The Gregson Family

The Colonel’s Son

On a ledger stone in the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Whitelackington, the inscription reads simply: Colonel, CMG, born 28 Oct 1872. The Colonel was Guy’s father — Henry Guy Fulljames Savage Gregson, born at Indore in British India, educated at Rugby, commissioned into The Buffs, and shot through the thigh in the Orange Free State before his twenty-eighth birthday.

The Boer War casualty roll records it in the flat idiom of military paperwork: “Wounded Severely on 13/12/1899 at Zoutspan Drift. Lieutenant. Thigh.” He was attached to Mounted Infantry, serving with the 2nd Battalion, King’s Shropshire Light Infantry, when a British patrol was surprised by Boer commandos near a drift across the Orange River. He was twenty-seven. The wound ended his career as an infantry officer. He transferred to the Army Ordnance Department — the military’s logistics and supply arm — and spent the rest of his service behind the lines rather than in front of them. It was the kind of career swerve that the Army understood without explanation: a man who could no longer march could still organise.

By 1902 he was a Captain, living in Kensington. By 1911 the census finds him a Major in the Army Ordnance Department, head of a household of ten — wife, four sons, his widowed father, and three servants — in nine rooms. By 1917 he was a Lieutenant-Colonel and a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George, gazetted in the New Year Honours for services in France. By 1939, Kelly’s Handbook of Distinguished People lists him as Colonel, retired. He spent his last decade at the Old Vicarage, Seavington St Mary, two miles east of Whitelackington, where he is buried.

He died on 20 April 1949. His wife Inez, his widowed father, his five children, his three servants — all the life of the 1911 Census household — had scattered by then. But the ledger stone at Whitelackington holds the essential facts: Colonel. CMG. Born 28 October 1872. The rest has to be assembled from the India Office, the Boer War rolls, the census, and a parish marriage register in a Devon seaside town.

The Lancaster Gregsons

The military tradition runs deep in the Gregson roots, beginning on the paternal line with Guy’s grandfather.

Matthew Henry Gregson was born in Lancaster in 1846, the son of Henry Gregson — solicitor, Justice of the Peace, twice Mayor of Lancaster — and Anne Kirkes of Liverpool. Henry Gregson was a Victorian civic figure of the first order: a man of property, standing, and municipal authority in a prosperous Lancashire county town. His wife’s sister Catherine married Thomas Fulljames, the Gloucestershire architect who designed the Shire Hall at Gloucester and rebuilt half the churches in the county. The Kirkes sisters’ double marriage connected two Lancashire families to the professional establishment of the West Country, and the “Fulljames” that would eventually appear as a middle name three generations later honoured that link.

But Matthew Henry did not follow his father into the law. He became a Major in the Royal Engineers — the Army’s builders, surveyors, and technical specialists. By 1872 he was stationed in India, where his son Henry Guy was born at Indore. By 1881 the family was back in England, at the School of Military Engineering, Brompton Barracks, Chatham — the Royal Engineers’ training establishment. His second son Geoffrey Kirkes Gregson was born there that year. His wife, Mary Emma Griffith Savage, was the daughter of Lieutenant-General Henry John Savage, from Halifax, Nova Scotia. The military ran on both sides.

Mary Emma died in London on 5 April 1906. Three days later, on 8 April, her grandson Guy Patrick Gregson was born in Cape Town. She never held him. He never knew her. By 1911, Matthew Henry — a widower at sixty-five, his career behind him — was living with his son’s family, still described in the census as “Major, Royal Engineers, Retired.” He died in Kensington in 1933 and was buried at St Mary’s, Hendon.

The line from Lancaster runs straight. Henry Gregson the solicitor married Anne Kirkes the Liverpool merchant’s daughter. Their son became a Royal Engineer and married a general’s daughter. Their grandson became a Buff and married a Gilchrist from India. Their great-grandsons — three of them — all served in the Royal Artillery. The step from civic respectability to military service took one generation. After that, the uniform was hereditary.

The Admiral’s Daughter

Mark married Christine Rozel Pigot Williams. Her father was Admiral Hugh Pigot Williams — a man who had commanded the British naval mission to the Ottoman Empire and served as Fleet Commander of the Ottoman Navy from 1910 to 1912. Her grandfather was General Sir John William Collman Williams, KCB, of the Royal Marines. Her uncle, Major-General Edward Ingouville-Williams — known throughout the Army as “Inky Bill” — commanded the 34th Division on the Somme and was killed in action on 22 July 1916. Another uncle, Major-General George Williams, was killed in the Boer War.

Two military dynasties — the Gregsons of Lancaster and the Williams family of Havant — were joined by a marriage that lasted five years before the desert took one of them. Christine’s uncle fell on the Somme. Her husband fell at Alamein. Two world wars took men from the same family.

“Pigot” was not a double-barrelled surname. It was a middle name, passed through the Williams family to honour a connection to the prominent Pigot naval dynasty. “Rozel” was a place name from Jersey — Rozel Bay, on the northeast coast — honouring Christine’s grandmother, Georgiana Isabella Ingouville of La Frégonnière, Jersey. Christine’s mother, Christine de Villiers Steytler, was South African, of Huguenot descent. She died in 1924, when Christine was fourteen.

The Admiral lived at the Manor House, Bedhampton — effectively Havant, Hampshire. In 1927, a Great Western Railway shareholder record places Colonel Gregson at Cosham, three miles from Bedhampton. The families were neighbours. Whether Mark met Christine through proximity, through military circles, or through some other channel, the two families shared the same Hampshire geography before they shared a marriage.

After Mark’s death, Christine remarried Henry Woodward. She died in September 1991 in Chichester, West Sussex. No children from either marriage have been found.

The Crest and the Chairs

Guy’s son Marcus remembered two things about the family’s ancestry: a Norman knight named Gregory de Normanton, and a crest showing a hand holding a battleaxe. A gold signet ring in the family collection bears precisely this device — an armoured cubit arm with diagonal wavy bands, holding a battleaxe, mounted on a torse. Fairbairn’s Book of Crests (1905) records five Gregson entries, all featuring the same motif. The entry for “Gregson of Lowlyn, Durh.” matches the ring exactly.

The crest belongs to the Gregson family of Murton, Durham, traceable to John Gregson, who died in 1607. From Murton the family dispersed: one branch to Lowlynn in Northumberland, where Henry Knight assumed the Gregson name in 1831 and received a formal grant of arms from the College of Arms in 1842 — motto Vigilo, “I keep watch.” Another branch to Burdon, near Sunderland, where Colonel Lancelot Allgood Gregson used the same crest and motto as High Sheriff of Durham in 1897. And another to Lancaster, where Henry Gregson became Mayor and his grandson married a general’s daughter from Nova Scotia.

The Lancaster Gregsons and the Knight Gregsons of Lowlynn are not the same branch. But they descend from the same root, and they share the same arms. Marcus’s family lore — the Norman knight, the battleaxe — was not a claim to the specific Lowlynn grant. It was a memory of the broader Gregson identity, carried through the generations from Durham to Lancashire to India to Cape Town to Somerset.

And the chairs. Marcus told the story of the Hepplewhite dining chairs, purchased by a Gregson ancestor directly from the craftsman “when the family lived in Lancashire” around 1800. The story checks out. The Gregsons lived in Lancaster at the turn of the nineteenth century. Hepplewhite apprenticed with Gillows of Lancaster. The chairs have passed from Whitelackington to Salisbury Plain to Bears Farm, and are destined to travel further still — through Marcus to Max and beyond. Four generations of family lore, and the records confirm every word.