Anna Massey Lea was born in Philadelphia in 1844 to an affluent Quaker couple, Joseph Lea and Susanna Massey.  She was the oldest of their six daughters.  She took lessons in art from an early age and also studied anatomy at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania.  From 1865, when the family moved to Europe,…

Guy Mainwaring Knocker was a very young Sopwith Camel pilot in the First World War, serving with No 65 Squadron Royal Flying Corps in France.  He was wounded in action in April 1918 but served in the RAF until 1947.

Knowles was born in Rotherham during the third quarter of 1890. The 1911 census records him as living with his parents and his occupation as ‘Clerk, Solicitor’s Office’. He was still based in Yorkshire when he got married in 1916. During the First World War he served in France and after being invalided out of…

Mudie was a Scot, born in Angus. He was largely self-taught. In sequence he was a weaver, soldier, teacher and then a journalist. He became a reporter for the Morning Chronicle and editor of the Sunday Times. In 1838 he moved to Winchester and was commissioned to write his Illustrated History of Hampshire.  Altogether he…

Michael O’Malley was born in Edinburgh to Patrick and Rachel O’Malley.  During the Second World War he enlisted in 1944 and served as a sergeant in Burma.  He was subsequently awarded the Burma Star.  After the war he worked for the Ordnance Survey in the UK and was relocated to Perth, Western Australia from 1964-1968. …

Alfred Oscroft was a place-names authority and polymath. Born in Nottingham, he was awarded a scholarship to the recently founded Nottingham University College, but, instead, trained as a teacher at Saltley College. After a short spell as a teacher, he joined the Royal Engineers in 1891 where he rose to Company Sergeant Major (WOII). He…

William was the fifth of six children of merchant Henry Page and his wife Georgina. Born in Paddington, his education at private schools was cut short by the death of his father in 1875. Subsequently articled to an engineer, between c.1881 and 1884 he was employed in this capacity by the Government of Queensland in…

Pannell was born in Plymouth. His father was a ‘cycle agent and maker’, which may have stimulated his son’s interest in engineering. Pannell began his career in this sphere in 1920 with a firm in Slough and two year’s later joined the Great Western Railway’s Civil Engineering Department, gaining experience of the operation of docks…

Edmund Parsons was, for many years, joint proprietor of Parsons & Hart, a Department Store which took up considerable space (Waterloo House) on the west side of Andover High Street. The business had been started by his grandfather, William Parsons, in 1842.  William Parsons met with an untimely end in November 1858, when he was…

27.11.1902-15.10.1983 A native of Northumberland, Patterson obtained a first-class honours degree in history from University of Durham in 1924, having studied for this at Armstrong College, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Initially a schoolmaster and later on the staff of Portsmouth Municipal College, during the war years and the immediate post-War period he was head of History at University…