Finding Kathleen ffrench
In 1986, my husband, John Lombard was appointed foreign correspondent for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to South East Asia. We lived in Singapore for nearly 3 years working and travelling around the region. On a visit to the Singapore office David Hill, then Managing Director of the ABC, mentioned to John that he was thinking of opening an ABC office in the USSR. At that time there was only a hint of an opening up of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev had just come into power, and it looked like an exciting time to go to Moscow from a journalist’s point of view.
So my next trip was the real one, ...the serious one.This was life in the Soviet Union and all the struggles that went with day to day living. We spent some weeks in London studying Russian and finally before we set off, we went Ireland to farewell our Irish families.
One day before we left Ireland, John’s mother told me that she had found some letters written by a Russian cousin during the Revolution. It was around the time that her cousin’s property was confiscated and she was put in prison by the Bolsheviks. My reaction at the time was - 'that’s interesting'. I had so much on my mind during the preparations to set up in Moscow. Later I read the letters and filed them away to do something about them later.
The first 3 years of our time in Moscow were all consuming, we worked so hard, had very little sleep, and really had a wonderful experience being exposed to this totally different culture. We fell in love with many talented Russian personalities. Russian people had so little materially, but were terribly generous. They were well educated in literature, the arts, poetry and music. We worked hard at getting to know the people, difficult at first, but much easier as the years passed and glasnost and perestroika began to take effect.
A very interesting coincidence was that the same family for whom I had worked as a nanny all those years ago in the 60s were also in Moscow. What a surprise – they were very welcoming and kind, and just as amazed at the coincidence as we were.
We knew our last year in Moscow was approaching, and we did not have the energy to work at that pace any longer. One of my friends was a Russian journalist Masha Kiseleva, a very lively woman, and typical of many Russians, very well educated, used to bartering, blat and survival tactics. I showed her the letters - she was very excited and we decided to go to Ulyanovsk (Simbirsk) together to see if we could find out any more about Kathleen ffrench.
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An Irish Woman in Czarist Russia
by Jean Lombard