1919-1937: CEYLON and AMPLEFORTH
CEYLON AND AMPLEFORTH
Anthony Desmond Joseph (Tony) Lovell was born at Hatton in Ceylon on 9th August 1919, the son of tea-planter Stuart Cuthbert Anthony and Clare Mary (“Chubb” or “Cherub”) Lovell née O’Neill. [1] When he died in a flying accident two days after VJ Day, on 17th August 1945, a few days after his 26th birthday, he had risen to the rank of wing commander. By that time he had also accumulated two DSOs, two DFCs, an American DFC, and had flown - it is claimed - more operational tours than any other RAF pilot in the Second World War. [2]
The Lovells were City businessmen throughout the nineteenth century, a three-generation dynasty founded at the Phoenix Fire Office in Lombard Street by ‘Secretary’ Lovell in 1820 and continuing there until 1900. They married into Roman Catholicism - and money - through the Dunns of Newcastle, the Gillows of Lancashire, and the Powells of Liverpool. [3]
Tony Lovell’s father Stuart, born in 1888, was the eldest of three children; and the fact that he was educated at Ampleforth suggests that the education was paid for out of family trusts (possibly the Cope Settlements). [4] This Stuart however drops out of sight after leaving school in 1907, only to re-emerge in 1913 as a tea-planter for Eastern Produce & Estates in Ceylon; and it is tempting to suppose that he was sent out there as a remittance-man. (And he had to be baled out when he was there, said a relation).
In 1916 Stuart Lovell married Clare O’Neill of Ulster, who apparently travelled out to Ceylon for that very reason. Seven years - and three children - later, he died from heart failure after a game of tennis one Sunday afternoon at the Namunukula Club. He was 33 - the age at which his own father had died. [5]
Clare Lovell returned with her children to Northern Ireland, ostensibly because she thoroughly disliked the hill-country climate (which has been described by others as “like an eternal Spring”). Whatever the reason - it may have had more to do with the fact that she did not picture herself as planter’s widow material, or simply that she had the education and future of her children in mind - Clare returned to Northern Ireland and went to live with her unmarried sister Kitty in Portrush.
It was a matriarchal, not to say feminist, environment. Golf Club secretary Aunt Kitty was a dominant - possibly even domineering - character whose view of male-female relationships seems to have been a jaundiced one. She appears to have taken all the practical family decisions, and her word among her nephews and niece was very much law. “You didn’t cross Aunt Kitty,” remembered a contemporary of the children.
Clare meanwhile, a gentle and perhaps rather unworldly soul, dedicated herself to the Catholic religion, of which she remained a strong supporter. She cherished hopes that Tony, her favourite child, would eventually become a monk or a priest. [6]
The family in the 1920s lived first in Golf Terrace in Portrush, then moved to a house which Aunt Kitty had built in Ballywillan Road, and which she wryly christened “Darnwee“.
Tony Lovell and his three-year-older brother Stuart were educated at Ampleforth, Tony going as an 11-year-old in 1930. How the fees were paid is unclear, for according to family belief Tony’s father Stuart had been separated from his inheritance by a clever lawyer; certainly his effects were only valued at £234 3s 10d when limited letters of administration were granted to Clare Lovell’s solicitor Robert Cooke in October 1923. [7]
It is probable that the Powell or Cope trusts met the cost of the boys’ education - Tony’s paternal grandmother Mary had come from a well-to-do branch of the Powells in Liverpool - or it may be that the school waived the fees for the two sons of the deceased Old Amplefordian Stuart senior, whose widow now lived in modest circumstances.
In any event, Tony passed through the Prep School, Junior House, and finally arrived at St Bede’s House in September 1933. Here he showed himself to have, as the school magazine said, “one of those mercurial dispositions which it is so hard to catch and portray in words”.
At school he was seen as
“intensely alive, vivacious and carefree; words came bubbling out from him, everything was designated by superlatives for he was not capable of any half-measures.
“Great charm of manner brought him many friends, attracted by his gaiety and held by those qualities of mind and heart which later were to carry him through six strenuous years of war with such distinction.
Beneath all this effervescence and gaiety lay a resolute and firm character. He had his aims and ideals, and these he pursued with quiet determination....
He was not a scholar, but he successfully pursued a somewhat elusive School Certificate with something of that grim determination with which, in later years, he was to hunt down enemy aircraft.” [8]
He was certainly a good athlete - he was in the school athletics team in 1937, winning the hurdles - but it was at swimming that Tony shone. An outstanding swimmer, he was in the school swimming team, and captained St Bede’s in his last year. With his brother Stuart, he did much (said the school magazine) to establish the house tradition in the sport; he also played rugger for his house, as the photo of the 1936 team shows. [9]
The late Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Basil Hume, was at Ampleforth with Tony and remembered him (not unnaturally, in light of the above) as
“a very charming young man, extremely popular with everybody and a first class swimmer”. [10]
NOTES
1. Birth certificate details re name and place of birth via RAF PMC Innsworth.
2. "Fighter Command", David Oliver, HarperCollins 2000. Oliver says he drew this information from RAF records and Air Britain but has not been more specific (pers. comm.).
3. The 19th-century Lovells were first in Mornington Crescent, moving out to Hampstead before returning to Kensington. Tony's grandfather William lived at 68 Park Road, Hampstead; his great-great grandparents were both notable as part-time playwrights and theatrical producers in the mid-1800s: George Lovell mostly for his play The Wife's Secret, and Maria Lacy Lovell, a former actress, for her translation and production of Ingomar the Barbarian, which yielded that quotable quotation "Two souls with but a single thought / Two hearts which beat as one". Through Maria, the family went back to David Garrick’s shifty partner James Lacy, one-time paid informer to Sir Robert Walpole and purchaser – in 1745 – of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane; his brother Roger was the first official Agent to the Overhill Cherokee Indians, and founded the city of Augusta. On the Lovell side, the descent was from a line of 16th/17th-century yeoman farmers centred on the Northamptonshire villages of Ecton and Mears Ashby.
4. Of the other two children, Katherine (b.1890) married Coury VC, and Harold (1891-?1980) was never spoken of in the Lovell family for reasons unknown (although they might have involved his marriage to one Connie, thought unsuitable).
5. Leaving net estate of £151, he having predeceased his father William. Luckily his wife Christina had Dunn and/or Gillow family trusts to fall back on.
6. Clare was a member of St Patrick's RC Church in Portrush. She was remembered by Maurice McAleese as "a most devout lady who never missed Sunday Mass"; and who always took Mass from the parish priest if she was going away anywhere for the weekend. (Via Hugh McGrattan, pers. comm.).
7. Tony Pearce, Joan Drury-Bird, pers. comm. But note that Stuart Lovell Senr's estate was re-entered to administration in London in 1940 by his widow Clare and solicitor Charles MacLaughlin, when the valuation was increased by £1000 to £1237. Tony, Stuart and Clare Lovell's major interest in family trusts would have been through their aunt Mary (Cope)'s estate. She however out-lived both her nephews; her niece Clare Pearce [d.1999] did however survive to inherit from her.
8. Ampleforth Journal 1945.
9. Photo from J. Spender, a school contemporary.
10. The late Cardinal Basil Hume, pers. comm.
