"Study the past if you would define the future" -- Confucius

In a world of dates, facts, and figures, it was nice to post something more personal yesterday. Take for example last week's probing of the military career of Arthur F. H. Mills: There are things to be learned from the dates, facts, and figures, but it only takes one so far.

The message I posted yesterday from Oriana, great-granddaughter of Col. Dudley Acland Mills, R.E., was a breath of fresh air, and I thank her profusely for it. We may not have learned anything that could really fit neatly into a time line of events, nothing packaged with indisputable numbers that could be shoe-horned into a sequence of events, but I do know I learned one thing quite clearly:

It was just a beautiful message about her family, written with love.

First of all, I was wrong about Dudley Mills having written a book. I actually ordered it from a bookseller in Australia and it turned out to be "British Diplomacy in Canada: The Ashburton Treaty" by Dudley A. Mills, an article from the journal United Empire, pp. 681-712, October 1911, that had been torn from the original periodical. That doesn't make it a bad thing. It's just not a book, as I had thought when I found it on amazon.com.

Apparently, that article and its maps are the Gold Standard regarding the issue, and one can easily find numerous references to it across the internet. Dudley was apparently a truly amazing man, and you can read about him in his London Times obituary from 26 February 1938 at the upper left of this entry [click to enlarge].

As far as fleshing out their branch of the family tree went, I had done pretty well, but Oriana's remarks really flesh out the people. It's hard to say how close the members of Dudley's family were with the family of Dudley's brother, Rev. Barton R. V. Mills, but telephone records show that Dudley Mills first got a London telephone in 1929 [pictured, right]—actually two phone numbers—under his name: "Mills Colonel Dudley A," one being listed at "29 Pembroke rd W.9" with the number "WEStern 5941," and the other listed at "24 Washington ho Basil st S.W.3" with the corresponding number "SLOane 6624."

London was a big place in 1929 and out of all of it, that Pembroke Road address in Kensington is about a mile west of the Hans Road address of Barton and family at the time, and the Washington House address would be less than 750 feet away from Barton's front door. Yes, Dudley was "in the neighborhood," although the next year he would drop the Washington House line from the directory and keep the Pembroke Road until it disappeared from the book after his death in 1938.

I didn't know much about Mordaunt Mills except that he was a wood worker who exhibited under the name "Algar." A brief article from the Montreal Gazette of 15 December 1931 [pictured, left] reads: "Mr. Mordaunt Mills, grandson of the late Sir Henry Joly de Lotbiniere, is showing under the trade name of "Algar" an interesting exhibit of his work in the utilization of various fine-grained woods for boxes and other articles at the handicrafts exhibition at the Horticultural Hall this week."

It makes sense that he ended up being involved as a patron of the arts, although I'm unsure of the connection to Malta. I've speculated, but not in any really informed way, that it may have had something to do with his uncle, George Mills, but that may be way off base!

All I really knew of Verity Mills was this tantalizing and incomplete snippet from Hawkeseye: The Early Life of Christopher Hawke by Diana Bonakis Webster: "Verity Mills, whose father, Colonel Dudley Mills, had a house on the further side of the Beaulieu River, was invited to tea one afternoon while Christopher and his father were staying, and she danced for them on the lawn." Hawkes was an British archaeologist and a professor of European prehistory at Oxford University.

Verity's wedding was covered in the London Times on 20 July 1934 [right], and we know she was a bridesmaid at the wedding of her cousin George Mills on 23 April 1925, which she attended with her sister, Ottilie [misspelled 'Othlie' in the actual Times article]. Interestingly, George and Vera Mills apparently did not attend Verity's nuptials. Verity also sat for a charcoal and pastel portrait by Lady Chalmers that was quite favorably reviewed in the 14 December 1933 edition [below, left] of the Times.

Of Ottile, I really only knew that she'd married Michael Heathorn Huxley, who I found was a scholarly fellow once described as a "soldier-diplomat."

Knowing some more about these people, their families, and their closeness as siblings, was something I simply wasn't used to in doing this research. Visualing the large painted portraits hanging in the living room, the elegant, colourful, crocheted scarves, the beautiful house and garden in Malta, and the flowing, elegant scarf amongst the dunes near St. Augustine all breathe some life into the entire Mills family, and its something that was unexpected, but quite wonderful for me.

I smiled when I read that Agnes and Violet Mills were "charming and very keen on the girl guides," but had to wonder who Brigadier Hallam Mills was. I looked him up quite easily, but still have no idea how he fits into the family tree.

Thank you, Oriana, for talking the time to share some of your mother's insights, as well as your own. Is there a book in all of this, you asked? I definitely think so.

It can't be an ordinary book, a dry compendium of names and dates, or a time-line in paragraph form. Without much to go on regarding the personalities of actual characters we're studying here, I think the book will end up being more about my relationship with these people who, outside of and at times even within their families, have been largely forgotten.

I'm coming to an age myself where I wonder about how I may be remembered, or if I will have marched through the world destined to be anonymous after the passing of more time. I think it's what drives and has driven me here. In a sort of plea to the notion of 'paying it forward,' meaning that if, perhaps, I can save George Mills, et al, from being lost in the sands of time, perhaps someone will someday do the same for me.

Finally, part of the story here is how to research someone who's never been researched. There are no authorized or unauthorized biographies. There are no 'up close and personal' interviews, no sound bites, no film clips, and no one has ever sat down and attempted to put the lives we're examining here into the context of the times in which these people lived. There's an autobiography of Lady Dorothy Mills, but one must stretch the definition of autobiography to Twiggy-like thinness to consider it any kind of a personal recounting of her life.

There's quite a bit of "story" to be told here, and its scope surpasses simply the cataloging the identities, names, and dates of Monica Mills or E. M. Henshaw or Sir George Dalhousie Ramsay or Valerie Wiedemann.

Who knows? It's a book that may never end up being written, but it is a story that's being told just the same, bit by bit, right here. Thank you, Oriana, for helping me tell just a little bit more of it.

A Wonderful, Brief Glimpse into the Mills Family

It's Sunday afternoon here in Ocala and dark clouds are now relentlessly marching in, accompanied by intermittent thunder. It appears Janet and I got back from an overnight in St. Augustine, Florida [pictured, in an image taken in the heat of the afternoon from the cool,open balcony of the Acapulco restaurant], just in time.

I'm sunburned and lethargic after a weekend of pool, sangria, waves, margaritas, sand, and too much sun. I've had this message on the backburner for a couple of months now and with St. Augustine on my mind, you'll probably see why I think it's finally time to post it.

It may be as much as we'll ever know about the George Mills family personally. It just seems unlikely that, unless a cache of letters, photos, and ephemera were to suddenly surface, we will do much better than this oblique, tantalizingly slight contact with someone who'd actually met them all. Much of the family information to which she refers can be found in an entry I posted on 4 May that you can read by clicking here.

It seems there will not be any more information than this, so we may as well make the most of this, and be thankful for this lovely message! [I've added emphasis to names.]


Sent: Saturday, May 15, 2010 1:37 PM
Subject: Family of Dudley Mills

Hello Sam. I am one of Selma's daughters. My mother was delighted when I told her about your e-mail. (she is not computer literate so I act as her assistant in such matters. ) She has gone off to the funeral of a friend this weekend so I shall confirm what I can meanwhile.

Your research is correct. In fact, I learnt from it, as I did not know the names of Ottilie, Mordaunt and Verity's siblings who had died before Ottilie was born, which you said were Hubert and Jocelyn.

Yes, Dudley is my great-grandfather, and there is large painting of him in my mother's living room, as well as one of his father Sir Arthur Mills, MP (1816-1898). My mother has very happy memories of staying with Dudley and Ethel at their home near the Beaulieu River, "Drokes". As far as I knew, Dudley, a royal engineer (& Colonel) for the British army, only wrote an article on his 1886 journey through China. It was published in the March 1888 number of the Royal Engineers Journal: "A Journey through China". I do know that Dudley donated his wonderful map collection to the University of Manchester. You can find it on the web, under Mills and Booker map collections, The John Rylands University Library. Did he also write a book, then??

Dudley and Ethel had 3 children who grew to adulthood, as you already know. Ottilie did marry Michael (my grandparents), and had 3 children, Selma, Thomas and Henry. Ottilie went to a sort of alternative school called Bedales. She was always the first in our family to see art exhibitions, theatre productions, etc. She was a wonderful grandmother, too. Verity did marry Neil. Verity was a beautiful dancer, my mother always said, and later on in life she made elegant, colourful woolen crocheted shawls for us all. She and Neil had 2 children. And Mordaunt never married but was a lovely uncle and great uncle to us all. He had a factory that produced mostly wooden-handled cutlery in London, and later had a beautiful house and garden in Malta, where he became a sort of patron for the arts. His home became a place where arts were taught, and artists gathered. Ottilie, Verity and Mordaunt were all very close.

My mother does remember Barton and Edith, and has been in touch with Brigadier Hallam Mills, from Hampshire, relatively recently. She said Violet and Agnes were "charming and very keen on the girl guides".

I don't know if any of this is interesting to you. Are you writing a book?? Related somehow??

In fact, the only time we went to Florida (which I gather is where you teach) was with Ottilie. I can see her now amongst the dunes near St. Augustine, wearing a long flowing elegant scarf over her legs. We watched the first landing on the moon from the hotel there.

Yours,
Oriana

World War Two, Malta, and my Ilfracombe Supposition

The internet is certainly a wonderful thing! If one wants to know about paymasters in the Royal Army Pay Corps during the Second World War, just tweak the search terms, and continue to do so, until the information bubbles up to the top!

Here's another memoir from the BBC's archive, "WW2 People's War," this one written by Leonard Francis Cuthbert Knight (1912 — 1991, pictured, left), who began in the Pay Corps on 5 November 1940 at the age of 27, less than a month after George Mills had returned to the service as a paymaster himself.

Enough of me telling the story, however! Here are L. F. C. Knight's own words:

"I had reached the age of 27 when hostilities commenced, a clerk at the Birmingham Electric Supply Department. The future in the expanding business looked good but prospects were denied over the war period, which lasted until demobilisation in 1946, at my age of 33. A fresh start had to be made.

Many of our staff were members of the Territorial Army. These were immediately posted to the Forces. Although a no volunteering rule was imposed several left for the R.A.F. Official requests for R.A.O.C personnel resulted in several departing for that branch of the forces. With myself working on civilian pay duties the R.A.P.C. (Royal Army Pay Corps) became my destination.

From the 5th Nov 1940 for over five years I was a member of the Armed Forces. Shrewsbury was the first depot, where a detachment of the R.A.P.C. was stationed. It was real November weather, bleak and dreary, with the town almost surrounded by floods from the swollen River Severn. In keeping with the weather it was personally a dreary time with several inoculations and vaccinations which did not help. We were billeted with civilian families, myself with a household near to the Abbey Church, containing husband, wife and young children. His trade was that of a farm wagon maker. The skill of his craft was displayed by an example on his premises. Farm wagons have ever since gone up in my estimation for I learnt of the skill which went into their construction.

For a while acclimatization to the new conditions became the main concern. I remember our first assembly in civilian clothes, a motley crowd with cardboard boxes containing our gas masks. We sat at long tables for our first meal, the majority wearing spectacles, one humorist remarking that we looked more like an opticians re-union than an Army intake. Those responsible seemed to be at a loss to know what to do with us and found all sorts of odds and ends to occupy our time. We went around clearing up litter and marched around suburbs to fill in time. Visits to stores were made, where civilian clothes were replaced by Army Uniform. Little did we know this was to be our everyday wear for many years. Very little Pay Office work was done in those first weeks. Lectures and so on were attended. After duty we had opportunity to get to know Shrewsbury, a fascinating small provincial town. After about six weeks we were considered fit and attuned for more serious and useful duties. We were then dispersed to those Pay Offices rapidly expanding and needing more personnel."


From this, we can gather that the closer one was assigned to Leicester, the more difficult the initial training and workload. Yesterday, we learned that an unnamed recruit in Leicester worked 9 am to 7 pm every day except Sunday [when the office closed at 4] in 1939.

We don't know where Mills was assigned for his initial RAPC training, but perhaps Knight's experiences can be instructive. Here is an excerpt about how he spent his time after a transfer to Ilfracombe:

"Wives could live with their husbands and several including myself enjoyed this occasion. Our honeymoon, the 17th Jan 1941 was at Ilfracombe whilst a member of the Pay Corps. We travelled down from Birmingham in complete pitch dark conditions by rail and on arriving at Ilfracombe were greeted by the sight of the monster fires from enemy air raids across the Bristol channel in South Wales. I was at first billeted with about fifteen others in a terraced house off High Street which in peace time was a smaller type of guest house. Newcomers were always allocated to the front bedroom down. I thought this excellent until I found it was an arrangement to answer the front door to let in others any time up to well after midnight…

As better weather conditions approached on off duty occasions we enjoyed a Spring time in Devon, walking many miles in the surrounding valleys and exploring the sea coast, together with my wife who had joined me in Ilfracombe lodgings. "

In the text, Knight mentions family members visiting, taking taxis from Exeter to Ilfracombe. George Mills certainly had Acland kin in Devon, both in Exmoor and southern Devon, near Broad Clyst, as it was primarily Acland land.

We also found out that a telephone listing for a "Mrs G Mills" does crop up in the "Portsmouth / Southampton / Bournemouth / Exeter / Plymouth / Taunton / Bristol / Gloucester / South Wales (East) / Swansea" telephone directory in February 1941, bearing a number in the Credition exchange [Crediton 112]. Crediton is seemingly a stone's throw from Broad Clyst, and just about 35 miles south of Ilfracombe.

Had George Mills been originally stationed in south Devon and transferred to Ilfracombe [as Knight had been transferred from Shrewsbury], Vera would likely have followed him north to the sea, near Exmoor, since accommodations for men with wives were clearly being made available.

A quick check of Google Maps shows Ilfracombe being slightly west of the lands of Exmoor—and Exmoor is the location of the death of George's wife, Vera Mills, in January 1942. We don't know any of the circumstances of her passing. She may have been ill. She may have been injured and passed away in a hospital later. She may have been pronounced dead at the scene of her death. Nonetheless, it must have been somewhere in that vicinity: Today's maps show Ilfracombe being located just 5 km from what is now the western tip of Exmoor National Forest.

Knight stayed at Ilfracombe until he was transferred to Reading in 1941. Presumably, Mills would have stayed in Devon since Vera Mills was still at the very least near Exmoor in January of 1942.

What happened to George afterwards and where it would have happened would be purely speculation, just as it would be as to the cause of Vera's death. Although Ilfracombe was not completely isolated from the war [pictured, left, is a Luftwaffe aerial reconnaissance photograph of the area, labeled "Zum Verbrauch! Mitnahme von Ausschnitten des Bildteiles zum Feindflug gestattet" ("To be used! You are allowed to take these photographs with you on raids")], the memoir of a child of that time reads:

"My father was a Baptist minister and in about 1944 my father took a church in Ilfracombe. They had virtually never heard of the war there: they had rationing of course, but no bombs. One of the mines blew up in the harbour and that was all they had of bombs."

Does she mean for the entire war, or from 1944 on? Either way, I can find no records of bombing or attacks any closer to Ilfracombe than South Wales, across the waters near the mouth of the Severn, or in Braunton [a good 10 miles to the south].

Vera's death, whether war-related or not, certainly seems to pin George Mills to the Ilfracombe area, working in the RAPC offices at the Ilfracombe Hotel and St Petroc's.

The next gap in the record of George Mills occurs between Vera's passing on 5 January 1942 and 3 November 1943, when he relinquished his commission and assumed the honorary rank of lieutenant. The bestowal of the 'honorary rank' would seem to imply that whatever circumstances of his health that caused George to leave his post during a global conflict during which England was fighting for her life, they must have been deemed sympathetic and acceptable to the brass.

What occurred in the life and career of George Mills during that 22-month span is uncertain. We do know that a young friend from Kensington, Terence Hadow, aged 21, had been killed in action during the Burma campaign against the Japanese on 18 March 1943. It's likely that a fellow as sensitive as Mills felt another metaphorical shell burst against his hull, although not nearly as devastating an impact as Vera's passing must have had on him.

L. F. C. Knight eventually embarked for the RAPC installation in Malta with a contingent of other RAPC men for the duration of the war [a photograph from his stay is pictured, right]. We know that, at some point, there were enough females to "man" RAPC offices in the British Isles, and that from 1941-1942 most males were then shipped overseas. George Mills would have been an officer, not an enlisted man, and an aging one at that, approaching 46. It's difficult to know if Mills would have been shipped abroad.

Was George Mills among those RAPC men who ended up on Malta? I can't say, but I do know that he had a cousin, Mordaunt Mills, son of George's uncle, Dudley Mills. Mordaunt, apparently a woodworking artisan who eventually opened a factory in London that produced wooden-handled cutlery, never married and apparently retired to Malta. Why Malta? Is it possible he'd heard his elder cousin's stories about the beauty of the Mediterranean on Malta, situated between the southernmost tip of Sicily and Tunisia on the North African coast? Is it possible he'd later vacationed there and decided to stay?

Is most of this evidence circumstantial? Certainly. Could much of it be dismissed as mere coincidence? Absolutely!

On the other hand, until I see possibilities that offer far more certainty, I'm disposed to pencil much of this in on my "George Mills Time Line." Well, maybe not the Malta part, but I'm sticking with the Ilfracombe supposition right now!

Do you agree or disagree? I'd love to hear your thoughts, ideas, and speculation! And for more chronological information and wonderful images of the life and adventures of L. F. C. Knight of the R.A.P.C. during the Second World War, please visit the family's website at http://website.lineone.net/~glb1/war/index.html.