Invisible Bordeaux recently picked up a guide to south-western France published in 1925 to tie in with that year's Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. The 350-page book comprised a number of advertisements which made me want to get out and about and see what could be made of them today. 

Starting out at the top of rue Sainte-Catherine, I was surprised to see that the jeweler's shop Mornier still exists although, as ever, the four-digit 1925 telephone number has probably been revised!

 

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The apparently massive Léveilley Frères furniture store on rue du Palais-Gallien is long gone. An office and apartment block has taken its place. 

 

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If this magnificent allées d'Orléans branch of the CCF (Crédit Commercial de France) looks unfamiliar, it is because a more modern building has taken its place. On the ground floor is a branch of HSBC; CCF was taken over by HSBC in 2000 and became HSBC France in 2005. The rue d'Orléans referred to in the ad was renamed rue Charles-Amoureux in 1929, a homage to the Bordeaux-born conductor who was the subject of a past Invisible Bordeaux article.

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Have you ever wondered who supplied wine to Sweden's King Gustav V? It was Chaigneau & Co. There are less barrels and horses on cours Martinique these days.

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With its 3 million readers, La Petite Gironde (which later evolved into Sud Ouest)  claimed it was the "most important, complete and widespread" provincial newspaper on the market. Its base was on rue de Cheverus and is now a luxury mansionhouse and reception venue: Hôtel de la Tresne.

 

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It would be quite an achievement these days to buy a van or tractor on cours de l'Intendance! The windows on the first and second floors were already bricked up in 1925. That was apparently a 19th-century method in order to pay less so-called "window tax".

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This was just one of two of Banque Française de l'Afrique's two provincial branches (the other was in Marseille). The building now comprises an Air France outlet although, from the outside, it looks like most of the office units are currently vacant. As for the fountain visible on the 1925 picture, much has already been written about this subject on Invisible Bordeaux!

 

> Ce dossier est également disponible en français !

Invisible Bordeaux recently heard about a plan to reenact Operation Frankton, the heroic 1942 suicide raid which ranks as one of the most incredible tales of Bordeaux’s dark wartime years (and which has already been featured on the blog): ten Royal Marines set out from the Atlantic, canoeing down the Gironde Estuary in order to plant mines on German cargo ships docked in central Bordeaux. Only two of the so-called Cockleshell Heroes, Herbert "Blondie" Hasler (1914-1987) and Bill Sparks (1922-2002), survived the mission; after escaping inland to Ruffec, near Angoulême, members of the French Résistance guided them across the Pyrenees and onto to Gibraltar, from where they departed for the UK.

What makes this project (codename Frankton 75 and scheduled for September 2017) stand out from other similar ventures is that it involves not just paddling down the Gironde Estuary, but also an overland trek to Ruffec, and that the crew includes Mike and Rich Heard, the grandsons of Bill Sparks. The extended team also includes their uncle Terry Sparks, Bills Sparks’s son. I caught up with Rich to get the full story.

Rich Heard.

What is the basic thinking behind this adventure?

We are following in the footsteps of our Grandad, Bill Sparks. It's been something of a dream for my brother Mike and me since we were kids, to reenact the mission and experience some of the sights and trials that the Marines faced. My brother turned 40 this year, so it seemed like as good an excuse as any to make it happen! My uncle Terry is joining us too, he was in the Marines for 25 years, following in his father's footsteps.

Who else is involved?

The six-strong team who are completing the paddle include me, Mike, Mike Hale (one of my best friends and our paddling “guru”), Juan Greyling (close friend of ours who is always up for a wacky endurance challenge!), Alun Davies (retired Police officer who has been working with me for the last 18 months) and Matt Lardner (soon to be retired Police officer, and ex-Marine - he's known of the raid since his days in the corps and he was thrilled to be invited along!).

Next stop: the Gironde Estuary (photo source: dorsetecho.co.uk)

When is the modern-day reenactment taking place? How long will it last?

The expedition will set out at 06.30 on Saturday 30th September 2017 from our launch location, Le Verdon-Sur-Mer. Our plans are to complete the paddle over three days, with the walk then taking a further four. This factors in a day as a buffer should we need it for either the paddle or the trek. Our aim is to have a little celebration at the cafe in Ruffec where Sparks and Hasler met the Resistance. We have contacted the charity that looks after the Frankton Trail and hope to have someone from Mary Lindell's family present; the Dubois family hid Hasler and Sparks, and then Mary Lindell helped them escape France. Any involvement from their lineage would be very welcomed!

Hasler and Sparks meeting up with Mary Lindell in more peaceful times.

Sparks (first left) and Hasler (first right) reunited with the Dubois family who took enormous risks to protect the two men.

How have you gone about preparing the adventure? Have you planned where you'll be stopping over?

We have been lucky in that Everyone Active (a national leisure centre company) have given us free access to their gyms so that we can prepare physically for the challenge. We have been busily trying to source two-man kayaks to train in and to use, and finally think we have three boats sorted! So we will book in some group training days as well as just getting out on the water as much as possible. Unfortunately we don't all live in one location which makes logistics a little fiddly!

In terms of the stops, my Uncle Terry is our navigator and planner, we are looking to confirm our exact stops over the next week or two. From my understanding there are actually very few places along the Gironde which you can safely get in and out of the water.

You also have a full-on support team following you.

The support team is getting pretty extensive, with people putting in a lot of time back at home to help with the fundraising efforts. My sister (Natalie Pitney) and mum (Gill Clark - daughter of Bill) have been sending letters to local businesses looking for support, as well as organising a raffle, etc.

For the actual trip, Terry will be our main man, he will be supporting us from the shore side along with my brother-in-law - Jim Pitney. Depending on our plans they will be setting up camp ready for us, or potentially ferrying us from pillar to post so we can paddle. Potentially we have a guy called Andy who is providing safety boat cover, but this is a way off of being confirmed. And when we get to the trek part of the trip we will potentially be joined by more friends and family.

Are you familiar with the region? What are you expecting to encounter along the way?

None of us have paddled the Gironde before, but we have been in contact with several people who have recently. We are aware of the tidal race especially at the mouth of the Gironde where the water meets the Atlantic, so we are thinking that the first leg of the paddle is going to be particularly difficult, with the current/tide pulling us in all directions. Also the Gironde is known for its bore wave… who doesn't love a 6-8ft wave appearing out of nowhere?!!

A team meeting in progress (source: frankton75th.co.uk).

Once we are into the paddle proper, the pace of the river is going to be our biggest concern, if we were to capsize, or to lose a bit of kit, it'll be away from us pretty quickly. Equally if we were to miss our stop point, it will be a longer paddle back against the current to try and get there.

From my understanding the tides change on a pretty sharp turnaround too, so we can go from having it behind us and helping us, to it being head on and slowing our paddle rate down. And then there's the wind, the uncontrollable unpredictable element which could change things massively!!

So we are preparing as best we can, once we have kayaks we will be hitting some slightly faster flows of water in order to get used to things. Plus we will all be drilled to a certain proficiency (hopefully).

Which part of the reenactment do you expect to be more challenging? The canoeing or the walking?

The paddling will definitely be the harder of the two, the raw power of the Gironde will mean we will need to keep our wits about us at every step. Plus the distances we will need to cover on a daily basis will make the physicality of it tough on all six of us.

The trek side of things is comparatively civilised, so fitness will be the main thing there. But the walk is going to be a challenge; covering 30+ miles over four consecutive days will certainly be hard wearing on our feet, however we plan to have a support van carrying the majority of our kit, who we will meet up with for breaks. My uncle has completed the walk on a couple of occasions, so this is certainly the more 'known' of the two areas.

Once Operation Frankton

Bill Sparks (second from left to rear of car) touring the US
to promote the Cockleshell Heroes movie.

was in the past, what did your grandfather Bill Sparks do next?

After the raid he served in Burma, Africa and Italy. In 1946 he joined London Transport as a driver, taking a year's break in 1952 to work as a lieutenant in the Malayan police during the insurgency.

Three years later he was an adviser for the film Cockleshell Heroes with Mel Ferrer and Trevor Howard, and toured America to promote it. He also published The Last Of The Cockleshell Heroes (1992) and Cockleshell Commander (2002).

He finished his working life as a London Transport garage inspector. At 65, tax regulations cut his invalidity pension, forcing him to auction his many medals in order to keep his retirement home at Alfriston, East Sussex. The anonymous buyer allowed him to borrow them for veterans' parades.

He was passionate about preserving the memories of his fallen comrades, and spent a large portion of his life ensuring that they were well remembered as the heroes that they were.

Did he return to Bordeaux or develop any particular ties with the city?


As far as I am aware he returned to Bordeaux on several occasions, in 1966 to unveil a memorial at the English Church in Bordeaux, and then in 1983 to complete his own reenactment of the raid. I am sure there were countless other occasions too.

1966: Sparks (third right), Hasler (middle) and Mary Lindell unveiling a plaque at what was then St Nicholas Anglican church in Bordeaux (Cours Xavier-Arnozan). The plaque can now be seen at Centre Jean-Moulin. 

 

 

 

Hasler and Sparks in Bordeaux in 1966.

 

Sparks during his own 1983 reenactment of the raid.

And you'll be raising money for charity along the way. Tell us more!

Eight years ago my father passed away after a very short battle with lung cancer (it was literally one month from diagnosis to his passing). For his final eight or so days he was cared for in a hospice locally. The Weldmar Hospicecare Trust operate in Dorset across a couple of sites, and provide the most amazing respite and end of life care imaginable, to families who are suffering.

I've been quoted as saying that the staff are like “angels on this earth” but that still doesn't seem to do them justice. The chef researched a “junket” pudding that my dad could remember from his infant days at school, then he went out and bought the ingredients and made it for him. Nothing was ever too much for the staff! Our aim is to raise £10,000 to support their ongoing needs as a trust... we just need a lot of support with this.

Finally, how can we monitor your progress?

I will be doing a couple of radio interviews with BBC Solent over the coming weeks, I'll post links to these on our social media. We will be blogging regularly via the website and updating social media as we go. We are contactable via all of these means and would encourage people to get in touch. We would especially like to hear from any descendants or locals who had some interaction with the marines either during the war or in the subsequent years after.

> Website: www.frankton75th.co.uk
> Facebook: www.facebook.com/frankton75footsteps
> Instagram: @Frankton75revisited
> Twitter: @frankton75th

> Justgiving page: www.justgiving.com/Frankton75inthefootstepsofourgrandfather

Archive photos from Frankton 75 social media feeds. Lead photo: detail from commemorative plaque in Le Verdon-sur-Mer.

Cette interview est également disponible en français !

One of the most-read items on Invisible Bordeaux is the overview of the remarkable Cité Frugès estate in Pessac, where influential architect Le Corbusier was encouraged by local sugar magnate Henry Frugès to roll out his grand designs for cheap, modular housing. The 1926 Pessac development has become a renowned sight in the area, promoted by the local council and recently listed as UNESCO world heritage. And yet, prior to the Pessac estate taking shape, a similar but far smaller and lesser-known scheme by the Frugès/Le Corbusier double-act was rolled out in Lège-Cap-Ferret, which is where we are today.

The story goes that, in 1923, the 44-year-old Henry Frugès was already a wealthy man, thanks notably to the sugar refinery business he headed up in Bordeaux. With a view to optimizing his business model, he had also taken over a sawmill in Lège, to the northern tip of the triangular Arcachon Bay. This is where he planned to manufacture the wooden crates and casing used to package his company’s sugar production. In addition to being a successful industry player, Frugès was a great lover of architecture and a philanthropist. So, in a move that was set to combine all of the above, he called on the up-and-coming architect Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, who went by the name Le Corbusier, to design homes for sawmill workers on a plot of land that lay across the road from their workplace (where a fire station is now located).

Part of the small estate and its focal point: a pelote basque court, which was sadly not in use the day I was there. 

Le Corbusier teamed up with his cousin, fellow architect Pierre Jeanneret, and conceived the tiny estate, made up of six small houses, a larger communal residence, and a central square which doubled up as a pelote basque court. The building process, which began in October 1924, involved installing prefabricated units around a basic backbone made up of concrete pillars and beams, the walls being “built” using a cement gun to project the cement onto steel formwork structures. The estate was completed the following year and, in essence, became the blueprint for the more ambitious Pessac project.

The smaller units were built to two designs: three were the rectangular-shaped “Type A”, with ground-floor covered patio areas and upper-floor pergola-covered terraces; the other three were the more cubic, no-frills “Type B” houses. Distinguishing features included wide, horizontal windows (also used in Pessac), along with narrow slit windows. A ground-floor fireplace was used to heat the homes, which initially did not have toilet and bathroom facilities (running water only became available here in the 1970s, until then the only source of water was through use of a hand pump by the central square). The larger communal building, referred to both as “l’hôtellerie-cantine” and “la maison des célibataires” (home for single people), comprised a kitchen and refectory on the ground floor, and male and female dormitories on the upper level (able to accommodate 15 men and eight women).

In behind the hedges: a Type A design.

A cube-like Type B design.

The communal unit.

Henry Frugès’s dream proved to be short-lived though. His sugar refinery business didn’t make it through the financial crash of 1929 (he had to sell on to Béghin-Say) and the sawmill was taken over by a Landais family, Darbo, who already owned a sawmill further south. Employees of the new company moved  into the small estate, which by now had become known locally as “le quartier marocain” (the Moroccan neighbourhood) because of the unusual first-floor terraces. Over the ensuing years, subsequent tenants successively tweaked and modified the houses, until they were pale imitations of their original selves. The estate gradually fell into a state of disrepair, so much so that the local council seriously envisaged carrying out full-on demolition work towards the end of the 1980s. A renowned local architect and Le Corbusier enthusiast, Michel Sadirac, was alerted to the issue by a Japanese visitor and stepped in, triggering a process that saw the estate listed as historic heritage in 1990.

Distinguishing features: wide horizontal openings.

Slit windows.

Three years later, the social housing structure Office HLM 33 (now Gironde Habitat) acquired the properties (which, apparently, still belonged to the Darbo family) and went about restoring the estate’s six houses (but not the communal building) between 1994 and 1997 (a couple of interesting photos from that period can be found here). In 1998, things came full circle as the good-as-new homes were rented out once again to low-income tenants, the estate now going by the name of “Résidence Le Corbusier”. And that is the way things remain today.

The one outstanding question mark hangs over the communal building which, for more than 20 years now has been completely bricked up to prevent the inside being tampered with. The structure now belongs to the town of Lège-Cap-Ferret, and studies are ongoing as to how the building might be used in the future. It could become a cultural meeting point, a music centre or a museum. But progress is slow; options have been on the table since 2015 and obstacles to be overcome include funding, not to mention the issue of noise and parking if this quiet cul-de-sac were to become a hive of activity. The case continues…

Awaiting rebirth? The bricked-up maison des célibataires from another angle.

Meanwhile, visiting the tiny estate is an interesting experience: you can easily sense the philosophy of the original concept of an area for communal living. Today, though, it has become a quiet side-street and the small gardens are hemmed in by tall bushes in a manner which is far-removed from the open-plan atmosphere that must have initially reigned. The strangest sight is the pelote basque court, where you wonder how often people actually congregated to play pelote here. The space now appears to be the territory of cats. One comes up and befriends me before posing for the camera. I feel as if I’ve captured an unusual sight, framing my feline model with a Le Corbusier home in the background, until back home I check out the associated Wikipedia page and spot the same cat on a photo there too!

"You may remember me from Wikipedia...". Our celebrity cat gets the Instagram filter treatment.

Still, as one of the more discreet achievements in the high-profile legacy of Le Corbusier, the Lotissement de Lège or, if you will, the Moroccan quarter or even Résidence Le Corbusier, is an interesting place to explore, and is a far cry from the ocean beaches and oyster farming villages more usually associated with Cap Ferret...

> Find it on the Invisible Bordeaux map: Lotissement de Lège, avenue du Médoc, Lège-Cap-Ferret.