Private Roland Eldrige, No 1945, 19th Bn Australian Infantry, AIF, died on 11 November 1916, age 31. He is Buried at Heilly Station Cemetery, Mericourt l’Abbe, Somme, France: Grave ref V.E.3. He was the son of Ellen Eldridge of 21 Forge Road, Southborough, Tunbridge Wells, Kent.

Roland had emigrated to Australia at the age of 21 and worked as an agriculturist at Surrey Hills, Sydney, New South Wales. He had served with the Kent Volunteers in England. He embarked at Sydney on HMAT A54 Runic on 9 August 1915.

From the Courier, 24 November 1916: Mr and Mrs Eldridge of Forge-road have received the following letter from a Chaplain of the Australian Forces: “I am very sorry to say that your boy was brought in here last night hopelessly wounded. He was unconscious, and did not live long after leaving the ambulance. I have just buried him in our little cemetery, where so many of our brave lads lie. His grave will be marked with a cross.” Private R Eldridge is the fourth son of Mr and Mrs Eldridge, and he joined the 19th Battalion Australian Forces in December 1914. He was twice wounded while serving in the Dardanelles. It is a coincidence that he should have been killed four days after Sergeant Parker (whose death was reported last week) with whom he went to Australia about seven years ago. Mr and Mrs Eldridge have three other sons serving in the Army.

There were lots of things that scared the hell out of me when I was little: earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanoes, tarantulas, and then perhaps the more likely things, in our corner of Kent, like the idea occurring to me of my mother dying. Then there were the books and pictures I came across on the shelves around the house. One of these which left a lasting impression was a volume of Hieronymus Bosch paintings - scenes of giant men cut in half with little demons sticking pitchforks into them. They held a horrible fascination for me.

When on a walking holiday in the Wildschonau in the Austrian Tyrol this summer, I popped into a small chapel at the side of the parish church in Oberau and found a series of truly gruesome depictions of the hell that awaited unrepentant sinners. Blimey, I bet these kept the congregation in line!

But for all the representations of the Devil and his works that mankind has pictured, surely the only true manifestation of evil on our beautiful planet is when human self-will runs riot. Events in the world so far this year have led many of us to wring our hands in despair -“What can we do about it?” But surely, each of us can do something, however small, each day, right now. For example, the Romanian nurse who, though very busy, gave her full attention to kindly soothing and aiding my mother yesterday when Mum, suffering from a chest infection, couldn’t breathe properly. 

It always surprises me when people say that if there is a God, how can he let things like famine, war, natural disasters and pestilence happen? Well, disasters and disease are part of the natural world, surely, and as for the other two - it’s not a Higher Being, surely, who hoards more food than he needs, who adjusts the price on the market so he can get a higher profit, or appropriates more than her fair share?

​Just saying.

This summer on holiday in Niederau in the Austrian Tyrol I was amused to read the above sign put up by an exasperated farmer. It reads: This is my cows’ salad-bowl, not your dogs’ loo!  In that part of the world, there are still farms in the middle of villages, even towns, and our hotel was right next to this small area of pasture. The hotel allowed guests to bring their pet dogs, so perhaps some owners had been allowing them to soil the grass.

This week I went out with my trusty poop-scoop to pick up several small turds (to use a time-honoured English word), which an irresponsible dog-owner had neglected to remove after allowing their dog to defecate on the pavement. Further up the street, outside the home of a lady whose multiple sclerosis means she has to get about assisted by a mobile scooter, was a larger pile, right in front of her gate. Bad enough, you might think, that she has to steer her scooter out on to the road occasionally when thoughtless car-owners have parked their car across the pavement... (anyone remember that brilliant GLC infomercial from the 1980s featuring an old lady kicking a car off the pavement?).

Across from us, there’s been a running battle going on between a resident and an anonymous dog owner who leaves little plastic bags containing dog poo, neatly tied up, at the base of a lamp-post. Polite printed notices are pinned up, asking for them to be taken away, which only elicit more offerings. Who, for goodness sake, would do this? it’s hard to imagine exactly what form of sociopathy leads someone to leave health hazardous filth in their wake to be slipped on, smeared on passing pushchair wheels, children’s shoes etc. I guess it must be down, in the main, to sheer ignorance.

I’ll finish on a confession. When I was very small (maybe two?) I climbed up on to a wide window-sill and left a little present behind a vase. I can see it now. Perhaps I’d been caught short, or perhaps I was influenced by the tales my older brothers had told me about the witch who lived down the toilet bowl and came up when you pulled the chain!  Anyhow, I remember thinking that no-one would ever know it was me, or they would think our  Shetland Sheepdog  had left it.  I can’t remember the outcome, but it can’t have taken Sherlock Holmes to work out who had done the evil deed!

I’ve always suffered from piles! Yes, you’ll find them all over my house. I’ve recently been waging war on them using Marie Kondo’s decluttering methods, but have called a temporary truce, with other demands on my time intruding! My newspaper/magazine/newsletter pile recently yielded up a copy of The Guardian from late July. I enjoyed reading Lauren Elkin’s article Reclaim the Streets, on the subject of the flâneur, a figure of privilege and leisure, with the time and money to amble round a city at will, and developments since the 19th century, when the flâneur was something of a phenomenon. Elkin writes: “For a woman to be a flâneuse, first and foremost, she’s got to be a walker - someone who gets to know the city by wandering its streets, investigating its dark corners, peering behind facades, penetrating into secret courtyards.”

Well, I’m not a figure of privilege and leisure, but otherwise I reckon I fit the bill, and reading the article prompted me to dive into another pile to find a wallet of photos I took in 2002 on a work trip to Berlin. It was my first visit, a three day educational development conference on editing alumni magazines. For a history-buff like myself this was a heaven-sent opportunity to see something of  a deeply fascinating city. In order to make the most of it, I decided to get up at the crack of dawn each day and walk its streets, a favourite strategy in an unknown place.

I’d arrived courtesy of Lufthansa at the old Tempelhof airport, where the US Air Force hangars were still visible, and was thrilled, in an Indiana Jones moment, to see a Zeppelin airship warming up ready for take-off on one of the runways. I had some time before the introductory seminar  to catch the bus to the British Military Cemetery near Charlottenburg. It was established in 1945 as a central burial ground for aircrew and prisoners of war who were interred in the Berlin area and East Germany. About 80% are aircrew, killed in action over Germany, the remainder prisoners of war, and two Southborough men, Edwin Cooper and Cyril Wickens lie buried here.

Early the next morning I visited the old Jewish quarter, easily reachable from my hotel at the northern end of Friedrichstrasse. I walked over the Montbijou Brücke and down streets including Georgenstrasse, Ackerstrasse, Oranienburgerstrasse, Gross Hamburgerstrasse, Koppenplatz and Turstrasse. Whenever I saw a doorway open to an old courtyard, I nipped in and looked round (incurably nosey, ask my husband!). I saw a memorial to Berlin’s Jewish dead, and a lovely little Jewish school right by it. In 2002, there was, just fifteen years after re-unification, a huge amount of building and renovation going on. The array of wonderful old buildings (some in the old East Berlin still pockmarked with bullet-holes from 1945, or with plaster still missing from the bare brick walls) mixed in with the ultra-modern, the Spree meandering through, but underlying it all, for me personally, was the knowledge that while it’s a great and elegant city, in Nazi times it was full of terrible violence, hatred and fear for those daring to oppose the regime.

The next day I walked down to Checkpoint Charlie and beyond, then up via Leipzigerstrasse, Jerusalemstrasse, Hausvogteiplatz and Oberwallstrasse to Unter den Linden, past the German Historical Musem and Lustgarten to the Berliner Dom, where creative beer-drinkers had left an impromptu art piece on the steps of the Cathedral. An old man was doing some early-morning fishing from the Eiserne Brücke. Later that evening I ducked out of a suggested drinking session with colleagues and instead heard a beautiful concert in the Cathedral, which has sublime acoustics, given by a choir from Bonn, of Spiritual Choral Music from the last 300 years.

On my last morning I walked up to the Brandenburg Gate (covered up except for the Quadriga) and back past the Russian Embassy, down to the Marx-Engels Platz (now Schlossplatz I believe), where a woman in shorts roller-bladed round the Platz and down the tree-lined paths beside it. The Neptune Fountain was dry, no doubt a temporary casualty of ongoing works. I bought my son a Russian surplus army beret at the flea-market along Am Kupfergraben, had breakfast at Cafe Chagall, then caught the U-Bahn to Luftbrücke Platz, and walked through the little park, which includes a memorial to those who died in the Berlin Airlift, to Tempelhof, just in time to snap a Zeppelin taking off. Flying home, I knew I would definitely want to return and see more of Berlin.

If you’d like to read more around the subject, some of my other related blogs:
The Casualties of War
Holocaust Memorial Day - Anita Lasker Wallfisch
Berlin in October
Through a Glass, Darkly

We recently visited Eltham Palace for the first time - a birthday treat for the pot and pan - with our son, daughter-in-law and baby grand-daughter. It was a lovely summer’s day, and the beautiful grounds around the old palace and its adjoining 1930s house were full of happy visitors - other multi-generational families were having fun too, listening to jazz on the lawn, or with kids playing in the adventure playground next to the cafe, relaxing and enjoying the  cameraderie of their fellow human beings.

There is something for everyone here: mediaeval architecture, 1930s modernist style, unusual garden plants, and in the distance a wonderful panoramic view of London - from Alexandra Palace across to the City, with many of its famous landmarks clearly depicted against the skyline. When Stephen and Virginia Courtauld had their 1930s Art Deco mansion built, incorporating the Great Hall where Henry VIII and his forebears once resided, there were critics abounding, but today, since its restoration by English Heritage after the Army Education Corps vacated the premises in 1992, most of its visitors would no doubt agree it is a splendid house.

Having both recently read William Woodruff’s wonderful memoir The Road to Nab End, it struck us, seeing the opulence here of a house created by its millionaire owners, with money no object, that there was, of course, another vastly different side to life in 1930s Britain. I urge you to read his book if you haven’t yet. It will remind you of what has been achieved in the last eighty years, and what we stand to lose if we are not careful...

Wandering out into the sunshine, we wondered what the strange-looking berries were on the tree at the end of the lawn. They looked like large, luscious raspberries crossed with blackberries. We had the good fortune at this point to bump into an Iranian family, who explained that they were mulberries; the family told us they had, on various outings in and around London, mapped most of its mulberry trees. I love this kind of serendipitous encounter, all the more so on this occasion, after discovering we were fellow bloggers, making the acquaintance of Mehrdad Aref-Adib, whose websites are treasure-houses, boxes of delights, which will bear many hours of happy browsing!

www.aref-adib.com
www.shahrefarang.com
  

I popped down to Yeovil last week for a couple of days, and was delighted to see that the trees by the Library in King George Street had been poetry-bombed! Notices attached to the nearby benches explained that this was organised by Yeovil in Bloom - Words in the Street, whereby residents in South Somerset were invited to write a short poem or phrase about what nature meant to them.

There were too some wonderfully planted beds, a mixture of flowers and vegetables, by the Church of St John the Baptist in the centre of town, where my co-workers and I sat and ate our lunch  on the lawn enjoying the August sunshine.

Later that evening a further blooming of 21st Century culture manifested itself near the Library - crowds of youngsters with their faces lit by mobile phone screens, playing Pokemon.

“I thought you were supposed to walk round catching them on your phone?” I asked a colleague.

“Apparently, there’s a Pokemon gym here where you can fight other people.”

You learn something every day!

(I see, thanks to my friend Google, that there is an active Community Arts Association in Yeovil, so I look forward to attending some of their events on future visits.)

www.yeovilarts.co.uk

My grandfather Harold Edgar Shaw died when I was a child so I don’t know as much about him as I’d like. During the First World War he  was a medical orderly. He had trained as a pharmacist with Boots after an embezzler in his family, whose theft had to be repaid, made it financially impossible for him to train as a children's doctor, his cherished ambition.  Mum told me once that, when he set up on his own, and during the straitened times following the economic crash in 1929 and Great Depression, he often gave medicines to the needy without payment, though he could ill afford it.  She also told me recently, in one of her lucid moments, that he was a Labour man, through and through, all his life. He must have served in Egypt as well as on the Western Front, as my sister recalled he had some treasured 78s of Egyptian music which he had brought home from the war. In later life he loved to read the works of celebrated travel writer HV Morton, and I have inherited one of his books, A Traveller in Italy.

When I recall Grandpa I feel heart-warmed, and have an emotional memory of a kind, quiet, humble man. He ended his days in a mental hospital, where he used to wake in the night, weeping in great distress, believing he was back amongst the terrible scenes of the battlefields.

I have been to battlefield cemeteries of both world wars on a number of occasions, and stood at the graves of men from many nations - Chinese, Indian, American, Canadian, Australian, Russian, French, North African, German, Irish, Scottish, English and Welsh, all in their time deeply mourned and missed by their loved ones.   As most do, who visit these places, I am  always profoundly moved.

One young man commemorated on my local War Memorial was Oscar Maier, a Private in the West Kent Yeomanry (Queen’s Own), who died on 31 August 1916 in the Battle of Delville Wood, and was buried in Mametz, in the Somme. Ironically, Oscar’s parents were economic migrants from Germany, arriving in Southborough in 1895. They had heard from the War Office that Oscar had been wounded several weeks before his death was finally confirmed to them on November 29th. Until then they hoped he might still be alive. His younger brother, was 16 at the time. His son Clive told me “The only thing my father ever told me was that the telegram came on the morning of his sister’s wedding.  His father read the telegram, put it in his pocket, told no one and went through with the wedding. Only when the last guest had gone did he tell the family.”

On 1 July 2016, in one of many ceremonies, the democratically-elected leaders of the nations who took part in the First World War will gather for a ceremony at the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing near Albert, in France, to commemorate the appalling carnage of the First Day of the Battle of the Somme 100 years ago.
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How desperately sad that what should have been a coming together of our leaders in a spirit of community and cooperation should be marred by the shocking division and hatred stirred up by the British referendum on 23 June.
 

All of my adult life I’ve felt grateful for the safety of being part of the European Community. I woke yesterday, on Midsummer Day, to the truly awful news that just over half who voted in the EU Referendum had cut the rest of us out of the heart of our European family.

In our house we were heartbroken. I wept on my way to work. I had felt compelled to choose something from my wardrobe which I’d worn some years ago as I sat by my brother’s hospice bed, with my family, on the day he died. I found it hard to look those of my colleagues who’d declared themselves leave-voters in the eye, such was the strength of my grief. The world looked different, narrowed - and for the first time, I felt ashamed of my country. I’m not a nationalist, but I’ve always felt assured and comforted by the decency of most British people. Yesterday shook that conviction. It seemed like England had been diminished ... as someone said in an Italian news comment: “Little England won over Great Britain”. Shockingly, I’m hearing that some voters had apparently thought to register a protest vote, certain Brexit wouldn’t  actually happen ... seriously?

All day, I found myself  looking at people as they went by, asking myself how they had voted. I hope this will pass. Hate undoubtedly corrodes.  The Referendum has torn away the myth of a United Kingdom, its divisions starkly apparent: north/south, that old especially treasured chestnut -  class war, old/young. I went to a gathering of friends from different nations  last night, and was shocked by the anger of two young graduates, who were convinced it was the older (60+) generation that had let them down. Hold on there! I wonder how completely accurate this statistic is? Of my 9 work colleagues, 6 of us voted remain (aged 60,60,60,55,23,21) and 4 voted leave (aged 46,41,29,23). I don’t happen to know a single one of my personal friends around the sixty mark who voted Brexit.

A winning feature of the leave vote seems to have been contempt for the establishment, a bit of a joke seeing as this was mostly managed and manipulated by the right-wing. I recently read Richard Evans’s terrifying book, The Coming of the Third Reich, about the persecution of the German people which preceded Hitler’s rise to power. Even before the Referendum I was thinking about the parallels:  how the Nazis used the suffering which had ensued from the First World War, and the later global economic influences which ensured Germany couldn’t rise out of its 1920s/early 1930s chaos, to blame the establishment and whip up support for their own nefarious purposes; how the democracy of the Weimar Republic foundered and died before the Nazis’ onslaught.

When I think of the appalling level of debate during the referendum with Gove voicing the view, “We’ve heard enough from experts”, I am reminded of the Chinese dictator Mao who, following the Great famine, between 1958 and 1962, when 45 million Chinese people were worked, starved or beaten to death, oversaw a Cultural Revolution that reviled all things intellectual and historic -  the young were encouraged to beat up, humiliate, even murder their elders.

We woke this morning, early, at 5.30am - we couldn’t sleep any longer, so deep was our sorrow at the awfulness of what has been done - not in our name by the way! I grieve for friends, family  and neighbours in the rest of Europe, struggling with huge problems in their own countries, and who now, through Brexit’s  xenophobia and ignorance, have been abandoned by what should have been the co-operating arm of Britain. The result of our referendum has helped the cause of the far right in other countries. Among the jubilant are Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Rupert Murdoch, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump - hooray (not)!

If the ground felt like it shifted under our feet yesterday morning, perhaps it’s the spinning in their graves of all those men and women who suffered in the many past wars fought on European soil, and who, having lost everything, might at least have hoped for their descendants the cooperation and peace which the European Community stood for, not just for Europe, incidentally, but hopefully also as a model for others. I feel enormously sad for our son and daughter-in-law, who will now be bringing up our beautiful grand-daughter in a world most likely made more unstable and less safe by victory of the leave-vote.

When I was a child, the story in my family was that my siblings and I were descended from an Indian princess. I knew that my father, James Hayter, had been born in India, and lived there until he was seven, but it wasn’t until some years later that I learnt more about my Indian ancestry.  My Aunty Janet and cousin Mary both had a passion for investigating the story of my great-great grandmother.

My father was born in Lonavala, a hill-station near Poona (now known as Pune), in Maharashtra, India,  in 1907, and was sent 'home' in 1914 for a British education at Dollar Academy, Scotland. He boarded with an aunt, and wasn't to see his mother again until after the end of the First World War. A family photograph of that time (see below) includes someone who was perhaps an 'ayah', who may have accompanied the children on the voyage. I read recently that these women were often shamefully abandoned after they outlived their usefulness. I hope this wasn't the case with my family.

​My great-great-grandfather John Howard Wakefield  was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Indian Army, and First Cantonment Magistrate in Lahore. He had been born in 1803, into a Quaker family, and was the grandson of Edward Wakefield, London merchant in Gresham St, and Priscilla (Bell) Wakefield, authoress and botanist. One of his brothers was Edward Gibbon Wakefield, a coloniser of New Zealand.

It was said that John Howard  eloped with a young woman he first spied over the fence of an enclosure. It's not always possible to tease out fact from fiction, but it is rumoured that their meeting was the basis of the love story in MM Kaye's The Far Pavilions. He married her in 1831, she converted from Hinduism to Christianity, after being re-named Maria Suffolk.  She was the daughter of Kheru-Jumnu, Hereditary Vizier of Bashahr, and also the ward of the Rana of Kumarsain. I have been told that her father was put to death by the British for his part in the Indian Mutiny (I have recently read The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple, which was very illuminating on the subject of the Mutiny from the Indian viewpoint). Maria died in 1852, ten years before her husband.
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I am told that John Howard Wakefield persuaded all of his regiment to take the pledge, and go teetotal, and that in 1862, resident by that time in Canonbury Square, Islington, he caught a chill on the way home from a temperance meeting at the Union Chapel on Upper Street and died soon after of pneumonia.
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Their son, my great-grandfather, was George Edward Wakefield* (East India Company Deputy Commissioner Ludhiania, Punjab ) (1831-1892). One of his daughters was my grandmother Violet Mary Wakefield.

In 1976, Aunty Janet, then around my age now, travelled to India for the first time since her childhood, flying in to Karachi and then taking the train to Hyderabad. She wrote: "Visited Gymkhana Club - just as remembered - and St Thomas Church...in the evening discovered to my great joy the bungalow we lived in, and had tea and delicious carrot sweet with the kind Lt Col's  family (the Najams) who inhabit it now...it was quite eerie going round the bungalow, and I expected to meet my own small self in a solar topee any moment”.

After an en route visit to Mohenjodaro, Janet flew on to Lahore "where I hoped to get help in tracing great-grandmamma's grave", which she did, via the Anglican Cathedral and the Diocesan Council's records of old burials.  She wrote: "...In the morning I called on the Reverend ...he called for someone to open a room going on the garden ... When the door was opened we were faced with a horrible smell. Don't go in, said the Reverend, "let the air go in first" ... the room had some odd growths hanging like strings from the roof, and one wall was lined with enormous leather-bound volumes in a very bad state of preservation and in no kind of order. They were going to fetch me a chair, and I was prepared to spend the whole morning, perhaps several mornings, searching. But by an extraordinary stroke of luck, the very first volume I picked out at random was an index of graves in the old Taxali Gate Cemetery, and so in less than five minutes I had found what I wanted... the Gate is one of the five gates of the old walled city... when I entered the cemetery my heart sank ... it is enormous ... and most of the gravestones have been knocked about and destroyed ... I walked through, and there it was - a plain slab of red sandstone flat but raised from the ground and in a remarkably good state of preservation, one of the best in the cemetery. Beautiful undefaced lettering."

Then she went on to Simla: "Explored Simla. Climbed Jacko - terribly steep - to Raja of Bushayr's house, which has what must be the most wonderful view in the world.

And on again, "breathtakingly lovely run", to Ranpur. "We climbed to almost 9,000 feet, and then gradually (the run took 6 hours), dropped down into a deep valley  made by the famous River Sutlej. Ranpur , the ideal capital of a small state ... one of the first free schools in India formed by the late Rajah Padam Singh ... on it is inscribed: BETTER UNBORN THAN UNTAUGHT, BETTER UNTAUGHT THAN ILLTAUGHT, and below that, COME AND LEARN GO AND SERVE and SERVE MAN AND SO SERVE GOD". (Note - I have inherited Aunty Janet's love of copying down inscriptions!)."The same Rajah built the new place, in 1926, where I am staying in lonely state ... in the grounds is an ornamental pavilion ... the most ancient building in Bushahr ... over it stands an enormous peeput tree - four or five hundred years old. I wonder whether Great Grandmamma played under it?... Taku Sahib, who is Chairman of the Municipal Council, thinks Great Grandmamma may have come from Pooh, another day's journey from here, and says there is a ninety year old there who is reputed to have talked about a Bushahr girl going off with an English soldier... alas! It is in restricted territory and I could only get a permit to go there in Simla... I'll have to come here again, later in the year next time."

Back in Simla, she "rushed to see Rajah of Bushahr, who said if I tell him the name of the Old Man of Pooh, he'll write to him and try and get some information for me. He said he was sure he'd seen the  name Wakefield on a sword or something."

In Mussoorie, she visited the church where her mother was married, and "Granny's house ... where we used to spend the hot weather ... I remembered how I had built a shrine on the steep bank above it and made a cross out of two bits of dried bamboo, and knelt there and prayed fervently. When I got bored with that I used to scramble down, go into the house, stand on a chair and steal toffee out of a large jar on a high shelf. Then I'd go back to my shrine and pray for forgiveness - and then back for more toffee, and then more prayers!"

I'd love to track down my great-great-grandmother's original home one day, should the opportunity present itself. I learnt today that 'in a step to create one of the largest repositories of Indian genomes, Bangalore-based Medgenome has teamed up with a southeast Asian consortium that has committed to sequence 100,000 Asian genomes. Were it to work to plan this could mean a consolidated storehouse of at least 30,000 Indian genomes'. So maybe one day I'll be meeting one of my distant Himalayan cousins!
 
 *John Howard’s aunt Isabella Wakefield married John Nicholson, Quaker of  County Down, and they had 16 children, the third child Alexander himself being the father of Brigadier-General John Nicholson, Soldier and Administrator, later styled ‘Hero of Delhi’, killed in the Indian Mutiny. He was Deputy Commissioner of Peshawar in 1857 with George Edward Wakefield (1831-1892, East India Company Deputy Commissioner Ludhiana, Punjab ) as an assistant (and also his first cousin, twice removed).

When I was researching the names on the Southborough War Memorial I discovered many touching stories, a number of which featured men who lost their lives in training, no less poignant than those who were killed in action. George Jones died   in an air-crash 100 years ago this week, on a fine May morning in Kent.
 
George was born in Bolotwa, a town in Eastern Cape, South Africa. He came from a line of men who had served in the military. His father, WC Prime Jones, a Government Magistrate in Whittlesea, South Africa, had previously served with the Cape Mounted Rifles; his grandfather was Captain Richard Walker Jones, of Park Place, Sevenoaks Common, and his great-grandfather was Captain Richard Jones, RN, of Warehorn, Tenterden.
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George lived with his aunts at ‘Ampthill’, 46 Pennington Road, Southborough,  and he was educated at Skinners' School in Tunbridge Wells, where he had been a member of the Officers’ Training Corps. George was well-known locally, particularly as a sportsman. A keen cricketer and footballer, he had played for Tunbridge Wells, Southborough, and several times for the Rangers (his prowess as a goalkeeper was “envied by every custodian in the district. Standing 6 ft 4 ins, his reach is a great asset, and he knows how to make the best use of it”). He had been asked to play for Tottenham Hotspur, and soon after joining the Army he had turned out for Brighton and Hove Albion.

He obtained a commission as Lieutenant in the 8th Battalion of The Buffs (East Kent Regiment) soon after the outbreak of the First World War, and went to the Front on 31st August 1915. He was wounded on 26 September in the Battle of Loos and promoted to Captain the following day. The Courier of 8 October reported:

‘He had an extremely narrow escape, a bullet striking his belt and glancing off, inflicting a flesh wound. A few minutes after - before he had recovered from the shock - a shell burst just behind him and rendered him unconscious for half an hour from concussion.’

About six months later, in the early Spring of 1916, George was attached to the Royal Flying Corps, then in its infancy, having been formed just four years earlier in April 1912. The Courier of 2 June 1916 reported that he "entered into the study and practice of aviation with the same enthusiasm that he has shown in everything else.  He had gained his pilot's certificate, and in about a fortnight or three weeks would probably have gained his 'wings'."

On the morning of 28 May, 1916, George went up as a passenger with Lieutenant Tennant, who had 20 hours flying time under his belt, for a practice flight from a local aerodrome in Kent. A police constable was on duty at the field being used by the authorities as a landing site, and at the inquest held two days later he reported that at 11am he "saw the biplane descend with Lieutenant Tennant acting as pilot, deceased being in the observer’s seat. They got out, had a smoke and a chat, and were both very cheerful, commenting on the fine morning. They stayed about a quarter-of-an-hour, and then prepared to return. The machine was not more than 100 feet up, when it appeared to gradually turn to the left, and then side-dipped, taking a nose-dive to the ground. Witness got to the spot two or three seconds after the machine fell, and found that Lieutenant Tennant had been thrown two or three feet clear of the machine, and was apparently badly injured, but was still living. Captain Jones was still in the machine, but was quite dead. It took about three-quarters-of-an-hour to get him out. Witness described his injuries, and said death was absolutely instantaneous. His wrist watch was still going when he was got away from the machine."

George Jones was given a military funeral at Southborough Cemetery, his coffin borne from his home on a gun-carriage drawn by six black horses. The mourners included his uncle, aunts Florrie, Leila and Maud, and officers and men of the Royal Flying Corps, but sadly, several members of his family  were unable to arrive in time. There are several other airmen buried in Southborough Cemetery, but Captain Jones must surely be the earliest.
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As regards Lieutenant Tennant, this link indicates that he survived this accident, only to be killed one year later on the Somme.

His photograph can be seen here. 

For an account of the conditions encountered by RFC airmen in France, I can highly recommend this link, featuring Fighter Pilot Cecil Arthur Lewis, one of the founders of the BBC (unless the current Government's commands to the BBC have meant dismounting this section from the BBC's superb website!).