Survivors - An historical novel by Christopher Meyer
Following the Conservative Foreign and Commonwealth Council AGM held at the House of Lords on Monday 11 May, members were privileged to hear Baroness Meyer discuss Survivors, the sweeping historical novel written by her late husband, Sir Christopher Meyer, which she has edited and self-published posthumously.
The brilliantly observed novel is based on Lady Meyer’s family history and begins in March 1917, the day of her mother’s birth and the collapse of imperial Russia. It follows the family’s perilous journey across Siberia as they escaped capture and execution by the Bolsheviks before finally reaching Manchuria in 1920. Yet safety proved elusive. The family soon found themselves caught up in the violent struggles between Chinese warlords, the Chinese Civil War between Nationalists and Communists, and the brutal Japanese invasions and massacres that followed. Forced to flee repeatedly, they moved first to Peking, then to Shanghai, before Lady Meyer’s mother eventually found refuge, love and security in Hanoi and later Saigon during the Second World War.
In introducing Lady Meyer, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, Patron of the Conservative Foreign and Commonwealth Council, members were reminded of the life and career of Baroness Catherine Meyer. Born into a Franco-Russian family, Catherine spent her early years in Africa and Paris before her parents moved to the UK in 1965. Educated at the French Lycée in London, she later studied at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SEES) and the LSE. She began her career in financial services, becoming a licensed commodity broker in 1979, and later served as a Non-Executive Director of London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (LIFFE) and the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences (LIMS). She also speaks five languages.
In 1985, Lady Meyer left her career and moved to Germany with her German husband, with whom she had two children. Following the breakdown of their marriage, and despite having custody of the children, her life took a devastating turn when, after a summer visit to their father in 1994, he failed to return them to London. Despite an English High Court order and Germany’s obligations under the Hague Convention, her sons stayed in Germany and she was denied access to them. What followed was a ten-year legal battle during which she only saw her children for a total of only 25 hours over nine years. It was not until her eldest son turned 18 and contacted her, that she was finally reunited with them.
In 1997, Catherine married Sir Christopher Meyer on the eve of his appointment as British Ambassador to the United States. During their five-and-a-half years in Washington, she campaigned tirelessly against international parental child abduction, founding her own charity, which she ran for 17 years.
Baroness Meyer began her talk by explaining why she had decided to publish her late husband’s manuscript, which had taken him four years to write. Her mother had urged Sir Christopher to tell the story of the family’s extraordinary survival during the upheavals of revolutionary Russia and wartime China. Once immersed in the project, he became captivated by the historical drama, weaving into the narrative intrigues inspired in part by his own experiences as a diplomat in Moscow during the Cold War. The result is a richly textured novel grounded in Lady Meyer’s family history and her grandmother’s meticulous memoirs written in exile in Harbin, brought vividly to life through Sir Christopher Meyer’s imagination and meticulous historical research.
Following Christopher Meyer’s premature death, the manuscript required attention and considerable editing. Catherine reduced it from 600 pages to 400 while maintaining the superb prose and gripping descriptions, horrors, dangers and tensions the family had had to endure. She said that with so little awareness of this dramatic period of history, she felt the story deserved to be told, adding that it had also proven therapeutic.
The novel provided the starting point for a fascinating discussion about the Bolshevik Revolution and the forces that led to the collapse of the 304-year-old Romanov dynasty and how it inspired communist movements across the world, including China, India, the West and Russia itself - a vast empire which at that time stretching across one-sixth of the globe, encompassing around 100 nationalities, languages and religions.
Lady Meyer reflected on the many forces that paved the way for revolution. The seeds had been sown decades earlier amid the unrest of 1905, following the trauma of the Crimean War, the emancipation of the serfs, rapid industrialisation, widespread poverty and growing political instability. Tsar Nicholas II’s inability to reform, food shortages, civil disturbances and corruption within the military all contributed to the collapse of the old order. Adding further intrigue was the sinister influence of Grigori Rasputin over the Tsarina Alexandra, while revolutionary figures such as Leon Trotsky also appear in the novel, bringing colour to the story.
Survivors is a remarkable and compelling book, and members were deeply grateful to Baroness Meyer for sharing both the story behind its publication and her own family’s extraordinary history. The evening concluded with a lively question-and-answer session, ranging from her work campaigning against international child abduction to discussions about Rasputin and revolutionary Russia.
Lady Meyer’s account to regain access to her children is told in her two books: Two Children behind A Wall and They Are My Children Too. The story features in DC Confidential, the memoirs of her husband, Sir Christopher Meyer.
William Knight
