What's in a Name?

On a day trip from Cambridge to London in September, 1995, I began at St. Clement Danes, the memorial church for the RAF in the Strand. This was not documentary research; it was listening, though thirty years ago I could not have imagined myself doing it. At about the time of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, I was hearing the kind of sentiments that inspired a late-sixties photograph I saw once in a collection about the Beatles. It shows a gray-haired man sitting on an airplane next to a cocky-looking Paul McCartney. The caption has the man saying indignantly, "We fought a war to save your lot," to which McCartney replies, "I bet you"re sorry you did." Now I was trying to hear something else. I could not forget Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Nagasaki, or Hiroshima, and I did my best to ignore the imposing statue of "Bomber" Harris on the little square outside the west end of the church. I had come to this place simply to remember someone I never knew. I found his name in the alphabetical book of remembrance: John Geoffrey Hayler Cox; and in the visitor's book I wrote, "Named for one remembered here."

Leaving the church, I headed in a more practical direction--toward the Imperial War Museum, whose grandiose name belies the quality of its collection and its thought-provoking presentation. The research department sold me a pamphlet about researching former members of the RAF, and I was on my way. I wrote several letters: to the RAF Personnel Management Centre, to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, to the Ministry of Defence, and eventually to a magazine called Air Mail and another called Fly Past. By the time I wrote to the magazines, I had found out what squadron John belonged to, and I asked the magazines to place a classified ad asking for information from anyone who might have known him.

In the meantime I learned a lot from John's three sisters, all still living: what his service number was, that he was a mid-upper gunner, where his logbook most likely was (i.e., who in the family most likely had it), and that he had flown with the South African Air Force. They did not know his squadron number (I found that out from the Ministry of Defence) or why an RAF man was flying with the SAAF. When I asked why he was flying over Yugoslavia when he died, all I could find out is that he was ferrying supplies to the Partisans. I wondered why he was doing that in a bomber.

From aunts, cousins, and family friends I also learned how much John's brief life had been affected by war, like many others in his generation. His father had been permanently disabled by a gas attack in World War One, and his mother therefore supported the family. In 1915, with her husband in the trenches across the Channel and three young children to care for, Margaret Cox had taken a job as matron at the Homes for Little Boys, near South Darenth, Kent, and she kept the position when her husband returned from France, though he too found employment at the Homes as drill instructor, after being refused re-employment by the Brighton Fire Brigade because of his disability. Founded in 1866 as a philanthropic charity, the Homes provided housing, food, clothing, education, vocational training, and a quasi-military lifestyle to homeless boys, mostly from the teeming streets of nearby London. Margaret and Edgar lived in Number 8, where she was responsible for thirty "boys" who were eighteen or older, in addition to her own children. Three more children were born to the Coxes in Number 8 after World War One, with John, the youngest, arriving in 1925.

John's sister Marjorie was thirteen when he was born on August 3, Bank Holiday Monday. Dr. Crawford came to assist, and the birth seemed normal. Soon afterwards, however, Margaret became ill, and Dr. Crawford was called back, to discover that his patient was hemorrhaging badly. "Come along, Cox," he said to Edgar, "help me lift the foot of this bed." He ordered that the bed be kept elevated to reduce blood loss, and he told Marjorie to care for the baby, insisting that she keep him away from his mother. Marjorie obeyed, feeding John with a rag dipped in milk expressed from his mother. "I'd already got Mary and Peg sharing my bed," Marjorie remembers, "then I had to have John as well." Peg was eight; Mary, only three.