Olive Mary Wheatland (1922-2008) and Ernest Moore (1917-1969).
My maternal grandparents.
Olive Mary Wheatland was my grandmother, or nanny as she was known to all. She lived most of her life in Croydon, Surrey, until her second marriage took her to Battersea in south London. My grandpops, Ernest Moore, was from Northern Ireland and served as a lorry driver in the Irish Guards before and during the Second World war.
Olive was born on 25 May 1922 in Croydon to parents William Albert Wheatland and Elizabeth Marlow. He came from a long line of sailors in the Royal Navy, and both had lost their first spouses during the First World War. They lived at 5 Haling Road, South Croydon, and the 1939 census showed them all there with Olive working as a chemist’s shop assistant. It would be around this time that she met Ernest, who was already a Guardsman in the British Army.
He’d been born on 24 November 1917 at Donaghmore, near Dungannon, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. His parents were John Moore and Joanna Rainey and for a time he worked as a weaver. He enlisted in the Irish Guards in July 1936 and before the war started he saw service in Palestine and Egypt.
After war broke out his battalion was sent to Norway and he was caught up in the disastrous bombing of the troopship Chobry in 1940. Ernest and his comrades returned to Britain after being evacuated but for how long was then unclear. So Olive and Ernest married on 18 January 1941 at Croydon Register Office. Her occupation at that time was given as a buffet assistant. They went on to have three children – the first, my mum, in 1941.
Ernest spent several years on the home front stationed just a mile or two away in Sanderstead, Surrey, before his battalion were sent to North Africa in 1943 and then Italy.
Olive and Ernest, who was also known as Tony, lived at 2 Napier Road in South Croydon after the war and he worked as a bus driver for the British airline BOAC. What he experienced in the war must’ve had an impact on him mentally, as it did many in his situation.
He would often travel back to Northern Ireland to see his family but I have only a few memories of him, most of them to do with Christmas visits and family holidays such as in Combe Martin, Devon. Tragically, he fell seriously ill in 1969 and died on 16 July at Guys Hospital in London from a severe chest infection and acute kidney failure. He was just 51.
Nanny had a number of jobs – I remember her working behind the counter at a local newsagent’s in South Croydon – but she finally settled into working as a home help for the local council, caring for the elderly and disabled in their homes.
Nanny remarried in 1974 but her choice of husband, Yorkshireman Frank Horace Brown Watson, was not a popular one in the family and she lived many difficult years with him in their flat in Battersea. For some years she continued to work as a home help, this time for Wandsworth Council, but after retiring ended up as a full-time carer for Frank. She was much involved in the local church, the Mother’s Union and the local carers charity. Frank died in 1995.
Nanny’s health steadily declined and she had to move away from Battersea into a flat near family in Caterham, then into a nursing home in Chaldon. She died on 26 December 2008.