A HALF CROWN HERO

[Second post from HDK for 1/17. Coincidentally there is now a movie out - "The King's Speech" - which touches on the abdication David mentions below. An interesting bit of history. -lt]

When King Edward VIII abdicated in 1936 many objects created to celebrate his coronation became either redundant or famous. Among these were mugs showing the King’s crowned image. Since St Christopher School was not particularly royalist, it is not surprising that some enterprising character decided to buy up a thousand of these mugs at a throw-away price - thus the school suddenly had an overflow of coronation mugs for its afternoon cocoa and rusks sessions. Perhaps it is also not surprising that a twelve-year old Jewish refugee boy from Holland, here called Eric, would come up with the idea of accumulating these mugs and, ultimately, selling them when they became valuable. Eric therefore would, at every meal, hide a couple of mugs in his pockets and store them in a trunk under his bed in the dormitory.

It is unclear what Eric had arranged to do with them, but one very perceptive master, Christopher Buckley, later a famous historian, had got wind of Eric’s plans. One night Eric was at his second floor bedroom window with a suitcase. That suitcase, filled with coronation mugs that he had not even carefully packed and protected in newspaper, he had attached to a rope so that he could let it down from his window slowly to an associate in the yard below. However, the associate did not show up and, instead, it was Christopher Buckley who stood below and received the mug-filled suitcase in his open arms and set it down carefully on the ground in the yard.

The result was typical St. Christopher School fame and Eric became regarded as a wild but creative fellow. Although the mugs were promptly returned to the dining hall, Eric’s feat led to his reputation as a juvenile gangster who could be expected to become wealthy. As it happened, Eric did later come into some money through an uncle and, after he returned from his visit to London with his pockets filled with half crowns, he generously handed dozens of these coins to all of us and became our “Half Crown Hero”.

When I came to New York in 1938, I heard rumours that Eric and his mother had moved to Hollywood. Since the connections between refugee immigrants were such that information about us sifted through gossip, I learned of Eric’s whereabouts through friends and others among the refugee community. Although I never again met Eric in person, he remained for quite some time on the horizon. Through other refugee boys, I learned that Eric had embezzled money and, discovered, had been sent to jail. However, his mother and her second husband, having managed to buy a ‘Five & Dime’ store, may have helped him to get back on his feet.

H.D. Kirk