Remembering Captain George Nice

I did so for the first time on 11 November 2014, just after I'd learnt something about my paternal grandfather's history from my cousin Diana's collection of photos and medals; my father had never brought a single record of Captain George to his marriage with my mother. Exactly a year later I had more to post, not least the astonishing revelation that we are not really Nices at all; George Senior (my father, Cyril, took on that name after the death of a so-named brother from tuberculosis - another of dad's too-many secrets which we discovered only after his own death) was the son of a chambermaid who, several years after having given birth to him 'out of wedlock', as they used to say, father unknown, married a Nice and the boy took on his stepfather's name. We're really Kings - and who the real great-grandfather is, we'll probably never know.

Anyway, the point is briefly to commemorate on this day the grandfather I never know, who died 20 years before I was born. The photo on the booklet is of Captain George holding the flag on a Remembrance Day some time after the First World War, probably on a field in France, but again it's difficult to date. He seems to be wearing more medals than the ones my cousin had in the box, including the croix de guerre and an iron cross acquired we know not how (their story is recounted in the first entry).

And one last reminder of the Dragoon Guard with his wife, my paternal grandmother whom I also never knew, and two children, possibly the older one the little girl who died in Egypt since she doesn't look like either of my aunts.

With time, hopefully, even more will be revealed. In the meantime, we will remember them.

More on Captain George

Exactly a year ago, on Armistice Day 2014, I shared what I'd only recently found out about my paternal grandfather, Captain George Nice. As I wrote then, my father never brought so much as a picture of his dad when he married my mother, so my cousin's box of photos and medals revealed Cap'n George's face to me for the first time, as well as his Croix de Guerre and a mysteriously sourced iron cross.

Two people have been in touch as a result. One was medal collector Barney Mattingly, who has written several interesting articles on the Fifth Dragoon Guards.

Though I should, of course, have gone and looked at my grandfather's records in the National Archives, Barney's information was helpful to clarify that Captain George entered the "Great War" on 16 September 1914, served in France throughout - until 11 November 1918 - and served with his regiment, first the Seventh and later the Fifth Dragoon Guards, until 12 August 1921. He went to Palestine, as I knew already, and was a trainer in horsemanship, seen here in baggy white trousers in Colchester in 1919.

This is one of several more photos I'd never have seen had it not been for a surprise contact, Helen Barrull, director of the Jairo Barrull Flamenco Company, whose step-grandmother Brenda Elva Tomkins had died, leaving a legacy to a sister who unfortunately died just before her. Helen had been amazingly diligent in tracking down all known relatives - Brenda had 11 aunts and uncles on the Tomkins side, and 10 on the Nice side. My cousins have been elusive to find, but the legal process is underway.

Whether it yields anything or not legacy-wise is, so to speak, immaterial contained to the revelations with which Helen furnished me. And it probably won't, since my grandfather turned out to be first a King, and only a Nice when he took up his stepfather's name on joining the army some time in the late 1890s or early 1900s. His half-brothers and sisters assumed he was a full sibling.

He was born in Lexden, Colchester, in 1882, the illegitimate son of 18-year-old Esther King, a housemaid - so presumably his paternal name will never be known: could it have been a master or another servant? Impossible to say. Esther married George Nice in 1886. While serving in South Africa, her son tracked down his maternal grandfather in an internment camp during the Boer War; the man later died in a Salvation Army Hospital out there.

While my father was alive he never mentioned a brother, George, who died of tuberculosis as a young man. Now Helen had discovered the death certificate of another sibling, Phyllis, who was only eight months old when she died in Abbassia, India - not long before my father's birth in Secunderabad in 1912. Here's another extraordinary picture furnished by Helen of my grandmother Elizabeth, nee Wass, daughter of a mariner, holding my auntie Edith.

Other than that there's not much more to add so far, except one more picture of my grandad putting another dragoon through his horse-paces while in Egypt.

As I wrote a year ago, the mind runs riot when confronted with unexpected fragments of a family jigsaw. So I can well understand how Patrick Gale, a gripping story-teller, made a gay romance out of his great-grandfather's unexplained exile to the Canadian prairies in A Place Called Winter. I'm two-thirds of the way through, and while it may not have the deepest psychological depth, it certainly constructs a world.

Later: two pertinent photo footnotes. First, this amazing image of 650 officers and enlisted men from the cavalry in 1910 - could then Second Lieutenant George Nice be among them? - forming a horse's head.

With hindsight, it could be seen as a prescient memorial to all the horses who were killed in the First World War (of a million, 65,000 came back, and another figure suggests eight million horses were lost on all sides). I hope the source, the valuable educational side Hungry for History, approves me appropriation under the circumstances.

And as a sign that life goes on, here's a NASA satelllite image of India, the land where my father was born a child of Empire in 1912, all lit up for Diwali on the night of what we know as Armistice Day.

Captain George Nice

Until this September, I'd never seen a photograph of my paternal grandfather, George Nice. I only knew that he was posted by the British army to Secunderabad, India, where my father was born in 1912, and after that he served throughout the First World War, where he suffered mustard gas poisoning and was something of an invalid for the rest of his life. Strange, isn't it, that my father had nothing to show my mother of his past life, not even a picture, and was so secretive that only after his death did we find out that he had an elder brother, George - the name he took despite being christened Cyril - who died of tuberculosis (when I was up for my BCG jab, Dad kept completely stumm).

My father was two decades older than my mother, of that more rigid and unrevealing generation, but even for a man of his age seems to have been remarkably unforthcoming. He became an invalid after a stroke when I was 10 and died five years later, so the longer chats that might have come with maturity never happened. I think I understand: that the fact he never talked about his work as a London fireman in the Second World War must have been to bury unimaginable horrors, while the death of his brother must have been so painful, and loaded him with responsibilities as the eldest son, the new 'George' to look after his by all accounts formidable mother. There was another brother, Harry, an older sister, Hilda and a younger, Edith, who kept the family heirlooms in boxes barely touched until this year.

So it was to her daughter, my beloved cousin Diana in Reading, and Diana's husband Lee, who'd put together a kind of 'presentation' for me, that I went while my mother was staying there a couple of months ago. Lee first presented me with the photo from which the above detail is taken and asked me to guess the identity of my grandfather. The above standard-bearer wasn't my first choice.

He stands, if I've got it right, between Lord Jellicoe and General Gourand, at a Whitehall Remembrance Day ceremony. A second photo, less damaged, shows another scene from the same event.

From what I can make out, he served in the army until 1920 but maintained his duties with the British Legion until his death on 16 March 1944. There's a very touching and personal letter from Major Sir Brunel Cohen to his widow, my grandmother (whom I also never knew), which concludes thus:

I have known him for so long, 22 years, I think, and I would assure you that we shall miss him in the Legion more than I can say. He has been ill for so long and I have always admired his pluck in sticking to his job under such hardship and difficulty. A man of unimpeachable integrity!

I'm going to wind the clock back slowly. There are programmes from four Albert Hall ceremonies of remembrance, such large-scale events in the 1930s. This one took place on this day in 1937.

Here it looks as if my grandfather had gone to a commemoration on the battlefield itself, though there's no date or details.

He became a captain in 1920. He'd gone to France in December 1914 as a second lieutenant in the Fifth (formerly Seventh) Dragoon Guards, received one commendation for valour signed by Churchill and ended up with a special medal in addition to the three awarded to most soldiers who lasted the duration (known as 'Pip, Squeak and Wilfred'; if you got two, they were 'Mutt and Jeff').

The History of the 5th Dragoon Guards published by Blackwood in 1924 gives the details of the action which led to the most prized of the medals, describing events on April 7 1918 in Fampoux Field to the east of Athies:

Second Lieutenant Nice of A Squadron was afterwards awarded the Croix de Guerre for his gallantry in reconnoitring under heavy rifle and machine gun fire to try and find a route for the regiment to make a further advance in the direction of Greenland Hill.

Here's the other side of the Croix de Guerre:

and, quite confoundingly, I also identified a fifth medal as a German iron cross. The mind whirls at this and so much else. How did he come by it? Who will ever know?

Around the war, my grandfather served in Cairo, Secunderabad and Palestine. Slightly curious that I've been to all three places, though I sought out Secunderabad, now a chaotic suburb of Hyderabad, because it always had a magic ring to it when I was a child, knowing that Dad was born there and looking it up in an atlas. Not surprisingly I jumped at this picture, which shows ever stern-looking Elizabeth and George with two of their offspring.

But the children must be Hilda and George Junior, and the location is probably Cairo, because we also came across George's birth certificate, D.O.B. 16 January 1910, Abbasiyeh Garrison.

My father, Cyril, followed two years later. And here he is, seated and serious in front of his Mama, with George the cheeky chappie, young Harry - who went on to serve in the Second World War with the Chindits in Burma, ending up in a prisoner of war camp, an event which scarred him for life - and Hilda (Edith was yet to be born).

Closing in, I have to admit he looks very much like a picture of me with teddy and model racing car aged five, though in my case the serious look may be unidentified myopia. You're spared that pic since I haven't scanned it, but here's Dad again.

Among the papers we also found a photo of Dad in his late teens, signed to Hilda, in which he looks so handsome and happy. But this is about Captain George, so back to the Dragoons. The all-important horse:

and George, third from right, in cod-medieval garb for I know not reason

on the back of which card he's written, which shows he must have had some sense of humour, this to his beloved:

Two more shots will do, a group photo of the Seventh Dragoon Guards in their Abbasiyeh Garrison,  Cairo, before the First World War

amd another after it, of riding instructors, which clearly Captain George became, in 1920.

You can imagine the tumult of imagination this triggered in a grandson who now had some puzzle pieces to join together. I hope it's just the beginning of finding out more about my father's side of the family; it's only a shame I left it until this special year to embark on the discovery. Praise be to a blog, then, for enshrining the information. There isn't a lot about the Nices on the web - only a few 18th century American soldiers, and it's a common name out there, so tracing our Nices back, as we have done for the Parrises - earliest known ancestor a Huguenot refugee from the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, Jean de Paris - is the next duty.