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Pamela Ann Moore was a young English woman who arrived in Portugal in the spring or summer of 1942, after escaping from France, where she had been arrested by the Germans soon after they invaded the country. This photograph was taken in Caldas da Rainha, where she spent a period of time.
This coming Monday her grandsons – Brett and Ross Gilbert – will be coming to Portugal to retrace the paths their grandmother once walked in Lisbon and in Caldas da Rainha, and also as part of a fundraising effort for a cancer-fighting organization.
In 1939 Pamela Moore was in France working as a governess in a country house that her descendants have been unable to identify. It was there that she met a man called Jacques, whom the family has been trying to identify ever since.
When the Germans occupied France in May 1940, she was captured near Chartres and imprisoned in the Besançon Civilian Internment Camp. She was later transferred, possibly as early as 1941, to the Vittel camp in the Vosges. This complex, which included a hotel, held more than a thousand Allied civilians, most of them women and children.
At the beginning of 1942 she managed to escape from the camp with another English woman called Audrey Eddington. In April of that year she was in Lyon, in Vichy-controlled France. The two women then went separate ways.
From this point onwards her route is not easy to confirm. She may have taken one of the routes from southern France to the Pyrenees in order to enter Spain. Some time later she is known to have taken up permanent residence in Caldas da Rainha, the town where the photograph at the top of this article was taken. It is not known how long she stayed there, nor the date on which she left the country.
Her departure certainly took place from Lisbon, on one of the BOAC flights that connected the Portuguese capital to Bristol. There is no exact date, but her grandsons believe it occurred between June and August 1942. It is most likely that it was in the first few days of the latter month.
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Pamela Ann Moore in England and a newspaper clipping showing the reunion of the two women who had escaped from a German civilian prisoner-of-war camp.
(Pictures sent by Brett and Ross Gilbert)
On 10 August an article in the Daily Mirror confirmed her presence in England and, in the following month, she married David Mailey.
Some months later she was reunited in England with Audrey Eddington, her companion in escape.
Her grandsons – Brett and Ross – are trying to reconstruct their grandmother’s story and are currently on the road in a 2005 Ford Ka, retracing the routes she once travelled. They crossed the Channel and entered France on the 23rd. Yesterday, the 24th, they were in Bordeaux. Today they are in Burgos, Spain. Tomorrow, 26 April, they will be in Braga, and on Monday the 27th they will arrive in Vila Galé, Cascais, around 6 in the evening. They also intend to visit Caldas da Rainha on the morning of the 28th..
Their research about Pamela can be found on Facebook at:
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61568119233348
This road trip also aims to raise funds for “Big C”, a charity organisation that fights cancer through research, education and support for the acquisition of equipment. Contributions can be made via the link:
https://www.justgiving.com/page/brett-ross-rally
Carlos Guerreiro
Sources:
Brett and Ross Gilbert
