Bombs in the Baggage Room

On the brink of Europe, facing Asia across the shimmering Bosporus, the Hill of Pera is crowned by one of the swankest old hotels in the world. It is Istanbul's famed Hotel Pera Palace, chuck-full of faded tapestries and the queerest collection of Victorian rocking chairs, settees and oversize bathroom fixtures this side of Bombay. Last week a rattletybang little streetcar jammed with Turks was just careening around a curve in front of the Pera Palace when a great belch of flame and smoke pushed out the whole first floor of the hotel with a crunching, grunting roar. Against the streetcar hurtled jagged slabs of plate-glass windows, splintered tables and chairs, and an avalanche of burst-open trunks and suitcases. Several Turks on the car were badly injured. Inside the now fiercely burning Pera Palace screaming chaos reigned. Cables flashed all over the world that a bomb attack had been made upon His Britannic Majesty's Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Bulgaria, George William Rendel.

The slight, dry and extremely shy British Minister was not killed, because at the moment of the explosion he was upstairs, probably worrying about something. An English friend has said of him: "Nobody could really be so worried about his work as George always looks." When he entered the Pera Palace with an entourage of some 50 persons, whom he had brought from Sofia because Britain broke off relations with Bulgaria after the Nazi influx (TIME, March 10), it was typical of George William Rendel that he went straight upstairs to his room and began to check over personally his Legation's more important papers. Other members of the British group were signing the hotel register or chatting in the lobby when the blast went off. Said British Vice Consul C. H. Page:

"I was standing near the porters' desk, close to the luggage room, when there was a blinding flash. Long tongues of flame shot out from the luggage room. I was thrown to the ground and got up to find myself in a crater, out of which I was only able to look up. Several others were in the crater with me.

"Flames were consuming the porters' desk and the partition between the luggage room and the hall. Lying in the midst of the flames was a woman screaming terribly. I rushed to carry her away and asked the Reverend Mr. Oakley (Chaplain of the British Embassy in Turkey) to take her by the legs and help me. He shouted something at me which I could not at first understand. He repeated it and I was horrified to understand him to say: 'Her legs are gone.' Somehow we got her out and carried her across the road where the ambulance picked her up. Later I found she was Miss Armstrong."

Terese Armstrong, 23-year-old British Legation stenographer, had also lost an arm, but death did not come to her for more than 30 hours. Instantly killed were four Turks, two of them hotel porters. The toll of wounded was 30. British First Secretary James Lambert was badly burned, slightly cut. When Minister Rendel came bounding down the Pera Palace stairs to see what all the noise and smoke was about he found his private secretary, Miss Gertrude Ellis, bleeding from serious wounds. His daughter and Legation Hostess, Ann Rendel, 21, had been knocked down by the force of the concussion, lay dazed but uninjured on the floor. Her father sent her upstairs to get his personal documents.

In any crisis the motto of the Turkish police is "arrest everybody," and in nabbing every living soul in the Pera Palace they did not omit to place under arrest the British Minister, whom they promptly released. In the confusion, however, instructions to take wounded Miss Ellis to the famed American Hospital of Istanbul were misunderstood and the dying British girl was taken to the German Hospital.

Out of the flaming Pera Palace, which burned for an hour before Istanbul firemen doused the blaze, darted Legation Clerk John Embury. He had suddenly remembered an extremely heavy and mysterious suitcase left with part of the Legation luggage at another hotel. This was one of two suitcases noticed on the tram from Sofia to Istanbul, opened and found to contain soiled clothing, some old Turkish newspapers and what looked like a big radio battery. The clerks could not find any Briton on the train to whom all these belonged, but they did not like to throw them away. Now Clerk Embury, with a hunch that the mysterious suitcase in his room contained an infernal machine, heaved it out the window onto an adjoining vacant lot. Turkish detectives cautiously opened the suitcase, found the "radio battery" to be a bomb.

The bombs had been carried into the British Legation train in Sofia--the private train of Bulgaria's Tsar Boris, loaned especially for the occasion--under the noses of Bulgarian detectives and Gestapo operatives who had been on duty for the previous twelve hours.

The British Legation staffers and Minister Rendel, moving on to the British Embassy and thence to Ankara, aired no theory about the explosion. Asked if they thought Nazi agents were to blame, they said, off the record, that this seemed to them "too fantastic to be probable."

"There is no doubt that the bombs were brought in the baggage of the British Legation from Sofia," said an official German spokesman in Berlin. "Most probably these were bombs which already had been set with time fuses to blow up bridges or cause other sabotage in Bulgaria. In the haste of packing, the British Legation officials forgot to remove the time fuses when they packed the bombs with their other baggage. . . . That just goes to show what happens when legations play around with explosives."

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