Category: Genealogy Posts

Facebook post #047 (Dec 2020; updated Oct 2025)

So, we left 3rd gt-grandparents Charles and Maria Brittain in 1851, he a silver plater. But in the 1861, 1871 and 1881 censuses, they lived on the other side of the Jewellery Quarter, and – somehow – had become chaplain to the workhouse and the asylum!

The asylum had opened in 1850, and would close, as All Saints Hospital hospital, in 2000; all but the entrance block was demolished. The remainder of the site was used to expand Winson Green Prison (now HMP Birmingham), where David Meaden was governor (post 45).

Thirty years after it opened, another was built down the road at Rubery. It was here that our unfortunate Samuel Wheaver ended his days in shell shock (post 42).

The relationship between the various buildings has been quite confusing in some accounts, so a map is called for. Top left is the prison, and immediately to its East, the ‘Borough Lunatic Asylum’, with Lodge Road, running across the top.

Below these complexes is the ‘old line’ of the Birmingham Canal, latterly known as the Soho Loop (Soho having a special place in the country’s industrial history). The Asylum Bridge across the canal must have been well-known to Charles. The walled area was the Winson Green Corporation Yard Wharf; gas works and isolation hospitals are also shown.

But the area is dominated by the Birmingham Union Workhouse, which opened in 1852 – quite new when Charles took up his job. It could accommodate 700 adults and 300 children.

The fear of ending up in the workhouse would have been palpable; our unfortunate Benjamin Weaver (whose descendant married Charles’s) ended his days down the road in the Aston Union Workhouse in 1881 (post 24).

The large infirmary to the West opened in 1888 – after Charles’ time – to a design championed by Florence Nightingale. She had overseen the introduction of trained nurses into the workhouse system: their predecessors were caricatured by Dickens in ‘Mrs Gamp’.

The infirmary eventually became City Hospital, and swallowed up the workhouse. Most of the site was cleared by the 1990s, but the entrance block, with its ‘arch of tears’, survived until 2017. The hospital itself closed in 2024 (after the original version of this post was written).

Charles and Maria had 14 children, and the church dominated their lives. They sent two of their daughters to the Clergy Daughters School – it had moved to Westmorland since the time two of the Brontë sisters died of TB at the school. One of these daughters later became a school mistress, the other a governess who married a vicar in Canada; another daughter married the vicar of Cleeve Prior, Worcestershire.

One of the sons used his clergy education to become a teacher of the classics. Two others became clergymen, one having started in engineering. Another son founded an Augustine Mission in Fulham, became Canon of Madras Cathedral in India, and ended up as vicar of Whittlebury-cum-Silverstone in Northamptonshire. Our Charles Edward became a commercial clerk – more of him next week.

If you prefer preachers of the ‘hellfire and damnation’ variety, we have them too. Daniel Lambert (whose grandson married Charles Edward’s granddaughter) had a sister Jane. While Daniel taught at a British school, for pupils of “every Religious Persuasion”, Jane taught at a rival National School, which stressed Anglican religious education.

She was also a lay preacher, and in 1876 in Shropshire, she married a Primitive Methodist minister. “As a preacher, [he] belonged to the evangelical school, preaching a full, free, and present salvation; his sermons were carefully prepared and forcefully delivered.” I found them in Buckingham in the 1901 census, and realised that I’d photo’d his chapel, unaware of any connexion. Then I found a list of his former postings, and that I’d photo’d his chapel at Oswestry too.

Facebook post #046 (Dec 2020)

In the C19, Birmingham was the workshop of the world. After generations in Knowle, Warwickshire (see post 41), Edward Brittain moved into Birmingham, probably for work. He married Mary Plant in Edgbaston (where development was restricted) in 1813. Of his children, baptised at St Philip’s, later the Cathedral, Charles married Maria Hill in in 1836 in Sutton Coldfield.

These days a chunk of central Birmingham, to the north-west of the cathedral, is known as the ‘Jewellery Quarter’, acknowledged as modern centre of jewellery and a place of unique character in the world for its particular combination of structures associated with jewellery and metalworking.

But it was not the jewellery business which brought the Brittain and Larard families together. While it is true that jewellery businesses clustered together to collaborate, the range of small metal products extended from badges to whistles to fittings for beds, doors and coffins. All that glittered in Brummagem was not solid gold or silver.

By 1841, when the couple were 20, he was a silver plate worker, very likely at the Soho Manufactory – an early factory, north west of the Jewellery Quarter, which pioneered mass production. It operated from 1766, was the first site with a Watt steam engine in 1782, and closed in 1848.

His brother Edward and cousin George were also silver platers: by 1851, electro-platers. This was a new industry, the new Elkington process having been patented in Birmingham in 1840, and using electric generators from 1844 (surviving part of the Elkington building pictured).

1851 was the year of the Great Exhibition: alongside the iron products (see post 33), electroplated goods were prominent. The process was based on potassium cyanide as an electrolyte, the same highly toxic compound used by Larard gold prospectors – and, famously, as a suicide pill.

It’s worth noting in passing that the Lambert family (post 27) were still making iron. One of Jesse’s iron founder sons was to move from Shropshire to the Jarrow and then Stockton, another to Stoke-on-Trent (my photo is of a sculpture paying tribute to the industry there). One of his daughters was a servant in the great house in Coalbrookdale, overlooking the world’s largest foundry. There is more to come on the Squire side too.

Charles and Maria Brittain moved to Bath Street, now in the ‘Gun Quarter’ (just east of the Jewellery Quarter) , near the Gunmakers Arms. His cousin Edward made pistols for Tranter, a precursor to BSA, but Charles’ career took an altogether different path, of which more anon.

Facebook post #044 (Nov 2020)

So, I promised you disaster. (See also the Wharncliffe Woodmoor colliery explosion in post 16 and the response to sinking of the Titanic in post 40). Last week, in my family war memorial – as well as the Somme, Ypres, Gallipoli, Monte Cassino, the R.38, and the RNAZ Dakota calamity – my post included the devastating explosion of HMS Princess Irene at Sheerness in 1915, which killed 352, including a cousin. There had been worse.

On 4 September 1878, John Marsh of Clerkenwell was an early witness at an inquest. He formally identified his deceased mother-in-law Zillah Waddilove, my 4th great aunt. She had been on a St John’s Mission Bible outing which had gone badly wrong. It was a treat from Susannah Law, a wealthy and generous woman, who had promised the poor women in her Bible group a day out. It was to be on 5 September but on seeing what a beautiful day it was on 3 September, she declared “Today’s the Day!”

Zillah née Teager had already had a tough life. She had lost three children in 1848, probably in the cholera epidemic of that year. She lived in St Giles, a focus of infection; the area gets a mention by Charles Dickens:

How many who, amidst this compound of sickening smells, these heaps of filth, these tumbling houses with all their vile contents, animate and inanimate, slimily overflowing into the black road, would believe that they breathe this air?

The Old Curiosity Shop (1841)

Zillah’s husband died in 1854; a year later, she married John Waddilove in St Giles. By 1861, John was a pork butcher; the couple lived at 17 Aylesbury St, Clerkenwell, a stone’s throw from William Larard’s shoe business. There is no known connexion between the families but William’s brother’s grandson (Ernest Larard) and John’s sister’s granddaughter (Gerty Brittain) were my gt-grandparents. They married in Birmingham in 1900. By further coincidence, my Dad worked on one adjoining street in Clerkenwell in the 1970s, and I worked on another in the 1980s. (See post #025).

Back to Zillah, forward to 1878. The vessel of choice for the day out was the smart paddle steamer pleasure-craft, the SS Princess Alice, named after Queen Victoria’s daughter. She weighed 432 tons gross. Princess Alice’s destination was Sheerness – the same port where Princess Irene met her fate. Londoners could escape to the seaside there away from the Great Stink. Some passengers alighted at the resort of Gravesend, others at the Pleasure Gardens at Rosherville. The atmosphere was happy: people were chattering about the terrible rail collision at Sittingbourne three days earlier, and glad to be on the water instead of on the rails.

Princess Alice left Rosherville at about 6:30 pm on the final leg of her return to Swan Pier, by London Bridge. A little over an hour later, there was a terrible pre-echo of the Marchioness Disaster from my time in Clerkenwell. The Princess Alice was struck amidships by a much larger vessel, the 1376 tons collier SS Bywell Castle. The smaller boat had no chance, and sank quickly, trapping many below decks. The crew of the Bywell Castle and boatmen from local factories did what they could, saving about 130 people. By the time the Princess of Alice’s sister ship arrived ten minutes later, there was no one left to save.

Some of those rescued died from ingesting the water. The miraculous Crossness Pumping Station, which had helped deliver London from Cholera, had – as usual – that day pumped 75 million gallons of decomposing raw sewage into the Thames close to the collision point. The gas works and chemical factories discharged to that stretch of the Thames, and there had been a fire that day, resulting in oil and petroleum entering the River.

There was no manifest, so it is not known how many died, but it was between 600 and 700, making this the worst disaster on British inland waterways.

Facebook post #042 (Nov 2020)[poem added Remembrance Sunday 2022]

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill: Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres.
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England’s foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

Robert Laurence Binyon, The Times 21 Sep 1914

In memory of my lost cousins, our virtual war memorial, extracted from the blog (in order of appearance; with some omissions, I’m sure. From a solitary WWI death in Swindon to some of the biggest disasters of War. I’ve included some of those who survived in commemoration of the lifelong impacts, which echo until this day.

• Arthur Barnes Wheaver (1881-1963). Royal Garrison Artillery. Apparently racked with guilt for being behind the lines, and never the same after the war. Of course, the big guns were targeted, so he wasn’t behind the lines at all.
• Samuel Horatio Wheaver (1887-1947). Merchant’s clerk from Erdington. Labour Corps (manned by men who had been medically rated below the “A1” condition needed for front line service). Discharged as unfit for war service, an “insane soldier”, elsewhere as suffering from ‘melancholia’. Died in 1947 at Rubery Hill Mental Hospital, formerly the 1st Birmingham War Hospital. The family had it as an old soldiers’ home.
• Jeremiah Bird (1889-1915). Brickmaker from Aston; emigrated. Australian Imperial Force. Killed in action on a diversionary attack at Gallipoli, Turkey. This catastrophic defeat is commemorated annually on ANZAC Day.
• Tom Wheaver (1895-1917). Engineer, then assurance agent, from Redcar. Rifleman with Royal Scots Regiment. Died of dysentery and pneumonia soon after his arrival in France.
• Charles Webb (1895-1918). Milkman from Sutton Coldfield. Rifleman with Royal Warwickshire Regiment; Royal Field Artillery? Killed two weeks before the end of the war, after his battalion had returned to England. Buried in Germany.
• Harry Roper (1891-1917). Laundry van man from Sutton Coldfield. Royal Warwickshire Regiment. Killed in action at Battle of Broodseinde, the most successful Allied attack of the Third Battle of Ypres, Belgium.
• John Edmund Shepherd (1897-1915). Apprentice compositor from Moss Side. Manchester Regiment. Killed in action at Gallipoli. Two thirds of the East Lancashire Division had been wiped out through battle casualties and sickness.
• Stedman Francis Kent (1888-1916). Builder’s clerk from Handsworth. Royal Warwickshire Regiment, the Birmingham Pals. Killed in action during the Attacks on High Wood, on the Somme. 784 comrades died on the Western Front.
• John Samuel Brinson (1890-1925). Waggoner, then Police Constable from Walsall. Gunner with the Royal Garrison Artillery. Gassed and wounded during service, suffered ill-health upon return to the police, including taking the last 14 weeks of his life off sick.
• Arthur Howard Asker (1892-1917). Bank clerk from Lichfield (see blog for my accidental photo of his home). 2nd Lieutenant, Essex Regiment. Evacuated from Gallipoli, wounded during the recapture of the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt (the Battle of Rafa); died soon after medical evacuation.
• James Lambert emigrated to New Zealand, probably for mining work, leaving his wife in England. He was part of the Auckland Regiment of the NZEF, and killed at Gallipoli on 8 Jun 1915. He is remembered at Lone Pine Cemetery.
• Matthew Webb (1881-1918). 2nd Lieutenant South African Infantry. Wounded during the horrific losses at Longueval (Delville Wood) in 1916. Killed when the unit was annihilated during a massive German offensive. Captain Matthew Webb brought his son up to be brave: doubtless he would have been proud.
• William Patrick Dunne (1890-1917), second husband of Esther May Wilson (1892-1980). Wellington Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force. Killed at the Battle of Passchendaele.
• Colin Edgar Wilson (1893-1916). Canterbury Regiment, New Zealand Expeditionary Force. Killed at the Battle of Flers–Courcelette, the third and final general British offensive – and debut of the New Zealand Division – on the Somme. 3000 yards were gained, a considerable success.
• Sidney Maynard Smith (1875-1970). Surgeon from London. Served in the Boer War as a surgeon, and in WWI, as a Colonel with the Army Medical Services. Awarded the Croix de Guerre; thrice mentioned in dispatches. Appointed consulting surgeon to the British Fifth Army in 1916, and later consulting surgeon to the British Second Army. Appointed Knight of Grace of the Order of St John, and Companion of The Order of the Bath (Military Division). Survived to become a senior surgeon and Grand Deacon of the Grand Lodge of England.
• Ivo Cecil Little (1895-1921) of the family from Kent enrolled in the Royal Navy in 1908. Flight Commander, Royal Naval Air Service. Transferred from Sopwith planes? to airships. Survived the war, carrying out numerous test flights in the R. 32 and the R. 80. Among those to complete the first ever airship trans-Atlantic crossing, carried out a parachute descent on arrival in New Jersey. Killed on the next big cross-Atlantic project when the R. 38 exploded. A trawler 16 miles away staggered under the concussion of the explosion and trains on railway lines in Lincolnshire shook on their tracks, while ceilings in houses in Hull and Grimsby collapsed.
• Joseph Frank Burrows (1883-1918). Otago Regiment, NZEF. Killed a month and a day before Armistice, on the “Advance to Victory” through the Hindenburg Line, and the ‘Masnières–Beaurevoir line’. “The men of the Regiment returned to Dunedin to a heroes welcome, greater social standing and numerous types of financial assistance.”
• John Harold Mousley (1885-1959). Electrical engineer from London and Manchester. Lieutenant-Colonel, Royal Engineers. Director of Military and Public Works in Baghdad. Awarded the Distinguished Service Order and Territorial Decoration. Survived the war to marry Dorothy Pease of ‘one of the great Quaker industrialist families of the nineteenth century, who played a leading role in philanthropic and humanitarian interests’.
• Henry Frost (1882-1916) of South London. East Surrey Regiment. East Surrey Regimental Cap Badge (credit). At Loos in March 1916 – the unit’s war diary gives a vivid but dispassionate account of the quiet days, the occasional attacks, the monitoring of enemy trench building, and bombardments with field guns, howitzers, trench mortars, mines and ‘torpedoes’ (used to clear barbed wire). Henry died of his wounds some months before the Battle of Loos proper.
• William Fredericks (1887-1917), husband of Charlotte Knight (1887-1939). Wharf labourer from Shoreditch. East Surrey Regiment. Wounded in France in 1914; Sergeant with Northamptonshire Regiment. Died of wounds suffered at the Battle for Boom Ravine, which proved that the German Army’s position on the Somme front was untenable.
• John Pippard (1878-1937), husband of Sophia Lucy Knight (1875-1942). Domestic servant from Norwood. Joined the Royal Navy on his 18th birthday; served on many ships (see blog), including the revolutionary battleship HMS Dreadnought. Mentioned in despatches for his role in the evacuation from Gallipoli. Survived the war.
• Walter Knight (1894-1914). Fishmonger’s assistant, later carman, from Croydon. Queen’s (Royal West Surrey) Regiment. Killed in a close-fought battle around Gheluvelt near Ypres, where the British Expeditionary Force was locked into a battle for survival. It marked the transition point between the mobile, open warfare to trench deadlock. There is a battle memorial gate in Worcester; Walter is remembered on the Menin Gate, memorial to the missing, Ypres.
• William Dudley Bezer (1884-1916). Insurance clerk from London. Lance Corporal, London Regiment (Queen Victoria’s Rifles). Fought at the First and Second Battles of Ypres; killed in the diversionary attack at Gommecourt, where German artillery pinned down the British, depriving them of hard-won trenches and making reinforcement impossible. Charles Dickens’ son Cedric was a Major in the Londons, and killed a couple of months later.
• Percy Roberts (1884-1916). Bank clerk from Clapham. Lance Corporal with the 10th “Stockbrokers” Battalion Royal Fusiliers (City of London Regiment) – the first pals’ battalion. Killed, with 249 regimental colleagues, at the Attack on Poiziers at the start of the Battle of the Somme.
• Walter Douglas Baker (1891-1917). Woodworking machinist from Hornsey; emigrated. Sergeant, Manitoba Regiment. Killed under heavy artillery barrage at the Third Battle of the Scarpe. Commemorated at the Vimy Memorial
• Alfred and Elsie Square (my retired gt-grandparents) were on the SS Queen Mary in 1938. Another passenger was Air Commander A. T. “Bomber Harris”, travelling to New York to place the largest foreign order ever placed with an American Aircraft Company – for 200 Lockheed Hudsons.
• John Bertram Harris (1893-1918). Joiner’s apprentice, Birmingham. Warwickshire Regiment then 3rd Special Company, Royal Engineers. Died of pneumonia in Étaples after an accident on the Somme when handling poison gas.
• Edgar Allan Bell (1896-1918). Trainee architect from Sheffield and Gloucester. Yorkshire Hussars and South Staffordshire Regiment. Present at the first battle where the Germans used flamethrowers. Died of wounds suffered when on duty near Angres: died at Millbank after medical evacuation and buried at the Military Cemetery, Brookwood. “You will be pleased to hear that he behaved splendidly, and did not so much as make a sound that he had been wounded until I turned and saw him. He was one of my best Section Commanders, and was most reliable and hard working while in the trenches”, wrote his commanding officer. His father gave a book to his university in his memory and chose “Ave! Morituri Salutamus (Hail, Caesar! Those about to die salute you)” for his epitaph.
• Wilfred Barlow (1888-1916), stepson of Henry Squire. Steelworker from Penistone. York and Lancaster Regiment. Killed in action 16 May 1916, before any official battle action.
• Edgar Hyde (1891-1915). Miner from Barnsley. York and Lancaster Regiment. Killed in action the day before The Battle of Aubers Ridge, part of the British contribution to the Second Battle of Artois, a Franco-British offensive intended to exploit the German diversion of troops to the Eastern Front.
• Ernest Hyde (1896-1915) from Barnsley. King’s Own Scottish Borderers. Killed in action at Gallipoli, three months after his brother Edgar.
• Herbert Outwin (1880-1917), husband of Eva Holmes (1885-1903). Paper maker at the works in Barnsley, which formed the background to the film ‘Kes’. Durham Light Infantry. Killed on the second day of the ‘Cambrai Operations’, which pioneered new artillery techniques and massed tanks.
• Jabez Thorpe (1887-1948?). Mine corporal from Darnall, Barnsley. King’s Royal Rifle Corps and Sergeant with Prince of Wales´s North Staffordshire Regiment. Awarded the Military Medal for exceptional bravery. Survived the war.
• Thomas Frederick Bell (1892-1915). Miner from Barnsley. York & Lancaster Regiment, the Barnsley Pals; then 171st Mining Company, Royal Engineers. Men who were working underground as civilians in the UK were underground at Givenchy only four days later. Engaged on underground work including the digging of subways, cable trenches, saps, chambers, as well as offensive or defensive mining. Killed in action at Ypres on the day the German army first used phosgene gas.
• Joseph Bell (1899-1917). Miner from Barnsley. Sherwood Foresters. Sent back and forth from France to Egypt. Died from wounds sustained on the Western Front.
• Cyril Vaines (1909-1941), husband of Elizabeth Bell (1909-1969) – from Barnsley. Royal Artillery; Kings Own Royal Regiment (Lancaster) in the BEF. Unit evacuated from Dunkirk on the SS Prague but Cyril’s name circulated to POW camps, as missing in action. There is a burial record at Merville, Pas-de-Calais.
• Francis Nelstop Green (1892-1972). Clerk from Sheffield. Served on HMS Sir Thomas Picton at the evacuation from Gallipoli. Invalided out of the Navy with sight problems but survived the war.
• Stewart Green (1882-1917). Chartered accountant from Sheffield. Company Quartermaster Sergeant , York and Lancaster Regiment. Saw repeated action at Ypres. Killed at the Battle of Poelcapelle on Passchendaele Ridge. Deep, slimy mud caused chaos and exhaustion, but the attack pressed on, with disastrous results.
• William Ernest Green (1898-1917) from Dore, Barnsley. Killed during the Second Battle of Passchendaele.
• Maurice Rowland (1898-1917) from York. King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. Served on the Somme and at Ypres. Killed during German counter-attacks at Passchendaele.
• Winter Henry Blampied (1878-1919), from Jersey. Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry. Died of heatstroke while awaiting demobilisation.
• My gt-grandparents George and Olive Lewty’s long walk to freedom from occupied Burma in WWII is covered in post #029.
• John Thomas Ballance (1894-1917), from Rugeley. First class stoker, Royal Navy. Served on HMS Begonia, recommissioned as Q-ship Q.10 after it was torpedoed. Killed in action when the ship collided with a German submarine, also lost, off Casablanca.
• George Gollick (1885-1914). Coal miner from Stanley, Yorkshire. King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, BEF. Killed in action in France.
• Sam Gollick (c 1887-1918). Coal miner from Stanley, Yorkshire. Sergeant, King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. Awarded the Military Medal. Transferred to the London Regiment (King’s Royal Rifles). Killed in action, like his brother George.
• Michael Stanley Barnard (1922-1943). Director’s son from Saffron Walden. Flight Sergeant, 192 Squadron. Killed on Special Duty Operations (special signals flight over Bay of Biscay) in Wellington MkX HE230 DT. Killed when plane ditched 50m W of Brest, France, due to engine failure. Commemorated at Runnymede.
• Robert Cyril Barnard (1893-1917). Farmer’s son from Saffron Walden. Lieutenant, Army Service Corps. Died of wounds in Poperinghe, Belgium, during the Battle of Passchendaele.
• Anthony Robin Byford (1929) from Indonesia, England, South Africa. Survived the war. In 1939, was on the ‘Patroclus’ from Shanghai to Liverpool. b. Indonesia, m. England, div. N. Rhodesia, d. South Africa. Four days after she docked, she was requisitioned as HMS Patroclus. She was torpedoed and sunk in November 1940.
• James Cordell (1896-1917), from Eastleigh. Joined Royal Naval Air Service at Felixstowe, an important flying boat port and development centre, looking after kite balloons. “Killed by bombs dropped by an enemy aeroplane” – only the third time this had happened –an air raid by Gotha bombers. These raids led to the foundation of the RAF and the rebranding of the royal family (post #004).
• Ernest Felix Imoda (1888-1915) from Staffordshire. Corporal, Royal Fusiliers. Killed at Ypres, a week before the Germans started the Second Battle of Ypres by launching 171 tons of chlorine gas against French forces.
• Stanley Ashley Lambert (1898). Sailed to Rangoon, Burma in October 1926 on the Warwickshire. Captured by the Japanese and held as a Prisoner of War. Survived the war.
• George William Thackray (1895-1915) from London. Served on HMS Princess Irene, a passenger liner converted to a minelayer. On 27 May 1915, she exploded and disintegrated – there was a column of flame 100 m high; wreckage was flung 30 km. People were killed on the shore and on other ships; 352 people were killed in all; severed heads were found on the Isle of Grain. A Court of Inquiry heard that priming of the mines was being carried out hurriedly and by untrained personnel; worryingly George was a probationary armourer. His body was not recovered; he is commemorated on the Portsmouth Naval Memorial.
• Alfred John Pratt (1921-1944). New Zealand infantry. Killed in action at the Battle of Monte Cassino. 343 New Zealanders died across four attacks, after waiting three weeks in freezing rain for suitable weather for an aerial assault: when it came, Cassino was reduced to a pile of rubble. The ancient Abbey of Monte Cassino, where St. Benedict first established the Rule that ordered monasticism in the west, had already been destroyed.
• Ralph Gordon Savage (1908-1945). Leading Aircraftman, 40 squadron, RNZAF. Killed with 19 comrades when a passenger in a Dakota C-47, which crashed over New Caledonia on 24 Sep 1945, en route from Vanuatu. This air accident remains the heaviest single loss in RNZAF history.
• William Walter James Brooker (1894-1917) of Croydon, husband of Emily Pretoria Florence Frost (1900-1985). Deceased. King’s Royal Rifle Corps. Died of his wounds, probably sustained at the Battle of Langemarck, on 16 Aug 1917 in Flanders. Memorial at Tyne Cot.
• William Samuel Fisher (1886-1912) from Norwood. Died on active service (before WWI). Buried at Aldershot Military Cemetery.
• William Edward Frost (1899-1918) from Norwood. Machine Gun Corps. Killed in action in France, in the Final Advance on Picardy, two days before the Armistice. Buried at Maubeuge-Centre Cemetery, Nord-Pas-de-Calais.
• Albert Edward Knight (1899-1918). Shipping clerk from Norwood. 14th (County of London) Battalion. “Accidentally killed… on the Midlands SW Junction Railway in the parish of Chiseldon and struck off strength accordingly.” The inquest showed that he had been hit by a passenger train near Chiseldon Army Camp, Swindon.
• Frederick Arthur Baden Peckham (1900-1941) from Bognor Regis. Master of the SS Umona, whose last voyage was carrying maize, pulses and jam from Durban to London. Killed with 81 crew and 20 others – only five were saved, when ship was torpedoed by U-124 off Freetown, Sierra Leone. Commemorated on Tower Hill (post #002).
• Victory Ernest Dear (1919-1943) from Bethnal Green, husband of Winifred Patricia Palfreman (1922-1976). Lance Corporal, 56th Regiment Reconnaissance Corps, which fought with ‘great distinction’ in Tunisia and Italy. He was killed in the run-up to the Battle of Sidi Bou Zid in Tunisia, possibly in an anti-tank role. Commemorated at Medjez-El-Bab.
• Christopher Harold Turner (1903-1943) of Lambeth, husband of Lily Heath (1906-1986). 6th Armoured Division, Royal Army Ordnance Corps, which fought in the key tank battles of North Africa, starting with Operation Torch. Killed in action in Algeria.
• Herbert Leslie Hallam (1909-1944). Bank cashier from Sutton Coldfield. Flying Officer (Navigator), 514 Squadron RAF. Awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross after showing great coolness, resolution and devotion to duty, plotting his path home after most of his navigational instruments had been destroyed. Killed when his Lancaster came down at Moers during a bombing raid on Hamburg-Rhenania.
• Ian Roy Maclennan (1919-2013) of Regina, Saskatchewan flew with the RCAF as a fighter pilot and flying ace, and awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal. He was involved in the defence of Malta during the seige. He crash-landed a Spitfire in enemy territory and was captured and imprisoned in Stalag Luft III, of Great Escape fame. He escaped in 1945. He survived the war to became a successful architect.
• (Charles) Bruce Maclennan (1924-1945) was Ian’s brother. Wireless operator on RCAF Lancaster bombers. Killed when his plane was shot down while targeting the U-Boat manufacturing yards of Voss near Hamburg, Germany. His plane was in a wave unprotected by a fighter escort, and was attacked by a swarm of 30 Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighters, with heavy calibre guns, which destroyed the nose and cockpit of Bruce’s plane.
• Richard Earle (1895-1916) of Durban. South African Infantry. “Most of the recruits already had military training or experience. They were, in general, middle class, well-educated and well-bred men.” The Regiment was deployed to France. Richard died of his wounds, probably suffered at Delville Wood.
• John Rupert Squire (1915-1966), my grandad. Medical tutor at University College, London. RAMC: medical research section at GHQ Home Forces; General Staff Officer, ranked a Major in the scientific adviser’s branch at the War Office; posted to South-East Asia Command as medical specialist to no. 10 operational research section; commanded Allied Land Forces biological research section in South-East Asia; mentioned in despatches [for gallant and distinguished services in Burma as a temporary Lt-Colonel. After a very late demobilisation – which separated him away from his young family – he was a successful consultant pathologist.
• Roland Henry Traviss Squire (1921-1945), from Market Harborough). Flying Officer, 117 Squadron, which switched from Lockheed Hudsons to Dakotas when moved in Libya, then India in 1943. In 1944 it transported supplies for the Chindits who operated behind the Japanese lines. Roland was killed, when his plane crashed 20 miles south of Binh Li [Bayin Nyi], Thailand.
• Edward Blampied (20 Apr 1913), from Jersey. Driver, 18 Division Signals. Japanese Prisoner of War. Survived the war.
• Barbara Evelyn Dover (1917-1942) and Pamela Dover (-1942) from Burma. Died in a Japanese POW camp.
• William Frederick Charles Martin (1903-1944) and his wife Beatrice Olga Martin née Perkins (1905-1944) from Burma. Died in a Japanese POW camp, Myitkyina, Burma.
• Frederick Alec Peters (1885-1941). Licensed victualler from Gillingham, Kent. Killed when the Plough Inn was bombed.

Facebook post #041 (Nov 2020)

A strange, sad story of coincidence for Remembrance week. As usual, I’m thinking of my schoolmaster gt-grandad Arthur Wheaver, who seems never to have been quite the same after returning from the guns of the Somme in WWI. And I’m thinking of my grandad John Squire, who served out East in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and wasn’t demobbed until well after the WWII had ended – and well after Mum was born. They emerged physically unscathed – but scarcely imaginable are their experiences.

This may be partly why, even when briskly exploring, I pause on passing a war memorial. Others I don’t walk past show up in the photos later, like the one at Knowle Church, Warwickshire. This is the church where my parents married, with John Squire present; Arthur Wheaver having apologised for not being able to make it on grounds of insufficient lifespan. Dad’s family was still close to Sutton Coldfield (post 24) but Mum was an incomer – the third generation of Yorkshire farming stock born in Surrey.

What we didn’t know until my recent round of research was that John Squire’s grandfather, John Traviss Squire, was not the only sibling to leave Yorkshire. By 1891, his sister Sarah was married to Alfred Harris, farming in Packwood nr Solihull, Warwickshire. In 1901, their son, John Bertram Harris (Mum’s grandad’s first cousin) was 17, a joiner’s apprentice staying with his John’s Sr’s widowed mother in Barnsley.

JBH tried to enlist for service in WWI three times but was refused. He eventually enlisted in the 16th Warwickshire Regiment, then volunteered to transfer to a ‘Special Company’ of the Royal Engineers.

It turns out that this was a euphemism for an illegal poison gas unit, formed in response to the German use of gas at the Somme. His fate too was obscured but it emerged that he had an accident while handling gas shells or cylinders. He was taken to the hospital in the port of Étaples, described by Wilfred Owen as:

“A vast, dreadful encampment. It seemed neither France nor England, but a kind of paddock where the beasts are kept a few days before the shambles … Chiefly I thought of the very strange look on all the faces in that camp; an incomprehensible look, which a man will never see in England; nor can it be seen in any battle, but only in Étaples. It was not despair, or terror, it was more terrible than terror, for it was a blindfold look, and without expression, like a dead rabbit’s.”

John Bertram Harris didn’t make it. Perhaps you guessed that our farmer’s lad – who would do anything for the war effort – is commemorated on the war memorial outside Knowle church; also in the Soldiers’ Chapel inside.

Facebook post #040 (Nov 2020)

There are dozens more stories in the Larard pages of the site. Servants in illustrious households, working people whose paths crossed with the famous or who travelled the world, wealthy relatives who bought mansions of their own (pictured is Ladywood, Orpington – home of Henry Larard’s cousin, George Burrows).

I even found a picture postcard on eBay sent by cousin Ruby Seymour to her daughter from Brighton in 1914.

One cousin on the Mousley side, Florence Bezer, married a gas fittings dealer in 1891, and they stayed in a lodging house in Holborn. It didn’t end well – Albert Flurscheim was German, and died in Utrecht in 1917. His family are interesting though. One of his first cousins was a prominent economist who turned around an important ironworks in Germany, built a railroad in Mexico, and died of depression when the Titanic sank. The other was Hermann Adolph Flurscheim, who emigrated to New York in the 1870s. He made his fortune, and is known to have helped victims of the Titanic disaster. His Fifth Avenue department store (pictured) apparently changed the face of retailing. Outlet stores and evening opening were amongst his innovations.

Facebook post #039 (Oct 2020)

Edith Ostlere (post 38) had a brother known as Abdhullah Mansur! The 1911 census has him living with a sister in Sidmouth under his birth name of George Bury, but an “explorer” by profession! Later, I found that he published an important book that year – “The Land of Uz”. Then I found that he was suffering from TB at the time, and that he married his nurse from Westminster Hospital a couple of years later… in El Hudayah, Yemen. These days, it’s an important port both for humanitarian aid and for coffee – including for Starbucks.

It turns out that after obtaining a commission into the Warwickshire regiment, George had joined a rebel tribe in Morocco! But like his cousin Henry Mousley in Canada (post 37), his interests were scientific: his ornithological specimens and descriptions are at the British Library. Apparently his looks, build and command of colloquial Arabic were such that he could be accepted as a local. It also helped him to an official position with the boundary commission in British Aden. When he fell from favour, he persuaded the Ottoman Turks to let him continue his exploits in their half of Yemen! Commentators suggest that his successive books give unique insights into the lands and life either side of the border just before WWI – even if his forecasts are not altogether accurate.

George’s father Henry Cox Bury had died in 1884. His will, held by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, shows him a ‘coffee planter of Stratford, late of Ceylon’. A couple of years earlier he was quoted in the Tropical Agriculturalist “on a visit to his fine properties” (in Haputale). “There is far too much outcry over the falling-off in Ceylon coffee production… a turn in the tide must be approaching. It cannot, surely, be in the designs of Providence that the fungus [“Devastating Emily” coffee rust] should be permanent in Ceylon, any more than that the iniquity of slavery should continue to exist in Brazil. The latter is doomed, and so, we hope and believe, is the former.” Sadly, his forecast for Ceylon was no better than his son’s for Yemen later. Coffee was wiped out and Haputale has grown tea ever since.