This Is Your Life article

"Dead" conductor appears in This Is Your Life

FOUR PEOPLE IN DIFFERENT PARTS OF BRITAIN SAW THE SAME SPIRIT FORM ON THEIR TV SCREENS. IT HAPPENED WHEN IDA COOK, BETTER KNOWN AS MARY BURCHELL, THE SUCCESSFUL AUTHOR OF ROMANTIC NOVELS, WAS CHOSEN TO APPEAR IN THE BBC FEATURE THIS IS YOUR LIFE.

One reason for the choice was the "Scarlet Pimpernel" activities of her sister and herself in helping Jewish victims to escape from Nazi Germany. Another reason, says Miss Cook in "World Digest," where she tells this dramatic psychic story, was that she and her sister Louise, when office girls, decided to save up their money and go to New York for the sole purpose of hearing the great Galli-Curci sing in opera.

Escaped from Nazis

Still passionate opera fans, the sisters went years later to Austria in 1934 to hear some of their operatic favourites at the Salzburg Festival. Among them were Clemens Krauss, the great Viennese opera conductor and director, and his wife, Viorica Ursuleac, the soprano for whom Richard Strauss wrote three of his last four operas.

They became friendly with the conductor and his wife, who later introduced them to a Jewish friend. The Cooks were asked to try to help her. They succeeded in enabling her and her family to escape from Nazi Germany.

By so doing they were brought into heartbreaking contact with hundreds of similar victims.

By that time Miss Cook was an established author. As a result of writing her first article about their New York visit, she had got a job on a woman's paper and found she had a flair for writing light romance.

Buying lives

Now that she was making money from her fiction, Miss Cook, having found that £25 could buy a man's life, decided to get busy. She and her sister financed their own amateur refugee organisation for getting people out of Hitler's Germany. In this work they were constantly helped by Clemens Krauss and his wife.

Unknown to Ida Cook, the producer of This Is Your Life had arranged to bring Krauss's widow to Britain to appear as a surprise item in the TV programme. Krauss had died two years previously.

Some months later, when Miss Cook was lecturing to a Women's Institute in Surrey, an elderly woman mentioned how much she had enjoyed the programme.

"What I simply cannot forget is that couple," she said.

Looking puzzled, Ida Cook corrected her with, "There was no couple on my programme."

"Why yes," insisted the woman. "The couple with the refugee work."

The woman would not be dissuaded. Ida Cook thought she must have confused her with somebody else on another programme.

A few months later, staying with friends in Newcastle, she was asked by them to meet a friend of theirs whom she calls Brenda. Ida Cook describes her as normal, clear-headed and the type to make a good witness in a law court.

Brenda discussed her TV appearance and asked Miss Cook, "Who was the tall, very good-looking foreigner who absolutely dominated the programme?"

Miss Cook shook her head, saying there was no-one like that description in the studio.

"You must know who I mean," said Brenda. "He was a tremendous personality – and with such charm!"

Nothing she said could shake Brenda, who said that the foreigner had appeared with the woman singer when their refugee work was being discussed.

Finally, Ida Cook told her, "You are exactly describing the singer's husband, who died almost two years before the programme took place."

"It can't be," Brenda insisted. "He was there just like all the other people."

Finally, to settle the matter, Ida Cook said that the next time she came north she would bring some photographs. A year later she brought some photographs of Clemens Klauss and asked Brenda to call. The author simply spread some of the photographs on the bed.

The result was shattering and instantaneous. "Beyond any question that's the man," said Brenda.

She took up one photograph and said, "This is how he stood, only... How strange! On the screen his hair was dark, not grey."

Ida Cook comments, "He was young again, you see."

[Since she wrote this account, Miss Cook tells Two Worlds, two other people have told her they saw this same man on their TV screens and assumed he was an ordinary member of the cast.]