Victor Cazalet

Colonel Victor Alexander Cazalet, MC (27 December 1896 – 4 July 1943) was a British Conservative Party Member of Parliament for nineteen years. He came from a prominent, wealthy English family.

In his political career, he was a noted authority on international affairs and was a veteran of World War I. He became the liaison officer with Polish General Sikorski (Prime Minister of the Polish government-in-exile) after the outbreak of World War II. He promoted strong military ties with the United States before and during the war and was an outspoken advocate for creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Cazalet was also an amateur athlete, squash champion and tennis player in Great Britain for many years. He became godfather to actress Elizabeth Taylor after developing a friendship with her family. Travelling back to London from Gibraltar, he was killed in the 1943 Gibraltar B-24 crash at age 46 along with General Sikorski and 15 others.

Early life and education

Victor Cazalet was born in London, at 4 Whitehall Gardens, on 12 December 1896, the second son of William Marshall Cazalet and his wife, Maud. Their country house, Fairlawne in Kent, had once been the residence of former Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel. The family also had a villa at Cimiez, France, where Queen Victoria was sometimes their guest; she also became Victor's godmother. The ancestors of the Cazalet family were Huguenots from Languedoc, in the south of France, who settled in England after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes had forced them out of the country.

Military service and political career He was commissioned into the Queen's Own West Kent Yeomanry in 1915 and reached the rank of Captain. He subsequently served in the front line with the Household Battalion of the 1st Life Guards, serving on the Friends of National Spain committee. However, at the Anschluss of Austria by Nazi Germany in March 1938, he opposed, with Winston Churchill, the appeasement of Adolf Hitler by Neville Chamberlain's government. He sent a statement of support to the inaugural national meeting of Moral Re-Armament, an anti-communist organisation, in the United States in June 1939.

Cazalet became the liaison officer with Polish General Władysław Sikorski, who served as Prime Minister of the Polish government-in-exile, in 1940.

Promoting military ties with the United States Cazalet also termed himself "a booster for America" and had publicly expressed the gratitude of British subjects for the aid that America gave Britain before and after World War II began. In 1940 he wanted Britain to give the US a free port in the West Indies, with all sovereign rights so that the US Navy could have a port closer to South America. He also hoped that the US and British Navies would join after the war to "pool their policies and ideas". He feared that a failure of Britain and the United States to reach an agreement, regardless of the other countries involved, would lead to a dangerous competition in shipbuilding between both countries that would seriously jeopardise world peace: In 1929 he said, "Each country should build the ships it needs without regarding the other navy as a possible enemy".

In 1941, during the London Blitz, Cazalet urged the American government to keep the lifeline between their countries open. "The victory can be won," he emphasised, "if the stuff gets over". He added that Britain was deeply grateful for the help it had already received from the US. However, although Jews were also victims of Nazi aggression, they were still not recognised as allies of Britain.

Although he never knew his grandfather, Edward Cazalet, the latter had first inspired his interest in establishing a Jewish state. An industrialist based in Russia, Edward had written a number of treatises in the 1870s in which he advocated a Jewish homeland and wrote that "under English protection the Jewish nation, after eighteen hundred years of exile, would have it in their power to return again to their own country". According to Cazalet biographer Robert Rhodes James, Edward Cazalet had seen the pogroms against the Jews in the Russian Empire, and their plight made a "profound emotional appeal to him". His efforts failed, however.

At a 1941 conference in the United States in which he was joined by Sikorski, Cazalet advocated forgetting differences and "uniting all forces in an effort to defeat the enemy".

On 27 June 1943, a week before he was killed, he visited Cairo and then Jerusalem, where he met with David Ben-Gurion and others. His last public statements recorded were at that meeting, in which he said, "I would gladly give my life for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, as I am ready to give my life for the preservation of the British Empire.... Whatever happens, the Jews must have a permanent home." Azure a castle triple towered Argent between two fleurs-de-lis in chief and a boar passant in base Or. After serving in the House of Commons for nineteen years, he was considered one of the "most brilliant" of the younger men in the Commons. "His knowledge of central Europe was probably unequaled," wrote The New York Times after his sudden death in 1943, at age 46, when his plane crashed seconds after takeoff from Gibraltar. A lead article in the New York Herald Tribune read: There can be few other Englishmen of our time who have touched so many nations and so many individual citizens upon terms of understanding and friendship. What he did for Poland he literally did around the world. Here in America his friends were countless ... it was as an understanding observer and appreciative visitor that Americans held him in affection and will remember him. To that post-war world, which must lean heavily upon men of goodwill if peace and justice are to prevail, Victor Cazalet is a heavy loss. Cazalet was a Christian Scientist and a member of Ninth Church of Christ, Scientist, London. He was a landowner and a wealthy bachelor, whose numerous social and political connections included close friendships with Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden.

In 1936, Cazalet purchased the 400-acre Great Swifts estate near Cranbrook, Kent, demolishing the old house and building a new one in Georgian style, designed by architect Geddes Hyslop.

Cazalet's sister, Thelma Cazalet-Keir, was a noted feminist and also a Conservative MP. She married journalist David Keir in August 1939. Cazalet's brother, Peter, who married P. G. Wodehouse's stepdaughter, Leonora, was a notable racehorse trainer who was British jump racing Champion Trainer three times and trained Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother's racehorses.

Godfather to Mary Churchill Cazalet was godfather to Winston and Clementine Churchill's youngest daughter, Mary, born in 1922. He tried unsuccessfully to persuade her mother to name her Victoria.

Godfather to Elizabeth Taylor Cazalet, who had a passion for fine art, became a close friend of American art gallery owners Francis Taylor and his wife Sara, parents of Elizabeth, after they had moved from the U.S. to London in 1936.

He gave 4-year-old Elizabeth a horse named Betty as a gift, which she would ride bareback throughout the property. Hopper met with Elizabeth and Sara and offered to help. Months later, Cazalet wrote in his diary for 16 April 1941, "Imagine excitement of Taylors. Elizabeth has a contract for seven years with a big cinema group."

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