Try as he might, Ted found passing the entrance exam to Eton impossible. His brother Joe had sailed into the school a few years earlier and would come home for the holidays with groups of confident friends. My father would never express disappointment, but failing to make the grade must have had a crushing effect on him at the time.
Instead of Eton, Ted was sent to Bootham School in York, a Quaker school that states on its website today that it ‘encourages its students to be creative thinkers, peacemakers and humanitarians,’ adding that ‘each person has the capacity for goodness and a responsibility to recognise that goodness in others.’ The Bootham culture was more forgiving and better suited than Eton would have been to my father’s non-competitive, diffident though trusting personality.
Ted was reserved at school and, although his quick wit made him popular with his peers, he disliked the attention of those in authority. He developed a lifelong horror of speaking in public as he had a tendency to roll his r’s – not easy if your surname name happens to be Branson. As an adult, he talked little of his schooldays. His sister Joyce told us there would usually be much walking up and down the platform to hide his tears as the family saw him off on the train to York at the beginning of each term.
Towards the end of his time at school, Sir George suggested that Ted go to a careers adviser. After asking him to fill out various forms and answer a plethora of questions, taking note of the young man’s knowledge and interest in natural and ancient history, geology and physics, the adviser recommended that Ted should become an archaeologist. Horrified by the prospect of one of his sons not following the family tradition of going to the Bar, Sir George refused to pay the career adviser’s bill.
The entire family would occasionally accompany Sir George when he travelled the country on circuit, which was unheard of at the time. Having been at Trinity College, he would stay in the master’s lodge while sitting at the Cambridge Assizes. Mona took matters even further: not content with having the children simply see their father at work, she insisted that they act as marshals in the court and bizarrely that she sit on the bench beside her husband.
On reflection, my grandfather’s cosy relationship with the master of Trinity must have helped my father win a place to read law in this most hallowed of academic institutions. It was here that Ted developed his immense sense of fun, his love of puns and the pleasure he took in a good party. I know only three things about his Cambridge life: that he was captain of the Cambridge swimming team, that he kept a Great Dane called Appin in his rooms at Trinity, and he told me the third only a few years ago, prompted by the noise of a champagne cork popping. He laughed out loud as he remembered a fellow undergraduate shouting to him across a crowded room, ‘Branson,’ he said, ‘bring me a fuckin’ firkin!’
4
TED’S WAR
As I dig deeper, the past feels increasingly tantalising. The leather-bound photo albums, so recently populated with unidentifiable figures, are now teeming with flesh-and-blood personalities. Piecing together entire lives, with their stories of dashed expectations, sweet romance and untimely death is beginning to feel voyeuristic, as if I’m a puppet-master in a Victorian tale of the unexpected. But learning how these relatives were born, how they fared in wars, dealt with adversity, prospered and, finally, how they died is fascinating, and I’m relishing every minute.
In the summer of 1937, Hitler was threatening peace in Europe but Sir George, who had just retired, was optimistic enough to take Mona, Joyce, Ted and Uncle Bill on a cruise to South Africa. The family had rented out Wharfenden and moved to Suffolk, taking a long lease on Bradfield Hall, a Georgian mansion in the grounds of Euston Hall, the Duke of Grafton’s estate. The grounds, landscaped by Capability Brown, were elegant and the main house, designed by William Kent, was outrageously grand. Dad told us that the duke’s wine cellars were so extensive that he’d built a small underground railway to transport the wine from its racks to the dumb waiter that would carry the cases up to the butler’s pantry. Sir George was thrilled with the move. His friend the duke was a generous host, inviting the family to join in his magnificent shoots, fish on his lake and dine in the main house.
The pension of a high court judge was a good one and Mona had come to the marriage with some income, so Sir George and Lady Branson were able to live well; Uncle Bill’s financial contribution was the cherry on the cake. Between them, they retained eight staff. In his will, Bill left money not only to Parton but to another chauffeur called Dewdney. However, regardless of their apparent financial comfort, according to cousin Michael money was ‘always a niggle’. The Branson children were conscious of tension around household expenses and were themselves kept on a tight financial rein.
The cruise, followed by a safari, was to last nine weeks. With four first-class cabins booked on the MV Dunbar Castle, it was to be Sir George’s last hurrah before he settled down to retirement in Suffolk. Ted was nineteen and, as he said himself, ‘quite a deb’s delight.’ He couldn’t believe his luck, being one of the few eligible bachelors on the boat among a positive bevy of young beauties. En route to their first stop at Port Elizabeth, Ted’s eye was caught by a girl who was travelling with her formidable mother. The couple managed to snatch loving dances here and there, and even exchanged the odd kiss. As the relationship progressed they decided that for secrecy’s sake they shouldn’t talk to each other in public. On the night before they disembarked, the eager girl sneaked into Ted’s cabin. Unbeknown to the lovers, the girl’s mother noticed that she was missing and sounded the alarm. Presuming she’d fallen overboard, the Captain ordered the ship to turn around and sail north once more.
The girl sneaked back to her cabin early in the morning. Ted awoke feeling very pleased with himself and looked through his porthole, expecting to see Port Elizabeth’s harbour but there was no land in sight. As he entered the breakfast room to join his parents he learned the reason that the ship had had to turn around. The captain came to their table to apologise for the eight-hour delay in getting to port. He caught the eye of Ted, who was blushing to the roots of his blond hair but said nothing. Ted was terrified and tried to reassure himself that there was no reason that he should be implicated in the fiasco, until the girl sidled up beside him and muttered under her breath words that would haunt him for many a year to come. ‘Mother knows,’ she said. ‘Mother knows.’
On the return voyage, fate was to play its tricks once more with a chance encounter that was to impact not just on my father’s generation, but on mine too. Ted became friendly with two ‘gorgeous girls’, South African sisters called Wendy and Jacqueline Payne. Wendy was not only beautiful, she was outspoken, funny, athletic and adventurous. Ted, infatuated by their playful teasing, turned on his usually foolproof charm, but it was in vain. Sir George and Lady Branson were also quite taken with the girls and invited them to stay with them for the weekend on their return to England.
News of the sisters’ invitation spread fast, and Ted’s brother Joe made an effort to get home that weekend too, arriving late on the Friday night after the rest of the party had turned in. The story goes that Wendy had recently seen a fortune teller, who told her that the man she was going to marry would have a number plate that added up to thirteen. Waking up on the Saturday morning, she looked out of the window, and blow me down, the number plate on Joe’s Morris Eight added up to nuptial heaven. Before she’d even laid eyes on him, Wendy decided that, come what may, here was the man she would marry.
Their marriage turned out to be a happy and fruitful one: they had two children, Jill and Michael, my secret source. Visiting the Addisons as a child was awe-inspiring. Wendy, who never lost her strong South African accent, kept a menagerie of animals, including an aggressive African grey parrot named Papageno, who would sit on her shoulder and threaten to nip us with his terrifying beak while screeching, in an Afrikaans accent, ‘Who’s my beautiful boy, then?’
Before Ted went up to Cambridge, the family travelled to Mougins in France. ‘It cost �
�14 for fourteen days and fourteen nights,’ Dad told me. ‘We would spend most of the morning climbing up a mountain with our skis tied to our backs, have a picnic lunch at the summit, then strap on our skis and whizz down again. There were no safety features or special bindings on the skis. The return train to London was chock-full of people with broken legs or twisted knees, being wheeled around in outsized bath chairs.’
Ted volunteered for service on 2 September 1939, reporting to the recruiting office in Chancery Lane, and war was declared the next day. He told the recruiting officer that he was a good horseman and became a trooper at the Redford Barracks outside Edinburgh. On his way up north, with a certain glee, he alarmed a number of fellow travellers; for in his determination to win a bet with his brother Joe of who would be the first to finish knitting a jumper, Ted sat in full uniform, needles clicking away, for the entire journey.
Returning to Trinity was unthinkable now. Before being commissioned, he was sent on a liaison officer course that included becoming proficient at riding cross country on a motorbike, a skill he would retain for the rest of his life. He was also sent to the Army School of Equitation at Weedon as an officer cadet. NCOs had to call officers ‘Sir’, but they could use any epithet before ending a sentence with that term of respect. Ted remembered having some problems with his spurs on his first day of training, and the sergeant major shouting at him, ‘Keep your knees together on the saddle, Mr Branson. You look like a willing whore, Sir.’
The prospect of going to war on horseback thrilled Ted and he embraced his new family in the Staffordshire Yeomanry, the Queen’s Own Royal Regiment. I was always under the impression that he took his own polo ponies to training camp, but cousin Michael soon put me straight. If he didn’t go to war on Tishy and Nobby, he must have seconded a couple of horses from a patriotic neighbour. It’s hard to believe that horses were used by the British Army until 1943; cavalry played a vital role in mountain combat, as horses could cover terrain that was inaccessible to tanks. Ted’s uniform was made up at his father’s tailor, and he had two pairs of leather knee-high riding boots made by the shoemaker Peal & Co.
Ted’s brother Joe joined the Queen’s Royal West Surrey Regiment, but before he went off to fight he hit a stone in the road during a motorcycle journey in the blackout, and flew over the handlebars, fracturing his skull. Medically discharged from active service, he reluctantly spent the rest of the war in the UK as an adjutant in the Queen’s Regiment. The gods were on his side, though: most of his regiment were killed in action during the war. His accident had almost certainly saved his life.
Dad’s diary for January 1940 displays a combination of excitement and dread. His youthful enthusiasm bursts from each page, with the exception of his frustration at ‘Church parade again and an awful sermon. “God could stop the war by raising a little finger” we are told, “but he is testing us”. Silly little man, how does he know what’s what? Why we are compelled to go to church to listen to such a fool I can’t think.’
Later he writes, ‘I rather wish I was going off to Finland with Bill [who had volunteered for the Friends’ Ambulance corps]. It seems so much better to be able to save life than doing our best to destroy it. However it is obvious that we can’t all be ambulance men – someone must use force. Bill says no, and I say as a counter that he wouldn’t talk to a tiger savaging a friend.’ And later, ‘The poor old Dunbar Castle has been struck by a mine, I have many happy memories of our nine weeks on her. Not many lives were lost.’
Dad told me that those going to fight had no idea how long they would be out of the country. As it happened, after sailing for North Africa in 1940, he didn’t set foot on English soil for over five years. He found saying goodbye to his fox terrier Patsy more agonising than saying goodbye to his parents, even though the elderly judge was convinced he was going to die of a heart attack at any moment. On his last weekend in Suffolk before being posted abroad, Ted worked out a secret code by which he could let his parents know where he was in his letters home, without drawing the censor’s attention.
‘Let’s imagine that this wall of shelves, in the cellar, is a map of Europe and Africa,’ he told them. ‘If I’m posted to, say, Palestine, I’ll ask you to look out for my skates on the middle shelf on the right and if I’m posted to France, I’ll ask you to find them on a shelf towards the left.’ They spent some time perfecting the code, and it was a great success; throughout the years that Dad spent at war, his parents knew of his exact whereabouts.
Ted’s war was a jumble of anecdotes, japes and adventures. A story of racing tanks across the desert on his horse, and winning; another of tripping on some marble steps in Algiers, scattering a mass of papers containing the plans of the 7th Armoured Division’s upcoming attack. As he protected himself in his fall, he realised, to his horror, that the well-meaning crowd around him was gathering up the top-secret papers as they caught the wind.
Ted told of digs with the eminent archaeologist Dr George Reisner, the then seventy-two-year-old Harvard professor of Egyptology. Whenever he had leave, Ted joined this droll elderly man on his excavations around the pyramids at Giza; delighted that he could fulfil his true passion, he revelled in the doctor’s knowledge and humour. Ted’s fellow officers would tease him about his love of archaeology and when they asked him how he was spending his leave, he would happily reply, ‘I’m infra dig with Reisner. Do you care to join me?’
I was keen that Dad should be present to hear his tribute speech rather than wait for his funeral, so when planning his ninetieth birthday I invited our family friend Stephen Navin (who would sit beside the Buddha with me a decade later) to do the honours. Navin embraced the task with enthusiasm, interviewing Dad at great length and capturing this magical story about his desert excavations:
The extraordinary thing about Dr Reisner was that he was both dumb and blind, but Ted was convinced that his instinct for archaeology provided him with senses that compensated where nature had failed. Ted would ride out to the desert to look for shards of pottery and bring them back to the doctor who would feel them carefully, place them in order on the table in front of him, go to his typewriter and proceed to tell Ted the route that he had taken across the necropolis, by the pieces of pottery which he was able to date through his fingertips.
Reisner had a loyal and devoted secretary – Miss Perkins. She was in her forties as Ted describes it and used to light Reisner’s pipe for him because he couldn’t see the smoke. Miss Perkins also took to smoking a pipe. The Americans were particularly concerned to ensure that no harm came to the doctor, as he had done very valuable excavating but had not yet had time to write it up. There was concern that the Germans might blow him up and they therefore insisted that he sleep at the site of his excavation. A young Arab would guard the outside chamber, Miss Perkins would sleep inside and Reisner would sleep in the sanctum sanctorum. I have this image of Ted, Miss Perkins and Reisner sitting on a rug, enjoying a post-prandial pipe beneath the Sphinx in the cool Egyptian evening, before Reisner and Miss Perkins retired to their tomb and Ted mounted his horse and cantered back across the desert to his base.
Ted was full of happy tales of pretty nurses caring for his every need after he fell from his horse, or of the time when, while attached to the 2nd Armoured Division, he suffered a nasty bout of jaundice and was hospitalised in Cairo. While in hospital, his headquarters was overrun by Field Marshal Rommel. ‘This was very inconvenient,’ he told me, ‘as it meant that I and another junior officer, who had not been captured, suddenly found ourselves liable for the entire regimental mess bill, amounting to £800. To put this into perspective,’ he laughed, ‘my monthly pay was only £4.’
For all his bonhomie, it became apparent to me as I researched the progress of the Staffordshire Yeomanry, that Ted’s war years were terrifying, sad, and tough. His regiment joined up with the Americans, forming the famous ‘Desert Rats’ and fighting the Battle of El Alamein. The only correspondence I can find from him during the war is a letter to his
father. The envelope is addressed to ‘The Rt Hon. Sir George Branson, Bradfield Hall, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk’. It has been stamped, passed by the censor dated 19 January 1943 and was received on12 January 1944. In it is a scrap of paper, on which the young soldier has written the following:
Capt. E. Branson. HQ II Corps CMF.
My dear Dad,
When I changed my HQ yesterday, General Lucas gave me this copy of a letter he sent my General, for (as he put it) my personal file. I think he thought I might have a father I should like to send it to, so I’m doing so.
My love, Ted
The address on the typed letter is headed HEADQUARTERS VI CORPS. APO 306, and the letter reads as follows:
Dear General McCreery
Capt. Edward Branson, Staffordshire Yeomanry, has been on duty as Liaison Officer with the VI Corps since the initial landing. During this period of time he has been most active and enthusiastic in furnishing me and the members of my staff with accurate and timely information. In addition, his contributions to our daily conferences have been extremely valuable in acquainting the entire corps staff with the successes and problems which have confronted our British Allies.
Captain Branson has shown himself to be an accomplished and cultured gentleman and has been popular with all of our officers and myself. I hate to lose him.
With hearty wishes for your continued success, I am
Sincerely Yours
John P. Lucas
Major General, US Army
My father’s final fighting years were spent in Italy. He took part in the Battle of Anzio, which began with an Allied amphibious landing known as Operation Shingle. When Dad mentioned the Battle of Anzio, I imagined it as being like a film – a few heroic days, with some near-misses before victory was achieved. In reality, they were pounded by heavy shells for over one hundred days, between January and April 1944. He was the liaison officer with the 36th Texas Division at the Salerno landings and told us that the Americans considered him very brave, as he remained standing during German artillery bombardments while they dived for cover at the sound of the 88 mm shells passing overhead. It was a clever party trick, for he knew that by the time you can hear an 88 mm shell you are completely safe, as it has already passed overhead.
One Hundred Summers Page 4