Simon Fanshawe

Author of THE POWER OF DIFFERENCE; Founder of DIVERSITY BY DESIGN (

[Dennis Noel Kavanagh @Jebadoo2]

Absolute genius

[Simon Fanshawe @SimonFanshawe]

@MenAtWork_MC What about some plain language like understands and respects boundaries. And treats women as colleagues.

[Simon Fanshawe @SimonFanshawe]

Just going to speak at #FestivalofWork #CIPDFOW
on success through leadership. Do come and find me if you’d like to explore diversity w/o the BS!! I hope the session will be plain spoken and practical. Getting diversity back to its core values of opportunity and fairness for all

[Simon Fanshawe @SimonFanshawe]

@TLRailUK My point is not is there anything telling me there is no WiFi…, it is WHY is there no WiFi????

[Simon Fanshawe @SimonFanshawe]

Help me out here @TLRailUK … where is the WiFi on the 22.00 from St Pancras to Brighton?????

[Simon Fanshawe @SimonFanshawe]

@TLRailUK I thought WiFi worked through phone networks or satellite … not stickers

[Simon Fanshawe @SimonFanshawe]

@Batmantallk 25

[Simon Fanshawe @SimonFanshawe]

@SqSehrish 41

[Simon Fanshawe @SimonFanshawe]

@didem5654 It’s twice plus 2

[Simon Fanshawe @SimonFanshawe]

@didem5654 110

[Andrew Kersley @AndrewKersley]

In November 2023, police found the decayed corpse of Tracey Turnell in Walthamstow Market.

She had no phone, job, passport, friends or lovers. There wasn’t a single photo of her.

I pieced together who she was and who was responsible for @_TheLondoner

https://t.co/Jxv5fnW0u3

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

Princess Alice opened her front door to find the Gestapo waiting.

It was October 1943 in Athens, Greece. The Nazis controlled the city and were actively rounding up Jewish citizens, sending them to Auschwitz.

The officer asked her sharp questions about who lived in her house and about the persistent rumors that she was hiding people. Princess Alice was 58 years old—a British royal living in Greece, and a mother of five. She was also completely deaf.

She simply smiled, pointed to her ears, and made hand gestures.

The officer raised his voice. She raised her hands in return, pretending she couldn't read his lips. Eventually, he gave up and walked away.

Up on the third floor of her house, a Jewish widow and her children sat perfectly still, listening through the floorboards. They would stay hidden there for another full year.

Here is how she got to that moment.

She was born on February 25, 1885, at Windsor Castle in England. Her great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, was present at her birth. Alice was born deaf, but her mother patiently taught her to read lips in English, German, and French.

In 1903, she married Prince Andrew of Greece and moved to Athens. They had four daughters, followed by a son in 1921 whom they named Philip.

Then, Greece fell apart. The royal family was overthrown in 1922, her husband was nearly executed, and the family fled into exile.

By 1930, Alice suffered a complete mental breakdown. She began hearing religious voices and believed Christ was speaking to her. Her panicked family sent her to a clinic in Switzerland, where Sigmund Freud examined her and diagnosed her with schizophrenia.

Doctors subjected her to experimental treatments, including X-rays aimed at suppressing her hormones, mistakenly believing her religious visions stemmed from sexual frustration. She was locked away in institutions for two years.

During this time, her husband moved to France with his mistress, her four daughters married, and her nine-year-old son, Philip, was sent away to a boarding school in Britain. Alice didn't see her son for years.

She left the institution in 1932 and eventually moved back to Athens to start rebuilding her life. Then, the war arrived.

In 1941, the Germans invaded Greece, and by 1943, they occupied Athens. Alice’s life was deeply complicated. Her son, Philip, was fighting the Germans in the British Royal Navy. Meanwhile, two of her four daughters had married German princes, and some of her grandsons were serving in the Wehrmacht. Her own family was split on both sides of the war.

Alice chose to stay in Athens. She worked tirelessly with the Red Cross, ran soup kitchens, and set up shelters for orphaned children.

Then, the deportations of Greek Jews began. The Nazis sent 60,000 Greek Jews to Auschwitz—nearly 80 percent of the country's Jewish population. In Athens, the roundups started in September 1943.

That was when the Cohen family reached out to her. Haimaki Cohen had been a Greek member of parliament and a close friend of the royal family for decades. He had passed away earlier that year, leaving his widow, Rachel, alone with their four sons and a young daughter. The Gestapo was hunting them.

The four sons planned to escape to Egypt to join the Greek resistance, but Rachel and her young daughter, Tilde, couldn't make the perilous journey. When Alice heard about their plight, she sent a simple message: Come to me. I'll hide you.

Rachel and Tilde moved into the third floor of Alice's house, hidden away from the world. Later, when one of the sons was unable to escape to Egypt and returned to Athens, Alice took him in as well.

For over a year, she hid them. She knew perfectly well that if the Gestapo found out, she would be executed. She did it anyway.

She brought them food, kept her staff quiet, and visited Rachel every day. She sat with her, talked to her in Greek, and held her hand when she cried. And when the Gestapo came knocking, she used her deafness as a shield, pretending she couldn't understand a word they said until they finally left.

The Cohens remained hidden until December 1944, three weeks after Athens was liberated. When they finally came down from that third floor, they were alive. All of them.

Afterward, Alice told absolutely no one what she had done. Not her son Philip, not her daughters, and not her friends. The story stayed hidden for almost fifty years.

What makes her story so poignant is what followed. After the war, Alice’s life took another unique turn. She founded a religious order of Greek Orthodox nursing nuns, selling her own jewelry to fund it. She put on a nun's habit and lived as a nun for the rest of her life.

In 1947, her son Philip married Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen of England. Alice attended the ceremony at Westminster Abbey in her simple nun's habit—the only nun at one of the most famous royal weddings in history.

In 1967, following a military coup in Greece, Queen Elizabeth sent for Alice and brought her to live at Buckingham Palace. She spent the last two years of her life there—a nun-princess living in the heart of the British monarchy. She told her son Philip that she wished to be buried in Jerusalem, beside her aunt who rested there.

She passed away on December 5, 1969, at the age of 84. Initially, her remains were placed in the Royal Crypt at Windsor. But nineteen years later, in 1988, Prince Philip finally honored her last request, and her remains were moved to the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.

In the early 1990s, the story finally came to light. Michel Cohen, one of Rachel's sons, was 78 years old when he decided to share what had happened. He went to Yad Vashem and told them about Princess Alice—how she had hidden his family for over a year and risked her life every single day.

In March 1993, Yad Vashem posthumously named her "Righteous Among the Nations," Israel's highest honor for non-Jews who saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust. She had been gone for 24 years.

In October 1994, Prince Philip flew to Jerusalem for the ceremony at Yad Vashem. It marked the first time a member of the British royal family had officially traveled to Israel.

During his speech, Philip noted, "We did not know, and as far as we know, she never mentioned to anyone, that she had given refuge to the Cohen family." He added, "I suspect it never occurred to her that her action was in any way special. She would have considered it a perfectly natural human reaction to fellow beings in distress."

The surviving members of the Cohen family traveled from France to attend, publicly thanking Prince Philip for his mother's incredible bravery.

Princess Alice. Born deaf, diagnosed with schizophrenia, locked away by her family, left by her husband, and separated from her young son. Yet, she saved a Jewish family from the Holocaust and never breathed a word about it for the rest of her life.

Her legacy lives on in a grave on the Mount of Olives, a dedicated tree at Yad Vashem, a grandson who became King, and a Jewish family whose grandchildren still light candles for her every single year.

She believed that saving lives was simply what it meant to be human. That is what makes her remarkable. And she was absolutely right.

Share this story. She deserves to be remembered.

[Smita Barooah @smitabarooah]

The quiet grief of adult friendship: One of the most beautiful articles I've read in a while. Hits hard
https://t.co/qXi6UBaTs3

[James Hogg @JamesAHogg2]

The great Paul Whitehouse is 68 years old today, which means I am obliged to post this (again!) - arguably the most majestically random but brilliant comedy sketch committed to celluloid for at least the last, what, forty, forty five years?

Yes, forty, forty five years.

Happy birthday Paul 🤘

[Simon Fanshawe @SimonFanshawe]

Brilliant idea. Also worth pointing out that bus stop has 7 letters. The German equivalent seems to have 20…. By the time you have read that the urge to leave has passed

[Maya Forstater @MForstater]

The OfS-Sussex judgement is logically flawed and can't be allowed to stand. @ObhishekSaha with a very good analogy about paths.

Sussex's defence was that it had a high level sign saying "this path will only be closed for very good reasons". Therefore it must have had a very good reason 🙄

https://t.co/tqcoswIPvR

[Michael Warburton @For_Film_Fans]

ERIC IDLE remembering the late GRAHAM CHAPMAN's brilliant one-line response to a German guard outside Dachau concentration camp after they were refused entry…

[Levi Pay @soppystern]

I’ve delivered training to colleagues at Sussex several times in the past couple of years, and I can confirm that Kathleen Stock’s description of a “culture of student complaints, disciplinary investigations, and fear” remains an accurate reflection of how colleagues there are feeling today. You can see it in their eyes. You can hear it in the slight, but constant, stutter in their voices.

The descriptions of the problems staff use are hesitant; more is implied than described. “Some of the student interactions we have are…tricky, particularly in relation to, er, protected characteristics.” “We’ve definitely seen a shift when it comes to students, er, behaving, well, presenting in ways that can be, I guess, challenging.” “We’ve had some problems in recent years, which you’ll probably have heard about.” That kind of thing.

Every now and again, you get someone in the group who is a hardcore believer ✊. They’ll be the first to test the waters by telling the room that they are also “mindful of neurodiversity”. And they won’t stutter as terms like “safe space”, “LGBTQ+” and “student voice” dance from their semi-grins.

This colleague tends not to give their name on the feedback forms at the end of the training session, but I’ll know them by their comment that “The session tended to frame the student as the problem”, or by the one lonely tick in the “disagree” box under the question about whether or not the trainer was effective. However, the hardcore believers are surprisingly rare.

Maybe they self-select out of my training in favour of other types of event. Maybe they don’t think they need training. Or maybe I am getting to work with a representative sample and the believers really are a surprisingly small minority. When they speak, I would generally describe the vibe among their colleagues in the room as tired.

This is not just a Sussex problem. Other university campuses are very similar, if sometimes a little less hesitant about naming it. However, it’s a very real problem - and, as this @unherd article sets out, no court appeal ruling on the technical meaning of the term “governing documents” will do anything to change the reality of what it’s like to work in a university today. The planet goes on being round.

If I am invited to deliver training on Sussex’s campus again, I know I’ll again walk under that underpass that takes me from the station to the buildings that I always need a map to tell apart. And, just as I’ve done on each recent visit, I’ll imagine it was my name on rows of menacing posters lining that tiled tunnel. I’ll imagine I’m walking to work, knowing that the reactions of my managers, all the way up, are almost certain to range from “I don’t want to get involved” to “You’ve brought this on yourself”, with not an ounce of humanity or liberty on offer. And I’ll know that no salary offer would ever be enough to give up my freedom and rejoin the ranks of the permanent university employee.

Sadly, the OfS’ errors of process, probably combined with some overzealous interpretation work from the court, have empowered the people in the sector who deny there’s a free speech problem. This ruling will be spun and it will be misinterpreted as some kind of clean bill of health. But, trust me, if you ever find yourself delivering training to a room full of academics, a court judgment like this will seem very unreal indeed.

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

The Academic Case for Intellectual Diversity | by my colleague and fellow Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard @cafh member Tyler VanderWeele. https://t.co/6jRUXrVUfg

[Giles Coren @gilescoren]

Ruth Hansom and her husband Mark tried to do a beautiful thing, to make a wonderful restaurant in Bedale, to help people get there, to create joy. But North Yorkshire Council shat on it because they hate innovation, they hate hard work and they hate love.

https://t.co/oebPrZU2j7