The Smith family
GEOFFREY'S grandmother, Elsie Smith, was one of the 11 children of Charles James Smith. He had been born in Guernsey in 1855, the son of Thomas Smith, originally from Farnham, Surrey, and Rhoda Druce from Somerset.
GEOFFREY'S grandmother, Elsie Smith, was one of the 11 children of Charles James Smith. He had been born in Guernsey in 1855, the son of Thomas Smith, originally from Farnham, Surrey, and Rhoda Druce from Somerset.
Charles ran a carpentry, painting, decorating and funeral services business in Little St John Street. He married Sophie Sarah Mauger, the daughter of Hellier, who had married Jane Langlois in 1841.
Hellier's father, also named Hellier, had married Marie Queripel in Castel in 1815 and Jane's parents, Joseph Sibrell Langlois and Marie Rougier, had been married at the Town Church in 1804.
All five of Elsie's brothers, William, Charles, Thomas, Arthur and Harold, fought in the First World War and fortunately they all survived.
All of them, Elsie and her five sisters, Edith, Alice, Florence, Annie and Irene, married and had families, and like the Marley and Maunder families can be found in most island parishes.
On 19 April 1911 Elsie May Smith married Leonard Maunder.
Those were the days decades before scheduled air services to the island and couples would leave for their honeymoon by boat.
No doubt Leonard and Elsie had organised the wedding service early in the day in order to be able to celebrate a wedding breakfast and have good time to catch the mail boat to England.
However, the time of their wedding service was delayed for unusual reasons.
It was not the bride's fault as she and her father were at the Town Church in good time.
As reported in the Guernsey Evening Press that day:
'A wedding party met with an unpleasant experience this morning. The bride and bridegroom and attendants arrived at the Town Church at the time appointed 8 o'clock and waited for the Rev. G. E. Lee, rector to conduct the ceremony, but they waited in vain.
'At the end of half an hour a messenger was sent to the Rev. J. Penfold, and on his arrival the ceremony was proceeded with.
The newly married couple, Mr and Mrs Maunder, left by the mail boat Sarnia for Southampton, after a hurried breakfast.'
Apparently the Rev. Penfold who saved the day was the vicar of St James' Church. The Smiths and Maunder families waving on the quayside were by that time amused and somewhat relieved.
The marriage produced five children, Ethel (Bichard), Daphne (West), Geoff's mother Muriel (Rowland), Phyllis (Gurney) and Arthur Maunder.
When Elsie May Smith had married Leonard, she was marrying into a sports-mad family.
Many of the Maunders were keen footballers, stemming from Arthur James Maunder, who had been closely involved with Rangers Football Club in its early days.
Leonard had been required by his employers to stay at his post in Guernsey when his wife and children were evacuated in late June 1940.
He was at home at 62, Victoria Road, shaving at teatime on Friday 28 June 1940, when the raid by six Dornier aircraft took place. It was a beautiful blue-sky summer's day.
It ended in tragic loss of life at the White Rock and nearby, including a machine gun attack on a St John ambulance taking wounded to hospital.
Elsie and her family, by then in England, learned on the radio that 26 had died and 33 had been seriously wounded. They were anxious for many days until they heard that Leonard, whom they expected would have been working at the New Jetty at the time, had arrived safely in England. He was to tell them of the number of shops with broken windows, the thick smoke hanging over St Peter Port, heavy damage to the weighbridge building, its clock stopped at just before 7pm, the destroyed tomato lorries and the fire brigade doing its best to put out fires. In the words of everyone he saw at the harbour, 'all hell had broken loose'.
Sadly, it was only at 9pm that evening that the BBC first reported that the Channel Islands had been demilitarised, a fact uncommunicated to the German forces.
In fact, Leonard left that evening on the last Southern Railways cargo boat, the SS Sheringham, soon after 9pm, carrying tomatoes, the last to do so.
Leonard and Elsie returned after the Occupation to their home in Victoria Road and Geoffrey, then just four or five years old, remembers grandfather Leonard teaching him football skills most days in the back yard.
