No Ordinary Life: A Memoir of an Extraordinary Man

By Ann Barron

This memoir of John Bernard Barron follows his long and varied life, which was defined by service to his country. From his early travels in the Middle East, and later in Canada, to the western front of World War One, followed by military and civilian service in Palestine, he was never far from the pulse of history. The momentous changes he lived through still resonate in the Middle East today. During World War Two, his organisational and financial acumen was vital in the shipping of supplies to a besieged Malta.



In retirement he was requested by the Archbishop of Canterbury to join The Council for Foreign Relations as his advisor in Middle Eastern church affairs and as an archivist in Lambeth Palace library. He finally retired at the age of 88.



‘No Ordinary Life’ is an impressive and very readable account of a life that was far from ordinary.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Silver Crow Books
• Release date: Nov 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9781839522208

Book preview

Jerusalem

INTRODUCTION

When she heard that I was going to write a memoir of my grandfather, my daughter said, ‘Why on earth would you want to do that?’ This rather took me aback, but after some thought I realised that it was a good question: it went to the heart of the matter and so I could not dismiss it and in my mind various questions followed that enquiry.

Such as, who was my grandfather? I had known him for so many years, yet now I was beginning to wonder whether I had really known him at all. Why had I now, at this stage in my life, decided to write his memoir? After I had spent some time thinking back through all the memories the answer was quite simple. Grandfather had been such an important and much-loved person throughout the greater part of my life. He had been a constant source of encouragement and support, never belittling me or ignoring my questions, always interested in what I was doing as I grew up. His example and his life influenced my decisions to travel, to train as a nurse and later, to join the Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps.

At the same time, the foundations which were laid through my early years of living with my grandparents, and in some way absorbing their strong Christian faith and lifestyle, led me to make my own commitment to follow Christ when I was twenty-nine.

Grandfather was an extraordinary man, larger than life in many ways, with a charismatic personality and a great ability to bring all his powerful intellect to the work that was before him. He never shirked his responsibilities or refused a challenge and had an adventurous spirit which led to a life full of interesting experiences which were later woven into fascinating stories. After his death in 1981, I knew that he had left quite a substantial archive, but at that time I was not in a position to give it any attention since I had a busy family life as the wife of a Church of England minister.

The years passed, the children grew up and left home, and my life changed as I retired and more time was available, so it became possible for me to explore his archive and tell his story as a way of honouring him. His life was by no means an ordinary one and when I read through all the material that he had left for me, I thought that his story would be of interest not only to other members of the family but also maybe to a wider public.

I have decided to start with some background information about my parents because this will help to set the scene.

Born in 1918, my mother, Marjorie Jean Webb spent the first eleven years of her life in Bombay, India with her parents and younger sister, Isabella. They lived a typically European lifestyle in a large colonial house with servants.

It was in 1929 that disaster struck the family when the girls’ mother ran off with her lover. It seems that their father, William Webb, a man given to sudden outbursts of temper that used to frighten his daughters, destroyed all evidence of his young wife from their home and shipped his daughters off to England the following year to live with a couple who became their legal guardians. The girls were subsequently sent to a Catholic boarding school.

Six years later, in 1936, Isabella became ill with appendicitis that developed into peritonitis, from which she died in January 1937 at the age of seventeen. By then my mother had left school and taken a shorthand and typing course which enabled her to earn some money and have some independence. She rarely spoke of her mother or sister to me, but I know that those tragic events left their mark on her life.

My father, John Reginald Bernard Barron, was born in London in 1918 to my grandmother, Elinor Anne Popham Barron. At the end of World War One, mother and son travelled out to Palestine to join my grandfather, John Bernard Barron. The family lived there until 1924 when they moved to Alexandria, Egypt. They were an influential family and my father seemed to have had an idyllic childhood, moving between England for his schooling and Egypt for the holidays.

The contrast with my mother’s background could hardly have been greater, and my mother told me later that there was some initial resistance to the marriage from my paternal grandparents. Despite that, John and Marjorie did get married in May 1940 by special licence and I was born nine months later.

It was in May 1943 that my father was killed in action in North Africa. This meant that by the age of twenty-five my mother had lost three close family members: her mother, her sister and her husband, in traumatic circumstances and was now left with no family in England except for me, a toddler, since there was virtually no contact between her and her father who was still living and working in India. As I think of all her history I am amazed at the strength and love with which she raised me through the many years before she married again when I was eleven or twelve. At the end of the war my paternal grandparents arranged for my mother and me to travel out to Egypt as soon as it was safe and so it was that we sailed away to join my father’s parents in Alexandria.

Here my life with my grandparents began.

Grandfather’s archive contained a large World War One scrapbook entitled News and Views from My Friends with the Forces, full of original letters and photos, postcards, hand-drawn trench maps and all sorts of other information from his experiences with the Canadians as part of the Expeditionary Forces, and later with the Worcestershire Regiment. There were also meticulously documented papers and letters of his life between the two wars, his time during World War Two in Alexandria and his life and service to the Church of England thereafter. These, together with photographs, will form the starting point for this memoir.

As I do not have a complete record of my grandfather’s very full life, I have allowed my knowledge and memories of him to fill in some of the gaps. Reading through his scrapbook and all his other papers, I have noticed that many of them are labelled with my name, almost as though he foresaw that maybe one day I would sit down and start writing.

This memoir is my gift and thank you to him.

PART ONE: THE EARLY YEARS

EARLY FAMILY HISTORY: 1886–1904

My grandfather, John Bernard Barron, was eighteen when he left the family home in Cheltenham and set off full of youthful hopes and dreams to make his way in the world.

He was born in 1886, the fourth of five children born to William and Mary Barron. Mary came from a Quaker family and brought up her children very strictly, instilling Christian values in them from an early age. There is a story in the family that the Quaker tradition was so strong in her household that no one ever dared to speak to Mary unless she spoke first!

John Bernard Barron with his mother, 1886

It was through Mary’s family, the Taylors, that we inherited a toll bridge at Whitney-on-Wye. This was the first bridge built as a shortcut for public conveyances, between Whitney and Clifford in Herefordshire, during the reign of King George III. As it was a wooden structure, it collapsed several times after severe floods and was eventually rebuilt, still using wood, but with metal posts to strengthen it. The use of the bridge was legalised by an Act of Royal Charter in 1796. A facsimile copy is still with our family records.

William Barron’s forbears were living in Cheltenham during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. William’s father, John Barron, was a public auditor whose wife was a Middleton, a name that has survived down through the generations as a second or third family name. Mary Middleton’s parents were landowners, coming from the village of Middleton in Herefordshire, which I mention here because I think some families still have middle names which originally were the villages where their ancestors had lived. There is a genealogy of the Barron family towards the end of this memoir.

By the time my great-grandfather William Barron had died in 1937, both my grandfather’s elder brothers had moved abroad, William junior had gone to India as an administrator and Frederick had moved to South Africa. Because of this, the third son, my grandfather (always known as Bernard), took on the role of trustee for Whitney Bridge. He made visits to the bridge every year and on one occasion I accompanied him on what was for me an exciting trip, though doubtless for Grandfather it was just a very necessary part of his responsibilities. His work involved checking the riverbanks for their stability and inspecting the bridge’s structure to make sure that it was still sound, and at the same time we visited the toll keeper so that Grandfather could check the records. During those few days, we stayed in an old coaching inn in Shrewsbury, exploring the medieval city which is even today still full of lovely buildings whose architectural and historical significance Grandfather delighted in explaining to me. Eventually, as time went on and Grandfather became older, he decided that it was time for the bridge to pass out of our hands and a distant member of the Taylor family took on the responsibility. But I remember this as a special time spent with my grandfather as he introduced me to a part of our family history I hadn’t encountered before.

Some early family history that has been passed down from my great-aunt Maud, Grandfather’s elder sister, relates that the Barron family initially came across to England with the Norman invasion and received a coat of arms with a crest for their loyalty. The crest description is: An eagle rampant, wings outstretched, holding in its dexter claw a dagger unsheathed. The motto was ‘Audentes Fortuna Juvat’, which translates as ‘Fortune Favours the Brave’. Later, the family moved to Bury St Edmunds and joined the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in 1172, settling in Waterford on property that King Henry II gave them.

In 1649, when Cromwell came to Ireland, the family fled to Scotland to escape persecution and their Irish property was confiscated. Family tradition has it that in Scotland they became chemists, developing and perfecting a recipe with blackcurrants as the basis for a cough remedy. When sales of their cough medicine started to decline, however, the Allen and Hanbury families offered to buy the recipe and were successful in re-establishing a market for the mixture. Shortly after this the Barron family moved to Gloucestershire.

EARLY TRAVELS: 1904–1908

Grandfather told me that he’d had a fragmentary and incomplete education. I never found out why. But he did attend Cheltenham Grammar School and matriculated in seven or eight subjects, not bad by any standards! By around 1904, he was working as a teacher at Kirton Grammar School in Lincolnshire where he taught mathematics and played cricket and soccer while living in the school, possibly as a sort of housemaster.