MY PARENTS
Before I was Born!!!
Where it all began
----------------------------------
MY FATHER
Let me start with my Father. Born on the 27th of July 1920, my Father (Thomas Hilary Barton) was
an enigma of a man. He was at once outstandingly good looking, proud, vain,
strong and had a rich warm sense of humour. Yet in contrast he could also be incredibly
vulnerable, private and emotional. In my
childhood I knew only certain facts about his life, and he was defensively reticent
if I pressed for more information than he was prepared to give. He bore emotional scars that he would never
share onto his death.
He had grown up in Australia as an orphan in a home,
somewhere in the vicinity of Lavender Bay, Sydney. Of this he said precious little.
As a young teenager he joined the Merchant Navy and sailed the globe. He would on occasion tell little anecdotes of his adventures in the China Seas, and how big rough “Stokers” would adopt him, take the youngster under their wings, and show him the joys of the opium dens and brothels.
He never spoke of this, nor of any of his family. Right up until the day he died he never shared his childhood with anyone, not even his wife. The best we knew was that in his early teens he joined the Merchant Navy, returning to the UK at the outbreak of WW2 to join the RAF.
I have often wondered about his heritage, his "story". After his passing I found his Death Certificate, which to my amazement revealed that he had been born in north Wales to Thomas Herbert Barton and Constance Barton. But still I knew no more - why was he an Orphan, did he have siblings, Uncles, Aunties. He was an enigma.
And then recently (2015) Anne Waters contacted me. Grand Daughter of my one of my grand fathers brothers. She had been searching, establishing a Genealogy, for the family branch (if any) of my Father. She said that he had disappeared without a trace. It transpired that my Father had two Sisters. And then Anne supplied me with a note that one of her Aunties had made when exploring her genealogy many years ago.
"Bert was in the Civil Service. He met his wife Connie when he was invalided in the Great War. She was a hospital nurse. They married and then she decided to become a Catholic. She got very obsessed with it and gave as much as she could afford to the church. After a while she began to give away all her housekeeping money, and took to pawning her husbands best clothes to get enough money for food. She then redeemed them on a Friday when she had her housekeeping money. Eventually this was not enough as she gave more and more money to the church., so she bought things on Hire Purchase and immediately sold them. But when she was found out and her debts were substantial, she committed suicide by walking in the river Dee until she drowned. Bert had a substantial amount of his pay deducted to pay the debts and this took the rest of his working life."
Bert, broke and unable to support his children, and this in the mid 1920s, they are taken into care, and they become orphans.
----------------------------
As a young teenager he joined the Merchant Navy and sailed the globe. He would on occasion tell little anecdotes of his adventures in the China Seas, and how big rough “Stokers” would adopt him, take the youngster under their wings, and show him the joys of the opium dens and brothels.
At the outbreak of the Second World War he travelled to
Britain and joined the RAF, becoming a bomber navigator and Squadron Leader.
The tales of the war were equally sketchy. Occasionally he would share memories
of wild young men becoming horrendously drunk and womanising outrageously at
dances. The story of Ken, his best
friend, who would always look (and I quote) for the “Biggest and Fattest girls
at the dance – because they were dead ‘certs’ - and they were always grateful” was
one of his favorites. But then this was balanced against another memory, the
day the Lancaster Bomber crashed with violence into a runway, and my father sat unhurt - next to Ken who had been neatly split down the middle by hot metal.
Toward the end of the war my Father met my Mother, a WAF,
and married her 3 weeks later. They spent some time posted to the Pembrey
Airbase, an irony in that later both his children would live in Wales. Following the Wars end my Father had a high profile. He met and had Tea on the terraces of Westminster with Winston Churchill. He was a key figure in the management and operational delivery of the Berlin Airlift. As part of that activity he also attended the Nuremberg War Trials as an observer.
But subsequently it transpired that the war had taken its toll, and ultimately he had to go for formal “Rehabilitation” - of this he never spoke. Today this would be called Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.
But subsequently it transpired that the war had taken its toll, and ultimately he had to go for formal “Rehabilitation” - of this he never spoke. Today this would be called Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.
There was a moment when he had the opportunity post war to
train as a doctor, but he took another path, that of running a highly
successful plantation business in Nigeria. It is here, as a very wealth couple,
that my story was to begin.
MY MOTHER
My Mothers story is perhaps a little less colourful, but no
less rich. Dorothy Humphries was born on the 23rd March 1923 in
Lancashire, to a traditional working class Lancashire
family.
She was one of the most genuine, honest and loving person I
ever met. And that isn’t just because she was my mother, all who met her were
of the same view. She was loyal and tenacious, and would always put others
before herself, and would always find the silver lining in even the most dire
of circumstances.
She had by all account a happy childhood growing with her
brother Jack and sister May in the village
of Poulton near Blackpool .
She` was 18 years old when World War 2 commenced, and soon after, in 1941, joined
the WAF as an Equipment Clerk.
Her time
in the WAF she would later describe as relatively mundane, but her life would
be forever changed by the whirlwind romance with my father. The stunning
diamond engagement ring he bought for her she wore all her life, and today it
occasionally adorns my wife’s hand. My
parents married on 13th of
April 1944 at the Parish Church of Poulton-le-Fylde Lancashire .
Her life path would now merge with my Fathers, and by the early 1950s
they were living in affluence, with my Sister to be born in 1952, 4 years
before my arrival in 1956.
A BEGINNING
