Intermission (2) – Home Front – The Blitz Kids of Palm Beach, FL

The Elliot Children

Three young siblings sit at a fountain.  Two girls in matching dresses and white, floppy bonnets; a lad in a schoolboy’s jacket and shorts.  Their smiles are subdued.  The children are long-term guests at the compound of one of Palm Beach’s more famed denizens, Charles Merrill.

Across the sea, their mother pines for her son and two daughters.  But she knows they are safer in America than they would be in England.  Night after night, the full fury of the Nazi war machine bombs their homeland.  “This photo shows Alistair, Anne and Jean Eliot one Sunday at a church in Palm Beach called Bethesda,” poet and writer Alistair Eliot, now 84, recalled. [Bethesda-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church.  Anne on the left; Jean in the middle.]

Charles Merrill

Their emergency host being Charles Merrill, founder of the world’s largest brokerage firm.   Alistair knows little about his family’s connections to the Merrills.  “I am unaware as to how or why these three were chosen, but I met them during the summer months when they accompanied my grandfather to Southampton, NY,” said Merrill Lynch Magowan.

What brought these children to Palm Beach, Florida was the Blitz.

Even before the raids started, British parents started thinking about getting their children out.  The Elliots first planned to move theirs to Australia, Canada or South Africa.  Starting in June 1940, a board that coordinated children’s passage was swamped with applications.

Late in the evening of 17 September 1940, the City of Benares  was 4 days out from Liverpool when a torpedo slammed into it.  The attacked killed 131 of the 200 crewmembers, 131 of the 197 of the passenger – including 70 of the 90 children – this would end the government program.

The British National Archives shows that privately sponsored programs continued and that’s how the Elliots got to the U.S.  In late November 1940, Mrs. Elliot and her 3 children crossed the Atlantic, bad weather and German U-boats and all.  Mrs. Elliot returned to England after she gave the children their Christmas presents.   Alistair said that other ships in their convoy were sunk, “We were attacked at night and I saw ships burning and heard the destroyers whooping rushing past us like Marine ambulances.”

In Palm Beach, the 3 were among many who saw the war come right to them.  In their case, for the second time.  “I saw ships burning on the horizon, in the Gulf Stream, as we were swimming – one time we got covered with oil that had floated in from a sunk tanker,” he said.

Alistair Elliot

Charles Merrill’s biographer, Langdon Hammer, said, Charles Merrill was moved by the heroism of the British… and was eager to do something for the war effort.  He welcomed the Elliot siblings as foster children, seeing not only to their safety, but to their upbringing and education.  He even hired them a governess, and a  British nurse named Jessie Love.”

Charles Merrill died at 70 on 7 October 1956, he would not be remembered for his generous hosting of the children, but as for creating a brokerage empire.  He is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in W.Palm Beach, Florida.  Alistair Elliot wrote to honor his mother, “My mother was a heroine in her own unspoken way.  It had to be done, and she did it, was all she had to say.”

Charles Edward Merrill, 1885-1956

Condensed from an article by Eliot Kleinberg, Palm Beach Post, staff writer, but it can also be located in Stars and Stripes.

Click on images to enlarge and read captions.

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Home Front Humor – 

“THE NEIGHBORS SAY SHE SOUNDS TOO MUCH LIKE AN AIR-RAID SIREN”

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Farewell Salutes – 

John Dean Armstrong – Hutchinson, KS; US Navy, WWII, CBI, Lt., pilot

Charles Bell III – Mt. Pleasant, SC; US Army, Korea, 11th Airborne Division, West Point Class of 1950

Daniel Doyle – Sarasota, FL; US Army, Afghanistan, Major

Norman Fraser – North York, CAN; RC Navy, WWII

Don Hill – Troy, MI; US Army, WWII

Grant Iverson – Washington, UT; US Navy, WWII

Ray James – Sylvarina, MS; USMC, WWII, PTO, Pfc, F/2/8th Marines, KIA (Tarawa)

Philip LaForce – Oxford, MA; US Army, WWII, SSgt., POW, Bronze Star, Purple Heart

Archie Newell – Lemmon, SD; USMC, WWII, PTO, Pvt., 2nd Tank Battalion, KIA (Tarawa)

Calvin Wilhite Jr. – Memphis, TN; US Army, WWII, Sgt.

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