Page 234 - They Also Served

of the Lehi paramilitary group, was kidnapped. The police believed Farran’s squad had murdered him, the main evidence being a trilby hat bearing the initials ‘RF’ left behind at the scene. Farran was court-martialled and acquitted, the prosecution failing to prove the hat was Farran’s, or indeed that Rubowitz, whose body was never found, was even dead.
Farran returned home, his reputation tarnished. A year after the kidnapping, a parcel addressed to R Farran, was delivered to the family home in Staffordshire. Farran’s brother, Rex, was killed when the bomb, sent by the Lehi, detonated. Resigning his commission, Farran, like his SAS comrade Blair Mayne, found the transition to civilian life hard and drifted between enterprises, including working in a quarry and standing in the 1950 general election. Working briefly in Africa, he married a Canadian and emigrated to Calgary, where he finally settled down.
After setting up and running his own newspaper, he turned, once again, to politics and was elected to the Calgary City Council in 1961, serving for a decade until elected to the Executive Council of Alberta with ministerial positions in charge of telephones and utilities and later as solicitor- general. Farran retired from politics in 1979 and founded a charity providing French exchanges for students. Awarded the Legion d’Honneur by the French government in 1994, Roy Farran died in 2006. Alexander Rubowitz is commemorated with the name of a street in Jerusalem.
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