Photographs: 1. Augustine J Lambkin (portrait by Lambert Weston & Son, Ltd Dover) 2. Hat and buttons 3. Hat, waistcoat, buttons and scabbard
Born 1888, Cork Died 1964, Cork Son of James Lambkin and Ellen O’Sullivan Educated at Radcliffe College 1907 Joined Munster & Leinster Bank, Skibereen, Co. Cork. (In later years: Clonakilty, Dame St. Dublin (Sub-manager) and Ballina, Navan (Manager)). 1915 Married Deborah Fraser Crichton, had a son and two daughters. 1915 Joined the British Navy as sub-lieutenant, mainly stationed in Portsmouth. He served on the warships: H.M.S. Victory battle cruiser 3/10/1915 to 8/11/1915 H.M.S. Arrogant battle cruiser 9/11/1915 to 18/3/1919 H.M.S. Attentive destroyer 9/3/1919 to 22/10/1919 On leaving the Navy after the war his fellow officers presented him with a picture of a three masted naval sailing battle ship of the line, which probably had 30 guns (of Swedish or German insignia of 18th century). He suffered a hearing disability from exposure to heavy naval gunfire, which left him with progressive deafness for most of his life. He was granted a small disability pension. He completed his banking career but could not achieve his full capabilities. Romie Lambkin’s Memoirs My Royal Navy Lieutenant father was a busy man that summer of l9l9. Having survived the war (albeit with eardrums perforated by incessant shellfire, which pestered him for the rest of his life) followed by a dose of the deadly Spanish Flu pandemic, he whisked himself from one necessitous thing to another. Firstly, says she, not at all modestly, he dashed to Dover’s Registry office to notify my recent birth - in Maison Dieu Nursing home. House of God! Who could wish for more? That done, Dad got on with his pending demobilisation formalities, simultaneously negotiating a return to his pre-war Munster and Leinster Bank career, in Dublin, from whence he had set forth to enlist, as well as to marry the romantic love of his life, my mother, Deb, who like him hailed from Cork. By that time she was enjoying herself singing and dancing in Gilbert and Sullivan productions in most major English cities so getting together became utterly complicated. So was the actual wedding. A good deal more of that anon. When Deb discovered her stage career as a married woman wouldn’t work out she opted for another glamorous occupation, a Naval wife living in roses-round-the-door Lavinia Cottage, Lower River Road, Dover. She was also pregnant with my brother. There the noise of German shellfire from across the Channel and retaliatory shelling from Dover’s shore and ship based guns became a normal background to the Lavinia Cottage idyll. And that was Dad’s shore base each time his ship, H.M.S. Attentive, anchored in Dover, its home port. However, Deb trusted more in a London nursing home for her first baby experience, little expecting to watch a German Zepplin enveloped in flames in the night sky as she gazed from her window, gasping, my brother already on his way. It was surprising she received medical attention at all, she often said. Doctors, nurses and her fellow about-to-be mothers could hardly be dragged away from black-out drawn window-gazing, each and all, including my mother, cheering as they watched the Zepplin disintegrate into ragged, jagged, orange and yellow flames. (This story used to horrify me the odd time my mother told it. ‘But Mum, people were up there burning to death!’ I’d gasp in horror, recoiling thinking how could anyone cheer such awfulness. But I learned, didn’t I, in my own wartime, that indeed such things could be). But on to July 18th, two and a half years after Tony’s London debut, Dad still had much to do, little things like where would we live once back in Ireland, that is if he didn’t accept the tempting offer his Admiral put in his way. ‘I’m off to Africa - I’d like you as my A.D.C’. Here Deb drew the line. No more of that. Back home we go. There are children to be reared. Anyway, Deb had by then had enough of war and whatever charms shorebound Naval wives accrued had worn off with the arrival of peace. Here they were, somehow or other, parents of two children. What’s more, friends from their Cork days wrote to say they were living in Bray, Co. Wicklow and, please, please, Gus and Deb, come and live here, too. So, that is what we did, Tony off the Mail Boat holding Dad’s hand, Deb clutching me inside my shawl, bound for No. 1 (2?) Meath Road, Bray. Cork roots or no Cork roots. Gus and Deb grew up in Cork, my father the youngest of nine Lambkin children, his Papa the city’s tobacco baron, a typical Victorian father figure, as was his Mama, who, like most well-to-do mothers of the day, relegated her children for twenty three and a half hours out of twenty four, to the top storey nursery of the tall terraced house down the road from Cork station. My father never loved his mother as he did the family Nanny. He could always find her photograph in his writing desk whereas he was hazy as to any parental pictorialisation. He visited her whenever he neared Cork until she died of old age. Papa Lambkin as was also the vogue, despatched his sons to Radcliffe College, Leicestershire, when they were barely out of rompers, seven or so, a school which also incubated the future Bishop Ellis of Nottingham, a matter of amused pride to my father when visiting me in Nottinghamshire during another time, when I lived there, too. Dad’s elder brothers, once grown, were despatched to farther fields, either to further our grandfather’s tobacco business, or because they were mad for adventure, two to die young, one in Salisbury, Rhodesia, one in France. Another, in Boys’ Own Paper style lied about his age and enlisted as a drummer boy in time for the Boer War. One seventeen year old brother did not go anywhere. He died of T.B. My Dad had a near miss with that disease, developing a spot on his lung, which fortunately did not develop further, why he never knew, but he stayed a fit man for the rest of his life. The T.B. menace evidently forced his Papa to think about preserving a few sons for posterity, infiltrated the last two, Dan and Gus, into the Irish banking system, Dan to the National Bank, our father to the Munster and Leinster. Out of Papa’s nine children only Gus produced grandchildren. Not that we, Tony and me, did Grandpa or Grandma Lambkin much good as the one and only time I saw them I cried with fright at their stiff, stern and starchy selves, clad in black from head to foot, Grandpa with a menacing white beard and Grandma’s clothing stiff, rustling, black bead bedecked, with a funny bonnet with pins sticking out of it on top. Tony’s impressions echoed mine when I asked what did he remember, sure his superior two and a half years to mine would render more. Not so. Also he was scared as witless as I was. I wish, in a way, they had not died when we were so young. I’d like to have known them better, more about them. My three aunts married. The one I never met intrigued me intensely. She was forever talked about in whispers, I am not quite sure why even now. Dad did not seem too clear either having being too young to understand adult things when she disappeared to New York, where, he learned, somewhat circuitously, that she died rather forlornly of old age in some institution, the priest principal of which wrote to tell Dad, as her last living relative. All I do know of her was a few parcels of children’s clothes when we were seven or eight. I knew and liked the other two aunts, who often came to stay with us, or we with them occasionally, but they retired to England. One of them intrigued me both because of her heavy limp, due to a TB hip, also as far as I know, and because her pet parrot pranced about the dining table every mealtime, demanding ‘ Apple for Polly’, until Aunt Mada rolled some mashed-up potato into a ball for the parrot to clutch in a claw, it’s apple. Dad’s banking career started off in Enniscorthy and progressed to Skibbereen before promotion to the Cork office. Eons of years later I drove him to Skibbereen for a nostalgic day out in his seventies. Exhausted he might have been but all his reactions demonstrated that his youth-hood had a high old time there! His adventurous streak and the dawning days of the motorbike joined forces. He owned one of the earliest models seen in Cork city and surrounds, roaring along the roads and lanes at maximum speed in cap and goggles, plus his plus fours, sweeping up in a noisy engine splutter to amateur dramatic rehearsals, where its noise and his good looks, first impressed a girl member of the Antony and Cleopatra cast, Deborah Frazer Crichton, of Donnybrook House, Donnybrook, a mile or so from Douglas. Romie Lambkin (daughter) was the author of My Time in the War: An Irishwoman's Diary, 1993