2012 therefore marked fifty years of the twinning and twenty-five years of the twinning association, which places the association’s founding around 1987.
The fiftieth anniversary
The anniversary was kept properly. There was an exhibition at Bewdley Museum on the history of the Cadets de la France Libre at Ribbesford, and the visiting party then went out to Ribbesford House to lay wreaths, in memory of the fifty-four of the two hundred and eleven who trained there and were later killed.
Three veterans of the cadet school came: Serge Arvengas, René Lemoine and René Marbot. Colonel Patrick Holcroft and the Mayor, John Latham, welcomed them. “The celebration at the museum was really lovely and very emotional,” Stuart Williams told the Shuttle afterwards.
Sixty years of visits
Between the wreaths and the archives it is easy to lose the ordinary part, which is that this has been a working friendship for six decades. Residents remember the first school exchange in the 1960s, with Bewdley Secondary School, and a Scouts and Guides trip in 1972. Those are recollections rather than records, and they are worth writing down before they go the way of the town archives.
If anybody in Bewdley still has photographs of those trips, they are the missing half of this story.