Phillip Wiltshire

Phillip Wiltshire was born in Ealing in 1892, to Millicent and Samuel Wiltshire. During his childhood, they lived at 7 Venetia Road in Ealing. In his teens, he lived with and worked for an uncle in Hartley Whitney, Hampshire.

Phillip in Gibraltar, soon after he joined up at the age of 16.	Phillip with some of his ship-mates above the town of Split, in the Balkans.	Phillip with his new baby daughter Joyce, in 1919.

In 1909 Phillip 'ran away' and joined the Navy as a boy seaman. He took part in the Battle of Dogger Bank on the destroyer H.M.S. Lennox, and spent the remainder of the war in the Persian Gulf. His other ships included H.M.S. Repulse and H.M.S Royal Oak. His home base was Chatham, known as H.M.S. Pembrokeshire. He retired from the Navy in 1931. When war broke out again in 1939, he was called up at the age of 47, and sent to sea on the anti-submarine trawler "Peter Hendricks" as a gunnery instructor. However the stress of going to sea in wartime again was too much for a man of his age. We might speculate that this was aggrevated by an incident on 19th July 1941 in which the "Peter Hendricks" rammed and sunk one of our own submarines with the loss of 22 lives, though it is not known if Phillip was on board at the time. After a spell in the naval hospital at Chatham he was given a medical discharge, but never fully recovered.

HMS Lennox, on which Phillip served in 1915.	HMS Repulse, photographed in 1916 or 1917.

May and Phillip pose in a photographer's studio in Ealing, about 1923.	Phillip Wiltshire aged about 75.

In 1912 he met May Simpson, and they married in 1914. They lived with his parents at 74 The Grove, Ealing while he was in the navy. On his release from the navy they decided to find a place of their own, and in about 1933 moved along the road to 46 The Grove. A result of this was that his mother sold her house at 74 The Grove and moved to Chinnor with Tommy Beard.

In 1952 Phillip and May moved to Little Scotlands Cottage, West Chiltington, Sussex, where they were still living when he died. The cottage has now (2002) been replaced with a modern house, but the garden retains some of its original character, including part of the box hedge seen in the picture below.

	Little Scotlands, West Chiltington, Sussex.

Phillip Wiltshire died in 1968 while visiting his daughter and son-in-law in Norfolk.

Updated 19-11-03