About
the background photo:
In
the mid 1930's, William Stephenson, a Canadian businessman living in Britain,
started reporting to anti-Nazi elements in Britain about the ominious military
buildup of Adolf Hitler and his Fascist regime which he saw on his business
trips to the continent.
Strangely,
records of Stephenson's businesses during that period, such as Earl's
Court and Shepperton
Film Studios, have lost all concordance of company ownership.* Back in Canada
at that time, Stephenson's relatives and friends - including his mother - stopped
hearing from him. For the most part, from the mid thirties on - they never heard
from him ever again.
In
the words of Bina Ingimundson (1904-2004), Stephenson's cousin - " I really
don't know what happened, with Bill, when he disappeared. He's the only one
who's ever, completely, ignored the family. Whether there was some reason for
it, I don't know. If there was, certainly my father never mentioned it, or nobody
in the family ever mentioned it. But I know that he was concerned about the
family, at one time. And ...we all loved him. We all thought the world of Bill...”
In
summer 1940, new British Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent a secret agent
to the United States
to try and get help for a beseiged Europe...
In the
background photo from left- Charles Farquhar, Julianna Stephenson, William Stephenson,
Jane Farquhar-Olsen, and Dave Farquhar - all friends from Winnipeg, Canada -
in London, England, 1924.
The background
photo one of the last known pictures of William Stephenson before he 'dissappeared'...
For
more information:
Photo
courtesy - Margaret Jamieson of Winnipeg, Canada
*
Shepparton Studios does have record of Alexander Korda purchasing the Studios
from Stephenson in 1946.