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Chapter one - page 9
Who was uncle Tom, he must I think have been related to the Liverton family, Claude may very well have met him whilst he and his mother visited her family at Barnstaple. For this they must have done as often in later years Barnstaple seemed to draw both Gladys and Claude like a magnet. The crumbling royal houses of Europe ably assisted by politicians were in the meantime shaping events that would climax in the greatest of all tragedies, what would be called The First World War. On the 28th of June 1914 the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot in Sarajevo, the unfortunate Archduke being the sacrificial lamb in a well-orchestrated charade that resulted in all out European war.
In England jingoistic politicians boasted how ‘the boys would be home by Christmas’. Men in their thousands flocked to the recruiting centres, in October Claude would be just sixteen. And here for the first time is where Dame Fortune clearly shows herself.
I have always had that feeling that a guardian angel watched over both father and I. The Sea Scout troop to which Claude belonged was under the leadership of an officer in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. This officer asked father what his intentions were; of course he said he would enlist. |
Every sailor leaves a girl behind, Claude’s sister Gladys of whom he was exceptionally fond for his entire life, his entry in his diary on the day she died said it all, ‘A terrible day’ |
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Unlike so many the Naval Reserve Officer had no illusions as to either the nature nor duration of the war and predicted years of trench fighting in which casualties would be catastrophic. ‘I can get you into the Reserve’ he told young Claude, the die was cast and a young man’s destiny decided.
GEORGE, CAPE PROVINCE
In another far off land, a girl was growing up in another world. We left Katherine and her apothecary husband James Henry Morris in the dry dusty town of Oudtshoorn in the Karroo. James did not linger in Oudtshoorn, understandably because an Englishman in that almost exclusively Afrikaans town would have found life very difficult during the Boer War. He did not have to take his family far, to the other side of the Outeniqua Mountains, crossing by way of Bain’s pass in an ox wagon, there was no other means of transport then. Over the mountains overlooking the distant Indian Ocean was the settlement (a dorp) of George, as far from Oudtshoorn as chalk is from cheese. George’s streets were wide, wide enough to turn a full span of oxen without ‘outspanning’, boardered by shady oaks gullies with fresh mountain water flowed down either side of York Street. Here, in Thatched Cottage a beautiful old Cape Dutch house James and Katherine raised their five beautiful daughters, they were bright and all five would be sent to university or colleges, almost unheard of in those times.
The fourth daughter was christened Ruth, born at home in George on June 21st 1902 she was like her sisters dark haired with blue eyes. Ruth’s early schooling was at the George Church of England school that her mother had done much fund raising for, the assistant laundress of Dawlish was now the friend of the Bishop of George and a leading lady in the church and rapidly growing town. Her husband James no longer the young ‘disappointment’ of his family, he was rejected by the Navy on health grounds, not the shy young Welsh apothecary’s apprentice from Pembroke Dock but proprietor of J.H. Morris, Chemist founded in 1902, information proudly displayed on the gabled front of his new premises in Hibernia Street. |
| James Henry Morris, possibly before his marriage to Katherine. |
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James had prospered, well liked by both English and Afrikaners alike he was now the owner of a number of business premises in the town and like his wife, a leading light in the church. George’s rapid growth was in very large part a repetition of Dawlish, a sleepy hollow transformed by the coming of a railway and James had taken full advantage of it.
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