Joan Pawsey Shoucair - An English Woman in the 20th Century Vortex of Change....Part 3

by Glenn N. Holliman

We continue our series on the fascinating life of Joan Shoucair whose father was a colonial administrator in the Uganda Protectorate, and whose husband was a published photographer in post World War II Egypt.  Below, on her 92nd birthday, Joan shares memorabilia and pictures with the writer of this blog.  This photograph was taken in Upper Slaughter, Gloucestershire, U.K., Boxing Day 2013.

In an earlier article, we looked at the World War I experiences of Joan's father, Henry Herbert Pawsey, who entered the Great War as a private and emerged an officer.  Undoubtedly his gifts for administration and leadership emerged during the stress and destruction of the war in which so many of his contemporaries perished.

In 1919, Henry married Elsie Ward Newton ( the engagement picture of the couple below). After further service in France in 1919, he was discharged in 1920.  

 He took his young bride to his new civilian occupation as a salesman for the famous Liverpool, England department store, John Lewis (pictured below).  In Liverpool on 26 December 1921, their first and only child, Joan, was born.

 Undoubtedly,  looking for economic advancement, in 1926 Henry accepted a position with the Mengo Planters, Ltd, and was posted with this corporation to Uganda, a British Protectorate in East Africa. He would serve with this company and Uganda Stores in Kampala, the capitol, until 1940 when he joined British Colonial Service.

 

Passengers records indicate Henry "Bert" sailed September 1926 on the German ship, Wangoni, without this family, who would follow later.  The port city was Mombasa, Kenya.  From Mombasa, Henry would have taken the train to Kampala, Uganda on the shore of Lake Victoria.

The Wangoni was launched in 1921, 7,700 tons, by the Woemann Company, a German shipping firm from 1881 to 1941 that specialized in the African trade.  The German Navy requisitioned the Wangonia in World War II, and the ship finished her life as the USSR ship the Chukatka.

Next posting, Joan and Elsie join 'Bert' in Uganda....

 

Joan Pawsey Shoucair - An English Woman in the 20th Century Vortex of Change....Part 2

by Glenn N. Holliman

The World War of  Henry Herbert Pawsey....

Left, Joan, ca 1933, in Kampala, Uganda

We continue our story of Joan Pawsey Shoucair, born 1921 in England, and whose life has encompassed England, Uganda, Egypt and lastly England again.  It is a story that begins when Henry Herbert (Bert) Pawsey fell in love with Elsie Ward Newton. He was born 4 September 1896 at Newcastle upon Tyne.  She hailed from Hartlepool, b.  24 September 1899.  They married  12 October 1919 in West Hartlepool, the year the Treaty of Versailles was signed ending the Great War.  They had one child, Joan...our story continues. 

Young Bert Pawsey's terrible war years brought out this leadership qualities.  By October 1915, the young enlisted man was sent to France with the Durham Light Infantry Regiment.  The next summer the ghastly Battle of the Somme occurred with 60,000 British casualties on the first day of the battle of whom 20,000 were deaths.

He survived years in the trenches, and by the spring of 1918, after the big push of the Kaiser's Armies, he was commissioned a 2nd lieutenant and transferred to the Northumberland Fusiliers.  Evidently he served the remainder of his service in England.  He survived the war. Almost 900,000 other British service men did not.  A whole generation of European leadership had been extinguished.

Below, the May 1915  enlistment and commissioning papers of Henry Herbert Pawsey of West Hartlepool, County Durham. He was almost 20 years of age and a tailor's cutter when he joined His Majesty's Army.  Three years later, he would be an officer in the legendary Northumberland Light Infantry. Click on the pages and they will enlarge.

Henry (Bert) Pawsey, center front, with his staff near the end of the war.  Matured by the experiences of the conflict, he married in 1919 and began a life in business.  That career would take his family and him to Africa and into service with the British Empire.

 Next Posting, the love of his life....

Joan Pawsey Shoucair - An English Woman in the 20th Century Vortex of Change....Part 1

by Glenn N. Holliman

A Chance Meeting and a Door Opens to History....

 

In 2012 my wife Barbara and I met Joan Shoucair on a Rhine River cruise.  We became good companions, and I began to learn of Joan's fascinating story.

Right, Joan in November 1944 on leave in Cyprus from the British Army.  Her parents probably would have been appalled if they had known their daughter was wearing trousers!  Said Joan, "How could I climb a mountain in a dress?"

When Joan came into this world 26 December 1921, the British King-Emperor George V, reigned over one-fourth of the globe's population. She and millions of other school children were taught that the sun never set on the Empire which circled the planet.

As a child in 1927, she and her mother, Elsie Newton Pawsey, traveled from England to Kampala, Uganda to join her father, Henry Herbert Pawsey, a businessman, soon to be colonial administrator.  In 1934, she went back to England for boarding school and returned in 1938 to employment with the Uganda Protectorate.

Left, Joan stands between her two parents at their home in Kampala around the year 1932.  Alas the family dog was eaten later by a leopard!

In early 1944, she flew from Uganda on a Imperial Airways flying boat to Cairo to serve with the British Special Operations Executive in Force 133.  After the war, she helped establish the U.N. Relief and Rehabilitation Agency.  Later, she married an Lebanese businessman with an artistic flair.  Albert Shoucair wrote poetry in French and English and his professional photographs grace several works of Egyptian archaeological treasures.   

Her mother is buried in Kampala, her husband in Egypt and her father in England.  Joan served in a World War, observed the rise of African nationalism, dodged death in an Arab uprising and the raging of Islamic fundamentalism.  She survives in the 21st Century having lived a long and complex life...in a world of constant change.

 I am indebted to Joan for many hours of sharing memories and photographs.  Below in her flat in Greater London in December 2013, she identifies pictures from her large collection of memorabilia of the Uganda Protectorate and Egypt from 1926 to 1989, the year she returned to England.

  Next posting, we begin our exploration of the adventurous life of Joan Shoucair!

D Day Veterans

by Glenn N. Holliman

D Day, 0800 hours...Omaha Beach....

Eugene Cogan remembers the June day, a week after he waded ashore at Omaha Beach in 1944.  At 5 a.m., 13 June at Couvains, two or so miles from the French invasion site, artillery shrapnel pierced his neck.  At 5 pm, 100 feet or so away in an apple orchard, a German rifleman took aim, and a slug pierced Gene's back right shoulder.   Below right, Gene at his training camp, Cornwall, early 1944, 29th Infantry Division.

The American infantryman lay on a slope, bleeding, temporarily incapacitated, daring not to move.  As the evening wore on, he tried to crawl only to have a sniper in a tree send a bullet into his left femur, breaking the bone and splintering it through his muscle and skin.  Night fall came, along with the Normandy chill and damp.

He scrounged a poncho in an abandoned back pack, covered himself and swallowed some sulfur pills.  The next morning his sergeant found him, cursing that the medics had missed the private the evening before.

Gene's career as a scout with Company B, 115th Infantry Regiment, 29th Infantry Division, was over.  He was evacuated to England, and by September on the S.S. Queen Elizabeth headed eventually to Ft. Benjamin Harrison near his Indiana home.  August 1945, healed but partially disabled, he was again a civilian.

Noble County, Indiana near Fort Wayne was his boyhood home.  Born December 7, 1922, he married his young sweetheart, JoAnn Wolf when she was 18 and he was 19.  After a time in a machine shop, he joined the U.S. Army in February 1943, and spent the next three months at Camp Walters near Ft. Worth, Texas.

By June 1943, the massive SS Queen Mary had carried him and thousands of others to England, where he was assigned to the 29th Infantry in Big Camp, Cornwall.  There the division trained in the moors of western England, preparing for the invasion of the mainland of Europe.  On occasion, Generals Eisenhower and Montgomery came to review the troops .  

June 4, 1944 at Portsmouth, the regiment boarded a LSI, ready to cross the Channel, when the word came to halt proceedings due to ugly weather.  For a night and day, the troops remained on board the cramped and damp ship.  Their captain told them to write home and for some, he warned, it would be the last letter they would ever write.

June 6th, the weather had cleared, and the 29th, along with the 1st Infantry, ran headfirst into the hell-fire of a reinforced German regiment, dug in on the bluffs of Vierville sur Mer of what is now Omaha Beach.  Gene was in the second wave, running close to shore at 8 a.m.

As they approached the beach,  a machine gun sighted on the debarking, overloaded soldiers.  He splashed into the sea, struggling next to another soldier. Spitting water and ever the wag, Gene remonstrated loudly, "Gee, a guy could get killed around here!"  Then he noted the trooper was dead, shot through the temple.  Shocked, scared and drenched, he moved away from the body and toward the sands of Europe.  

Gene remembers nothing of the beach, or how he got off and over the bluffs and behind the Nazi pill boxes.  Neighboring Company A of the 116th took 90% casualties that day.  The entire division took 50% dead and wounded while in Normandy, over 125% during the 11 months in action.

The first day, B Company advanced 1,000 yards.  That night Gene saw General Omar Bradley speaking to his company officers.  After that first day, it was hedgerow to hedgerow for B Company.  Just before sailing, his platoon had been issued a new fangled communications radio - the famed Walkie Talkie.   

On one occasion a radioman was wounded and lost the radio.  Sgt. Lindsay asked for a volunteer to retrieve it.  Gene raised his voice and soon was crawling through knee high grass the 75 yards to find it.  Machine gun bullets chopped the grass above his lowered head as cleanly as if a scythe had sliced off the tops.  He survived and crawled back with the radio.  The sergeant promised a medal, but other events intervened.

A week after D Day, two miles from Omaha Beach, Gene took three pieces of Nazi metal in 14 hours, and survived.  Survived to come home, father three children and know his numerous grandchildren.  He taught school, served as a principal and later a regional speaker on Indiana history for school children.  In 2012 the French Government presented him the prestigious Knight of the Legion of Honor for his service in freeing France from the demonic Nazi occupation.  

Below left, Gene Cogan, b. 1922 and Bishop Holliman, b 1919 hold Gene's Legion of Honor medal, the pixie and certificate.  Bishop, U.S. Navy was a radioman on the U.S.S. Barker, a destroyer, escorting a convoy through the Straits of Gilbralter on D-Day.  The two are neighbors in Avilla, Indiana.

 

 Inside the shadow box of the Certificate and ribbon as Knight of the French Legion of Honor  also is the little pixie, a good luck folklore charm from Cornwall. 

Prior to the Invasion, a G.I. had purchased the entire stock from a souvenir store in Truro, Cornwall and distributed them as lucky charms to his company.  There were not enough pixie charms to go around, and Gene's superior, one Sgt. Miller, ordered him to take his.  Reluctantly Gene did so.  

Gene came home; sadly Sgt. Miller did not.  Nor did tens of thousand of others who gave their lives for our freedom.

 When Gene visited the Cemetery at the Normany invasion he was moved to write the following poem about all the Sgt. Millers....

 

If you would like to contact Pvt. Cogan or Seaman Bishop Holliman, just write me at glennhistory@gmail.com.

Shipton in Bloom

by Glenn N. Holliman

Shipton on Stour in Bloom

For the past eighteen months, Caroline Perkins, below left, has been volunteering at the Shipton-on-Stour, Warwickshire, England recycling center.  During this time she has 'rescued' thousands of items, including books, pitchforks, glasses, toys, lawn mowers and all sorts of bric-a-brac for her 'charity cabin' at the skip (i.e. garbage dump in American).  Last month one of her daughters, Sabrina, and husband, Shane Perkins, below) joined Caroline in donating additional volunteer hours.

Last spring, Caroline,'rescued' pots from the tip (dumpster to Americans), added 'throw-away' soil, planted seeds, watered the flowers and presto, won the runner-up spot in the Shipton-on-Stour Public Beautification display for 2013!

Another winner is the job placement and training centre of Shipton.  Thanks to Caroline in the past year and a half, she has collected 25,000 British pounds from persons purchasing the throw-away items in the her 'charity cabin'!  The not-for-profit agency has receive the largess.

Why is Caroline there at the Recycling Centre seven, yes, seven days a week?  "A. I believe in the cause.  B. I am looking for a job myself but can't drive which limits my possibilities.  C. I can walk to this work.  D. I really, really enjoy meeting people."

And the joy with which she greets her 'customers' really, really shows.  Congratulations from these Americans to Caroline, her family, her co-workers and the lovely community of Shipton-on-Stour, England for making our world prettier and friendlier.

Caroline is a wonderful ambassador for Shipton and England. This American hopes she is on the short list for an end-of-the-year award from the Palace!

Comments may be directed to glennhistory@gmail.com, one of Caroline's satisfied customers!