Duncan Heaton-Armstrong

Heaton-Armstrong (right) next to the Dutch General De Veer in Durrës in the spring of 1914

William Duncan Francis Heaton-Armstrong (born September 29, 1886 in Bled , Slovenia , then Austria-Hungary ; † May 1, 1969 Holymount, Stanley Hill near Bosbury , Hertfordshire , United Kingdom ) was a British officer.

Life and activity

Early years

Heaton-Armstrong came from the noble family Armstrong and was a son of the Anglo-Irish officer William Charles Heaton-Armstrong (1853-1917) and his wife Bertha Maximiliana Freiin Zois von Edelstein († 1949), an Austrian. His family was already the third generation to reside in Austria after his grandfather John Armstrong entered the kk service in 1831 and married into the Mayr family (von Melnhof) in 1849 . He was therefore equally proficient in German and English as his mother tongue, and he also spoke French and Italian fluently.

From 1900 to 1903 Heaton-Armstrong attended Eton College . He then joined the army. In 1904 he was assigned to the 3rd Battalion of the Lancaster Fusiliers.

After attempts to study at Trinity College at Cambridge University failed because he failed the entrance exam, he spent a year improving his language skills in France and Italy.

Worked as private secretary to Wilhelm zu Wied

Duncan Heaton-Armstrong to the right of the prince, his wife and Isa Boletini

At the beginning of January 1914, Heaton-Armstrong was dispatched by his regiment and entered the service of Prince Wilhelm zu Wied as aide-de-camp , who was appointed as Wilhelm I as Prince of Albania that became independent in 1912 at the instigation of the great powers . Until August 1914, when the short-lived monarchy in Albania - which has gone down in literature as the "six month kingship" - collapsed, Heaton-Armstrong stood by the prince in this capacity and as administrator of his "private treasury" (i.e. his private assets). Together, among other things, they went on a tour of Europe in February 1914, during which they visited the capitals of almost all of the great powers ( Rome , London , Vienna , Paris and Saint Petersburg ). On March 7th, the prince and his court arrived in Durrës , where they moved into their palace.

On May 19, 1914, Heaton-Armstrong personally arrested Essad Pasha Toptani , one of the main opponents of the newly established principality. However, the collapse of the monarchy of Wilhelm I could no longer be averted: It was overturned , among other things, by uprisings of the Muslim population in central Albania shortly before the outbreak of the First World War .

In August 1914, Heaton-Armstrong led the children and ladies-in-waiting to Germany at the behest of Wilhelm I in order to bring them to safety. The destination was Waldenburg near Zwickau , the home of the princess. As a British officer, however, he was arrested in Munich because the First World War had broken out. He described himself as probably the first prisoner of war of the world war. In July 1916 he was able to return to Great Britain in the course of a prisoner exchange.

In January 1917, Heaton-Armstrong joined his old regiment with the rank of major. He spent the rest of the war as paymaster with the Lancaster Fusiliers in France. At the same time he held the title "Lord of the Manor of Roscrea".

Next life

Heaton-Armstrong married in December 1920 and returned to Austria. There he worked as a businessman in Vienna until 1938. Due to the annexation of Austria by National Socialist Germany, he fled to Switzerland with his wife and two children in March 1938 and moved from there to England.

In 1937, Heaton-Armstrong participated as Goldstaff officer at the coronation of George VI. and in 1953 at the coronation of Elizabeth II .

At the end of the 1930s, Heaton-Armstrong came into the sights of the police forces of National Socialist Germany, who classified him as an important target: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people whom the Nazi surveillance apparatus considered considered particularly dangerous or important, which is why they should be located and arrested by the occupying troops following special SS units with special priority in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht.

During World War II , Heaton-Armstrong ran a prisoner of war camp in Herefordshire that housed Italian prisoners.

Fonts

A manuscript written by Heaton-Armstrong on the six month kingship in Albania based on his diary was published posthumously:

• Albert Rakipi (Ed.): The Six Months' Kingdom - Albania 1914. Memories of private secretary of Prince William of Wied. Albanian Institute for International Studies, Tirana 2001, ISBN 99927-659-4-1 .
• Gervase Belfield, Bejtullah Destani (Ed.): The Six Month Kingdom. Albania 1914 . IB Tauris, London 2005, ISBN 978-1-85043-761-1

literature

• Robert Elsie: A Biographical Dictionary of Albanian History . IB Tauris, London 2012, ISBN 978-1-78076-431-3 , pp. 198-200.

Remarks

1. ↑ The information on the place of birth varies greatly. Robert Elsie describes a castle Egg on Faaker See near Villach , but it cannot be proven. In the introduction to the published work by Heaton-Armstron (p. XXI), Gervase Belfield names the family property on the mother's side, Schloss Egg in Velden , as the place of birth , where no such building can be proven either. The family seat of the Zois von Edelstein family , from whom Heaton-Armstrong's mother came, was, however, Castle / Gut Egg northwest of the Slovenian capital Ljubljana , at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy . Genealogical sources from England consistently refer to Bled (Veldes in German), twenty kilometers away, as the place of birth.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Arthur Charles Fox-Davies: Armorial Families: a directory of gentlemen of coat-armor . TC & EC Jack, Edinburgh 1905, William Charles Heaton-Armstrong, p. 646 ( scan the page ).
2. ↑ Major William Duncan Francis Heaton-Armstrong on thepeerage.com , accessed February 1, 2017.
3. ↑ s: BLKÖ: Zois von Edelstein, the barons, genealogy
4. ^ Genealogical paperback of the noble houses of Austria