I wrote about Frank Laskier’s fictionalized autobiography, Log Book, over six years ago, but it wasn’t until recently that I had the chance to read My Name is Frank, the collection of BBC broadcast talks that brought him to fame. Even slighter in length than Log Book, My Name is Frank still manages to carry a powerful message after over seventy-five years.
In the spring of 1941, a small crew led by BBC reporter Terence de Marney toured some of the ports most badly damaged in the Blitz. They spent an afternoon at the Seamen’s Home in Liverpool, where they met numerous merchant seamen just ashore from Atlantic convoys under constant attack by German U-boats. De Marney decided it would be a good source of material and returned soon after, spending six weeks as an ordinary resident, collecting stories. But when he sat down with Frank Laskier, who was at the home waiting for an artificial foot to replace the one shot off when the German raider Komoran attacked and sank his ship, de Marney realized he’d found a perfect personality for radio.
Over the next few weeks, de Marney sat down with Laskier and recorded around a dozen talks, all roughly 10 to 15 minutes long. The first of these, broadcast on 5 October 1941, recounted his experience of being sunk, spending two days on a raft with nine other survivors, being rescued by a Spanish steamer and then transferred to a Royal Navy cruiser. “I am a sailor, an Englishman, and my first name is Frank,” Laskier begins. “I am quite an ordinary sort of individual — all we sailors are,” he continues in the matter-of-fact tone that characterizes the entire book.
You can hear a recording of the original broadcast, released as a 78 RPM single on His Master’s Voice, on YouTube:
I highly recommend taking the time to listen to it all. For a story about violence, survival, and suffering, there is no extraneous dramatization. Instead, there is a sense of calm resolution and, most remarkably, a tenderness rarely found in a man’s account of war. I can’t listen to the last two minutes without tearing up.
The response to the first broadcast was beyond any expectations. BBC not only broadcast the rest of Laskier’s recordings with de Marney but London publisher Allen & Unwin arranged to release them as a book, with an introduction by noted sea writer William McFee a foreword by BBC staffer Eldon Moore. The U.S. rights were bought by Norton, and the book sold well in both countries.
Laskier returned to sea after receiving his artificial foot and survived two more sinkings, but the demand for his material led to a further contract from Allen & Unwin and Scribner’s for his autobiography, Log Book, which they released in 1942. Laskier was then hired by the British Council to do a tour of Canada and the U.S., giving talks in support of the Allied cause. He married an American woman, settled in a town up the Hudson valley from New York City, and began a second career as a writer. He published sea stories in Collier’s and other magazines and a novel, Unseen Harbor, in 1947. He died in July 1949 when a car he was riding in veered off the road and struck a tree. In 1954, John Harris, author of The Sea Shall Not Have Them, edited a second novel Laskier was working on when he died, and it was released as Siren Sea.