Background
While in Bucharest, he married Marion Elizabeth Walsh, the daughter of Jack Walsh, an American accountant with Standard Oil of New Jersey in Romania.
Businessman Soldier secret agent
While in Bucharest, he married Marion Elizabeth Walsh, the daughter of Jack Walsh, an American accountant with Standard Oil of New Jersey in Romania.
University of London.
He was the father of Canadian General John de Chastelain. On graduation, he moved to Romania and worked for Unirea (a British Petroleum branch) in Bucharest, rising to a managerial position towards the end of the 1930s. Captured by the Romanian Gendarmerie soon after their landing near Plosca, Teleorman County, he and his team were taken into custody as prisoners of war and held in a Bucharest apartment.
They were all released in August 1944, when Conducător Ion Antonescu was overthrown and King Michael I assumed full powers (see King Michael Coup).
Decorated, de Chastelain was demobilised after the war, joining a unit of the Special Air Service in the Territorial Army. After the start of the Cold War, Soviet authorities alleged that he was keeping contacts with Iuliu Maniu, the leader of the National Peasants" Party.
The latter had opposed both Antonescu"s regime and the Soviet occupation of Romania. During Maniu"s trial for treason (1947), the Minister of the Interior, Teohari Georgescu, was handed a report which indicated Maniu"s alleged contacts with de Chastelain as proof that the politician was a British spy.
In 1954, he left that business to accept a post as Vice-President of the Canadian branch of an American oilwell drilling and services company, H. J. Eastman, in Calgary, Alberta.
Living for several years in Canada and then in Australia, he returned to Canada in the early 1970s and died in Calgary at the age of 68.
On the outbreak of war with Nazi Germany, de Chastelain was commissioned into the Artists" Rifles and became a member of Special Operations Executive (SOE), with which organisation he conducted sabotage operations in the Balkans and served in the North African campaign. A book giving an account of the SOE Operation in Romania was written by one member of the team, Ivor Porter, later a British Ambassador (Operation Autonomous: With SOE in Wartime Rumania, Chatto and Windus, 1989). He was a founding member of the Special Forces Club in Knightsbridge, and of the Food and Wine Society in Calgary.