I
f you are not familiar with the extraordinary life led by “Paddy”,
below is a brief summary to whet your appetite. His is perhaps
most well-known for his involvement in the Kreipe affair, which
reads like a Boys’ Own adventure story and for which Fermor
was awarded the Distinguished Service Order, while his colleague
“Billy” Moss, (who penned his own account of the incident, Ill
Met By Moonlight, later to be made into a movie starring Dirk
Bogarde) was given the Military Cross.
Patrick Leigh Fermor, 1915–2011
• PLF was born in London on 11 February 1915 into an
upper-class but by no means wealthy family Soon after leaving King’s School, Canterbury with his housemaster describing him as ‘a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness’, he decided to walk to
Constantinople and boarded a boat from London to
the Hook of Holland on 9 December 1933. He reached
Constantinople on 31 December 1934 and after his
first adventures in Greece he went with Princess Balasha Cantcuzene to Rumania, where he lived until the
outbreak of war in 1939.
• His attempts to join the war effort took him in 1940
to Greece and in 1941 he was inducted into the Special
Operations Executive: in Crete his exploits culminated
in the kidnap with Billy Moss of the German General
Heinrich Kreipe on 26 April 1944.
• PLF’s first book The Traveller’s Tree was published in
1950 and his best known works are A Time of Gifts
(1977), Between the Woods and the Water (1986),
Mani (1958) and Roumeli (1966). On 11 January 1968
he married Joan Rayner (née Eyres Monsell) and later
that year they completed the building of their house
at Kardamyli on land which they had bought in 1964.
• Joan died in 2003 and Paddy, who was knighted in
2004, died on 10 June 2011. They are buried together
at Dumbleton, Gloucestershire.