Carol Vorderman’s father didn’t speak much to her about his life (Image: Getty)
‘s parents separated when she was just three weeks old. While she was very close to her Welsh mother, Edwina, it would be 42 years before she saw her Dutch father Anton, again in 2002. As such she grew up knowing little about him or his side of the family.
In 2007, five years after they reunited, she finally did some digging when she appeared on ‘s genealogy show Who Do You Think You Are admitting: “I felt quite rejected when I was young.”
Carol knew her father had been involved in the Dutch Resistance, and there was a conspicuous gap in his army record in the years after the German invasion. Unusually it proved very difficult to find information on him other than this and Carol was forced to do a TV appeal to try and learn more.
It turned out there was good reason for this gap and the lack of intel as he had bravely worked as a “radio man” around Tegelen on the border of and Holland for the resistance during World War II.
The Nazis had outlawed owning radios, a ban that was brutally enforced, and one Carol’s father’s friends revealed he hid in their house to avoid being captured and taken to the German labour camps. The friend confirmed he possessed an illegal radio which memebers of the resistance used to listen to illegal broadcasts before distributing the information in pamphlets.
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Carol Vorderman researched her family history on Who Do You Think You Are in 2007 (Image: Getty)
Documents in the local archives served to substantiate this and showed he worked at a place called the Hotel Geisler, which was a centre known for illegal pamphlet production.
A police report of 1944 showed he and 12 friends tried to cross the River Mann to freedom, but he triggered a landmine and was injured and two people died.
Carol also learned through one of her cousins that her father had rescued his own brother, her uncle, from a Nazi labour camp.
Sadly Anton suffered a stroke and died soon after filming concluded so Carol never got the chance to discuss her findings with him. “I’m glad I have been in touch with him because that’s closing a circle,” she reflected on the programme.
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Carol Vorderman was very close to her mother Edwina who died in 2017 (Image: Getty)
The show also threw up a surprising revelation about her great-grandfather, Anton’s grandfather, who appeared to have been robbed of a Nobel Prize.
Dr Adolphe Vorderman had become part of family lore with a story passing down through the generations that he would have won a Nobel Prize for Medicine had he not married an Indonesian woman.
Carol learned he was actually married to a Dutch lady but that he did indeed deserve to share in a Nobel prize for his work. As chief medical officer in the Dutch East Indies he studied beriberi disease, which caused muscle wasting, paralysis and ultimately heart failure in prisoners.
He made a crucial breakthrough observing those who were given white rice got the disease. Those who ate brown rice didn’t. The scientific reason which we understand today is that vitamin B1 which is found in the husk of unpolished rice, protects against beriberi.
He was a colleague of Christiaan Eijkman, who in 1929 took the Nobel Prize for his work in the discovery of vitamins. The director of the Eijkman Institute told Carol on the show that Adolphe’s work did indeed merit a share in the award.