Arthur Ferdinand Yencken
Arthur Ferdinand Yencken (1894 – 18 May 1944) was an Australian businessman. Yencken died in Spain.[1]
He was educated at Melbourne Church of England Grammar School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (B.A., 1919). Enlisting in the British Army in August 1914, he became a major in the artillery and was awarded the Military Cross. After World War I he joined the Foreign Office and rose to be British minister in Madrid. Arthur Ferdinand Yencken, was thus an Australian diplomat serving in the British Foreign Office, Australia not having its own representation at the time. Postings in America, Germany, Egypt, and Italy were followed by his appointment in 1939 to Madrid where he worked to help preserve Spanish wartime neutrality. In 1941 he was appointed C.M.G. Arthur Yencken died on 18 May 1944 in an air crash south of Barcelona, Spain, an event recorded in a book "Flight 777".
Arthur Ferdinand and wife Joyce worked fearlessly, in difficult and hostile conditions, to repatriate Allied airmen having been being smuggled over the Pyrenees, by ship to the UK. She was a daughter of George Russell, a Victorian grazier. She with her sister grew up on his sheep station, Langi Willi, near Skipton. Joyce, after a period of desolation on Arthur's death in 1944 married Sir Denys Pilditch in 1948 the wartime director of counter-espionage in India. Joyce lived with him in England until her death (coincidently in Madrid in the arms of her grandson, Arthur) in 1975, though she returned frequently to Australia where her children lived: John, Elizabeth, and David.
References
- ↑ Sayers, Stuart. "Yencken, Arthur Ferdinand (1894–1944)". Australian Dictionary of Biography. Canberra: Australian National University. Retrieved 2012-02-18.