His biographer wrote: "Alan started his life as a Frenchman; having been born in Bagneres, he had ultimately to be naturalised. But beneath this formality was a reality. He spoke French before he spoke English. His early education was undertaken by German and French governesses and he was fluent in both languages. In English, on the other hand, spelling and some of the finer points of grammatical usage eluded him to the end of his days. He was shy - and, of course, not a little ashamed of these `shortcomings', but they were part of the boy and they remained part of the man." The Alan concerned was Alan Brooke, from the Fermanagh Brookes, and his biographer General Sir David Fraser adds: " There was something unmistakably French - indeed Gascon - in Alan Brooke, which must have come from the atmosphere, and which mixed with Anglo-Irish blood to produce the ultimate distinction. His rapid speech - likened in later life to a machine-gun - his speed of perception, thought and action, his impatience and his peremptory quality may have owed much to the environment of French."
This Alan Brooke was ultimately to become, in the second World War, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and thus Lord Alanbrooke. "I was, all the same, half French," he once said. How did this come about? Well, his father, Sir Victor Brooke, Third Baronet of Colebrooke, was something of an absentee landlord who preferred to live in the foothills of Pyrenees in his house at Pau. The climate suited his health and that of his wife while Alan, their youngest son, also flourished in the French air. A lot of English people lived around and hunted and went shooting. The area was known as "The Leicestershire of France". Alanbrooke's relationship with Churchill were described as "often turbulent yet fruitful". You could guess from that phrase that he knew when to say "No, Sir," to his Prime Minister.
After the war he returned in triumph to Pau and to his place of birth at Bagneres de Bigorre. In Pau he spoke to the crowds in French of deux patries - "after all, I am half-French." The crowd went mad when he broke into their local dialect. Then to Bagneres, to his place of birth. There, too, he broke into the local dialect, after a fomal opening in French. Tears were in his eyes, this man of impatience, peremptoriness, as his biographer relates.