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ON KENTISH CHALK
A Farming Family of the North Downs

Dedicated to my youngest grandson Charlie who is a racer

PREFACE

This is at heart the illustrated story of an old English farming family. We see them at the beginning
struggling to make a living off the heavy clay soil up on the chalk hills of Kent. At the same time it is the
beautiful County of Kent, once known as ‘the Garden of England’ and situated strategically between London
and France, which provides the indispensible background to the story. This is enhanced by some striking
watercolour landscapes painted by the late famous Rowland Hilder.

Our story is firmly set in its historical times. Local, national and world events form an important part of the
tale, so that it should also appeal to those who have no connection with the family Gore, whose story is
being told. Their farming fortunes fluctuated wildly with the weather and the hazards of the times but also
because of Kent’s pivotal position between London and France. It is only twenty miles across the Dover
Straits to the European coast which meant for example that the family felt the full effects of the long wars
with France and the social distress that followed the victory at Waterloo. In the countryside, they were also
beset by riots and arson, products of a real fear of famine among the poor in the 19 th century. In Chapters 2
and 4 the author has provided some detailed notes about farming in the three centuries touched by that
aspect of the story. This is a surprise in view of his admission that his knowledge of the subject was “mostly
derived from driving a Centurion tank across the north German plain at harvest time”.

It was in the 19th century that young members of the family started leaving their great farmhouse ‘home’,
then at Herne near Kent’s north coast, to seek their fortunes abroad. The first was Henry Gore who sailed
alone to Australia in 1856 aged 16, becoming an engineer and then mine owner in the gold fields of
Victoria. Others, who we follow, left for the USA and some went to farm in Canada. The two world wars of
the 20th century changed everything and their effects are described in some detail. They also caused the
various branches of the family to lose touch. The English, American, Canadian and Australian branches
have recently rediscovered each other, and this book is the result of that reunion.

Cover Picture: “Crockham Hill Farm”, a watercolour by the late Rowland Hilder OBE, a typical example
of a farm on the North Downs of Kent by the County’s most-revered painter of its landscapes.
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 CONTENTS
Preface

Chapter 1: Kent 3

Chapter 2: Farming on the North Downs in the 17th Century 6

Chapter 3: Lenham and Stalisfield 1641-1775 10

Chapter 4: Farming in 18th & 19th Century Kent 14

Chapter 5: Round the Villages: John & Martha and their children 1775-1850 19

Chapter 6: Family Gathering 1850: Herne Bay new town 23

Chapter 7: Joseph & Eliza and their children 1858-1914 28

Chapter 8: The Great War 1914-18 32

Chapter 9: Between the Wars 1919-39: Pandemic, Penury & Pathans 36

Chapter 10: The Second World War 1939-45 41

Chapter 11: The Cold War and Dissolving an Empire 1945-2000 46

POSTSCRIPT 49
------------------------------------

Annex A The Origins & Distribution of the GORE name 50

Annex B Letters from France 1918: Elizabeth Gore née Mayne 52

Annex C King’s Police Medal Citation 1934: Capt Reggie Gore, Indian Army 54

Annex D Memories of Iraq 1943-46: Reg Gore 55

Annex E Learning to Fly during the Second World War: Canon John Gore 57

Annex F She flew an aircraft too: Captain Mary Augusta Gore, US Navy 59

Annex G Dissolving the British Empire 1945-2000 60

Annex H Gore Family Sketch Pedigrees 1640-2005 61

Acknowledgements 63

Bibliography 64

By the same author 65

First published in 2006: ISBN 978 0 9530912 2 5; Copyright © David Gore 2006
Reissued for electronic distribution in 2015; Copyright © David Gore 2015
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 Chapter 1

KENT

“Kent, sir – everybody knows Kent – apples, cherries, hops and women”
(Charles Dickens: Pickwick Papers 1837)

Kent was a kingdom and had that name three centuries before Christ [Arthur Mee, “The King’s England – Kent” 1936].
The county emblem of a prancing white horse with the motto “Invicta” (unconquered) is so old that nobody knows its
origin – it was on the first gold coin struck in Britain. It is also on the silver cufflinks, which belonged to my uncle,
Sydney Kingston Gore of the Royal West Kent Regiment, who was killed at Neuve Chapelle in France in October
1914, in the first three months of ‘the Great War’ (see https://one-name.org/service_story/sydney-kingston-gore/ ).
Kent, with its coastline of white chalk cliffs, has been the gateway to Europe through which came the Roman and
Norman invaders and generations of immigrants. Caesar found the people of Kent had more cattle and were more
civilised than others elsewhere in the country. Historians attribute this and the Kentish spirit of enterprise and
innovation, particularly in farming methods, to having the continent as a close neighbour [Victoria County History, Kent,
Vol 1, Agriculture p.457].

The white cliffs of the North Downs near Dover Invicta

Known as ‘the Garden of England’, Kent is a beautiful and fertile County with a mild climate and flourishing
agriculture. It has some of the finest farming land in the country, especially on the borders of the Thames and Medway
Rivers and on the Weald in the south. It is famous for its orchards, fruit farms and market-gardens. Apples and
cherries were introduced in the 16th century by King Henry VIII to make the country independent of foreign supplies
[John Boyle in “Rural Kent” 1976]. At the same time, Flemish refugees, besides bringing better varieties of fruit and
vegetables, also improved hop cultivation for which Kent became famous. Nowadays hop-fields are no longer so
numerous and many of the distinctive cowl-topped oast houses, where the hops were dried, have been converted into
modern living space.

KENT – “The Garden of England”: from an advertising poster of the 1960s

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EAST KENT, showing the extent of the North Downs (light green), with the Weald and Romney Marsh to the south and
the Thames Estuary to the north. The two eastern rivers, the Medway (left) and the Great Stour (right), each cut through
the chalk of the Downs. Also marked are the main towns (black) and roads (red).

Kent boasts several striking physical features.

(1) The rich grassland of Romney Marsh in the south and the marshes along the shores of the Thames Estuary.
(2) The band of clay and greensand covering much of the south of the county west of Romney Marsh, known as the
Weald, where once a great forest grew – “the haunt of deer and hogs”.
(3) The curious Isles of Sheppey (‘Scaepige’ or sheep-isle) and Thanet (the scene of many Viking incursions), which
are barely islands at all.

But the backbone of this County is the North Downs with its beautiful chalk hills and woods. This range of chalk and
clay stretches from the white cliffs of Dover, once joined to France, westward past Canterbury, Faversham, Maidstone
to beyond Sevenoaks. These North Downs lie like “a lost bit of the Alps (where) we can sit on top of the world
between fields of blue and gold listening to nothing but the song of birds”. That lofty description was written ninety
years ago [Arthur Mee (Ibid) describing the time when the bluebells and gorse are in blossom]. Although the Downs rise to
only a few hundred feet above the surrounding countryside, to be up there now can still lift the spirit in the same way.
Some parts remain like a different world where the pace is slowed and you are peacefully and happily removed from
the noise and congestion of towns, roads and railways down in the valley. The Channel Tunnel, and the extra traffic,
dwellings and other developments it brought, have changed the face of the County, in which the unspoilt and secluded
Downs remain a peaceful refuge. North Downs landscapes

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 North Downs escarpment overlooking Folkestone (Alfred Gay 2007)

Along the southern escarpment of the Downs runs the Pilgrim’s Way, the ancient road from Winchester to Canterbury,
parts of which date from the Stone Age. The path gives wonderful views across the Chart Hills to the Weald beyond.
For early travellers, it was a safe open route avoiding the dangers of what were then large trackless forests to the
south. On the north side of the Downs, the Romans built Watling Street, the arrow-straight road from London to
Canterbury which Chaucer’s pilgrims followed. The town of Faversham, and opposite it the village of Ospringe where
our family once lived, are on Watling Street, now called the A2 (which runs roughly parallel with the M2 Motorway).
From the Downs above Faversham one can overlook the traffic to get a magnificent view across the Swale Estuary
marshes and the Isle of Sheppey to the Thames Estuary with Essex beyond.

Kent boasts many literary associations, useful for those wishing to find out more of the background to the lives led by
our ancestors. The County figures in much of Dickens’ “Pickwick Papers” and “David Copperfield”. “The Ingoldsby
Legends” are all round Canterbury, and Kent was the home of Philip Sidney and is in his “Arcadia”. It is also in some
of Jane Austen, who wrote “Kent is the only place for happiness; everybody is rich there”. But she was probably
thinking of the great country houses that she visited – Knole, Penshurst Place , Leeds Castle and Godmersham Park
near Canterbury, which her brother Edward inherited.

Three rivers have cut their valleys through the North Downs chalk:

(1) To the west, the gentle Darent flows (20 miles) from Westerham, near Winston Churchill’s old home at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartwell , into the Thames at Dartford. It is around Westerham and nearby Ide Hill that
the Downs are at their highest, rising to 800 feet above sea level.

(2) The River Medway, which divides East Kent from West Kent, flows for 69 miles through Tonbridge, Maidstone
and past Rochester to reach the sea at Sheerness.

(3) Finally, to the east is the Great Stour with its two mouths. After 53 miles, the river meet the sea either side of the
Isle of Thanet (at Pegwell Bay and, through the River Wantsum, at Reculver) having arrived there via Ashford and
Canterbury. The Great Stour rises at Lenham, just below the North Downs escarpment, and it is at Lenham that the
story of our family, who were farmers on and around the Downs for almost three hundred years, begins.

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 Chapter 2

An Introduction to Farming on the North Downs in the 17th Century

“An unfrequented and obscure place situated in a wild and dreary country
near the summit of the chalk hills.” (Edward Hasted c.1800)

It was a forgotten world up there. I had climbed a steep grassy escarpment, crossing the Pilgrim’s Way, to reach the
top of the Downs, a few hundred feet or so above the surrounding countryside. Below me was the pretty village of
Lenham, an ancient market town near where our family were farming at the time of the Civil War. Beyond was a
magnificent landscape across the Chart Hills to the great Weald of Kent, once thick forest and now a patchwork of
fertile fields. Turning my back on the view, I headed north and found myself on a narrow winding lane, little wider
than a track, following heavily wooded dry steep-sided valleys. There was pastureland and, on the few level areas,
some cultivation, generally the remnants of a root crop harvest. After a mile, I passed a small farm with no sign of life,
and had a glimpse through the trees of the distant Thames Estuary. Then, a couple of short steep hills later, I came on
a little church at the corner of a wood with some sheds nearby.

Stalisfield church. Fields and roads near the church

This was Stalisfield church where many of our ancestors were christened, married and buried. I found the church
locked, but my prowl round the well-maintained churchyard disturbed a young black cat sleeping peacefully in the
sunshine. He shot off through an old rickety wire fence and I suddenly heard the sound that had made Sherlock
Holmes’ blood run cold – the deep baying of a bloodhound – close by. But this was not just one, there were four or
five large shapes I could now see under dark yew trees just a few yards away, the other side of a couple of strands of
wire fence. I heard the rest of the pack joining in. They were obviously on their way and I didn’t stop to count them
but high-tailed it out of the churchyard and down the lane.

Such was my introduction to the part of the North Downs where our ancestors had lived more than three hundred
years before my visit. I was later told that a pack of bloodhounds was indeed kept near Stalisfield church by two
quarrelling brothers who owned the land in the vicinity. It seems that most farmers in the area are ardent members of
the local shoot, and the hounds are used by some of them for drag hunting. Oddly there was no sign of any village near
the church and I later found the nearest dwellings, a small hamlet called Stalisfield Green, a mile away by footpath.
This is characteristic of Kent where settlements were dispersed from earliest times, and there are still many scattered
outlying farms, mostly on isolated sites that have been occupied for centuries. Villages, like Lenham, were then more
like small market towns than agricultural communities.

Apart from these occasional isolated farms, there is a remoteness about these secluded valleys and the network of tiny
twisting lanes through the woods. Not many strangers seem to find their way up here. Sometimes I would pass another
walker or see a farmer in some distant field, but never a car. I felt like Dr Who stepping out of the Tardis into some
earlier time.

Edward Hasted wrote a rather dismal description of Stalisfield parish in about 1800:- “An unfrequented and obscure
place situated in a wild and dreary country near the summit of the chalk hills. It lies on high ground, exceedingly
bleak and exposed to north-east winds. The land is in general a red cludgy earth of very stiff tillage, very barren, wet
and flinty, and the inhabitants, as well as the country, are equally poor.” [Probably the description of a sub-editor. Hasted
was in debtor’s prison when this text was added]. It didn’t seem like that on the day I was there. Although it was dark
under the trees with few people about, the sun was shining and there was a surprise round each twist of the narrow

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lanes – sometimes a view, a small herd of cows, the gentrified buildings of a farm where the family once lived,
numerous pheasants, partridge, some roe deer hinds, and of course the pack of hounds. It seemed more like hunting
heaven than productive farmland.

In the Domesday Survey of 1086, Stalisfield parish is referred to as ‘Stanefelle’ (Stonefield). [‘Stal’, meaning a cattle
stall, is a possible alternative origin – as in Stallefeld in Yalding]. Thus it is the flint stones, about which Hasted comments
above, that may be the origin of the name. These stones, widespread in the heavy clay soil of these chalk Downs, were
in earlier times sold for use on the roads. But it was then thought that they improved the fertility of the poor soil and so
were left in the fields. Hasted wrote that their effect was to “bring forward the crops either by their warmth, or
somewhat equivalent to it”. The stones possibly help to prevent soil erosion too, but the only clear advantage in
leaving them was that nobody had the onerous task of picking them up.

The rest of this chapter contains background information about farming in 17 th century Kent. Its purpose is to provide
an historical perspective to the details of the earliest known members of the Gore family who appear in Chapter 3. The
limited data we have about these people, based primarily on Church records, makes this preliminary material
necessary to understand the circumstances in which this farming family lived and worked.

‘Winter ploughing’ by Rowland Hilder

Background History to Farming on the Downs in the 17th Century

Variety of Farms
At this time, farming was Kent’s most important industry, but there was little uniformity across the county. The
variety of geology is such that farms differed very much according to the nature of the soil and terrain rather than the
skill of the farmer (FW Jessup. “A History of Kent” 1995, p.1). Moreover, later improvements in crop rotation, methods of
cultivation and in farm machinery could take several generations to pass from the most progressive to the most
backward farm.

Crops
The North Downs of the 17th century were described as “sheep and corn country and had the largest acreages under
cereals in the County. Many of its farmers had substantial holdings and became very rich” [Lawson & Killingray. “A
Historical Atlas of Kent” 2005, p.72 (ISBN 1860772552)]. Their main crops were wheat for the London market, described

7
by a contemporary as “the great mouth”, and barley for brewing. Oats were then the third cereal, providing food for
people and fodder for horses. Rye hardly featured. Other livestock feed came from peas (rarely beans) and tares
(vetch), which had been introduced from France in the Middle Ages.

This was before crop rotation was introduced, and at a time when animal waste was the primary means of fertilising
arable land. Thus farms had, generally, to be mixed, a combination of arable and livestock. But then, not all areas had
the advantages of ground suited to the growing of corn or easy access to markets. Among the problems on some of the
higher parts of the Downs were the difficulty and expense in cultivating the heavy clay topsoil, a severe shortage of
water, the steepness of the ground, and its elevation above sea level (ASL). There is a significantly shorter growing
season up on the Downs where the Gores were than 350 feet below in the valley around Faversham. On top, the
weather is also prone to be more severe and, after snow, farms become almost inaccessible.

The Kentish turn-wrest plough (above) which, despite criticisms of it being ‘heavy and clumsy’, was in use all over
the County until mechanisation, could plough no more than an acre of such clay in a day, for which at least four horses
would be needed. One solution was to dress the fields with lime to break up the thick clogging texture of the clay.
Chalk was dug out of the Downs and converted to lime by burning in kilns. The lime was then spread on the land in
late autumn, to be broken down by frost, and ploughed in in the spring (“The Lime Spreader” by Claughton Pellew ).

Few North Downs farmers were among the ‘rich’ wheat growers. This was not only for the reasons above, but also
because of the small size of most farms. An assessment of farm sizes in the region made by Sharon Monk at the end of
the 16th century [“Aspects of Farming in North Kent 1570-1600”, 1998, p.13], was deduced from 52 farm inventories. From
this come the following statistics [Note that the farm acreages given only include arable land. Pastureland, which might on
average equal the acreage of arable, is excluded as this was often rented separately on marshland] :-

Large farms (over 50 acres) 21%

Medium farms (25-30 acres) 21%
Small farms (5-25 acres) 46%
Other farms (below 5 acres) 12% (below self-sufficiency)

Thus nearly 60% of farms had less than 25 acres of arable land, and these farmers would probably have had to
supplement their living by working on larger farms. Of these, about a quarter had less than 5 acres and are considered
as being below self-sufficiency. The percentage of crops then being grown by acreage was :-
Wheat 59%, Barley 15%, Peas 8%, Oats 3%, Rye & Tares under 2% each, Others 11%.

Livestock
Sheep were the most treasured animals for their wool and meat and were kept in large numbers on the fine grass of the
Downs, some being fattened on the Swale marshes. By comparison there were relatively few cattle. The average
flock/herd size was Sheep: 10-40; Cattle: 5. Almost all farms had at least one pig and some poultry. A few kept bees.

Enclosures & Fields

Kent was not a county of great landowners, once the monasteries had been dissolved and their estates broken up. The
typical large farm is quoted as “perhaps two hundred acres in extent”, although many farmers had to make a living
from cultivating less than a hundred acres (see figures for the Downs above). Kent benefited from being a county of
‘enclosures’, each farmer’s holding forming a compact area in which he could introduce new methods or crops
without seeking his neighbour’s approval. (This is in contrast to the open-field system, where a farmer’s land holding
was in strips in separate fields allocated by the parish with little assurance as to continuity of tenure). By the beginning
of the 17th century, nearly all the county was covered by enclosed, generally small, fields. Few fields were larger than
ten acres, and on the downland clay with flints, most were between three and seven acres. But where the chalk was at

8
the surface, fields were much larger. For sheep and cattle pastures, small fields with hedges were useful for dividing
livestock and giving them some shelter. While for the arable crop, hedges wasted land, harboured vermin and kept the
sun off the corn.

The ‘Best’ Farming Land and Access to Markets

In contrast to farming on the Downs, the fertile alluvial soil to the north along Watling Street (the A2 road) between
Rainham and Faversham is some of the best farming land in Kent. It then produced good crops of wheat, beans and
birdseed, and had orchards, especially cherries and apples, hop-gardens, soft fruit and vegetables. South of Watling
Street, as the land gradually rises and the Downs begin, there were still some orchards and hop-gardens in suitable
areas. These crops and the produce from the Downs above were despatched to London, some of it down the River
Swale from the Faversham or Sittingbourne creeks, and most went in hoys (great freight barges) down the Medway
from the quays of Maidstone, where they later returned full of groceries. The coastal region north of the Downs also
had large flocks of sheep along with cattle fed on the riverside and coastal marshes.

Hasted refers to Stalisfield on the Downs as having “continued hill and dale in it, the greater part of it is coppiced
wood which is mostly beech and oak” (a valuable commodity to local farmers). He notes that the wider sale of this
wood was not worth much because of “its out of the way distance to markets”. This was a serious handicap suffered
by many downland farmers who, because of the terrain and the poor roads, had difficulty in reaching local markets
with any of their produce.

Problems of Wars, Mortality, Fire, Food Riots and Population Increase

Farmers of those times had to face more problems than the weather and their yields. Their difficulties included the
effects on their lives and their markets of various wars: the Civil War 1642-60 (discussed in Chapter 3), the Dutch
attack up the Thames in 1667 and the Irish War 1689-91 coinciding with the start of a hundred years of conflict with
Kent’s neighbour, France.

Families continued to suffer high death rates which were exacerbated by the great epidemics of plague, smallpox and
later cholera. Ague (malaria) was rife in the marshes alongside the River Swale and the Thames Estuary where
farmers fattened their sheep and cattle.

Fire in general, including arson attacks, was an ever-present threat to farmers. When harvests were bad and when
wartime needs reduced grain stocks, then prices rose and the fear of famine provoked disturbances. Food riots were a
common form of protest.

This was also a time when changes in farming started to be driven by the need to feed a growing population. Between
the year 1600 and 1700 the population of England and Wales is estimated to have increased from 4¾ to 5¾ million,
and then to 6¼ million by 1750. This was just a precursor to the huge increases that occurred in the following hundred
years due to the Industrial Revolution. By 1850 the population had almost tripled to 18 million.

The South Downs

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 Chapter 3

Lenham and Stalisfield 1641-1775

“I grant indeed that fields and flocks have charms, for him that gazes or for him that farms.”
(George Crabbe: The Village 1783)

Canterbury is where this family story begins. Bachelor Thomas Gore, a husbandman (farmer), married Ann Jeffery,
spinster, at the Church of St Andrew’s, Canterbury, by special licence – the date: 25th March 1641. This was just a
year before the start of the English Civil War. The licence, our earliest family record, shows that the couple were each
aged about 30, lived in the parish of Lenham, which is about 20 miles west of Canterbury, and that both Ann’s parents
were dead. The bondsman (surety) at their wedding is named as Thomas Ellett, a miller of Lenham.

This was an England in which it was common for babies to be baptised at birth, because so many did not live long
enough to get to church later. The parish church and its parson were at the centre of rural communities in which
religion had a strong influence. Few people could read or write, and ignorance and superstition were rife. Fear of
witches swept Cromwellian England and many women were ill-used and some killed. Few villages in Kent had any
local work such as stone or chalk quarrying, and the staple industry, which sustained village life, was agriculture.
Farm labourers though, as ever poorly paid, generally lived on the farm so at least did not go hungry. The poor were,
in the main, looked after by the parish.

In 1641, after their marriage, Thomas & Ann Gore returned here to their farm at Lenham.
Lenham is a Domesday village which has had a church since Saxon and Roman times.
St Mary’s Church, built here in the 14th century, replaced one destroyed by fire in 1297.

So Thomas, the husbandman, returned with his wife, Ann, to their farm in the parish of Lenham. It is one of the larger
Kent parishes. In the north half it rises 300 feet up onto the chalk Downs, and to the south, around the source of the
Great Stour River, there is sweet farming country suited to corn and orchards. The attractive village of Lenham stands
in the shadow of the great escarpment beside the main Maidstone–Ashford road (today the A20). “It has one of Kent’s
lovely old squares … an ancient market place. A row of limes throws it shadow across the square, on which timbered
houses and quaint fronted shops look down” writes Arthur Mee in “The King’s England”.

We know little of Thomas Gore’s circumstances at Lenham or where his farm was. That his friend or colleague
Thomas Ellett was a miller, suggests that he was growing corn, probably wheat for the London market. He was
certainly best-placed at Lenham with its fertile well-watered fields. It was also the main market in the area with good
direct access to the quays on the River Medway at Maidstone ten miles away. We can reasonably conclude that
Thomas did well there because just a few years later his eldest son, Abraham, had the lease of one of the most
desirable farms on top of the Downs in the parish of Stalisfield five miles away.

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 “Sweet farming country” – The fields behind Lenham church

In July 1641 Thomas and Ann took their first-born son, Abraham, to be baptised at St Mary’s parish church just off
Lenham square. The church is mainly 14th century (having been rebuilt after a ‘malicious fire’ in 1297), but the
original Norman east wall and window still remain in the adjoining St Edmund Chapel. After Abraham, Ann bore
three other children, Elizabeth, Thomas and Rachel, who were baptised there in 1643, 1645 and 1649 respectively (see
them at the top of the first pedigree in Annex ‘H’ at page 61).

These were also significant and momentous years in English history. It was a time when many a Kent citizen was set
against his neighbour. Spies and informers were everywhere, and it was not wise to proclaim your loyalty to the King
in the County. Following Parliament’s rejection of the Maidstone Petition in 1642, a parliamentarian administration
was rapidly imposed throughout Kent, to which there was little local resistance. A number who were loyal to the King,
including 22 army colonels, left the County. When the war started in August, Faversham gunpowder works became
the main supplier to the Parliamentary army, but the fighting was elsewhere in England (Edgehill, Marston Moor,
Newbury, Naseby). In 1643 a large group of Kentish men, many coming from the Faversham area, showed their
opposition to the new régime, but they were easily overcome in a skirmish at Tonbridge.

In 1647 Parliament banned all celebration of Christmas and Easter as being “superstitious festivals” – all shops to stay
open, “no prayers or sermons in churches”, “no rosemary or holly” decorations and “no plum potage”. This caused a
riot in Canterbury where the mayor was mobbed and half killed, and the town celebrated Christmas in the traditional
way. The mayor sent for help [There were no police: the Metropolitan Police were not formed until 1829]. Although the
citizens locked the city gates, troops broke through, arrested the ringleaders who were thrown into the dungeons of
Leeds Castle (5 miles west of Lenham). A petition was got up to have them freed whereupon its writers were ordered
to be whipped and imprisoned.

In the final phase of the war the main field armies entered Kent. They clashed at Maidstone, where the Royalists under
Sir John Mayney were defeated after their gallant defence of the town against a much larger force, suffering great loss
of life. The following year King Charles was executed in London. Among the 59 signatories to his death warrant were
three Kent Members of Parliament. Below are portraits of Cromwell and his opponents:

King Charles I Oliver Cromwell Prince Rupert 1619-82,

Born 1600, Executed 1649 1599- 1658 Royal cavalry commander
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Other laws that Oliver Cromwell and the Long Parliament passed showed just how prescriptive, austere and self-
righteous those given overriding power can be. They dubbed sport and entertainment as ‘blasphemous’ and closed the
playhouses and public houses. Adultery was punishable by death and a single mother could be imprisoned. If you met
with a group of friends, it was assumed that you would be ‘plotting’, and you could be fined on the spot. People had to
be careful that what they said in public was politically correct. The property of Royalist sympathisers, many of whom
had already left the County, could be sequestered and a crippling fine imposed in their absence. The similarities with
the Islamic Caliphate being set up by ISIL today, nearly four centuries later, are inescapable!

In the country communities of those times, there was virtually no split between the sacred and the secular. In a
practical sense, it was the parish church council that ‘ran’ each village community. This local structure was
undermined when half the church benefices in Kent were sequestered or forcibly vacated by the new régime, with
church services being prohibited or churches closed. An edict of 1644 ordered the defacing or demolition of all
representations of Christ and his Apostles, the clearing of Chancels of all their paraphernalia and the removal of fonts
and organs. Such was life during the eleven years of Cromwell’s so-called ‘Commonwealth’ (Republic). It ended after
his death in 1658 with the return two years later of the new King, Charles II, who came to restore “Merrie England”.

The Gore family seem to have remained in Lenham parish until after 1683. Thomas had died by 1664 when Ann
appears in the Hearth Tax record for that year as “Widdow Goare of Lenham Borough – one hearth”. Abraham, their
elder son, would have taken over his father’s farm at Lenham, and in October 1669, aged 26, he married Mary Roper,
“a maiden of 25 years”, whose father William farmed at nearby Harrietsham. Abraham, like his father, went off to
Canterbury where he and Mary were married by licence at the Church of St Mary Bredman. The licence shows that
Abraham’s mother gave her consent. This is the last we hear of Abraham’s parents as no death or burial record for
either of them has been found. Of Abraham’s siblings, we know only that Elizabeth married Obadiah Viney at
Lenham in 1666, the year of the Great Fire of London, but nothing about the two youngest, Thomas and Rachel, who
probably died young. Among the hazards of life then, was the plague – spread by rats. The Great Plague of London
killed 75,000 people the year before the fire, and before that there had been severe outbreaks in Kent, one in nearby
Faversham killing 75 people.

It was in Faversham in 1688 that a man, arrested off a boat in the Thames Estuary, was discovered to be the King!
James II was trying to escape to France in disguise but was recognised and taken to the Queen’s Arms in Faversham
where he was held for several days (at 18 Court Street) before being returned to London. His pro-Catholic policies and
arbitrary rule had caused both the Whigs and Tories in parliament to unite against him and invite William of Orange to
replace him (which he did later that year). No wonder James felt uncomfortable in London.

The spotlight now falls on Abraham Gore and wife Mary Roper. They had eight children, all except the youngest,
Abraham (junior), were baptised at Lenham. At some stage around 1683-88, the family left Lenham and settled five
miles away up on the Downs in the parish of Stalisfield. It is mainly thanks to the wills, which both Abraham and
Mary left, that we know more of the lives of the family (the pedigree mentioning all these people can be found in
Annex ‘H’ near the top of page 61).

One may ask what brought Abraham Gore with his family to face the hardships of farming up on the North Downs.
Farm rates at Lenham had begun to increase, and they may have wished to leave the pressures of life in the valley for
the more peaceful environment above. The family would not have forgotten the disruption caused by the Civil War
and the repressions of its aftermath. The availability of the lease for Holbeam Farm, a highly desirable property
(owned by St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London), may also have been a factor. Whatever the reasons, the Gores
stayed farming up on the Downs at Stalisfield and various neighbouring parishes for the next 160 years.

When in 1714 Abraham (senior) made his will, aged 73, he bequeathed all his property, including Holbeam Farm
where the family were living, to his wife, Mary, and their youngest son Abraham (junior), with some provision for
their other surviving children – two sons and two married daughters. Normally Thomas, the eldest son, would have
been the main beneficiary. He had his own land and separate farmhouse, but seems to have suffered a series of
tragedies with all six of his children dying young. He may have been passed over because of his own health, as he died
in 1719 – aged 47, just a year after his father. Thomas’ headstone is in Stalisfield churchyard, and an inventory of his
property taken after his death has survived.

Thomas’ inventory shows that his was a small mixed farm of probably less than 25 acres, valued with all his
belongings at £85. He was growing wheat, had 4 mares with a plough, 3 harrows, a wagon and a cart (‘cort’), 2 cows
and a calf (‘bud’), 8 sheep and 2 young pigs (‘sheats’). He would also have had poultry, but the assessors would not
have bothered to corral and count them! He had a ‘Brewhouse’ where they brewed their own ale (water being
completely unsafe to drink), a ‘Drinkhouse’ - a cool room where the ale was stored, and a Buttery (‘butterne’) for
butter, cream and cheese-making. He also appears to have been selling produce locally from his ‘Shoop’, such was the
12
high value of goods found there (although in those times a shop was also a place where a particular handicraft or trade,
some aspect of husbandry, was carried out).

In the absence of a will, the custom of the time was for all sons to inherit their dead father’s land in equal portions The
drawback to this system, known as Gavelkind, was described in the saying ‘many heirs make small portions’. It led to
‘peasant farming’ in the English Midlands, Ireland and Germany. But, on the whole, Kentish farmers in this period
avoided the problem. After a farmer’s intestacy, where more than one son survived, a son would buy out his brother,
or the family would decide which son was best placed to inherit the family farm. Abraham (senior) was unusual in
getting round to make a will, and in his case with four adult sons, it was the youngest of them, Abraham (junior), who
took on Holbeam Farm from his father. Judging by its buildings today, it was a substantial property with the advantage
of fairly level ground for cultivation but exposed to winds and weather as it is right on top of the Downs at 450 feet
above sea level. The farm name is still marked on today’s maps. Its owners, Bart’s Hospital, rebuilt part of it in 1839
to develop it as a model farm. Today its grand old flint-walled buildings have been converted to ‘modern living’. They
look in pristine order, but this once busy farm seemed deserted and forgotten when I passed it in high summer, with
not a human or animal in sight. It probably figures in some estate agent’s window in Faversham.

The entrance to Holbeam Farm, Stalisfield, today. The original flint wheel house
and threshing house have been converted to living accommodation

Abraham (junior)’s mother, Mary, lived on with her son at Holbeam until she was 89. In her 1727 will, of which
Abraham was the sole executor, she remembered each of her four other surviving children with the gift of a silver
spoon. She also bequeathed one to her late son Thomas’ only surviving daughter, although she sadly never lived to
receive it. Mary was buried in Stalisfield churchyard alongside her husband Abraham (senior) and son John. The grave
is marked by a flat stone on the east side of the tower.

In the Stalisfield church registers, which survive from 1699, there is a record of the baptism in November 1711 of a
boy, Abraham, who the Parson wrote was “begotten on ye body of Hannah Such by Abraham Gore (junior)”. Poor
Hannah Such never married her Abraham, who seven months later married another girl, Catherine Jeffery. Sad to say
Hannah’s baby died, aged only three.

Catherine Jeffrey was also from a Stalisfield family, possibly related to her husband’s grandmother, Ann Jeffery of
Lenham. Like his father and grandfather before him, Abraham Gore (junior) was married by licence in Canterbury – at
St Margaret’s church. He and Catherine had eight children, of whom four died as infants. They had one surviving son,
Thomas baptised in 1716, and three daughters all of whom married (see Pedigree at page 61). When Abraham
(junior) came to make his will in 1758, his son Thomas was the sole executor and there was no mention of Holbeam
Farm, just small cash bequests to his daughters. We have found no evidence to show just how Abraham and his son
Thomas managed in what, for some farmers, was a difficult period. It was blighted by war with France, changes in
farming practices and increasing unrest among farm labourers as the Industrial Revolution gathered momentum. Food
shortages and prices were becoming people’s main concern and sometimes led to rioting and arson attacks on farms.
In 1768 food riots spread throughout the country. The background to these events is discussed in Chapter 4.

We can only say with certainty that in 1775/6 when Thomas was a widower aged sixty in Stalisfield, where the family
had been settled for three generations, his elder son, John aged 27 with new wife Martha Rogers, left home for the
peripatetic life of a jobbing agricultural labourer in the surrounding parishes. This leads one to think that the family’s
fortunes had dwindled during Abraham and Thomas’ tenure of the Gore land at Stalisfield. It is difficult to be sure of
the reason, but it emphasises the unforgiving nature of farming up on the chalk, not only as a hard life but as a cyclical
and potentially volatile business. As tenant farmers, the Gores sat, sometimes uncomfortably, between the landlord
and the marketplace to face the fluctuations of weather, labour and prices. It was a difficult balancing act. The story of
the young John’s travels and of Martha with their large family is taken up in Chapter 5.

13
 Chapter 4

Farming in 18th & 19th Century Kent

“The farmer will never be happy again;

He carries his heart in his boots;
For either the rain is destroying his grain
Or the drought is destroying his roots”.

(AP Herbert 1890-1971)

18th CENTURY

War
The history of this century is disfigured by war. The list of just those wars in which England (united with Scotland
from 1707) was in conflict with other European states covers two thirds of the century :-

1701-14 War of the Spanish Succession (Britain, Prussia, Holland v. France, Spain)
1738 War of Jenkins’ Ear (trade war with Spain)
1740-48 War of the Austrian Succession (Britain, Austria, Holland v. France, Spain, Prussia)
1756-63 Seven Years War with France
1775-83 American War of Independence (France joined in 1777, Spain in 1778)
1793-1815 Napoleonic Wars (Trafalgar 1805, Waterloo 1815)
(This list does not include two Jacobite rebellions, various colonial wars in India, and the French Revolution of 1789)

It was the decision taken in 1688, by England under King William III, to join the coalition against Louis XIV of
France which began more than a hundred years of war with our nearest neighbour. This conflict did not end until 1815
at Waterloo, and was to have a great impact on, among others, the farmers of Kent and their Kentish and London
consumers.

Agricultural Developments and the Effect of War

The 18th was a century when more scientific interest began to be taken in agriculture with books by Jethro Tull on his
system of ‘horse-hoeing husbandry’ in the 1720s, by ‘Turnip’ Townshend of Norfolk in the 1730s and 40s, and by two
Kent farmers, John Boys and John Banister, both writing in the 1790s. While the production of fruit and hops in Kent
continued to expand, the most important crop was the acreage under wheat, which fluctuated with the market price
and was at its greatest when the import of foreign corn became difficult. The wars with France, particularly in the
latter part of the century, applied pressure to increase corn acreage and yields. At the same time, there was a shortage
of farm labour due to the Army’s demand for men. Between 1770-1798 farm wages in Kent nearly doubled, and
continued to rise until the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. Meanwhile the price of food had trebled and the wage
gap contributed to the severe depression that was to blight the period 1815-29.

Crops & the Value of Potatoes

Besides wheat, the other main crop continued to be barley for the beer. In 1782, when the barley crop failed due to bad
weather, it was, surprisingly, not the farmers but the Kent brewers who went bankrupt. The acreage of oats increased
between 1760-90, but this was because people in the cities, especially in nearby London, had become more
prosperous, and the number of horses had multiplied. Rye was grown for cattle fodder and straw but, in Kent, it was
never used to make bread. Before the 1770s, potatoes and cabbages were grown only for cattle feed. But, such was the
urban demand after 1780, they became acceptable on the plates of all levels of society. Indeed, without this
‘emancipation’ of the potato it is doubtful whether England could have fed herself during her wars with Napoleon.

The Value of Turnips

Townshend showed the profitability of turnips, which made their way into Kent to become an important crop,
especially on the Downs. “Sheep, folded on the turnips improved the land, and another part of the crop, harvested for
winter use, enabled the farmer to keep more livestock, to obtain more manure, to enrich the land, to increase its yield.”
On the slopes of the chalk hills the turnip came into common use as part of a four-year rotation (1. wheat, 2. turnip, 3.
barley, 4. grass).

14
 “Morning sunshine”

Cattle & Sheep Breeding

The 18th century also saw some attention at last being paid to the breeding of cattle, which on the Downs were mainly
Welsh or some indeterminate home breed. A few Guernsey and Friesian cows were brought in, and some larger
graziers began to improve the Kent sheep, which had evolved from the East Kent and Romney Marsh strains. Yet, by
the end of the 18th century, the standard of animal husbandry in the county was still considered “backward”. Breeding
improvements followed eventually, and it is interesting that a hundred years later a member of our family, Robert
Gore (1845-1929), built up a fine herd of Friesian cows at Herne Bay, which successfully supplied his own Creamery
there for over 22 years.

The Industrial Revolution

This was also the century in which the Industrial Revolution started to gather momentum – from about 1750 when
water and steam power were applied to manufacturing. It saw a rapid increase in the population (by almost threefold
between 1750 and 1850 in England & Wales) and movement from the countryside into the towns, which added to the
pressure on farmers to improve both their land and labour productivity. There were improvements in nutrition, the
start of vaccination and a decrease in the dreadful human death rate.

Between 1701-09, four of Thomas & Elizabeth Gore’s six children died before their first birthday, the other two died
aged three and seven. Thomas’ younger brother, Abraham (junior) & wife Catherine had eight children between 1713-
25, of whom only half survived to maturity, the other four dying in their first few months of life.

Roads
The 18th century marked a great improvement in road transport. Until they were ‘turnpiked’ roads (maintained by
charging a toll) were mostly impassable in bad weather. Watling Street, the main (A2) road from London through
Faversham to Canterbury, had been turnpiked by 1750. Between 1750-80 the important North-South road linking
Faversham over the Downs to Charing and Ashford (A251) was turnpiked (one can still see the tollhouse window in
Sheldwich). This was followed after 1780 by the Maidstone-Ashford road (A20).

Fear of Famine
The increase in population and the fluctuating effects of wars on the availability of food began to cause unrest in parts
of Kent. In the countryside, grievances were nailed to the parish church door with the purpose of reminding the
wealthy of their moral duty towards the poor. This was a common prelude to threats to make individual farmers or
millers lower their prices, culminating in arson attacks on farms, and/or food riots. 1768 was a year of food riots
nationally. In Kent, during the Napoleonic war, there were severe food shortages in the years 1795-96 and 1799-1801,
which coincided with the threat of French invasion and the British naval mutiny at the Nore. The combination even
caused disturbances among the urban workers in Maidstone and the Medway towns. In Canterbury, mutinous
militiamen forced food stores to lower their prices. Many town and church councils moved to prevent hunger by
subsidising wheat, bread, flour, potatoes, rice and coal, which were bought in bulk and sold cheaply to the poor.

15
 “Winter landscape” by Rowland Hilder

19th CENTURY

Post-War Depression & Unrest 1815-29

The end of the Napoleonic War in 1815 brought penury and social distress to many of Kent’s farm labourers. The
economic depression that followed the war lasted for nearly fifteen years. Work on farms was increasingly being done
by horses and machines. John Boys on his farm near Deal, for example, had invented a threshing machine and its use
spread rapidly throughout Kent. Large numbers of men were without work and looked to the parish for relief. And this
was the background to the unrest, which culminated in protests in 1816, 1822 and in the ‘Swing’ riots of 1830-31. In
1830 outbreaks of arson, machine breaking and wage-rioting by agricultural labourers, which started in Kent, spread
across the whole of southern and eastern England. By August, gangs were breaking up threshing machines in East
Kent and threatening letters, signed “Swing”, were sent to farmers throughout the County. By October, arson attacks
began, rioters around Sittingbourne smashed machinery in daylight, and 500 labourers who marched on Maidstone
had to be dispersed by soldiers.

General Prosperity & the Farm Labourer 1830-50

Unfortunately, the increase in general prosperity that came after 1830 did not benefit the poor farm labourer on low
wages or out of work. But his situation evoked sympathy from the public so that, in general, rioters were initially
treated sympathetically. By November 1830, after pressure from the establishment, harsher sentences, usually
imprisonment or transportation, were given. But the spread of rioting from Kent to other counties was greeted by
severity from the start. Overall, of some 2000 convicted rioters, 250 were sentenced to death, of which all but 19 had
their punishment commuted to transportation, the rest facing either imprisonment or transportation. Executions by
hanging were not then held publicly, but prisoners whose death sentences had been commuted were forced to watch
them. Four were hanged in Kent.
16
Then 1834-36, after a new Poor Law was introduced (under which bread tickets were substituted for relief paid in
cash), further riots and arson swept through areas previously affected by ‘Swing’. In this, Swale villages in the
Faversham and Sittingbourne areas suffered badly. Then in 1838 occurred ‘the battle of Bossenden Wood’, near
Boughton, where “Mad Thom” Courtenay leading a group of protesters shot at soldiers sent to arrest him. He and nine
of the farm labourers with him were killed. Arson attacks revived again in the ‘hungry forties’ followed by a second
‘Swing’ outbreak, which coincided with the re-introduction of threshing machines in 1849-50.

New Village Schools 1830-70

The deaths in Bossenden Wood, the first in this long period of agricultural unrest, drew attention to the conditions in
which many of the rural population lived and their backwardness and ignorance. There were unexpected results. In
particular the event gave impetus to the building of village schools. In 1830 there were only a dozen villages with a
school (including Sheldwich). By 1870 when the Education Act became law, schools existed in more than 170 rural
Kent parishes – most of them being Church schools or those established by local benefactors.

Prosperity (for some) 1850-75

After 1850 there followed two decades of prosperity for farmers – although mainly for those growing corn with more
than 300 acres who could take full advantage of conditions. Jonathan Gore started with 148 acres at Owls Hatch Farm,
which he later reduced to 97 when his son took over, while his brother Joseph’s Parsonage Farm had 165 acres, which
he more or less maintained in his time. Buoyed by high prices and larger markets, farming was then typified by high
productivity through the application of new techniques – in field drainage, flexible crop rotation, new machinery and
artificial fertilisers. When, after 1875, prices started to fall again, it became difficult to maintain the high investment
that was needed, and depression quickly followed.

The Railways 1860-63

The rail link from London through Rochester to Sittingbourne was completed in 1858, and the population of
Sittingbourne doubled in the next twenty years. This line was extended in 1860 to Canterbury and to Whitstable, from
where a line along the coast to Herne Bay (where the Gores were farming) and Margate was completed in 1861-63. So
began the influx and the expansion of the North Kent coastal resorts.

“Blossom time” by Rowland Hilder

Bad Weather & Recession again, but good for Cows! 1875-1900
The weather contributed to the gloom with several wet seasons and poor harvests culminating in the particularly wet
summer of 1879. With the bad weather came competition from cheap imports of grain from abroad. Many farms were
sold, food prices fell (which, incidentally, made farm-workers better off). Some farms were able to withstand the

17
worst effects of the recession: the milk trade and horticulture both benefited from the growth of the railways, which
brought remote farms into contact with urban markets (the railway reached Herne Bay in 1863). The recession in Kent
lasted to the end of the century and forced a great move from arable to pasture. The extent of this change is shown in
the amount of land used for various crops between 1867 and 1906. Acreages of Corn fell by 42%, Hops by 30%,
Sheep by 15%, while acreages used for Cows increased by 56%. This would explain the success of Joseph’s son,
Robert Gore’s herd at Parsonage Farm, which he continued to maintain until 1914.

General Health & Longevity 1830-1900

After 1850, when the great epidemics of plague and smallpox were over, life expectancy began to increase. Among
the debatable reasons behind this improvement were higher incomes, better diets, better medical treatment and public
health facilities, as well as a wider understanding of how to avoid contagious diseases. But in Kent there were still
regular devastating outbreaks of measles, whooping cough, influenza and cholera. Freedom from infected water
marked the end of the great cholera outbreaks in Kent between 1830-66. Cholera was in Faversham in 1832 and 1866
and at Maidstone in 1832, 1849, 1853 and 1866. Still, diseases like tuberculosis regularly killed thousands every year
until well into the 20th century. Some epidemics were exceptional, such as the typhoid outbreak at Maidstone in 1897
which killed 132. But this was nothing compared to the ’flu pandemic that was to come in 1918-19. It killed several
thousand people in Kent in the space of a few months, but millions across the world died of it – more than all those
who had been killed during the Great War.

Family Longevity Compared

Using our family data covering ten generations for those individuals whose birth and death dates are approximately
known, the percentage of men and women reaching adulthood who gained the age of 70 are shown below. Also given
are the rough percentage of children who died before reaching adulthood, generally succumbing as infants :-

Before 1850 (8 generations): Men aged 70+: 8 out of 26 adults = 34%

Women aged 70+: 5 out of 31 adults = 16%
Children who died young: 27 out of 84 births = 32%

After 1850 (2 generations): Men aged 70+: 11 out of 19 adults = 58%

Women aged 70+: 13 out of 17 adults = 76%
Children who died young: 2 out of 38 births = 5%

This shows the sea change in longevity which occurred after 1850. The big difference between men and women’s life
expectancy before 1850 is presumably due in part to the hazards of childbirth. Note the dramatic increase in the
number of children reaching adulthood after 1850.

“Country lane, Cowden” by Rowland Hilder

18
 Chapter 5

Round the Villages – John & Martha and their children 1775-1850

“O, gie me the lass that has acres o’ charms; O, gie me the lass wi’ the weel-stockit farms!”
(Robert Burns: “Hey for a Lass wi’ a Tochter” 1799)

John Gore, the elder son of Thomas, married Martha Rogers of Chilham at Badlesmere church in July 1775. John was
aged 27, the only surviving son of his mother, Ann, who had died nearly 20 years before. John’s brother and three
sisters had all died young, and from his early years John had been helping his father run the family farm, Holbeam in
Stalisfield parish. This had been a difficult time for the pair of them. The farm was dependent on having good labour,
but this became harder to get and to retain, such were the demands of the army and with all the better paid jobs now
becoming available in the towns. Since the food riots of 1768, the fear of mob violence in respect of farms was
widespread in the countryside. Thomas’ feeling of insecurity cannot have been improved by hearing the occasional
explosion from the valley – major accidents at the gunpowder factory in Faversham being not unknown. Farm wages
were now rising, and the disadvantages of weather and distance (despite the turnpiking of the main A251 road to
Faversham in 1762) had reduced the profit on their produce. John’s father was nearly 60 and no longer able to work as
he once did, and with the arrival of John’s new wife, Martha, it was a moment for them to review their situation (a
pedigree mentioning all these people can be found in Annex ‘H’ in the middle of page 61).

The outcome was to sell the lease of Holbeam Farm. John, who was familiar with many of the other farmers in the
surrounding parishes, would in future earn his living by offering his experience of downland farming as a jobbing
labourer, while his father remained at Stalisfield – where he died five years later. Thereafter we can trace where John
and Martha lived and worked from where their twelve children were baptised and, in some cases, buried. They took
rented accommodation wherever John found work. In the first year, 1776, they were in Throwley, then back in
Stalisfield for a year, and, from 1778, in Eastling.

Throwley (rhymes with ‘Cowley’, not ‘holy’), to the north-east of Stalisfield, is by comparison to it “a more pleasant
and open country ... though wild and romantic among the hills and woods, it is not so dreary and forlorn, nor the soil
so uncomfortable, being much drier” writes Hasted. Similar to Stalisfield, its height at about 325 feet significantly
restricted its annual growing season by several weeks in comparison with Faversham down below. The Norman
church contains memorials of the Sondes family who lived in Throwley before the Civil War and then moved to
Sheldwich where they built Lees Court, the great estate on whose land John’s son was later to work.

Valley leading from Holbeam Farm to Throwley Church, which is just beyond the distant ridge

Eastling (the ‘–ing’ ending suggests a parish of very early Saxon origin) is just north of Stalisfield with similar terrain.
In those days it was the scene of an annual November ‘diversion’ known as “squirrel hunting”. Hasted describes the
assembly of “a lawless rabble with guns, poles and clubs parading through the woods with loud shoutings. And under
the pretence of demolishing the squirrels, they destroy hares, pheasants, partridges, and in short whatever comes in
their way, breaking down the hedges, and doing much other mischief. In the evening they betake themselves to the
alehouses finishing their day in drunkenness”. As the preacher, John Wesley, said when he visited Faversham a few
years earlier “I addressed a few of these so called Christians, but indeed they were more savage in their behaviour than
the wildest Indian I have seen”.

19
By 1782 John and Martha with three children had moved from Eastling down to Ospringe by Faversham on Watling
Street, the old Roman road to Canterbury, where the great and the good used to break their journeys. The village is
named from the stream that rises there. The Maison Dieu, a 15th century house built on the site of a hospital, centuries
older still, which took care of sick or injured travellers, is now filled with relics of the Romans who came through here
and is today an English Heritage site. Ospringe, on superb quality soil with its orchards, hop-gardens, soft fruit and
vegetable crops predominating, must have been a revelation to John Gore.

The Maison Dieu at Ospringe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maison_Dieu,_Faversham

But after three years or so, John left Ospringe and was up on the Downs at Eastling again. Finally in 1788 he and
Martha, then with seven children, settled at Challock, five miles away to the south-east, where they remained for the
rest of their long lives. The continuing war with France, the unrest, due to the food shortages and rising prices of the
late 1790s, and the economic and social distress after the war was over, saw to it that their last days at Challock were
not a comfortable time. But they lived in a beautiful place and had there what is described by Arthur Mee as “one of
the best miles in Kent”. This was the walk from the village through Eastwell Park to its completely remote 13th century
church (from which its village and the main road has long since been moved). It is country “where nothing seems to
have happened for perhaps 600 years”. The approach to the church is “along a sunken road between old banks held
up by spreading tree roots http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/247366 , and if you come in due season there are
bluebells all the way!” The Germans hit this misplaced and isolated old church with a flying-bomb during the Second
World War, but the village saw to it that the building rose again, and it was rededicated in 1958. Yet their church, St
Cosmas & St Damian’s, has no burial ground, so villagers all go for their final rest to neighbouring Molash where
John and Martha both lie.

John and Martha’s eldest child, Elizabeth, married a local farmer, Robert Harrison, and they settled at Woodsell Farm,
next to Holbeam Farm where she had lived with her parents. Two of Elizabeth’s sisters, Martha and Mary, also
married. The two older brothers, John and Thomas, farmed with their father at Challock while Joseph, the youngest,
worked at Chilham. In 1803 Thomas died and the following year his brother John moved to Sheldwich to marry Ann
Baynes, the widow there of a Robert Ofield.

Joseph followed in his brother’s footsteps in 1811 by marrying another widow, Elizabeth Pilcher, from the
neighbouring parish of Selling (see Robert Burns’ lines about marrying a widow with land, at the start of this chapter 5
on page 19). Joseph founded a large farming dynasty. His 4xgreat granddaughter, Angela Green, tells me that her
Gore ancestors after Joseph all farmed at Egerton, 11 miles south-west of Selling near Ashford, and all were named
‘John’ – four generations of them followed by her mother Joan. Another part of this dynasty, ancestors of Barry Gore,
settled nearby at Egerton Forstal and also remained there true to the family farming tradition until the 1940s.

Meanwhile John and Ann Gore had settled at Sheldwich where they had four sons born between 1804-12 (see
pedigree at the bottom of page 61). Sheldwich is an ancient village on the Ashford-Faversham main road (A251), then
a turnpiked highway. The road provided a vital link for villages, like Throwley, Selling and Badlesmere, on the
network of narrow downland lanes that became impassable in bad weather. Unlike Stalisfield, Sheldwich “lies mostly
on even ground. It is in rather a pleasant and healthy country, the greatest part of which is on a chalky soil, having
much poor land in it, and that covered with flints. In the northern part of it, where the chalk prevails less, there is
some tolerable fertile land; in the eastern part where the hill rises, there is much rough ground and adjoining
woodland”, according to Hasted. The village was then the venue for an annual race in May between the ‘young men
and maids’ of both Sheldwich and Chilham, the winner of each sex receiving a handsome £10.
Sheldwich parish has a 12th century church, but was dominated by Lees Court (below), an estate owned by the wealthy
Sondes family who moved there from Throwley in the 16th century. The following century, Sir George Sondes built
this great mansion. Lees Court and Sir George are now remembered mainly for the tragedy which struck them in 1655.
His wife had died and he was left to bring up their two surviving sons. In a fit of jealousy, the younger son killed his

20
brother with a butcher’s meat cleaver and was hanged for it at Penenden Heath the following month. Then Sir George
suffered the indignity of being fined by the Roundhead Parliament, having his house sequestered and himself being
imprisoned for two years in the Tower of London. But the story ends happily following Charles II’s arrival; George
was made Viscount Sondes in 1676. The peerage survived until 1996 when the heirs ran out. Phyllis, Countess
Sondes, a young New Yorker, the widow of the last Earl Sondes, now runs the estate of 7000 acres. The core of it,
2600 acres, lies around the villages of Sheldwich and Badlesmere.

Lees Court, now flats, was the home of the Sondes family from 1654-1996.

Sheldwich ‘Parish Chest’ material shows that John Gore and his family were initially renting privately-owned
accommodation there, but from 1807 they rented from ‘Lord Sondes of Lees Court’. So it is probable that John
worked on the Sondes’ estate, especially as from 1826, the year after John’s father’s death at Challock, he was renting
both a house and land from Sondes. The following year his eldest son William was married at St James’, Sheldwich,
but returned to be buried there only two years later. His father John continued working in the village for another two
years, leaving in 1831-32 for retirement at Herne Bay aged 54. The reason behind such a move is not far to see.

The long depression that followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 was not a propitious time for farmers or for
many others. After the labour protests of 1816 and 1822, increasing tension among farm labourers eventually sparked
into the ‘Swing’ riots of 1830-31. Selling then suffered two incendiary attacks and the destruction of threshers, while
its northern neighbours, the parishes of Boughton and Faversham, were at the centre of local disturbances with wage
riots and numerous arson attacks. Sheldwich, immediately south-west of Selling, appears from records to have been
unaffected, as were Throwley, Eastling and Stalisfield.

Nevertheless, this threatening environment must have accounted for John’s decision to retire to Herne in 1831-32. His
oldest surviving son Jonathan had moved to Southwark by 1833. Joseph went back to Stalisfield until, by 1838, he
was able to take on the lease of Shulland Farm (then spelt ‘Sholand’) in the village of Newnham (see where Joseph’s
farmhouse once stood in the picture below). Here, apart from pastures, he had sheltered orchards and was able to grow
cherries and other fruit, and found the scope to prosper. In the 1841 census, he is shown as employing four labourers, a
clerk, a servant and two young cousins, the children of his uncle Joseph at Selling. By 1850 Joseph and Eliza had
baptised eight children at St Peter & St Paul’s church at Newnham.

SHULLAND FARM buildings once stood in this valley where the house has been drawn in. Recent
excavation found that a large medieval Manor House stood on this site in Edward I’s reign 1272-1307.

21
In 2013 the site where Shulland farm building had stood when Joseph Gore was farming there in the 19th century was
excavated by a local archaeological group sponsored by the Heritage Lottery. They unearthed evidence of six
centuries of habitation prior to the site being deserted in the late 1900s. They discovered that the medieval manor
house of Shulland had stood there in the 13th century. Among their many finds was a silver Edward I longcross penny
minted 1289-91. From ancient manuscripts held locally the history of the Manor and many of its early owners, trustees
and tenants were chronicled. One trustee was the daughter of King Henry VIII’s powerful Chancellor, Sir Thomas
More who was eventually overthrown and beheaded.

John Gore’s youngest son Henry probably went with his father to Herne, but died at Canterbury in 1836. Then in
1850, both John’s surviving sons, Jonathan and Joseph, rejoined their father at Herne where they took on two mixed
farms. Until this move of some 20 miles down to the coast, the family had been farming on the North Downs chalk for
more than 200 years – since Thomas Gore came to Lenham in 1640. It was the end of an era.

As our family finally leaves the rigours of the North Downs chalk for the seaside, their story shows up some of the
special difficulties these downland farmers faced and the hard and isolated life that they and their families then led.
Such farmers today at least benefit from some extra subsidies, yet an increasing number of the old farmsteads are
being deserted. So I was pleased to hear that the Prince of Wales, through the Duchy of Cornwall, had recently
purchased seven downland farms in the Faversham area. These are: Parsonage Farm at Throwley, Leaveland Court
Farm, Dane Court & Gushmere Farm at Selling, Macknade Farm near Selling, and three farms at Boughton – familiar
place names in our story. The downland farmer is an endangered species in the modern world and needs such
encouragement.

Entrance to St Martin’s church, Herne (see next Chapter)

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 Chapter 6

Family Gathering 1850 – Herne Bay new town

Herne Bay town “being level and unsheltered is continually fanned by sea breezes, rendering it
a most desirable place of residence during the sultry summer months.” (John Hogbin, June 1875)

One of the treasures belonging to Herne village, once part of the wealthy parish of Reculver, is a chair which stands in
its early 14th century church - St Martin’s. It is said to be the chair of Nicholas Ridley, the Vicar of Herne in 1538,
who made the village famous by ordering the Te Deum to be sung there in English rather than in the Catholic Latin.
He later helped revise the liturgy for the English Protestant church. But with the arrival of ‘Bloody Mary’ on the
throne, Bishop Ridley was among many burnt at the stake for refusing to disavow their Protestant beliefs. Herne’s
beautiful church was in his mind as he walked into the fire at Oxford saying “Farewell Herne, thou worshipful and
wealthy parish, the first whereunto I was called to minister God’s word…”

Herne is just a mile and a half from the sea. In Ridley’s time there was barely a dwelling, apart from the hamlet of
Eddington, between the village and the shore. A quiet place, far from officialdom, and facing a coastline which was
frequently breached by the tides, it was the resort of smugglers. A house opposite St Martin’s church, which gave a
view of the sea, has a “smuggler’s window”, but along came some early Victorian businessmen to block that view
with an enterprising scheme for a seaside town. “Herne Bay” new town, as described by Arthur Mee, was to be laid
out “in squares and terraces; they built houses and shops, a pier, a church, and a pleasure-house”. Then misfortune
struck. “The church was left unfinished, the great hotel was deserted, and the teredo [a woodworm of the sea] ate up
the wooden pier”. (Harold Gough discounts Mee’s stories about the chair and the window above – he says Ridley’s
chair “looks like a Victorian settle”, and the smuggler’s window “was a late 19th century addition to give extra light”!)

Herne High Street circa 1812

Happily Herne Bay eventually developed into a successful seaside resort to rival Whitstable and Margate. It remained
difficult to reach until the railway arrived in 1863, but there was little improvement to road access from the west until
the completion of the Thanet Way in the 1930s. Now it also has a dual-carriageway (the A299) and is stifled and
swamped by summer traffic, although the noise and smells are forgotten when there’s a breeze on the front. The sea
view is magnificent. In the west, one can see Warden Point on Sheppey and, in the east, the twin towers of St Mary’s
church at Reculver, known to seamen as “the Two Sisters”. One can walk for more than three miles along the shore in
either direction.

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 Herne Bay front, late 19th century http://bayguide.co.uk/wp/index.php/short-history/

Reculver is actually the most historic site in the vicinity. There is evidence that it has been a settlement for almost
2000 years. A farmstead existed here during the Iron Age, and in the 1st century when the Romans invaded, they built
a fort. Later they used it to prevent Saxon access up the Wantsum channel when Reculver was still a couple of miles
from the advancing sea. A monastery and church were built on the ruins of the fort, but the Vikings destroyed the
former. The distinctive twin towers, which were added to the church in the 12th century, are still used by sailors as a
landmark. Once the centre of a large and thriving parish half a mile or more from the sea, Reculver in 1800 was
almost inundated, and had become “a small mean village, of five or six houses, inhabited mostly by fishermen and
smugglers”. It was written that “there hath bene much Romain money fownd abowt” – and Saxon money too. Today
Reculver is still washed by the waves from which it is protected not just by walls of Kentish stone but also by ‘rock
armour’ brought across from Scandinavia. It is now under the auspices of English Heritage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reculver

We now find John Gore living at Underdown Road in Herne Bay as a ‘retired farmer’ with a housekeeper and her
daughter. His road, which ran along the west edge of a five acre field, was near the centre of the intended new town
which John must have watched developing around him. He and his youngest son Henry, who died at Canterbury four
years later, had left Sheldwich in 1831-32. John’s two older sons, Jonathan and Joseph left Sheldwich soon after.
Joseph settled on a farm at Newnham and seems to have done well, but we know little of Jonathan, except that he
went to the parish of St Saviours, Southwark, where his wife Mary bore him four children. Their fifth child, Harriet,
was baptised at Faversham in 1844. Finally, we find both John’s sons rejoining their 72 year old father at Herne Bay
in 1850-51 (a pedigree mentioning all these people can be found in Annex ‘H’ at the bottom of page 61).

On arrival, Jonathan leased 148 acres of open farmland from one John Palmer. The land was about a mile due west of
Herne village and known as Owl’s Hatch Farm according to the 1840 Tithe Map. However, in the 1851 and later
censuses Jonathan’s family is shown with others living at “Bullockstone”. This was presumably because the
enumerators couldn’t distinguish between all the farm properties in the vicinity. His was a mixed farm on heavy soil
for which Jonathan was employing four labourers. His elder son, Joseph, was then 18 and would be expected to help
too. But in the event, he appears to have looked elsewhere, taking on the work of a carrier and marrying Jane, a
dressmaker. While Joseph went on later to do other jobs (greengrocer, farm labourer), by 1871 his wife Jane had
became a lodging house keeper in Charles Street, just behind Herne Bay’s sea front, and was still working there
twenty years later as a widow. They had no children.

The open landscape where Jonathan’s Owl’s Hatch Farm (148 acres) near Herne lay

24
This left only Henry, Jonathan’s younger son, to work with his father at Owl’s Hatch. But it seems that things did not
go well on this farm for, by 1861, the acreage they were leasing had reduced to 49 and they were employing just one
man – a surprising change in a period when corn prices were up and most farmers were doing well. In 1871 they were
employing two men on about the same acreage. Then, ten years later, after Henry, a bachelor, had taken over the farm
from his father, he had 97 acres with five labourers. This, however, is the last we hear of the family. By 1891, both of
Henry’s parents were dead and he, at 52, had given up the farm and moved away.

Undoubtedly, part of the reason for Henry’s eventual departure lay in the depressed state of agriculture in the last
decades of the century. There had been several wet seasons and poor harvests after 1875 followed by an especially wet
summer in 1879. Worst hit were the cereal growers who also faced cheap grain imports, the product of free trade
agreements. The fall in prices and a stampede from arable into pasture farming produced a slump in agriculture overall
which continued to the end of the century. Many farmers, who found they were unable to maintain the high investment
needed, were forced to sell up. Some who failed to sell soon enough went bankrupt. Corn acreages were greatly
reduced, with the main beneficiaries of the change being the milk trade and horticulture. Farms had fewer sheep and
the number of cows in Kent more than doubled.

Joseph was more fortunate. He had arrived at Herne from Newnham in 1850-51, at the same time as his brother
Jonathan had taken on Owl’s Hatch Farm. Joseph rented Parsonage Farm a mile or so away, consisting of a patchwork
of fields covering 165 acres which lay between Herne village and the sea. Joseph’s most northerly fields (‘Chalk
Field’ and ‘Reeds’) were less than 400 yards from the shore on the eastern side of the area where the new town of
Herne Bay was being built. His father John’s house in the new town actually overlooked one of his fields (‘Quick
Field’). No doubt there were difficulties farming on the edge of an expanding town, but Joseph seems to have
overcome them. It was just as well that he had a substantial farmhouse, because he arrived with his wife Eliza and
eight children and, in 1851, was employing two house servants and five labourers. Their youngest son, William, was
born there three years later and baptised at St Martin’s church in Herne.

It was a propitious time to arrive at Parsonage Farm. The Great Exhibition opened in London and confidence and
optimism were in the air. In the 1850s and 60s farmers in general were buoyed by high prices and expanding markets
– the period is referred to as ‘the golden age of Victorian agriculture’. The photograph (below) of Joseph, Eliza and
most of their family taken in front of Parsonage farmhouse circa 1862 reflects the confidence of the moment.
However, good times for farmers were to come to an abrupt end a few years later.

Parsonage Farmhouse with some of the Gore family posing on the front lawn, circa 1862.
[Photo: John Hawkins – “Herne Bay in old photographs” 1991]

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Harold Gough told me that Parsonage Farm was on permanent lease to the Sondes family, John Gore’s landlord at
Sheldwich. Maybe this was how John’s son, Joseph came to the Parsonage. Historically the manorial property of the
Archbishop, the farm had been granted in the 17th century to the Milles side of the Sondes on a virtually freehold basis
so that they were able to sub-let the farm. Christopher Milles in 1638 by his will left money “to continue so long as it
shall please his Grace (the Archbishop) and successors to continue the lease of the Parsonage to any of my surname
that shall succeed me ..”. When Joseph Gore took on the tenancy of the farm in 1850 his landlord was a Milles-Lade.
Around 1900, when George Mills-Lade, 5th Baron Sondes, died with considerable debts, Parsonage Farm was sold and
the old farmhouse pulled down.

Parsonage Farm: looking east across ‘Fifteen Acres’ field from near where
the Farmhouse once stood, at the east end of the new Parsonage Road.

We left Joseph and Eliza in 1862 posing in front of their old Farmhouse with four of their seven surviving children
(photo on previous page). The farm was doing well, Joseph had become a respected local figure, a deacon of the
Congregational church (a faith to which he had been introduced by Eliza), trustee of the new Broomfield chapel, and
treasurer of Herne National Schools. At the age of 54 he was perhaps beginning to be concerned as to who among his
five surviving sons would take on the farm. Henry, his eldest, had already left to be a civil engineer in Australia.
Frederick was apprenticed to a draper (Charles Bryant in the Market Place at Faversham), Robert was articled to an
architect in London, while both Jonathan and Harriet talked of joining Frederick. William, the last hope, was aged
only eight! The pedigree mentioning all these people can be found in Annex ‘H’ at the bottom of page 61 and the
top of page 62.

But nine years later at the time of the 1871 census, Joseph, 63, was confronted by a very different scene. The recession
in farming had begun to bite, and he had to face its problems almost alone. His sons had all gone to careers in
commerce. Frederick was a draper in Berkshire with six employees, of whom Jonathan and his sister Harriet were two.
William had become a commercial traveller in London. Robert, however, had returned home from his architectural
practice in London, having had a breakdown in his health. The doctors had advised him to give up his career in the dirt
and fog of the city for work that would take him outdoors. So there Robert was, a sick man, but ready to help his
father. And alongside him was just Eliza Louisa, who had remained to help her mother.

Robert’s return to help his ageing father undoubtedly saved the farm. Robert took a special interest in the dairy and,
with the need to convert some of the arable land to cow pasture, this became an increasingly large portion of the
farm’s produce. Other factors helped in the transition. With a growing town adjacent to the farm, and the recent arrival
of the railway, they were well placed to reach both the local and London markets with the farm’s dairy products. With
his commercial experience, Robert saw the advantage of not only producing, but also selling, his dairy products
locally in the town. The success of this new venture, a shop in Mortimer Street called “The Creameries”, was assured
when he married Sarah Swain, the daughter of a family who had been running a local bakery for fifty years.
Gradually, as the dairy retail side expanded, and with the addition of a sub-post office, the farm was reduced in size
and given over entirely to the pasture needed for milk.
Robert was not the first in the family to open a shop in Herne Bay. His younger brother Jonathan, after working with
Harriet in his brother Frederick’s drapery firm, returned to Herne Bay, where he is reputed to have started doing some
tailoring door to door on a bicycle. Finally in 1874, aged 25, he opened his own ‘bespoke tailors & outfitters’ at No. 5
William Street in the centre of the town. So began a family firm which was to continue in Herne Bay for almost a
hundred years.

Meanwhile, by 1891, after the deaths of parents, Joseph and Eliza, the bulk of what was Parsonage Farm was in new
hands. Of their children, Frederick, who had married Caroline Stringer from Norfolk, was living in Paddington,
London, and travelling as a silk merchant. The brothers Robert and Jonathan were busy with retail and their growing
families in Herne Bay, while their sister Eliza Louise was acting as mother’s help to Jonathan’s children. William was

26
still a commercial traveller living in Islington, London. The story of what happened to the various strands of the
family as they entered the 20th century and began to disperse is continued in the next chapter.

A statement of confidence: the Creameries in the centre of Herne Bay with Robert Gore and his family c.1895.

“The Garden of England” (a Kentish winter scene) by Rowland Hilder

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 Chapter 7

Joseph & Eliza and their children 1858-1914

“The cow is of the bovine ilk; one end is moo, the other milk.”
(Ogden Nash 1902-71 – ‘The Cow’, 1931)

Henry in Australia [This branch of the family is shown in the first Pedigree on page 62]
Henry, the eldest son of Joseph and Eliza Gore of Parsonage Farm, was the only one of his generation of the family to
travel abroad. He sailed to Australia and never returned. Life in England was hard for most people, beyond the
imagining of the present post-war generations. Opportunities abroad, particularly in countries of the Empire, like
India, Canada and Australia, were expanding. Of course these were not without their dangers. There was the 1857-58
Mutiny in India, just after Henry crossed the Indian Ocean; then came the American Civil War 1861-65. The Suez
Canal was opened in 1869, and shortened the voyage to the Far East. But there were still major troubles ahead in
South Africa (Zulu War 1880-81, Boer War 1899-1902). The talk, however, was of gold and other precious metals,
and the prospect of excitement and wealth would have had some appeal for a young man working on his father’s farm
in a cold Kentish winter. Henry was not alone. In the period 1815-75, 3¾ million people emigrated from UK to the
USA (including nearly a million from Ireland during the potato famine 1845-51). 1½ million went to Canada and one
million to Australia and New Zealand.

Australian gold was first discovered at Clunes and Andersons Creek, Victoria, in July 1851. In the following years, the
State of Victoria turned from being a relatively poor agricultural community into a rich mining and industrial colony.
Its population soared from 77,000 to 463,000. Although sources differ on when Henry arrived in Australia, we are
now sure that he sailed from Southampton on the “Blundell”, disembarking at Adelaide (South Australia) in 1856. He
was aged only 16 and was described as an ‘agricultural labourer’. It was two years before Victoria recorded his
presence in the new township of Ballarat, built as ‘a gold town’ just west of the main diggings. And this is where
Henry was married to Mary Byrne in 1859. Whatever he did in his first years in Australia, he had not wasted his time
because he obtained a government job as a civil engineer with the Roads & Bridges Department in 1861 and, three
years later, was appointed Chief Engineer for Creswick Shire. It was a position he held until he was elected to the
State Legislative Council (Parliament) representing the Wellington /Nelson Province in 1886 – a famous win by a
single vote! He served in the Parliament at Melbourne for six years.

Meanwhile, as an engineer, he was described as being “closely identified with mining in the Ballarat division and was
one of the pioneers when the great rush broke out at Spring Hill, two miles from his home, and was a director or
shareholder on many of the significant claims on the Berry lead. He is probably best remembered for his organisation
of companies to open up the same gutter at Moolort. In 1875 he was a founder of the Seven Hills Estate Co., a highly
successful speculation. His mining interests also included the districts of Maryborough, Rutherglen and Gippsland,
where he was a director upon the boards of many companies, in both alluvial and quartz-mining.” [Local obituary
extract, 1909: The Argus, The Age, Creswick Advertiser]

Henry’s mining speculations were not without spectacular failures. He bought Yawong Station for £7,000, but had to
sell for £2,000 “owing to incursion of rabbits”. He sank another £12,000 into three companies, which collapsed and he
lost the lot. And he had to admit to the Ballarat Supreme Court that “I was induced by misrepresentations to buy
£5,000 shares in the North Shore Tramway Co. of Sydney”, which turned out to be nothing but a line on a map drawn
through impenetrable scrub on the north side of Sydney Harbour.

Father & son (the new Australians): (left) Henry Gore 1840-1909 and his son William 1866-1926.
Both were civil engineers at Creswick, Victoria. Henry became a mining pioneer and speculator
and later served on the State Legislative Council 1886-92 and bred greyhounds for racing.
28
A strong work ethic seems to be one of the characteristics we have inherited from the Gores. It possibly derives from
centuries of trying to extract a living from the unforgiving downlands chalk. Henry’s business life, coupled with his
patronage of coursing in Victoria and the breeding of greyhounds, seems to be a prime example. He twice won the
Waterloo Cup – in 1877 with Gitana (prize 500 sovereigns) and in 1889 with Good News (400 sovereigns). Some of
the silverware his dogs won still survives in the family. In the midst of all this activity, Mary and he brought up their
five surviving children in their home at Kingston, a small ‘farming township’ (population 200 in 1865). It is in Spring
Hill parish near Creswick, about 80 miles from Melbourne.
Henry’s obituary is at: http://oa.anu.edu.au/obituary/gore-henry-13550

Henry and Mary Gore’s eldest son, Alfred, copied his father in leaving home as soon as he could to go abroad. He was
aged 18 when he arrived in London from Australia in October 1882 to become a doctor. He trained at St
Bartholomew’s Hospital and, by 1887, had qualified as a surgeon (MRCS, LRCP), and married a Lambeth girl, Edith
Tompkins, the daughter of a Civil Servant. The new Dr Alfred Gore had a medical practice in London in 1889, in
Barry, South Wales in 1891, in Chester in 1897, after which he finally settled back in Kent at Folkestone in 1906.
From there he was in touch again with the branch of the family at Herne Bay, which his father had left fifty years
before. But Alfred had not forgotten his Australian roots, and gave both his eldest son and his house in Folkestone the
name ‘Kingston’, after the home in Victoria he had left.

As far as we know, none of Alfred’s four siblings in Australia produced any surviving children. With Alfred having
settled in England, his bachelor brother, William, became his father’s heir apparent and, indeed, followed him as Chief
Engineer for Creswick Shire. William must have shared his father’s assiduous application for work because,
amazingly, he continued in this post for nearly 40 years, selflessly taking on many additional Shire Hall
responsibilities. He came to a sad end, dying at his desk of overwork and depression, the last of our Gores in Australia.
More about this branch of the family is in Chapter 8, and then at Chapter 9 under ‘Reggie Gore in Iraq, India &
Burma’, and they are included in the first pedigree on page 62.

Robert of Parsonage Farm and ‘The Creameries’ [Pedigree at the bottom half of page 62]
At Herne Bay, Robert Gore and his wife Sarah’s dairy business continued to flourish as their family grew.

Robert & Sarah Gore and their children at Herne Bay c.1900.
L-R: Robert, Harold, Grace, Kathleen, Frederick, William & Percy (twins), Mabel, Sarah.

Robert’s cows were grazing on a Parsonage Farm field not far away from the shop, over which the family lived and to
which they had added a sub-Post Office (photo page 27). Robert, Sarah and the Swain family bakers, together with
Robert’s younger brother, tailor Jonathan, formed an important part of the business life of Herne Bay in its early years.
The Creameries prospered hugely until the death of Robert’s wife Sarah in 1912, and his own advancing years, forced
him to retire. Although he had four sons, three of them had emigrated to the New World, and the fourth, Harold, had
found a lucrative career with the Westminster Bank in London. So, in 1914-15, the Creameries business was sold to a
James Woollard. Robert continued to live in Herne Bay, by Victoria Park, for another 15 years. He died aged 83,

29
while staying with his daughter Kathleen in Buckinghamshire. He had been a devout member of a strict religious sect
known as “the Brethren” (or the Plymouth Brethren), and it was perhaps the austere life they imposed, as well as being
outdoors on the farm, which account for such a remarkable life span for one whose health in his thirties had ‘broken
down’.

Robert’s youngest son, Harold, remained in England, but his three brothers had all left home for prospects on the other
side of the Atlantic. Frederick, the eldest, having graduated from Kent Coast College at Herne Bay, decided at the age
of 21 to visit America on his way to see his uncle Henry Gore who had apparently ‘struck gold’ in Australia. Frederick
arrived in New York in 1903, found work in the construction business, eventually joining J. Henry Miller Inc. as an
architectural engineer. For the next few years he worked in various places, including New York, Chicago, Denver and
Washington DC, where in 1909 he met and married a Virginian girl, Ida Price, whose parents ran a small Inn and
Livery Stable at North Garden. Meanwhile Uncle Henry in Australia had died; instead Frederick returned to England
twice, firstly for the wedding of his sister Mabel (known as May) and, in the summer of 1912, to take Ida and their
first born, Fred Junior, to meet his family at Herne Bay. Sad to say, Little Fred died of diphtheria back in Washington
the following year.

American visitors: Frederick and Ida Gore return to Herne Bay seaside, 1912. R-L: Ida, Fred Gore Jr (died young),
Kathleen Gore, her brother Frederick, his sister Grace, her young son Charlie, and husband Charles Hall.

The twins, Percy and William, both emigrated to Ontario, Canada, in about 1913. Percy worked on various dairy
farms there, as he had done on his father’s at Herne Bay. Meanwhile, William journeyed south to contact his brother
Frederick in Washington DC, and joined him on many of his construction projects up and down the east coast of the
USA. Ida gave birth to Hilton Gore in 1913 and, two years later, William married Ida’s widowed sister, Gladys Price,
raising her surviving daughter, Regina, as his own. The two brothers and their wives became very close, sometimes
living together when on projects away from Washington to such cities as Albany and Utica in New York, Baltimore in
Maryland, and Macon in Georgia. Before the USA entered the war in 1917, Frederick also worked in Philadelphia,
Denver, and Cumberland in Maryland. Pedigree details of this branch of the family are at the bottom half of page
62. There is further about them in Chapter 8, and in Chapter 9 under ‘Gores in the USA’.

Tailor Jonathan & family in Herne Bay [Pedigree of this branch is on page 63]
Jonathan Gore was a farmer’s boy, brought up on Parsonage Farm, far from the world of commerce. He loved the
countryside and used to go on marathon walks through the fields and woods of Blean, between Canterbury and the
coast, or east across the Chislet Marshes towards Thanet. Yet he was determined on a business career and, after
serving an apprenticeship in his elder brother Frederick’s drapery in Berkshire, returned home and tested the local
market by selling door-to-door on his bicycle (no motor cars then). Finally in 1874 with his father as banker, he
opened a “Gentlemen’s Bespoke Tailors & Outfitters” at 5 William Street, Herne Bay.

As his grandson Reg Gore (himself a banker) records, there was then a Tory government under Disraeli, the income
tax rate was less than half of one percent (instead of the present 20 or 40%), Jonathan was paying his errand boy four
shillings a week (20p.), and his best day’s takings in that first year amounted to only £20. But despite a slow start his
tailoring business began to prosper. He was a great organizer and innovator and it was his influence in the town that
resulted in several important changes. After he had pioneered mid-week half-day closing, all the shop assistants in the
town marched with the town band to his house one evening and gave him a musical cabinet and an illuminated address
30
of thanks. He served as President of the Chamber of Commerce and, even after his retirement, remained closely
associated with it as chairman of the Chamber’s insurance company for 33 years (1901-34).

Jonathan Gore, tailor in Herne Bay: The shop at 149/151 Mortimer Street
which the family ran together with their original shop at 5 William Street.

Like his brother Robert, Jonathan had a strong evangelical faith, and shared with him the austere beliefs of the
Plymouth Brethren with whom he worshipped and preached. But he had broad sympathies and it was he who, for
example, obtained general agreement for religious services to be held on the foreshore during the summer. Then in
1914 came war and four difficult years, during which Jonathan and his eldest son Reginald kept the business going
while the two younger sons, Hubert and Frank, were away in the army. More on this family is in Chapter 8, and then
in Chapter 9 under ‘Herne Bay’.

William Henry in London [He is a third of the way down the first Pedigree on page 62]
We know little of the youngest son, William who was born at Parsonage Farm, Herne Bay in 1854. He appears on the
census of 1891 as a ‘commercial traveller’ (salesman, or ‘drummer’ in the USA) living at 21 Londsdale Square,
Islington, London, with his wife Katherine Sweatman, a Londoner born there in 1861. They had two young children,
Katherine and William and, later, two girls, Grace and Constance. Young William married but did not have children
and the only continuing descent we can discover is through his three sisters. We are in touch only with the descendants
of young Katherine who married a hotelier, Joseph Smith. His father was a professional boxer and an early holder of a
Lonsdale Belt. Joseph’s brother, Ernest, also boxed, but used the name ‘Joe Smith’ (there already was an Ernest on the
circuit) under which he too held a Lonsdale Belt at featherweight. Katherine and Joseph had three children born during
the First World War. We traced the descent of this family line with the help of Christine French in Canada to find that
most of William Henry’s great grandchildren emigrated either to North America or Australia.

Gore brothers from Kent. L-R: HENRY, Victoria, Australia: Civil Engineer, Goldmine owner, MP, Greyhound breeder.
ROBERT & Sarah , London: Architect. Herne Bay: Farmer/’Creameries’. JONATHAN, Herne Bay: Tailor shops owner.

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 Chapter 8

The Great War 1914-18

“Here dead lie we, because we did not choose

To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.” (AE Housman, 1936)

The Great War (‘World War I’) in Europe was far more destructive than ‘World War II’, which was to follow it
twenty years later. In Britain the Great War destroyed few buildings, yet it almost completely changed the fabric and
infrastructure of life and the confidence of British citizens built up during the Victorian era. It was a watershed in our
history as important as the Civil War, three hundred years before it. The British casualty lists were so long that, in a
short four years, almost a whole generation of men had been removed. This and the ’flu pandemic, which followed the
war and was responsible for more early deaths than the war itself, changed society irrevocably.

Stretcher bearers in Flanders mud 1917, by John Brooke

It was a war in which larger forces and many more countries were involved than ever before. Allied to a rampant
Germany were the Austro-Hungarian (Hapsburg) Empire of Eastern Europe, Bulgaria, and the Turkish (Ottoman)
Empire, which included Arabia, Armenia, Palestine, Iraq and Syria. Against them were 24 nations world-wide. These
included the other countries of Europe except for Switzerland, Holland, Spain, Denmark, Sweden and Norway which,
with four South American countries, were virtually the only nations in the world to remain neutral in the conflict. It
was the first war in which aeroplanes, submarines, tanks, gas, and guns that could reach Kent from France, were used.
The extensive trench systems, protected by barbed wire and machine-guns, which were constructed by both sides on
Europe’s ‘Western Front’, led to a stalemate. They made attack by infantry over the open terrain almost hopeless,
unless their objectives had been completely devastated by artillery fire, which itself churned the soft ground into an
obstacle to further advance.

The efforts to break this deadlock took four years, and cost many millions of the lives of men and horses. The
appalling conditions under which soldiers lived in those trenches and dug-outs are beyond modern imagining. They
suffered from every affliction from trench-foot to typhus. Many soldiers died horribly, if not from bullet, bayonet or
shrapnel, they succumbed to the effects of gas or drowned in battlefield mud. The French place names where these
great inconclusive but costly battles were fought have passed into our language or its slang: Mons, Passchendaele,
Somme, Ypres (‘Wipers’).

32
 Infantry marching up to the front, by Frank Hurley, Australian Imperial Force

It wasn’t until the 1918 campaign that the deadlock was broken. Despite Russia being in the grip of its revolution,
there were Italian, British and other successes on the Eastern Front, which eventually led to both the Turkish and the
Hapsburg Empires suing for peace. Meanwhile in the West, troops from the USA, who had entered the war in 1917,
joined those from Britain and France in facing a heavy assault by the German army, which succeeded in threatening
Paris. Fortunately, this attack overreached itself and the allies were able to chase the Germans, now without their allies
in the East, back to a position from which they were forced to accept armistice terms. Sad to say, the failure to arrive
at a just peace led, eventually, to World War II

Only one member of the Gore family was in uniform in August 1914 when war was declared. This was Sydney, a
Lieutenant in the Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment, the eldest son of Dr Joseph Gore of Folkestone and
earlier of Victoria in Australia. Sydney had been serving with his battalion in Ireland. He was well-known as an
international footballer and army cricketer. Later that August he went with his Regiment to France as part of the
British Expeditionary Force of 100,000 men (‘the Old Contemptibles’) to help the French hold the German army,
which was then marching through ‘neutral’ Belgium. The British “fought bravely at Mons and Charleroi” and held the
left flank while the French finally stopped the German southward advance between the Marne and the Aisne rivers. In
the first Battle of Ypres, which took place in October-November 1914, the British succeeded in stopping the German
attempt to capture Calais and the Pas de Calais coastline. It was in this battle near Neuve Chapelle that Sydney
Kingston Gore was killed on 28th October just south of the Bethune-Armentières road. He was 25.
https://livesofthefirstworldwar.iwm.org.uk/lifestory/1392577

Sydney’s younger brother, Cecil Harry Gore (known as ‘Ginger’), joined the Seaforth Highlanders and was with them
in France in 1914-15 and in 1916 at Sheikh Saad on the River Tigris in Mesopotamia (Iraq). There his battalion
suffered so many casualties at the hands of the Turks that they had to amalgamate temporarily with the Black Watch
who had suffered similarly. Ginger survived and was there the following year to see the Turks being driven out of
‘Mespot’. Al Kut was retaken in February 1917 and Baghdad the following month.

33
 Sydney Gore, Royal West Kent Reggie Gore, 49th Aus Imp Force Harold Gore, 16th Queen’s Westminster

Sydney’s youngest brother, Reginald (Reggie), was also in the Middle East. In September 1914 aged 18 he had been
visiting his Australian relations at Murgon near Gympie in Queensland with a view to settling out there. He decided at
once to enlist and joined the 9th Infantry (Queenslanders) of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF). With them he sailed
to Alexandria in Egypt in March 1915, and landed with the Australian and New Zealand (ANZAC) Forces in the
amphibious assault on the narrow peninsula of Gallipoli, which forms the western shore of the Dardanelles. The
landing, which was to be the first phase of a big naval attack on the Turkish capital, Constantinople (Istanbul), proved
to be a costly failure. Reggie, who was promoted Corporal during the eight month operation, was fortunate to have
survived it. He, along with the remnants of his battalion, were evacuated to Greek islands in the Aegean Sea (Imroz
and Limnos), and by January 1916 they were back in Egypt, where he was commissioned into the 49 th AIF. Four
months later Reggie sailed for Marseilles and England where, after leave and training, he was fighting in France in the
AIF. In May 1918 both he and his brother Ginger were appointed to commissions in the Indian Army.
https://wiki.fibis.org/w/Reginald_Malpas_Gore . See first pedigree on page 62.

Back in London in 1916, some of the southern suburbs had minor damage from Zeppelin bomb raids, casualty lists in
France were mounting and conscription had just been introduced for the first time, but the war still seemed a distant
problem. This changed in July when the British and French launched the first major offensive on the Somme. The
British Army suffered 58,000 casualties on the first day of the battle, with only a small strip of shell-torn ground
gained. The offensive continued for over four months at an enormous cost in lives. By November the dreadful toll of
casualties suffered by each nation in the battle was: British 420,000, French 200,000, and German around 500,000.
Verdun, a key point in the French defences, had been relieved, the shaky British-French alliance secured, and pressure
taken off the Russians on the Eastern Front. But the deadlock in the West remained.

Harold Gore (photo above), the youngest son of Robert & Sarah (2nd Pedigree page 62), whose brothers were in
America, was working in London at the headquarters of the Westminster Bank in Chancery Lane. With many of his
colleagues, he was called up and joined the local (London) Territorial Regiment, the 16th Queen’s Westminster Rifles
with whom he went to France in 1917. Of his service over there, we only know that he was twice captured. The first
time, he managed to escape before he was taken back behind German lines, and the second time, near the end of the
war, when he succeeded in escaping, hidden under straw on a cart, from a Prisoner-of-War cage in Belgium. He said
he was lucky in that the Germans were then more concerned with saving their own skins than in the security of their
prisoners. Nevertheless, it was a fine but exhausting feat, and it is said that on his arrival home he slept for 48 hours
and had to be woken by the doctor for his own safety. In far away America at Lyles, deep in the Appalachian
mountain country of Tennessee, Harold’s brother Frederick had also been doing his bit – constructing a plant to
produce the special “goop” needed in the manufacture of military aircraft wings.

In Herne Bay, tailor Jonathan Gore was aged 65 at the beginning of the war (Pedigree page 63). With the help of his
two older sons, Reginald and Hubert, he steered the family business through four very difficult financial years. With
so many customers wearing khaki, the market for men’s outfitters collapsed. Herne Bay suffered only an occasional
German air raid but, in one, the rear of the Mortimer Street shop was damaged. Frank, the youngest of the three
brothers, was already away in the army (we know no more of his service than that he was wounded and became a
Captain). Hubert, also a bachelor, then volunteered, but his health was not good and he had to visit many recruiting
offices before he was finally accepted by the Royal Engineers. He served in UK until nearly the end of the war when
he was sent to Salonika (Thessaloniki) in Greece. There Hubert’s unit helped to ensure the free flow of supplies
through the Salonika base to a mixed force of British, French, Italian, and Serbian troops. By September 1918, this
force had advanced from Greece into southern Serbia and was threatening Bulgaria, which capitulated at the end of
that month.
34
 “Oppy Wood 1917 evening” by John Nash (IWM ART2243)

These events coincided with the British force under General Allenby overwhelming the Turks in Palestine; then
Damascus, Acre, Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, and Aleppo all fell in rapid succession. This forced Turkey to sue for peace and,
with the other successes on the Eastern Front, put pressure on Germany to end the war in the West where she had been
partly forced back into Belgium. The armistice terms handed to the Germans by Marshall Foch were signed in a
railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne, 35 miles north of Paris, at dawn on 11th November. The guns fell silent
on the Western Front at 11 a.m. the same day.

When looking at the statistics of this war, one is shocked by the awful losses, numbers which were never approached
in World War II. It is why in Britain, ever since 1918, we have remembered “the fallen” each year on 11/11. Britain
mobilised some six million men during the Great War, of whom around 40% became casualties, and 740,000 men
were killed in action. These figures do not include those from the Dominions and Colonies, the French and other
allies, who all suffered similarly. Nor do they include women who, for the first time in Britain, left their homes in
large numbers to take on work which was needed for the war effort, many as unpaid volunteers. From Herne Bay
came Ethel Gore, who worked for soldiers’ welfare, later taking up a career with the British Legion, while her sister
Millicent became matron at a Chatham hostel. Elizabeth, the future wife of Reggie Gore, was among many women
who worked for the Red Cross in France. Some of her letters home, as a 20 year-old, have survived (short extracts are
at Annex ‘B’). https://livesofthefirstworldwar.iwm.org.uk/lifestory/5148359

British casualties blinded after a gas attack near Bethune 1918, by TL Aitke

“Good-morning; good-morning!” the General said

When we met him last week on our way to the Line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
“He’s a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
But he did for them both with his plan of attack.

[Siegfried Sassoon: “The General” 1917]

35
 Chapter 9

Between the Wars 1919-39 – Pandemic, Penury & Pathans

“First comes one Englishman, as a traveller or for hunting; then come two and make a map;
then comes an army and takes the country. Therefore it is better to kill the first Englishman.”
[Pakhtun (Pathan) proverb from the North-West Frontier region of India]

Like the war that had just ended, the influenza pandemic of 1919 (linked incidentally to a strain of bird ’flu which had
adapted to humans) affected many countries. It is estimated to have killed 50 million people. The speed and power of
that infection is shown in such startling press headlines as: “Four women sat down to play bridge one evening. Three
were dead by the morning”. It blighted the start of peacetime recovery for many war-weary people.

Meanwhile the diplomats were struggling to agree on the final peace terms amidst the turmoil left at the end of
hostilities, with the countries of both the defunct Austro-Hungarian (Hapsburg) Empire and the Turkish (Ottoman)
Empire now flexing their new-found independence. It was an impossible task and the result produced elements of
continued instability in Europe, which were compounded by the severity of the reparations, particularly the swingeing
financial payments imposed on Germany. It is said that the peace treaty signed at Versailles in 1919, and the other
post-war settlements which followed, made the Second World War inevitable.

Herne Bay (Pedigree on page 63)

Back home, the war had changed society. It left a large number of women without men but with the freedom of not
having to care for children. The three daughters of tailor Jonathan Gore at Herne Bay were typical among these
spinsters of the Great War. Ethel (married only briefly to a jeweller called Arthur Harris) became a senior figure in the
British Legion; Millicent became a religion and youth teacher, and Muriel a highly qualified music teacher. Muriel
was also leader of the local Choral Society and a church organist for 25 years. The combined influence of such women
becoming active outside the home, some of them going into industry, education or business, provided further impetus
towards female emancipation. But it was not until 1928 that women finally gained equal franchise with men.
Meanwhile, there was a strong liberal reaction to the restrictions of Edwardian society. The 1920s saw the demise of
the chaperone and the arrival of young women with a refreshingly unconventional attitude to dress and behaviour –
the Flappers! With them came new fashions and style (such as men’s ‘Oxford bags’ with 25 inches of trouser flapping
round their ankles), music including jazz from Black America, and ‘wireless’, the first dominant mass medium. But
this fun was all in stark contrast to the financial scene.

The economies of most of the European participants were in tatters after the war, and verging on bankruptcy. The
USA, still with a strong economy, provided loans both to Britain and France. There were labour troubles, with falling
wages and prices, and increasing unemployment. These conditions finally led to a world depression, marked by the
1926 General Strike in UK, the 1929 Stock Exchange collapse, and the 1933 Wall Street crash. This last was at the
depth of the slump when in the USA alone there were 6 million jobless (known there as ‘the Great Depression’). They
were given no ‘dole’ and had to rely on charities and State work schemes. With his “New Deal” in 1934, President
Roosevelt tried to combat mass unemployment by increasing government spending, but it was, in the end, the
armament programmes preceding the 1939-45 war that reduced the jobless. Despite this, in 1939, there were still
1,500,000 jobless in Britain.

At Herne Bay, Jonathan Gore had retired in 1919 and his sons Reginald and Hubert had taken over the family tailoring
business, awarding their father a generous pension of £312 a year for life (no inflation-proofing available then). While
Hubert covered men’s tailoring at the original shop at 5 William Street, Reg, a qualified master tailor, opened new
premises at 151 Mortimer Street to look after the ladies. The business flourished, with Frank - the younger brother -
also helping. But by 1930, they found they were no longer impervious to the depressed market conditions and growing
unemployment. The business began to haemorrhage and, in 1935, they were forced to merge the two shops at the
Mortimer Street premises in order to survive.

Reg was gregarious and very active in the community, while Hubert was a more private person, but a keen sportsman,
playing tennis at county level, a member of the Kent County Cricket Club and a golfer. Reg was a Rotarian and, like
his father, a member of the Chamber of Commerce, of which he became President. He was a governor of the Queen
Victoria Cottage Hospital and of the State Schools in the town, and was also active in the local branch of the Royal
Observer Corps of which he was chief during the 1939-45 war. Reg, who had married a Congregationalist, Constance
Crouch, was a loyal worker for that Church community for more than forty years. He also shared with his father and

36
uncle Robert an allegiance to the Plymouth Brethren. However, in later life, he and his wife both became Anglicans –
perhaps influenced by their youngest son, John, who had become a Church of England clergyman.

Jonathan Gore (retired tailor) & his family at Herne Bay c.1922. Front L-R: Muriel (Music teacher) 1895-1977,
Jonathan 1849-1937, wife Eliza née Burbidge b.1850, Ethel (British Legion) b.1881. Back L-R: Hubert (Partner J Gore &
Sons with Reg – absent) 1888-1962, Millicent (Crusader leader) 1884-1962, Frank 1891-1954.

Gores in the USA (2nd Pedigree on page 62)

After the Great War, Frederick and Ida returned from their itinerant life to settle in Washington DC near her family
where their son Hilton could start school. Frederick had been working for George A Fuller, Inc., but the American
economy was expanding, and the population and demand for building both growing. So, early in the 1920s, he decided
to start his own business designing and building apartment buildings and single family homes in the Washington area.
Initially encouraged by his friend, the English architect Harry Wardman, and occasionally joined by his brother
William, Frederick’s business flourished and his houses came to be much in demand. He and Ida had a daughter,
Mary, and son, Fred, each born in houses built by their father in Chevy Chase. One of his houses was later sold as a
home for orphans and opened by Mother Theresa and Hillary Clinton, the President’s wife. Frederick’s reputation rose
after his warning that the roof of a popular Washington cinema, the Knickerbocker Theatre, was not properly
supported. Its roof collapsed in a 1922 snowstorm killing 98 people.

Typical of the English & Colonial style homes designed and built by Frederick in America

Like his cousin Reg Gore in Herne Bay, Frederick was very active in the local community. He was a Freemason, a
strong supporter of the Baptist church and a member of the Washington Board of Trade. In 1927 he bought a 200 acre
farm on the lower Potomac River to develop it as a summer water resort. Meanwhile, remembering his Kentish
heritage, he ran it with his brother Percy as a farm with cows, sheep, hogs, chickens and tobacco. Percy had suddenly
appeared from Canada in 1920 at Frederick’s door, and had then settled nearby, at Silver Spring, working in the dairy
trade.
37
But, misfortune struck the following year. Frederick contracted terminal cancer and, during a long illness, lost all his
property holdings. When he died in 1930 in the middle of ‘the Great Depression’, Ida had barely any income on which
to support their three children – Hilton 17, Mary 6 and Fred 3. With the help of family and friends, she was able to
maintain the family until Hilton could graduate and start work – in the Acacia Insurance Company, where he stayed
for forty years.

Ida Gore with her children, on the steps of her 42nd Street home
in Washington DC c.1931. L-R Frederick, Hilton, Ida and Mary

Reggie Gore in Iraq, India & Burma (First Pedigree on page 62)
As part of the peace settlements after the Great War, Britain took on the mandates for several countries including
Palestine, Transjordan and Mesopotamia (Iraq), and for German territories in southern Africa. Reggie Gore, who had
transferred from the Australian to the Indian Army at the end of the war, found himself in Iraq with the 1st Battalion of
the 88th Carnatic Infantry at the start of the British mandate there in 1920-21. (More than twenty years later, another
member of the family in uniform was to spend three years in north Iraq with the Kurds – see Annex ‘D’ page 55).

Ever since Alexander the Great invaded India through the Khyber Pass, the North-West Frontier with its mountain
passes has been seen as a vulnerable border. In Britain’s time in India, the threat was mainly from Russia, with whom
“the Great Game” of the 19th century was played out in Afghanistan. India’s frontier region is arid, mountainous and
cut by valleys, which are oven-hot in summer and freezing in winter, and above them rise ‘hills’ of up to 6000 feet. Its
people are a troublesome miscellany of armed tribes, generically described as ‘Pathans’ or ‘Pakhtuns’, who were
invariably at odds with each other or, when united by their fierce Islamic faith, with the British – or whoever was
trying to bring the present into their 13th century lives. It is no surprise that Osama bin Laden chose this wild region,
then part of Pakistan, in which to hide out.

Indian North-West Frontier – Waziristan 1936-37: Operations of 2nd/8th Punjab Regiment in progress.
The tower of the Wazir village is for observation and defence. Photo RM Gore

38
The following extract from Andrew Skeen’s “Tribal Fighting on the North-West Frontier, 1932” gives an idea of what
Reggie Gore first faced in 1922 when he returned from Iraq to join the 90th Punjab Regiment on operations against
these fierce Pathan tribesmen along the North-West Frontier in Waziristan.

“There is probably no sign [of approaching Pathans] until the burst of fire, and then the swift rush with knives,
the stripping of the dead, and the unhurried mutilation of the infidels.”

Camp perimeter defence: Waziristan 1937 (British Library)

Reggie married Elizabeth Mayne the following year (Indian Army officers were not permitted to marry before age
28), and then went back as adjutant to his battalion, which had been re-numbered as 2nd/8th Punjab with the badge of a
Chinthe, the mythical lion-dragon which guards Buddhist pagodas. He remained in the 8th Punjab Regiment for the
rest of his service.

Wedding of Capt Reggie Gore & Elizabeth (Nellie) Mayne at the bride’s home at Kodaikanal, South India, 1923

Twice more, Reggie took part in fighting in the frontier region – in 1930 and then in 1936-37. In between, in 1931, he
was seconded for three years to the Burma Military Police. This was firstly in Rangoon (Yangon), from where he
helped to quell the rebellions at Tharrawaddy and Prome (Pye). Then, based at Loimwe up in the Shan States of North
Burma (Myanmar), he had to deal with a different sort of banditry, and over terrain where the hills, although lower
than on the rocky North-West Frontier, were covered in primary jungle. He was awarded the King’s Police Medal for
Gallantry after three operations which he led against armed bandits in Jan/Feb 1934 (Citation at Annex ‘C’ page 54).
See also an overview of his career https://wiki.fibis.org/w/Reginald_Malpas_Gore

Reggie’s family
Elizabeth, his wife, was with Reggie at Loimwe until the summer of 1934, when she took their young son home to
England both for his education and to establish a home there. They naturally settled at Folkestone, not far from
Reggie’s parents, and he joined them there for his long leave. Reggie found all three of his surviving siblings had
married. Brother Ginger had wed an heiress: Ena Whigham Richardson was the daughter of the co-owner of
shipbuilders Swan Hunter; Sister Doris had married a wealthy lawyer, Tod Smith Howard, and the youngest, Judy,
had married Dr H Sumner-Moore, a pathologist, whose claim to fame was that his father had been dentist to the
German Kaiser Wilhelm II!
39
 Elizabeth and her son being rafted across the Irrawaddy on the way home from Loimwe, North Burma 1934
Reggie’s mother, Edith, was a kind but formidable woman, then nearing 70 and still a Justice of the Peace. His father,
Alfred, had by then retired from his doctor’s practice but continued to provide medical support for Folkestone’s senior
cricket and soccer teams – the clubs played on fields at the back of his house. Dr Alfred died in 1936. Three years
later, Folkestone came within range of German coastal batteries in France.

Among the populations of British dependent territories, the 1914-18 war had raised the expectation of self-
government. Britain reacted in 1931 by establishing the “Commonwealth” of independent and equal nations that had
been colonies. Among candidates for membership, India was experiencing increasing nationalist unrest. Her new
constitution was in force by 1937, but her independence was delayed by the 1939-45 war. The mandated territories
were also affected: Iraq gained her sovereignty in 1932 and Egypt was given concessions in 1936. But, with the
pattern set, the pressure for colonial independence gathered momentum and, after the Second World War, it became
irresistible (see Chapter 11).

The growth of radical and extreme political movements in Europe in the 1930s is well documented. Fascism in Italy
and Spain, Nazism in Germany, and Communism in Russia, all fed on the severity of the economic depression which
had beset the world. They offered solutions to the problems of capitalism, along with the promise of redress for past
injustices – all in an apparently more ‘efficient’ totalitarian package. Only after embracing these ‘alternatives’ did
people discover that there was no way back, and some of the countries of the Russian Empire (the USSR), like the
Ukraine and Georgia, have only recently managed to escape to a partial freedom (currently under renewed threat from
President Putin). The Stalinist (communist) solution to the slump was through heavy industrial development and tight
central control. Fascism and the Nazi form of it, offered belligerence and the threat of war to obtain the changes
needed. In Germany, emotive claims to claw back the lost territory, ceded under the harsh peace terms of 1919, had
wide appeal. Blaming the Jews, conveniently unpopular and easily identified, for the country’s predicament, and then
attempting to eliminate them, and establishing other racist policies based on so-called ‘Aryan supremacy’, showed the
sort of regime that had taken power in Europe.

Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, and then, with the wholehearted support of a people still
resentful at the peace terms which had been forced on the country, he acted with the ruthlessness of an opportunist
who had complete contempt for his opponents. Post-war pacifism and economic weakness in Germany’s European
neighbours meant that they wanted to avoid another war at almost any cost – a fact Germany exploited to the full. By a
process now referred to as ‘appeasement’, she was allowed to discard or ignore the terms of the Treaty of Versailles,
one by one. While Britain and France wondered what to do about their rampant neighbour, Germany was able to
rearm and, in 1938, annexed Austria (as depicted in the “The Sound of Music”), and then Czechoslovakia, on the
pretext that they needed just this final piece of “Lebensraum” (living space) to be satisfied. But Germany next attacked
Poland in 1939 and Britain declared war.

The decision to go to war is always a difficult one. It is probably one of those decisions that cannot be taken
democratically, because people’s natural resistance to it is so strong as invariably to want to take every step to avoid it
– just as was done in 1933-39. Also such a decision has to be based on many aspects, of which the public is, of
necessity, almost completely ignorant and so generally has to be taken by the government on our behalf. We are still
arguing about the decision to enter the ‘limited’ war in Iraq in 2003 as we wait, now 13 years after that event, for the
long-delayed Chilcot report. But in reality we are unlikely to get a truly dispassionate view of such events at least until
a new generation is in charge (30 years minimum). The question still hangs: if you had been around in 1938, would
you have been ‘an appeaser’ like Prime Minister Chamberlain who, had he been successful, would have saved
millions of lives? Or would you have been a so-called ‘warmonger’ like Winston Churchill? For those who were here
in 1939, it was a step in the dark: the prospect for success in the war looked gloomy, and the outcome, at best,
uncertain.

In his Christmas message broadcast to Britain and the Empire in 1939, King George VI caught the mood when he
quoted from Minnie Haskins :- And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, “Give me a light that I may
tread safely into the unknown”. And he replied, “Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God.
That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”

40
 Chapter 10

The Second World War 1939-45

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
(George Santayana 1863-1952: ‘The Life of Reason’ 1905)

Kent has generally found itself in the front line when Britain goes to war, and the Second World War was no
exception. Many Kentish crews and their boats helped in the rescue of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk,
just as the victorious German army was marching on Paris, and France capitulating. It was in the skies over Kent that
the Battle of Britain (1940) was fought, and where our depleted fighter aircraft confronted the enemy bombers on their
way to ‘blitz’ London (1940-41). The first shells from guns on the French coast, only 22 miles away, started landing in
Dover and Folkestone in August 1940, a bombardment that continued for four years during which both Deal and
Ramsgate also suffered.

“The Battle of Britain” by Paul Nash (1889-1946)

The Folkestone/Australian Gores (first Pedigree on page 62)

Like many other families whose lives were disrupted by the speed of events, the Folkestone Gores all left the south
coast. Reggie and Elizabeth Gore’s house was requisitioned by the army “for the duration”. While Reggie sailed to
rejoin his regiment in India, Elizabeth moved inland to stay with relations. Their son, aged 8, went off to a boarding
school just north of London, where he learned to play football, cricket, and distinguish between the sounds of the
German bombers and our own night fighters; the boys heard them from the school cellar where they spent many
disturbed nights. For many children, holidays during the war were often parent-free, and spent with relations or kindly
folk, typically spinsters of the Great War with large houses. Reggie’s widowed mother Edith, aged 74, went to stay
with her youngest daughter Judy at Esher in Surrey, where she remained until her death in 1955. It was as a result of
these, and subsequent moves that, after the war, this (Australian) branch of the family lost touch with their cousins in
other parts of Kent and, in particular, with those at Herne Bay.

The Herne Bay Gores (Pedigree on page 63)

Reginald John Gore (‘old Reg’, aged 57) and his brother Hubert were running the tailors in Herne Bay. Old Reg’s son,
young Reg, who had been working in the Lloyds Bank branch at nearby Whitstable since 1935, remained there until
he was called up in June 1942. He then joined the Intelligence Corps, working in England for a year before being sent
out to Iraq in 1943. Leaving his wife and baby daughter Liane behind, he set out on a hazardous journey through the
Mediterranean and then across 1200 miles of desert to reach his new home, a mud house in a Kurdish village on the
Turkish-Iranian border. He lived there among the Kurds for three years, a remarkable story of adapting to alien
circumstances with complete success. Reg made many friends among his neighbours and came to command no little
influence among their Kurdish leaders. His story is at Annex ‘D’ page 55.

41
His younger brother John was at school in Canterbury at the start of the war. In August 1942, he volunteered for RAF
aircrew and, in the course of his training, was sent to qualify as a pilot in Arizona – a place where there was good
weather and no interference from enemy fighters. In rather more comfortable circumstances than his brother in
Kurdistan, he not only learnt to fly, but had time to make many friends, among whom were several Hollywood film
stars. After flying with the RAF, John trained at Cambridge for the Anglican priesthood and went to Singapore as an
Army padre. Back home again, he was rector to several parishes in Kent and Sussex –and, in 1986, was made Canon
of Chelmsford Cathedral. John now lives in retirement in Suffolk. His story of the war years is at Annex ‘E’ page 57.

Harold Gore, London banker (2nd Pedigree on page 62)

Harold Gore now aged 50, whose three brothers had all emigrated across the Atlantic before 1914, was still working at
the Westminster Bank head office in London where he had been since the Great War. He was on holiday with his wife
Lylian at Plymouth when war was declared in 1939. Deciding that London was no place to be during the coming
conflict, he called his bank and found that there happened to be a vacancy at his level in a Plymouth branch. He was
offered it, and accepted and, in the end, never returned to London.

Like London and Dover, Plymouth, with its harbour and naval dockyard, was a German target and suffered bombing
raids from 1940-44. However, on seven nights in March and April 1941, Plymouth received such heavy and sustained
bombing attacks that the heart was torn out of the city and neighbouring Devonport and its docks. Almost a thousand
civilian lives were lost over those seven nights.

George Street, the main shopping road in Plymouth after the March 1941 night raids (photo: Crispin Gill)

Harold and Lylian survived this onslaught, but the Plymouth bank building where Harold worked didn’t, so Harold
was transferred to the branch at Exeter, the nearest large town. Exeter is a pleasant university city and, with its
cathedral and many old buildings, is attractive to tourists, but of no military importance. However, in April and May
of the following year, 1942, German bombers attacked Exeter on three nights causing severe damage; it is said it was
in retaliation for a British raid on Cologne. In the same period, they also attacked four other similar provincial cities,
Norwich, Bath, York and, finally, Canterbury, where they destroyed the great cathedral library. Harold, perhaps
wisely, decided not to move again, but to stay put in Exeter and retire!

Three United States Sailors (2nd Pedigree on page 62)

Harold’s nephews and niece in the USA, the children of widow Ida Gore, all went into the Navy. When the Japanese
fleet carried out its unprovoked air attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbour, Hawaii, in December 1941, Hilton
aged 28 was several years into his career in insurance and had three dependants (his mother, sister and brother, the
latter two both at school). Even though this made him exempt from call-up for the Services, he felt it was his duty to
enlist, and did so in the US Navy in December 1942. Because of his accounting experience, he joined the Seabees (the
Navy’s Construction Battalions), who are responsible for building naval shore accommodation and supplying facilities
in support of operations at sea. Training followed for 18 months in Virginia and then, finally, in Illinois, after which
Hilton was sent to California to ship-out to Okinawa, a Japanese island in the Pacific.

42
Okinawa was a key Japanese naval and air base with a garrison of around 70,000. Its capture and use by the Allies was
essential as a springboard for the invasion of Japan, and large forces, mainly consisting of the US 10 th Army of
100,000 infantry and marines, were assembled for the operation. The Allies had over 1400 ships and some 1500 naval
planes, including a carrier task force of the British Pacific Fleet. The troops started landing on 1st April 1945. After
meeting little resistance initially, there followed 82 days of the bloodiest fighting of the whole Pacific war, before the
three airfield objectives were captured. Meanwhile, the Japanese navy made reckless attacks on American shipping,
supported by waves of kamikaze pilots (suicide attacks or, in Japanese, ‘Divine Wind’), which cost the US Navy 30
warships sunk and 223 damaged. For Japan, the loss of Okinawa was a death blow. In a desperate attempt to relieve
the island, she lost a quarter of her remaining fleet while communications with her overseas conquests were
completely cut off.

World War II: The Gores join the US Navy. L-R Hilton, Mary and Fred

Hilton and his battalion built a camp for the marines on Okinawa, but it was destroyed – not by the Japanese, but by a
severe typhoon. This forced the Seabees to shelter in caves on higher ground, which Hilton recalled were native burial
chambers – and “pretty spooky”. They rebuilt the camp, but within two months Japan had capitulated following the
dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hilton’s naval discharge came at the end of 1945 when he
resumed his career with Acacia’s Investment Department.

Hilton’s sister, Mary, followed him into the navy, enlisting as a ‘seaman recruit’ in the WAVES (Women’s Voluntary
Emergency Service) in August 1944. After training at the Yeoman School in Oklahoma, Mary worked in Washington
for the Chief of Naval Personnel, fending off awkward questions from Congressmen and others. She was discharged
in June 1946. However this was not to be the end of her naval career: see Annex ‘F’, p.59. Meanwhile her brother
Fred, aged 17, enlisted a month before the war ended and served for a year sailing in USS Rockbridge in the Pacific.

Reggie Gore in Burma (first Pedigree on page 62)

Burma, on India’s eastern border, was invaded by the Japanese in 1942. To reach Burma, the Japanese came through
Siam (Thailand), a route laid open for them by the defection of French Indo-China (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia).
British forces in Burma under General Bill Slim were vastly outnumbered but, after a series of brilliant rearguard
actions, they managed to reach India along with about 100,000 refugees.

To deter the enemy from exploiting their success into India, the British ordered a limited counter-offensive southward
from Chittagong down through the Arakan, the western coastal strip of Burma. The terrain of the Arakan is some of
the most difficult to fight over. It has 1500 foot jungle-covered hills, two main rivers and an impassable mountain
barrier on its eastern side. Added to this, troops in this region are unable to manoeuvre during the monsoon rains from
May to November, malaria is rampant, and scrub typhus and dysentery persistent.

So it was that among the soldiers of 15 Indian Corps, who began this Arakan counter-offensive in January 1942, there
was a battalion of the 8th Punjab Regiment led by lieutenant-colonel Reggie Gore. By the following month, they had
made progress and, after some heavy fighting, succeeded in capturing Dombaik at the southern end of the Mayu

43
peninsula. Here, although a patrol reached Foul Point, it had to withdraw and the advance was unable to breach the
Japanese defensive positions which had been reinforced.

“It was a life in which I lived like a prairie dog, never more than a leap from my foxhole.”
(John Prendergast, a Punjabi officer during the Arakan campaign, Feb 1943)

Havildar Parkash Singh, 8th Punjab Regiment, Arakan 1942-43,

awarded the Victoria Cross http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkash_Singh

It was at this stage that Reggie was evacuated from Mayu having contracted amoebic hepatitis. In these days of
helicopters, one can but imagine the difficulties of evacuating casualties in such circumstances, over the Arakan hills
and then “a long paddle in a sampan” to reach road head, and “a rough hundred mile run by ambulance to Chittagong
during which it was impossible to stay put on a bunk. How many must have succumbed on such a journey?” Reggie
survived, and was eventually treated in a Calcutta hospital. After 28 day’s sick leave, during which he took a voyage
to New Zealand, he finally convinced a medical board in July 1943 that he was fully recovered.

His posting to be CO of the Punjab’s newly raised 16th jungle training Battalion followed. By December they were in
the Arakan as a part of Slim’s master plan for retaking Burma. The key to it was that components of the main assault
towards Mandalay had, at critical times, to be dependent on air supply. To achieve this, it was essential that the port
and airstrips on Akyab Island (Sittwe), in the delta of the Mayu and Kaladan rivers, were in our hands. This became
the new objective of 15th Indian Corps in this second Arakan campaign. By the onset of the monsoon in May, Indian
troops, Reggie’s Punjabis among them, had inflicted the first serious defeat on the enemy, and had secured a base
from which to capture Akyab when operations could be resumed at the end of 1944.

Sikh soldiers in the Arakan

In the event, Akyab Island was captured on 5th January 1945 and the runways there rapidly made all-weather ready for
the main offensive. But by then, Reggie Gore and the 16th Battalion had been withdrawn, and he was saved from a
third Arakan campaigning season. By March, Slim’s 14th Army had re-captured Mandalay; they then fought their way
down south to the capital, Rangoon, which they entered at the beginning of May 1945. They were already planning for
the recapture of Malaya when the Japanese sudden capitulation made this and subsequent operations unnecessary.
Thereby were many British, American, Indian and other South-East Asian lives saved.

44
Reggie stayed on in the Indian Army after the war, retiring in 1947 when India became independent, and the 8 th
Punjabis became a regiment of the new Pakistan army. He had been a soldier with the Australians and then in the
Indian Army for 33 years. Like many of his generation, he served through both World Wars; he had been at Gallipoli
and in France in the first, and in Burma during the second. In the 21 years between the two wars he had seen three
campaigns on the North-West Frontier of India and been decorated for his work with the Burma Military Police. The
medals awarded him for his service are shown below. They are a reminder of how much we of the 21st century owe to
Reggie and his generation:-

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11)

(1) King’s Police Medal for Gallantry (7) India General Service (NW Frontier 1936-37)
(2) 1914-15 Star (8) 1939-45 Star
(3) British War Medal 1914-18 (9) Burma Star
(4) Allied Victory Medal 1914-19 (10) War Medal 1939-45 (with oak leaf)
(5) General Service Medal 1923 (Iraq) (11) India Service Medal 1939-45
(6) India Frontier (Waziristan 1921-24; NW Frontier 1930-31; Burma 1930-32)

Peaceful and beautiful Burma: Pagodas at Bagan

45
 Chapter 11

The Cold War and Dissolving an Empire 1945-2000

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain

has descended across the Continent.” (Winston Churchill in Fulton, Missouri, 1946)

When peace arrived, Britain was broke, rationed as heavily as at any time during the war, about to dissolve an empire
and nervous about the post-war intentions of the Soviet Union, one of our allies in victory. Personally, as a thick-
skinned teenager who had been virtually parent-free for six years, I was shocked by two images which have been on
my mind ever since. Cinema newsreels never showed dead bodies in the prurient way that TV and other media do
today, but a special exception was made in portraying the horror of what our troops found in the German
‘Concentration Camps’. We were shown the bodies of unfortunate inmates at Belsen being piled into huge pits with
bulldozers (later, as a member of what was then an ‘army of occupation’, I was to live barely a mile from where this
Camp had been). The other image was of the fathers of two friends in our village, Cold Ash in Berkshire, who
returned home having been prisoners of the Japanese. They were gaunt figures, like walking skeletons with sunken
staring eyes which had seen too much. They made us realise that not only was there a powerful evil abroad in the
world against which we had been fighting, but that the spirit of men like these two survivors of the Japanese death
camps would, in the end, help us face whatever the future held.

In Germany, the western occupying powers – Britain, USA and France – were having increasing difficulty in co-
operating with Russia. This came to a head in the awful European winter of 1946-47, the coldest in living memory.
Our weakened economies neared collapse, and many Germans, under-nourished and without fuel, literally froze to
death on the streets. One product of this in 1948 was the introduction, sponsored by USA, Britain and France, of the
Deutschmark on the western side of ‘the Iron Curtain’. At a stroke, it formalised the division of Germany into two, but
it quickly improved commercial activity and progress, and it destroyed the scourge of the black market. Russia
retaliated by closing-off land access through their zone to Berlin where each ally had a sector of the city. Instead of
using tanks to force a way through, the Americans set up the Berlin Airlift, which continued to supply Berliners for
eleven months until Russia backed down and reopened the autobahn (motorway) to Berlin.

In this way, war in 1948 was averted, but the likelihood of yet another generation having to fight a third world war
remained high as Western Europe continued to face the threat of communist domination from an immensely powerful
and militant USSR. It was claimed that Russian tank divisions could be at the French ports along the English Channel
in less than a week. Britain instituted ‘National Service’ in 1949, whereby every young man of 18 had to spend two
years in the Armed Forces; this first ever peacetime conscription continued until 1963. For several years in the early
1950s, and again in the 1960s, I was a soldier in an armoured division on the North German plain which had the task
of helping to contain the Russian tank threat when it materialised. Fortunately the Cold War remained cold, and this
was mainly thanks to the USA.

Soviet rockets in a May Day parade on Red Square during the Cold War

Initially, America’s enlightened response to the hostility of the Soviet dictatorship was the Marshall Plan – economic
aid on a vast scale to revive the ruined democracies of Europe – and then to call their bluff with the amazing Berlin
Airlift of 1948-49. In her actions as a member of the 1949 NATO alliance, with her troops remaining on West German
soil, the USA showed she was prepared to fight to prevent Western Europe becoming part of the Soviet Communist
Empire. Even the use of her “tactical” nuclear weapons to counter the military imbalance eventually became policy.
The confrontation continued with troops facing each other across the river Elbe, through the Cuban missile crisis of
1962 and beyond, until a few remarkable leaders, among them Reagan, Thatcher, Gorbachev, Havel, Walesa, and
Pope John Paul II, started to break the logjam. In the end, it was the revelation of Soviet economic bankruptcy which
46
prompted the collapse and break-up of the ‘evil empire’ in 1991. The Russian form of communism was finally
discredited.
Britain, meanwhile, had also been using its armed forces in the difficult and dangerous process of dismantling its
empire and coping with its mandated territories. We think of the second half of the 20th century after World War II as
essentially a period of peace; that is apart from the Cold War, the UN three year war in Korea and the American
debacle in Vietnam. But it may be a surprise to hear that British forces have carried out operations large and small in
no fewer than 34 different territories between 1945 and the end of the century. These are listed with some additional
details at Annex ‘G’ on page 60. Almost all were part of the UK’s long retreat from Empire.

In the USA (See second pedigree on page 62)

A strong Methodist thread runs through the Gores in America originating from Hilton’s father Frederick, the first to
arrive in the USA in 1903. Frederick’s father, Robert, belonged to the Plymouth Brethren, while his grandparents,
Joseph and Eliza, had been Congregationalists, so there seems to have been a significant nonconformist tendency in
this Herne Bay family. Hilton, like his father, was a strong supporter of the Baptists. He was also a Freemason, the
Master of his Lodge in 1954. After the war, he returned to his job in Acacia Life Insurance where his mother, Ida, had
started work in 1943. Ida retired in 1953 remaining in her original 1931 home in Washington’s 42 nd Street until her
death in 1973 aged 85. Hilton met his future wife Webblyn Mangum, a Baptist from Mississippi, at Acacia. He retired
in 1978 as Assistant Treasurer after forty years with the company where he had had to oversee the difficult transition
to computers. For ten years of his retirement he enjoyed driving the school bus. He died in 2003 at Rockville MD
where Webblyn lives today. They have two children and two grandchildren. Their daughter, Nancy, who has been a
teacher in Montgomery County for 28 years, has a Masters degree in special needs, while their son, Robert, is in retail
and resources management, having worked for such famous stores as Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdales and Sak’s Fifth
Avenue.

Hilton’s family at Fred & Jean’s 50th, anniversary in 2005:

(L-R) Thomas, Nancy & Michael Craig, Webblyn Gore, Jean & Fred Gore, Mary Augusta Gore, Robert Mangum Gore.

When Mary Gore left the US Navy in 1946, she was able to take advantage of the ‘GI Bill’, as did her younger brother
Fred, to attend George Washington University where she obtained a degree in sociology with history as a minor. Her
wartime service qualified her to apply for a commission in the US Naval Reserve, and she was recalled in 1951 to
active duty as Ensign with the Chief of Naval Ordnance in Washington. During this tour she was accepted as one of
very few women allowed to transfer to Regular Navy as an unrestricted line officer. Thus, in 1952, Mary began her
second naval career as a personnel specialist. And a spectacular career of 29 years it was: among many achievements
her contribution to the smooth integration of women into the higher ranks of the US Navy was recognised by the
award to her of the Meritorious Service Medal with Gold Star. There is more on her at Annex ‘F’ page 59.

Fred & Jean Gore celebrating their Golden Wedding with the other members of their large family: (L-R) Kristin & Paris
Hicks (behind), Jean Gore, Joshua & Larry Hicks, Fred Gore, Noah, Cory, Megan, Anna Grace & Pam Hicks, Thomas,
Kathleen & Bill Stephens, and Lois Johnson (step granddaughter of Uncle Will, photo next page)

47
After completing his naval service in 1946, Mary’s younger brother, Fred, worked initially for his uncle Will on a
housing project in Washington DC, before taking courses in civil engineering & land survey. Ten years after starting
work in 1950 for land consultants Seybolt & George Inc. in Washington, Fred was invited to be a partner in the firm
becoming chief executive until his retirement in 1992. He was very active locally with the Rotary Club and with the
Freemasons, which he had joined in 1948 and in which he, too, held a high position. It was through his loyal support
for the Baptist Church that he met his future wife, Jean Stovall, a fellow Baptist from Arlington, Virginia. They
married in 1955.

Fred and Jean have two daughters, Kathleen and Pamela, and eight grandchildren. Like her father, Kathleen also met
her first husband through the Baptist church, but he died a year after their marriage. In 1993, she obtained a Master’s
degree at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky and became a Baptist Minister. The church worked
as matchmaker yet again when she married Bill Stephens, a lay leader who now works for the US Navy. Both Pamela
and her husband Lawrence Hicks, together with their large family, find time to work for the poor and homeless. They
are also Deacons of their local Fredericksburg Baptist church. Fred and Jean celebrated their golden wedding in 2005
at their Kensington, Maryland home of more than 35 years, which they called “Eddington”. This was the name of the
Kent village where the old family home, Parsonage Farmhouse, stood. It is 112 years since Fred’s father left
Parsonage Farm with the intention of visiting his uncle Henry in Australia, but then got waylaid in America on the
way – later to be joined there by his twin brothers, Percy and William.

William (Will) with wife Gladys at his step granddaughter Lois Johnson’s wedding 1953

Lois Johnson, the step-granddaughter of Uncle Will, also joined the party. William had brought up Lois’ mother,
Regina, as his own after he married Ida Gore’s widowed sister, Gladys Leake. Fred, Jean, Mary and Webblyn
remembered other absent friends during the celebrations. Among them were, of course, their cousins back in England,
Mary Markland née Gore, the daughter of Fred’s uncle Harold, and her daughter Alison, son-in-law Andrew Lacey,
and her young grandchildren Georgia and Edward living in Winchester (see second Pedigree on page 62).

The Herne Bay Tailors (See Pedigree on page 63)

The family tailors, John Gore & Sons of Herne Bay, had survived through difficult times including two world wars
and had its centenary in sight. The brothers Reginald and Hubert had taken it on from their father in 1919 and, in
1948, after World War II, were joined on the board by their younger brother Frank. But Frank was then nearly sixty.
The family had, in effect, run out of young men able to take the business on. The only two surviving sons, Reg CB and
John H Gore, were established in other careers as banker and clergyman respectively. By 1962 the three brothers,
Reginald, Hubert and Frank, had died – Frank in a freak bicycle accident in 1954. Of their three spinster sisters, only
Muriel survived. She had been at the centre of the musical life of Herne Bay for many years, but was now blind. So
young Reg, who had rejoined his bank after the war, came in as chairman. But it was the end of the line, and the firm
was sold ten years later. This severed the family’s close connection with the town which had lasted 140 years, starting
when John Gore arrived from Sheldwich in 1832 to retire by the sea – later to be joined by his two farming sons,
Jonathan and Joseph, and their wives with 14 children between them (Chapters 5 & 6).

‘Young Reg’ lived on in Sussex under the care of his younger daughter Diana, whom he had named after the village in
Iraq which had been his ‘home’ during the war. He died in 2013 aged 104. In his last years he thought often of Herne
Bay and was a frequent visitor; his other daughter Liane lives nearby in Whitstable. He leaves four grandchildren, of
whom Daniel Gore Smith and his family live in America, and two great grandchildren. Reg’s younger brother, Canon

48
John Gore and wife Marjorie, live in Suffolk. See both brothers’ wartime stories at Annex ‘D’ and ‘E’, pages 55 and
57 respectively.

The Remnant from Australia (See first pedigree on page 62)

Finally, there are the descendants of Henry Gore, the eldest son of Parsonage Farm, Herne Bay. He was the only one
of the family in his generation to emigrate, reaching Australia in 1853, two years after gold was first discovered in
Victoria (Chapter 7). His eldest son, Alfred, was born in Victoria, but came to London to become a doctor and finally
settled in Kent. Then Dr Alfred’s fourth and youngest son, Reggie, did the reverse trick, intending to settle in
Queensland in 1914, but got caught up in the Great War in which he served in the Australian army (Chapter 8). He
later transferred to the Indian army and was with them in Burma during the Second World War (Chapter 10). His son
David, who was born in India (now Pakistan), was until recently unaware of the other branches of our large family. He
too became a soldier, but in the British army, serving in an armoured division in Germany, in the parachute brigade,
with commando forces, and finally on the staff of the NATO School based in the Bavarian mountains. In the course of
a rather chequered career, he was sent to some desolate but beautiful parts of the world, among them the Arctic Circle
in winter, the jungles of south-east Asia and the North African desert (see Annex ‘G’ page 60).

POSTSCRIPT

Having cantered through three and a half centuries of our family history, I am struck by the stark difference between
the two parts of it. In the early years of the story, it is clear that life was very much of a struggle, especially for farmers
trying to earn their living up on the downland chalk, beset by all the problems that have been described. Indeed, to 21st
century eyes, their lot might appear to have been one of “unending hardship, deprivation, ill health and an early
death”. Fortunately, there were exceptions. Despite the hazards of the time, at least one part of the family prospered,
and was sufficiently long-lived and bore enough healthy children to survive to benefit from the new opportunities and
freedoms which came in the 19th century. So, by the time the next farming slump arrived, in about 1870, the family
were in the process of making a successful transition to other forms of commerce. For the first time, a few of them
were emigrating, leaving the warm hearth of that great Parsonage Farmhouse at Eddington, in the hope of better
prospects and perhaps some excitement abroad.

They did not travel in desperation, like the poor Irish immigrants escaping from the potato famine of 1845-47, but
with confidence in their future. Unlike many of their farming ancestors, who could neither read nor write, these were
men with some education. The rural population had always been poorly served for schools. In 1830, there were just
twelve villages in the whole of Kent with a school. One of those happened to be in Sheldwich where the four sons of
John and Ann Gore (including Jonathan and Joseph) had been born early in the 19th century. But, by 1870, when the
first Education Act became law, the number of schools in Kent rural parishes had grown to 170. Most of them were
paid for by the church, or established by local benefactors. When the two Gore families arrived at Herne Bay in 1850,
with fourteen children between them, there were school places for them. Later, many of them attended the excellent
Kent Coast College, which had become part of the new town.

I am disappointed that we failed to uncover any murderers, highwaymen, thieves, traitors, terrorists or other
malcontents in the course of this family story. Based on our limited evidence, these Gores seem to have been brave,
hardy, enterprising, God-fearing, loyal, law-abiding and generous with a strong work ethic. The latter is an admirable
trait, but can also cause unhappiness, as in the case of William Gore who died at his desk in Australia in 1926 of over-
work. Yet, behind the glum faces of our ancestors’ Victorian portraits, there also seems to lurk a certain spirit of non-
conformity (at least in religion), but falling far short of eccentricity, God forbid.

In essence, the family were survivors from what were ‘very hard times’. With their strength of purpose and drive, they
were able to adapt to new situations and then to the turmoil of war in the first half of the 20th century in which they
served with distinction. Now, with the burden of an international debt mountain, the growth of world-wide terrorism,
dissention among ‘western allies’ after the failure of their regime change policies, and with the potential growth of
Chinese and Russian imperialism in the wings, the 21st century shows every sign that ‘interesting times’ lie ahead. To
survive, we need to regain the unity of purpose between Europe and our North American and Commonwealth allies,
which finally ended the Cold War. Perhaps our numerous and widespread family with its sterling qualities and
international vision can help in a small way to bring such understanding about.

49
 Annex ‘A’
ORIGINS AND DISTRIBUTION OF THE GORE NAME

Origin
The Gore name is found back in English records of the 12th and 13th century. These include Ralph de la Gore 1181
(Pipe Rolls of Kent) and his descendants Robert ate Gore (Hundred Rolls) and Thomas de la Gore (Placita de Quo
Warranto); John de Gore 1257 (Archaeologia Cantiana iii); and Alan ate Gore 1274 (Hundred Rolls – Essex).

Gore is described as a ‘habitation name’ from any of the various places where it is found, so called from Old English
‘gara’ meaning a triangular piece of land. The derivation of ‘gãra’ is from ‘gãr’ = spear, with reference to the
triangular shape of the spearhead. Thus a dweller in, or owner of, a triangular shaped property might be called Gore.
The description is also said to encompass ‘a ravine or narrow strip of land, usually three-cornered’, or ‘a passage
between houses or a narrow defile between two hillsides like a gorge’. The name has no connection with coagulated
blood or bull fighting.

If you don’t like this official English explanation, try the origin of the name in France. There it derives from the
nickname for a gluttonous and idle individual from the Old French ‘gore’ = sow. It is said that this ‘gore’ imitates the
sound of the animal grunting!

The spelling of the name varies in earlier centuries, when few were able to read and write, and documents were often
signed with a cross. Spellings then relied on the phonetic interpretation by the lawyer or scribe of the name spoken to
him. Variations of Gore found in the records consulted include Goar, Goare, Goars, Goor, Goore, Gooer, Goure and
Gower.

Distribution in 1881
The earliest reliable count of the Gore name with suitably wide coverage was in the National Census of 1881. In Kent
this showed a heavy preponderance of the name in the North-East of the county and particularly in the Isle of Thanet
where, for centuries, the name has been common, and westward along the coast. This is reflected in the first map
showing the incidence of the name in the Poor Law Union Registration Districts which better differentiates various
parts of the County :-

Thanet (Margate, Ramsgate) 88 people with the name

Blean (Herne Bay, Whitstable) 49
Canterbury 19
Faversham 17
Ashford 19
Milton (Sittingbourne) 15

50
 Distribution of the actual numbers of the surname GORE in the Poor Law Union
Registration Districts of Kent and Greater London occurring in the Census of 1881.
The darker the District shade the higher the name count.

Distribution of the actual numbers of the surname GORE in the Counties of England, Wales & Scotland occurring
in the 1881 Census. The darker the County shade the higher the name count. Note 278 in Kent and 1160 in Lancashire.

From Kent or Beyond?

We have tried to identify the parish in Kent in which our earliest known ancestor, the Thomas Gore living at Lenham
in 1641, was born (circa 1610 – probably the son of an ‘Abraham’), but without success. Most marriages take place in
the bride’s local parish church. That Thomas, his son and grandson each went to Canterbury to be wed by licence
might suggest that the family originated from East Kent. They didn’t, for instance, get married in Maidstone, only 9
miles west of Lenham. Clearly, north-east Kent, and particularly in and around the Isle of Thanet is the most likely
place of Thomas’ origin. Nevertheless, Dr David Wright has done a trawl through both East and West Kent records
without finding him. This is not conclusive proof that he came from beyond Kent, as not every parish record could be
checked, and not all baptismal records have survived – and especially few of them have done so in West Kent.

However, if Thomas Gore did not come from Kent (278 Gores in 1881), then it is likely that his origins were in
London/Middlesex (320), Surrey (193) or beyond. The other areas where the name is concentrated (see 2 nd map) are
Lancashire (1160), particularly centred around Liverpool, the port for Ireland, where the name is also well known, and
parts of the West Country (Somerset 127, Wiltshire 110, Gloucestershire 105).

Comparative Statistics
1881 Census
The name Gore occurred 3,387 times in this national census. This compares with Smith 422,733 and Walker 100,295.
Frequency of the surname (over 100). Density (no. per 100,000).

Lancashire, mainly Liverpool. 1160 34

Kent, mainly along the north coast. 278 28
Somerset, Wiltshire & Gloucestershire 342 27
London, Middlesex & Surrey 513 12

English death records 1837-56.

Lancashire (including Liverpool 9%) 26% of Gores dying in England
Kent 20%
London 17%

References
51
PH Reaney, “Dictionary of British Surnames”, 1976
Patrick Hanks, “A Dictionary of Surnames”, 1988
Archer Software (Maps), “The British 19th Century Surname Atlas”, 2003
Annex ‘B’
ELIZABETH GORE née MAYNE

Extracts from letters she wrote to her sister from France where, aged 20, she was for the three years 1916-19 a
volunteer for the Red Cross working as an orderly and ambulance driver, for which she was ‘mentioned in dispatches’
(indicated by the oak leaf on the ribbon of her Allied Victory Medal 1914-19 below).

28th July 1918: BRCS MAC, APO S11, BEF, France

A description of a dug-out – the underground shelter used against attack.

"We sleep in one of the vacated hospitals and it’s funny to see about 60-70 girls sleeping in two long rows – the house
staff are up one end and the drivers the other. We use the hospital dug-out. It’s the most topping one I’ve ever seen,
and it’s impossible to get the wind up. Once you’re there, the firing is indistinct and you can’t hear the planes. That’s
what upsets me – it’s the awful hum getting louder and louder and all the time feeling it’s your last minute. We’ve had
some pretty bad times lately. It’s rather the limit to have to trek 10 miles each night and then get the worst of it right
over you. Such a come-down to be hit after running away!

At any rate you and mother can feel perfectly at rest about our little dug-out in the west. It is really not at all little as it
holds the whole Convoy, as well as many Sisters and some MOs from the nearby hospitals if they have time to run
here. Last time I arrived in a pair of shoes and a Burberry and my hair all loose. It must have looked funny to see
pyjama legs below, but everyone is so intent on reaching the dug-out that no one minds."

1918 undated and no address except: BEF, France

Rioting of troops in a transit camp, thought to be in the vicinity of Étaples.
"We had rioting among the soldiers here, which started five days ago. Apparently, a military policeman [MP], a prize
fighter, had tried to arrest a soldier in a café who had absconded from a detention camp. In the fracas, the MP shot and
wounded a woman and killed a Jock Tommy [Scottish soldier] bystander by mistake. It seems that many from the
camp went after the MPs, who were not popular at the best of times, and were intent on killing them. Rioting went on
for three days while we were all CB [confined to barracks]. There were machine-guns on the square and some of our
drivers had a hot time getting wounded out. One of our girls had a bit of a thrill taking some MPs out of the area in the
back of her vehicle. If the rioters had caught her it would have been curtains for all of them! One night a mob of
infuriated men arrived at the gates of our Convoy. The Commandant and Sister walked out to them, and they then
suddenly realized that women were here, and one Jock shouted, “This is a Red Cross place, leave it alone. I’ll fight the
first man who dares to enter!” which was rather sweet of him."

5th April 1919: BRCS MAC, APO S17, BEF, France

A visit to the battlefield after the armistice and before peace treaties had been signed.
"Clara and I went up to Ypres [Ieper] last Monday and had the most ripping run. Started at 6 o’clock – we went to
Bailleul and Armentières and then through Neuve Eglise, Kemmel and saw the Messines Ridge in the distance, then to
Ypres through the Lille Gate. This part of the line is more terrible than Vimy Ridge. The Cloth Hall in Wipers
[anglicised ‘Ypres’. See photo below] is in ruins but you can still see that it must have been a gorgeous building. Then
along the Menin Road – nothing on earth could describe it. The mud and pools of water with bits of clothing lying

52
everywhere were too ghastly. There are tanks lying about absolutely destroyed, some half covered in water. And then
a big wood on one side with nothing but thousands of stumps of trees left."

"We saw the entrance to a German tunnel, which ran almost to Ypres, but couldn’t go down as it was almost full of
water. We went out to St Julien to find the grave of a friend of Clara’s but failed to see it. We also went up an
observation post built into a house, although the house itself was knocked to smithereens. We crawled along a passage
almost on hands and knees, then up two flights of iron bars instead of stairs, and you can see the country for miles. We
got back about 9.15, simply filthy and covered in dust. We only had one puncture the whole day."

The magnificent Cloth Hall, Ypres BEFORE

53
 The Cloth Hall, Ypres AFTER

Annex ‘C’

Captain REGINALD MALPAS GORE, Indian Army

Assistant Commandant, Burma Military Police 1931-34

KING’S POLICE MEDAL FOR GALLANTRY

Captain Gore joined the Burma Military Police in February 1931 and has been stationed at Loimwe in the southern
Shan States since November 1932. He has exhibited remarkable powers of endurance and has shown himself to be an
organizer and leader of outstanding merit on three occasions whilst on column duty during the open season of 1933-
34, in dealing with an organized gang of (Chinese) bandits estimated at about 400 and armed with rifles and Mauser
automatics in the Kengtung State, southern Shan States.

(1) On 10th January 1934, a band of these bandits were reported to be operating from the largest of the Lihsaw villages
on Loimi Hill, 7,300 feet high. Setting out with a party of 30 rifles, he reached this village in 24 hours after traversing
some 41 miles of very precipitous and mountainous country. He surrounded the village under cover of darkness and,
as a result of the skilful manner in which the attack was directed, the bandits were driven out into the open and forced
to lay down their arms, only one effecting his escape.

(2) On 18th/19th January 1934, in responding to a call from the panic-stricken villagers, he proceeded with 30 rifles to a
bandit camp near Wan Tongniu, and under cover of darkness surrounded and captured the whole gang of 21 fully
armed young and able-bodied bandits. This operation required very delicate and careful handling and its success is a
tribute to the leadership, enterprise and dash displayed by Captain Gore.

(3) On 8th February 1934, while returning to headquarters and when only 10 miles from Kengtung, he received a call
for assistance from the State officials of Mong Yang to oppose the main band of armed bandits consisting of 370 men,
who had crossed over into British territory [from China] and were looting and threatening to burn the surrounding
villages. Realizing that only mounted men would stand a chance of cutting off the bandits before they fled over the
frontier, he decided to employ Mounted Infantry. Having only 17 Mounted Infantry with the Column, he improvised
two Lewis Gun Sections, using mules for the purpose. With this force he covered about 80 miles in 36 hours over
steep and rugged hills – country almost impassable for mounted men – only to find that the bandits had the previous
day retired across the [Chinese] frontier where they have since remained. Though he failed to catch the marauders, his
speedy arrival on the scene restored the confidence of the local inhabitants who had been thrown into a state of panic
by the incursion of so large a gang.

54
The dispersal of the bandit menace was due entirely to the prompt and effective measures devised and ably carried out
by Captain Gore and his party. Captain Gore has displayed great decision and gallantry in restoring peace on a border
which otherwise would have endured murder, pillage and arson, and his keenness, energy and devotion to duty have
set a fine example. Citation from: The Statesman Saturday 5th January 1935

Annex ‘D’
REGINALD CHARLES BURBIDGE GORE
Born Herne Bay 1909, died Burwash, Sussex 2013, aged 104

Reg was a generous man of great vitality and wide interests. He had a distinguished career of more than 40 years with
Lloyds Bank and subsequently did wonderful work with Canon John Collins for “Christian Action” in Britain and
Africa. He, like his parents, had been a loyal worker for the Congregational Church community wherever he lived, and
later also found time to support the work of the Freemasons in which he held a high rank. But tucked away in his
glittering CV is something quite different.

He was called up in 1942 when he was 33 years old and spent four years in the Intelligence Corps with which he
served in Iraq. The calibre of the man is evident from the way he adapted to such very different circumstances, and the
rapport he achieved with the people of Kurdistan with whom he worked for three years, mostly in an isolated position.
All this shines through the long report he wrote for us and which is condensed below. We all perforce know more
about Iraq and the Kurds today and can better appreciate the difficulties faced by the young Reg of 1943.

Memories of Iraq 1943-46

I had been called up into the Intelligence Corps in June 1942 and had had an interesting year working on Field
Security in England. 1943 saw us preparing for the Normandy invasion and ‘D Day’. We had done some of the battle
courses and other training for France and Germany when fate stepped in. The War Office needed more German
speakers, and I, who spoke no German, was needed elsewhere. So suddenly there I was bouncing around in a 15 cwt
truck following an oil pipeline through the heat of the Transjordan desert. I was on a 1200 mile journey from Port Said
via Babylon and Baghdad to reach Arbil, the northernmost province of Iraq on the frontier with Turkey and Iran.

Our convoy through the Mediterranean had been under attack from the air and by submarine and I was glad to be on
dry land again despite the desert heat and the dust storms. On arrival at 71 st Field Security Section at Al Mawsil
(Mosul), I found that I and another NCO were to be based in a Kurdish village called Diâna in the mountains near the
Rowandiz Gorge. A network had been established of about thirty British Intelligence Officers (Area Liaison Officers
or ALOs), one in each province, with numerous NCOs like us as outposts providing information back to the ALO –
ours was in Arbil town. We were there with the agreement of the Iraqi government to provide warning of any
interference that might affect the transit of arms to Russia through their country, which was then just as tribally and
religiously diverse and disunited as it seems it is today (now partly occupied by the Islamic Caliphate!) .

55
 Lieut Reg Gore in Baghdad 1945 On retirement from Lloyds 1969

In Diâna, a village of about a thousand inhabitants, we shared a flat-roofed mud house without electricity or running
water and just a latrine hole at the bottom of the so-called garden. To make best use of daylight, we got up at sunrise
and went to bed at sunset, as did the rest of the village. We lived entirely among the Kurds. They are descended from
the Medes (Muslims), the Assyrians (Christian descendants of those in the Old Testament), and the remnant of Jews
who never got back from Babylon. They have had a raw deal over the years, their territory divided up between
Turkey, Iraq and Iran. With the fall of Saddam Hussein, they have acquired a measure of autonomy in Iraq and are
represented in the current Iraq government.

I came to speak Kurdish fairly fluently, for which I was indebted to the local schoolmaster: I helped him with his
English in exchange. Arabic was not a requirement. There were no Arabs in our area; at that time Kurds and Arabs
detested each other, and probably still do. My colleague and I obtained our information through living alongside the
people and travelling around the area. We used a Jeep but there was only one road in our bit of Kurdistan! Otherwise,
we had the use of a mare and two mules stabled in Diâna. Our only other means of communicating with our Area
Liaison Officer (ALO) at Arbil was on the local telephone, but great care was needed because of people listening in all
down the line.

From far and near the Kurds brought us their troubles, were they economic, medical, tribal or political. The tribal
chiefs seemed to think we possessed some power over their government. They remembered the British Mandate
(1920-32) and the authority of the British Political Officers [Reggie Gore was there then with the Indian Army in 1923
– medal, page 45]. We became great friends with many of our neighbours who had happy memories of those years,
and they constantly talked to me affectionately of the British Officers who they knew then, by name. This time the
British forces were guests of Iraq and we were under strict instructions never to join in or interfere with Iraqi
government matters – something we often found difficult to get the Kurds to understand!

Medical help in Diâna was limited to a First Aid dresser. The nearest doctor was in Rowandiz three miles through the
mountains, and it was not unusual to see a sick man being taken there strapped to a horse. The people were grindingly
poor and we never got used to the sight of our Kurdish friends living on or below subsistence level. We helped where
we could. Working with the villagers, we improved the water springs, built a road of stones through Diâna, which in
winter was a sea of mud, and introduced a spinning wheel and loom which the ALO obtained for us. The villagers
were able to complete the whole process, turning the wool off their sheep into a finished garment.

Of the many Kurds that I met, I will mention just two, both of whom impressed and interested me greatly. On the
Harir Plain, some twenty miles away from us, lived Mar Yusef, the Assyrian Matran, who was the spiritual and
temporal leader of the Assyrians of the Nestorian church. When he was made Bishop in Harir in 1928, the Kurds
ostracised him. By 1943, when I was a frequent visitor, all sorts of Kurds would be found in his diwankhana (guest
room), seeking the advice of this wise Christian bishop, who often showed that he knew more about the faith of Islam
than they did.

The second notable Kurd is Mulla Mustapha, the son of Sheikh Mohammed of Barzan. Barzan is about 50 miles
North-West of Diâna. Mustapha was at the head of a rebellion which was in progress when I first arrived in 1943. It
was a potential threat to the security of the province and we had to monitor its progress. Mustapha had returned from
exile to Barzan where his following was growing. He demanded the release of important Kurds then in gaol, and that
the Iraq government guarantee normal treatment of his tribe in future, while he would guarantee law and order. He
56
then obtained weapons and ammunition by overrunning police posts, and before the end of the year the Iraqi army was
shelling and bombing Barzan positions. Eventually the British ambassador intervened and persuaded Mustapha that he
was damaging our war effort and causing distress to women and children in his Kurdish area. The Iraq government
offered Mustapha and his followers a pardon, and peace was secured.

I met Mustapha for the first time at Bishop Mar Yusef’s house in Harir when he was returning from Baghdad like a
conquering hero having apparently obtained virtually all his demands. This bright eyed virile man was the most
impressive Kurd I had met. Despite all the fuss and the Kurdish notables around him, he remained modest to a fault.
At one time we feared he might be attracted to the enemy through Turkey. There were of course German sympathisers
around, especially early on when they were winning. In 1944, after my commission came through and I became the
ALO at Arbil, I got to know him better. Officially he was viewed as ‘a difficult customer’ and at one time my Colonel
even thought that I might be taken hostage by him, but I trusted and liked him.

When I was due to leave Iraq, I went on horseback with my Assyrian escort, Yalda, to Barzan to bid Mustapha
farewell. We shared a black tent with him and others – the only time I have seen a man take a rifle into bed with him!
Such were their feelings of insecurity. When I think of the treatment of Iraqi Kurds in subsequent years, which
included the slaughter of a whole village with gas, their caution was probably justified. But I lived and worked
alongside these wonderful people so I cannot claim to be impartial. Indeed, when I arrived in Baghdad for the
quarterly meeting of ALOs from all over Iraq, I was greeted by: “Here comes our Kurdish Nationalist!” The name of
my daughter who was born after my return home? “Diana”, in memory of my home in Iraq.

Annex ‘E’

Reverend Canon John Harrington Gore

born Herne Bay 1924

Learning to Fly during the Second World War

I am Reg’s younger brother and one of the Herne Bay Gores. We look back to my great-grandfather Joseph, who
owned Parsonage Farm in the latter half of the 19th century. In 1940 the Battle of Britain was fought over our heads
and South-East England became known as “Hell Fire Corner”. In the nightly air raids that followed in 1941-42, my
school in Canterbury (Simon Langton Grammar School) was badly damaged. Fortunately by then, half the boys had
already been evacuated to Wantage in Berkshire.

I joined the Observer Corps when I was 17; my father was a long-standing member. A year later, in August 1942, I
volunteered to serve as aircrew in the RAF and was selected by them for a six month university course at Cambridge
the following year. There I was in uniform studying RAF ground school subjects on two days a week, and the rest of
the time, in an undergraduate gown, reading history.

In October 1943, I went into full-time air crew training. My earliest flying was in Tiger Moths at a grading school at
Fairoaks in Surrey, at the end of which we were streamed for future training either as pilots, navigators or bomb
aimers. I was selected to continue pilot training. By this time in the war, all pilots and navigators completed their
training overseas in South Africa, Rhodesia, Canada or the USA, where they could learn to fly in good weather
conditions and unmolested by enemy aircraft. But before we could travel to our various destinations, we had a long
wait at a holding unit in Heaton Park, Manchester, during which I and fellow cadets went on various placements.

I served as supernumerary ground crew on a Lancaster squadron engaged in thousand bomber raids on Germany. Then
there was an appeal for volunteers to help repair homes in the East End of London damaged by German flying bombs
(known as ‘V1s’ or ‘Doodlebugs’) fired from launch sites in France. We travelled to RAF Hornchurch in Essex, from
where we went daily in trucks to London. I found tiling a roof with buzz bombs passing overhead was not one of life’s
most enjoyable experiences! But in the event, neither I nor any of my colleagues became a casualty. See old movie of
V1 launch and flight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0EE5ZGKJyE

57
 The V1 ‘Doodlebug’ in flight. It sounded like this http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20407283 (Click below left on ‘sound’ sign)

But then one day I was on a train bound for Herne Bay and a short leave when a Doodlebug’s engine stopped and it
fell on a bridge just as we were about to cross it. There were a hundred casualties, all in the front two carriages. I was
in the rear of the train and unhurt. A total of 9,500 of these first cruise missiles were launched against London, Kent
and Sussex between June and Sept 1944. However, overall about three quarters malfunctioned or failed to get through
the defences (AA guns on the coast, then fighter aircraft, with barrage balloons behind). Nevertheless the weapon
caused about 23,000 casualties, and destroyed or damaged well over a million buildings. This aerial assault was only
ended when the launch sites were overrun by our troops following the Normandy landings on ‘D day’ 6 June 1944.

Each dot on this map represents the fall of a V1 ‘doodlebug’ , crashed

or shot down. The 2,300 V1s that reached London are not shown.

At last my posting came and it was to be RAF Falcon Field, Mesa, near Phoenix in Arizona. We crossed the Atlantic
in the old liner Aquitania, dodging the U-boats, which were still lurking in those waters. I then spent nine months in
flying and ground training. Starting on Stearmans (PT17s: open cockpit biplanes), and graduating on to Harvards
(AT6s: enclosed cockpit monoplanes, picture below), we became familiar with every attitude the aircraft might adopt.
This included a thorough training in stalling and spinning the aircraft, looping and slow rolling it, formation flying and
air gunnery attack.
58
 Pilot Officer John Gore 1945. The Harvard AT6 in formation.

During leave, many of us made friends with our hospitable hosts among whom were some well-known Hollywood
names. I had not anticipated my training would include having tea with Joan Fontaine and Greer Garson and dancing
with Olivia de Havilland, top British film stars of those days.

In August 1945 I was awarded my RAF wings and a commission. The war in Europe, however, had ended in May,
and in the Far East a few days before my graduation, so I never had to fly in wartime operations. I stayed in the RAF
until my ‘demob number’ came up in July 1947. I returned to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, to complete the degree
I had started there in 1943, and thence to train for the Anglican priesthood. But that is another story.
Annex ‘F’

A Dazzling Naval Career – she flew an aircraft too

Captain Mary Augusta Gore US Navy

born Chevy Chase, Maryland USA, 1924

We think Mary Gore was first marked out for preferment during World War 2 when she was a Yeoman working for
the Navy in Washington DC, where she had the politically sensitive task of answering awkward questions from
Congressmen and others. In August 1944, she had enlisted in the WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary
Emergency Service) as a ‘Seaman Recruit’, which she describes as “bottom of the line”. She did her ‘Boot Camp’ in
New York and four months at the Navy’s Yeoman School in Stillwater, Oklahoma, and was then assigned to what one
might think is more a ‘top line’ post for a Yeoman. This was working for the Chief of Naval Personnel in Washington
in the Congressional & Special Inquiry Unit.

When she left the Navy in June 1946, she was able to take advantage of the ‘GI Bill’ to attend George Washington
University where she obtained a BA degree in sociology with a minor in history. Her wartime service qualified her to
apply for a commission in the US Naval Reserve, which she received in the rank of Ensign in 1950. After doing social
work with children, she was recalled to active duty with the Chief of Naval Ordnance in Washington, and during this
tour was accepted as one of very few women allowed to transfer to Regular Navy as ‘unrestricted line officers’. So in
1952, Mary began her naval career as a personnel specialist (or ‘Resources Management’ in business jargon).

59
 Captain Mary Augusta Gore, US Navy, in April 1980
giving her retirement address at the US Navy Yard, Washington

Many of Mary’s assignments continued to be high level posts – for instance, she was on the recruiting staff of the
Chief of Naval Personnel in Washington, and later in Norfolk, Virginia, as Personnel Planning Officer to the
Commander-in-Chief US Atlantic Fleet. This last post brought her into contact with NATO officers, and during it she
was promoted to Commander – the highest rank a woman could then hold. In her spare time she joined the Navy
Flying Club, completed her solo flights but was unable to get her licence as she was suddenly required back in
Washington. There she had the difficult task of selecting women for line management posts on shore in competition
with men when few women had held many of these key positions. Mary succeeded in getting the first woman officer
assigned as an instructor on the staff of the Naval Academy, and the first to attend the Naval War College, and she
more than doubled the average number of vacancies for women each year at Post Graduate Schools.

In 1971 she was one of the first group of women to be promoted to Captain, and was made CO of Women’s Recruit
Training Command which she transferred from Bainbridge, Maryland, (conveniently near the home of her 83 year old
mother, Ida) to the Navy’s new training base at Orlando, Florida. In 1974 Mary was made Head of Recruit Support
Division in Arlington where with her powers of gentle persuasion she successfully canvassed the help of many diverse
naval and civilian organisations. Her enthusiasm was so infectious that she was offered a ride on the Navy’s 4-man
Bob Sled team which she was sponsoring. Come the day, the brakeman was injured and the run had to be cancelled.
Of this she says, “I can’t remember whether I was disappointed or relieved”.

This intelligent feisty officer then became the first woman in the Navy to be selected to command a major shore
establishment. In 1976 she took over the key Naval Recruiting Area, based in New York and covering all nine States
on America’s north-eastern seaboard. Two years later in her last post, she was the Navy’s representative alongside
other Services in the office of the US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower in the Pentagon. In this role she
planned and coordinated a NATO conference for all the nations with women serving in the military. The keynote
address at the conference, which took place under NATO auspices at the Hague in Holland, was given by Queen
Juliana of the Netherlands.

It is clear that Mary had a key role in the development of the US Navy during her 29 years as an officer. This was
recognised by her award of the Meritorious Service Medal with Gold Star. She succeeded in blazing a trail for the
smooth integration of women in senior positions in one of the most masculine and conservative of professions.
Throughout, she was herself the best example of happy integration at each stage of what was a dazzling career.

Annex ‘G’
Dissolving the British Empire 1945-2000
We think of the second half of the 20th century essentially as a period of peace – that is, apart from the Cold War in
Europe which stayed cold, the UN war in Korea and the American debacle in Vietnam. So, it may be a surprise for
some to see the long list below of all the different operations in which British servicemen, many of them young
conscripts (until 1963), took part in this period. Almost all these operations are what in the trade are referred to as low
60
intensity, and were part of the long process of dissolving an Empire, and fulfilling Britain’s commitments to its
mandated territories, such as Palestine. Where the figure is known, the number of British servicemen killed in each
conflict is given in brackets. Events in which the author had a part are highlighted:

1945-48 Palestine – Jewish insurgency [233]

1946-48 India Independence riots
1946-47 Egypt riots
1948-49 Berlin airlift (a Cold War operation)
1948-60 Malaya Emergency [340]
1949 Chinese Yangtze River incident [46]
1950 Singapore riots
1950-53 Korean War (United Nations v. N. Korea/China) [765]
1951 Persia (Iran) oil crisis
1951-54 Egypt [54]
1952-56 Kenya – Mau Mau Emergency [12]
1955-58 Cyprus – Greek insurgency [79]
1956 Suez – attempt to secure canal access [22]
1958 Jordan civil unrest
1961 Kuwait – Iraq invasion threat
1962-64 Guyana civil unrest
1962 Brunei Revolt [8]
1963-66 Borneo – Indonesian Confrontation [62]
1964-67 Aden – fighting withdrawal [68]
1965 Mauritius riots
1967 Hong Kong ‘Red Guard’ riots
1967 Libya coup
1968 Gibraltar disturbances
1969-99 Northern Ireland terrorism [719]
1970-76 Oman & the Dhofar [24]
1971-72 Malta withdrawal
1972-81 Belize invasion threat
1974 Cyprus – UN Force: Turkish invasion
1979-81 Zimbabwe – monitoring transition to independence
1982 Falklands conflict with Argentina [255]
1983 Lebanon – UN Force
1991 First Gulf War – Kuwait/Iraq [47]
1992-99 Balkans – UN Force & UNHCR relief [43]
2000 Sierra Leone [1]
Annex ‘H’

GORE FAMILY SKETCH PEDIGREES 1640-2005

Recent additions to the family: L-R Brothers Joe and Oliver Gore

Farming in Kent 1641-1890

61
 \|/ \|/
Kent, Australia, India & World Wars /|\ 1830-2005 /|\__

62
63
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank many people who helped me to complete this short history of the family Gore of Kent. Among
them is the late Harold Gough, the historian of Herne Bay, whose erudite comments on the text were invaluable. He
also helped in finding two branches of the family with whom we had lost touch over the last century, and for much
other useful material covering the time when they were farming in the Herne Bay area. Another branch, most of whom
had emigrated to Canada and elsewhere, was found for us by Linda Bowditch of the Kent Family History Society
through the ‘Genes Reunited’ web site. Linda, who is a descendant of the Hogbin family of Herne Bay, also provided
us with much local information, some of which has come from her aunt who knew the Gore family there.

I would also like to thank the following, all of whom gave me either material, advice or encouragement, and many of
them all three: the late Reg Gore and his daughter Diana Wimbs of East Sussex, Reg’s younger brother Canon John
Gore of Suffolk, Mary Markland and her daughter Alison Lacey in Hampshire. In the USA, Captain Mary Gore
(US Navy), her brother Fred Gore and his daughters Kathleen Stephens and Pamela Hicks, and the rest of the
family group in and around Washington DC, have generously provided me with the whole history of their branch
since their ancestors emigrated from England early last century. Angela Green alerted me to her long line of Gore
farming ancestors, including four ‘John Gores’; Angela’s branch remained farming for more than 150 years at
Egerton. Thanks also go to several other members of the Kent FHS for their help: Kristin Slater, the Librarian and
Secretary of the Society, Peter Ewart, Vice President, and Pauline Turner for their information on agriculture.
Thanks also to Dr Arthur Percival, Director of the Faversham Society, the kind ladies of the Fleur de Lis Heritage
Centre in Faversham, and to Peter Frances of Lenham and Pat Winzar of Charing Hill.

I am grateful to Dr David Wright of Whitstable, a professional genealogist, for his painstaking work in extending the
family line right back to the Civil War period (he thereby lengthened the task of writing the book considerably!). Both
he and my eagle-eyed friend, Brian Mayne of Lydden in Kent, undertook the onerous but much appreciated task of
editing my text. Thanks also goes to those who helped with my earlier research: Heather Lewis of Canterbury, Mary
Price of Coxheath in Kent and, in Australia, Elizabeth Northcott of Creswick, Victoria, Anne Nathan of Gladstone,
Queensland, and Mrs Perry McIntyre of Ashgrove, also in Queensland. Finally, I would like to thank Heather
Hilder and the family of the late Rowland Hilder PPRI RSMA for permission to include works by this wonderful
Kent landscape artist. The picture “The Battle of Britain 1941”, by Paul Nash, is included by kind permission of Robin
Langdon-Davies and John Sibley of the Paul Nash Trust. Most recently Paula Jardine-Rose has generously
provided a photograph and information on the excavation of the 13th century “Medieval Manor of Shulland” where
Joseph Gore of Newnham had had his farmhouse six centuries later (see pages 21-22).

64
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1972 (Australia)
“Victoria County History – Kent” Vol 1 (Agriculture p.457)

Withers WB, “The History of Ballarat, Victoria” 1870 & 1887 (Australia)

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 BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Soldiers, Saints and Scallywags, stirring tales from family history

https://books.google.co.uk/books?printsec=frontcover&id=2_ZstVBZSfIC#v=onepage&q&f=false

My God, Maiwand! –Ignominious defeat in Afghanistan

http://www.britishempire.co.uk/forces/armycampaigns/indiancampaigns/campafghan1878maiwand.htm

Faith and Family in South India – Mission to the poorest of the poor
http://www.britishempire.co.uk/article/faithandfamily.htm

A Cornish Inheritance, the Harveys of Chacewater

http://www.scribd.com/doc/241619569/A-Cornish-Inheritance

Short Articles

Death on the Pale Horse – Afghanistan: end of the First Afghan War
http://www.britishempire.co.uk/article/palehorse.htm

Dance-Master to the Wehrmacht! – A son of the Scottish Clan MacThomas in the German Army
http://www.scribd.com/doc/185783787/DANCE-MASTER-TO-THE-WEHRMACHT

Ardnamona Wood & its Gardeners - An ancient Shangri-La on the shore of Lough Eske, Donegal
http://www.scribd.com/doc/142203861/Ardnamona-Wood-and-its-Gardeners

Gladys’ Story – A Leap Day shipwreck off India

http://www.britishempire.co.uk/article/gladysstory.htm

The House that Byrd Built – The founder of Virginia

http://www.britishempire.co.uk/biography/byrdwilliam.htm

Artists

Claughton Pellew 1890-1966 – Pacifist and artist of the aftermath of the Great War
http://www.scribd.com/doc/117326171/Claughton-Pellew-1890-1966-Artist

Kechie Tennent 1888-1968 - An instinct for art and motherhood

http://www.scribd.com/doc/193108438/KECHIE-TENNENT-1888-1968-An-instinct-for-ART-and-MOTHERHOOD

One-name Study

MAYNE - a partial study of the surname in UK (7 websites)

http://www.scribd.com/collections/3524517/MAYNE-One-name-Study

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