Chapter Twenty Two

     This all happened after we finally left the Duke on November 6th, 1968. It was a sad day in many ways as we had many happy memories of our time there and we had made many friends. However, we would be staying in the village  and would have more time to enjoy the beautiful area around Bratton . We loved The Court Farm House and Peter was delighted with the garden which he made his own.

Starting again

Bridging the Centuries 

By Eileen Younghusband

      Three years earlier, my father on the death of his second wife had become very lonely. One day he phoned and asked if he could come and join us at the Duke. Of course, we had said yes and he soon fitted in, becoming a great help with his carpentry and joinery skills and the staff loved him. Some weeks before our move, he was invited to join with his cousin and visit a favourite nephew in South Africa. He went by boat, having a luxurious trip on the Windsor Castle. After visiting Cape Town to see Frank and Dorothy Le Croissette, they went along the Garden Route and saw the beautiful southern coastline of South Africa.

     Sadly, after the trip, he returned looking ill. Within days it was confirmed that he was suffering from lung cancer. He had always smoked, rolling his own cigarettes filled with Digger Shag. This coupled with his work as a cabinet maker and shop fitter, where he was constantly exposed to wood dust, had brought on this terrible disease. Just prior to us leaving The Duke, he had a huge operation to remove one lung and rebuild his chest wall, leaving him considerably weaker. He joined us in our new home some weeks later, after a period of convalescence. He had always been a strong person and seemed to recover well. Before long he was using his beloved car again and visiting his stepson in Manchester and other distant friends. However, he could not settle living in the old house. It bothered him that the beams were not regular and aligned. He found it difficult to settle. He was missing the company of the Duke. We gave him his own bed-sitting room and bathroom but he was never really happy there. His illness had changed him and made him bitter. Sadly within four years, the cancer re-occurred and he died in 1972. He was a fine man, who had lived a good life but one filled with hard work and very little pleasure. I think his greatest pleasure was to know how well his son, my brother Dennis, had done.   

       Before my father died, he had the satisfaction of learning that Dennis as Manager of the Space Instruments Department, not only was responsible for all the instrumentation on the eight Surveyor Unmanned probes, sent to the Moon but in addition, he had instruments on the Mariner probe to Mars and on Voyager which went out past our solar system and is still journeying in space.   

      After his first operation, he regained enough strength to undertake his first transatlantic flight to visit Dennis in Pasadena. There he was able to enjoy meeting Jill, his so far unknown daughter-in-law Dennis had married in Philadelphia. Jill was born in Cambelltown, Australia. Her mother was a schoolteacher from Kent who had emigrated there. Her father was fourth generation Australian of Scottish descent. Jill had a brilliant academic career, specialising in library science. She was a great partner to Dennis. He as a scientist and she as a librarian were both meticulous in everything they did. They had the same sense of humour and taste in wine!

     My brother showed my father the California that he had come to love. They visited San Francisco and Santa Barbara. They did a little gambling in Las Vegas and enjoyed the beauty of the desert surrounding Palm Springs.

      Dennis, by then in the USA for more than thirteen years, had progressed from being a lecturer at Kansas University at Lawrence, to an Assistant Professor at Drexel College of Technology in Philadelphia where he published his much-used text book ‘Transistors’. He became a pioneer of bio-medicine and launched the initial training programme for both doctors and scientists in this sphere. Because of this and also since he was a specialist in instrumentation, he had been head-hunted to join NASA at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasadena. There he took over as Manager of the then troubled Surveyor programme. This unmanned probe was being designed to land on the moon. Its complex instruments were to act as probes of the moon’s surface and atmosphere. Dennis successfully rescued the programme and eight Surveyors were launched sending back vital information. These instruments included the camera, alpha scatterer, the probe for soil content and the computer. The successful landings had sent back reports from these instruments giving details of the atmosphere, the soil and pictures of the environment on the moon, all essential knowledge for the astronauts in the forthcoming Apollo landings. One of the astronauts managed to walk up to a Surveyor and retrieve both the camera and computer and return it to Dennis.