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…

Hampshire can lay claim, in a small way, to some of the archaeological work of General Pitt Rivers, the country’s first Inspector of Ancient Monuments.  In the mid 1890s his investigation of sites on Cranborne Chase spilled over into the county and Martin Down and Bokerley Dyke are included in his impressively produced excavation volumes. …

The daughter of George Washington Sandell, head of a local shipping firm of Sandell & Son, Elsie was born in Southampton and spent much of her life in the town. At the time of the compilation of the 1939 Register, however, she was residing at a guest house in Axminster, Devon, with her father and…

Born in London, Pledge undertook his higher education at Oxford University studying classics, history and French during the second half of the 1890s. Around the turn of the twentieth century and while he was in Scotland, Pledge’s path crossed with that of (Otto) Ernest Philippi. The latter had been born in Germany acquiring British Citizenship…

Plunket Greene was born in Dublin, son of Richard Jonas Greene, barrister, and his wife Louisa Lillias (neé Plunket) a writer of children’s stories. He was educated at Clifton College, Bristol and set aside a career in law on account of a severe rugby football injury. With his evident musicality, however, and the development of…

E H Lane Poole was from a distinguished Oxford family. His father, Professor Reginald Lane Poole (1857–1939) was a historian and Keeper of the Archives at Oxford University, while his brother Austin (1889–1963) was a medievalist, and President of St John’s College.

As Porter explains at the begining of one of his autobiographical publications ‘the Porter family had been settled in Rugeley, in Staffordshire, more than a hundred years’ before he was born there. Leaving school in 1852, his father, a tailor, was keen for John to enter the legal profession. However, his son had other ideas…

Prideaux-Brune was Rector of Rowner (Gosport) from 1884 to 1919. Both branches of his family had a long pedigree, the Prideauxs in Cornwall, where he was born, and the Brunes in Hampshire.  The first Brunes appear in the 1270s, and the estate and advowson of Rowner continued in their hands through the following centuries.

Roger Quirk was the son of Robert Quirk and his wife Stella (neé Sedgewick) and grandson of John Nathaniel Quirk (1849 – 1924) Bishop of Sheffield.   He was educated at Winchester College, and Kings College, Cambridge where he obtained a 1st class Natural Science tripos, a BA in 1931, and an MA in 1935. In…