This blog contains a summary of the ancestry of Rebecca Brandon, also known as Rebecca de Daniel Brandon and Rebecca Rodrigues Brandão, who was born in London in 1783 and died at Purnea near the Himalayan foothills in India in 1820. Rebecca was a Sephardic Jew from a family of merchants who had fled the Inquisition in Portugal in the mid-18th century. She was my four-times great grandmother, the wife of Captain (later Lieutenant-Colonel) John Littledale Gale of the East India Company’s Bengal Army ...
Read MoreMy account a few postings back of the military career of Captain Thomas Edward Gordon, 14th Light Dragoons (my great-great-great grandfather), has led me to look at the careers of two of his wife’s uncles, one an officer in the East India Company Army and the other in the British cavalry. Together the careers of these three men cover most of the big wars of the earlier part of Victoria's reign– the first Anglo-Sikh War of 1845-6 and the second of 1848-9, the Crimean War of 1854-6 and the Indian Mutiny of 1857-9. They encompass some of the most glorified moments of war in the Victorian age, epitomised in Crimea by the 'Thin Red Line' of the 93rd Highlanders and the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava ...
Read MoreNinety-nine years ago this morning my grandfather Tom Verrinder and his brother Ed were saddled up with their squadron of the 9th Lancers behind the front line south-west of Albert, waiting for the breakthrough that was expected to follow the first hours of the British Somme offensive. They had trained for five months previously in the New Forest learning to use lance, sword and rifle from horseback, and the Battle of the Somme was the be their first experience of war ...
Read MoreMy great-great-great grandfather, Captain Thomas Edward Gordon, 14th Light Dragoons, had the unusual distinction of fighting in the Punjab War of 1848-9, the Indian Mutiny of 1857-8 and – as a colonial volunteer - the New Zealand War in 1866, and of thus being one of a small number of men to receive the medals for all three campaigns. Skelton and Bullock’s Gordons under Arms (Aberdeen University Press, 1912) summarises his British army career as follows, based on the biographical details in Hart’s Army List of 1849-63 ...
Read MoreThe greatest challenge facing the regimental surgeons with the Rumpa Field Force in India in 1879 was jungle fever, ‘that severe sickness that paralyses every effort, disheartens the men, and fosters the preconceived belief of the superiority and valour of the insurgents.’ The Madras Military Proceedings for 1879 and 1880, the source of this quote and others below, reveals a stark picture ...
Read MoreThe Military History of the Madras Engineers and Pioneers, published in 1881, contains only a brief account of the involvement of the Madras Sappers and Miners in the Rumpa Rebellion, written by an officer who was not present and at a time when most of the junior officers who had been deployed in the Rumpa Field Force had left the Corps for other appointments ...
Read MoreOne of the characters I most enjoyed creating in my novel Total War Rome: The Sword of Attila was Gnaeus Uago Alentius, a senior tribune of the fabri – the Roman equivalent of the Corps of Engineers – who oversees a military mapping unit in Rome. I'd imagined that by the 5th century AD, Roman proficiency in field survey and road-tracing might have led to a kind of topographical department in the army, with the fabri close to creating detailed maps akin to the early British Ordnance Survey series - something that would have been halted by the collapse of the Roman army in the west shortly afterwards, leaving us no evidence of their work ...
Read MoreThis photo above was taken in 1940-1 on board SS Clan Murdoch, a British merchant ship that brought essential goods from Africa and India to ports in Britain during the Second World War. The man second from left is my grandfather, Captain Lawrance Wilfred Gibbins, who was the ship’s Second Officer and Gunnery Officer …
Read MoreThe painting above is by Henry James Gibbins, a prolific amateur watercolourist who exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1871. In his professional life Henry was a hairdresser, perfumer and purveyor of European fabrics and other finery, operating for many years from 7 King Street, St James, London, adjacent to the auction house Christie’s ...
Read MoreThis indenture of 28 June 1770, never previously published, contains an agreement between Matthias Gale of London, merchant, and John Hasill, mariner, regarding the ownership of a property in Workington, a town in Cumbria on the north-west coast of England near the port of Whitehaven. Matthias, whose elder brother John was my ancestor, was one of an extensive family in Whitehaven who had prospered in trade with the American colonies ...
Read MoreWhen the German battleship Bismarck put to sea on 19 May 1941 on her one and only offensive mission, ‘Operation Rheinubung’, she carried a boosted complement of sailors to provide prize crews for the many Allied merchant ships she was expected to capture. The naval action that followed, the most momentous of the war against Nazi Germany, is remembered for the relentless determination of the Royal Navy to pursue and sink Bismarck at whatever cost ...
Read MoreThis is my fourth blog on the British assault ship Empire Elaine and my grandfather’s experience as her Second Officer under Combined Operations, the British naval command responsible for seaborne landings during the Second World War. Empire Elaine had been designed for the Ministry of War Transport (M/T) as an L.S.C. (Landing Ship Carrier), one of few heavy-lift ships purpose-built to carry L.C.M.s (Landing Craft Mechanised). Despite her military role, the crew of Empire Elaine ...
Read More'Operation Dragoon' was the codename for the Allied landings in the south of France on 15 August 1944, a massive naval and airborne assault that served as the counterpart to the Normandy landings a little over two months earlier. The assault was primarily a US operation, with most of the troops landed around Cavalaire Bay being from three US divisions, but many of the assault and supply ships and their escorts were British ...
Read MoreThe official history of the Clan Line during the Second World War, In Danger’s Hour by Gordon Holman (Hodder and Stoughton, 1948), contains many accounts of courage and loss among the Merchant Navy crews who provided a lifeline for Britain as well as support for Allied military operations in every theatre of the war. We are used to images of ships on Atlantic convoys, their crews enduring the constant threat of U-boat attack, but an oft-overlooked role of merchant seamen was the huge part they played in seaborne assaults and the dangers they faced there as well. Just what this involved is shown in the remarkable voyage of one of these ships ...
Read MoreA few posts back I wrote of the First World War death of one of my great-great uncles in France in 1914. Another death on the other side of my family is recounted in the press release opposite, from July 1915. Two Muslim sowars – cavalry troopers – went on a murderous rampage in Jhansi in central India and killed four of their British officers, including my grandfather’s first cou sin Marmaduke Gale. Their regiment, the 8th Cavalry, had been kept in India for internal security duties ...
Read MoreA little over ninety-nine years ago one of my great-great uncles died of his wounds near the river Aisne in northern France, a few weeks after the outbreak of the First World War. He was one of the ‘Old Contemptibles’, the regular soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force which was all but destroyed by the end of that year, among the first of some eight million men of all sides killed by the time of the Armistice on 11 November 1918 ...
Read MoreThe
broadcaster and historian Dan Snow had written a moving tribute in The Radio Times to his grandfather’s experience
as a merchant seaman during the Second World War, as part of the commemoration
of the abatement of the Battle of the Atlantic seventy years ago that’s been
taking place this summer in Liverpool and elsewhere. Because my grandfather was
also a Battle of the Atlantic veteran I’ve wanted to post a few blogs remembering the role of the
Merchant Navy, focusing on some of the less well-known aspects. One of those is
that the battle was not just ...
Read MoreOne of my great-great uncles, Norman Martin Gibbins, was a Cambridge mathematician and chess aficionado whose main claim to fame was a paper he published in The Mathematical Gazette in 1944 entitled ‘Chess in Three and Four Dimensions.’ During the First World War, after being wounded as an infantry officer on the Western Front, he’d worked as a cipher officer for military intelligence ...
Read MoreWith the celebrations this week of the seventieth anniversary of the Dambusters Raid, I have special reason to remember one of the other dambuster raids carried out by RAF Bomber Command during the Second World War - the attempt in December 1944 to breach the Urft and Schwammenauel Dams on the Ruhr River, directly in the path of the US 9th Army as it fought through the Hürtgen Forest into Germany ...
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