During the 1939 Speech Day, Chorister School Headmaster Canon Ganderton made the following statement: “I think I should mention “George”, who completes his first year in England tomorrow. He came knowing just a few words of English, whereas now he is doing the same lessons as the rest, including Latin and French, and doing them very well indeed.”
 
The passage is curious, not least because the student’s surname is never given; typically pupils were referred to with surname and initials only. It is also curious because ‘George’ here refers to George Bendori (born Rechelmann), a German Jewish refugee who escaped Nazi Germany through the Kindertransport rescue effort in January 1939. In 1988, Bendori recalled the experience in a passage reproduced in Tony Kushner’s The Battle of Britishness (2012). “Who can ever forget the feeling of having escaped it all even though we were only eleven years of age. Crossing the German-Dutch border the train could not move quickly enough for us as we feared a last-minute hitch. The final inspection of documents, the ruthless way of going through our meagre possessions carried out by stern SS men whose menacing looks left no doubt in our minds as to what they would have liked to do to us.”
 
Bendori arrived safely in Dovercourt, a former Butlin’s holiday camp in Essex that had been requisitioned for the use of child refugees. “Bitterly cold in the winter of 1938-39 but still heavenly. The dedicated and kind staff who looked after us did their utmost to make us forget what our little minds had absorbed.” It was there that he met Canon Ganderton who, had been given permission on the 30^th December 1938 from the Dean and Chapter to bring one or two of the “‘Non-Aryan’ Refugee Boys” back to the Chorister School.
 
George Bendori’s account of his time at the school comes from Chorister School teacher and historian Brian Crosby, who reached out in 1996 to Bendori after his name appeared in Martin Gilbert’s The Day the War Ended (1995). By then, he had become reacquainted with old schoolfriend Harold Wykes (1938-1943) and was quite willing to reminiscence about his youth. The three and a half years (1939-1942) were “a period I have forever cherished”, and he described his gratitude towards Ganderton, who he thought of as a second father. A few days later he was placed on a train and told to change at Darlington. When he arrived at the Chorister School he was immediately a figure of interest for the other students; he could hardly speak English, and he was the rare example of a Chorister student who did not actually sing. Within a year, however, he had settled in well, and would eventually become fluent enough to win a Prize for English in 1942.
 
George attended the cathedral services, but was excused of prayers, practices and services in consideration of his Jewish faith. During this free time he would explore Durham, enjoying rowing on the river and playing table tennis. Before the introduction of rationing, he acted as a messenger for the other boys, buying sweets and other items that were requested by the Choristers. Ganderton specifically commissioned him to tend to the garden of the Count’s House, a small Grecian folly not far from Prebends bridge built by the diminutive self-styled ‘Count’ Józef Boruwłaski in the 1820s.
 
This was not to say that he did not get into trouble. He was caught smoking on one occasion, with his trips into town rewarding him with a pack of ten ‘Craven A’ cigarettes. Canon Ganderton (or ‘Gandy’ as he was known) was a great enthusiast for model trains, having a selection laid out on a specially-constructed table. Once, George played with them without permission; to his dismay, he broke one, causing “a major derailment”, and guiltily fled the scene.
 
He slept, like all other Choristers during the war, in the temporary dormitory of the Deanery undercroft chapel which also acted as an air-raid shelter (pictured above). During the holidays he would stay with various school friends and their parents, or else with Canon Ganderton; he recalls thoroughly enjoyed a sailing holiday he took with the Headmaster along the coast of Devon and Cornwall, in which he visited a number of ancient cathedrals. He graduated from the Chorister School in 1942, but was unable to attend Durham School; instead, he was sent to a Scottish refugee camp in Bonnyrigg, where Ganderton paid for him to attend evening classes.
 
He moved to London in 1946 where he married another refugee; in 1950 he moved to Israel where he became a bank manager. He still kept in contact with Canon Ganderton; in the published volume of Chorister School Speech Day reports, two letters from George Bendori are included in the back. One, dated to the 17^th July 1967, recalls his experience fighting in the Six-Day War between Israel and a coalition of Arab states. “The war was no picnic although it only took 6 days until it was all over. There was many a moment when I was scared and doubtful if I would get home again. However, for me it was not too bad as I came out of it all without a scratch.”
 
George Bendori lived the rest of his days in Israel, but he always had a great fondness for England. He would watch BBC and Sky News on the television and read the Sunday Times; every year he would return to England to expand his book collection and visit the theatre. In October 1997 he returned to Durham to visit his old schoolfriends. He brought with him two objects he had kept all those years: the first letter Canon Ganderton wrote to him before coming to the school, and the label (with brown string attached) he had worn on his train journey to Durham in January 1939. When he died in 2007 at the age of 80, he was survived by his two daughters and six grandchildren.