Douglas Hamilton Macnee 1903-1967
Birth and Citizenship
Douglas was born in Orange, New Jersey USA, 6 February 1903. The State of New Jersey has yet to uncover a birth certificate, but he is listed in a New Jersey index of births as born in 1903. At the time his father was working in New York.
Douglas was a US citizen his entire life, even though he lived in Great Britain from an early age and as far we know never returned to the USA. As an ‘alien’ he was required to report his whereabouts to the police every six months. I remember one time the policeman who came to the door at Appsley (our house in Broadsands, Paignton) seemed quite happy to accept my word that Dad lived there. That would have been about 1958.
Early Years
Douglas crossed the Atlantic several times when he was small, but I have found only two voyages. In September 1905 the family sailed from Glasgow, on the SS Caledonia, headed for New York, which presupposes an earlier voyage from the USA to the UK. Two years later Emma and Douglas, but not Robert, sailed from New York to London on the SS Minneapolis. They traveled cabin class, were listed as British citizens, and English not Scotch (sic), and Douglas as ‘under 12’. While Robert made many more crossings over the next two decades, these are the only two I have found for Emma and Douglas.
By 1911 Emma and Douglas were living in England. The census of that year records them in a boarding house, the Ocean View Beach House, at 314 Sussex Gardens, Westgate-on–Sea, Kent. Robert was not with them. The census entry confirmed that Douglas had been born in Orange NJ about 1903, and that his mother, Emma Jane Macnee, born in Birmingham about 1871, was married. While the boarding house was undoubtedly a temporary setting, Emma remained in Westgate. Douglas soon began school, attending Tormore School, a private boarding school in Littlehampton, Sussex, where he was to stay for five years. The proprietor was Mr. D.R. MacDonald, and Douglas was a member of Wellesley House. In 1911 he had the whooping cough, and in 1916 the measles.
From Tormore, Douglas went on to Fettes College, in Edinburgh in 1917. The admission record confirms his birthdate as February 6, 1903, and that he was the only son of Robert Hamilton Macnee of 5 Rumford Street, Liverpool, who was listed as his guardian. The record also informs us that “His digestion is poor. Care should be taken to avoid chills.”
Douglas lived in Carrington House, meaning he was not a scholarship student, for the ‘scholars’ lived in the main building. The school buildings were Hogwarts-like, and the accommodation was stark. What’s more, in 1917-18 the country was at war. “We came to Fettes during the war…[which]… more or less dominated our life” writes one of Douglas’s contemporaries. Another described the time as ‘dark’, with ‘an atmosphere of strain and anxiety … The war-time restraints, the careful screening of lights, the shortage of food, the general nervous tension’ and ‘the chilly pencils of the search-lights wheeling and wheeling through the sky’ helped to create a curious feeling, almost of careless fatalism’.
Douglas was at Fettes for 3 years. He studied Classics to School Certificate, then practical subjects, taking the track for students aiming at the Army, Engineering or Medicine. He was a keen sportsman, as noted in the school journal, The Fettesian. In his final year he was on the Shooting VIII and the Cricket 3rd XI. In the former “there was a tie between G.K. Knox and D. H. Macnee for the Donegal Badge, given for the best score” when both scored the maximum 100 in the first round. In a house cricket match between Carrington and Moredun, Douglas scored 90 runs in the second innings but ‘a fine second wicket stand of 78 by Macnee and Halley’ failed to carry the game for Carrington.
In July 1921 Douglas left Fettes and matriculated at Glasgow University, where he studied Engineering, Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, graduating with a BSc in 1925. The University provided the following: “Our records indicate he was born in New Jersey, USA and his father Robert Hamilton Macnee was an accountant. He first attended Glasgow University in 1921/22 at the age of 18, and studied Engineering, Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. He graduated with a BSc in 1925. His address while in Glasgow was 63 Vincent St.” I found no other information in the University archives – no sporting activities that made the student newspaper, for example.
After he graduated Douglas moved to London. In 1926, he was listed on the electoral rolls, at 18 Kemplay Road in Hampstead. The record shows that he was qualified as a resident. This allowed him to vote in Parliamentary but not local elections. Kemplay Road is a single block long, just off Rosslyn Hill and a stone’s throw from the Heath, and Willow Road, where Joan, his future wife, but a mere 10 years old at the time, was living with her mother and father. It is also parallel to Denning Street, where he and Joan were to live for a month after they married in 1935, and where Tom and I lived for three months in 1999. Ancestry searches can be full of such serendipitous coincidences.
1922 to 1932: Information from Douglas’ photo index
Douglas was a keen photographer, who carefully organized his photographs in albums, and kept an index with the date, the people and the location of each photograph. We have two albums covering the years 1935 to 1966, but the earliest one – from 1921 to 1935 – has been lost. However this remarkable index provides information about his whereabouts from 1921.
He spent a great deal of time in the small Scottish town of Kenmore, at the eastern end of Loch Tay in Perthshire. The first sixty-five photos in the index, taken between 1922 and 1928 were taken in and around Kenmore. They were mostly taken in the summer time, suggesting a holiday location, but others were taken in March and April and two in January. His mother, Emma Macnee, was in one Kenmore photo, taken in April 1923. Kenmore has a fine golf course, at Taymouth Castle, and Douglas, who was a golf and ‘plus fours’ man in those days, may have played there often.
During these years Douglas was working for the International Standard Electric Corporation of New York, ‘manufacturer and marketer of telephonic equipment’. Their London ofice was at Connaught House, Aldwych, W.C.2. In 1925 ISEC was puchased by the new International Telephone and Telegraph Company (ITT) and added its operations to those of the International Western Electric Company, founded in 1918, which had factories in Woolwich, Antwerp, Paris and elsewhere in Europe. ITT later renamed its UK operation Standard Telephones and Cables. “The new organization was based on entrepreneurial risk-taking, based on solid research and brave innovation.”
In 1931 Microwave communication was first demonstrated by STC between Dover and Calais. Within a few years, multi-channel transmission (1932), microwave transmission (1934), coaxial cabling (1936), the entire radio systems for the liners Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth (1936-39), the patenting of pulse code modulation (1938) all contributed to the hey-day of telephony’s development.
Douglas was a consummate professional. He became a student member of the Institute of Electrical Engineers (IEE) while still in Glasgow. By 1927 he had become an associate member, and was working in London, at Connaught House, for the ISEW. In 1929, according to the Institute’s records, his work was based at The Hyde in Hendon.
There were several groups of photos of activities around the London area, and a visit to his mother in Westgate on Sea in May 1928. There were also trips to places with which we are very familiar – the West Country, with photos of Torbay and Dartmoor; of Weston super Mare; and of Jersey, which he visited in June 1931. Finally there are three photos taken in Hendon. Two are work-related, of a ‘telephone building’, and one is of a house at 45 Elliot Road, a short walk from 77 Vivian Avenue, to which Joan and her family had returned.
Douglas also traveled in Europe around this time. From July to November 1927 he was in Switzerland, as well as Paris, Strasbourg, Calais and Brussels. January to March 1930 found him in Spain, Berlin, The Hague and Hanover then in June and July he went to Lowitz, Lodz, Warsaw, Berlin, Lowitz again, Rotterdam, and again to Warsaw. There was also a photograph taken from the air over Holland indicating that he had access to air not just ground transport. In June 1931 he spent time in Jersey. These probably include both vacation and work related journeys.
But his career was soon to take him on a much longer journey, and the photo index allowed me to fill in some details of this next stage of his life as well.
1932-1934 The Punjab
In January 1932 Douglas left England to spend the next two years in India, as an electrical engineer with the Callender’s Cable and Construction Company. He left England at the end of 1931, to work on hydro-electric dam-building in the Punjab. The voyage to India took him through the Suez Canal to Bombay, then he travelled on to Lahore, where Callender’s Cables and Construction had their offices.
His base was in Lahore (at that time still part of India), though his work involved major water engineering projects throughout the Punjab. The more than 600 photos he took during his journeys to and from, and his travels within, India are all documented in the index – too bad we no longer have the albums!
Photos of the Himalayas, Indian temples, forts, cities, and countryside, were interspersed with others of transmission lines and irrigation canals. There are hill men and women, a ‘native’ woman winnowing chaff from rice; views from rest houses and gymkhana club gardens. And there are ‘pole structures’, sinking caissons and overhead switchgear. There were photos of acquaintances and friends, and their dogs, and of trips to the Khyber Pass and to the Agra and the Taj Mahal. And Christmas appears to have been celebrated widely by the expatriate community in Lahore in 1933.
There is a Persian wheel in Shalomar, and water buffaloes in Jalloo. Amritsar, Wagaa, Dharwal, Kotla, Beas, Baijnath and Dharmsala are just a few of the places listed. There is a photo of Zam Zammah annotated “ref.Kim” – it is a large cannon which stands in front of the Lahore Museum, and is also known as Kim’s Gun. Built before 1791 for the Persian Emperor, Duri Durran, it has a long and venerable history of being stolen by one group after another. Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim opens with the boy straddling the barrel of the gun. Douglas greatly admired Kipling, and read us his tales when we were children. He was very proud of having had tea with Kipling.
But why was Douglas there? We know that he was an electrical and civil engineer, and that he worked for Callender’s Cables. Once again the photo index provides valuable information. The transmission lines and irrigation canals, the caissons and switchgears were all part of a hydro-electricity project in the Indus Valley. Improvements in turbine design ushered in a boom in mega-dam building in the 1930s. On January 30 1933 Douglas was present at the signing of a contract involving hydroelectric projects on the Uhl River. The Uhl is a tributary of the Beas, one of the major rivers under the Indus basin. British Engineer Colonel B.C. Batty planned to construct 5 hydroelectric power stations by utilizing the water of Uhl river. The plan was to use the water for 5 power projects, in three stages. Stage 1 saw the building of the Shanan Power House. But on the death of Mr. Batty, the project remained incomplete. What part of this particular project Douglas was involved in is only conjecture, but it seems likely that this was the reason he was in India.
After India
In April 1934 Douglas left Lahore. The journey home, from Bombay to London on RMS Narkunda, took two months. The ship manifest recorded that he was 31 years old, a telephone engineer, a citizen of the USA and that he traveled 2nd class. He gave as his address the Regent Palace Hotel, Piccadilly. There were stops in Aden, Malta, Gibraltar, and rough seas in the Bay of Biscay. The voyage ended at Tilbury Docks in May.
Soon after he returned to England Douglas visited his mother in Westgate. But in August he was to meet Joan Harley for the first time; from then on she is in almost every photo.
1935: Death, marriage and migration
On April 5, 1935, Douglas’s mother, Emma [Carr] Macnee, died. She was cremated on April 9 at the Golders Green Crematorium. Douglas was there, and so was Douglas’s father, Robert Hamilton Macnee, whom he had not seen for some years. Robert however was not there simply to mourn his wife, but had a rather nefarious purpose. He informed Douglas, in the crematorium garden, that he intended to contest Emma’s will, which had left her not inconsiderable estate entirely to Douglas. Douglas, who was about to be married and committed to leaving for Australia within a few weeks, felt that he could not afford to be tied up in a legal battle with his father, and agreed to divide his inheritance.
Douglas and Joan were married in Hendon Parish Church on June 1, 1935. After the wedding they lived briefly on Denning Road, Hampstead until their departure for Australia at the end of June. They left England, from Plymouth, on the SS Bendigo, and made stops in Gibraltar, Malta, Port Said, Suez Canal, Aden, Colombo, and Melbourne before arriving in Sydney in July. Australia was given as their permanent residence, suggesting that they intended to remain. On their arrival in Australia Joan had to confirm that she was a British citizen, because she was married to ‘an alien’. A law that allowed her to retain her citizenship had been passed only recently.
1935-37, Sydney
Douglas went to Sydney as an employee of Standard Telephones and Cables, for whom he continued to work until he retired in the 1960s. STC in Australia was an independent subsidiary of STC in the UK and was established in the 1920s to manufacture radio receivers, transmitters and telephone equipment. In 1926, the company had opened it first factory, in Chippendale.
While Douglas and Joan may have intended to move permanently to Australia, he apparently felt too distanced from cutting edge research, and they returned to England, in April 1937. Joan was pregnant with Ian by then and this may have been a factor in their decision. They left from Woolloomooloo on the RMS Orford, travelling first class. The voyage went via Aden, Suez Canal, Naples, Pompeii, Toulon, Gibraltar and Nice, arriving in Southampton on June 3. In the manifests Douglas was again described as an Engineer, aged 34, with a Westminster Bank address.
1937-1939 Petts Wood, Kent; first child
Douglas and Joan took up residence in Petts Wood, Kent, at 145 Kingsway, and Ian was born in Hendon on July 26. After his birth the family moved to Sunnymeade, 18 Wood Ride. Douglas, meanwhile, commuted from there to STC’s Valve Division in North Woolwich.
The plant produced telephone repeaters, triode valves, radiation-cooled valves for radio transmitters, and water-cooled valves, as well as thermocouples and cathode ray tubes. Power valves were used in many manufacturing processes as well as telecommunications. Super high Frequency (SHF) valves were used in the STC radio altimeter that enabled an aircraft pilot to determine his height above ground, and also is part of instrument landing systems for poor visibility. This was to provide the foundation for Douglas’ work during the war years.
1939-1945 The war years
In 1939, as World War II threatened, Joan and Ian were evacuated to Sport–y-Gwynt, Anglesey, in North Wales. Douglas remained in London, visiting the home in Anglesea at weekends when he could. In London he served as a volunteer air raid. His duties included ensuring that the blackout was observed, sounding air raid sirens, ensuring that people went into public air raid shelters in an orderly fashion, checking gas masks, evacuating areas around unexploded bombs, helping to rescue casualties from bomb damaged properties, as well as helping to find accommodation for people who had been bombed out. And at the end of May 1940, he once told me, he had been aboard one of the fleet of tiny ships that crossed the Channel to evacuate the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk.
During the blitz the Valve manufacturing activities at North Woolwich, in the middle of the most heavily bombed area in Britain, were vulnerable. The first heavy bombing raids started on the night of September 7th 1940. It soon became clear that the manufacture of valves, crystals and magnetic materials, all of high strategic value, must be taken out of London to escape the bombs. For STC’s products were vital for the war effort. The valve division made valves designed for special missions, such as the search for the German battleship Scharnhorst, as well as valves for BBC radio transmission. They also designed and made crystal sets for daily bombing raids over Germany, in which the crystals were set to specific frequencies determined daily. Douglas’s job was quality control – he was in charge of the unit that measured the accuracy of the valves and crystal frequencies, and signed off on each of these shipments on a daily basis.
As a result of its importance in the war effort, STC’s research, valve and one other division were moved from Woolwich. After a countrywide search, an old rope factory, Dowlish Ford Mills near Ilminster, Somerset, was requisitioned for the production section, and the Valve Manufacture and Permalloy Departments. The unfinished Ilminster Secondary School was taken over for the research and development sections – the Valve Laboratory and its small pilot production unit, and the Quartz Crystal Department. The valve division moved to Somerset in November.
Joan, who was pregnant with Sheila, set about house hunting, partnering with Harry Newman, whose wife, Nete, was pregnant with their first child. The two families moved into a cottage in Dowlish Wake. Elizabeth Newman was born in July 1940, to be followed by Sheila in January 1941. By then the cottage was somewhat small for both families, and they moved on, Macnees to Rose Cottage, Hewish, Newmans to Westport.
Family Life
The story of our childhood family is more fully told in my story of Joan, so here I will only summarize briefly. Hazel was born towards the end of the war, on June 6 1944, which was D-Day + 4. We moved to Merriottsford, Merriott in 1948, and thence began the on-and-off-again affair that was to characterize the marriage of Douglas and Joan. In 1954 the Ilminister STC plant closed, and Douglas planned to move to the new location in Paignton. Joan took this opportunity to sell the Merriottsford house and end the marriage – or so she thought. In fact she rejoined Douglas after he bought a new home – Appsley, Brunel Road, Broadsands, where Joan joined him in 1955. There were still more separations to come, but Joan rejoined him after his first stroke in about 1965.
How well can we know our parents? My memories of Dad are confused. I remember him first of all as the ‘father’ that fathers were supposed to be in those days, someone to fear if we transgressed some perhaps unknown rule. He was a keen gardener and a capable handyman, always ready to fix things around the house. And he was a man of routine. We went shopping as a family every Saturday morning, finishing up at the sweet shop in the post-war years, where he would wait patiently while we slowly gathered our ration-allowance. He would take us on outings every weekend almost year-round – to the beach or the woods or stately homes and castles, often for picnics or a pub-lunch – or for walks across the fields, collecting mushrooms, nuts, watercress, blackberries – whatever was in season. But he was unpredictable. You could never quite count on his reaction, and knew that often it would be terse, for he was a man of few words, and many silences. But he never punished, to the best of my memory. On the contrary, most of my memories of him are of times when he was thoughtful, considerate, warm, almost cuddly. I think I remember some of them because they surprised me, and I realized later that much of his negativity was more of a half-joking bluster.
We tend to think of the parent as the whole personality, since this is the one we know. But for the adult, parenting is not all there is. My biggest surprise was discovering that in the world beyond the family he was jocular and very well liked, especially by the people with whom he worked, a world we experienced on company outings and parties. This was a side we sometimes saw at home, but sadly not enough, especially as he aged, and his alcohol consumption increased his moroseness.
He was proud of his company’s achievements, and we often benefitted from having access to new devices – such as a transistor radio – before anyone else we knew. When the company first moved to Paignton he showed me around the new transistor division, confidently displaying the latest innovations in electronic communications. Many years earlier he had equally proudly shown me photos of the Transatlantic underwater cables laid by STC’s predecessor company, at an earlier stage of development in communications. He loved being part of innovation and its application, and I suspect would be deeply involved in internet technology were he a young man today.
He approached retirement with ambivalence, since it would leave him without the work he had earlier found so meaningful. In his last years at STC he came to feel out of step, displaced, as the company made a transition from British to American managerial style and business culture. As one whose role had for many years been quality management, the transition to quantity, speed, and ‘efficiency’ was very hard on him. That and his increasing physical weakness, led him to be more morose, and he quite probably suffered from depression.
1967 Death
Douglas died in Torquay, Devon, on 17 April, 1967. He had suffered a series of mild strokes over several years, which his doctor considered not life threatening. One night Joan called to say that Douglas had suffered another stroke, but the doctor declined to visit, suggesting it was probably indigestion. The next day Douglas was hospitalized for what the doctor still insisted were unimportant symptoms. I have heard it said that when Douglas died the doctor said “he had no business dying; his illness was not that severe”. It is possible that Douglas’s desire to live was in fact low.
Douglas was cremated and his ashes scattered in a rose garden at the Torquay Crematorium.