HUGHILL, Mrs John (Fanny Tudor Imogen nee GORE-BROWNE) 1923-2023
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She was d of Col Sir Eric GORE-BROWNE DSO OBE TD 1885-1964 sometime head of that gentry family of Glaston House and Mary Imogen 1883-1975 d of Rt Hon Charles BOOTH 1840-1916 (BOOTH Bt) and Mary Catherine 1847-1939 d of Charles Zachary MACAULAY 1813-86 (bro of 1st & only Baron MACAULAY 1800-59) and Mary POTTER 1821-1913. She m 1946 Lt-Cmdr John Antony Crawford DSO RNVR s of Rear-Adm Réné Charles HUGILL CB MVO OBE 1883-1962 and Winifred Fleming 1889-1969 d of Henry BACKWELL 1855-1920 by his 24 Aug 1881 m (Braddan, Isle of Man) to Helena FLEMING c1860-, and had a son and three daus:
1. Charles Eric Antony b 1960, m 1980 reg Q3 Solihull Louisa A d of D C GODSALL of Solihull, W Midlands and had issue
1.1 Emma Charlotte 21 Sep 1991 (Times 2 Oct, reg Q4 Herts)
1.2 Lydia Anne b 1994 reg Q2 Herts
1. Olivia Imogen b 1948
2. Victoria Mary b 1951, m 1981 reg Q2 Wilts Col Clive b Nov 1946 (solicitor) s of Maj H FLETCHER-WOOD and Mrs S F SLY (nee JENKINS) and had issue:
2.1 Harry FLETCHER-WOOD b 26 Nov 1984 (Times 27 Nov)
2.2 Guy Antony FLETCHER-WOOD b 28 Feb 1987 (Times 3 March)
3. Sarah Jane Tudor b 1953 m 1971 (div 1983) as his 1st w the LP Baron LLOYD-WEBBER CBE b 1948 and had issue
3.1 Hon Nicholas Alastair LLOYD-WEBBER 1979-2023 m 2007 Charlotte Louise d of Robert John WINDMILL of London and had issue
3.1.1 Molly Matilda LLOYD-WEBBER b 2008
3.1 Hon Imogen Anne LLOYD-WEBBER b 1977
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Fanny Hugill, Wren and Navy plotter who helped the Allies prepare for D-Day and served in France after it – obituary
She tracked ships’ movements from the operations room and later visited newly liberated Paris
Fanny Hugill, who has died aged 100, was thought to be the last survivor of the staff of Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, who after the evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940 masterminded the Allied landings in North Africa in 1943, and the D-Day landings in Normandy in 1944.
Fanny Gore Brown, as she was at that time, was at the admiral’s headquarters at Château d’Hennemont, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, on January 2 1945 when she heard the shattering news that Ramsay’s plane had crashed on take-off at Toussus-le-Noble, killing the admiral and all on board. “Accustomed as we were to death,” she wrote, “we felt that a light had been extinguished. Nothing would ever be the same again.”
In 2017 she attended the unveiling of a memorial in France, and laid flowers on Ramsay’s grave and those of her friends who died with him, saying it was “hallowed ground which I hadn’t expected to see again”.
Fanny Tudor Imogen Gore Brown [sic] was born on January 22 1923 at home in Eaton Square, London. She enjoyed an affluent childhood but it was disrupted by her ill health. Her patchy education was done by post through the Parents’ National Education Union, then at Camden House School, Southover Manor School (where the pacifist headmistress was known as “the Asp”), and finally for two terms at wartime Downe House….
Her fate changed, however, when her father, the banker Colonel Sir Eric Gore Browne, DSO, OBE, who was also a senior director of Southern Railway, shared his directors’ compartment in a train from Charing Cross with the then Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay, who was Flag Officer, Dover. Gore Browne told Ramsay that his daughter was bored, and Ramsay asked the WRNS for Fanny Gore Browne, by name, to come and work for him….
When Ramsay’s headquarters moved to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, there on October 18 she met her future husband, Tony Hugill, a liaison officer of 30 Assault Unit, an elite, covert commando group which was advancing ahead of the army to capture German equipment and scientists.
After Ramsay’s death, the British naval headquarters moved to Brussels and, after VE-Day, to Minden, before Fanny Gore Brown was discharged from the WRNS on April 6 1946.
Later that year she married Lieutenant Commander J A C “Tony” Hugill, DSC, RNVR. He bought her engagement ring with the £100 advance for The Hazard Mesh (1946), his classic wartime memoir, a highly personal, first-hand account of the Normandy landings, described by one critic as “an emotional odyssey that catches the nerviness and mood-swings of war, the irritations and exhilarations of danger, the spasms of rage, boredom, fear and longing”.
The Royal Navy’s 30 Assault Unit has been wrongly called “Fleming’s commandos”, but Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, was disliked within 30AU. Nevertheless, Fleming used Tony Hugill’s character, with his name unchanged, in the last of his Bond novels, The Man with the Golden Gun (1965).
Post-war, Fanny Hugill supported Tony while he worked his way to the top of Tate & Lyle. For 11 years she managed a Citizens’ Advice Bureau, and was a vice-president of the WRNS Benevolent Fund; later in life she refused to let macular degeneration curtail her interests.
In 2001 she had a memoir privately printed, Shaken and Stirred, and she contributed to several other books including Debs at War (2005). She began to give talks about the war, and placed her papers and her husband’s at the Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge.
In 2016 Fanny Hugill was appointed to the Légion d’honneur for her part in the liberation of France. Her husband Tony died in 1987 and she is survived by three daughters and a son.
Fanny Hugill, born January 22 1923, died September 28 2023
Richard R
Obit in the Times of 11 Oct 2023:
E X T R A C T
Fanny Hugill obituary
Wren officer who worked on the preparations for D-Day and plotted the vast allied armada on the night it crossed the Channel
… Fanny Tudor Imogen Gore Browne was born at home in Eaton Square, London, in 1923, the fourth child of Colonel (later Sir) Eric Gore Browne and his wife Imogen, née Booth. Her father had won the DSO commanding a (Territorial) battalion of the Post Office Rifles during the First World War, afterwards becoming a director of Williams & Glyn’s, bankers to the Southern Railway, of which he became chairman. Fanny was educated at Camden House School and then Southover Manor School in Sussex, not very happily, and finally at Queen’s Gate, Kensington…
… After VE Day, the headquarters moved to Minden in Germany, but in 1946 Fanny persuaded the navy to release her so she could marry. She and Hugill were wed that year at St Martin-in-the-Fields off Trafalgar Square, with the reception at the Charing Cross Hotel courtesy of the Southern Railway. Tony Hugill died in 1987. She is survived by their four children: Olivia; Victoria, a solicitor; Sarah; and Charles, an advertising executive…
Fanny Hugill, Légion d’Honneur, D-Day Wren officer, was born on January 22, 1923. She died on September 28, 2023, aged 100
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/fanny-hugill-obituary-wmgdvbhm0