Patrick Leigh Fermor

Sir Patrick 'Paddy' Michael Leigh Fermor DSO OBE (11 February 1915-10 June 2011) was a British author, scholar and soldier, who played a prominent role behind the lines in the Battle of Crete during World War II. He was widely regarded as "Britain's greatest living travel writer".

Background

He was born in London, the son of Sir Lewis Leigh Fermor, a distinguished geologist, and Muriel Aeyleen (née Ambler).

Shortly after Patrick was born, his mother left to join his father in India, leaving him in England with another family. As a child, Leigh Fermor had problems with academic structure and limitations. As a result, he was sent to a school for difficult children. He was later expelled from The King's School, Canterbury, when he was caught holding hands with a local greengrocer's daughter. He continued learning by reading texts on Greek, Latin, Shakespeare and History, with the intention of entering the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.

Early travels

At the age of 18, Leigh Fermor decided to walk the length of Europe, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. He set off on 8 December 1933, shortly after Hitler had come to power in Germany, with a few clothes, the Oxford Book of English Verse and a volume of Horace's Odes. He slept in barns and shepherds' huts, but also was invited by landed gentry and aristocracy into the country houses of Central Europe. Along the way, he heard many stories and dialects.

Two of his subsequent travel books, A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986), detail this journey. Written decades later, they benefit from his scholarly learning, and give a wealth of historical, geographical, linguistic and anthropological information as the narrative proceeds. A planned third volume, intended to follow the journey to its completion in Constantinople, has not yet appeared.

Leigh Fermor arrived in Constantinople on 1 January 1935, then continued to travel around Greece. In March, he was involved in the campaign of royalist forces in Macedonia against an attempted Republican revolt. He was fascinated by Greece and its language. In Athens, he met Balasha Cantacuzène (Bălaşa Cantacuzino), a Romanian noblewoman, with whom he fell in love. They shared an old watermill outside the city looking out towards Poros, where she painted and he wrote. They moved on to Băleni, the Cantacuzène house in Moldavia, where they were living at the outbreak of World War II.

World War II

Main article: Kidnap of General Kreipe

Leigh Fermor joined the Irish Guards, but due to his knowledge of Greek, he was commissioned in the General List and became a liaison officer in Albania. He fought in Crete and mainland Greece. During the German occupation, he returned to Crete three times, once by parachute. He was one of a small number of Special Operations Executive (SOE) officers posted to organise the island's resistance to German occupation. Disguised as a shepherd and nicknamed Michalis or Filedem, he lived for over two years in the mountains. With Captain Bill Stanley Moss MC as his second in command, Leigh Fermor led the party that in 1944 captured and evacuated the German Commander, General Heinrich Kreipe. The Cretans commemorate Kreipe's abduction near Archanes.

Moss featured the events in his book Ill Met by Moonlight: The Abduction of General Kreipe (1952). It was later filmed as Ill Met by Moonlight, directed/produced by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and released in 1957. In the film, Leigh Fermor was portrayed by the actor Dirk Bogarde.

Wartime honours and legacy

• DSO
• Honorary Citizen of Heraklion
• Honorary Citizen of Kardamyli
• Honorary Citizen of Gytheio.

The National Archives in London holds copies of Leigh Fermor's wartime dispatches from occupied Crete in file number HS 5/728.

A documentary film on the Cretan resistance movement, entitled The 11th Day (2003) and produced by Christos and Michael Epperson, contains extensive interview segments with Leigh Fermor. He recounts his service in the S.O.E. and his activities on Crete, including the capture of General Kreipe.

Post war

In 1950, Leigh Fermor's published his first book, The Traveller's Tree, about his post-war travels in the Caribbean. The book won the Heinemann Foundation Prize for Literature and established his career path. He went on to write several further books of his journeys, including Mani and Roumeli of his travels on mule and foot around remote parts of Greece.

Many critics and discerning readers regard his 1977 A Time of Gifts as one of the greatest travel books in the English language. He translated the manuscript, The Cretan Runner, written by George Psychoundakis, the dispatch runner on Crete during the war. Leigh Fermor helped Psychoundakis get his work published.

Leigh Fermor wrote a novel, The Violins of Saint-Jacques. It was adapted and set to music as an opera by Malcolm Williamson.

Leigh Fermor's extraordinary charm and gift for bridging the cultural divide between the United Kingdom and the Hellenic world was vividly described by his close friend, Lawrence Durrell, in Bitter Lemons (1957). During the outbreak of Cypriot insurgency against continued British rule in 1955, an episode which severely strained Anglo-Hellenic relations, Durrell describes how Leigh Fermor visited Durrell's villa in Bellapaix, Cyprus:

"After a splendid dinner by the fire he starts singing, songs of Crete, Athens, Macedonia. When I go out to refill the ouzo bottle...I find the street completely filled with people listening in utter silence and darkness. Everyone seems struck dumb. 'What is it?' I say, catching sight of Frangos. 'Never have I heard of Englishmen singing Greek songs like this!' Their reverent amazement is touching; it is as if they want to embrace Paddy wherever he goes."

Later years

_{The London Library's copy of Words of Mercury on location, chez P.M.L.F., 2007}

After many years together, Leigh Fermor was married in 1968 to the Hon. Joan Elizabeth Rayner, née Eyres Monsell, daughter of Viscount Monsell. She accompanied him on many of his travels until her death in Kardamyli in June 2003 aged 91. They lived part of the year in their house in an olive grove in the Mani Peninsula, southern Peloponnese, and part of the year in Worcestershire.

In 2007, Leigh Fermor said that, for the first time, he had decided to work using a typewriter - having written all his books longhand until then.

Patrick Leigh Fermor died on 10 June 2011 after a long illness.

Awards and Legacy

• 1950, Heinemann Foundation Prize for Literature for The Traveller's Tree
• 1978, WH Smith Literary Award for A Time of Gifts.
• 1991, elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
• 1995, Chevalier, Ordre des Arts et Lettres
• February 2004, accepted the knighthood which he had declined in 1991.
• 2004, awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award of the British Guild of Travel Writers.
• 2007, the Greek government made him Commander of the Order of the Phoenix.
• His life and work were profiled by the travel writer Benedict Allen in the documentary series Travellers' Century (2008) on BBC Four.

Books

• The Traveller's Tree (1950)
• The Violins of Saint-Jacques (1953)
• A Time to Keep Silence (1957)
• Mani - Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (1958)
• Roumeli (1966)
• A Time of Gifts - On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (1977)
• Between the Woods and the Water (1986)
• Three Letters from the Andes (1991)
• Words of Mercury (2003) edited by Artemis Cooper
• Foreword of Albanian Assignment by Colonel David Smiley, Chatto & Windus, London (1984). The story of SOE in Albania, by a brother in arms of Patrick Leigh Fermor, who was later a MI6 agent.
• In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh-Fermor (2008), edited by Charlotte Mosley

See also

• George Psychoundakis
• Xan Fielding
• W. Stanley Moss
• Sophie Moss
• Ill Met by Moonlight

External links

• Faces of the Week - you can hear Leigh Fermor's voice there
• Long Distance Paths E6, E8 and E3 trace similar routes across Europe
• Official site of the documentary film The 11th Day which contains an extensive interview with Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, and documents the Battle of Trahili, filmed in 2003.
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