Chapter One

Cornish Roots

Robert Hichens, Robert as I shall call him until he became universally known as ‘Hitch’ in Coastal Forces, saw himself as a Cornishman with his roots in that seafaring county. He was proud of that and it was one of the reasons why it was to the Navy that he went when the Second World War started. The Hichens’ family records show that they were prosperous citizens of St Ives in Cornwall at least as early as the first quarter of the seventeenth century, and probably for 100 years or more before that. They claimed descent from Hichens of Saltash, a Tudor landed family, and displayed the same coat of arms, but whether they were a cadet branch, or simply adopted the arms without licence, is uncertain. They supplied St Ives with portreeves, the sea port equivalent of mayors, over a number of generations between the early seventeenth and the late eighteenth centuries. They had a ropewalk as the principal family business and other commercial interests, including pilchard fishing. They were sturdy, solid, minor gentry, no longer landed if they ever had been, but educated, with capital behind them, playing their part in provincial government.

As with so many families, one man can be picked out as having changed the family’s fortunes and its way of life. He was also called Robert Hichens and was born in 1782 and, at the precocious age of seventeen, went off to London to make his fortune. He founded the firm of Hichens, Harrison & Sons, stockbrokers, in 1803, only one year after the foundation of the London Stock Exchange. Stockbroking was not regarded as an altogether reputable profession in those days. Some would say it still isn’t, but it was certainly not in the same class as the Army, the Navy, the Church and the Law in the early nineteenth century. However, it was capable of making a man’s fortune and Robert Hichens made his as a stockbroker. He was Chairman of the London Stock Exchange between 1838 and 1842 and a leading figure in City circles over nearly half a century. He died in 1865 ‘possessed of a significant fortune’. A fine portrait survives of him showing a sensitive and intelligent face, and he appears to have had a reputation, perhaps unusual for a stockbroker of that time, as a cultivated gentleman with high ethical standards and a charitable disposition. His were genes worth inheriting.

Robert Hichens the stockbroker had two sons which concern us. Neither chose to go into the prosperous stockbroking firm founded by their father, where they might well have added to their family’s fortune and perhaps, who knows, led a more eventful life than that usual amongst the rural clergy. Instead they chose to be clergymen, a far more respectable calling which their father’s fortune made affordable. Frederick, born in 1836, became a Canon of Canterbury and his brother, Thomas, became Rector of Guilsborough in Northamptonshire. Nothing very remarkable is known of Canon Fred Hichens’ life other than the belief on the part of his eldest son, another Robert Hichens, and a prominent Edwardian novelist, that he dissipated the family fortune to a marked degree. This was due more to inattention to business than to riotous living. He in turn had three sons. Robert the novelist, the author of works that are still remembered but seldom read today, such as The Green Carnation, Bella Donna and The Garden of Allah, went on to some fame and fortune. The youngest brother was my grandfather, Peverell Hichens. He went up to Oxford, to Magdalen College, in 1888 where he got a First in Physiology and became a distinguished consulting physician, settling in Northamptonshire where he was one of the consultants at the Northamptonshire General Hospital.

It is not clear why Peverell Hichens decided to go to Northamptonshire but it was probably related to the fact that his Uncle Thomas had a living there. It was probably through his uncle that he met his wife, Constance Downes, whose grandfather, the Reverend John Downes, was a brother clergyman of Thomas Hichens. Peverell and Constance married in 1906 and their first child, Loveday Hichens, was born in 1907. Robert was born in March 1909.

Descended from an ancient Shropshire family, John Downes’s father made some money in the late eighteenth century and John was educated at Christ College, Cambridge, where he was a natural scientist of some note and the contemporary and friend of Charles Darwin. Their tutor, one Professor Henslow, according to family history asked John to join the Beagle as its scientist but, as he was going into Holy Orders, he declined the post and the choice fell upon Charles Darwin who went in his place and on to immortal fame. John went to Northamptonshire in 1834 and, continuing his interest in plants, collected an herbarium for his part of the county which is still on show in the County Museum. His eldest son, Leonard went into the Army and became a colonel in the Artillery and was the father of Constance who married Peverell Hichens.

Peverell and Constance lived in Northampton and brought up their family there until the start of the First World War. Great wars tend to stir the pot and many unexpected consequences flow. No doubt Peverell and Constance would have lived to a ripe old age in Northamptonshire, possibly retiring to Cornwall given the sentimental link with that county. What happened instead was that Peverell, who had been a pre-war territorial in the Royal Army Medical Corps, went out to France and his family went to live at St Mawes in Cornwall in 1915. He went as major to the Western Front where he commanded a succession of Casualty Clearing Stations, and was then promoted to lieutenant colonel and commanded a base hospital in Calais until the end of the war. In 1919 he was demobilized and returned to Northamptonshire.

Meanwhile Constance had taken a house in St Mawes and here Loveday and Robert lived until the end of the war. It must have seemed an idyllic existence. Both children immediately took to the water. A Major Tuke took them under his wing and taught them the disciplines of sailing. Constance purchased for them a small lug sail dinghy called the Arethusa which they sailed all over Carrick Roads and out beyond St Anthony’s Point. Who was the captain and who was the crew? Feminists will snort at such a question and a surviving photograph of the two children, Loveday much the taller and older looking with her seniority of two years, does suggest that it should have been she rather than he, and yet? The leggy little boy in a Guernsey standing beside his older sister looks very determined and in the early twentieth century the assumption that a man should be in charge was a great deal more pronounced than it is today. Certainly I was always told as a boy that the Arethusa was Daddy’s boat, not Aunt Loveday’s, and that she crewed for him, or indeed left him to sail Arethusa by himself. Was this his first command? I think it was. It certainly gave him his first taste of the sea which he never lost and which to so great a degree influenced his choice of career and war service.

In due course Constance looked round for a more permanent home in Cornwall with a view eventually to retiring where her husband’s family had come from and where her children were so obviously happy. In 1929 Peverell and Constance purchased the long lease of a house on the edge of the village of Flushing, looking across the Penryn Creek to Falmouth, and the family was to move there at the time of Peverell’s death in 1930, calling it ‘Bodrennick’, ‘house on the cliff’ in Cornish. It still serves as the Hichens’ family home. I was born there and my elder brother, Bob, lives there still.

Robert went off to prep school near Northampton when the family returned in 1919. It must have been for Robert a disagreeable change of life style to leave St Mawes and the Arethusa to return to an inland county and a boys’ boarding school. He went on to his public school, Marlborough, in 1921.

In 1922 Peverell retired at the age of fifty-two from his work as a consulting physician at the Northampton General due to ‘a mysterious illness’ which struck him down. It now seems probable that the illness was encephalitis lethargica, a distressing and mortal brain disease. Peverell, as a distinguished doctor, must have known pretty well what was coming to him and he took decisive steps. The family moved to Guernsey, where there were no death duties, and he bought Havelet House, just outside St Peter Port on the sea, where they lived until his death in the spring of 1930.

This had the great virtue from Robert’s point of view of taking him back to the sea, so that throughout his years at Marlborough and Oxford he could return to Guernsey to fulfil his passion for sailing. A second Arethusa was commissioned and was sailed around the rock-strewn and strongly tidal waters of Guernsey, thus consolidating the sound base laid down in St Mawes of familiarity with the sea. Perhaps the best photograph ever taken of Robert shows him sitting on the quayside opposite Havelet House with his back to the water, dressed in the oldest and most deplorable of trousers and a guernsey, looking tough and manly. It says more than any words can do about the development of the schoolboy and the undergraduate into a tough, confident young seaman.

The last pre-Oxford event of which I have a record is Loveday’s wedding in 1927 during Robert’s last year at Marlborough. She married a man on home leave from Burma, Leonard Fletcher. The wedding was held in Cornwall, at Treriefe, the house of Constance’s sister, Dorothy Le Grice, which lies just beyond Penzance. A photograph survives with a self conscious, goodlooking young Robert in his morning coat. The bride is in a then fashionable short white wedding dress, surrounded by Hichens, Downes and Le Grice family members. It is the last photograph of Robert before man’s estate.

Peverell died in March 1930, having been reduced in mental capacity by his dreadful illness, so that my mother, who only knew him at this time, always struggled to understand the huge love that Robert had for his father. Obituaries at the time recall him as a much respected physician in Northamptonshire and an even more successful RAMC officer in France. He was noted for his love of music, including his own playing of the piano, and a general interest in artistic matters which included the buying of pictures, some of which I still have because I share his taste for marine artists.

Peverell’s ashes were brought down from London to Cornwall and buried at Mylor Church, one of the prettiest in the county, overlooking the sea. Constance had just moved into Bodrennick, hence the choice of Mylor Church, less than a mile away. His father’s early death must have affected Robert profoundly. He was now the man of the family. Constance became ill. Loveday was in Burma. On Robert’s shoulders descended responsibility for managing the family’s affairs. It hastened the early maturity which is so clearly visible at each stage of the thirteen years of life left to him.

Robert went up to Magdalen College, Oxford in October 1927 at the age of eighteen to read law. Magdalen was the obvious choice of college given that his father and an uncle had been there. Magdalen had an enormous influence on Robert and it is worth describing the college of his time and thus the influences that were brought to bear upon him.

Sir David Kelly, later a distinguished British ambassador, went up to Magdalen in 1910 and in his memoirs describes the college in some detail as it was just before the First World War. The change from then to seventeen years later was, as far as one can see, modest. The Magdalen of 1910 had 150 undergraduates, all men. Magdalen had been radically changed by one of its greatest presidents, Sir Herbert Warren, who became head of house, at Magdalen called the President, in 1885 and remained in post until his death in 1928, a year after Robert came up. Warren is often remembered as a snob whose main claim to fame was turning Magdalen into one of the socially elite Oxford colleges and dominant on the river, but that is a superficial view of a very great President who cared deeply for the undergraduates in his charge. Whether he had a passion for rowing, or simply saw it as a means of furthering the prestige of his college, I do not know, but shortly after his appointment he began the practice, which continued until his death, of getting some of the best oarsmen from Eton each year to provide the core of the Magdalen boat. No doubt he also looked for talent elsewhere, but Eton supplied him with some outstanding oarsmen. The Magdalen Boat Club competed in the Olympics of 1908 and 1912, winning the coxless fours in the former year and the eights in the latter, an achievement that no college could conceivably match today.

Kelly, in defence of a man he clearly hero-worshipped, told the story of his own experience with Warren. Kelly had been at school at Uppingham and was not from an influential family, but he wished to enter the Foreign Office. In those days the Foreign Office was very largely manned by men who had been to the most prestigious public schools and had family connections who could introduce them at a senior level. Lacking these advantages, Kelly sought Warren’s help. He promptly, no doubt because he saw exceptional qualities in Kelly, obtained the support of half a dozen distinguished old Magdalen men in the diplomatic service and Kelly got his job. This was not an isolated incident.

He remembered the dons, as the fellows of a college are commonly called, as extremely relaxed about whether men went to lectures or not so long as they filled a reasonable amount of their time with reading their discipline. It was not required that you sat for an honours degree. The requisites for remaining in statupupulari were little more than attending Chapel and dining in Hall a set minimum number of times a term. You were also supposed to attend breakfast but the Junior Dean, standing at the foot of the staircase up to Magdalen’s hall, would obligingly accept your name as you passed by in your dressing gown on your way to your morning bath.

Most men lunched in their rooms, served by their scout, a college servant, and dined in Hall two or three evenings a week. After dinner men would drop into the room at the foot of the stairs leading up to the Junior Common Room to have a drink under the auspices of Gunstone, always known as Gunner, the Junior Common Room steward, who had an endless flow of anecdotes about old members of the college, frequently of a salacious kind. Others would spend their evenings visiting each other’s rooms to drink and talk. In an age when opinions of a liberal or radical nature were not necessarily popular in upper middle class circles, the young men could talk about anything they pleased, with no taboos, whether it was art, music, literature, religion or politics, and would perhaps never be able to do so again with the same intensity and freedom.

Women played almost no part in their lives. It was not done to pursue female undergraduates from the few women’s colleges. The young men had entered a monastic world, following on the heels of the all-male British public school, and accepted it as such with good grace. These were the years they had set aside for talking, playing and learning in a man’s world.

When Robert went up to Magdalen in 1927 he found himself allocated rooms in St Swithun’s, a part of the college beside the porter’s lodge overlooking the High. Douglas Dodds-Parker, a Wykehamist and experienced oarsman, had been allocated rooms above him and the two young men became firm friends. Douglas described to me a world remarkably similar to that that David Kelly observed. There was the same requirement to breakfast in Hall. It was not a requirement to dine but you had to pay for it whether you dined or not and the charge of 1s. 4d, perhaps £9 today, was enough to make most men dine most evenings in College. Before going into Hall it was usual to have a drink in what by then was known as Gyne’s room. Gyne was the successor to Gunstone and, in turn, his successor was Bond who presided in my day. They dispensed sherry before dinner and port afterwards, and their room formed a club within the college for about 100 years. An introduction to Gyne’s room was necessary before one dared enter the sacrosanct door.

Compton Mackenzie, in his novel Sinister Street, captured the essential attraction of this informal club, writing of Gunstone’s era just after the Boer war in about 1905. Mackenzie calls it Venner’s room in his novel and Magdalen is called St Mary’s. I quote from a passage describing a conversation between a group of undergraduates and the long-standing JCR Steward:

‘Venner,’ said Lonsdale one evening, ‘do you remember the Bishop of Cirencester when he was up? Stebbing his name was. My mother roped him in for a teetotal riot she was inciting this vac.’

‘Oh, yes, I think he was rather a wild fellow,’ Venner began, full of reminiscence. ‘But we’ll look him up.’

Down came some account-book of the later seventies, and all the festive evenings of the Bishop, spent in the period when undergraduates were photographed with mutton-chop whiskers and bowler hats, lay revealed for the criticism of his irreverent successors.

‘There you are,’ chuckled Venner triumphantly. ‘What did I say? One dozen champagne. Three bottles of brandy. All drunk in one night, for there’s another half-dozen put down for the next day. Ah, but the men are much quieter nowadays. Not nearly so much drinking done in college as there used to be. Oh, I remember the Bishop – Stebbing he was then. He put a codfish in the Dean’s bed. Oh, there was a dreadful row about it. The old Warden kicked up such a fuss.’

And, as easily as one Arabian night glides into another, Venner glided from anecdote to anecdote of Episcopal youth.

The young men did not appear to work much harder than they had before the Great War. Douglas said that the only time anyone had ever asked him what degree he had got was when he entered the Sudan Civil Service. For that it was necessary for him to get at least second class honours so he worked for it, but most undergraduates with no such testing hurdle to jump didn’t bother. Each undergraduate saw his tutor at least once a week for a one-to-one tutorial. Douglas had two tutors, one of whom was called Thompson, previously the Dean of Divinity but now a History Tutor. Thompson had unfortunately believed in one supreme being instead of the Trinity so that Warren had felt it necessary to put the Chapel in sounder hands. He got Douglas his second in spite of the distractions of the river and Gyne’s room.

In the afternoons most men were involved in sport of one sort or another, many of them on the river, rowing being then and now the most important sporting activity at Oxford. This didn’t necessarily mean being in strict training all the time and indeed the crews only trained hard for three or four weeks before the spring races known as Torpids and the summer races known as Eights. However if you were an oarsmen you might go down to scull any afternoon on the river by yourself, or take out a pair with a friend.

Robert told Douglas that he was interested in playing hockey, but soon discovered that it was a minor sport at Oxford and that he could not play it regularly every day. Douglas claims to have converted him into being an oarsman and certainly he appears in the Magdalen torpid second eight of 1928, only six months after coming up, rowing at number seven. By 1929 he was in the torpid first eight rowing at number three, and in the summer eight as stroke. He was again stroke in the 1930 eight. This was a fair achievement for a man who had never sat on a sliding seat before coming up to Oxford as Marlborough was not a rowing school, although of course he would have been used to pulling on an oar in the waters of Guernsey and Cornwall. Given Magdalen’s high standard of rowing, to become stroke within a year of coming up says a good deal about his strength and determination, although Douglas never had too many good words to say about his skill. ‘He had once been told by an Australian that ten of the fastest strokes at the end of the race was worth more than nine of the best’ he told me. ‘Unfortunately, it isn’t easy to know when your last ten strokes are about to commence. We didn’t win many races but we had an awful lot of fun.’

After the heady heights of the Olympics before the Great War and being Head of the River several times in the early 1920s, Magdalen’s rowing, it has to be admitted, was sliding a little. Douglas put this down to the appointment as Dean of Admissions in 1927 of a Canadian don called Oliver Wrong. He had apparently insisted upon merit entry into the College, presumably for the first time ever, so that there were no longer assured places for top schoolboy oarsmen. The college was third on the river in 1928, sixth in 1929 and eighth in 1930, the lowest position Magdalen had sunk to since 1876! They regained the headship in 1932 but Magdalen’s near absolute dominance of the river was over. However, all that we need note in Robert’s case was his ability to take on a new task and then excel at it by being stroke for his college in his second and third years, and who shall say the gentle slide from head of the river owed much to his unpolished labours? They did, however, contribute to the building of a physique that was to stand him in good stead under the punishing conditions of Coastal Forces warfare.

More than one of his contemporaries remembers Robert as of a serious turn of mind when it came to his work, not a common state of affairs in the Magdalen of his time. Oxford between the wars, though always attracting more than its share of serious scholars, could be fairly described as still primarily a finishing school for the upper middle classes. James Griffiths, later to become a Fellow of Magdalen and ultimately its President in the 1970s, was a member of the boat club in Robert’s time and particularly recalls him coming down to the college barge, in the days before a boat house was built, carrying a law book or two and becoming immersed in them before and after training outings in the eight. He may have been remembering the summer of 1930 when Robert’s father had just died, a major distraction before his final examinations, and Robert could well have been unusually pre-occupied with his work. However Douglas also remembers the same characteristic and it seems that Robert took his work seriously. This still left him a great deal of time for conviviality and few members of the boat club in those years would have been other than convivial drinkers. Although when they were in strict training alcohol was limited to a pint of beer in the evening, at other times the boat club indulged in the fruits of the college cellars in the days when a glass of sherry or a glass of port cost 6d and a bottle of champagne only 4s. 6d. In that all-male world this generally led to singing at some point in the evening. Douglas has a particularly clear memory of Robert singing a chant, allegedly composed for the boat club by another of their contemporaries, Humphrey Slade, later a London solicitor and father of Julian Slade who wrote Salad Days. It started, chanting in E-flat minor, a quotation from a much derided Great Western Railway lavatory notice, ‘Passengers are respectfully requested to refrain from putting into the pans articles calculated to cause obstruction, to the inconvenience of the passengers and the closets thereby rendered both objectionable and useless, etc. etc.’ It was a refrain still being sung in the 1950s after boat club dinners, led by James Griffiths.

There are regrettably no casual photographs of Robert at Magdalen. The only photographic record which survives comes from the boat club archive where you can see him straining at stroke oar at the start of a bumping race or seated in the middle of a group of nine young men who formed the elite of Magdalen’s rowing in 1930. Considering that few of them could be over twenty-one, they look a remarkably mature group, and with a selfconfidence bred of a natural assumption of leadership. Almost the whole undergraduate body of Magdalen at that time had been to independent schools of one sort or another, with a high preponderance from the best known public schools. The young men are clearly from a privileged world but it was a privileged world which did not shrink from its responsibilities when the time of war came.

In his third year Robert had digs in the Gatehouse, almost opposite the College on the other side of the High and next to the Botanic Gardens.. In those days the Gatehouse was not a part of the College, though it is today. I was aware of this because my mother remembered going to his rooms there when they were first going out together and Douglas also recalls receiving hospitality at the Gatehouse. However it is interesting that he has no recollection at all of meeting Catherine Enys who was to marry my father in 1931, thus confirming my mother’s clear view that Robert liked to preserve his reputation as a misogynist, apparently carefully cultivated from the moment he came up to Magdalen, and thus never permitted her to meet any of his friends, which she thought a considerable bore.

Robert and Douglas were very close at Magdalen but they only saw each other again once after Robert went down in 1930. Douglas went into the Sudan Civil Service and was virtually cut off from England, apart from the occasional long leave. Thus he did not attend Robert’s wedding the following year with all the other members of the Boat Club. They did, however, run into each other again in 1942 when ‘in some London club or other’ Douglas spotted Robert in naval uniform. Douglas was then in SOE, the organization set up ‘to set Europe ablaze’ after the fall of France. Douglas was impressed to find his old friend with a DSO and a DSC and bar and, after gathering that they had been mostly won in a motor gunboat operating in the North Sea and the Channel, asked whether Robert would be willing to help him to land agents in the Low Countries where SOE were having great difficulty in gaining access. Some weeks later this suggestion bore fruit and Douglas went out one night with Robert in MGB 77 to try to drop an agent on the Dutch coast, a failure due to the brightly lit area that he had selected for the drop off point which made it impractical to get ashore unobserved.

Magdalen is one of Oxford’s most beautiful colleges and few who have spent three or four of their formative years there have failed to be profoundly affected by the experience. It is also a college with a long history of tolerance for differences in intellect, outlook and social status. Robert would have absorbed Magdalen’s civilizing influence. It evidently had little impact on his impatience, a characteristic he increasingly displayed as he carved his way in the world through peace and war, but it did start to teach him the elements of logical analysis and judgement.

Robert and Catherine met in Cornwall in 1928. Robert was in his second year at Magdalen aged twenty and Catherine was six years his senior. Catherine and Robert were fourth cousins and no doubt when Constance Hichens looked around for a house to buy in Cornwall she would have started to meet Cornish families to whom her husband was related. Harry and Sadie Enys, Catherine’s parents, lived barely two miles from Bodrennick at Enys, just outside Mylor, which Harry had inherited in 1912. Their youngest daughter, Elizabeth Enys, always known as Betty, was exactly the same age as Robert to the day and perhaps the two mothers thought that it would be nice if they met. As with so many calculations of that nature, neither parent could have allowed for the attraction that grew up between the much older Catherine and young Robert. Catherine was, of course, of that generation of young women in England whose husbands would normally have emerged from the ranks of the young men who officered the British Army in the First World War, from which virtually a generation failed to return. In Cornwall in the late 1920s there was a distinct shortage of suitable young men. Catherine, good looking, vivacious, quick witted and not at all averse to flirtation, found the prematurely mature Robert quite attractive enough to overlook the difference in age. No doubt scoring off her younger sister, whom she cordially disliked and regarded as the undeserved family pet, would have added a little spice to the situation. However it came about, Robert and Catherine were well away within weeks of first meeting.

It cannot have been easy to keep their relationship a secret from their families but they did their best. Catherine had by then become bored with Cornwall and the life of a young women going to tennis parties, garden parties, cocktail parties, dances and dinners, and had with great difficulty persuaded her conservatively minded father to let her go and work for one of their neighbours, a Mrs Stephens, as her social secretary in London, and she was then living at the Basil Street Hotel which her family thought more suitable than having a flat. This allowed the young couple to meet in London and Oxford. Evidently at some point the alarm bells started to ring, certainly in the Enys household, for in the summer of 1929 Sadie Enys, a Philadelphian by birth and very American in outlook, decided to take Catherine, her second daughter, with her on her first return visit for forty years to see family and friends in that great city. It is pretty clear that her motives in doing so were not just to see relatives on whom she had not set eyes, or sought to do so, since marrying Harry in the 1890s. The primary motive must have been to keep Catherine apart from Robert for some months to see whether things would cool off. They didn’t.

At this point it is necessary to explain who Harry and Sadie Enys were and how that affected the subsequent marriage between Robert and Catherine. Harry and his American wife were a distinctly unusual couple to be found as the squire and lady of an ancient Cornish estate. The Enys family had lived at Enys since the reign of King John in the early thirteenth century. As was commonly the custom in Cornwall, the family took its name from its land. The Enys family had the habit of marrying well and adding to their holdings so that by the mid-nineteenth century their property extended far beyond the 1,400 acres of farmland surrounding their ancestral home. Successive generations of Enys squires were much like their neighbours and did little more than marry the occasional heiress and breed the next of many generations. Yet when Harry Rogers inherited Enys through his mother in 1912, changing his name to Enys, he was somewhat different from most of his neighbours in the same walk of life.

Harry’s father, Captain Henry Rogers, Royal Navy, was the scion of another old Cornish family with its seat at Penrose, near Helston, still lived in by the Rogers family today. Henry Rogers met Jane Enys and married her in the mid-nineteenth century, and she had the good fortune to be the only Enys of her generation to marry. Her older brother, Francis, left his property to his younger brother John, who had spent the last forty years in New Zealand farming sheep. He in turn left Enys to his late sister’s oldest son, young Harry Rogers, on the sole condition that he changed his name to Enys.

Harry had been brought up as one of the very large family which old Captain Henry Rogers had sired when living in comfortable retirement in a substantial house just outside Plymouth. Harry went into the Church and was a curate in Brighton when he met his future wife, Sadie Dufus. Sadie’s mother had been a member of the Baldwin family who made locomotives in Philadelphia in the nineteenth century, very profitably it would seem. Sadie was orphaned at a young age and brought up by a Baldwin aunt. She was kept at school however, allegedly to avoid her marrying one of her rich cousins, to the unusually late age of twenty. When she was twentyone she inherited a modest capital that made her sufficiently independent to leave both school and Philadelphia and travel in Europe. One of her school mistresses had been English and came from Brighton, and it was staying with her old English friend that she met young Harry Rogers. They brought into the world successively one boy, Saltren, and then three girls, Jane, Catherine and Elizabeth. Sadie’s small private income must have been an immense benefit to an impoverished clergyman who had nothing from his own father to add to his stipend. However, his Uncle John died in 1912 and suddenly he was the owner of two substantial estates and much town and village property in Cornwall.

The family did not immediately move to Enys, only going down there for holidays in the summers of 1913 and 1914, and then came the Great War. Harry decided that he should stay and serve the people of Brighton, being by then too old to become a military chaplain, and it was not until 1919 that the family moved to Cornwall. No doubt from 1912 onwards the social standing of Henry and Sadie was considerably enhanced by whatever income they felt they could take from Enys while death duties were being paid, and the prospect that they would be translated in due course to the grandeur of their estate, with its substantial William IV house and extensive and beautiful gardens. Nevertheless the children were not brought up in Cornwall and in many respects the family did not all that closely resemble their neighbours amongst the landed gentry of that county. This did not prevent Sadie from cutting a swathe through Cornish society.

Sadie had a strong character. No doubt her odd upbringing had contributed to this. She had a very American viewpoint and would say about almost everything that it was done better in America. She was highly intelligent and put her considerable energies to work improving the life of the Cornish poor and entertaining anyone with intellectual pretensions who came to that not markedly intellectual county. George Bernard Shaw and A.L. Rowse were guests at Enys, as were the officers of every visiting Royal Navy warship to come into Falmouth, including, as my mother recalled frequently, Captain Carpenter VC of Zeebrugge fame, a married man who had a flirtation with Catherine.

With a mother who, in A.A. Milne’s deathless verse, ‘sat on committees for cleansing our cities’ and a father who was a sufficiently keen Mason, as many clergymen of his era were, to have his portrait painted with apron and trowel, the Enys girls must have presented something of a challenge to Cornish county society. The elder, Jane, was an attractive girl, but more conventional than my mother and less sharp witted. Young Betty was generally regarded as a terror, and certainly cut her own peculiar swathe through the young men of her era. They had no help in carving out their place in society from their one brother because he was distinctly odd. His mother always said that he had been run over by a runaway horse as a baby to account for the fact that he never managed to cope with formal education, in spite of a couple of years spent at a particularly broad-minded Cambridge College during the First World War. He was in and out of the Army in a good deal less time than most people achieved, being invalided home from basic training. Eventually his father decided to put him into the Church but the Bishop of Truro wouldn’t ordain him and he remained an unordained clerk in holy orders.

The county watched all this amused and said behind their backs that the Enys girls were a little different from everybody else. Robert’s first cousin, Charles Le Grice, who appears in the photograph of Loveday marrying Leonard Fletcher at Treriefe in 1927, once said to me that he thought the bravest thing my father had ever done was to marry one of the Enys girls. That probably sums up the view that their neighbours took of them.

Robert was accepted as a future partner of Reginald Rogers, a very long established firm of solicitors in Falmouth and Helston, whose senior partner was his cousin, Percival Rogers, also cousin to Catherine. Percival wanted a young partner who was also a kinsman, and he must have seen the potential in Robert, reading law at Oxford and desirous of staying in Cornwall. By the spring of 1931, when Robert married Catherine, it was settled that he would become an articled clerk with Reginald Rogers for the necessary three year period to become a qualified solicitor himself and then a junior partner. If Harry and Sadie had objections to Robert on the grounds that he was not yet in a position to support a wife, these now finally evaporated and both families accepted the fait accompli presented by the young couple’s determination that they should be man and wife.

Robert actually proposed to Catherine in 1929 while cutting bamboos in the Enys gardens, as he recalled many years later in his war time diary. The marriage took place in April 1931 in St Gluvias Church, Penryn, where the Enys family had worshipped for hundreds of years and whose walls are adorned with their memorials. The Magdalen crew of 1930 came down as a body, my mother recalling that they dined at Bodrennick in dinner jackets and at Enys in evening dress, a fact that stuck in her mind because one had forgotten to bring either so had to wear a dinner jacket at Enys and evening dress at Bodrennick, borrowed from one of his friends. Enys was always something of a challenge for the diner because they had a butler who was convinced that you passed the port anti-clockwise and would solemnly march round the table filling glasses in that unusual direction, unnoticed by Sadie who was a teetotaller, as many of her American generation were, and Harry who apparently seldom noticed anything connected with social graces.

They honeymooned in Italy, driving there in an open Lancia which had increased my father’s popularity at Magdalen substantially in his last year as he could squeeze the Magdalen eight into it when they drove to training sessions or regattas. Catherine’s recollection of the honeymoon was of mile after mile of scorching French and Italian roads, parking on hills because the Lancia did not run to a self-starter and this saved hard work with the starting handle, followed by the blessed peace and beauty of the island of Capri, then years away from becoming a mass tourist destination, where the chief attraction was the absence of the Lancia which meant that they could stay in one place for a few days’ rest. Driving to Italy in an open car with a restless driver unwilling ever to stop for more than dinner and a bed was a prelude to holidays throughout the 1930s married to Robert Hichens.