M Y
y Life and the City.
ou might think that
the name Furzland sounds German or stems from the older name for a gorse bush, furze. Well neither is true the name dates back to 1500 when John of Fursland‘s birth was recorded and for the next 400 years the family lived in South Devon. Through the years parts of the family altered the spelling to Firsland, Furzeland and our own version. After having enlisted in the army at 16, my father survived the First World War serving in Ireland and then in France and Belgium. He often talked of be- ing shot at more frequently between 1919 and 1921 by ―friendly farmers‖ as he escorted German prisoners of war back to Cologne in train cattle trucks. His sympathy for the enemy was enforced by the meagre food rations on which they were forced to live for so long. His attitude probably helped shape my life.
A
fter being ―demobbed he worked for several years for the
Mildmay family of Flete House- Lord Mildmay was the MP for Plymouth and a director of several banks. It was thanks to him and his connections that during the
depression my father and his younger brother were able to move to London and get jobs with the Westmin- ster Bank and it was in St Bartholomew‘s hospital in the City of London that I was born and christened in its church, St Bartholomew‘s the Great. (Coincidentally Sir Walter MIldmay-Chancellor of the Exchequer under Edward VI is buried there).
W
ith war approaching we moved away from the Smith-
field market, Jewish fur district in the City, to the relative security of North London, taking advantage of the newly extended Bakerloo Line to live between Kingsbury and Harrow. I remember, living fairly close to Hendon and Stanmore, the sirens warning of the approaching bombers and the sky full of large numbers of bombers, fighters and barrage balloons. My mother and I left London for a break to stay with my aunt and cousin in Gillingham and the first night we were they we looked down to the Medway watching the German bombers following the river to drop their bombs on Chatham dockyards. Later we spent school holidays with another aunt in Devon and the only Germans (and Italians) we saw there were working on the farms and kicking a football with the village kids on Wednesday afternoons.
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