This picture is of one of the fur boots worn by Manfred von Richthofen, the ace German fighter pilot of the First World War known as The Red Baron. It’s one of my favourite objects in the Australian War Memorial, a place I’ve been visiting quite often since I returned to Australia a few months ago. It’s in a cabinet with a few other souvenirs taken from the dead body of von Richtofen: the brass compass that was mounted on von Richthofen’s Fokker Triplane; a piece of one the plane’s struts painted in the red paint that gave him his nickname, described by a contemporary as being ‘the colour of dried blood; also the control column of the Fokker he was flying, which eyewitness accounts say that his lifeless hands had to be prised from.
The Red Baron is said to have taken these boots himself from a British pilot that he shot down. I’ve recently tried to find the source of this story, as I’m not sure whether I quite believe it or not. The closest I could find is the suggestion that L.G. Hawker, the British VC-winning ace pilot both pioneered the knee-high fur flying boot and was a victim of von Richthofen. Von Richthofen talks about his defeat of Hawker in his 1917 autobiography, where although there is no mention of any such fur boots, there is a claim that '[Hawker's] machine gun was dug out of the ground and it ornaments the entrance of my dwelling.' I found this statement abated slightly an ongoing pang of sympathy I felt when standing in front of the AWM tableau of objects associated with him, a sympathy for a dead man whose bleeding and lacerated corpse was stripped of his possessions by souvenir hunters whilst his body was still warm. Elsewhere in the biography there is an account of MvR travelling by car to see a British plane he had shot down earlier, so the provenance of the fur boots is possible.
There is, however, another story about the Red Baron's footwear that I'm convinced is actually a load of old cobblers. When I first arrived in Oxford several years ago, I was told repeatedly - both by reputable individuals and by websites that shouldn't always be trusted - that The Red Baron had been a student at Lincoln College, Oxford, who had his shoes made at at Ducker and Son, a shoe maker that still stands opposite Lincoln on The Turl. The story suggested that he returned to Germany when war broke out in such a rush that he left his account there unpaid until a descendent was lured into the shop years later and presented with the bill.
There are many reasons to like Ducker and Son. It is the last remaining independent shoe maker/ seller in Oxford out of the twenty there when it opened in 1898 and, in this, is a reminder that once English towns once had independent retailers in every business and trade, rather than high streets made up solely of multinational and chain shops. Indeed, I saw the evidence of this over my years there: the last antiquarian bookshop on the High Street closed two years ago, to be replaced by a brand-spankingly new store called Ye Olde Sweete Shoppe, seemingly with no irony whatsoever; four independent music shops in town closed over the same years, as well as the huge Virgin on Cornmarket; the ironmongers Gill and Co., who moved to Chipping Norton last year after five-hundred years (!) of trading in the same location, tucked down an alley off The High. And so on, and so it goes, as Bob Ellis' chorus goes. Enough! Enough about the inevitable tide of human progress on the English high street and back to the Baron v.R!
So, over the last few years my wife and I bought several pairs of shoes at Ducker. On our last trip there, since we were now repeat customers I thought myself able to ask whether I could see Richthofen's famous entry in the the leather-bound ledgers kept in the back of the shop (seen on the right here), into which every new customer is still entered, even customers like ourselves who fall far short of being able to afford bespoke rather than ready-to-wear shoes. The appropriate volume was pulled down and the page found. Richtofen, in the years just before war broke out, Lincoln College, an order for several pairs including patent leather shoes and a pair of "Beagling Pumps", presumably shoes suitable for wearing with the traditional green coat and white stocking of the beagler over fields in the middle of winter, following dogs intent on ripping apart a hare...
However, this account isn't for The Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen, but his cousin, Baron Wilhelm von Richthofen, a German Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in 1913, who gave an interesting 'to those that could follow him' defence of German foreign policy to the Oxford Union the following year. WvR was, apparently courting officials at the German embassy in London in the 1920s, it seems he was unemployed and fishing around for work. His 1927 publication, Brito-Germania: Europe's Salvation suggested that a sickly European political landscape could only be ameliorated by the political union of the two nations, although Germany was to take a subservient role to Britain in this arrangement. According to the British Library catalogue, he's also W. Freiherr v. Richthofen who wrote Zurückgehaltenes und Unterdrücktes aus vier Kriegsjahren, in which he describes his military career as an officer in the Great War.
It's an understandable mistake, seeing as the German title Freiherr can be held simultaneously by several family members, unlike the equivalent anglophone Baron. And, incidentally, one that the official Ducker website doesn't make itself, as it advertises "Baron von Richthofen" as one of its significant customers over its long history.
I should add that this by no means diminishes how I feel about Ducker and Son's shoes, how lovely the owners Bob and Isobel are and how you should buy a pair of their shoes if you're in the area. Moreover, that since those ledgers do contain the accounts of writers JRR Tolkein, Evelyn Waugh and others, the lack of MvR there does not mean they are any less important as historical documents.
NB: there is one pack of Beagles that survives in Oxford, the Christ Church and Farley Hill Beagles.
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