John Simkins
The generous bequest of over £100,000 to the Trust in the will of Ursula Graham (neé Behringer) triggers memories not only of Ursula herself but of her husband, Prof Dominick “Toby” Graham, MC, a distinguished and adventurous former PoW.
Ursula was Toby’s third wife. Shortly after the death of his second wife, Toby and Ursula met, as the only two passengers, on a container ship to New Zealand, where Toby was heading in order to visit his daughter.
They got married in 2002 and lived at Staindrop, Co. Durham.and Ursula fully backed Toby’s devoted support of the Monte San Martino Trust. She remained in touch after Toby’s death in 2013.
Toby was a man of many parts, a British Army officer, a cross-country Olympic skier, a university professor and an author.
Serving with the Royal Artillery, Toby was captured in North Africa and first imprisoned at Chieti, where his attempt to escape through a sewer was foiled by a fire. Transferred to PG49 Fontanellato, he got out for a day but was recaptured. When the camp’s gates were opened in September 1943 at the Armistice he set out on a six-week journey to freedom.
He described it in his book, Escapes and Evasions of an Obstinate Bastard – the epithet used by one of his two companions when he decided to go a different way from them as they approached the fighting in south Italy. He wore peasants’ clothes, was lodged and fed by contadini, spent a night in a barn with a sick cow and was fired at several times by Germans scouring the woods. Finally he was escorted with a party of 17 by a drunken guide to a village near Ortona, where a Canadian patrol found him being shaved in a barber’s chair.
He later commanded a battery with the Guards Armoured Division in north-west Europe, winning the MC.
Military historian
After the war, Toby became well known as a military historian, after taking a PhD at London University and joining the University of New Brunswick. His book Tug of War – one of three written in collaboration with Brigadier Shelford Bidwell – is a classic account of the Italian campaign.
Toby was an early supporter of the Trust and a regular attender of the Fontanellato lunches. When no longer able to make the journey, he once caused an alarm by vanishing from his home but was eventually found lunching at the Army and Navy Club in London. It was also typical of Toby that, while participating in a Freedom Trail, aged over 80, he only very reluctantly allowed himself to be stretchered back after feeling unwell. He was up and running the next day.