JGL Memoirs: My Parents

I was born on 23 February 1925 at St Thomas Hospital in London. I was christened at St. Martins–in-the-Fields on Trafalgar Square. The family then lived for two years in Surbiton, on the Thames west of London where they ran a private hotel “Becleuch” without much success.

My mother had been a nursing sister and my father a first mate on ships plying between Durban in South Africa and Calicut in India. He had previously been on sailing ships (windjammers) and sailed around Cape Horn three times. He was born on 3 August 1900 in Reading and left school at 14 to join the merchant navy as a cadet, which schooled young men as well as teaching them to sail.

My mother was born on 23 September 1892 in Roscarbery, Co. Cork, Ireland. She grew up on a substantial gentleman’s estate “Burgatia” owned by her father John Deane. The family were English Protestants and during the “troubles” with the Shin Fein the house was burnt down in 1922 and the family threatened with being shot, so they left for Northamptonshire in England, where they received another farm as compensation from the British Government.

In the meantime my mother had gone to South Africa with her friend Rita Jago to follow her nursing career. I never knew she had had T.B. as a girl of 17 in 1909 and spent some time in a clinic in Switzerland as a cure . This seemed to have worked. My mother never had brothers and sisters because her father died of T.B. at. age 36 in 1894. Her mother Annie married Tom Kingston in 1902 and they had a son Fuller Kingston in 1905 who later became a great friend and help to me as a young man while I was studying in the U.K. My parents were married in Durban in December 1922.

During the First World War, my mother was a nursing sister at a military hospital in Southampton, taking care of injured soldiers who had been shipped back from the trenches in France.