JOHN HOARE'S FAMILY HISTORY |
The Perkins familyfirst draft Oct 2018, corrected February 2019 We all hope to find that we have distinguished distant relatives. In my case there are two stories which connect me to the Perkins family. As I am not currently in touch with them I am only using publicly available sources, and will happily remove any material if requested. The first trail starts here and leads to my second cousin once removed. It first appeared as a DNA match, confirmed by a little digging. My great grandfather John Dalby Williams, a lighterman in Limehouse in the East End of London, born about 1846, married Sarah Eleanor Maxwell in 1869. In 1866 Eleanor’s sister Henrietta Maria, my 2nd great aunt, had married John Perkins born 1842. John Perkins had been born in Sheerness in Kent, but lived in Portsmouth and worked in the dockyard there. The names Maxwell and Perkins were to be significant in my family story in two ways. John Perkins, was a ‘writer’ in the dockyard in 1881 and 1891, progressing to principal writer and eventually retiring on a pension; a writer in this context was a naval record keeper, a post that required trustworthiness. John and Henrietta’s son Donald Maxwell Perkins, my first cousin twice removed was born in 1870. He served in the Lincolnshire Regiment as Lance Corporal In WW1 and was awarded the British war Medal and Victory Medal. He was a freemason in the Portsmouth lodge early 1900s but was ‘erased’, apparently because he failed to keep up payment of his dues. He married Lizzie Norah Isabelle Mcphail Perkins in Kingston, Jamaica in 1903, and seems to have spent quite a lot of his life moving around the world. He doesn’t appear in the UK 1901 census, but in 1911 he was back in Portsmouth working in the dockyard as a Senior Civil Servant writer. Donald and Lizzie had two children, Ella Norah Massy Perkins born 1905 and Maxwell Edmund Massy Perkins (known as Max), born 1907, both my 2nd cousin once removed and born in Portsmouth. Maxwell Edmund Massy Perkins had a long and distinguished military and diplomatic career. He married Helena J P Newberry in 1934 and they had two daughters and a son. He joined the RAF in 1929 and qualified as a pilot in 1930. He attended an officers engineering course in 1932, and worked as an RAF Engineering Officer India until 1938 when he became Engineering Officer, HQ Bomber Command. In the 1950s he was apparently working in a diplomatic role. In 1954 he became Senior Technical Staff Officer, HQ Fighter Command, and in October1961 Director General of Engineering.
The National Portrait Gallery holds a set of four photographs of Max marking his position as an Air Vice-Marshall and Director General of Engineering, Air Ministry. This picture is from that set, by Walter Bird © National Portrait Gallery, London, published with the permission of the National Portrait Gallery under a Creative Commons licence as detailed at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ Bromide print, 14 November 1961, 8 1/8 in. x 6 1/8 in. (206 mm x 155 mm) image size. Commissioned, 1961, Photographs Collection. NPG x169943.
Honours bestowed on Max have proved a little more tricky to confirm. I have found a record on the Genealogie Online - The first award, is confirmed by an entry in the supplement to the London Gazette published 28 December 1956, and an entry in the RAF Web website. The CB in 1962 is harder to corroborate. There is a cryptic entry in the Rafweb website which appears to have the date removed. Max retired in 1964, and passed away in November 1985
Web references (seen September 2018)RAF Web Ancestry Genealogie Online National Portrait Gallery London Gazette 28 Dec. 1956 |
