Capt. Philip George Bateman

  Notes:

From Ann G-P research.

Mem photo here; http://www.eggsa.org/library/main.php?g2_itemId=1597424

Birth date from Philip Bateman, not sure where he was in '01 census tho'.

1911 Census from Wendy; (Age 14); Living at 22 Randolph Gardens, Maida Vale, London with mother and 3 siblings.

From Bateman research; Educated; Mercant Taylors.
The Daily Mirror were unable to track down an item mentioned in his book. In 1915, sometime before June, there was a photo of PGB in RFC uniform under the heading 'Airman to Marry Actress'. She was Gertrude Lawrence, but the engagement didn't last long and Gertie kept the ring.
and his family homes, same source;
1903 - 49, Devonshire Street (also Dr B's consulting rooms - next to Harley Street)
1905 - 7, Queen Anne Street (also Mrs B's nursing home until during/just after WWI - between Harley St and Cavendish Square)
1906 - Avenue Road, Saint John's Wood (family home)

London Gazette; 14 Oct 1914; 18th (County off London) Battalion, The London Regiment (London Irish Rifles). The undermentioned to be Lieutenants, with senority next below Lieutenant Stephen B. Skevington. Dated 1st September, 1914: — Philip George Bateman.Laurence Dudley Alfred Dircks.

From Wendy H;
Times September 21 1921, Marriages: Captain P G Bateman and Mlle Blanc. The Queen of Romania with Princess Marie and Princess Helen of Romania (the former of whom, according to Romanian Custom, gave away the Bride) was present at the marriage on Sunday at Manastirie, Sinaia, Romania, of Captain Philip George Bateman, London Irish Rifles and Royal Air Force, son of the late Dr A G Bateman and of Mrs Bateman of 7 Queen Anne Street W and Mlle Marie-Louise Blanc, eldest daughter of the Mme Irene Procopiu, lady in waiting to the Queen of Romania, and of the late M Louis Blanc. M Misue late Romanian Minister in London was best man. The Staritz Dionisie, Superior of the Monastery of Sinaia officiated. The bride was attended by : ........... Miss Dorothy Hubbard.......... Mlle Lila Procpiu carried the bride's train. After a reception held at the Villa Caprita, Sinaia, the bride and bridegroom left for Constantinople where the honeymoon will be spent. Those present at the marriage, which was attended by almost of the members of the diplomatic corps in Rumania, included among others Signor Martin-Franklin (Italian Minister at Bucharest),....... Princess Nadige Stirberg. Mr and Mrs Boxhall. Count and Countess Tchiakowsky. Count and Countess Quaranta di Suline.

The engagement had been announced on May 30 1921.

From Bateman research; Journalist of Cape Town and Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Captain Royal London Irish Rifles and Royal Flying Corps. Flight Commander Royal Airforce. Special Constable Rangoon River Police. Signaller S.African Corps of Signals (Vol.), Sub-Lieut, S African Naval Forces (Vol).
Also; Wrote a book on his WWI service (1914-20). He wrote it in Rangoon in the 1930s so it remained unpublished because of the plethora of such memoirs. Anthony has had it accepted by Pen & Sword books subject to extending the text. Anthony is doing this by putting his service into the context of other Batemans on the Western Front (uncle and two (possibly three) cousins. he had Schwartz and Ackermann cousins on the other side, presumably. There is only one other book written by an ex-kite balloon observer officer, as they were a rare breed.
Also; He was Centre Secretary (ie manager) of the Cape Town Cape of Good Hope SJS Centre before joining the SA Naval Forces in 1942. His third wife was awarded a Grand Priory commendation certificate for her war work, as was Philip the younger in the 1970s.
Also; Part author of "Ballet in South Africa"

From Anthony; Philip Bateman married May Hosana Joakim, spinster, 27, of Grosvenor House, Park Lane W, daughter of Minas Joakim, General Merchant, in the St Martin Registry office on 23 Sept 1929. PGB was an Engineer's Representative and lived at 2 Embankment Chambers, Villiers St WC. He was export manager of Aveling & Porter and travelled the world selling the successor to the steamroller, including in SA (1925-6). The firm packed up during the recession not long after and he spent 8 years in Rangoon as a director of Balthazar Bros, his father-in-law's firm.

By Philip Bateman, jnr;
Philip Bateman (1896 - 1965), his families and circle
Philip George Bateman was born in London on October 26, 1896 to an Islington-born physician Dr Alfred George Bateman (1852-1919) and his German wife Antonia (nee Schwartz). Philip was the only son of four children and was educated at Pinewood Preparatory School and Merchant Taylors School. His father lived and practised at 49 Devonshire Street, London. He was also a well respected lego-medical practitioner as the first General Secretary of the Medical Defence Union. He was recognised by the King of the Belgians for his war work with Belgian refugee children by appointment as a knight of the Order of Leopold, Belgium's highest civil honour. Philip's mother ran a society nursing home from elegant Georgian premises in Queen Anne Street. Her patients included Alfred Lord Milner, Beit, Curzon and a host of worthies including 'Randlords' who had made their money in South Africa.

IN THE TRENCHES
Young Philip Bateman, like so many other public school boys, was among the first to sign up for the trenches at the outbreak of war. He enlisted in the Artists Rifles but was commissioned a few days later in the London Irish Rifles whilst still 17 years old. His commission was dated October 5, 1914 - just 27 days after the declaration of war. His father had served as a Surgeon Captain when the regiment was still the London Irish Volunteers. Philip was soon promoted to full Lieutenant and accompanied the 1st Battalion to the Western Front in March 1915. He survived unscathed during several months of standing to at dawn each day punctuated by him leading night time raids into no-man's land. He was gassed during the battle of Loos in September 1915 but remained with the regiment until January 1916 when a sniper shot him through the arm whilst he was trying to fix a communications line. His survival was something of a miracle as he was the only junior officer left from the original batch, life expectancy of a subaltern in the trenches being about three weeks at that time.
He was sent back to England to one of the most pleasant hospitals imaginable. The Empress Eugenie had turned over a wing of Farnborough Hill, her elegant Hampshire mansion as a hospital for officers. "The atmosphere was delightful and patients were at once made to feel that they were honoured guests at a country-house party" wrote Philip. "It was my first break from army life for two years and at first I found it hard to accustom myself to the change. I had lost the habit of being treated as an intelligent human being."
He soon recovered and applied to be attached to the Royal Flying Corps. After being trained at Roehampton to pilot a spherical free balloon, he was sent back to the Western front in May 1916 as a kite balloon observer in No. 2 Kite Balloon Section. Promoted to Captain within a month, he spent his time identifying targets and spotting the fall of shot for the heavy guns. At one stage he found himself encamped with his kite balloon and crew in a wood close to his uncle's headquarters in Vlamertinghe Chateau near Ypres. Brigadier General Bateman CMG, Officier de le Legion d'Honneur, commanded the heavy artillery of VIII Corps, covering the Ypres Salient and Philip was pleased to be spotting for his Uncle Bernard. Philip's cousin Bernard, a Lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery and the General's only child, died of wounds after winning the Military Cross at Sanctuary Wood, near Ypres.
Philip soon became a useful aeronaut and was proud to be awarded his Observer's brevet after the requisite number of flying hours. The 'balloonatics', as they were known, stood for hours at a time exposed to gunfire and the elements in a flimsy wicker basket suspended below a huge gasbag filled with highly inflammable hydrogen. He was shot down in flames by enemy aircraft several times but was able to parachute to safety behind Allied lines. It was estimated that these early types of parachute failed to open once in about 200 jumps. On one occasion he was dragged out of the kite balloon basket when his parachute deployed accidentally in a storm. As he fell he grabbed at the rope of the balloon's tail parachute that streamed out far behind the tail of the balloon. He clung to this slender rope for twenty-five minutes, arms aching unbearably, with his own collapsed parachute dangling uselessly below him whilst his ground crew winched the balloon down three thousand feet. He described this hair raising feat in an illustrated article in Wide World Magazine in 1917.
Philip had survived two years under fire in and above the trenches. He was recalled to England in July 1917 and sailed for the Middle East. He was appointed as a Flight Commander and commanded No. 51 Kite Balloon section in the Mesopotamian campaign against the Turks. Like his fellow members of the RFC and Royal Naval Air Service, he was transferred to the Royal Air Force on its formation on 1st April 1918, receiving a new commission.

GERTIE LAWRENCE
He spent much time at the theatre when home in London on leave. He became engaged to an up and coming actress - Noel Coward's later protege, Gertrude Lawrence. Philip's photograph was featured in the Daily Mirror, "Airman to Marry Actress" but it was an unsuitable match and soon came to an end. He recalled rather ruefully that "She kept the ring." She recalled in her autobiography, somewhat inaccurately, that her boyfriend had given a sense of security as he floated over London in his balloon.
He returned to the Army at the end of the war and was attached to the War Office. He was demobilised in mid-1920, relinquishing his commission a year later. Opportunities for ex-officers were few and far between by that stage and he was fortunate to obtain a post in Paris as foreign correspondent for the Financial News.
It was here that he met Dorothy Whyte. An American friend of his mother's had introduced him to her niece, Dorothy. "You will like Dorothy," she said. "She shares a studio flat in the Rue Boissonade with three charming girls. Go and see them. They will do you good."
As Philip put it: "With those words she changed the course of his life." The girls, all students, were fun and extended the hand of friendship to Philip. There was English Maisie, Swedish Inga, American Dorothy Whyte and Rumanian Colette. While Philip liked Maisie (and she him), life was to take a different turn, and in his writings he stated that he always regretted not having married Maisie. The reason was that fate had arrived in the form of Colette's sister Marie-Louise from London where she was studying medicine and Philip "forgot sweet little Maisie" as he put it, and could think of nobody but the dazzlingly attractive Rumanian. She was nicknamed Morit and was the daughter of a lady-in-waiting to Queen Marie, Madam Irina Procopiu. He proposed to Morit, and to his astonishment, was accepted.

RUMANIA DAYS
Philip moved to Bucharest, Rumania, and marriage formalities for a wedding at the ancient Monastery at Sinaia (where the royal family worshipped) were arranged for September 25, 1921. There were two weddings, as was the Rumanian custom - a civil one and a much more elaborate ceremony according to the ancient rites of the Roumanian Orthodox Church. The Queen, Crown Princess Helen, Princess Marie (who gave the bride away) and Princess Ileana attended, as well as the whole of the diplomatic corps in Sinaia with the Court, together with members of the royal household and numerous relatives and friends.
The couple left in a Rolls Royce lent by the British Legation to honeymoon in Constantea, the Black Sea port favoured by the royal family. The preparations for the wedding are recalled in the memoir from Dorothy Whyte and in Philip's own writings. At this time he was the Bucharest correspondent for the London Observer.

HIS SON PETER
Philip and Morit had one child, Peter Philip Col, born on October 28, 1922 in their flat in Bucharest (the name Col was a tribute to Colette). The good-looking boy was a favourite of Queen Marie and played as a child with the future King Carol. Peter was determined to become a naval officer. After a spell at an English preparatory school he joined the Britannia Royal Naval College Dartmouth in 1936 as a thirteen year old Naval Cadet. Academically gifted and a good linguist, he won the College's two top prizes, including the Sovereign's Gold Medal, when he passed out as a Midshipman, Royal Navy in 1939. He was sent to sea and took part in several actions against the Italian fleet in the Mediterranean as a junior gunnery officer in the battleships HMS Barham and Warspite.
Burma interlude
After Philip's marriage to Morit ended, he travelled widely in Europe, Africa and the East as export manager for Aveling and Porter. When he lived in South Africa in the 1950's he delighted in pointing out to his sons any 'steamroller' he encountered by the roadside that bore the white horse of Kent - the sign of an Aveling and Porter machine that he might have sold. He settled in Burma in the early 1930's where he was a director of Balthazar and Sons, a leading merchant house and bank in Rangoon. He married a second time, to May Hosana (or Hosanna) Joachim, daughter of the owner of Balthazar and Sons who was of Armenian descent. There was one child from this marriage, Valerie (married name Murray), who lives in Somerset, England and has two sons, Christopher and Nicholas - both are married with children of their own. He continued his writing during this period, including series of articles on airships and his unpublished memoirs of the Great War. After the Second World War had begun he was asked to broadcast talks entitled "I am a Pacifist, but…" on Radio Burma in support of the war effort. He also joined the Marine Division of the Rangoon Police as a part time Special Constable.

TO THE CAPE
Philip, who had been living in the East for eight years, decided to leave Rangoon. "It was the hot weather that got me as it was fast destroying my eyesight," he explained, rather underplaying both the fragility of his marriage and the fact that Burma was clearly destined to fall to the Japanese. He arrived in Cape Town, South Africa, in about October 1940 - a city he said reminded him of Bucharest. He had visited the Cape before but knew no one in Cape Town. Indeed his only significant contact had died. This was his uncle Ernie, who had arrived in South Africa at the age of 21 and risen to prominence in scientific circles. Ernest Schwartz ('Kalahari Schwartz') who was a visionary professor of geology at Rhodes University. He was famous for having propounded the Kalahari Scheme - a hugely ambitious plan to irrigate the desert wastes of the Kalahari. Despite his German parentage, Schwartz was an old boy of Westminster School and a fervent Anglophile. His coffin was draped with a Union Jack at his own request after his death from an infection in St Louis, Senegal in 1929.

MARRIED FOR THIRD TIME
Cape Town enjoyed a Mediterranean climate and was not suffering the wartime austerity of Europe. Philip loved it. He soon got a job as secretary of St John Ambulance Association, an occupation that proved less stressful than his Rangoon directorship. There was one essential piece of business carried over from his days in the east and that was that he was still officially married to May. He applied for, and was granted in the Cape Supreme Court, a divorce on 25 November 1941.
In 1942 Philip married a war widow, Eileen Bianca Hilda Calvert (nee Morgan, born 17 February 1913). She had married her first husband, Pilot Officer James Lionel Calvert, RAF, at the onset of the war. Jimmie had gone to France as a fighter-bomber pilot with the Advanced Air Striking Force immediately after their wedding. His Fairey Battle crashed and he died on 20 September 1939. He is buried in France alongside his two aircrew but is commemorated in the form of a plaque on the pulpit light in the church of the Royal Air Force, St Clement Danes, in London. There is a memorial to him also in the chapel of his old school, Sedbergh, in the English Lake District. Jimmie was the first of the many Old Sedberghian who were to die in the Second World War.
Eileen had been living in Nigeria with her brother Evan, a District Officer in Ibadan province, who had just died of tropical fever. She had come to Cape Town to stay with her aunt Hilda Poole Gabbett at Willowfield in Rondebosch. Her mother left her flat in wartime London to join her sister and daughter at the Cape but died there before the war had ended. Eileen's family had known the Batemans in London. She worked for Philip as a volunteer war worker at the Saint John Ambulance Cape Town centre.
Eileen was the daughter of Charles Ceccarelli Morgan OBE, His Majesty's Consul in Rome. Her father has been born in Valletta, Malta, to Raffaelle Ceccarelli di Savignano but had changed his surname to Morgan, derived from his Welsh mother's family. He attended the University of Valletta and went to Rome where he worked his way up the consular ladder. He was honoured by being appointed as one of the few British members of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. Raffaelle Ceccarelli came from Savignano, near Rimini, and had served a Colonel in the army of the last King of Naples before settling in Valletta as a merchant.

TRAGEDY IN ITALY
Philip was shocked to be informed by the Admiralty that his son Peter was missing in action. HMS Hereward, the destroyer in which Peter was serving as a Midshipman, had been sunk during the withdrawal from Crete on 29 May 1941 after a German dive bomber had delivered a bomb down the ship's funnel. Peter spent some time in the water before being rescued by Italians and made a prisoner of war.
Peter was an accomplished escaper, and got as far as stealing a boat at Bari before being sent to the punishment camp that was the Italian equivalent of Colditz Castle. In 1943, he was on a train in Italy being transported to a camp in Germany after the Italian surrender. Peter was one of a small group who decided to jump from the train. The last to leave the train, he was shot and killed on 14 September 1943, near Allessandria, Piacenza. Identified only by his naval jersey and leather belt, Peter was buried in the Italian civil cemetery at Corvino San Quirico. There is some doubt as to the identity of the grave but Peter's name is commemorated in the college chapel at Dartmouth. Mentioned as a keen escaper in George Millar's book 'Horned Pigeon', Peter was described by his best friend from the punishment camp - a fellow escaper - as "The bravest person I ever knew."

THIRD COMMISSION - IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN NAVY
Philip had enlisted in the ranks of the SA Corps of Signals as a part time soldier but transferred to the newly formed SA Naval Forces. Commissioned as a Sub-Lieutenant in the Special Electrical Branch he served in Cape Town Docks and at Saldanha Bay on the Cape's West Coast. He had achieved the unusual distinction of holding commissions in all three services as well as serving as a police officer. Although Cape Town seemed to be far removed from the war, many merchant ships were sunk by U boats hunting in the stormy waters off the Cape. The huge expanse of water enclosed by Saldanha Bay was earmarked, but never used, as a major convoy assembly point. One notable incident occurred whilst Philip was serving in the Controlled Mining Station at Saldanha. A large underwater object was spotted crossing the detection loops that guarded the entrance to the safe haven of Saldanha. For the only time during the war the command was given to detonate the mines. The object vanished and it is thought that, logically, it could only have been a German or Japanese submarine.
Philip's eyes continued to give him trouble. Part of the problem was that he had been injured by Allied gas which had blown back into the trenches in 1915. One eye was to be seriously damaged when he slipped whilst throwing a hand grenade whilst on watch in Cape Town docks one wet winter's night. He underwent several operations but never fully recovered his sight. He had to retire eventually from active naval service but retained his commission.

ARCHAEOLOGICAL PIONEER
It was fortuitous that he had been posted to Saldanha Bay. He enjoyed exploring the then little known semi-desert West Coast area. He recognised and documented its enormous archaeological potential, especially the Hopefield fossil site. At that time archaeology in South Africa was in its infancy and much valuable work was done by amateurs under the guidance of the few professionals available. Philip became secretary of the Cape Archaeological Society and spent every spare moment scouring the countryside and shoreline on foot, by boat and on motorcycle. He did much of his work with Keith Jolly, a senior lecturer in archaeology at the University of Cape Town.
On Philip's death in 1965, Keith insisted that full credit should go Philip for his pioneering work in the Saldanha area. "It is possible that the Archaeological Society or even a Government department will set up some permanent memorial to the man who alerted South Africa and the world to the fossil beds of Hopefield," wrote the Wanderer in the Cape Argus at the time, after interviewing Jolly (18th August 1965).
The Saldanha area has subsequently become world-famous for its archaeology and palaeontology, more especially since the discovery of the Saldanha Skull and the recent discovery of the oldest footprints in the world, recently discovered at Langebaan Lagoon. It is now a World Heritage Site.

Philip was also instrumental in forming the Cape Town Ballet Society. He was a well known figure in the arts scene in Cape Town as the Cape Argus daily columnist as well as an arts critic, book reviewer and financial writer. In their latter days in Cape Town the family lived in an elegant Victorian double-storeyed house in Park Road, Rondebosch overlooking the considerable expanse of Rondebosch Common, against the backdrop of the mountain.
Philip, like many pro-Smuts ex-servicemen, was a member of the Torch Commando, opposed to the government removal of the Coloureds (people of mixed racial origin) from the Voters' Roll. He was horrified at the resurgence of Neo-Nazism in South Africa so shortly after the end of the war. Many of the U-boat sinkings in Southern African waters were attributed to intelligence reports sent to Germany from the Cape by Afrikaner Nazi sympathisers. These included the future Prime Minister, John Vorster, who was interned during the war.

LATTERS DAYS IN PORT ELIZABETH
He moved with his family to Port Elizabeth in 1953 in order to work as a columnist and arts critic on the Eastern Province Herald. Philip was an active man who had enjoyed robust health ever since joining the Army as a teenager. He was felled by a stroke in 1956 and had to retire before turning sixty. The family lived in a pleasant country house set in large grounds with a stream running through it, 7 ½ miles from the city centre. It was nevertheless relatively rural compared to the suburban life they had enjoyed in Rondebosch. They had to pump brackish water from a borehole as well as catching rainwater from the roof for drinking. The mains electricity supply was prone to failure and they kept oil lamps on standby. There was a time when local activists from the Poquo organisation of freedom fighters stretched wire ropes across the main road that ran past their house in an attempt to ambush passing motorists. Life was reasonably tranquil for most of the time however, with long wagons laden with agricultural goods and drawn by several spans of oxen trundling along the road to the city.
His son, also Philip, remembers him burning his many handwritten (and difficult to decipher) diaries while in Port Elizabeth, perhaps because their contents could have embarrassed other living people. Some of his memoirs remain in the form of two unpublished books - 'Simple Soldier' and 'Adventures of an Edwardian'.

There were three children from this (third) marriage to Eileen, all born in Cape Town:

1). Anthony (b 10 October 1942) served for twenty years in the South African, British and Sultan of Oman's navies. He is now a business psychologist working on consultancy assignments in the UK and in post-conflict countries abroad. He was divorced from his first wife in 1975 and he and his second wife, Susan, have two children: Iona (b1984) and Ross (b1988).

2). Philip (b 5 January 1945) twice world champion in Creative Thinking and a commercial journalist living in Cape Town, South Africa. Philip Bateman (junior) is married to Caroline (nee Gale) has two children - Giulietta Francesca Cordelia Gale Bateman (b 23 June 1995) and Raffaella Luciana Ginevra Maria (b 9 June 1999.).

3). Geraldine (b 3 February 1948) who is divorced is a dedicated nurse caring for geriatric patients in Somerset, England. She had an earlier career as a zookeeper with particular experience of working with great apes including gorillas.
What happened to them
Inevitably, because this article deals with history rather than current affairs, almost all the people mentioned are dead. Morit, Philip Bateman's first wife, the mother of Peter, and the subject of the Dorothy Hibbard (nee Whyte) memoir remarried but was killed in a car accident in Bucharest in 1961. His second wife May ('Maisie') died in London in the 1990s, while his third wife, Eileen, died in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1986.

Philip Bateman's health deteriorated rapidly in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He
suffered numerous strokes and gradually lost his eyesight - a tragedy for a man who main source of stimulation was reading. He spent several years in a Port Elizabeth hospital where he died in August 1965. He is described by the well known South African writer (and ex-Cape Argus colleague) Lawrence Green in one of his many books as "a pleasant, studious … versatile … ingenious … man". He was proud of having been a balloonist as well as one of the Army's earliest parachutists but never spoke about his experiences as an infantry subaltern in the trenches. Studies after the Great War have suggested that kite balloon observers suffered even greater stress than did their fellow officers in the trenches below. He had produced five children over a period of 26 years and lived a full and, as he put it, "often dangerous" life.

Philip married Marie-Louise 'Morit' Blanc, daughter of Louis Blanc and Irene Procopiu, on 25 Sep 1921 in Manastirie, Sinaia, Romania. (Marie-Louise 'Morit' Blanc died in 1961 in Bucharest.)

Philip next married May Hosana Joachim on 23 Sep 1929 in St Martin's Registry Office, London. (May Hosana Joachim died in London.)

Philip next married Eileen Bianca Hilda Morgan, daughter of Charles Ceccarelli Morgan O.B.E. and Unknown, in 1942. (Eileen Bianca Hilda Morgan was born on 17 Feb 1913 in HM Embassy, Rome and died on 11 Jan 1986 in Cape Town, South Africa.)