Pepita Behrend's suspected child - Raíces y documentos.

Oropesa’s family in Bilbao (Spain) claims to be Michel Balfe’s only remaining Spanish descendants nowadays. Spanish law still doesn’t allow the children to be informed about their Biological parents.

Anything we are going to explain here can be just a nun invention or a romantic novel, even though the characters are completely real.

Anyway, they claim to be Willie Oropesa and Josephine Behrend as it follows:

Josephine Otilia Behrend, was born in London in 1865. She was the granddaughter of W.M. Balfe . Her mother was Luise Behrend, Balfe’s first daughter. Josephine came to Spain in her childhood. She came to live with her aunt Victoire and her three cousins in Madrid .Her mother had died in 1869 and her father had 6 more children to care of .

She lived with the Duke and Duchess of Frias in the family palaces in Madrid and Oropesa.

Josephine was renamed as «Pepita» by her spanish family. Pepita means » little Josephine» in Spanish.

In 1871 her aunt Victoria died. Despite her aunt’s death and her oncle’s new marriage with an italian noble woman, Pepita remained with her spanish family until the Duke of Frias’ death in 1888.

Between 1888 and 1889 there was a romance between Willie Oropesa, his younger cousin, and Pepita. She got pregnant. It was impossible to get marriaged .

The liberal Duke had died and his widow was more conservative . Pepita was sent back to her father’s home in England. Bilbao was the boat departure place. Willie was younger, he was just 19 y.o , and he was sent to the military school. Later on he went to Cuba as a lieutenant.

The baby

The baby is born in Bilbao. Pepita decides at last minute not to take it with her to the boat to England. It was a girl.

Pepita leaves the baby in Bilbao, in a place called Inclusa, an orphanage , together with a letter informing that the girl came from the Estates of Oropesa. Pepita refers the story to the nun in charge of the Inclusa.

That’s the only thing the family Oropesa knows about their mother’s birth.

The girl’s name was Oropesa due to that reason.

Pepita’s later life in Great Britain

After she came back to England she had a normal life. Her father died some months after her arrival.

We know various moments in Pepita’s life in England. She did not marry and lived with her unmarried siblings.

They devoted themselves to music and were songwriters of great success in the Anglo-Saxon area.

Pepita often made trips to Prussia, where she still had several cousins and uncles from her paternal line. In Germany, she was staying in the city of Danzig (now the Polish city of Gdansk) where some of her brothers were also been born. The last trip she made to Imperial Germany, at the end of 1913, was used a year later, after the Great War had already been declared, by the British Secret Service of the time to accuse Pepita of betrayal to British Crown in favor of the German Reich.

Pepita’s official statements can be read in the internet.

Here is some of the press notes about her

Friday 23rd October 1914: A long time resident of Sharnbrook appeared at the Petty Sessions today charged with failing to register as an enemy alien. After war was declared it was rumoured that Miss Pepita Eleanora Henrietta Ottilia Behrend was of German nationality. Police Inspector Bliss made enquiries and found she had left England for Berlin on 30th July to visit relatives. He heard on 23rd September that she had returned to Sharnbrook. He paid her a visit and told her she would need to register under the Aliens Order 1914 unless she could produce naturalisation papers. She showed him a passport signed by the American Ambassador in Berlin and told him that she had returned to England as a British refugee. She admitted to him that she had relatives in high positions in Germany, one of them a countess. He told her that the passport was not sufficient proof of her nationality. She said that her father had been German and her mother Hungarian, but that she herself had been born in Upper Seymour Street, London. Inspector Bliss told her that she would need to obtain her birth certificate as proof and she agreed to do this.

Inspector Bliss visited Miss Behrend again on October 21st. She had tried to obtain a birth certificate, but although a search had been carried out no birth had been registered between 1863 and 1867 which matched her details. There was supposedly a letter accompanying the results of the search stated that compulsory registration of births and deaths was not in force until 1875, but Miss Behrend had lost this. She suspected her parents had failed to register her birth. She had older brothers and sisters, all born in Germany before the family moved to England in 1864. She herself was the youngest and the only child to be born here, and her sister recalled being present at her baptism at a church in the parish of St George’s, Hanover Square. Her second brother had registered as an alien but her eldest brother was a naturalised Englishman. She herself had not bothered to take out naturalisation papers as she always understood she was born here and believed herself to be a British subject. She had not realised the gravity of her situation and had not taken any legal advice as she thought it was simply a matter of finding out where she was born.

Monday 9th November 1914: Miss Pepita Behrend of Sharnbrook appeared in court for the third time today. Her defending counsel stated that if it could be proved that she was born in this country then she was a naturalised subject. Her brother Michael Theodore Behrend, who had been a naturalised subject for 40 years, gave evidence on her behalf. He stated that he was born in 1852 and remembered 1864 when the whole of his family came to England. Pepita was born in 1865 at the residence of their grandmother in Seymour Street and subsequently lived at Clapham Common. His father returned to Germany only once, for a holiday in the 1870s, and lived in England until his death in 1890. He remembered his sister being baptised and believed the baptism certificate produced was hers. The Bench were satisfied with the evidence and the case was dismissed.

She assured that she was born in Great Britain in 1864 but she was not able to locate her birth certificate at the time to prove it. It iwould have proved that she was and she felt to be a subject of His British Majesty even though her father and some of her brothers had been born in Prussia and that in addition to having other brothers born on British soil, she had a cousin who was a Count in Spain. He asked for help from his other brothers, who pointed out the history of the Balfe family (his grandfather’s grave is in the pantheon of illustrious men at Wensminster Abbey) Later they located the game, confirmed the kinship data and its relationship with the Balfe family, so they stopped investigating it. According to what we know, Pepita passed away in 1942 in England, without ever contacting her daughter again.

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