Harold HAYNES

Image from the Haynes Family Tree on www.ancestry.co.uk.

Harold Haynes was born on 10 June 1907, the son of Francis Haynes, a postman, and his wife Annie (née Bridgman), who worked as a housemaid before her marriage. The couple lived in East Oxford and had six children: Francis junior (born 1900); Reginald (1901); Ruby (1903); Harold (1907); Hilda (1910); and Olive (1914). At the time of Harold’s birth they were living in Golden Road (and Harold was baptised at SS Mary & John Church) but they had moved to nearby Hawkins Road by 1910. By the time of the 1921 census, the family was living at 13 Henley Street, next door to where Francis senior had lived as a child. He was still a postman; Francis junior (aged 21) was working as a boatman for Round & Faulkner, pleasure boat owners at Magdalen Bridge; Ruby (seventeen) was a general help at 66 Fairacres Road; Harold (fourteen) was an errand boy for Evans & Evans, tobacconists at 129 High Street; and Hilda (eleven) and Olive (seven) were at school.

In September 1937, when he was thirty, Harold married Violet Lowe at St John the Evangelist church in New Hinksey. Violet had been born in Plymouth in 1903, but by 1911 she and her family had moved to Oxford and were living at 5 Norreys Avenue in New Hinksey. Her father John was working as a printer’s reader, probably at the University Press in Jericho. On leaving school Violet became a photographer’s assistant, but by the time of her wedding she had worked for ten years as a typist at Morris Motors. Here are some family photographs of Harold and Violet.

Harold and Violet had a daughter, Gillian, in 1938. When the 1939 register was taken, four weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War in September, they were living at 51 Herschel Crescent in Cowley. Harold was working as an engineer for the Post Office and was an army reservist. Harold and Violet went on to have two more children, Caroline and Christopher.

Harold was called up and became a Warrant Officer Class II with 253 Forward (or Tank) Delivery Squadron of the Royal Armoured Corps. Forward Delivery Squadrons carried out the final stage of supplying replacement armoured vehicles and crews to armoured regiments. Harold served in North Africa, delivering tanks for use at the front line. He died as the result of an accident on 26 May 1943, near Tunis in Tunisia. He was 35.

Harold was buried at the Medjez-El-Bab War Cemetery, forty miles west of Tunis. The inscription on his gravestone reads ‘Out of the stress of the doing / Into the peace of the done’.

Harold is also remembered on the Royal Armoured Corps Memorial at the Tank Museum in Bovington, Devon, and on the Oxford City Second World War Roll of Honour, which is in the church of St Michael at the Northgate on Cornmarket.

After Harold’s death, his widow Violet and their three small children returned to her family home at 5 Norreys Avenue where her mother Helen – now widowed – and sister Edith were still living. All three women lived there until their deaths: Helen in 1946, Edith in 1981, and Violet – who never remarried – in 1986. The family’s connection with the house had lasted for eighty years.

At the time of writing (2026), all of Harold and Violet’s children are still living: Gillian in Oxford, Caroline in California, and Christopher in Wootton near Abingdon.

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