Elizabeth O’Reilly (1915–2006)
Elizabeth O’Reilly (1915–2006)
My mother was the youngest of four children, two boys and two girls. She was born in India on 11 November 1915, in the town of Shahjehanpore (United Provinces: now Shajehanpora), a place named after the famous prince who built the Taj Mahal. Four weeks later, in the Catholic Church of Bareilly, she was baptised ‘Elizabeth, Josephine, Alice’, her first name being that of an aunt or cousin of her father. The celebrant was a Carmelite priest, and her godmother (from whom she took her second name) was Josephine Clements, whose husband was a businessman in Shahjehanpora.
Early life
When she was about five or six years old, she was taken by her mother, Alice, to Bruges in Belgium, where her sister and brothers were at school. The journey by sea lasted several weeks, and took them through the Suez Canal, across the Mediterranean and up the Atlantic coast of Spain. When they arrived, they stayed in a hotel (Le Coronet d’Or), from where she was sent to a day nursery, run by nuns. There she could remember her elder sister, Patricia, helping to make her bed. Then hermother took her to England, where they stayed near the home of a Mrs Sander, whose sonswere at school with my mother’s brothers in Bruges (Mr Sander was a landscape gardener, famous for his orchids). After that they returned to India and stayed there until my mother was ten or eleven, when (after the death of her sister) she travelled back to England to attend the boarding school, the Holy Child Jesus convent in Sevenoaks in Kent, where Patricia had been a pupil. Her years there were not happy. In the vacations she stayed with registered ‘holiday’ families. Her mother interviewed them in advance, but the experience was not pleasant. In these years she saw her mother at intervals, but seldom her father, who worked for long stretches to save up leave. The expense and difficulty of travel meant that her mother could visit her children only every two years.
At the end of her time in Sevenoaks, she sat the exams for the School Certificate and left. To geta job, however, she needed further qualifications, so in 1930, at the age of fifteen, she enrolled in the Secretarial College in Richmond, where she remained for the next two or three years. Then, having got her diplomas, she went to London to find work.
Her first job was in Fleet Street, in the advertising department of Benn Brothers. Her second was in Holborn, in the offices of Philip Samuel. Neither enthused her. But things improved with job number three, in the Malta Trade Commission in Regent Street, where she was personal secretary to the Commissioner himself.
About this time her parents moved from India to England, and bought a house in Teddington, where she joined them. When her father fell ill, she helped to look after him, and after his death, in January 1936, she decided to return to India with her mother. They set sail in September of that year, and on arriving they went at first to Allahabad to stay with Alice’s best friend, who was married to a judge in the High Court, Edward Bennet. Then, in 1937, they went to Bangalore, and moved into a flat on Infantry Road, in the precincts of the Scottish Kirk.
Seeking work, my mother decided to train as a nurse in the local hospital, but she realised before long that nursing was not for her. On one occasion, she recalls, a woman to whom she administered medicine spat it back in her face. She contracted dysentery there and was for a time most unwell. So she left nursing and went back to the secretarial work that she knew best. In those days it was not considered proper for a European to do such tasks, but she had no choice, for she needed somehow to support her mother and herself. With the help of her mother’s brother, Markham Le Marchand, she got a job in a firm in Madras. It meant leaving Bangalore and staying as a paying guest in a family. After a while she moved to another job in Madras, with a firm called Spencers, the Indian equivalent of Harrods, whereshe was secretary to the Company Secretary and lived in a hotel. She remained there until around 1940, when she decided to return to Bangalore to be with her mother.
The War
By now the Second World War had broken out, and she sought work in the Army, which employed many people in the city. Her first assignment was to the camp for Italian prisoners of war, where she was secretary to a Major Stephens and to the commanding officer, General Nicholson.
Then, in 1941, she transferred to the Military Secretaries Department in the headquarters of the Southern Army and gave up her civilian status to join the Women’s Auxiliary Corps India (WACI), in which she was a Junior Commander.
She was appointed a staff officer under Colonel Neville Smith, who was in charge of the posting of officers, a job which brought her into contact with young soldiers, many of whom were subsequently killed in action. She also worked for the commander of the Southern Army, General Sir Noel Beresford-Peirse.
It was around this time that she met and got to know her first cousin Lewis Patrick (Pat) Le Marchand,who was an officer in the 5th Gurkha Rifles. For twoor three years things continued unchanged. Then, wishing to spend more time with her mother, who was suffering from high blood pressure, she obtained a transfer to the Technical Recruiting Office, in which she was Adjutant to the officer in charge, a Colonel Wall.
After the War
In January 1945 she met her future husband, Michael O’Reilly. He was a Flight Lieutenant in the headquarters of the Royal Air Force in Bangalore, where he was teaching aerial navigation, having flown himself as a navigator on many missions in the Far East. They were introduced at a dance by a mutual friend, Thelma, who also worked in RAF HQ, and on the same occasion she also met a friendof his, R.W. (Reg) Bigg, who later acted as best man at their wedding. This took place in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Bangalore, on 29 May. It was conducted by a French priest, Fr L. Van Peene, and, since neither of her brothers could be present, my mother was given away by Colonel J.D. de Wilton. Afterwards they went for their honeymoon to Kodaikanal.
The war was now approaching its end, and like many others my parents decided to return to Europe. In the event the RAF gave them 24 hours’ notice to report to a military ship leaving Bombay. They reached England in January or February 1946. Initially they stayed with a friend of my father, Helena Lucey, who ran a pub in Newport (she later acted as my godmother). Then, after about a month, they moved to Surbiton in Surrey, where my father was officially demobbed and got a job teaching French in Wimbledon College. In October they bought a house in Cheam (Kilbrin, 61 Priory Road), which my mother remembered with affection, and they spent four years there, during which time (1948) my father became headmaster of The Holy Family School in Morden. By 1950 they had two small children, myself (born in Surbiton in 1947) and Mary(born in New Malden in 1948), and they moved to a larger house in Arundel Road, Coombe Hill, in Kingston, where a third child, Angela, followed in 1951. In 1953 my father was appointed Head of a new school, St Wilfrid’s, in Crawley, Sussex, and in August of that year we moved down there,staying overnight in the George Hotel before taking possession of the headmaster’s flat in the school itself. Christopher was born in Horsham in 1955, and two years later the family moved for the lasttime, to 48 Brighton Road, where we children, two girls and two boys, grew up.
Elizabeth’s family
Alice Maud Sherwill LeMarchand was born in India on 29 February 1875. Her father’s family, the Le Marchands, who had been in India for several generations, came originally from the ChannelIslands and were of Huguenot stock, while her mother’s side, the Maitlands, had connections with the army. Her parents divorced when she was a child, and she was brought up by her mother. At the age of seventeen she travelled to India as a ‘lady’s help’, and there she met her husband, Patrick Donlea, whom she married in 1904. A few years later she became aCatholic, and always practised her faith devoutly. Her mother joined her in India, it seems, and eventually died there, perhaps of cholera, in 1903.
Alice was small in stature, just five feet, one and a quarter inch tall (‘don’t forget the quarter’, she used to say), but this did not prevent her from being good at tennis, which she enjoyed playing. Rather shy and quiet, she worried a good deal, and was terrified by thunderstorms, from which she would hide. My mother recalls the anxiety Alice once felt in Teddington when the pay chequefrom India was delayed, and how, to reassure her, she and her brother Terry earned one shilling and sixpence by selling flowers on the Common. She also remembers an occasion in India during the war when Alice, fearful of a Japanese invasion, said to her in their flat in Bangalore, ‘I have a revolver in my handbag, and if the Japanese come I shall shoot you, and then shoot myself’.
Alice was devoted to her children, and felt constantly torn between Europe, where they were at school, and India, where her husband worked. From India she wrote to them each day, posting a letter every week, and when she left India to visit them, she posted a daily letter to her husband at home. Despite their separation, the parents and the children were closely united. When her husband retired, and they moved to England, she missed India, and after his death she decided to return, partly to escape the English climate, and partly to be near her sons, Basil and Terry. After the war, however, she left India again, and settled with my parents in Cheam, where she died of a stroke on 6 August 1949. She is buried, with her husband, in the public cemetery in Teddington.
Patrick Plunkett Donlea (whom his friends called Paddy) was born in India on 26 March 1877 in the beautiful hill station of Naini Tal (United Provinces), and baptised by a Carmelite priest, Fr Lewis. Both his parents had been married before and left widowed with offspring to bring up, so he wasraised in a family of many children. In November 1898, at the age of twenty-one, he joined the Indian Civil Service, and began work in Ghazipur as an agent in the Opium Department of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh. The job involved extensive travel to supervise the poppy crops in the region, and he was often away from home. In September 1923 he was appointed district opium officer. The Department’s remit is described as follows in his service record (which was sent to me by Miss Alison Michell):
Opium production is a Government monopoly. The poppy is cultivated under government supervision, usually by licensed cultivators in specified areas, and must be delivered to the Government Opium Department. Acreage has decreased from 614,000 in 1905 to 47,964 in 1928. The whole of the opium is dealt with at Ghazipur factory, and is either exported under the Hague Convention or sold at cost price to the Provincial governments…Opium exported was until recently wholly disposed of bymonthly auction at Calcutta, and originally the bulk was bought for China. To assist the Chinese government in putting down the abuse of opium, the Government of India from 1908 progressively reduced the amount exported until its export to China was entirely prohibited in 1913. Now (1932) all the opium is exported to Hong, Siam,Ceylon, Sarawak, Straits Settlements, chiefly for smoking, and to UK for medical purposes.
My mother remembered him as a quiet and thoughtful man, who was loved by his Indian servants for his kindness. He was patient, not given to sudden temper, and a good listener. In his spare time he enjoyed playing tennis and bridge, and he was a good shot of duck, wild geese and crocodiles. She recalls going camping with him one Christmas, and seeing him shoot wild geese as they flew, high and fast, in the sky. In height he was, unlike his wife, imposing (six feet, three or four inches), and, unlike her too, he was not a worrier, but would reassure her often with the words, ‘It will be all right’.He used to call his wife (phonetically) Carlis Mcree (was this his memory of an Irish phrase his parents had used?). Though conscious of his Irish background, he did not visit Ireland until 1927, when, during a period of leave, he managed to contact some of his relatives, including a cousin, Mary, with whom he was photographed on a go-cart. But while he was there a government minister was assassinated (Kevin O’Higgins, who died on 10 July), and Alice telegraphed him to return. Five years later, in March 1932, he retired, andbought a house at 23 Claremont Road in Teddington, where he died of heart trouble on 4 January 1936, attended by his wife, my mother and her brother Terry.
Grandparents
According to his Last Will and Testament, Thomas Donlea, the father of Patrick, was born in Ireland on 8 August 1838, at Drewsboro, near Killaloe, in County Clare. His family name was Dunlea, but when he joined the army, in 1854, the recording clerk spelled his name with an ‘o’ (Donlea), and soit remained. He enlisted on 29 March in that year, and gave his age as 16 years, 3 months (a slightexaggeration). His occupation was noted down as ‘gardener, from Scariff, County Clare’, and he was described as five feet, eleven and three-quarter inches tall, with a fresh complexion, light brown hair and grey eyes. In the years that followed he served in the Somerset Light Infantry, where he rose to the rank of Captain and saw action in the Crimea, Afghanistan and India. His medals, which are now in the Somerset Military Museum in Taunton, outline his career:
Crimea 1854; Crimea 1855 (Turkish); Indian Mutiny (1857–58); Afghanistan (1878–79–80); Delhi Durbar (1911); Volunteer LS Decoration
At Fort William in Calcutta, on 2 November 1861, he married Catherine Harriot, and they had a daughter, Frances, whom he mentions in his will. But his wife died a short time later, and on 20 November 1865 he married Annie Josephine Fitzgerald in Benares. They had six children, one of whom was Patrick, my grandfather. The others were Julia, Agnes Esther (described in his will as an invalid), William (also mentioned, as an inmate of the Government Lunatic Asylum in Madras), Marie Therese and Michael, who became an Inspector of Police in a place called Tank. On leaving the army, he joined the Indian Railways, where he worked as a conductor. He made his will on 22 September 1914, giving his address as ‘Herbert Ville’, Dalhousie, in the Punjab, and died in Meerut on 3 February 1916.
My mother did not know her grandfather, who died before she was born. She did, however, have a distant memory of her grandmother, Annie, who was born on 31 July 1845, and grew up in Springfield, Dunmurry, County Clare, where her father, Peter Fitzgerald, was a yeoman farmer. Her first marriage was to a medical student in Dublin, George Walton Butt, who became a medical officer in the army, and sailed from Newry to Calcutta in September 1863 in the ship Patrician. They had at least one child, a daughter named Georgina. George died in Benares of cholera in April 1864, a month before she was born. Two years later Annie married Thomas Donlea, and they settled in Dalhousie. My mother remembers Annie as a rather formidable woman, and a bit of a martinet, who disapproved of Alice, her daughter-in-law. A devout Catholic, who loved saying the rosary, she did her best to ensure that her grandchildren practised their faith. (Once she offered Basiland Terry a rupee each on condition they said a decade of the rosary, and this they undertook to do, provided she gave them the rupee first…). She died in Dalhousie on 2 June 1923.
Brothers and sisters Patrick and Alice Donlea had five children in all. The first, Sheila, died in infancy. Then came Patricia Frances, who was born in 1905, and died of heart trouble in India on 25 August 1925. She is buried in the hill station of Missouri. My mother, who revered her, recalled her beauty and cleverness. She was good at maths, and she excelled at music, becoming a L.R.A.M. at the age of seventeen. At the time of her death, she was engaged to be married to an army officer.
Their first son, Basil James Fitzgerald, was born on 1 July 1910 at Betiah in Bengal, and like his elder sister he attended schools in Europe, in his case the Xaverian colleges in Bruges and Mayfield, Kent. Keen to enter the army as an officer, he applied to Sandhurst, but was not accepted. So hejoined the Life Guards as an ordinary soldier, and after rising through the ranks was sent to Sandhurst for officer training. After receiving his commission, on 31 August 1933, he joined the First Batallion of the Royal Ulster Rifles, with whom he served on the North-West Frontier. There he per-formed an act of gallantry on 20 May 1939 for which he was awarded the Military Cross. An Army press release described it thus:
Lieutenant B.J. Fitzg. Donlea was in command of a section of machine guns in the vicinity of the Khaisora River, Waziristan. His section came under heavy fire, and he was wounded in the face and eye with rock and bullet splinters, but continued to command his section. A few minutes later, a rifleman was hit and fell towards the Khaisora Valley. Without hesitation, Lieut. Donlea, in the face of heavy fire, ran down the slopeand carried the rifleman back to the top of the hill. Just as he reached it, the rifleman was hit again and once more rolled down the slope. Again Lieut. Donlea carried him back to safety. His action and conduct throughout the whole operation was exemplary.
During the Second World War he was based with his regiment in England, where he married Julieta Angélica Platini Mettler, an Argentinian, on 21 December 1940. They had two sons, Patrick and Timothy. In 1944 he took part in the D-Day landings, and was one of the first to land on 6 June.
He remained in the army after the war, being promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel in 1953, two years before retiring. He died in Witham, Essex, on 11 January 1986. His younger brother, Terence Anthony Michael, who was born 20 August circa 1912, attended the same schools, where Basil stood up for him when he needed defence. Discipline in Bruges was severe. On one occasion a boy spat in Terry’s soup, and when he refused to finish it he was caned, an incident that outraged his mother, who sent both boys to Mayfield instead. There they rejoined the Sanders boys, whom they had got to know in Bruges (one of them, David, later became a family friend).
Only two or three years separated Terry from my mother, and they were devoted to each other. Aletter he sent her in 1920 (when he was seven and she five) shows his affection and imaginative mind:
My dear Betty,
Happy Xmas and a holy New Year.
Thanks for the lovely long letter you sent me and Basil. So I hope you like this one, and I hope you like my book too, and I hope you will read the stories in it as well. You have grown tremendously, and I think you are an inchsmaller than me, so you are growing a lot. We saw the film Peter Pan yesterday. It is the best film all throughEngland now, so I wish you could see it, because it’s all about Peter when he goes to Never-Never Land with all the fairies, and some pirates come and explore it, and capture all the fairies, but not Peter Pan, so Peter asks the mermaids to tell them where the Pirates’ ship is, and tell him. So he goes and fences all the pirates, and kills them except the captain,so he catches him and makes him walk the plank. I shall end.
Terry and Basil were close too (they called each other ‘kid’), but they differed in personality andgifts. Basil was drawn to army life, which suited his vigorous temperament, but Terry was a bit of a dreamer, with a liking for poetry and music.
Despite his unmilitary ways, however, Terry became a soldier when he grew up. He entered his grandfather’s regiment, the Somerset Light Infantry, and like Basil he was sent to Sandhurst from the ranks. He was there in 1935, when his father was unwell and confined to bed, so he was able to spend time at home, and help my mother look after him. After his father’s death in 1936 he went to India as a commissioned officer, intending to join the Indian army. Regulations, however, required him to spend one year in the British Army first, so he joined The Border Regiment briefly, before transferring to the Prince of Wales First Fourth Gurkha Rifles. In the years that followed he grew to love the regiment’s way of life, and the Nepalese people from whom its soldiers came. One of his fellow officers was John Masters, the writer, who mentions Terry in his autobiography, Bugles and a Tiger (London, 1956), when describing how they both became involved in the hunt for a man-eating tiger, which Masters eventually shot. Among my mother’s papers was a typed account of the incident which Masters wrote at the time.
During the war Terry did not see active service. He fell ill while training to fight in the Burmese jungle, and when my parents returned to England in 1946, Alice, his mother, stayed behind to benear him. My mother naturally wished to bring them back to England too, but she realised that in the post-war upheaval the ships were fully booked. So she wrote to her old employer, General Sir Noel Beresford- Peirse, who was then Head of Welfare in GHQ Delhi, and he arranged a free passage home for Terry and Alice. On arrival Terry was taken straight to a hospital in Southampton, andlater he was moved to the Cambridge Military Hospital in Aldershot, Surrey, where he died on 8 January 1947. As a child Terry sometimes got into trouble for disobeying instructions and breaking rules, but when his father died he suddenly grew up, and, in Basil’s absence, took responsibility for his sister and mother. About two years before he died he decided that, if he was spared, he would try his vocation as a priest, and during his last illness he was sustained by his faith. My mother remembers him fondly as a force for good.
Full references and notes included in the printed book.