Powys-Lybbe Forbears - Person Sheet
Powys-Lybbe Forbears - Person Sheet
Birth22 Nov 1908, Norwich, Norfolk
Death22 May 2000, Shrewsbury, Shropshire
General1st dau. Writer and broadcaster.
MotherMary Olive Wood (ca1878-1947)
Notes for Veronica Grissell
Her birth index:

First name(s) VERONICA
Last name GRISSELL
Birth year 1908
Birth quarter 4
District N ORWICH
County Norfolk
Country England
Volume 4B
Page 160
Record set England & Wales births 1837-2006
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She, nor her husband, were not found in the 1939 Register.
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Her death index:

First name(s) VERONICA
Last name BAMFIELD
Gender Female
Birth day 22
Birth month 11
Birth year 1908
Death quarter 2
Death year 2000
District SHREWSBURY
District number 7151A
Register number A59A
Entry number 251
Date of registration mm/yy 0500
County Shropshire
Country England
Record set England & Wales deaths 1837-2007
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Nor was any will found for her in England.
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The birth indeces show four daughters with the surname of Bamfield and mother’s maiden name of Grissell:

Last name First name Born   Died Event Location

BAMFIELD ANNE G 1946 — 1946 Wrexham, Denbighshire, Wales
BAMFIELD JULIAN V 1938 — 1938 Surrey South Western, Surrey, England
BAMFIELD OLIVE T M 1933 — 1933 Bromley, Kent, England
BAMFIELD PHYLLIDA K 1933 — 1933 Bromley, Kent, England

The various obituaries say they had four daughters.  It looks like they were all born in England.
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DNB Main notes for Veronica Grissell
From The Guardian on 15 June 2000:

Veronica Bamfield
Historian of intrepid women who herself loved open-top motoring adventures from Baghdad
Ethel King
Thursday 15 June 2000 01.56 BST


When the British army served the same purpose around the globe as the United Nations does now - being imperially present and occasionally useful - most military wives on station chose to import the social gradations of Sussex to Simla and saw the lands of their exile as plentifully servanted picnic grounds.
Not so Veronica Bamfield, who has died aged 91. She wrote of the life of the British army wife from the 17th to the 20th century in On The Strength (1975). It was the life she had been born to: her father was a lieutenant-colonel killed in Palestine in the first world war, her stepfather a general, and in 1930 she married Captain WH "Tich" Bamfield of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. But she was not a snifter at tiffin on the verandah sort of lady: she identified with women who had shared male hardship, and explored upcountry for themselves.

Bamfield came out as a debutante in the last days of the bright young things, but escaped to study at the Sorbonne before her marriage. Tich was posted to the Assyrian Company of the Iraq Levies in the early 1930s - chaps in an advisory capacity dotted the Middle East because of the British mandate in Palestine and the new petroleum fields. In Baghdad, the Bamfields did not set up housekeeping in a Wimbledon bungaloid manner; they moved into a traditional adobe house by the Diyala river. An 18th-century forebear of Veronica had written of ruined Palmyra, the Assyrian-Greek-Roman city of Queen Zenobia: it was a day-trip away from Baghdad.

The Bamfields drove their open-top Lanchester car over dubious roads east into Persia, north into Kurdistan, west through Syria: their mechanic rode in the back seat both as a human tool kit and a charm against the evil eye. The Iranian Shah had ordered nomads to settle and westernise; radio and Royal Air Force-manned airfields were abridging the distances between the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea; yet Bronze Age ways of life continued in the hills and the Bamfields pottered off to see them.

In Baghdad, they met Freya Stark (who described Veronica, in Beyond Euphrates, as "a tall and lovely Juno"), a fellow spirit, though rather more expert at operating on muleback. Stark had discovered the privilege of a woman traveller - booted, behatted and disparaging of female silliness, she became an honorary man, welcome to discuss public affairs in the selemlik, the masculine half of the house; while, in a crumpled frock from her saddlebag, she had access to chat about sex in the haremlik, the women's quarters. Bamfield joined Stark on jaunts into this double life, slipping into the all-male zones of mosques, attending weddings and anointing brides with cold cream, washing in beaked ewers of water drawn from heated cauldrons.

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The Bamfields were posted to India in 1938, where Veronica stayed on until 1942, although Tich came home at the outbreak of the second world war: long after, she corresponded with Paul Scott, novelist of The Raj Quartet, who recreated his pre-partition India from details checked in fact and tone with those who were actually there - though it is hard to imagine Bamfield, with her inquisitiveness about local life, among his India-despising memsahibs in Pankot.

In 1945, she and Tich rooted themselves in Shrewsbury, Shropshire. She went into radio in the 1950s, broadasting on Woman's Hour, and later interviewed Percy Thrower from the potting shed at Shrewsbury Flower Show. Her interest in the forgotten histories of ordinary people led to her work for the re-publication of Richard Gough's History Of Myddle (an account of a Shropshire parish circa 1700), and to the research for her own second volume, Victory Of The Vanquished (1990), a history of the 1793-96 insurrection in the Vendée region of France against the Parisian revolutionary republican government, a tragedy not much written about, even in France.

She was inspired by the Vendéean heroines, notably the amazon Celeste Bulkeley, who led her crack troops into battle, and survived wounds, defeat, repeated widowhood and a sentence of death by guillotine. Bamfield rented a cottage in the region and supplemented her archive investigations into the period by walking the ground and recording local family memories of the uprising. The book, in translation, provoked scholarly debate in France: Bamfield was delighted by the response.

Her curiosity did not abate with age. She took to the computer at 83, and wrote for both the Shrewsbury Hospice and the Assyrian Journals in her late eighties.

Tich died in 1975; four daughters survive them.
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Kevin Brownlow writes: Shortly after the triumphant revival of Abel Gance's film Napoleon at the Empire, Leicester Square, in 1980, I paid a visit to Gance at his home in Paris. He was bedridden, but his neighbour showed me some of the letters he had received as a result of the show. Among those he was most proud of was one headed Homage A Abel Gance, written in impeccable French by Veronica Bamfield.

Veronica, then in her 70s, had contacted me when she heard about my restoration of Napoleon. She explained that she had seen it as a girl while she was at finishing school - "sent by my parents in the hope of transforming a sow's ear into a silk purse" - at the Opera in Paris. "I remember what I can only describe as the magnificent confusion of the whole colossal impact. Nothing I have ever seen, until the reconstruction was shown, ever produced the same complete bouleversement."

When she eventually saw the restoration, with live orchestra, in 1980, it more than fulfilled her expectations. "The tension was incredible and at one moment I felt I was going to scream. There were bursts of spontaneous applause and many more of absorbed silence. We were elated, battered, exhausted. We weren't sitting in a cinema, we were tossing at sea, we were scrambling over the mountains of Corsica. That energy, that dynamism... it poured off the screen."

When I told her I was doing a book, Napoleon - Abel Gance's Classic Film (1983), she offered her help, and proved enormously valuable. I was unable to visit all the locations. Veronica travelled to France and not only checked old newspapers, but tracked down veterans who had played in the picture, recording and translating tapes and providing background from her enormous knowledge of revolutionary history.

Veronica Bamfield was one of those brave, resourceful women one associates with the Victorian era. But it is her enormous charm, her enthusiasm and her self-deprecating humour that I shall miss most.
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Notes for Walter Harold & Veronica (Family)
Their marriage index:

First name(s) VERONICA
Last name GRISSELL
Marriage quarter 4
Marriage year 1931
MarriageFinder™ VERONICA GRISSELL married
WALTER H BAMFIELD
Spouse's last name BAMFIELD
District GUILDFORD
County Surrey
Country England
Volume 2A
Page 269
Record set England & Wales marriages 1837-2008
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Last Modified 21 Jan 2017Created 14 May 2022 by Tim Powys-Lybbe
Re-created by Tim Powys-Lybbe on 14 May 20220