London History

Is truth stranger than fiction? The tale of ‘The King of Lampedusa’ would suggest so. The play, the story of East End orphan Sydney Cohen and his capture of the tiny Italian island, started a record breaking run for a Yiddish play when it opened at the Grand Palais Yiddish Theatre in Commercial Road in the 1940s. It was a true story, but no Hollywood scriptwriter would have dared to make it up.

20-year-old Syd was working as a tailor’s cutter when he was called up to the RAF in 1941. He began his flying career at North Weald in Essex, before moving on to Malta. And it was from there that he was sent to search for survivors from a German plane that had, reportedly, crashed into the Mediterranean.

Cohen’s compass started playing up and, unwittingly, he struck a course directly away from Malta. Fuel began to run low. ‘We had to make for the nearest land,’ he remembered later. It turned out to be Lampedusa, a tiny speck of an island covering just 25 square kilometres of the Mediterranean. Belonging to Italy it’s far closer to Africa in fact, lying 205km south of Sicily and 113km east of Tunisia. In 1941 it was the base for a dispirited battalion of Italian soldiers.

‘As we came down on a ropey landing ground we saw a burnt hangar and burnt aircraft around us,’ Syd recalled. ‘A crowd of Italians came out to meet us and we put our hands up to surrender but then we saw they were all waving white sheets shouting, “No, no - We surrender.” The whole island was surrendering to us!’

An unnerved Syd put on a brave face and asked to see the commander. As he entered the commandant’s villa an air raid began. ‘Everybody suddenly dashed from the room. I concluded that the nerves of my hosts were a bit jagged! They asked me to return to Malta and inform the authorities of their offer to surrender. They gave me a scrap of paper with a signature on it.’

Sgt Cohen took on fuel, fixed his compass and the crew set off home to Malta, where he delivered the surrender document, confirming the capitulation of the 4300 Italian troops.

The story quickly spread - it was great morale boosting stuff back home in the East End. ‘London Tailor’s Cutter is now King of Lampedusa’, trumpeted the headline in the News Chronicle, while the Sunday Pictorial gave Syd a front page headline on 13 June, proclaiming ‘Lampedusa Gives In to Sgt. Cohen’. Young Syd his lightweight Swordfish biplane and a small crew had instigated the first step in the collapse of one of the major Axis powers. But the story was to get stranger yet.

SJ Charendorf was a Czechoslovak-American journalist and London correspondent for the ‘Jewish Morning Journal of New York’. He picked up on the popular tale doing the rounds in London and was off to wire his story back to base when he realised that Syd’s adventure would make a terrific play. Rather than continuing to the telegraph office at the Ministry of Information he headed back to his flat, whipped out a pen, and began to write ‘The King of Lampedusa’.

Syd Cohen became Sam Kagan in the play, and the orphan acquired parents and a fiancee. Otherwise the story was straight from life. In November 1943, Meir Tzelniker, the actor, producer, director and force behind the Grand Palais Yiddish theatre in Commercial Road, commissioned some music, wrote the lyrics himself and put on the play. He and daughter Anna had the lead roles and the musical had its premiere on New Year’s Eve.

The musical wasn’t a hit at first, but Charendorf was an ace at drumming up press support, and the play went on a record run. BBC Radio picked it up and broadcast (this time in English) with Sydney Tafler as Syd/Sam. Even Nazi propagandist William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) mentioned it in his nightly rants from Berlin, saying: ‘The Yids at the Grand Palais should not be laughing for much longer at the ridiculous play The King of Lampedusa because they are earmarked for a visit from the Luftwaffe.’

Syd finally saw his story in a Hebrew production at the Hamatae Theatre in Haifa at the end of 1944 when he was on leave from Malta. Life cannot imitate art with its happy endings though. Syd was flying home to a life on Civvy Street on 26 August 1946 when his plane was lost in the Straits of Dover. The King of Lampedusa was never found.

pictures:
A Fairey Swordfish similar to the one Syd would have flown
Lampedusa courtesy of Google Earth [note to subs: as long as we credit Google Earth there is NO problem using the image]