Alice and Claude Askew
He wrote this many years later recalling this childhood encounter when he met up with him once more – this time with his wife Alice and during the much darker circumstances of the 'Great Serbian Retreat' during World War I (see below).
[18] And this detail is corroborated by notices in The Times, that between 1891 and 1893, Claude Askew, "of Guy's Hospital," passed a series of examinations by the 'Royal Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons'.
Nonetheless, those studies may well have stood him in good stead when, during the First World War, he volunteered his services with a British field hospital attached to the Serbian Army, which both he and his wife (as a nurse) accompanied during its 'Great Retreat' across the mountains of Montenegro and Albania to the Adriatic coast, during the winter of 1915-1916 (see below).
The buildings highlight a unique period in the nation’s history when the upper-middle class longed for expansive flats and substantial leases, but without the responsibilities of a house and access to porters to service the property.
« CLAUDE and ALICE ASKEW, who wrote popular serial novels in the daily papers, lived in a rambling old home at Wivelsfield Green, in Sussex, known as "Botches."
[1] Alice & Claude Askew – always as co-authors after their marriage – wrote more than ninety stories, which were published variously in books, novelettes or novellas in popular magazines or 'weeklies'.
As the unnamed nurse wrote:— Another source for this - including a description in their own words - comes from The Battles in Flanders, From Ypres to Neuve Chapelle by Edmund Dane, published by Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1915.
Mr. Dane takes us back to the end of November, 1914:— Following this experience at Furnes in Belgium - and still in 1915, Alice & Claude Askew published their novel, The Tocsin (London: John Long, 1915).
The scene rapidly shifts to Belgium, and Mrs. Claude Askew, owing to what she has recently seen with her own eyes at the Belgian Field Hospital at Fumes, is able to give some most realistic and interesting pictures from her own experience of Red Cross work.
Alice Askew had a close friend in Mildred 'Millie' Watson, who was then Secretary of the Serbian Relief Fund (SRF), which was headquartered in London's Cromwell Road.
"[35] He wrote this in their personal account of their experiences and impressions accompanying the Serbian army on its famous 'Great Retreat' across the mountains from Pristina to Alessio, during the winter of 1915–16, which was published in 1916 under the title: The Stricken Land: Serbia As We Saw It.
"[38] They went on to write: "Taking things all round we were not sorry to disembark from the Saidiah, but I think that no one who travelled upon her heard without a sigh of kindly reminiscence, some weeks later, that she had been torpedoed in the Channel and gone to the bottom.
"[43] And where they would stay until: "On September 28th, 1915, we left Mladenovatz, and it is from that date that we may reckon the beginning of the long and eventful journeying—nearly three months—that carried us across Serbia and Montenegro and has eventually landed us here at Scutari in Albania.
But in October she also returned to the theatre of war and was with her husband Claude in Salonika until about the end of April of the following year, when she went to Corfu to work with the Serbian Red Cross there, under Colonel Borissavljevitch.
Claude had sent a letter, dated Rome, September 30 (1917), to his older brother Hugh Askew in London, in which he wrote: "We are leaving here to-night to return to Corfu.
"[48] They most likely travelled from Rome directly to the southern port of Taranto in Apulia, where they could embark on the Italian steamer Città di Bari bound for Corfu.
It has been reported that the Città di Bari left Taranto on 4 October to stop en route at the nearby port of Gallipoli - also in Apulia, from where it departed for Corfu at 6:30 in the evening of the next day.
Then during the early hours of 6 October 1917, when it had almost reached its destination – "about 37 miles from Paxo"[49] (or Paxoi), which lies just south of Corfu – the Città di Bari suffered a fatal torpedo attack from a German submarine, SM UB-48, under the command of Oberleutnant zur See (Sub-lieutenant) Wolfgang Steinbauer – and sank a little after 4:30 in the morning.
[53] In fact her body had fetched up in a small cove on the inland side of a smaller island called Zvirinovik – just in front of the fishing village of Karbuni (as it is now spelled) – near the town of Blato.
On the following day her body was examined by the authorities and, from various letters and telegrams that were found about her person, identified as that of the "well-known English lady writer Alice Askew of London.
It was conducted by the Archbishop of Serbia, "who paid an eloquent and touching tribute to the benevolent work of Major and Mrs. Askew, to whom, he said, the Serbian people owed eternal gratitude".
[56] The Windsor Magazine issue 279 (March 1918) carried a final article, From Salonica to the Albanian Coast by "the late Major Claude Askew", introduced as "the following article has a pathetic interest as one of the last few manuscripts sent to England by the author before he and his gifted wife and collaborator met their tragic death, through the torpedoing of a vessel on which they were returning to their War duties at Salonica and in Corfu, after a brief absence in Italy in connection with the work of the Serbian Red Cross.
By a sad coincidence, this theme is introduced with a reference to the submarine peril, to which Major and Mrs. Askew fell victims within a few weeks of the dispatch of this article."
