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Tony Gosling, politicsthisweek.wordpress.com with author John Harris.
Summary: https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/wwii-airmans-grave-located-70-years.html
Credits: The von Hassell diaries were first published in 1948 as early evidence of the German wartime resistance to Hitler. Harris and Wilbourn were intrigued to find that the 2011 unexpurgated edition of the famous diaries revealed more about Borenius:
He has very intimate connections with the Royal House [principally with the Queen].
Harris and Wilbourn admit at first failing to perceive that von Hassell and Burckhardt were not talking about the wartime Queen of England, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, but about Queen Mary, widow of George V, an active art collector and grandmother of our present Queen Elizabeth II.
And then they got lucky. Borenius had died of a cerebral embolism and valvular heart disease in 1948 at Laverstock House, near Salisbury and when Harris examined the Salisbury phone book in 1998 he found a Borenius. It was Tancred’s son Lars Ulrich, a retired lawyer often known as Peter.
His father’s wartime trip had caused some [post event] amusement in the Borenius household on two accounts: firstly that he had been asked to deliver a ‘book’ to Switzerland, disguised as a novel, and secondly, that he had been given a poison pill the size of a golf ball.
Lars also told John Harris that he had been given the book by a ‘Claude Dansey’ prior to his departure. Upon its delivery there was much relief.
Had we been perhaps a little more alert and knowledgeable, we would of course have soon realized that Claude Dansey was the then deputy head of MI6…
After twenty years on the case, Harris and Wilbourn have drawn some important conclusions in this truly thrilling investigation.
The ‘book’ that Borenius carried to Switzerland was clearly one of the MI6 ‘one-time pads’ that the late Keith Jeffery, official historian of MI6, reported as being in ‘very short supply’ in Switzerland in 1941.
Harris and ..
