12
INNER TEMPLE CELEBRATE THE LIFE
Master Monier-Williams By his daughter, Vivien Piercy
S
omething I find remarkable about my father’s life is that he was only 22 when he was placed in charge of a group of field and heavy guns in Tunisia, where he took part in the Battle of the Mareth Line. The experience of death at such an early age made a lasting impression upon him. But such was the lot of that generation of young men and women. And we their children grew up in the ‘50s with parents who, ever after, divided their lives into ‘before the war’ and ‘after the war’. A quarter of a century before that battle, my father was born in 1920 into a legal family – his father, Roy Monier-Williams was a practising barrister and Bencher of the Inner Temple. My father grew up with his two sisters in a large, comfortable house on Camden Hill in an atmosphere he described as conservative, old fashioned and mildly xenophobic. After leaving his prep school, he spent happy years at Charterhouse where he made good friends, developed a lifelong love of books and reading and spent much time cycling about the villages of Surrey sketching churches. When he was 16, he was offered a place to read history at University College Oxford, but by the time he went up, the country was under the shadow of war and his degree was truncated to a one year war degree – something he regretted for the rest of his life. Nonetheless, while he was there he was active in the Oxford Union and although
he did not follow the family tradition of ‘rowing at Univ’, he immersed himself instead in the theosophical movement founded by Madame Blavatsky. In October 1940, he received the devastating news that the much-loved family home had received a direct hit from an enemy bomb. The housekeeper was killed and all of his possessions were destroyed, but mercifully his family, who were away at the time, were spared. A few days later he was called up. My father had an active war as a field gunner officer, first in the 8th Army and then in the 50th Northumbrian Division. He saw action on many occasions – in North Africa, and in the allied invasion of Sicily. Thereafter, he fought in Normandy and finally in the bloody battle of the Reichswald and the crossing of the Rhine. Following the ending of hostilities my father, who was a competent German speaker, was stationed in the Rhineland in Munchen-Gladbach and placed in charge of entertainment and welfare of the British troops waiting to be demobbed. They were a restless and unruly crowd and my father’s idea was to reopen the town theatre and to stage opera and concerts for the troops and local population. He set about it with typical determination – refitting the theatre, forming an orchestra, finding musicians and, in the process, he made lifelong German