A BUST in honour of a Highbridge spy who risked his life to save the lives of thousands of Jews has been unveiled.

Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt made a speech and unveiled a bust of Frank Foley alongside Holocaust survivor Mala Tribich on Wednesday (January 23) at the annual Holocaust Memorial Day Commemoration event at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London.

Major Frank Foley, who has been dubbed 'the British Schindler', tore up the rule book in order to provide travel papers for Jews facing persecution after Adolf Hitler's rise to power, using his official position as a passport control officer in Berlin to aid their escape.

Speaking at the event Mr Hunt said: “In 2006, I had the life-changing experience of visiting Auschwitz myself with Holocaust Education Trust. The trip was led by the inspirational Rabbi Barry Marcus, who many of you will know.

“We visited a museum to commemorate the Poles who had sheltered Jews. The penalty, of course, was death, not just for the individual, but for every member of that individual’s family.

“More than 5,000 Poles took that risk. Many others across Europe looked away. What would each of us do if history repeated itself?,” he added.

Since then, Hunt said a “question that troubled me as I tried to take all this in is, would I have looked away? Would I have done the right thing?”

Mr Hunt said it was 'an incredible privilege to honour some of those who did not look away, and who worked for the Foreign Office, or our sister organisation, the Secret Intelligence Service.'

He said: “One of them was Captain Frank Foley… Ostensibly, he was in charge of passport control; in fact, he was an SIS officer – something that the Government has taken the exceptional step of publicly confirming.

"After Hitler came to power in 1933, Foley used his official position to issue visas to thousands of Jews trying to escape Germany. He applied the rules with what might be called sympathetic flexibility.

“We should reflect that it was not the state as a whole, but remarkable individuals like Frank Foley who did the right thing, made the correct moral choice, often in defiance of the rules.

"One of the Jews he (Foley) saved happens to be the father-in-law of my cabinet colleague, James Brokenshire. Others include the grandparents of an SIS officer who is serving today.

“But even as we take pride in the memory of Frank Foley, we should never lose sight of the hard truth that when the crucial moment came and the moral test was posed, there were too few people like him.”