Facebook post #052 (Jan 2021)
Last week, I posted my Grandad’s final résumé. It was quite a coincidence that he was posted to British India in WWII. He met my Gran (who liked us to call her by her first name, Marguerite) at Cambridge. She would have been caught up in the war out East herself had she not sailed to Britain in 1935 to continue her studies. It’s another matter of regret that I never had the chance to talk economics with Marguerite, given that she managed a 1st Class Degree at Rangoon, despite having completed the first two years in one. She ‘blazed a path’ to England in 1935, where she was permitted to shorten her Degree at Newnham College, Cambridge, too.
John and Marguerite married in 1940, and John joined the army in 1942. These were strange times – another relative recounted to me how he and his mother escaped India to Australia. There he joined the Australian Air Force, only to be posted back to his mother’s home town, and then to Swindon!
John’s obituary recounts that he had command of the Allied Land Forces biological research section in South-East Asia, and that he was mentioned in despatches but I don’t know why, nor have I heard that he ever talked about it.
But, as a curiosity, it did remind me of the cousin on Dad’s (Larard) side we didn’t know we had, Sidney Maynard Smith. He was also a Major in the Royal Army Medical Corps (pic)(but in WWI), and also mentioned in despatches (three times). Apparently, he was consulting surgeon to the British Fifth Army and then the British Second Army. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre by France, and appointed Knight of Grace of the Order of St John (pic), and Companion of The Order of the Bath. And he was Grand Deacon of the Grand Lodge of England! His wife was sister of the Olympic rower, Frederick Pitman – and daughter of the old Etonian founder of stockbroker, Rowe & Pitman. Quite a catch for a lad from the District Royal Medical Benevolent College, Epsom (around the corner from where Marguerite lived with John’s mother during WWII).
But for every illustrious cousin I discover, there’s a black sheep! One of the Brittain cousins, Nellie Riley, married a Benjamin Bennett. He also served in the RAMC in WWI. On enlisting, he asserted that he was married to an Ethel Cunliffe. I found letters dated 1918 from the Major at the Queen’s Hospital, Sidcup: “I should be obliged if you interview the soldier and favour me with your observations on the matter, at your earliest”, and then explaining that Bennett “was under a misapprehension”, that Ethel was an “unofficial” wife, and that he would allocate his separation allowance to Nellie henceforward. He was later caught stealing blankets from the hospital.
Closer to home, John Squire’s second cousin Letitia Marjorie Green (1903-1978) deserves a medical mention. She lived in Dore Village, Sheffield and was one of the earliest physiotherapists, specialising in child polio patients. I found her in 1935 on the register of Chartered Society of Massage and Medical Gymnastics (patroness: Her majesty the Queen), with qualifications in massage, medical gymnastics and medical electricity.
John and Marguerite may not have met through medicine but it was through medical men that she came to be in British India in the first place. More anon.