A short family biography by Caroline Bury, written in December 2012.
Our father was born in the Argentine on 29th September 1912 where his father was building a bridge over the River Plate. He was killed doing this when Dad was 3 months old. His mother, Dorothea, and her baby were caught by the Germans on their way back to England and taken prisoner. Grandmother did not have enough milk for her baby who was fed on whatever could be found on a war ship. They were returned to England. Dad always blamed this for a poor digestive system.
His education was paid by an Uncle (I think) called Fraser. He went to Eton and was very good at running and steeplechasing. When he left school he went into the family business which was timberbroking — getting wood from Scandinavia to England. I gather he hated it. As soon as the possibility of war became apparent he and some friends decided they would join the army as regulars, and chose a regiment called the 12th Lancers.
They were stationed at Sandhurst. Dad fought against Rommel in the African desert and was taken prisoner and sent to a prison camp in northern Italy. He and a couple of fellow officers escaped. Peter Burn was his CO and Van de Burg another officer from the regiment. Peter B said he was going to wear his Sam Brown and Dad and Van de Burg could not persuade him to throw it away, so they decided they would all go separately. Peter got recaptured. Dad walked down the length of Italy posing as an Italian peasant and was helped a lot by the priests at the monasteries. He got to the American lines in the South and was sent back to England.
I was living with my mother and her mother and an American called Doris in a cottage at North Aston in Oxfordshire. I heard all this talk about this man, your Daddy coming back, and had no idea who he was or what this meant. I remember hearing a male voice one evening and creeping down the stairs and peeping through a crack in the door and seeing this huge man in army uniform talking to Mum and Grandmother. I found he impinged on our well settled and female household and apparently behaved very badly. He fell off a motorbike and dislocated his shoulder and had to wear an aeroplane splint that held his shoulder at a right angle and must have been very painful and inhibiting — though not enough to stop him picking me up and dumping me in a bedroom because I had bitten him.
A returned prisoner of war did not see active service again so he was sent to Sandhurst as an instructor. We lived in a caravan in a field near there. I have hazy memories of a grey Shire that pulled the caravan, and of going on the back of a bicycle with Mum, and causing a greenstick fracture to my leg by getting tangled in the spokes of the bike.
After the war we moved back to North Aston and Dad got out of the Army and went back to Churchill and Simm timberbroking, and liked it no better. He had a flat in London where he stayed in the week and we were at North Aston. Some time around here my mother’s mother died, but I didn’t go to a funeral or really understand what had happened.
In about 1947 he bought Pinkhill, helped financially by his mother, and got out of the woodbroking business. Patricia was born in 1944 at North Aston, Tessa in 1946 and Jane in 1948. We moved to Pinkhill and it was very primitive: no running water, indoor bathroom or loo, or electricity, just an old copper with a hand pump and a very old wood stove. The only heating was from wood fireplaces. As time went on Dad rectified all this and got electricity, water, a bathroom, a fridge (what a luxury) and a slow combustion stove called an Esse that heated the water and was used for cooking and warming cold bums — which we were told would give us piles.
Dad had a vision of what England would need after the war to feed itself and grew as much as he could: cattle, milk, sheep, and corn. Pinkhill was very self-sufficient and grew a lot of what was needed to feed its animals. He was given POWs to help him get established but they couldn’t understand English, nor did they want to, and were reluctant workers, so were not much help really.
Pinkhill was well run and a wonderful place to be brought up. Michael was born in 1953 and John in 1957.
Dad had been very taken by Catholicism on his trip down Italy and converted not long after we went to Pinkhill. Mum did too and I felt partially to keep the family peace. Us girls were sent to a convent at Lechlade and were, I felt, swept into the fold with no choice. I was probably the only one old enough to have had a choice.
Mum died in 1967 of a brain tumour and Michael in 1974 from a motorbike accident.
Dad married Odile in 1968 and she was fantastic for him. She came to Pinkhill as a student and helper to Mum when she was doing a course at Oxford. They ran Pinkhill till it got too much for Dad and none of Dad’s children wanted to take it on.
They moved to Salford in the Cotswolds and stayed there till Dad died in April 1993.