Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery signing the Instrument of Surrender of the German Armies in the northern part of Germany at Lüneberg Heath 4th May 1945. Image: Malindine E G (Capt), No 5 Army Film & Photographic Unit. Public Domain. From the archive collections of the Imperial War Museum.
It is not widely known that a senior Goldsmiths lecturer played a key military and translation role in the surrender of Germany and bringing an end to the Second World War in Europe.
Norman Kirby was a valued member of General Bernard Montgomery’s headquarters’ military security. He was fluent in French and German and he was selected by ‘Monty’ to be the British soldier who translated and provided the words in German to Field Marshal Keitel delivering the Allies’ final terms for the surrender of all their armed forces.
Norman also witnessed and experienced the worst of war’s cruelty in France, Belgium and Germany which would, he poignantly observed, endure through the mutilation of minds as well as bodies.
At Goldsmiths he was a leading figure in the Education Department. He wrote a memoir which stands out as one of the most thoughtful and humanitarian accounts of the Second World War.
His writing is eloquent and memorable, and it can be argued his work deserves wider recognition.
Sergeant Edward Norman Kirby’s War
There cannot have been many university lecturers in British Higher education who had such an active part in ending World War Two in Europe. Norman had been Principal Lecturer and Head of Middle School Education at Goldsmiths’ College until his retirement in 1978 after 26 years of service.
This gave him the time to write his dramatic and powerful account of being in charge of Intelligence and Security at Field Marshall Montgomery’s Tactical HQ, 21st Army Group between 1943 and 1946.
1100 Miles With Monty: Security and Intelligence at TAC HQ was published by Alan Sutton in Gloucester in 1989. It is still in print with History Press.
He was there during ‘Monty’s’ encounters with General Eisenhower, General de Gaulle and King George VI.
His fluency in French and German (he had studied the languages for his degree at King’s College, University of London) meant he would act as Monty’s interpreter.
And this is why on 8th May 1945 he accompanied Monty’s liaison officer Major O’Brien and the BBC’s War Correspondent Chester Wilmot with the documents containing the final terms of unconditional surrender to Field Marshal General Wilhelm Keitel.
General Alfred Jodl had signed surrender documents the day before, but the Russians wanted the more senior Field Marshall Keitel to do this in Berlin.
Keitel would take these documents from the hands of the small two officer delegation Norman was translating for and travel to Berlin for the formal signing on that very day which is immortalised in the photograph below.
Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel signing the unconditional surrender of the German Wehrmacht at the Soviet headquarters in Karlshorst, Berlin. By Lt. Moore (US Army); restored byAdam Cuerden Public Domain.
Keitel would be arrested for war crimes only days later, tried and convicted in the Nuremberg trials and executed on 16th October 1946.
Norman Kirby remembered practically every second of his encounter with Keitel on Tuesday 8th May 1945.
While he was nervously waiting outside Keitel’s German Supreme headquarters in Flensburg, Germany, a national holiday had been declared in Britain.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill appeared on the balcony of the Ministry of Health building in central London, gave an impromptu speech to huge, cheering crowds and declared: ‘This is your victory.’ The crowd shouted back, ‘No – it’s yours!’
Norman recalled:
Norman Kirby as a sergeant in the Intelligence Corps providing security to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery in 1944. Image used for fair dealing criticism and review.
‘As the narrow door leading into Keitel’s room swung open I was still wrestling mentally with the ordeal of having to translate military jargon into German. Suppose he rejected the terms! All sorts of embarrassing possibilities suggested themselves, but it was too late. We were already over the threshold and the august figures of Keitel and his Chief of Staff stood silhouetted against the window. That is how I will always remember them. There was a tense moment of deathly silence. Of course! They were waiting for the interpreter to speak first! We walked up to the field marshal’s desk and, with a brisk salute, I took the plunge by introducing Major O’Brien the Liaison Officer, and the captain, his assistant, and was struck by the weighty climax in which my words built up when spoken in the German order:
“Herr Field Marshall may I present to you Major O’Brien who, from Field Marshal Montgomery’s Headquarters, on behalf of General Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, has brought the final terms of surrender of German Armed forces on land, on sea, and in the air.”
I was even more amazed to think that it was my voice which had actually made this solemn announcement of the war’s end to the Supreme Head of the German Wehrmacht. Field Marshal Keitel, an imposing figure in those drab surroundings, opened the letter which the LO [liaison officer] presented to him and with face like granite replied:
“Thank you for this document containing the text of the surrender terms. I am already acquainted with those terms through General Jodl, who has communicated with me from General Eisenhower’s Headquarters, whither I despatched him his morning, but I require and will keep this letter as security.”
When people speak English or French you know what they are saying while they are saying it. When people are speaking in German you don’t know what they are saying until they have finished. Field Marshal Keitel’s reply went something like this:
“I you, for this surrendertermscontaining, requiredassecurity document the message of which has been communicated to me from General Eisenhower’s Headquarters by the thitherdespatched General Jodl this morning, thank.”
Waiting desperately for the final verb (suppose it had been “curse” or “defy” or “challenge”?) which was to make sense of what seemed an endless sentence. I turned half-left in military style to the liaison officer and translated the Field Marshal’s words by simply saying:
“He said ‘Thank you’.”
Major O’Brien’s raised eyebrows seemed to imply, “Did he really?”
In conclusion Keitel said:
“And thank Field Marshal Montgomery for the promptitude with which he has sent you.”
He grasped his baton and gave a smart salute by holding it obliquely across his chest. The monocle in his eye wobbled with this sudden movement of his body. We too saluted, in less spectacular fashion, turned right-about and walked out of the room.’ (Kirby 1989: 137-8)
The cover of the first edition of Norman Kirby’s book 1100 Miles With Monty: Security and Intelligence at TAC HQ in 1989.
Witnessing the pity and carnage of war
Norman Kirby’s service in Normandy, France, through Belgium, Holland and then into Germany frequently put him in great danger. It was his job to drive ahead on his motorcycle and find safe and suitable camping locations for Montgomery’s headquarters usually less than a mile behind the advancing battlefront. He would have to make contact with resistance groups and avoid meeting any of the retreating enemy.
On one occasion his motorcycle broke down when they were driving through the Falaise corridor in Normandy, France where thousands of German soldiers, their horses and vehicles had been devastated by Allied fighter bombers.
A road near Chambois, south-east of Trun, Normandy, filled with wrecked vehicles and the bodies of retreating German soldiers following an attack by Hawker Typhoons of 83 Group. Clark N S (Fg Off), Royal Air Force official. photographer – This photograph CL 910 comes from the collections of the Imperial War Museums
He would be on his own in a terrible modernist Golgotha of death and destruction:
‘With the bodies of dead Germans heaped high on each side of the road … The heat was intense, the smell nauseating and I decided to push my motor bike into the shade of a tree which stood up starkly on a hill in front of me in silhouette against the sky. When I reached it, I found that it was not a tree at all but the roasted bodies of a German tank crew trapped at waist and knees in the opening of the turret with their blackened arms and charred faces stretched upwards, locked tightly in a frantic effort to escape from their burning tank. It was nightfall when the MT (motor transport) crew, having noticed my absence, eventually made their way back along this road of death to rescue me from my forlorn and grisly vigil. Many of the dead were mere boys, some of whom looked no more than fourteen years old. I had taught boys of that age and taken them to Scout camps.’ (Kirby 1989: 61-2)
Norman Kirby’s career in teaching
Edward Norman Kirby was born in 1913 and brought up in Rosebank Avenue, Sudbury Hill in Harrow, North London. His father William was a civil servant clerk in the Air Ministry and his mother Emma was from Liverpool.
Norman went to Sudbury Elementary School and then on to Wembley County Grammar. He took a degree in French and German at King’s College, University of London and did his teacher training diploma at Reading University.
At the beginning of World War Two he was teaching French and German at Dartford Grammar School. The languages meant that on being called up he was directed into the military intelligence field. After the War, he returned to teaching, first at his old school Wembley County Grammar where he enlivened his French classes with stories of his wartime adventures. In 1952 he joined Goldsmiths’ College, University of London as an education lecturer. He was now teaching the teachers.
This would lead to a quintessentially Goldsmiths’ experience just after starting in New Cross when he would discover that a young Catholic priest from Holland he was teaching in a special course for missionaries had been the 9 year old boy Paul Kuipers who was the first person Norman had met when crossing into that country in 1944.
Paul hopped onto the back of his motorcycle to direct him to the house of nearby resistance fighters. And then at the end of his time at Goldsmiths he would be introduced to Paul again- now the successful managing director of a publishing firm in London. Norman learned ‘Father Paul’ had given up the priesthood after falling in love with a woman also studying at Goldsmiths’ College.
While at Goldsmiths Norman had received the Eleanor Fishburn Award of the Washington Educational Press Association in 1977, and afterwards, the Kathleen Gurner Award for Services to Education in 1986. He had also written two books on education How Can We Develop Caring Relationship? (1976) and Personal values in primary education (1981).
He took retirement in the summer of 1978 after 26 years of service with the College, but continued his active involvement by running an evening course on the purposes of education.
Norman passed away at his home in Brook House, Forty Avenue, Wembley on the 3rd of October 2007. Having been born in Harrow on 3rd December 1913, he was 93.
Goldsmiths and the Second World War
The history of students and staff and their experience of the Second World War is also unique and remarkable.
The narrative covers so many of the complex and troubling dimensions of war itself.
At least 17 Goldsmiths staff and students would be killed in action serving in the RAF, Army and Royal Navy. Two RAF men were killed when operating a Barrage Balloon to intercept a V1 flying bomb on what is now the College Green.
This figure was much less than the more than one hundred deaths of alumni during the Great War of 1914-18.
The Goldsmiths’ History Project will be providing biographies and profiles for all of these men and some of them are already represented with Percy Thomas Rothwell- Outstanding Goldsmiths’ student, lecturer who played Hockey for England, survived Dunkirk, liberated Tobruk and then died defending it and Remembrance at Goldsmiths- a question of resilience?
It is also a fact that the moral and spiritual opposition to war is fully represented by individuals who would risk reputation and their liberty in support of their sincere beliefs.
This was the case with Goldsmiths’ fifth Warden (equivalent of Vice-Chancellor), Sir Ross Chesterman, who led the College between 1953 and 1974. In 1941, he had to appear before the West Riding Conscientious Objector Tribunal in Leeds when he was a 32 year old teacher living and working in Barnsley. His Quaker background and beliefs qualified him for registration with the option of non-combatant duties, land or civil defence work.
Two Goldsmiths students who became prisoners of war of the Japanese did not survive the conflict. Perhaps it is an agonising irony of war that one Goldsmiths alumni Japanese POW drowned when a ship carrying him to another camp was sunk by a United States submarine.
But three Goldsmiths Artists, staff and students, did survive in the notorious POW camps of Singapore, Java, Thailand and Burma, and they captured their world of cruel captivity and deprivation surreptitiously by drawing and painting in pencil and water colour.
It is possible there are more Goldsmiths alumni, staff and students who were killed on active service during WW2. Exhaustive research of public records and archives is still underway and where found their profiles and names will be added.
For each and every one of them there was profound tragedy and loss for their bereaved families and friends.
This was also a generation who tended to quietly sigh when recalling and reliving their pain and sorrow in losing children, grandchildren, wives, husbands, sisters and brothers.
There were infant children of Goldsmiths alumni who would grow up never knowing their fathers after they fell in battle in France, Italy, Egypt, Burma or Italy.
And many of the grieving families had no body to sanctify through burial. Goldsmiths’ service people were lost and never found at sea, would go on air missions and no trace of whatever happened to them would be left to explain and understand.
These were all young men; mostly in their early to middle twenties and in the prime of life.
They were the ‘teachers who went to war’ and never came back- great future careers wiped out by the munitions and crimes of war.
When we time-travel eighty years ago it is self-evident that the surrounding Deptford and New Cross society of today (May 2025) is significantly different after eight decades of migration and social change.
However, people of today should also be proud of the fact that it was a brave veteran of the Great War of 1914-18 from Trinidad and a leading fireman based at New Cross fire Station, George Arthur Roberts BEM MSM (1891-1970), who played a key part in saving the Goldsmiths main building so that it could be used as the central part of the University Campus today.
George Arthur Roberts. Image: By Figures CC BY-SA 4.0
The firefighters were bereft of long ladders- so on the four occasions George and his AFS/NFS colleagues entered the mezzanine corridors pursuing the smoke and flames precipitated by bombing raids, they had to drag their fire hoses up those very narrow and steep staircases all too familiar to us today.
George is now rightly celebrated as a Great War veteran, Leading Fireman WW2 and educator and we can all be thankful to his memory for attending the four bombing attacks and fires at Goldsmiths which devastated the building and left the swimming pool turned public mortuary into a roofless and blackened shell in May 1945. George also attended the terrible scene following the V2 attack Saturday lunch-time 25th November 1944 and helped save lives and rescue survivors.
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Many thanks to the staff of Special Collections and Archives at Goldsmiths, University of London including Dr Alexander Du Toit, and staff alumni Pat Loughrey, Ian Pleace and Lesley Ruthven. The Goldsmiths History Project contributes to the research and writing of the forthcoming That’s So Goldsmiths: A History of Goldsmiths, University of London by Professor Tim Crook.
The project is dedicated to being Open Source which means free access for reading and appreciation.
Kultura Press will be publishing in book form a series of volumes preserving the research and writing called The Goldsmiths History Series. These will be a printed format of the online work for future book reading and library research.
The planned volumes are:
The origins and beginning of Goldsmiths University of London 1792 to 1914
The First World War and Goldsmiths University of London 1914 to 1919
The Nineteen Twenties and Thirties at Goldsmiths University of London 1920 to 1939
The Second World War and Goldsmiths University of London 1939 to 1946
V2 on the New Cross Road 25th November 1944
Post War Goldsmiths University of London 1947 to 1959
The Sixties at Goldsmiths University of London 1960 to 1969
Late Twentieth Century at Goldsmiths University of London 1970 to 1999
Early Twenty First Century Goldsmiths University of London 2000 to 2030
Other volumes commissioned are:
That’s So Goldsmiths
One Thousand Short History Stories and Pictures of Goldsmiths University of London