Worcester Park Life
history
This month we take a look at Royal Avenue: as this was the location of the family home of Worcester Park’s only recipient of the VC, this seems appropriate as we approach the Remembrance season.
From Royal Avenue to the trenches by David Rymill
The word ‘avenue’ was popular in the 1930s as a name for suburban roads, but here there really was an ancient avenue of trees, said to have formed part of a royal route from Hampton Court to Nonsuch. By 1866 three houses stood on the western side of Royal Avenue. A fourth, Drumaline, built around 1926 and demolished around 1973, stood near where Drumaline Ridge leads off; it was built for Sir Frederick George Dumayne, a former colonial official in Bombay and Calcutta. Possibly he chose this Scottishsounding name for the house in commemoration of his wife, Mary MacAdam, who lived near Drymen above Loch Lomond, and who died less than a year after their marriage in 1896. There is a Drumline Farm about ten miles away, and I wonder if the place had some significance for them. Next to the right was Tunstall House, known as the Worcester Park Nursing Home by 1930. Daphne
Court stands on the site of the house, and Drumaline Ridge extends across its grounds. The third house was Manor Lodge, home of the Wearne family. Mr and Mrs Wearne had four sons of whom two died in the First World War, within six weeks of each other. The eldest, Keith Morris Wearne, joined the Essex Regiment in India in 1911; Captain Wearne was severely wounded at Gallipoli, but was sent to another front where he was killed on 21 May 1917. His brother, Frank Bernard Wearne, went up to Oxford, from Bromsgrove School, in 1913. The next summer, when war broke out, he immediately volunteered, and joined his brother’s regiment. He was badly wounded at the Battle of the Somme in July 1916; only in the following May was he fit to return to the Front. u
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