Michael D.Heath-Caldwell M.Arch.

1939

Diary of Genesta Heath

12th January 1939 - Mycenae, Greece

Mycenae, Greece, No war-torn, homesick warrior of Alexander's army was ever more glad to go back to these shores than I was. Russia has disappeared behind me, I can get off this boat, the sun is shining and I am in touch with Imperial Airways again.

14th January 1939 - Athens,GreeceT

oday I left Athens and came to yet another enchanted village, after three and a half hours in a bus. I should be in Alex, repacking, but Greece is so lovely I can't bear to leave it - so damn the luggage.

This village has probably been here for thousands of years. The sea is quite close, the hills stand behind it, and across the valley steep, jagged mountains tower against the dark blue sky. I had supper out of doors, while flocks of turkeys, sheep, donkeys with loads of hay and sticks, some goats, peasants with vegetables, mule carts and ploughing ponies, all came slowly back from different directions, and the village quietly folded itself up for the night.

16th Janary 1939 - KenyaA

t last I was in the flying boat, homeward-bound. And now I am home again, on the farm. Life is wonderful.

8th March 1939 - Kenya to England

I had a wire to say that Father was sinking, so I flew back to England. He died at the very moment I reached my brother Grigg's house - just as though he was waiting for me to get back before he was released, Margit said.

When I saw him there was nothing there - only the framework, the covering. The splendid spirit, vital and brave and wise, had gone. And now he seems nearer to me than he has been for two years past, when he sat in a chair or stumbled up and down the garden paths, his body still moving but his mind already half away.

11th March 1939 - England

The tenants and farm people came to say goodbye to Father. They walked quietly up to him, looked at him a moment, and went out.

The memorial service in Coldharbour church was rather splendid. All the neighbours, the villagers, the tenants, the hunt servants were there, all the house servants and some office people. The were only flowers from his garden, and his two banners. His coffin was drawn uphill on a farm cart, by two splendid carthorses, groomed and gleaming.

There was a memorial service in the City;the church was so full that half the people were standing. The Chairman of Lloyd's read the lesson, and a great many City dignitaries were there. Father was one of the most powerful men in the City, and at Lloyd's itself a special meeting was called to pay tribute to him.
My father was a most remarkable man, a genius and a saint, a rare combination. Deafened in his youth, he lost his chance of going into the Royal Navy, for which his Admrial godfather had given him a nomination, which was one way of getting into the navy, in those days. He joined Lloyds Insurance instead, and here his remarkable financial brain came into its own. He would take risks that no other insurer would look at, and in a History of Lloyds some members are quoted as saying, 'Poor young Heath is riding for a fall.' 

But poor young Heath never fell - he went from strength to strength, and it was only his deafness which prevented his becoming Chairman of Lloyds He worshipped my beautiful mother and they really were a striking-looking pair. He helped everyone who was in need, and only regretted, as he once said to me, that none of his kindness and goodness 'cost him' anything personally. At Anstie there were endless parties, children and their parents from the village, tenants and employees, shooting parties, meets of hounds (he was joint master of the Surrey Union hounds) and summer bathing parties in the lovely rhododendron embowered 'Bath Garden,' made by my great grandfather. Mother loved entertaining, with her beautiful looks and perfect figure, she was an ornament in the landscape and a born hostess.
Brought up in France (where the Hugennot Gambiers originally came from), she was in Normandy in 1870 when the Germans invaded Paris; there was a flood of French refugees into Normandy, some of them wounded and with terrible tales of the atrocities they said their enemies had committed. Mother never forgot this, and all her life she detested and distrusted the Germans as a race, though she did, of course, have a very few German friends. 

April - England

Political upheavals follow each other at such a rate that the map of Europe seems to be breaking up all around us.Suddenly in mid-March, without warning, the German armies entered Prague, a few hours after Dr Hacha, the President of Czechoslovakia, had had an interview with Hitler. The people did not fight, having nothing to fight with, but they lined the streets and watched the soldiers going past in deadly silence, except that here and there women booed and jeered, while others wept. The Gestapo got to work at once, and by the evening of the second day had made eight thousand arrests. A concentration camp, the first in the country, was opened, to which five thousand prisoners were sent.

The posters in London were typical. They stood side by side, some saying 'Death of a Nation,' 'Czechoslovakia Breaking Up,' and others, 'Test Match Reports, England scores a century.' People rushed for the papers, stood in clumps reading the headlines, the sports pages, then folded up their papers and walked quietly on. In tubes and buses the only ones to take any notice of the foreign news were workmen and labourers, who read all the foreign news with set faces and grim mouths - dreaming, perhaps, of that false dawn, Communism.

In the streets groups of East End Jews suddenly appeared, talking loudly in Yiddish, their faces crumpled or stony with misery. All the telephone boxes were full of Jews pouring in coins, sending long-distance calls. These people, trying in vain to get news of their relations who might by now be in German concentration camps, their lives suddenly broken up, were tortured with anxiety. Helplessly roaming the steady, stolid London streets and surrounded by phlegmatic British faces, they were as heart-rending as those other refugees I saw in Prague five months ago.

About two days after Prague was invaded in March, the British public began to realise there was a crisis. The posters were purely political - people talked of conscription and the power of the German and Russian air forces. One party says: 'Chamberlain must go. There won't be any end to this engulfing of Europe until we have someone in power who will act. Another party says, 'Trust Chamberlain, He'll move when he's ready. In any case, we can't have a split yet.'

When Czechoslovakia had been completely swallowed, people sat back and breathed again and said 'How awful!' The eastern European countries tembled. Russia entered into a trade pact with Germany. The British government tentatively approached Poland, Russia, Greece and Yugoslavia to form a peace pact against aggression. Hardly had they begun than on 22nd March the Germans, after one day of German minority agitation in Lithuania and one day of threats, marched into Memel (on the Baltic coast), hard on the heels of the retreating Lithuanian army and the panic-stricken, fleeing Jews.

Germany had now established herself pretty successfully round Poland, hemming her in on the north and the south. Demarches were made towards Poland, but the Poles are tough. When the Germans arrested several thousand Polish subjects in Germany on some flimsy excuse, the Poles arrested an equal number of Germans, and held them until their own nationals were released. 

A few days ago a wave of benign sentimentality swept the world on the news of the birth of a son to the lovely Queen Geraldine, the twenty-three year old Roman Catholic, Hungarian wife of Zog, romantic Mohammedan King of the romantic mountain country of Albania. This world-wide cradle appeal was a great relief after all the iron and blood and terrorism and Jewish agony and continual crises. But two days after the baby was born Geraldine and her son were fleeing across the mountains by car, while Zog, in peasant costume, led his tiny army of mountaineers against the Italians who were invading the Albanian ports with guns and planes. Zog gave up after a hopeless fight, and joined his Queen. The mountaineers fought on a little longer, and then their resistence collapsed.

14th April 1939

Corfu flashed into the news - an important Greek island with a big deep harbour. The Italians assured us that if we occupied it there would be 'most dangerous reactions.' We told the Italians that we were not going to occupy it, but if anyone else did we would take ' a very grave view indeed.'

Ciano and his Edda (Mussolini's daughter) are to become Viceroy and Vicereine of Albania. This, the paper says, is to remove him from the post of Minister of Foreign Affairs, which he has not handled to the entire satisfaction of his father-in-law.

Everyone is preparing for war. British engineers are building barriers across the roads leading out of Gibraltar. The French have manned the Maginot Line, and the Germans the Siegfried Line, German ships sail for Spain. Italian troops pour into Spain - to leave, says Franco, after the Peace Parade (the Spanis Civil War officially ended 1st April). Spanish troops are concentrating opposite Gibraltar.
2nd August 1939 - on board ketch 'Zareba,' EnglandThere was a pause in the threatening and arguing: all quiet politically. Personally, I've had a bad time. Boy (Carswell Long) has left me for good. He wants to marry soneone else's wife (Paula Long). He and his new friend are living together on the farm in Kenya. (Nderit).

Don Taylor-Smith has got a 50 ton seventy foot ketch, 'Zareba;' my daughter Heather and I have been getting her ready. Two days ago she was decorated, stocked with food, clean from stem to stern, with new plates in the galley and new green sheets on her lovely bunks. She was all ready to go to sea, and so were we, but it seemed quite impossible to find anyone to go with us. We asked everyone we knew, but everyone either had previous dates, or couldn't get away, or thought it was the most awful idea they'd ever heard of.

On Monday evening Heather and I were sadly wondering if we ever would get started when a little racing boat sailed past us and the two boys waved. We waved back. The put about and asked for matches. We asked them if they would like to come to Marseilles. The end of it was that late last night two tall, dark, handsome and very nice medical students, Gordon and Ian, arrived with their luggage and a black kitten.. Today we steamed down the estuary and said goodbye - we hoped for good - to England.

15th August 1939 - on board ketch 'Zareba,' Brest, France

Brest. After endless delays and countless tacks across the Channel, we got here. At dawn we came carefully into the estuary with the motors. Soon one began to knock badly, and Don abandoned his hard-earned lunch and went into the engine room; here he sat staring at the works and looking rather like a blond Satan, crouching among his smokey fires contemplating his roasting sinners, wondering whether he should give this soul another turn, or stoke up the fire under that one. The trouble was a broken tappet, but our hearts were in our mouths until we finally crept past the lines of French battleships and dropped anchor inside the port.

26th August 1939 - on board ketch 'Zareba,' Brest, France

We were about ten days in Brest getting another crew. First Ian and Gordon left us, as their holiday was nearly over. The health officer, a Corsican called Poggioli who acts as paterfamilia to all yachts, got us a snub-nosed, round faced Breton sailor called Corentin Gourlasuen, who knows the way, and all the lights, apparently by heart, and who washed first the decks, then the plates, then the galley floor, without even being asked.

Brest is one of the strangest ports in Europe, and holds most of the French fleet. French planes roared overhead all day - them make more noise with less speed than any planes I've ever seen, and when they turn they put the stick hard over and stamp on the rudder and seemingly bend round.

We went to Plougastel village on Sunday, where everyone wears native dress and the flocks of women and girls look very demure and clean and rather sweet in their flouncy black skirts, their little plaid neckerchiefs and their tall, plain, starched white caps. The men have big black hats with curly brims and streamers behind, and embroidered, blue cloth waistcoats. We got a Breton captain named le Duff, and were all ready to sail when another crisis blew up. Germany and Russia have signed a non-aggression pact, to the stupefaction of the whole world, and the Germans naturally say: 'Now for Danzi' (Poland's only port).

French reservists have been called up. Roosevelt, the Pope and the Belgian King have made peace appeals; German nationals are leaving England and British nationals are leaving Germany and France. English schools are prepared for evacuation; the French fleet has put to sea. and all the ministers are making long, patriotic speeches. I still hope and pray that peace will remain with us. I feel no price is too high to pay to prevent one or two million men from being killed.

28th August 1939 - on board ketch 'Zareba,' Bay of Biscay

We had little wind, and crept along at about half a knot an hour. It may take me two months to reach Marseilles, there to pick up an aeroplane which left England three and a half hours before. Life is as you take it.

Just now several million peole are enduring terrible fears; women for their menfold, the Poles for their country, Jews for their lives. Millions of pounds spent in preparation for a war which may yet be averted. Cabinet ministers dash to and fro, prayers rise up from every church, caterers and cloth merchants make a bit on quite profiteering, and munitions factory owners are coining money. Everyone is in an agony of uncertainty. 

And here we are, safe and quiet at sea, tied to world events only by a voice which we can summon from the air or leave silent, as we choose. We have, at the moment, very little money, but we have enough food to eat and a little wine, and there is the sun; we have enough, and no one need have more.

30th August 1939 - on board ketch 'Zareba,' Bay of Biscay

Wireless news: everyone preparing for war. Messages have passed between England, France and Germany which, Chamberlain says, it would be unwise at this stage to make public. British ships are warned to keep out of the Mediterranean, so we will try to reach Portugal, by which time either a war will have started or all will be settled peacefully. The line-up is England, France and some Balkan states versus Germany and Italy. No news of Spain. Japan is angry and astonished at the Russian-German pact; the cabinet has resigned and they are 'reconsidering' their European policy.

1st September 1939 - on board ketch 'Zareba,' Bay of Biscay

Warsaw and other Polish towns and cities have been bombarded by the Germans. Hilter has declared himself supreme head of the army. Children are being evacuated from Lond and all other big coastal cities. All officers have been called up. Food buying is restricted ('This does not mean there is a shortage.' says the BBC soothingly). Roosevelt has ordered all American battleships to be ready to sail, saying that war has begun between Germany and Poland.

Last night the Bay of Biscay decided to give us a piece of its mind. The wind, which had been against us all day, dropped completely, and the sea, whipped up by the thunderstorm, rose. Zareba lay rolling among the huge billows, each of which struck her a terrific blow on the sides. At every impact she groaned and shook, like a mortally weary trek ox about to founder.

About 2.am the sea subsided, and the creaks and groans and bangs grew fewer and quieter. This morning the sea is quietly heaving - regaining its breath, as it were, after last night's tumult.

3rd September 1939 - on board ketch 'Zareba,' off Spanish coast

The Germans invaded Poland, so we have kept our promise and declared war on Germany at eleven o'clock this morning.

5th September 1939 - on board ketch 'Zareba,' off Spanish coast

A perfect day! The sun and sea are like a benediction; so peaceful are all our surroundings that a war seems as fantastic and silly as a bad dream. But a Spanish cruiser is patrolling near us, and though we hoisted the red ensign and saluted, she made no sign of recognition.

The liner Athenia was sunk off the north-wast of Ireland; she carried fourteen hundred passengers, of whom a thousand were women and children and over three hundred were Americans. There are no mines there, so she must have been torpedoed. All were saved, except those killed in the explosion. Our aeroplanes flew unmolested over north and west Germany one night, and dropped six million pamplets in German. As if this would stop the Germans! Our planes also bombed Kiel, and there were some casualties. 

7th September 1939 - on board ketch 'Zareba,' Vigo, Spain

Last night we came into Vigo (Spain). After so many days at sea, and the shrieks and groans of a boat tortured by stormy weather and tumultuous seas, shore sounds and scents seem strange and yet familiar, like an old house revisited after a long absence. A dog barking, a car hooting, a train whistling, become curiously interesting.

This morning the first sound I heard was Don, 'Ooh la la, Ooh la la!' and when I went on deck, where should we by lying but in the middle of a German merchant fleet! There we were, safe in port, completely surrounded by enemy ships, forty-four of them. The sailors hung over the rails, bored and disconsolate, and presently a ships boat put outand rowed round us, with two high-collared, peak-capped, glaring, glowering ship's officers, who looked at us loathingly. We all sat on deck in pyjamas, eating porridge, laughing at them and looking scruffy on purpose.

10th September 1939 - on board ketch 'Zareba,' Vigo, Spain

We went to see the British Consul, who seemed very harassed.
"This is not the time to be pleasure cruising,' he said. 'I must advise you to keep near the coast and not to sail at night. There will be vessels without lights, and -er- other things.'
Don said, 'Any submarines about?' and at the look of horror he got, he added, 'Or am I asking an indiscreet question?

'You certainly are asking an indiscreet question,'' said the Consul, and with that he vanished with no apology or goodbye.

We went to the Spaniard who was acting as French consular agent to talk about Corentin's position since he was on the reserve of the Frency navy. He said he felf more French than Spanish, through long association with the French, that the Germans were 'une race inflame,' and that there woudl be no peace or safety on earth while any were left alive. We parted bosom friends and promised to write. He was a pleasant contrast to his British countrerpart.

Around the hill from the castle is a bar, and there we found Heather and an Englishman who had introduced himself. When he had left us two Germans sat at a nearby table, so by way of committing our first act of war we asked them to cme and drink with us. They were pleasant, non-commital, upset about the war, hoped it would be over soon, and wished for trade and peace. One was a captain of a ship with twelve passengers and a lot of cargo, while the other had just come back from Madrid, where he said there were very few houses left in the poor quarter (after the Civil War) and the people were living like animals.

It is hard to get food here. People are rationed, and hospitals have the best of what's going. The poor people steal bananas and fruit off the quay. It is worse in Madrid and the south, and yet the food there, for Cordoba alone produced enough oil for all of Spain, and Spain has exported oil this year.
Farewell to Vigo was a battle royal with the ship's chandler, who charged us nearly double for everything. Don stormed at him, laughed at him, twisted him inside out, threatened him, and in the end kept the stores and cut the bill in half. The old man recognised a master bargainer in the end and seemed amused.

Who wants buoys? We saw a dark lump floating, and when we passed it saw it was a branch of bananas - grea big, ripe, yellow ones. Corentin started whooping about the deck, and Don unshipped the boat hook and amid the wildest excitment we made the captain turn the ship round and hunt bananas. Corentin yelled and blasphemed, gaffed the bunches and passed them up. More and more appeared in the sea and after a while we were going through great shoals of them. A torpedoed ship's cargo, we thought - it couldn't be anything else.

12th September 1939 - on board 'Zareba,' off Portugal

Yesterday we arrived off Portugal. Fishing boats came out to us, we traded two branches of bananas for seven fish. The fishermen asked for bread; it seems strange there should be none here. Unfortunately we could not spare any.

War news: Canada and South Africa have come in. French troops are in Germany on a twenty-kilometre front. All the Arabs have declared for us. The Poles are nearly beaten but still fighting hard - seven German divisions have not yet succeeded in breaking them down.

Friendly messages come through from the German workers to their British counterparts, saying that though watched and persecuted by the Gestapo they still work for peace and a 'Socialist world.' They need bread, butter, oil, meat and trade, they say. Posters have been pinned on trees reading: 'Rather the heaven-appointed Kaiser than the beast o Berchtesgaden.' 

13th September 1939 - on board 'Zareba,' off Portugal

Very early in the morning a fishing trawler came up to us; the men asked what nationality we were, and when the captain answered, 'British,' they said we must not stay here; a German submarine was hanging around and had fired on a British ship two days before. 

They would not even wait for us to start our motors, but put a man on board us, made fast a line, and started for shore. We had been lying outside the three-mile limit on account of the fog. They towed us right in before they turned and steamed down towards Leixcos. They would not take any money; all they wanted was to get us safely into harbour. They said a ship had been sunk recently, and another had arrived in Brest with her engines hot from dodging a submarined.

The Portuguese have been wonderful to us, they are kind and courteous, friendly and hospitable. They are Britain's oldest allies, and they never forget it.

15th September 1939 - on board 'Zareba,' Leixoes, Portugal

We found a berth for 'Zareba' at Leicos, and now we can all go ashore. We go to Oporto by tram along the beautiful, balustraded seafront, through the awful slum where the houses are like kennels and the rooms like small boxes, the streets are narrow as footpaths, dark and curving, and into the fine, big square, under the seven-hundred year old cathedral, standing splendidly on its hill commanding town.

The British Consul here was kind  and helpful. He said that communications between here and France were very bad indeed, and the railways congested with troops. He knew the U-boats were along this coast, but thought it safe to go to Lisbon, so long as we stayed within the three-mile limit.

18th September 1939 - on board 'Zareba,' off Portugal coast.

At sea again. Before we left there was a message to say we must see the British Consul, so into Oporto we trailed once more. The message said there were no laying up facilities in Lisbon, the trip there might be dangerous, and would we not rather return to England with the yacht, hugging the coast all the way. In any case, said the Consul, he thought the two lady passengers should go by train and not risk the submarines. They might not sink us at sight, but they might force us ashore and then destroy Zareba.

Very crushed, we went to a cafe and held a council of war. We decided to stick together and chance it, so we went back to Leixcos where my spirits completely recovered when I bought a lovely Portuguese peasant hat for fivepence. We sailed out on the evening wind, and the northerly breeze carried us along in fine style. It was good to feel the boat moving again, and hear the familiar creak of wood and the hum of the rigging.

1st October 1939 - on board 'Zareba,'  Bay of Biscay

Despite - or perhaps because of - all our precautions, for Heather and I packed a box of food and one of clothes in case we were sent ashore in the dinghy, there was never a sign of a submarine until we came into Lisbon harbour, where there Portuguese ones were lying. This was a dissapointment to us, but not to the skipper, who was sunk twice in the last war and has not even yet quite got over those awful experiences.

1939 - Letter - 13th October 1939

From - General Frederick C.Heath-Caldwell, Linley Wood (Pass. Station Alsager, Parcels, Harecastle, Sth L.M.S. Telephone Kidsgrove 41. (FCHC, aged 80/81)
To - Capt C.H.Heath-Caldwell

My dear Cuthbert,

You know of course that Mr and Mrs Poole have been certain rooms here under an arrangement financially satisfying to both parties.

The rooms were practically unfurnished and not required. On the arrangement being made we put in some furniture to add to which the Pooles purchased themselves which was a great deal more than we put in. On leaving this house they will have to completely furnish another and your mother and I thought we should like to help them by giving them the contents of the rooms they are occupying. 

We did not think you would feel aggrieved considering that the bulk of the furniture in Linley Wood belongs to us; there is very little Caldwell furniture and it was given the Marsh furniture and we are leaving all to you except this little we are leaving to the Pooles. We have therefore signed documents making the gift. 

I do not know what will be the fate of Linley Wood, but I cannot think that either you or Jimmy will want to live here. It is much too large for these days, is very old and therefore expensive to keep up, the neighbourhood is not good. I was strongly advised to sell when I came in, and buy another Linley Wood elsewhere, but I resisted, and was sorry afterwards, but I and my brothers and sisters had known the place all our lives and hated the idea of (treehive?) with all the old associations. 
These considerations would have no influence on you and Jimmy.

If you do sell you will probably want to sell a great deal and odds and ends with it. So if you do I want another favour of you, and that is to let the Pooles have a first chance of buying off you anything they may like to keep. You would be saved auctioneer's expenses. I suggest you might ask a little over probate value. 

Your affectionate father,
F.C.Heath-Caldwell

Diary of Genesta Heath (ex Long) aged 39/40

6th December 1939 - on board 'Zareba,' 

We are returnig to England - we can't get any money sent out, Don wants to get into the air force, and Heather and I want to see Mother. 

The lovely Zareba lies up here, guarded by an old pilot.

24th December 1939. Spain.Trains again. We left on 12th December carrying a good hamper of food and wine, since everyone said we could get nothing in Spain, though heaps in France. But we gave it away to the Spanish. 

The last time I saw Irun (border with France) it was burning, and the flames seemed to leap halfway to heaven. The roar they made, and the crash of falling walls and roofs mingled with the sound of rifle fire, the snarl and crackle of machine guns and the booming of Irun's solitary big gun, were all very exciting. Now it is a cold, dreary, tragic place, half in ruins still. Walls pitted by bullets. Windows with no panes. Grey faced, hard-eyed, stricken people.

26th December 1939. Paris - London

At 7.am we arrived in Paris and stayed, very comfortably, at the Hotel Crystal. Money was sent from England. Heather and I sacked the shops.

The shops are quite brightly lit at night. They are not as they were, but you can see your way about. The restaurants are crammed, but everything shuts at 11.pm. A barman sadly said that before the war he never got to bed before 8.am but now he had to get up at 8.pm. It had upset his system. Here and there English women in uniform walked about the streets, regarded by the French with polite and veiled amusement.

On the whole - very few uniforms - great gaiety - and money circulating freely.
After six days we started for England.

The train was normal - warm - good food - scheduled for Calais, but ran on to Boulogne.
The steamer, painted grey, was very full, mostly troops on Christmas leave. All civilians were herded below as we left port, and made to put on their life-preservers.

The biting wind which swept the deck kept us in the saloon, so the sad thrill of seeing again those white cliffs was lost to me.

Again we had to go below as we drew in, and finally emerged to find ourselves in Dover. The customs people were charming to Heather and me, and passed us, and our smart new clothes, through with the slightest of duties. But they pounced on Don. His passport issued in Shanghai, visaed for Russia, was too much for them. There were endless questions - where did he get the camera. Who owned the yacht, who were we. How long had I known him. They went through his diaries, and he started reading out an endless letter to his father. Three hours after the train had gone, they decided he was harmless.
They became angelically kind and solicitous. A taxi was found, then a restaurant, then a train. Tired, fed-up, and cold, we silently sat in the back carriage, gloomily approaching London.

Memoirs of J.A.Heath-Caldwell - aged 8/9

After that I was sent off to a boarding school near Winchester, at a place called Winton House. Now Winton House was about 100 miles away to the East of Wiltshire from where my father had his parish, and my father had been there forty years previous to me, and his headmaster was very fond of elephants. He had ornaments of elephants all over the place and every kind of elephant thing you could imagine, that was in my father’s time.

Winchester was a bustling city even in Roman times and it’s had 1,500 years at least of interesting history, far longer than London’s history.

At that age, when I was less than eight, I was shown the Grand Hall and the Round Table allegedly King Arthurs, but it was constructed in about the 1600’s. So it can’t have been King Arthurs even if he existing, and I think he did. And a legendary history of Arthur was written in about 1135 by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Sir Thomas Malory wrote his prose romance ‘Morte d’Arthur’ in the late fifteenth century and Lord Tennyson wrote Idylls of the King in the middle of the 19th Century.

When I got there, Winton House, the headmaster was called Mr C.L.D. Fawcus, and I think most of the people who left there at the age of 13, and I went there at the age of eight, went on to the public school called Winchester, which is the public school in Winchester.

(Fawcus, Harold James, who died on July 13, 2002, aged 83, succeeded his father as honorary secretary of the Cryptics in 1949 and held the office for 50 years, combining it in the 1980s with a five-year stint as the club's president. The Cryptics were founded in 1910 by J. G. Fawcus, Harold's father, and three fellow undergraduates at New College, Oxford. One of the club's original aims, which still survives, was to encourage cricket in schools, hence the high proportion of schoolmasters among its members. For many years Harold Fawcus's meticulous organisation, backed up by letters written in his own hand, was fitted into an already busy life as headmaster of Dunchurch-Winton Hall. )

And there round about this time, coming back to the parish now, just over the other side of the church and the village was the manor house and this was the farm house that farmed the land over and about the downs behind on the eastern side of the parish church in the village. Now what happened then was that the son of the Walkers, shot himself with a shot gun, he was aged about 18, and he apparently had had an unhappy love affair with a girl somewhere in the surrounding district whilst he worked in a paint factory in Warminster I was given all his toys that his parents gave away all his toys to me so I got a little play fort, soldiers made of lead, quite a few different toys and of course this was my first experience of suicide.

The Walker family sold up, the memories that house held for them were all bad and as he was known as a gentleman farmer, that was he had quite a lot of his own money besides having to survive on his own farm, he was probably quite well off and so they left and another farmer came called the Listers. The Listers, the main thing about them was that they had no family. Mr Lister was not a “gentleman,” i.e. he had to make his farm pay for his wife. Mrs Lister kept greyhounds and she used to exercise her greyhounds just the other side of a small paddock of about two and a half acres that my father had with the church, this paddock and the quite large rectory that he lived in. And she used to whistle which I remember quite well. And her hounds won the Waterloo Cup, a very prestigious Greyhound racing event. 
. 
The War went on and I was at school and a big air raid shelter was dug in the school grounds in case of air raids. Another thing about that school was it had a swimming pool, there was a footbridge across the road that it was situated on, across to a  playing field and a rifle range, and at the age of eight I learned to shoot with a 22 rifle there. We played soccer against other schools. Everything was new to me at the boarding school and I was very unhappy for many months after arriving there and it so happened that my headmaster’s and headmaster’s wife had a child who was about the same age as I was, but that comes into it later.

This school, I can remember the first time something happened at school that rather upset me, mainly because I had not read the notice boards, my reading was not wonderful at that time at the age of about eight one is just getting the hang of reading. And one day the whole school seem deserted and I could not understand where everybody was, and then I heard that they were out in the school sports pavilion by the cricket ground and there they were having a strawberry feast which some well off parent had shouted for the whole school so they had cream and strawberries and sugar and they had it in the pavilion on the cricket ground near by.

So that, I can remember well. Another thing I can remember is learning to swim. I learnt the breaststroke and that kept me afloat. I was never taught anything about the crawl or any other strokes however I could keep afloat and knew breaststroke because it was rather like how a frog swims.

And another thing was I used to get head aches in Spring, in hay fever season and was sent to bed in the afternoons. The other thing was that the father of the young man in the village who had committed suicide visited me and he somehow or other thought here was some other child that he could take an interest in to replace the interest that they had in their own son. He paid a visit or two but I don’t think I reciprocated well to that. I can remember he gave me a florin.

I did relate to a parent called the McDonald sons and there I went and stayed a day or so with them near Winchester. 

There was a swimming pool in this school, there was one long hut where there was a school room outside the main school and that was my first experience of boarding school, we did a certain amount of art. I can remember decorating lamp shades and making lamp shades. I can remember one experience, I was running down the passage way to get to our classroom and I tripped and fell and caught my eye on the corner of the table there, on the corner of the steps outside the classroom and I gave myself a black eye and it was lucky that it was not worse.

I can remember the 22 range, and I can remember some gardens, we had little plots of about a square metre, not more and there we had plants that we could grow in it just to show us what a good little bit about growing things. 

I think I enjoyed French; I was not overjoyed at Latin, maths was all right, maths was ok. I can’t say that there were any subjects that I took a dislike to. I think I was quite average, nobody ever told me whether I was extra bright, I just took school as it came, you took so many subjects and the curriculum was a full time curriculum being a boarding school.

I remember getting into trouble because we had black marks if our behaviour was not as required and if we got more than a certain number of black marks we got what was called a swishing, that was we paid a visit to the headmaster’s study and I can remember almost queuing up to have a swishing, for bad marks.

Another punishment was being made to sit and do nothing on a bench for quarter of an hour. Mr Faurcus, our headmaster used a cane about three feet long and I think the term swishing was the noise of the rod on our behinds, and then we would go to the loo after that and inspect the damage. And we very often had corrugated bottoms where the cane had hit us. We all took it quite for granted.

One of my school chums ran an insurance scheme, and it was a certain amount of talk whether it was legal or not, we paid him a certain number of sweets each week and if you got a swishing he paid you, so more or less you were insuring yourself against swishing only there was a little bit of argument over whether it was legal to do that as you were breaking the law to get swished. 

There were about sixty pupils. 1939 came and the war came and this long air raid shelter, a big trench in the grounds was built in case anything happened, air raids and things. In actual fact Winchester had no more than a few stray bombs for the whole war and those bombs were not aimed particularly, they may have just been jettisoned from a German aircraft. However, there was one rich parent who pushed the headmaster to evacuate us up North, so the whole school moved from Winchester to a place half of the way between Rugby up in Warwickshire and Coventry.

It was also quite near a large wireless station which was used by the Navy for communications for  submarines and Coventry was noted for its machine tools manufacturing and Rugby had a large general electric company where they made electric motors and big generators and things like that and I think the idea was, I was told by my parents, come the war there were a lot of manufacturers up in that area who were making a lot of money and who would then be able to afford the fees to send their children to boarding school there. 

Bilton Grange.

We first went to a school where the vice principal was our headmaster’s brother, in a place called Dunchurch near Rugby. The whole school moved, some parents it may not have been convenient for them but most of us, perhaps twenty or so dropped out and did not move North with us but most of us did and we came to this place called Bilton Grange, which may have at one time been a converted country house. It was called Bilton Grange and it had a great view over some sort of valley, a very broad valley but I never looked at maps at that age so I don’t know what river it was, anyway I could always look up that now.

It was overlooking a large valley about ten miles across, or eight miles across, and we amalgamated with this other school, maybe some of the children there had dropped out and they may have found it convenient to amalgamate in order to survive the war years, and, this is what interested me the most, was that one of the masters at Winton House drove me from my home in Wiltshire up to Warwickshire, where both of us were new to this school.

My parents had been told that he offered to give me a lift up to the new school. It was lovely weather, lovely drive, about a two hour drive, we witnessed the whole school on parade down a very very long hallway and on either side of the hallway were cases and cases of all sorts of what you normally find in museums, big shells from all over the world and various stuff and birds and things and they were all made out in glass cases on top of things down the width of this hall and it struck this new master that it was very much like the army.

We arrived to see that whole school parading before they marched down to the dining hall there. This particular school had boy scouts in it which I did not partake in. Our quarters in the school were separate dormitories right at the top of a wooden stair case. We were near Rugby, so Rugby was one of the games we played in the afternoon, That was in the winter term. We had soccer one term in the winter or the autumn and in summer we had the cricket, and I got to know the Headmaster’s wife, this was picking fruit from their orchard and their kitchen garden. On one occasion again crime and punishment, I didn’t know the layout of the school and there were some toilets five yards away from Mr Faurcus’s study.  

Fruit picking with the headmasters wife, I can’t remember, I remember talking to her, but I was on to this business, about four of us were fooling around in some toilets which were about five yards from my headmaster’s study and we were making a noise, we all swung down, being a bit rugger minded being near Rugby, and we made a noise, some noise there, and we just swung door to the door of the toilet when the headmaster appeared behind us and grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and pulled me up about five paces up into his study and I got four swishings, four strokes of his cane for that, and it was such a sudden crime and punishment that it certainly took my breath away. It was a curious effect of crime and punishment that was. I if I could have hit him I would have.

In some ways I was sorry to leave Bilton Grange. While there the army exercised in the fields just outside the school grounds and I saw a 2” mortar crew tending their 2” mortar. And a pupil called Critchley-Waring came with us to Dunchurch Winton Hall and his parents had a horse drawn carriage with large wheels clad with rubber. It was very comfortable to ride in around Dunchurch.

And a Bilton Grange there was a class for girls and daughters of the members of the staff, and Anne Fawcas, our Headmaster’s daughter was one of the girls and she may have continued in that class when the rest of us moved about ½ mile to Dunchurch Hall when we became Dunchurch Winton Hall. And I think we moved largely because C.L.D. Fawcas fell out with his brother, there must have been bad family blood somewhere there. And the war was raging, though we did not read the newspapers but at home in the Rectory we always listened to the BBC News at 9pm. 

And at Bilton Grange I came top equal with another pupil from the pre-amalgamated Bilton Grange, in the school singing competition. And the pupils of Bilton Grange were boy scouts. And I got on very well with Mrs Macklin, the Head Master’s wife. No doubt she knew I came from a prestigious family with lots of money, they thought C.E.Heath and various Admirals as being well known in our family. And they formed a Girls School or class with Bilton Grange and Ann Fawcus was one of those. 

The next thing that happened was that I went to school at the age of eight, having spent a period of about one year in the local parish school at Kingston Deverill. During the war the old rectory situated in Kingston Deverill had been occupied by soldiers. Finally, in about 1942/43 the Americans occupied it, and it was a large rectory surplus to the Church’s requirements but it did very well as an army camp. It happened that the school lady who taught the children lived in the parish school about 50 yards below the rectory, I was on my holidays, my father said to me when he was opening his mail at breakfast one morning, “this is interesting,’ he said, “I’ve got a poison pen letter here” and the letter said  that the school lady who was in charge of the parish school  was pregnant, and my father thought it was just a poison pen letter and that is all it was.

However, as the months went by it became obvious that the news in that letter was a one hundred percent correct. And the school lady had to leave and another lady took her place. So I saw the result of possibly soldiers child causing a big change to the life of a women who I had great respect for. It taught me a lesson not to do what some American soldier had done. Nobody admitted to writing the letter. It was anonymous. 

Prep school was near Winchester, and at the beginning of the war in 1939 great trenches were built in the school grounds for an air raid shelter for everybody in the school could shelter in and it was just a large ditch dug out, excavated in the grounds with corrugated iron put on top of that. At the same time my parents in their rectory back there in Wiltshire, they also had an air raid shelter, there’s was in the haha at the end of the garden, which was a way that people had so that at the boundary you did not have to have a wall, so that you could admire the view.

A ditch was dug, on one side there was a bank and the side of the ditch, was generally built with a wall to prevent the earth coming back and any animals that tried to get through first of all had to descend into the ditch and then they had to jump up this wall about five or six feet high. They were quite a feature of a lot of gardens in England in those days when a view wanted to be preserved.

Just before the war my god parents came down to visit  us at the rectory and he took me out to follow army maneuvers on the Salisbury plain area. It was a huge military area where my father’s parish was. There was sometimes live ammunition had been used and we were told a story of some children who had attacked an unexploded shell with a hammer and they had been killed or injured by it.

So that was part of the life in this particular village which was in the grounds of the school of infantry, so when I used to come back for holidays from my prep school quite often I would see the army in maneuvers, either coming on onc occasion, they burst through the hedge on the left hand side of garden, several of them ran across the garden and then over the kitchen garden wall.

At other times I had seen tanks coming down from the hill, through the farmers gates, of course in war time they would have gone straight through fences, they would not have been worrying, but they had to take some regard of the farmers fences so they had to pass through the farmers gates, and I have seen come over the hill like that.

On another occasion on going out with a walk with my father, walking on the downs, perhaps to pick mushrooms or blackberries, we ran into maneuvers on at least one occasion. I remember once there were a large number of soldiers advancing from the left, and rounds of mortar going over us to the right and it really was quite a thing to see for a young boy with his father. There wasn’t any shadow of doubt that there was a war on and that soldiers fought it. 

Up in Monckton Deverill, about one and a half miles away one afternoon I was following the maneuvers and I happened to talk to a young man who was polishing his bayonet, and he asked me about myself and told him I lived in the rectory. I also told him I had three sisters. And we went on that afternoon, we came to a farm house surrounded by a small wood of fir trees, and they asked me if I knew the area, and I said yes, and they said they wanted to get somewhere in behind them, and I said ok and follow me, and I actually had not been there before but I knew the rough layout of the farms with a patch of  fir trees around them and a barn of tow with a section of plot of about an acre or two.

So I led these men, about a section of infantry around this wood and we came up behind the defenders who, and there was a lot of banging with their rifles and blank ammunition and we reckoned we had taken them by surprise in the back and had won, so that was quite a success.

I went back home but before I went back home they gave me one of their meat pies that was baked in the field kitchen that fed them. I noticed that there were a lot of potatoes in the meat pie and not enough meat.  Anyway, this chap that I met cleaning his bayonet, his name was Donald. And a few days later he turned up at home in the rectory and he came each night when he paid a visit each night he came up and said good night to me and he got on rather well with my middle sister, who was there at the time, Diana.

A year or two later in his military career he found himself in India and in Assam, north of Burma and to the north east of India. And from there he sent us boxes of tea during the war and this was a great thing to have as tea was rationed along with all sorts of other foods. There the tea came back to us in boxes. Unfortunately at the same time news came that Donald was missing in action presumed dead. 

Around about this time our school during the first few years of war was evacuated up north. That was a great eye opener for me, and I was there in two locations.

At the age of 13 I had the chance to take the common entrance examination to an exam for entry into the Royal Navy. This was quite an event. My grandfather had tried to join the navy but he failed the exam. That was around about 1870. But he later became a Major General in the Royal Engineers and finished up his career as an Air Commodore organizing the Royal Air Force.

Anyway he failed to get into the Navy, but for some reason or other, I don’t quite know how, I got a scholarship into the navy. My father was not too pleased when he found that he still had to pay the school fees. I suppose in times of peace he might have got off paying the school fees because scholarship people were supposed to have got their education free.

That happened when I was 13. The actual interview down in London was quite a exercise and quite an adventure. The headmaster accompanied me down to London by train, we went to the Admiralty, I did not know where I was going but he obviously knew the way, and their my interview was just after lunch time and once while I was waiting for them to process me or for me to go in front of the board I was asked to sit down and write an essay about what country I would like to visit most at the end of the war.

So I thought for awhile and thought I might say Switzerland, but I thought that would be a bit, and I had another choice, so my choice was that I would like to visit Poland. And I did that because I could then get in all the reasons for why the war had started in 1939. That was four years previously and that must have gone down well, and I was perhaps just lucky and I also had a word from the father of a fellow pupil at my prep school who had been the first man to dismantle a magnetic mine on beach without being blown up. Other bomb disposal men had been killed because mines and shells and bombs were sometimes booby trapped so that if somebody tried to get in to them and find out how they worked that would cause the mine.