Praying through poetry and with USPG: 28 January 2023

Tamworth Castle and the Moat House, the former Comberford home on Lichfield Street, decorate the welcome sign at Tamworth Railway Station (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Patrick Comerford

Christmas is not a season of 12 days, despite the popular Christmas song. Christmas is a 40-day season that lasts from Christmas Day (25 December) to Candlemas or the Feast of the Presentation on Thursday next (2 February).

Throughout the 40 days of this Christmas Season, I am reflecting in these ways:

1, Reflecting on a seasonal or appropriate poem;

2, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary, ‘Pray with the World Church.’

I interrupted that pattern to mark the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, which came to an end on Wednesday.

I have an appointment in Milton Keynes University Hospital later this morning. But, before the day gets busy, I am taking some time for prayer and reflection.

Inside Saint Editha’s Church, Tamworth (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

I was back in Tamworth earlier this week, visiting some places associated with the Comberford family. So, my choice of poem this morning is Mal Dewhirst’s ‘We are Tamworth,’ a poem commissioned for ‘This is Tamworth’ at Birmingham Symphony Hall on 3 July 2014.

Mal Dewhirst, who died in 2021, became Staffordshire’s first poet laureate in 2012. He lived in Tamworth and Tamworth inspired a number of his poems.

He was a writer and film maker, and his plays have been performed across the Midlands, including ‘The Fell Walker’ in Tamworth and ‘At the Crossroads’ at the Garrick in Lichfield, which was commissioned by the Lichfield Mysteries.

Mal was a poet-in-residence in a town market and an archaeological dig, his work has been published in many magazines and journals, and he appeared on BBC Radio and Radio Wildfire. He was also responsible for the Polesworth Poets Trail.

Mal was a regular reader on the Midlands poetry scene and was part of the Coventry Cork Literature exchange in 2011, performing readings in Cork City and Limerick. As a film director, his film Double Booked was shown at the Corona Fastnet Short Film Festival in Ireland in 2014.

He hoped to bring ground-breaking writing to new audiences, always seeking to redefine boundaries, and wanted to develop and improvise new work as collaborations with other artists and performers in unexpected places as a melding of ideas, skills and talents.

Sir Robert Peel’s statue outside the Town Hall in Tamworth (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

We are Tamworth, by Mal Dewhirst:

We are Tamworth
We are Tamworth
We are Tamworth
From the Lamb
from Stonydelph, Wincote, Belgrave, Amington, Two Gates, Lakeside, Riverside, Coton Green, Gillway, Perrycrofts. The Leys, Leyfields, Glascote and its Heath, Bolehall, Dosthill, Kettlebrook, Bitterscote, Castle and town and all our blessed lands.
We are Tamworth.

Where Tame meets Anker,
bringing Birmingham and Black Country tales
to mix with the Anker's Warwickshire words,
all the ripple and flow from here, to the Trent, to the Humber, to the Sea.

Rivers spilling full lap through meadowlands:
where Offa palaced in the castled grounds
of Sandybacks and Plastic Pigs,

Aetheflaeda proclaimed
build me a bridge, a Lady Bridge,
then guard it so that only I might cross.
Build me a mound, a castled mound,
where I might live and watch for dust.

This is Tamworth.
Where Saxon and Viking built their border,
we gave camp to the knights of Bosworth field,
where Roundhead met Cavalier on the Tame bridges
and we gave tea to soldiers as they passed on to the Somme,
always trying to bring some comfort to conflict.

This is Tamworth
where Enigma Heroes learned to swim,
ski’s ride summers of man-made frosts,
Rawlett, preached his legacy of learning,
where Guy built a town hall and gave Alms
then took them away when he didn’t get the vote
and Policeman Peel built his weaving mills,
warp and weft, webbing and tape,
building his new manifesto.

This is Tamworth where the Beatles and the Stones played,
in their constant touring, egg and chip days.
Tamworth, where the original Teardrop Exploded,
and Wolfsbane gave us a massive noise injection,
where every year we see the Assembly Rooms
host the next Battle of the Bands,
which is not when young testosterone filled teenagers
thrash guitars and grunt about being misunderstood.
It is when, just maybe, our Beatles and Rolling Stones might be heard.

Ventura Park and Ankerside, the retail lands
of designer brands and coffee shops,
supermarkets, house and homes,
enclosed by roads that circle and twist and never want to let you leave.

Market on Tuesdays and Saturdays,
for the purveyors of:
fleeces and fruit, cakes and clothes, trainers and towels,
books and batteries, rugs and rollers,
cheese and chutney, shoes and socks, games and gifts.

Town has several co-ops, flower shops, a row of: banks and building societies,
travel agents and estate agents, solicitors and accountants,
they all group together, power in numbers,
creating quarters, where they know each others secrets.
All watched over by the Philosophers of Upstairs, Downstairs, Sidewalk Cafe.

This is Tamworth
Our housing estates that are built on themes; of counties, of plants,
cars, poets, space travel and stately homes – and we don’t waste
people’s time in naming our roads, don’t see the point of adding road or
street or close – makes it so much easier to write an envelope.
And have you noticed that many of our famous people were named after the streets.

Famous people: Marmion, Ferrers, Robert Peel. Thomas Guy, John Rawlett, William McGregor, Colin Grazier, Tom Williams back to Ethelflaeda and Offa, and onward to Julian Cope, Blayze Bailey, Phil Bates, Mark Albrighton. Miss Pym and her suffragettes –
All worthies who have a staked a claim in Tamworth.

Along with the miners of Glascote and Amington, the car workers of Reliant, the spinners and weavers, the potters and warehouse crews. The choirs and bands all hammering the sound of Tamworth.

This is created in Tamworth, along with the crafts and cakes, the paintings and
sculpted forms that bring all the welcomes into the light of valued art.

This is Tamworth
Where the Herald reports our community woes and triumphs
then reminds of how the town used to look.
Tamworth, home where the Tamworth Two were trying to return,
and the Lambs raise goals to the songs of the shed choir.
Tamworth where the town hall is like an orange, it has Peel on the outside,
where the Olympic torch chose to catch its breath,
and jousters, fireworks, skateboarders,
families all strut their thought in the castle grounds.

Tamworth with our French and German twins
Sharing culture and song
Poetry and peace
Bringing markets to share cheese and meat and finest wine.

Tamworth where we race for life.
bring help to heroes
and support those in need.

This Tamworth where our dialect is spoken with a distinction, alright me duck.
These are our words that tell of a proud heritage built on toil
and a strength that sees one Tamworth, perfectly placed
to create our piece of theatre in the world
and remember who we are and where we are from
we can shed a tear and raise a smile
as we share our town with all those who choose to come.

Because we are Tamworth
Super Tamworth
We are Tamworth
from our land.

© Mal Dewhirst 2014

Aetheflaeda ‘enclosed by roads that circle and twist and never want to let you leave’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

USPG Prayer Diary:

The theme in the USPG Prayer Diary this week is the ‘Myanmar Education Programme.’ This theme was introduced on Sunday with a reflection from a report from the Church of the Province of Myanmar.

The USPG Prayer Diary today invites us to pray in these words:

Let us give thanks for the Myanmar Education Programme. May its work amongst the rural communities of its dioceses resource and empower them.

Yesterday’s reflection

Continued Tomorrow

The former Peel School at 17 Lichfield Street, Tamworth (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Audrey Hepburn’s brave role during the Holocaust and her father’s life in Dublin

Patrick Comerford

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day (27 January 2023). Over the past few days, the World Jewish Congress has drawn attention to the role of Audrey Hepburn as a teenager living in the Netherlands under Nazi occupation, and how she helped the Dutch Resistance and saved Jewish lives during World War II.

Audrey Hepburn died away 30 years ago this month, on 20 January 1993. She starred in many memorable roles, from Manhattan socialite Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) to Cockney flower seller Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady (1964). The 1953 classic Roman Holiday — in which she played Princess Ann, a royal exploring the Eternal City with Gregory Peck — earned her an Academy Award. She is one of the few stars to win an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony award.

Yet few people know that was also a Dutch aristocrat, raised by parents with controversial political sympathies, who aided resistance to the Nazis while enduring tragedy and starvation.

In his biography, Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II, the author Robert Matzen reveals his discoveries about Audrey Hepburn’s life growing up in the Netherlands during World War II, and how her parents’ Nazi connections haunted her for the rest of her life.

With meticulous research, he tells the story of her heroic efforts during World War II, and how those difficult years led her to a life of humanitarian service. During that time, she was also becoming a prima ballerina on her way to Hollywood and stardom.

Robert Matzen’s book is based on research in the Netherlands, where he had access archives, interviewed people with war-time memories of Hepburn, unearthed rare photographs, documents and mementoes, and visited Arnhem, where she lived there during World War II.

Her Dutch mother, Baroness Ella van Heemstra, met Hitler in the 1930s and wrote admiringly about him in British fascist publications. She changed her mind during the brutal Nazi occupation of the Netherlands from 1940 to 1945. Her father, Joseph Ruston, ended up in jailed because of his Nazi sympathies.

The baroness aided the Dutch Resistance after Hepburn’s uncle, Otto Ernst Gelder, Count van Limburg Stirum, was executed by the Nazis. After the execution of her uncle, Audrey and her mother relocated from Arnhem to the village of Velp five km away and heard hear the destruction of their former hometown during the 1944 Allied defeat in the battles of Arnhem and Oosterbeek.

Audrey Hepburn volunteered for the resistance, aided Jews in hiding, and raised funds through dancing to keep them safe. Despite everything, fewer than 25 per cent of Dutch Jews survived the Holocaust.

Audrey Hepburn was invited in 1958 to play Anne Frank in the film version of The Diary of Anne Frank. But she found the subject too close to home and turned it down, although she met Otto Frank. Two decades later, in 1976, she turned a role in A Bridge Too Far.

Hepburn’s war years explain her later work as a UNICEF ambassador working with children affected by war.

Audrey Hepburn was born Audrey Kathleen van Heemstra Ruston on 4 May 1929. Her family had aristocratic connections on both sides. Her Dutch grandfather, Baron van Heemstra, was a former governor of the South American colony of Surinam and a former mayor of Arnhem. Her English father claimed a royal descent from James Hepburn, the third husband of Mary Queen of Scots in the 16th-century.

Young Audrey, or Adriaantje as she was known in her family, grew up between Belgium, England and the Netherlands. Her parents visited Germany with Sir Oswald Mosley and other British fascists, and met Hitler in Munich in 1935.

Ella returned to Germany for the Nazi Party Congress later that year and praised Hitler in British fascist publications. She continued supporting the Nazis after they occupied the Netherlands. Ironically, Hepburn’s ballet teacher, Winja Marova, was Jewish and hid her identity from the occupiers.

The Nazis arrested her brother-in-law, Hepburn’s uncle Otto, a court prosecutor, and he was executed on 15 August 1942 in a mass killing with another relative, Baron Schimmelpenninck van der Oye.

Otto’s execution was a turning point and shook the family to the core. Ella relocated with Audrey to Velp, where they lived with Audrey’s grandfather, Baron van Heemstra, and Otto’s widow, Meisje. There the family joined the resistance. The refusal to join a Nazi artists’ committee ending Audrey Hepburn’s burgeoning dance career.

In Velp, Audrey assisted Dr Hendrik Visser ’t Hooft, who helped shelter hundreds of Jews. She brought messages to families protecting Jews. She danced to raise money for the resistance and to feed Jews in hiding.

In an unexpected development, when Audrey Hepburn and her mother lived in Amsterdam after liberation, their fellow lodger was the editor working on publishing the Diary of Anne Frank. Audrey and Anne were born less than five months apart in 1929, but Anne Frank was apprehended in 1944 and died in Bergen-Belsen in 1945. Audrey Hepburn would later describe Anne Frank as a soul sister.

‘I believe Audrey felt survivor’s guilt,’ Robert Matzen says. ‘She survived. Anne Frank did not.’

Eventually, she left with her mother for England, where Audrey Hepburn found success not through ballet but in film. In time, she came to terms with her past. Years after becoming a household name, she took part in public readings of The Diary of Anne Frank and became a Unicef ambassador.



Audrey Hepburn was born in Belgium, spent the war years in occupied Holland, she sounded English and her first acting roles were in British films, became a Hollywood success, and had a second international career as a Unicef ambassador and a humanitarian campaigner. Yet, there was also an Irish element in her life story too.

Her father, Joseph Hepburn-Ruston, was born Joseph Ruston in Bohemia, Austria-Hungary, in 1889 to an English father and his German wife, Catherina Wels.

He was an Englishman living in Belgium when his daughter was born in 1929. In the years before World War II, he expressed unqualified enthusiasm for Hitler. He left Audrey and her mother in 1939. After detention in the Isle of Man, made his way to Dublin where, assisted by the Carmelite order, he found lucrative work in the insurance industry.

Joseph Hepburn-Ruston became friends with the Guinness family and Sir Alfred Beit, the art collector and philanthropist. He and his third wife, the model Fidelma Walshe, more than 30 years his junior, were living near Merrion Square, Dublin, when Audrey first reconnected with him in the early 1960s.

She tracked down Joseph with the help of the Red Cross. A meeting was arranged in the Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin, in 1964. But it was not the occasion she had hoped for. When Joseph saw Audrey, he made no move towards her. She took the initiative, stepping forward to hug him. She soon realised that the man she had pined for as a child was distant and emotionally detached. They did not speak for another 20 years.

He lived in Sydenham Road Dublin for over 35 years. His daughter supported him financially until he died in Baggot Street Hospital at the age of 91 on 16 October 1980. He is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery, Harold’s Cross. Audrey did not go to her father’s funeral, but returned to Dublin in 1988.

Audrey Hepburn died in Switzerland 30 years ago this month on 20 January 1993.

Shabbat Shalom