Car salesman Ernst Dawyl was held in a Romanian prison for six years
Businessman’s tales of the West End kept up spirits
Published: 20 August, 2010
by JAMIE WELHAM
A MAN who was brutally tortured and sent to a labour camp in communist Romania after selling luxury British cars to eastern Europe kept up his spirits by regaling inmates with tales of Piccadilly Circus and orchid sellers in Regent Street.
The harrowing account of Ernst Dawyl, who had been importing Rolls-Royces and railway equipment into Bucharest before he was arrested by the secret police in 1949 on suspicion of spying, has been released by the Foreign Office after 50 years of being classified.
He describes being forced to stand in freezing water, wedged between two walls for 48 hours at a time, being injected with “talking drugs” to break his resistance and regularly being beaten unconscious.
“The terror methods were horrible,” he wrote. “There are no words in any language to describe what I had to go through.”
But in six gruelling years behind bars for 18 separate charges of high treason – spent at a series of Soviet-run prisons by the Black Sea – Dawyl refused to admit his guilt, saying it was his duty to stand up for “a free world”.
The businessman, originally from Oakwood in north London, whose wife and son were living in Paris, hoped his account would help Britain’s Cold War struggle, and bring about the fall of the iron curtain. Files released to the National Archive reveal the Foreign Office was astounded when he turned up on their doorstep in 1959 and told them his life story, spanning 30 years in Romania.
In one bitter-sweet section he describes the morale-boosting lessons he gave to fellow prisoners – many of them littered with anecdotes about the West End.
“For years I gave elementary English lessons to my suffering partners, telling them about Great Britain,” said Dawyl.
“I’d tell them about Piccadilly Circus, about hot chestnuts, about the old ladies who sell orchids in Regent Street. Tell them about Shakespeare, about Stratford upon Avon, about the industries in Halifax, Manchester, Sheffield, Coventry, Birmingham and Leeds. About the Battle of Britain, when thousands of women served the guns on the roofs of London houses and about my work and life which I have entirely devoted to Great Britain.”
Remarkably, it wasn’t Dawyl’s first stint in a Romanian prison. Having arrived in 1930, he was imprisoned by the Nazis after they claimed he had led a resistance movement against German occupation of the country in 1940.
His business, which he had been forced to close by Hitler, was reinstated with the arrival of Allied troops in 1944.
But Dawyl persevered with his work in Romania. Before the war, he had sold Jaguar cars to the then King of Romania, King Carol II, and Prince Michael I.
He was eventually released in a diplomatic deal in 1958.
An ardent anti-communist, he told the Foreign Office: “I send you the statement about my life, work and struggle for Great Britain, the statement which will prove to you that a simple representative of British firms had to go through all one and underground fights between east and west and had to pay with his body for his British feelings
“I had the moral and physical power and force to resist their dark manoeuvres and am the happiest man of the world.”