Postcards from the Edge

The Nazi actor next door

Jack Trevor, a cinema star backed by Goebbels, lived quietly in Deal in his last years. By Mary Kenny

Deal in Kent has been nominated as ‘one of the best places to live’ in the United Kingdom for the third consecutive year, according to a survey in the Times.

The town has transitioned from being a rather rough resort back in the 1950s – natives remember brawls in the now dinky Middle Street – to a hipster’s ideal.

Not all Dealites welcome the transformation. ‘I used to meet so many people I knew when I went down the High Street,’ a neighbour lamented. ‘Now I hardly know a soul.’

But that is the way things are. Places alter, new residents arrive and a certain neighbourly familiarity is lost. The average price of a house – £334,896 – also prompts social change.

Yet Deal has had some rum residents in its time, including the actor Jack Trevor, who died in Deal in 1976.

He had been a big screen star in Weimar and Nazi Germany. Trevor, born in England in 1893 as Anthony Cedric Sebastian Steane, made 67 films in all – including some British ones. He was also a Nazi radio propagandist who enjoyed the patronage of Goebbels.

Trevor was put on trial in November 1946 on a charge of ‘working for the enemy’ and found guilty, but was released in 1947 after an appeal to Lord Chief Justice Goddard. He claimed to have been, literally, acting under duress.

A British screenwriter, Julian Paige, now living in Perpignan, has compiled a lengthy research archive on Jack Trevor, documenting his colourful life.

He was educated at Westminster and New College, Oxford. A Second Lieutenant in the Manchester Regime, he was cashiered for using fake cheques.

Jack married a twice-divorced American heiress called Alma Vetstera Hayne, who died mysteriously of poisoning. He married another rich divorcee, Mary Penton, and got into movies in Germany in the 1920s, often playing an English gentleman.

After the 1940s, he made no more films, but lived in the south of France for some years. He then returned to England to live, drinking quietly in the pubs of Deal. Then it was an undiscovered seaside town, where a man could fade away in obscurity.

It was a joy when Eurostar came back on track after the long absence during lockdown, with reduced services for some time afterwards.

But, alas, the fabled train no longer stops at Ashford in Kent as it zings its way towards Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam. This is a grave inconvenience for Kentish travellers, for whom Ashford was so handy.

The reason, it seems to me, is that the London-Paris Eurostars are doing such good business departing from St Pancras that they don’t need to factor in another halt at Ashford. The Eurostar train was packed when I travelled on it in April. It was great to see this crucial link to the Continent thrive.

One cannot order one’s destiny, but my preferred location to die would be in a cheap hotel in Montparnasse. Such hotels still exist. Parisians grumble that Montparnasse has become tacky and down-at-heel, but I’m quite fond of it that way. This is real life – not a theme park. Douglas Murray, author of The War on the West – his timely jeremiad against blaming white Western civilisation for everything awful – alerts us to the fact that Barbary pirates once seized white captives from the British Isles, and sold them into slavery in Africa.

There is a well-established historical narrative that these Barbary corsairs – Muslim privateers thought to be Algerians, Libyans and perhaps Turks – plundered West Cork in June 1631, and kidnapped Irish captives from the coast of Baltimore, taking them off to North Africa.

It has been suggested that the late Colonel Gaddafi of Libya really owed his ancestry to an enslaved Irishman called O’Duffy. I believe it was the immortal Peter Simple (Michael Wharton of the Telegraph) who made the claim, perhaps without entirely complete historical documentation.

But Baltimore (after which the Maryland city is named) remembers its Barbary pirates in song, story and tavern: the Algiers Inn is said to be one of the best pubs in that lush territory of West Cork.

I have a new German portmanteau word for my collection. Russlandversteher means ‘Russia-understander’, with the implication of a soft approach to Russia. There is also the more critical Putinversteher – one who is especially understanding towards Mr Putin. Angela Merkel, once so praised as a steady hand on the tiller, is now characterised as a Russlandversteher, since she communicated so frequently – in Russian – with Vladimir Putin, and then made Germany dependent on Russian gas.

Yet, in Russian literature, is it not German science and technology that are so often admired? Intense passages in Turgenev express such sentiments. I wonder if there is a parallel word in Russian.