Churchill's Legionnaire Edmund Murray

By Edmund Murray

In 1937 aged just 19, Edmund Murray left his family and a comfortable job in London, caught the boat train to France and signed up for the minimum of five years' service with the French Foreign Legion. Armed with little more than school-boy French and a desire for a life of adventure, Murray travelled through France and on to the Legion's headquarters in Algeria where he completed a gruelling three-month basic training programme. He went on to serve in Morocco and Indochina (now Vietnam) where towards the end of the War, his regiment were forced to retreat from invading Japanese forces into China where his service ended after eight years as a Legionnaire. Throughout the Second World War, Murray's overwhelming sense of duty compelled him to try to leave the Legion and join the Allied forces, but he was thwarted at every attempt. He was an Englishman, in a French organisation, by definition a home for 'the men with no names', during a time of global conflict where battle lines and countries' boundaries changed almost daily. He was an anomaly, a diplomatic puzzle. But as such, his was an extraordinary war-time experience. This book, which borrows heavily from Murray's earlier book, Churchill's Bodyguard, includes rare personal insights into Legion life from drills and manoeuvres, to feast-days and festivals as well as accounts of friendships forged in exceptional circumstances and which would last a lifetime. It also documents a unique war-time experience of the man whose sense of duty never faltered and led him, in later life, to become bodyguard to Sir Winston Churchill. Edited by his son Bill Murray, this is the story in his own words of Edmund Murray, Churchill's Legionnaire, and his service in the French Foreign Legion from 1937 to 1945.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Unicorn
• Release date: Jul 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781914414022

Book preview

Contents

TITLE PAGE

PROLOGUE

AUTHOR’S NOTE

FOREWORD by Simon Murray

1: CHILDHOOD MEMORIES

2: THE LONG ROAD TO ALGERIA

3: GIVING ONESELF TO THE LEGION

4: INSTRUCTION AT SAÏDA

5: THE LEGION, LA MUSIQUE AND L‘AMOUR

6: JOURNEYING TO JOIN THE WAR

7: INDOCHINA

8: THE GREAT RETREAT

9: FROM CHINA TO INDIA AND THE END OF A CHAPTER

10: REUNIONS AND REMEMBRANCES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INDEX

COPYRIGHT

Prologue

In the first week of November 1958, on his way back from a stay in the south of France, Sir Winston Churchill stopped off in Paris where he was to receive the French nation’s highest honour, La Croix de la Libération, from the hands of his war-time ‘colleague’, General de Gaulle. Churchill had once described de Gaulle as the ‘… greatest cross that he [Churchill] had to bear…’ The ceremony took place in the Matignon Gardens and Churchill stayed the night at the British Embassy where his son-in-law, Christopher Soames, was the British Ambassador. The following day, prior to departure from Orly, the General gave Sir Winston lunch at the Elysée Palace.

The lunch terminated. Churchill descended to the entrance by lift but de Gaulle marched down the elegant marble staircase. I was there preparing to assist Sir Winston by offering my arm as usual. General de Gaulle reached the last steps when Churchill turned to him and bellowed out, in understandable French but with his usual terribly English accent: ‘Vous devez connaître mon garde-du-corps, le Sergent Murray… il a passé dix années dans votre Légion Etrangère.’

The General, faced by this momentous disclosure had no other option than to come towards me with hand outstretched. I thought for a moment that he was going to salute me in the typical Gallic way with kisses on both cheeks, but he restrained himself, grasped my hand firmly and asked me when and where I had honoured the Legion with my presence. We chatted, without interruption from Churchill who just stood by watching with a smirk on his features for a good ten minutes looking like his cat at Chartwell after stealing a bit of fish, before shaking hands once again and saying goodbye. A few minutes later as we made our way with a Garde Mobile escort towards the airport, I turned round in my seat beside the chauffeur to thank Sir Winston for his kind gesture. I could see that he was still smiling contentedly and relishing the moment.

From this episode came the idea of calling the story of my time in the French Foreign Legion, Churchill’s Légionnaire.

Author’s Note

In my autobiography, I was Churchill’s Bodyguard, published by W.H. Allen of London in 1987, I wrote about my life in the French Foreign Legion without really going into the matter in any great length, but used it to suggest the probable reasons for my being chosen, in 1950, to protect Sir Winston Churchill MP, then Leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons. I was deemed to be the right officer in the right place at the right time and was selected by the then Chief of Special Branch, the late Commander Leonard Burt, with the approval of the Home Secretary who was the final arbiter on such an important assignment. I was to remain with Sir Winston as his constant companion for the next fifteen years, accompanying him wherever he went on land, on sea and in the air, and even on one occasion, under the sea on a submarine with Lord Mountbatten acting as guide in the south of France. I was just outside his bedroom when he died on 24 January 1965, leaving behind an emptiness that will never be filled.

I received many wonderful letters of congratulations on my autobiography including one from Lady Churchill who wrote that I had gone over and beyond the call of duty. Mr Anthony AD Montague Browne, CBE, DFC, one of the numerous private secretaries that Winston Churchill had throughout his long public life, commented in a review of my book for the International Churchill Association, that more details about my life in the French Foreign Legion would not have gone amiss and this sentiment was echoed by many others.

So here is the book about my life in the Legion which I dedicate to my comrades, that great family of merry, mean yet magnificent mercenaries, the men of the French Foreign Legion.

Vive La France! Vive la Légion!

Edmund Murray, Bath, 30 April 1994

Foreword

by Simon Murray

This is the remarkable story of a young man in the French Foreign Legion, where he spent eight important and character-forming years of his life. Edmund Murray joined the Legion in 1937, two years before the outbreak of World War Two, and is sent to the strange world of Algeria and even stranger world of the Foreign Legion at the young age of nineteen. His early years are relatively mild as he joins the Legion band and has some ‘freedoms’ compared to other legionnaires, but we can see the Legion through his lucid writing, which is free of exaggeration and a pleasure to read.

When the war breaks out the band is abandoned and in 1941 he is sent to Indochina and it is war with the Japanese. His five years in Indochina take us through the head-to-head battle with ferocious Japanese fighters in the deep jungle of Vietnam. Realising that he is in his mid-twenties keeps the reader in a state of constant amazement at what he is going through.

It is also a story of friendships between allies and strangers and the essential Esprit de Corps that keeps the Legion, made up of ‘foreigners’ to each other, as the original Band of Brothers.

This is a must-read for young people starting out in life to whom I always say, "Do not follow where the path may lead, but go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. And it makes the older generation read with envy and think Now why didn’t I do that?".

Churchill’s Legionnaire has brought back many memories as in 1960 I followed the same path as Edmund Murray; it is a coincidence that we are both Murrays as we are not related. I also joined aged nineteen and recalled my experiences in Legionnaire: Five Years in the French Foreign Legion. Running off to join the French Foreign Legion is something that many have thought about but few have accomplished. The life of a Legionnaire is a unique experience – and one that is worth sharing.

1

Childhood memories

It was in 1934 when I decided, against the wishes of my parents and teachers, to abandon the long road to university and follow my brothers to London to seek my fortune, or maybe just adventure.

After eighteen months with Joe Sainsbury as a counter-hand, a summer season as a deck-steward on the Crested Eagle, a paddle steamer of the General Steam Navigation Company plying between Tower Pier and Clacton-on-Sea, and a hectic twenty-eight days with the Irish Guards at Caterham, Surrey, I joined my brother Joe at the Holborn Restaurant as a checking clerk. Although I enjoyed the work there, in very pleasant company and conditions as well as the cricket outings round the London and Middlesex area and the excitement of listening to the orchestras in vogue at the time playing in the ballrooms, I was bored. One Sunday in May 1937, copying the example of Leopold the waiter in White Horse Inn (though my heart was not broken), I just got up and left, as I had decided to join the French Foreign Legion.

I was born on 18 August 1917 in a very small mining village in County Durham. It was called Low Friarside, and I mean was, for when I took Beryl my wife to see it just a few months after we were married, my birthplace was no more. The fifty or so houses once all occupied by miners, all the way up a very steep, mile-long bank, were gone. What fun we had experienced on that bank during the winter months, for in those days we had snow to tell that it was winter and it used to last for two or three months. My father was most adept at making sledges for his children; I had two brothers and two sisters, the former both older than myself and the latter both younger.

The sledge I remember best of all was a solid wooden construction, about a yard long, eight inches high on rockers that had steel rods down the length of them; Old Bob the blacksmith along at the mine stables made those, probably for a pint bottle of ale.

The reason I recall that particular sledge was because on one occasion my two brothers, Tom and Joe, and I were riding down from the very top of the bank in the middle of the road for there was hardly ever any vehicular traffic about in those times. There was the occasional rag and bone merchant who was greatly in demand in those difficult days or the grocer’s horse and cart or the coalman with his great big, wonderful, friendly draught horses. The animals using the roads in winter were always shod with shoes that had heavy prism-shaped spikes in them to help them to keep going on the icy surfaces.

It was a lovely evening and there was a wonderful full moon in a cloudless, dark blue sky. The Cresta Run was nothing compared to this and we sped down at what felt like hundreds of miles per hour. Just as we got to the beginning of the houses at Middle Friarside where the ground levelled off somewhat, the sledge hit something in the road and stopped dead. But we didn’t stop for we were very ‘posh’ and always had a bit of carpet or mat to sit on. We carried on, just the mat and ourselves for many yards afterwards till friction stopped the mat and the Murray lads. One of my brothers always sat in the front with a skate on his foot to guide us without having to use our heels and toes to steer. This was the reason why we were always the fastest sledge in the district. I must have been seven or eight years old at the time and life must have been very hard for some, but oh how happy I was and how I loved those good old days and still enjoy the memory of them. My thirst for adventure clearly began at a young age.

Naturally, my father and two elder brothers worked in the mines. There was a mine at the Lintz and yet my father and eventually both brothers, still worked at the Beaumont right down at the bottom of the mile-long Friarside Bank. What torture it must have been for them to have to climb it after eight to ten hours of hewing and putting coal, miles under the hill in seams that were only 18 inches high a good part of the time. (Hewing was the cutting of the coal from the face and putting, the heaving of the loosened coal into the tubs). Tallies (round metal numbered discs) were attached to filled tubs indicating the identity of the putter, and the more tubs filled, the more the team earned. I do remember that my brothers, working together most of the time as a team acquired a superb reputation for production. My father, who had served his apprenticeship in the harder jobs during his younger days, was by now more or less comfortably placed as he did not have to hew the coal out of the seams, nor put it into the four-wheeled tubs which were drawn by the very small Shetland ponies. However, he did have the great responsibility of the wellbeing of hundreds of men on his shoulders, especially when he had to place and fire the shots that could bring down tons of rock and stone on them if the gelignite was misused or misplaced or mistimed.

He was also the one who had to take the can back if anything went wrong in the actual working of the mine when the gaffer (the Under-Manager) was not there, and sometimes the gaffer knew ‘nowt aboot the pit’ and that placed an unfair burden on his shoulders. Dad had a fixed weekly pay but often earned more by working overtime which was so often necessary when trouble arose.

When Dad and my brothers were home, the dirt and grime caked on them by the sweat of their toiling had to be washed off in a small galvanised tin bath placed in front of the fire range and filled with hot water using a ladle, as baths and showers in miners’ houses were quite unknown in those days. Nowadays of course, miners go to work in suits, changing and showering at the pithead which is most civilised, and who could possibly say that they do not deserve it.

These days when explosions or roof falls occur in mines around the world, they are reported by the media and rewards are often handed out to those brave men who save, or try to save, the injured and recover the bodies of those who have not made it. But in those days of the 1930s and before, only those involved knew about the terrible calamities that happened; of the men killed or injured, of the women and children deprived of husbands and fathers, and there was never, or only rarely, any reward for miners risking their lives for their fellows. It was only after his death that our family found proof, in the shape of medals and testaments, of valorous actions of our father. When miners talked about their mines and heroic deeds, it was always someone else who had been brave, not themselves.

How my mother, Margaret Buchanan Gibson Wildsmith Murray became endowed with such a fine name, with such Scottish connotations, I have not been able to find out, but she was a wonderful mother. They made them like that in mining districts, their one thought being for their family even though they must have found it very difficult in those days to make ends meet. Oh yes! I have heard Meggie, as she was known to her peers, sigh at the injustices in the world; I’ve heard her threaten me with the direst of punishments for misdemeanours; I’ve felt her hand across my cheek very often for some misdeed or another, but there was always