Relationship to me:	Father	Gen -1	HEMN - I guess in India in the Late 1930s
Born:	5th October 1900	London
Died:	4th February 1991	Somerset
Age	90
Father:	Walter Ernest Newman	1864 - 1947
Mother:	Lilian Jekyll (née) Paynter	1873 - 1957
Brothers:	None
Sisters:	(younger) Aline Lilian Newman	1907 - 1978
Married:	Margaret Helena (née) Smith	m. June 30? 1929
	H.E. (Babs) Solomon (née Snell)	m. '68 d. 20 Apr '79
	Patricia Hilda Richards (née Feaver)	m. 1982
Children:	Jane Newman	1930 - 1948
	Daphne Veronica Newman	1944 -
	Christopher John Edwin Newman	1946 -

Outline his Life:

Chronological Summary

Harold Ernest Montague Newman (known to his friends as Henry) was born in London in the year 1900, the eldest son of Walter Ernest and Lilian Jekyll (nee Paynter). He was nearly 8 before his sister was born, and his early childhood seems to have been rather solitary, spent under the watchful eye of a domineering mother. He remained somewhat shy and retiring throughout his life.

Henry was educated at Wellington College from 1914 to 1918, after which he joined the army going through the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich from 1919 to 1921. He spent much of the 1920s in India where he met Margaret Helena Smith, in 1928. They married in 1929 and produced their first child Jane, born in England in 1930.

Through the early1930s Henry worked for the Ordinance Survey department in Shrewsbury, Edinburgh and Southampton, before returning to India in 1936. After a short break in England in 1939, he returned to India at the commencement of WW2, was sent to Rangoon, Burma, in 1942 where he immediately joined the allied retreat from the Japanese invasion of the country. The 600 mile walk back to India killed many of his companions and nearly killed him, and his recuperation in India took several months (many spent in the care of his mother-in-law, Gran Smith).

In 1943 he was repatriated to the UK for further recuperation, where he resumed duties in the South of England with the Ordinance Survey in the preparation of maps for the D-Day invasion. After his second daughter Daphne was born in 1944, he was sent to Germany with the invading forces under Field Marshall Montgomery.

At the time of my birth in 1946, Henry was posted to Chessington in the south of London, where he retired from the army in 1949 at the rank of Lt Colonel. After considering a move to New Zealand, he chose instead to move to Somerset where he took up the challenge of running a small-holding at Churchland Farm in Bason Bridge. 13 years of toil ended in 1962 when he moved to the neighbouring village of Brent Knoll, first to Park Farm and then, after my mother's death in 1965, to Bilsdean, the house he built on land subdivided from Park Farm.

He married Babs Soloman my one-time teacher at Hill Brow School (also in Brent Knoll) in 1968, and after her death in 1979, he married Patricia Richards, Daphne's god-mother and long-time friend of the family. After several visits to me in Australia in his seventies and eighty's he suffered a stroke in 1987 after which his health steadily declined. He died peacefully on Feb 4th 1991 at the age of 90, and was cremated in Weston Super Mare after a remembrance service at the village church in Brent Knoll. Four trees were planted in the Brent Knoll churchyard in his memory, but no plaque has yet been erected to record this fact.

Several of his military memorabilia, writings, photographs etc were donated to the Royal Engineers Museum at Chatham where they can be inspected by members of the family.

Throughout his life Henry was perhaps best known for his intellectual leanings and his shy disposition. Mundane conversation with him could be difficult, but he was always happy to talk at a more intellectual level. His interests always leaned towards the arts and in particular towards poetry and music, though he was also passionately interested in literature and painting. He was a talented artist (see Art and Poetry page) and painted many pictures which hung in the house during my childhood. He wrote one short book of poems ("Nostalgia"), which was published by his military unit, but which he grew to hate, nevertheless keeping a few copies (which I now have). His love of music was inflicted on us as young children, but we were expected to learn to appreciate it, and so (eventually) we did!

Henry was highly self-disciplined and through most of his life allowed himself very little self-indulgence. (No doubt this helped him to survive his experiences in Burma). Despite his shyness, he pushed himself to become a member of the local community in his retirement (when I knew him) and amongst other things took on the duties of church warden in both Bason Bridge and Brent Knoll. He also began the village "music evenings" where like-minded music lovers would meet in one or other's houses one evening each week, to listen to and discuss classical music recordings. He was also an expert gardener, and cook - maintaining a large collection of recipes which he followed with military precision. He had mixed feelings about the church, but was a regular attendee if he liked the vicar. Religion was another of his interests and he was very knowledgeable about many of the major religions in the world.

In later life, particularly when money was more plentiful, he allowed himself greater indulgence and he loved buying the latest in the way of miniature cameras to take slides pictures of the many travels he enjoyed in his later years. Sadly, his photographs, like his paintings, were almost all of landscapes, gardens and historic buildings, and very seldom were the faces of friends or relatives allowed to enter his camera's frame.

Note: Harold Ernest Montague Newman's memoirs are covered in several separate pages as follows:

• Reminiscences
• Education Part 1 1908 - 1913
• Education Part 2 1914 - 1919
• The Missing Years
• Episodes (transcribed and combined into H.E.M. Newman's Memoirs - see note below)
• Ladakh: 1st April to 30th June 1926.
• Article in the Royal Engineers Journal published in 1984 describing his time in Waziristan in 1937 - 1939.

His name is also mentioned in "The Indian Sappers and Miners" by Lieut.-Colonel E.W.C. Sandes D.S.O., M.C., R.E. (Ret.) published by The Institution of Royal Engineers, Chatham, 1948, pages 662 to 666.

I am currently working on a combined volume of these memoirs, sorted into chronological order, to which I am adding some (scanned copies of) photographs from my father's collection. This work is still in progress, however I have posted the file as now stands onto this website where it may be accessed by clicking here. Please note that the file size is over 3MB, so downloading may be slow.

Babs: I can't relate a huge amount about Babs, other than that she was my first teacher when I joined Hill Brow prep school in Brent Knoll in 1954 at the tender age of 8. Babs (Mrs. Solomon as she was to me then) took the junior class and was also responsible for conducting music lessons in all classes, together with piano teaching. I recall she lived in the cottage at the entrance to the school.  I imagine that Babs must have stayed on in Brent Knoll after the school closed (sometime in the '60s, I guess) and that she remained actively involved in the church, which I guess is how she and Dad got to know one another (he being a church warden at one time). I recall Dad coming to my graduation in Aberdeen in 1967 and announcing his intention of remarrying, but I don't recall where and when he and Babs married. I think it was a civil marriage which few people were invited to attend. Dad and Babs lived comfortably together in Bilsdean for eleven years before Babs stepped off the pavement and was struck by a car when shopping in the High Street in Burham-on-Sea. She died instantly. Dad arranged for a memorial to be set up for her beside the alter in the church at Brent Knoll (see photos on the Brent Knoll page) where she had spent so many years serving in the choir and as an organist.