The Chasseaud Family were like the Charnaud’s also Huguenots from France probably from the St Nazaire region. The family crest is a rampant stag on a mountain crest with three stars above.Originally the family were chamois hunters from the Alps, but after the massacre of St Bartholemew of the Huguenots at St Nazaire, the family moved to Jersey. My great grandfather wanted to study medicine, and this he did under Dr Simpson, the pioneer of anasthetics at Edinburgh. It was shortly after he graduated , at Simpsons instigation that he went out to the Crimea War to help with the terrible outbreaks of cholera in particular, but also to tend to the wounded under the appalling conditions out there. It was whilst in the Crimea, that he developed a liking for the relaxed Mediterranean way of life, with its shorter winters and so got a job after the war in the new British concession at Smyrna. There he was the doctor for the British community and the British Seamans hospital.

He was a man who had an intense respect and a feeling for the occult, and in fact wrote a book on the subject based largely on the experiences he had with his second wife ( no relation of ours), who was an acknowledged psychic. An example that he used to often relate, was that on one occasion she awoke in the middle of the night terribly agitated, to say that she had dreamt or heard in a trance, of a poor Mother screaming for the doctor from a very poor street in the city. He summoned his carriage and as they went up the street slowly, a woman rushed out crying and weeping, “Thank God it is you Doctor, my son is in agony and dying”. He was able to take the boy who had acute appendicitis, operate on him, and save his life! Without her intervention he would have been completely unaware of the crisis.
In turn his son Henry, my grandfather also went to Edinburgh to study medicine. After graduation, amongst other things he was a medical officer to the men working on the Forth Bridge when in those early days of civil engineering there were the most appalling number of casualties. He eventually took over his Father’s practice in Smyrna, and married Helen de Kramer an Austrian from a Merchant Banking Family in Salzburg, who’s father in turn had married the family’s gardener’s, daughter. He was an Englishman called Perkins and it is probable that both my mother’s and my intense love of gardening has its roots derived from this love match! They had three children, Madeline who was to become my Mother and was born on the 13th February 1897, Helen a year later, and a third child Elizabeth who died at about eighteen months old. They were brought up in a very multilingual family environment speaking English and German equally at home as they also had a german nanny . At the same time however most of their childhood friends spoke French, whilst in the home the maids spoke Greek. In this way the two sisters were able to communicate easily in four languages. Because her friends were all French and she found the German environment at home oppressive, after a great deal of pleading the sisters were allowed to go to school at the French Convent where they remained until 1907 when they were brought to England.

One evening when she was about six years old the doctor summoned the girls to come
into the drawing room well dressed before they went to bed. “ I want you to meet a very famous Englishman who is coming to dinner this evening,”
he said, “ This morning I treated his arm after a shooting accident and his name is Winston Churchill”. Mother would recount how the two small girls were ushered into the room, and there was Winston, his arm bandaged and pleasantries were exchanged before the girls were hurried off to bed. It was a small incident, though it was one that she never forgot, and her only meeting with the great man!
In 1910 it was decided that the family would move from Turkey to London for the childrens education, and the doctor also wanted to modernise his surgery, and accepted an appointment at Westminster Hospital. Mother recalled the train arriving at Victoria, from where they drove off in a carriage to Ladbrooke Grove where the family had rented a large house. A young lad helped load the carriage with all their belongings, and then ran alongside it all the way to their house, and helped unload it all. Grandfather gave him a florin for his help, for which he was deeply grateful. It was an eye opening introduction to the state of poverty in London at that time , and the desperation people would go to just earn something.
The two girls were then put into a good Ladies College, Tudor Hall at Chislehurst Kent, which was close to London and not too big and impersonal. There they remained until grown up and they became in due course great friends of the Inglises who had started the establishment. At the school when they arrived there were a fair number of Irish girls, both Catholic and Protestant who spent endless hours bickering and arguing with one another. Mother would recall that she was completely and utterly mystified as although she was from a Protestant family most of her friends were Catholic, as was the convent that she had previously attended. She used to say in later years that the arguments were incomprehensible when she was ten years old, and were equally so when she was 90!
It was at Tudor Hall that they made great friends of the Yarrow Shipbuilding family from Scotland, who had two daughters Gwen and Mary. They had a large mansion at Bickley near Bromley, and also another at Brechen near Montrose in Scotland. There they would meet with the other brothers, Goodwin, Teddy, Ronald and his twin sister Kathy who at that time were both in their infancy. The family was very artistic,Gwen was an excellent artist with a beautiful talent for line drawing, whilst Mary was more musically inclined. Like Madeleine and Helen they were all very well read, and so there was in Ladbrooke Grove especially, but also at Bickley a constant stream of artists, musicians actresses and writers. They were all encouraged by the doctor , who was himself also extremely well read ,and a great historian to have a very intellectually stimulating life. Later Mother was to get increasingly involved in social work in London with Gwen helping distressed families, where the major problem was endemic drunkeness through a constant supply of cheap alcohol at any time of the day.So it was that when Father made his way to their address in Ladbrooke Grove, to eet up with friends from Turkey, he automatically got involved into a very intellectual and artistic milieu. From a rather raw colonial background, he now was getting involved with a highly educated and avant garde set. He was of course taken with the two sisters, but Madeleine was engaged to Goodwin Yarrow with whom she had known for years, and with so many others at the house, father was just “one of many”.However they both agreed to correspond with him when he went to the front, as their way of helping the war effort, and he later found in these letters a wonderful companionship in all the future hardships that he was to undergo.

Next Chapter

Henry Chassuad with pet squiral Cairo 1916.