Clark Gable's butler

In 1940, a ‘furtive delicate man, with a pencil moustache and darting grey eyes’* was arrested in Jersey for a minor fraud. Unfortunately for him, Jersey then was under German occupation and an anti German leaflet was found in his possession. A further month was added to his six-month sentence. The unlucky man was Charles, Anthony Faramus, former hairdresser and dishwasher and barely twenty years old. In Ben Macintyre’s words: ‘…tall and slender, he looked as though a puff of wind might blow him away.’*

His luck took a turn for the worse when, in prison, he hooked up with one  Eddy Chapman, a wily adventurer and crook. Chapman persuaded Faramus that the best, indeed only way to escape German occupied Jersey was to offer themselves as ‘spies’ for the Germans. A letter was duly sent to the German governor of Jersey and apparently ignored, until one night there was a thunderous knocking on their door in the small hours of the morning. The Gestapo, more suspicious than impressed, arrested them and whisked them to France. Eventually the Germans decided that a tough and resourceful crook would, with the right training might prove a useful agent. They had no use for a shy hairdresser and and Faramus was left in his cell to rot.

Before seeing him for what may have been for the last time, Chapman urged Faramus to trust him, and that whatever happened he would somehow protect his friend from further harm.

They were empty words. Chapman might well have thought he could negotiate Faramus’s safety in exchange for what he was offering the Germans. The Germans saw things differently. Faramus would be a  pawn for Chapman’s good behaviour – a fictitious pawn for—unknown to Chapman, Faramus was promptly removed to Buchenwald concentration camp, where things went from bad to worse. Failing to see an approaching Warrant Officer and removing his cap in time, he was sent to Mathausen-Gusen, a concentration camp for the ‘incorrigible.’ There, inmates were worked until they dropped dead.

Somehow this delicate man with the pencil thin moustache survived, but only just. In May 1945 the 41^st U.S. Cavalry liberated Mathausen-Gusen concentration camp and found, amongst an army of ‘emaciated ghosts,’ Anthony Faramus, his body traumatised by diphtheria, scarlet fever, gangrene and dysentery. He’d lost seven ribs and one of his lungs, which he eventually lost, was riddled with TB.

Faramus was nursed in an RAF hospital and released with £16 and a weekly stipend of £2. But Anthony Faramus was not yet done with life. He  became a film extra, and with exquisite irony, played minor roles in war films such as Colditz and King Rat. Then he emigrated to America and became a butler — to Clark Gable.

Faramus eventually returned to Britain where, despite having only lung he became an active hunt saboteur, eventually dying in 1990 aged seventy.

What happened to the even more remarkable Eddy Chapman? I suggest you read Agent Zigzag by Ben Macintyre,* which I strongly recommend.