PART ONE: AND DID THOSE FEET?
It has often been said by those who, in the view of the local council may be considered uncharitable, that the emblem of the City of Bath might best be portrayed by a seagull of which there are only too many and who spend much of their time, like the politicians, shopkeepers and officials of one kind or another, shitting all over the townspeople. An uncharitable view? Well if one were to put it to any of the above worthies, especially the landlords and shopkeepers who make Bath a rip off merchant’s paradise and one of the most expensive places to buy food and live anywhere in the known Universe, they’d tell you to fuck off and live elsewhere.
Well naturally, but then these people, whose only real interest has been screwing whatever they can get from the tourist trade and what may best be described as ‘property development’ for which read a whole long litany of hanky-panky, are only defending interests which have characterised the City for hundreds of years. Georgian Bath was built as a speculator’s paradise among whom dwelt Beau Nash, hero of the Council and city establishment who put the town on the map for all the well-heeled and famous to visit and was himself Master of Ceremonies at the Pump Room where he presided over swank when actually he was really a master of fraudulent activity and confidence trickery second to none. No problem!
And what a treat it has been to see the writer Jane Austen promoted to iconic status heroine by these people as the City’s well beloved darling daughter! Oh she lived in the place all right, sure she did, but she hated its pretentious swank all ends up partly because a wretched local shopkeeper falsely accused an aunt who lived there of shoplifting, a hanging or transportation offence at the time. The writer expressed her opinion of the place two years after she left it for good in a letter to her sister Cassandra dated 1808,
“It will be two years tomorrow since we left Bath for Clifton, with what happy feelings of escape.”
Even more damning is a passage from her novel, Northanger Abbey, where she has Isabella Thorpe confiding to Catherine Morland,
“I get so immoderately sick of Bath; your brother and I were agreeing this morning that though it is vastly well to be here for a few weeks, we would not live here for millions.”
Yeah, right. So much for Bath’s heroine! Today however, given the City’s lust for the tourist trade, the Jane Austen industry is seriously big with countless Americans and other wealthy ignorant tourists paying big money to doll themselves up in Georgian dress and parade around the City like arseholes. And that’s to say nothing of the wretched cream teas and pissy little souvenirs they get taken for a ride on.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly! The great poet Shelley who stayed in Bath was always the Bad. Of all the metal plaques the Council’s put up to anyone famous who lived here there’s nothing for Shelley, sent down from Oxford for being a radical and atheist. That says it all. Bath, a tight little, right little place always up its own arse and full of prejudices had a long term mayor in the 1860’s aptly named Tite, a name that featured as a family in one of Dickens novels, the Tite-Barnacles. No wonder the Liberal Democrats have got the place by the balls but better them than their Tory opponents, constantly fearful of the travelling community and threats of an unclean and troublesome, indeed alien encroachment into the City as they see it, which neatly brings me to the subject of the first part of this post, Adolf Hitler’s visit to Bath in 1920, possibly on his way to Glastonbury, Tintagel and Stonehenge with a strange idea in his head.
Of course, there’d be many people who’d say I was having a laugh. After all, didn’t the Luftwaffe bomb the shit out of the place in the Baedeker anti-British culture raids? So much then for Hitler having any affinity with it. Well actually, apart from dropping a bomb in the Circus they only really hit the Rail Station and surrounding areas. The Abbey, which stood out like a sore thumb, along with the Pump Room, Roman Baths, all the great Georgian Crescents along with the Guildhall, the famous Palladian Bridge, Pulteney Street and most of the rest of Georgian Bath were left untouched when they could so easily have been flattened. In short if Hitler did visit Bath he may well have had a special affection for the place.
And yet was that all it was? Could it have possibly been something more? I’ve already mentioned Glastonbury, meaning the Tor, Stonehenge and Tintagel, all of which, like Bath with its legendary King Bladud and his daughters, are places of real ancient mystery and folklore. The Tor and Glastonbury Abbey along with Stonehenge are associated with the druidic cult and rosicrucianism, and Tintagel with its Round Table Arthurian legend and Sir Percival are at the centre of much Holy Grail talk. Well, weren’t all these places with their iconic symbols, ancient heroic knights, cults and legends absolute grist to the mill for Nazi ideologists, especially such proponents as Heinrich Himmler who became guardian steward of the SS and was involved in so much Nazi mythology-seeking. Hitler, already by 1920 a virulent and vocal anti-Semite now on the extreme right wing of German politics was already looking for ways to mythologise Germany’s past, harking back to a spurious greatness after its ignominious defeat in the First World War, so any inspiration gained from West Country English legend might certainly have proved useful in helping him develop his Wagnerian ‘lost in the mists of time’ views. Indeed, rather than dismiss it all as a joke one could, with little effort, regard his time in Bath and elsewhere as positively inspirational, and certainly a subject worthy of speculation and enquiry.
For the thirty-one year old Hitler, whose ideas for a new Germany rising out of the ashes were already fast coming together, in order for a nation to create its future it had to look to its past. In this sense, his visit to Bath and other places deeply rooted in a powerfully spiritual and mystical national past can be seen as highly formative in the development of his views.
So what of the evidence? The impetus for my thesis originates from an incident of which I thought little at the time, occurring during the sixties when Bath was still semi-rustic. It’s a story worth telling. I was sitting in the Ring of Bells pub in Widcombe, now a posh wine bar, listening to some locals talking with broad Somerset accents. I’d only recently arrived in the City and was keen to learn more of the place from those who’d lived there for so many years as I thought. The talk was mainly about the old days and how things were back in the twenties and thirties when many of the townspeople had worked as cooks, coachmen, waiters, charwomen and servants of the well to do along with others who were self-employed tradesmen and innkeepers. Conversation turned on drinking and old hostelries and the folk who used to stay at these places.
“You remember the old Castle Hotel in Northgate Street don’t you George?” someone said to a friend. “Fanny Bateman was still there running it when they closed it down. Lively lady she were and no nonsense about her. Full of stories she were.”
I listened avidly. Keen to lap up any reminiscences of old times.
“Once you got ‘er talking she’d start going on about some of the coves who’d took lodging there. Many of them jobbing travellers they was. The town didn’t have much tourists in them days though some of them travellers were mighty queer fellers at that. One of them came after the War, nineteen-twenty she said it was. A mighty peculiar young fellow. German, I remember her saying but spoke funny like he wasn’t German at all. There for a couple of days seeing the town he told her. What you might call a touristing man. Having a look round.”
My curiosity was aroused. A young German visiting the town two years after the War. Well I suppose it was unusual but then maybe he was a student or something, interested in architecture or history.
“He was visiting around he’d told her. Would have been water off a duck’s back for someone like Fanny Bateman, even him being German and all, only he was a strange kind of chap she let on. Paid his money all right, but the look of him, that’s what give her the creeps! Not only his look but him looking at her! Black hair swept over his forehead and eyes black as the devil himself she told me. Seemed to look all the way through her, she said, and all in a face white as a sheet…
“She took pity on him I remember her saying. Thought he looked skinny, needed feeding and all. She was always generous filling his plate. That was another strange thing. I mean his habit of eating and drinking. Vegetables only it were and really down on his ale. Drank water most with his meals. Still, she was used to all kind of folk, only it was his eyes she remembered most so she said. Made her feel creepy.”
That was the end of it, for the strange young German at least, before he began going on about other things. The other tale I remembered was about a Second World War bomb killing an off duty fireman in the Circus who happened to be on his way home. Both stories stayed in my mind for a while but gradually faded, disappearing into the much broader canvas of everyday life, marriage and family. It was only many years later when something occurred to bring it all back. I’d been watching a program about the rise of the Nazis on television when a series of pictures appeared, one of the striking me forcibly. The year was around 1920 and a pale faced man, hair swept across his forehead, with piercing black eyes instantly caught my attention. It was the young Adolf Hitler!
My thoughts raced and the memory of what I’d heard all those years earlier in the pub came flooding back. I couldn’t believe it but once made the connection was irrepressible. It couldn’t be put back in the bottle. The story I’d heard in the pub, the description, and now the face on the screen! The resemblance was simply too strong, too shocking to be dismissed. The young German who’d stayed at the Castle Hotel and the man who was to become Fuehrer of the Third Reich were one and the same. Hitler had been here in Bath!
I related the whole thing to my wife, no-one else. Who else would believe me? I was faced with the same problems that Dan Brown had to face when developing his theories about Mary Magdalene and the blood line of Jesus. Scepticism, disbelief and doubt. Maybe if I began searching for evidence? My thoughts went back to the old man in the pub. That was forty years in the past. He’d be dead and gone long time ago but maybe he’d passed on his tale? Maybe his family knew something? Such a line of enquiry had nowhere to go. I didn’t know the man’s name and maybe he hadn’t even lived in the City. I thought of making other enquiries. Would anyone else know the story? It was hardly likely. But then what of Fanny Bateman herself?
It was over ninety years back and the Castle Hotel long gone. Part of Bath’s heritage demolished in 1924 to make way for a ghastly neo-Georgian style post office. It was only a precursor to the 1960’s tearing down of nearby old Walcott Street and its taverns to make way for a huge and seriously ugly car park besides an architectural joke of a post-modern style hotel. But that was in the late ‘60’s when planning controls could best be described as fifty quid and a handshake. As for myself I was looking much further back and despite various phone calls and enquiries at the Public Records Office my efforts to track down her family got nowhere.
It made me think long and hard. No, I wouldn’t give up. Maybe if I turned the story the other way round. What if the young Hitler just couldn’t have been here? For example, like it could be proved without doubt that he’d been somewhere else at the time. I needed to find out what he’d been doing throughout 1920. He’d joined the German Workers Party in September 1919 though had stayed in the Army until end of March 1920, drawing army pay and speaker’s fees for being an extreme rightist political agitator. This was a time before he actually took over the Party and began organising it. If I could create a daily record of his life and account for what he’d been doing I was in with a chance.
It was true that in later Nazi mythology, in their polished up ‘manufactured’ record of his life, there was no mention of him ever travelling abroad after he’d left Austria for good and taken up residence in Germany. Sure, we all know about those later trips to Paris and Prague with both countries under his boot but that was much later on. Nineteen-twenty was something else. His time in the War and immediate years after were never fully detailed or made clear. Well if I could account for all his time during that year being spent in Germany then he surely couldn’t have visited Bath!
Alternatively what about British immigration controls at the time? Aliens’ registration requirements and passport controls. He was still an Austrian citizen and it was less than two years after the War had ended. Even for tourists? Would the British authorities have needed to keep an eye on a young traveller from Germany? All these issues required considerable research. I needed to establish a timeline.
More important than anything else however a question kept coming back. If Hitler had come to England, travelling to Bath, Glastonbury and Stonehenge, perhaps even Tintagel, why had he come? It was a question that led to much deeper thought. Could he have been looking for something? Something so special, so powerful that the idea could no longer be ignored.
What on Earth could Bath have had to offer him? There’d been Iron Age settlements built nearby, the place had then become Roman and with the later Romans had come Christianity. The first formal place of prayer had been built by Bertana, a French Abbess who came to the area with twelve nuns from the South of France and constructed what is known as the first Abbey very close to the site of the Roman Baths whose waters are fed by an ancient spring. The waters indeed, are another matter for they were well known to Romans and then on through Saxon, Medieval, Georgian and modern times for their strange healing powers. That is indeed why the Georgians established a Mineral Water Hospital there, now the Royal Mineral Water Hospital and the only one of its kind in the country. A special centre for the treatment of many diseases.
So the water had healing power. I couldn’t get the thought out of my mind. The water had the power of healing. Why should that be. Was it only coincidence? Could the young Hitler have had some illness from the War and come to Bath for treatment? I checked the records extensively. No, the name wasn’t recorded. Whatever his interest was it could only have been something else.
No, I was getting ahead of myself. I already had evidence that he’d been in Bath. What I needed to do was firm it up. Naturally the best thing would be finding a photo. A shot of the little guy and his moustache outside the Guildhall or Roman Baths. I scanned everything available from the time to no avail. However the more I thought about it the idea came into my mind that there might be another way. If I could prove beyond doubt that he couldn’t possibly have been here at that time because there were records proving beyond doubt that he was in Germany, let’s say making a speech somewhere, or at that time so soon after the War he wouldn’t have been allowed into Britain, well that would be that.
I felt a buzz of excitement. I had to switch to the methods of Sherlock Holmes! Build up a meticulous record of his time during the year and check out the records of controls on foreign nationals visiting Britain. If I could eliminate the impossible what was left had to be true. Some serious detective work lay ahead and I relished the prospect. Only then, only when I felt sure, could I let my thoughts run. The real reason for Hitler being in Bath… His search for something so precious, so fundamental, that its possession might dominate the history of mankind for a thousand years…
I could barely contain these thought as I relayed idea after idea to my wife who I knew would accompany me in this enterprise. However, as you will know from your reading of other material, there are grave dangers associated with the exploration of this subject. The power of the Vatican, of Opus Dei in particular, with its limitless financial resources and fanatical disciples, to reach out its hand to eliminate enquiry is very real.
I AM INDEED, YOU WILL UNDERSTAND, SPEAKING FROM THE PRESENT TIME ABOUT ENQUIRIES CONDUCTED IN THE PAST. MY RESEARCH IS NOW ALL BUT COMPLETE AND ITS FINDINGS ASTONISHING.
TO ENSURE ITS SAFETY IT HAS BEEN PLACED IN THE HANDS OF GUARDIANS FROM WHOM IT CANNOT BE RETREIVED BY OUTSIDE HANDS AND WILL ONLY BE RELEASED UNDER CIRCUMSTANCES THAT I MYSELF WILL DETERMINE. MY THOUGHTS ABOVE ALL ARE THAT THEIR SAFETY AND SECURITY CANNOT BE COMPROMISED.
IT IS MY HOPE, HOWEVER, THAT ANOTHER CHAPTER OF THIS STORY WILL SOON BE RELEASED.
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