HO 144/13395 and HO 334/116/20226
Thaddeus Altounyan (also spelled Thadeus) was born in Aleppo, Syria on February 14, 1906 to Megerdich and Mary Altounyan, both of “Ottoman (Armenian)” nationality. Megerdich was deceased by 1930, while Mary, Thaddeus “believed,” was in America. One sister was living with Dr. Ernest Altounyan of the Altounyan Hospital in Aleppo. A younger brother was born in that city in 1908. The applicant was educated at American University Beirut (5 years), St. Aidan’s Westgate-on-Sea (1 year), Emmanuel College Cambridge (3 years), and Pitman’s College (1 year). At the time of his application, he had earned a B.A. degree and was taking his M.A. at Cambridge University. He was raised by his uncle, Dr. Aram Assadour Altounyan (father of Ernest) of Altounyan Hospital, who financed his education.
Thaddeus arrived in the United Kingdom on September 29, 1924. His uncle Dr. Aram Assadour Altounyan was still supporting him by 1931 and intended to continue doing so after Thaddeus graduated and began a job at Iraq Petroleum Company in London, where his “services” would be “required.” Thaddeus was single. His stated reasons for applying for a certificate of naturalization were that he had relatives by marriage who were British; his uncle Capt. E. N. R. Altounyan, M.C.,[1] M.D., formerly of the Royal Army Medical Corps, was British born; being an Armenian he had no fixed nationality; and having had an English education and his friends being in England, he was desirous of making his home there, becoming British, thus having a British subject’s privileges and responsibilities.
Altounyan first applied for naturalization in 1924, at which time the Home Office determined that “he should wait his turn of seven years,” probably a reference to the Order in Council that would formally end hostilities between England and the Central Powers in 1931. When he applied for a final time in 1930 through his agents, the Home Office failed to respond for months at a time. This silence may have been in part because the applicant had lived in many English counties, which required police reports to be conducted in each place. Yet, Altounyan’s agents, Morrish, Strode & Searle, solicitors based in London, were unusually sharp and direct in their rebuke of the Home Office. In October 1930, after the Home Office’s six-month silence, the agents wrote that their client was “suffering very great inconvenience by the delay of the Home Office in dealing with his application.” “Is it really necessary and usual,” they demanded, “that unfortunate people who apply for naturalization should be treated in this way?” A Home Office official noted in the internal minutes: “no need to answer this.”
The Home Office also had to sort out Thaddeus’s nationality. Thaddeus had registered as an “Armenian” at the Central Register of Aliens in 1924, but the Kent police report described him as “an Alien of no fixed nationality.” The Home Office had issued a Nansen Travel Permit to him in 1925, perhaps in anticipation of his visit to Chateau de Prenleroi Oise District, France in the summer 1926. He was also issued a French passport at Aleppo, Syria in 1924, which had been confiscated when the Nansen permit was issued. A younger brother of his was described by the French High Commissioner in Syria as of “Syrian nationality.” Ultimately, the Home Office directed Thaddeus to list his parents as “Ottoman (Armenian race).” On his naturalization certificate, both he and his parents are listed as “Ottoman (Armenian).”
His referees included the manageress and owner of a private hotel in North Yorkshire, England; a solicitor in London and secretary of the same hotel; a physician who knew the applicant during his residence in Aleppo from 1896 to 1914; a clerk in Holy Orders and vicar in northwestern England; the wife of a mining manager; and the applicant’s brother-in-law, who was also a cousin of Dr. Altounyan of Aleppo, a Fellow and Tutor of Pembroke College, and a Lecturer in the University of Oxford; and a Tutor of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, who had had the applicant as a pupil.
The Altounyan family achieved public prominence for the asylum, employment, and medical care its members provided to survivors of the Armenian Genocide during and after World War I. Thaddeus’s uncle Dr. Aram Assadour Altounyan set up a refugee settlement in Aleppo, which Taqui Altounyan describes in her two memoirs. The extended Altounyan family was ethnically Euro-Armenian, with matrilineal Irish-Scottish and Germanic ancestry. Dr. Aram Assadour Altounyan married a woman of Irish-Scottish descent who raised her son Ernest as an “English gentleman.” Ernest, in turn, married a woman of the Collingwood family and moved to Aleppo. They had five children there, of whom Taqui was one.[2]
Thaddeus’s application for naturalization contained five separate police reports for the various British counties in which he had at one time or another resided. Subfiles 1-6 and 8-10 were destroyed. He was naturalized in 1931. This naturalization file was closed until 2032 and declassified at my request on August 13, 2013.
[1] Military Cross. This family member was Ernest Haik Riddall Altounyan, the only person in the Altounyan family with a British passport.
[2] Taqui Altounyan, Chimes from a Wooden Bell: A Hundred years in Life of a Euro-Armenian Family (London: I. B. Tauris, 1990), 5; 35; 52 and In Aleppo Once (London: John Murray, 1969, 4-5.