A Memorial Tribute

Diana and George came to Compton in 1958, on his retirement as a Royal Navy chaplin. They loved Compton after the constant moving of their Naval life.

Her parents, Graham and Mamie met as undergraduates at Oxford where they both read modern languages. Her father, Graham was already a pilot – being one of the very first to join the Royal Flying Corps. He went off to war, and a few months later in 1915 was shot down and captured.

A gifted athlete, Diana acquired the family nickname of Possum – as she liked to hang upside down in trees. At 13 she went to Downe House near Newbury – a settled school at last, and one where she revered the head mistress, the renowned Miss Willis, and in due course became captain of gymnastics, fencing, vice captain of cricket, and with a good ear for languages, toured a Moliere play in France.

Her parents were now happily back in Oxford, where the RAF had tasked Graham with setting up the University Air Squadron. Among his student pilots was one George Fawkes, a student at Keeble College reading Medieval English under professors such as JRR Tolkein. Intriguingly, he was the pilot tasked to give the Boss’s daughter her very first flight aged 12!

After school Diana embarked for South Africa where a family friend was vice chancellor of the Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg. There trained in high board diving by the coach to the South African Olympics diving team, and she also travelled widely in the Zulu hinterland taking many fine photos with her complicated Rolleiflex camera. On her return she considered architecture but trained as an haute couture dressmaker in London.

The family were all early skiing enthusiasts. Diana started when she was 12 in 1926 and with her love of speed became so good that she was selected to train for the British Women’s Olympic team for the planned 1940 Winter Olympics. Her great regret was that Hitler scotched that plan.

Diana had good French from school and wanted to also learn German. So undaunted, she bought an old model Y Ford and set off in 1936 to stay with a family in Munich. Hitler’s ‘Brownshirts’ were strutting the streets, and she said she took particular pleasure in avoiding giving any ‘Heil Hitlers’ or Nazi salutes!

Back in London she took her bi-lingual secretarial exams and was promptly head hunted by the secret service to work for Dilly Knox, the famous chief cryptologist who was desperately working to crack the Enigma code. And this is why she was among the very first to move to Bletchley Park with him in the summer of 1938.

She continued in the secret service until 1941 when - after her brother Nigel had been killed in the Battle of Britain, and her father drowned six months later when his ship was torpedoed – she was given compassionate leave and went to look after her mother in Shaftesbury.

At this time she got to see much more of George and they married in January 1942. They bought Hunters Hill, in Twyford, by rather daringly submitting a sealed bid for ‘£100 more than the next highest bid’. Once accomplished she volunteered to join the Winchester Guild of Cathedral Guides and for the next 22 years led regular tours in German.

She carried on fiercely independent, living with very little help at Hunters Hill until past her 100th birthday, when we finally persuaded her to relax a bit and take a place in Brendon Care’s Old Parsonage in Otterbourne.

Her’s was a generation marked by war, grit and sacrifice to whom we must always be grateful for giving us the chance to lead the peaceful lives we have enjoyed.

Written by: Mr Nigel Fawkes (son of Diana)

Read Diana’s testimony about her time at Bletchley Park, 1938-1939