Donald Frank MACKENZIE

Image from the Oxford Mail, 25 January 1945.

Donald Mackenzie, known as Don, was the son of Edward Mackenzie and his wife Gladys (née Colley). Gladys grew up in Church Hanborough, near Witney, but by the time she was eighteen she had moved to Oxford and was working as a live-in cook in Park Town. Edward was from Church Street (now Vicarage Road), New Hinksey, and worked as a driver. The couple married in Marlborough, Wiltshire, on 16 October 1915. Edward served in the Army Service Corps during the First World War.

Edward and Gladys’s first child Gordon was born on 31 July 1918, followed by Donald on 1 September 1920. The family had been living in Jericho, but by 1921 they had moved to New Hinksey, and were living at 47 Church Street with Edward’s older sister Agnes and her husband and three children. Several other members of the Mackenzie family lived next door at no. 45, where Edward had been brought up. Edward was by now working as a hot water fitter for Ison, Kidman and Watts, ironmongers and plumbers on Cornmarket.

Don and his brother Gordon attended New Hinksey School. Don was in the same class as Eric Bowles who also died in the war and is named on the Second World War memorial in St Matthew’s Church. Here are two pictures of Don and Eric's class in the late 1920s.

By 1939, the Mackenzies had moved to 38 Freelands Road, East Oxford. Don – now aged eighteen – was working as an aero sheet metal worker at the Pressed Steel factory in Cowley.

After the outbreak of war, Don joined the 1st Battalion of the Ox & Bucks Light Infantry as a Private. In the spring of 1942 he married Alfreda Butlin (known as Freda), a shop assistant at Woolworths whose family lived at 373 Cowley Road in East Oxford. According to Eileen Cox, a family friend, Don and Freda were both keen cyclists and featured on the front cover of a national cycling magazine. They set up home at 4 School Place in New Hinksey.

In June 1944 Don’s battalion landed in Normandy in northern France and took part in the Second Battle of Odon, eventually entering Belgium in September. In last-ditch fighting, the Germans attempted to retake ground in the Ardennes, in the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. The 1^st Battalion was involved in the counterattack in January 1945. On 25 January, the Oxford Mail reported that Don had been injured. This was around the time that the battalion was relieved and recalled to the Netherlands to prepare for Operation Veritable, the invasion of Germany. Don died of his wounds on 17 February 1945. He was 24.

Don was initially buried at Hervorst in Germany, but was re-buried at Reichswald Forest War Cemetery on 26 September 1946. The inscription on his gravestone reads: ‘Always thoughtful / Loving and kind / What a beautiful memory / He left behind.’ Don is also remembered on the Oxford City Second World War Roll of Honour, which is in the church of St Michael at the Northgate on Cornmarket.

Whilst Don was away fighting, Freda gave birth to a son, Paul, on 29 July 1944. He was six months old when his father died. Eileen Cox recalls that her sister Barbara, who had been Freda’s bridesmaid, used to go to stay with Freda after Don’s death, as she did not like being alone.

Freda remarried in 1947. She and Joseph Hawkins, a cabinet maker and joiner, were married for over fifty years and stayed living at 4 School Place until their deaths within six months of each other in 1998.

Don and Freda’s son Paul owned and ran Mackenzie’s Florists in Kidlington before retiring to Devon. He died in 2022.

Research by Siobhan Lancaster;  with thanks to Eileen Cox who knew Freda and her family, and to Mark Hathaway and Lesley Dewhurst.

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