John Arthur ROWLEY

John Rowley aged about five, c. 1925. Image from the Rowley family tree, www.ancestry.co.uk, courtesy of Liz Chivers.

John Rowley was born on 17 May 1920, the son of Frederick Rowley and his wife Mary (née King). Frederick was an accountant whose family were originally from Gloucestershire. Mary’s father ran the Berkshire House pub and later the New Hinksey Inn, both on the Abingdon Road in South Oxford, but after his death in 1901 she and her family moved to nearby Gordon Street. Mary’s brother John King was killed serving in the First World War, in July 1918.

Mary and Frederick married at the church of St John the Evangelist, New Hinksey, on 14 July 1919. Their first child John (named after his recently deceased uncle) was born on 17 May the following year. By 1921 the family was living at 208 Abingdon Road (a few doors from the New Hinksey Inn) where Mary and Frederick would remain for the rest of their lives. Frederick was working as an accountant and debt collector in offices at 5 Turl Street.

John’s brother Robert, known as Bob, was born on 24 February 1924. Both boys attended New Hinksey School and John went to the prestigious City of Oxford High School for Boys in George Street from the ages of eight to sixteen, 1928 to 1936. His father Frederick died in 1938, aged 53.

The 1939 register, taken on 29 September, four weeks after the Second World War broke out, records John and his mother Mary and brother Bob living at 208 Abingdon Road. John, aged nineteen, was working as a hospital costs clerk. Bob, aged fifteen, had just left the Oxford Technical School in St Ebbe's, and was seeking employment.

John joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve on 11 October 1940, aged twenty. On the same day, his engagement to Audrey McBride Broadis was announced in the Oxford Mail. They married a year later in October 1941. Audrey came originally from Minster Lovell near Witney, but by the time of the 1939 register she was living with her family at 38 Abingdon Road, Cumnor, a village three miles south-west of Oxford. Her father was a jobbing gardener and Audrey was working as a costings clerk.

John was assigned to 104 Squadron as an Observer. Early in the war, 104 Squadron was part of Bomber Command, operating out of RAF Driffield in the East Riding of Yorkshire, and flying night raids over northern Europe in Wellington bombers. At the beginning of 1942, a detachment – which included John Rowley – was sent to be stationed at Kabrit, on the western bank of the Suez Canal, in northern Egypt. John’s plane was shot down about 470 miles to the west, over Tobruk, on the north-eastern coast of Libya, between 8 and 10 September 1942 (there is some uncertainty over exactly when). He was reported as missing, presumed killed. He was 22.

John Rowley is commemorated on the Alamein Memorial, El Alamein, northern Egypt, and on the Oxford City Second World War Roll of Honour which is in the church of St Michael at the Northgate on Cornmarket.

A commemoration service for former pupils of the City of Oxford High School for Boys was held at Christ Church Cathedral on 27 March 1947. John’s name is on the order of service with those of three other New Hinksey men: James Lynes, Frederick Taylor, and John Turner. All four are named on the school's war memorial.

John’s widow Audrey was living at her parents' home, 36 Abingdon Road in Cumnor, in 1946 (she probably just remained there after her marriage to John in 1942). She appears to have married a man called Hall in 1948, and then married again, to James Otway Smith, in 1954. She died in 2012 aged 92.

John’s mother Mary also remarried twice: in October 1945 to George Rhind, who worked for the BBC at Bagley Croft, Hinksey Hill; and in October 1949 to Alexander Amos of Friars Street, St Ebbe’s. She died in Oxford in 1974.

John’s younger brother Bob found employment as a motorcycle mechanic and enlisted in the army the year after his brother’s death, on 1 July 1943, when he was nineteen. He served in Britain as a Driver for most of the war, and was later deployed to the British Army of the Rhine and to Egypt and Iraq. He left the army in 1954. He married Mary Coppock in 1951 and died in 1982 in Carterton.

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