88. War Baby: a brief note on my family background

War Baby
War with Germany had been declared in September 1939. In October my father, advised by the War Office to continue his teacher training work in the Southern Sudan, shipped out from Liverpool docks in the first war convoy to go through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal.

I was born in the Queen Mary Nursing Home, Edinburgh, on 23^rd June 1940, a few weeks after the Dunkirk troop evacuations. A few days after I was born there was an air raid warning and everyone in the nursing home went down to the shelter.

Mum, my big sister Elizabeth and I stayed with my grandparents in Greenbank Crescent Edinburgh for a spell before moving to a cottage in Gorebridge, a mining village about twelve miles from Edinburgh. It had no air raid shelter and in October, during a particularly close air raid, Mum evacuated us all to under the bed. For most the war years of 1941 to 1944 we lived in Glen Devon, about five miles from Dollar in Clackmannanshire.

I have no recollection of course of any of that but I do remember, probably from when I was four, that the Polish Free Army had a camp in the hills on the other side of the road from our rented cottage in Glen Devon. I liked to spend time there playing in their bivouacs. Our biggest excitement of the war was when we were not allowed out because a local bull was loose and prowling around our road. Among my Mum's collection of mementoes from that time was a curl of my hair.


 
The Deeks Family
My great great great grandfather was John Deeks, a corn chandler in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. Deeks was a common name in the low lying parts of East Anglia in the eighteenth century, a name that was probably a variation of Dykes, meaning someone who lived by a ditch or a dyke.  

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century there was a lot of movement from the Suffolk area into London. The actress Barbara Windsor, best known for her parts in the Carry On films and Eastenders, was born in Shoreditch in 1937, the only child of John Deeks, a barrow boy, and Rose Ellis, a dressmaker. She too can trace her ancestry back to Suffolk; her great great great grandfather, Golding Deeks, was a Suffolk bricklayer who moved to London to find work.

I scarcely met my grandfather, William Charles Deeks (1876-1946). In a classic story of office boy to boardroom, he worked his way up to become a partner of George H Penney and Co., export buying agents in the City of London. I have a vague recollection of a dapper little man who said little and disappeared into his office almost immediately after he arrived home from work.

My Deeks grandmother- “Grannie Deeks” – ruled the family roost in Honeywell Road, Wandsworth Common, London. My father Norman Spencer Deeks (1906-1987; always called ‘Spen’) was the second of five boys.

The others were my Uncles Joe (1904-1992), Rod (1908-1994), Harry (1911-1945) - killed at the end of the war, and Geoff (1924-1976) - accidentally run over on a pedestrian crossing.

Granny Deeks served crustless salmon and cucumber sandwiches for afternoon tea and we had to have our cups of tea delicately poised, little pinkies crooked in line with her directives, desperately minding our Ps and Qs. But we were never a "posh" family. Granny was a publican's daughter and a wonderful pianist with a classical repertoire and Grandad Deeks was the son of a cashier in a mining company and grandson of a Mayfair hairdresser.

The Henderson Family
My mother’s family were from Edinburgh. Her mother Kate, my Grannie Henderson, had eight children only three of whom lived, my Aunt Lena (b.1906), my Uncle Peter (b.1907) and my mother Catherine (always known as Cathie; b.1910).
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Before her marriage my Grannie Henderson (nee Thomson) had been in service as a table maid. My grandfather, Peter Henderson, owned two family grocery shops in Edinburgh but he died in 1944 so I scarcely knew him.

My Mum met my Dad on a Thursday evening in September 1930 at the Edinburgh Medical Mission Dispensary in the Cowgate, a very poor part of the old city. She was helping out there while waiting to start training as a State Registered Nurse at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and my Dad, who was a maths and physics master at Loretto, an Edinburgh Public School, was doing some voluntary work helping with dressings. They were engaged the following year and married in June 1935 after completion of my mother’s nursing studies. In December 1935 they left by sea for Nigeria to work with the Church Missionary Society at St. Andrew’s College Oyo, founded by CMS in 1896 and the first teacher training college in the country. My Dad taught sciences and my Mum ran the school dispensary. As I have reported elsewhere I didn't meet my Dad until I was three years old.



Some 1943 Family Photos