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Dreyfus, Kommetjie and the Dublin conman

Author: Published on: Published in: Diaspora

(Author: Gwynne Schrire, Vol. 64, #1, Pesach 2009)

  • Feature image: View of Kommetjie, early 20th Century

 

The year 2006 marked the centenary of the declaration by the French Court of Appeal that the evidence against Alfred Dreyfus was completely unsubstantiated; moreover,  that no conclusive proof existed that a crime had ever been committed.1 On 12 July 1906, the United Court of Cassation unanimously declared Dreyfus innocent of all charges and announced that his conviction had been pronounced wrongfully and by error.2 Thus ended twelve years of ignominy, injustice and imprisonment for Dreyfus, a French army captain of integrity.3

Ten days later, the Cape Times announced to its readers in Cape Town: “Dreyfus honoured on the scene of his Degradation – A Paris telegram states that the Cross of the Legion of Honor was conferred this afternoon on Major Dreyfus in the Artillery Yard of the Military Academy where he was degraded.”4

The Dreyfus trial had two major repercussions. It led to the fall of the conservative French government and its replacement by a left-wing administration that passed anti-clerical laws, including one separating the church from the state. It also exposed an assimilated young Viennese journalist to the virulent antisemitism arising from the case. This exposure propelled him to found the World Zionist Organisation in an attempt to solve the problem of antisemitism.

The ripples of the Dreyfus trial reverberated around the globe. “A thrill of horror and shame ran through the whole civilised world”, the London Times had editorialised when Dreyfus was convicted a second time; 50 000 people marched from Hyde Park to the French Embassy in protest. Queen Victoria expressed herself as “too horrified for words at this monstrous, horrible sentence.”5 There were even ripples in Kommetjie, a remote fishing village near Cape Town.

L’Affaire Dreyfus

A secret court-martial, replete with irregularities contrary to all legal procedure, unanimously found Captain Alfred Dreyfus guilty of treason and exiled him for life to Devil’s Island off the coast of South America. On 5 January 1895, he was publicly demoted to a chorus of antisemitic curses by a howling mob. Among the horrified onlookers at the event was Theodore Herzl, who was covering the trial for the Neue Freie Presse.

When the French Intelligence Service found that a secret military document had been sent to the German embassy Dreyfus, being the only Jew on the general staff, was the automatic suspect. It was impossible for the French establishment, in particular Major HJ Henry of Intelligence, to believe that the aristocratic Major MCFW Esterhazy could be guilty. Dreyfus, the Jew, was the logical scapegoat. He was duly sentenced and exiled.

The Dreyfus family refused to accept his guilt and pressed to have the trial re-opened.6 Major Henry refused to accept his innocence.

When the new head of French intelligence, Lt. Col. Georges Picquart, discovered that Major Esterhazy was in fact a German agent, Major Henry proceeded to forge documents to confirm Dreyfus’ guilt. In return for his fine detective work, Picquart was dismissed and sent to Africa. However, before leaving Paris, Picquart told his friends what he had discovered and they passed the information onto a left-wing senator who accused Esterhazy in the Senate and announced that Dreyfus was innocent. However the right-wing prime minister, pressured by the powerful religious and military establishments, was not prepared to admit that the army could be at fault. Esterhazy was tried and acquitted and poor Picquart was sentenced to sixty days in prison.

For the first time the press exercised a major influence on the political life of the nation, dramatizing and fuelling the event, supporting or denouncing the authorities, exercising pressure and various forms of blackmail.7 Novelist Emile Zola took up the case with a front-page letter on January 13 1898, in the newspaper L ‘Aurore. In J’Accuse, a letter to the President of the Republic, Zola accused the opponents of Dreyfus of malicious libel. Such was the interest aroused by the case that 200 000 copies were sold in Paris. In February, Zola was himself found guilty of libel and fled to Britain.

By now the French public had split into pro- and anti-Dreyfus factions and tempers ran high. Officers of the General Staff threatened to resign if Dreyfus was acquitted. There were antisemitic riots throughout the country. These even spilled over into Cape Town when, on 18 April 1898, “two poor men” appeared before the committee of the Cape Town Jewish Philanthropic Society asking for assistance because “they had been driven out of France on account of the late antisemitic movement.”8

“In a climate of escalating hysteria, the media acted as a necessary safety valve; its unremitting publicity upheld public opinion over the traditional French authority, which for more than a century had been vested in the army, the judiciary, the nobility and the old money of Catholic France.”9 Henry’s forgeries were detected. He was arrested and committed suicide in his cell.

The government was forced to retry Dreyfus but as before, it was not prepared to admit that the army could be at fault. The court-martial in Rennes in 1899 once more declared him guilty of treason. This time his sentence was reduced because of “extenuating circumstances” to ten years, five years of which he had already served.

Dreyfus was persuaded not to appeal, and was eventually pardoned by the President of the Republic. In 1904, when a leftist government gained power, Dreyfus demanded a fresh investigation and in 1906 the court of appeal pronounced his complete innocence.10

Kommetjie

Kommetjie is a small seaside village near Cape Town where, some years before the First World War, the small community of regular summer visitors was joined by newcomers, the DuBédats. Mrs DuBédat told them she was an actress who was half English, half Spanish.

“She was a large, fiery, and very commanding woman, married to an elderly, silver haired, very aristocratic looking Frenchman, who was quiet and retiring and never seen to leave the house. The story went that he had been involved in the Dreyfus case in Paris, that he had made a stand, like some others, for Dreyfus when the latter was falsely accused of, and sentenced for, a murder [sic] he had not committed. The case against him was framed in order to protect some high military official – it caused an international scandal at the time, and the Dreyfus defenders fled the country and sought refuge elsewhere.”11

The mysterious Frenchman, his exotic wife and his young son evoked considerable sympathy from the locals. (The inaccuracy of the reported facts could be attributed to faulty memory – the information was written when she was in her nineties by Anne Seeliger, a childhood friend of the young son – or it could be due to the ignorance of the locals because a vast distance separated the handful of holiday cottages that made up the remote community of Kommetjie and the sophisticated city of Paris.)

Kommetjie was certainly not Paris. The French family would have found the life there primitive but inexpensive because shellfish could be gathered from the rocks and  Anne’s father would come in “towards evening with his friends with their boats laden to the hilt with Hottentot, Silverfish, Galjoen, Snoek in season and Cape Salmon. The seafood replaced meat which was unobtainable locally and we lived virtually on what we had harvested from the sea.”

Seeliger remembered that between 1910 and 1920, other families began to filter in and spend holidays there on a regular basis. The most interesting and entertaining character who joined their group at that time was a lad called Willie DuBédat, who “moved into Kommetjie with his parents before the 1914 War and became the heart throb of all the girls in a very short time. He spoke English such as we had never heard spoken in our lives, was sophisticated by our standards, danced well, and was good at making up funny verses relating to small happenings in our lives.12

This sophisticated retiring man, who was never seen outside his cottage, his flamboyant actress wife and his charming son who set the hearts of all the young girls aflutter – they would have represented a contact with an outside world and its dramas quite foreign to the locals who would have known little about French fashions or dances. One can imagine the excitement created at the arrival of these poor refugees from the Dreyfus Affair. Fugitives who had been forced to flee from Paris to this isolated beach because they had boldly taken a stand for the falsely-accused Dreyfus, a man who had been sentenced for “a murder he had not committed”.

Overseas newspapers took three weeks to come to Cape Town on the Union-Castle ships, and the news would arrive stale and a shop that did not stock daily bread was unlikely to stock daily newspapers. Even so, news about the gross miscarriage of justice that marked the Dreyfus trial had filtered through and was avidly followed in the local papers, just as it was in England, America and Europe. The international interest in the ongoing saga of Dreyfus was so intense that 200 journalists from near and far had descended on the town of Rennes for his re-trial in 1899. It was “the first great international media event of the age, thanks to the influence of the press and modern means of mass communication.”13

The Dreyfus Trial was regularly featured by the Cape Times as its main item in its overseas “Cable News” section. The Cape Times’ partisanship was plainly seen in the subtitles attached to these articles. Examples of these include:  Accused Reaffirms his Innocence (8.8.1899). Dramatic scenes: I swear I am Innocent (9.8.1899). The Captain Ill (10.8.1899 – the accompanying paragraph stated that Dreyfus was surviving solely on milk), Sensational Statement; The Real Culprit (12.8.1899). No Motive and No Crime; Absolutely False Charges (18.8.1899).

One can imagine the shock to the Cape Times readers, filled with the expectations built up by those reports, on opening the paper on 11.9.1889 to read: Dreyfus sentenced – 10 years imprisonment – Further details – Leave to appeal – A chance of pardon, “‘I declare before my country that I am innocent. I have suffered tortures for five years for my name and my children. Have confidence in my loyalty and give me justice’. The speech created great excitement in the court.”

It was a gross miscarriage of justice. Small wonder that to the holiday makers spending their summers in such isolated surroundings, the romance the DuBédats represented was sufficient to set every tongue wagging and make the locals feel very protective towards these refugees who had been persecuted for standing up against such injustice – although they may not have necessarily approved of them. Some of the harvested candles, canned herring, hairbrushes and pea soup would certainly have gone their way along with surplus fish or shellfish, not to mention shipwrecked golf and cricket balls. Anne’s mother would frequently feed young Willie and take him in when his mother Rosita threw him out in a fit of temper.

Willie “led a miserable life because his temperamental mother had no rapport with him whatever, no patience, no sympathy, and no interest in his welfare. Sometimes he spent days on the mountain or could not come out to play cricket or hassie (sic) because he had been locked inside for a minor misdemeanour. I can remember seeing Willie being thrown out by the scruff of his neck more than once, followed by kitchen utensils that happened to be handy, a chopper, a bucket, or even a bicycle.” 14

Anne might have been too harsh on her. Another child of the period, Norah Henshilwood, recalled that she did not meet other children at Kommetjie as their cottage was some distance from the others until an invitation to a birthday party arrived from a mother with a young son. It was “a splendid tea with a gift for every child. What her real name was I never discovered: our version of it sounded like Mrs Do Better.”15  Under the circumstances such a party must have involved “Mrs Do Better” in considerable advance planning and organising.

To Anne “she was so absolutely different from anyone else we had ever met. We used to find excuses to go visiting her and to coax her into performing for us. When she was in a good mood, she would dress up for a part… and act (it) out for us. I remember best the performance of Charlie’s Aunt. She would give us cups of something to drink, which we discovered quite soon was white wine which would send us home tipsy.”

They discovered later that she had other weaknesses and when the war broke out Rosita moved closer to the military camp and opened what she called a “comfort station for the boys.”

Frank DuBédat died suddenly in 1919 of heart failure and was buried in Glencairn cemetery near Simonstown, leaving no estate whatever. Rosita said she had supported him for years. She remarried a farmer from Beira and, on his death, settled in England with Willie, who later ran a film advertising company in London.

The Irish conman

The truth about the refugees was not quite what the Kommetjie people had been told. Frank DuBédat was Irish, not French, although his family was of French extraction having arrived in Dublin as Huguenot refugees two centuries previously. He had been the president of the Dublin Stock Exchange and a Justice of the Peace. He was wealthy, influential, charming and respected. On Christmas Eve 1890, he sent a letter from London to his wife and disappeared. It was believed that he had fallen under a train and been killed.

It was soon discovered that all the money in the Dublin Stock Exchange had also disappeared. His debts were estimated to be between £105 000 and £117 000. His mansion was sold along with his shooting lodge, property, mines, stores and building materials and his grieving widow and three children moved in with her father.

Six months later DuBédat was traced to Cape Town where he was living in a boarding house using the alias Denver. He was arrested and sent back to Dublin where he was charged with bankruptcy and fraud. He was sentenced to twelve months hard labor and seven years penal servitude.

He was released in 1896 after a petition from his wife’s family, influential friends and associates. His generous friends gave him a ticket to leave the country. His charm and style accompanied him to Johannesburg where he called himself a company promoter and finance agent. He claimed to have introductions to Cecil John Rhodes and Alfred Beit.

Frank DuBédat began promoting a scheme known as the Delagoa Bay Concession which planned to lease from the Portuguese Government 7 500 sq. metres of coastal land on which they intended to build a jetty to enable ships to come alongside and unload coal. Soon a friend had invested £800 in the scheme and other investors followed. With the cash in hand DuBédat returned to England to interest more investors in the scheme, leaving the concession in the care of his partners.

In London, he moved in with the lovely Rosita Martinez, who was 25 years his junior. She was born in South America and had acted in minor roles with Sir Henry Irving. Eleven days after his wife died in Ireland in 1902, Frank married Rosita, who was recorded as being the daughter of an “African merchant”, Elias Nunez Martinez. The witnesses were her father, Hermann Cohn and David Somerville.16

As before, Frank lived extravagantly and travelled extensively. As before he obtained a great deal of money and spent it all. An angry investor discovered that the Portuguese government had rescinded the concession some years previously declaring it null and void. He asked Frank for his money back. Frank denied knowledge of the Portuguese decree and would not give clear answers to questions about what he had done with the money.

In 1903, Frank DuBédat was arrested while visiting the offices of that investor’s lawyer and tried for obtaining money on false pretenses. The judge summed up: “Would the jury expect that the men back in South Africa would not tell their … partner DuBédat who was exploiting the affair in England that … the concession had been cancelled?”17 In sentencing DuBédat to four years’ penal servitude, he remarked:

One would have thought that [the previous sentence] would have been a warning and a lesson, and that you would have employed your great ability honestly. The one thing that has been vouchsafed to you is great ability, common honesty you have not… Men like you will always find dupes.18

Within a year, Rosita had managed to obtain a telegram from Beira stating that Frank had not been advised that the notice of cancellation had been published. This, together with representations from his influential friends, gained him an unconditional discharge from prison.

Dreyfus, Kommetjie and the Dublin conman

After a few years, having run through his – or other people’s – money, Frank and Rosita settled in a small cottage in an isolated fishing village inhabited mainly during the holidays. Kommetjie seemed an unlikely choice for this sophisticated man-of-the-world. Its isolation poses the question of whether he was still on the run. It was a village to which there was no road and access was only by hired mule wagon. A village in which there were about ten houses, a few fisherman’s huts and an unpretentious boarding-house with a little shop attached to it that did not even stock fresh bread. A village which had no electricity, water or sewerage, but where the living was cheap, fish and seafood freely available and where no one had heard of Frank DuBédat.19

It was not what he had been used to in Killiney, Ireland, where his home had had electricity, hot and cold running water and fresh bread. That house also had seven  lofty well-proportioned bedrooms, six lavatories, a drawing room, a dining room, a morning room, a day room, a billiard room, a play room, a kitchen, a wine cellar, a dairy, a laundry, a stable for eight horses, a cow house for four cows, a bedroom for three coachmen, and a castellated gate entrance.20 But the cottage in Kommetjie, Cape Province, was certainly better than a prison cell.

The other attractions of Kommetjie to the impoverished DuBédats are still very much in evidence. DuBédats’ cottage, in Afrikander Avenue, still stands, renovated and altered as land-hungry investors are starting to move into the fairly undeveloped seaside village.21 Afrikander Avenue leads straight to a sheltered bay in which sea birds paddle, not 100 metres from the cottage. Children still paddle in the ‘Kom’, the natural pool in the rocks that provides safe swimming without the waves and currents of the open sea. Fishing boats are still launched from the beach, which now carries a prominent sign “Pumping of Prawns Prohibited”. The soft white sands lead onto rock pools hidden between flat smooth rocks, fringed with decaying fronds of shipwrecked seaweed. Apart from the noise of the motor boats and the cry of the birds, the lifestyle is still quiet and peaceful.

Before his bankruptcy, Frank DuBédat had traveled extensively, “especially to Paris where he acquired a base (and) began to mix with the Theatre set both in Paris and London.”22 After he regained funds through promoting the Delagoa Bay

Concession, he and Rosita “travelled a great deal … living an extravagant lifestyle.”23 It was highly probable that he would have introduced his young actress wife to his Theatre set in Paris.

In Paris, the Dreyfus Affair was being hotly debated, particularly among the Theatre set, the artists, writers and intellectuals. The spiritual and political crisis engendered by l’Affaire was strongly reflected in French literature.24 It was in the Dreyfus Affair that for the first time the intellectuals intervened as a group in a massive show of commitment.25 The DuBédats could not have avoided being constantly exposed to it.

They might have seen a play alluding to it, Romain Rolland’s Le Loups (The Wolves, 1898), which was a theatrical cause célèbre,26 or antisemitic plays by Lavedan or Donnay in the opposition.27 They might have attended a showing of the new motion pictures, premiered by the Lumières in Paris in 1895, and viewed filmed docudramas, containing acted scenes from the trial, until these were banned.28 They could not have avoided the press headlines, the cartoons, the newspaper drawings, the illustrations, the art works and the songs that were being produced by both the pro- and anti-Dreyfusards. It was the main topic of conversation. There was a two-part cartoon of a dinner party which began with the host banning all conversation on the topic and ended with the guests at each others’ throats, the table in ruins. Many duels were fought over Dreyfus. It was quite possible that Frank DuBédat himself got into heated arguments in which he took Dreyfus’ side.

When DuBédat was released from prison after the intercession of his wife and his friends in 1896, he would no doubt have followed with interest the attempts by the wife and friends of Captain Dreyfus to do the same and he could not have been unaware of the intense press coverage of the Rennes trial three years later. When DuBédat was released from prison for the second time in 1904, after new evidence had been obtained, he would have read of demands for Dreyfus’ case to be re-examined.

Small wonder, then, that DuBédat should have identified himself with Dreyfus, a man imprisoned on a trumped up charge who was fighting for justice. Small wonder, too, that he should have turned his feelings of empathy for and solidarity with Dreyfus into a cover story that he was forced to flee France because he had been persecuted for defending him.

Words and excuses came easily to DuBédat. His letters used as evidence in his trials show a pattern of glibness29. Assuming a guise was easy for him – his family called him “the actor” 30 – he had used false identities before, as a dead man, as a Mr Denver, now as a Frenchman; the latter was made easier by the fact that he carried a French surname.

The identification with Dreyfus also indicated that Frank DuBédat was a shrewd judge of public opinion and had sufficient social sensitivity to appreciate that if he portrayed himself as a defender of Dreyfus he would be ensured of sympathy and acceptance from the locals. And if the reporting in the Cape Times was anything to go by, as a Frenchman who was a supporter of Dreyfus, the Killiney conman and his family could rely on the support of the good men and women of Kommetjie. Those good folk never discovered his true identity and his tombstone, a granite obelisk, gave away no secrets.

 

Gwynne Schrire is Deputy Director of the Cape Council of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies. She is a regular contributor and a member of the Editorial Board of Jewish Affairs and has written, co-written and edited various books on aspects of local Jewish and Cape Town history.

NOTES

  1. I would like to thank Dr Ute Ben Yosef and Lorraine Knight of the Jacob Gitlin Library for assisting me with this project. Lewis, David, Prisoners of Honour: The Dreyfus Affair,(1973), 317.
  2. Bredin, Jean-Denis, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus, (1983), 480
  3. Dreyfus was reinstated as a major, re-enlisted in World War I, and was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel.
  4. Cape Times 23.7 1906
  5. Lewis, J, op cit, 298-299
  6. One of their supporters was Bernard Lazare, a socialist and Zionist. In 2005 a square in Paris was named after him. This marked a change in French attitude. Twenty years previously the French army had refused to erect a statue of Dreyfus in the Paris Ecole Militaire – the statue found a home in the Tuileries gardens.
  7. Bredin, J, op cit, 517
  8. Minute Book of Cape Town Jewish Philanthropic Society1897 – 1903, Alexander Papers, Archives of the University of Cape Town.
  9. Musiker Naomi, “Emile Zola and the Liberation of the Press”, in Jewish Affairs, Summer 1994 vol 49 no 4, 41
  10. MC Encyclopaedia Judaica, 1972 Vol 6 230
  11. Wootton, Maria ,The Du Bedat Story, Killiney to Kommetjie,(1999), 68. Thanks to Dr Samuel Schrire for ordering this book for me from Ireland.
  12. Seeliger, A, op cit, 172-173 Wootton ( p71) gives an example of one his “funny verses”, part of which reads “Beneath the mountains, by the sea/ lies healthy, breezy Kommetjie/Where Chapman’s and Hout Bay combine/ To make the view around sublime./ Here lived one Willie du Bedat/Whose mother dear was fairly fat/ His father too was fairly stout/And very slow to move about…”
  13. Wistrich, Robert, “The Dreyfus Centenary”, in Jewish Affairs, Summer 1994 vol 49 no 4,31
  14. Wootton, M, 69
  15. Henshilwood, N, op cit, 27
  16. Wootton, M,47
  17. ibid, 61
  18. ibid, 62
  19. ibid, 73, Henshilwood, op cit, pp 25-27
  20. ibid, 22
  21. probably about 16 Afrikander Ave, Wootton, p69
  22. ibid, 21
  23. ibid, 47
  24. Harvey, Paul & Heseltine, JE, The Oxford Companion to French Literature, (1959), 225
  25. Bredin, J, op cit, 521
  26. Lewis, D, op cit, 221
  27. Harvey P & Heseltine, JE, op cit, pp 225, 627
  28. Musiker, N, op cit ,43
  29. Wootton, M, pp 49-60
  30. ibid , 47

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