Anthony Neil Cornwall

Ancestry of Anthony N. Cornwall (1942-1999)

Anthony ('Tony') Neil Cornwall was born on 30th January 1942 at the Emergency Hospital in Hartismere, Suffolk. He was registered under the name Robin Neil Austin, and the Robin was changed to Anthony when he was adopted later in 1942.

Tony was the first child of Iris Austin; she may have had another son ten years later but this is far from certain. Iris seems to have disappeared from available public records.

In 1942 Iris was 21 years of age and living with her parents in Friday Street, Rendlesham, which was a Suffolk village near to the town of Woodbridge. She was working as a canteen assistant in a NAAFI canteen. In 1941 construction started on two large aerodromes in this part of Suffolk, one of them on the outskirts of Rendlesham. They were not operational until 1943, and so the NAAFI facilities must have been provided for Royal Engineers construction units, or other army units protecting the construction site. If Tony's father was a servicemen then he probably came from this workforce.

Iris was born either very late in 1920, or more likely in the first three months of 1921. Her parents were Frederick and Hannah Austin, who had married in St Gregory's Church, Rendlesham in 1913. Both Frederick Austin and his new wife, Hannah Reeve, came from families of agricultural workers. The men in both families, going back a hundred years or more, were agricultural labourers, gamekeepers or foresters.

Frederick and Hannah became the parents of non-identical twins in 1914: Frederick Percy and Doris Violet. During World War 1 Frederick was eventually conscripted into the Army (1916) and in 1917 appears to have been sent to fight in France on the Western Front. He was posted missing on 27th March 1918 and on 30th August 1918 he was reported to have been captured by the Germans and so became a prisoner-of-war. The war ended 11th November and Frederick was freed; he left the Army in 1919. Iris was born a year or so later. The Austins had one more child, Leslie, but he died in infancy in 1925.

Doris Austin got married in 1936 and moved to Oxfordshire. Frederick Percy was still living at home in Friday Street when the Second World War broke out in September 1939. Living with Frederick P and his parents was a girl called Ada E Sampson; Frederick and Ada married early in 1940 and very soon afterwards had a daughter, Shirley.

In September 1939 the Government conducted a National index survey, but Iris cannot be found anywhere in this survey. She was certainly not at home in Friday Street. She might have been lodging with relatives or working as a live-in domestic servant and because of the rules surrounding availability of the Index records, her record might still be blocked.

Iris became pregnant in late autumn 1941. She was still in the area and at the family home at the time of Tony's birth. Given that her parents had not sent her away, and that Frederick P's need to get married in 1940 when his presumed girlfriend Ada got pregnant seems to have been acceptable, suggests that the Austins would have supported Iris if she had wanted to or was in a position to marry Tony's father. This suggests too that his father was not a local Rendlesham man.