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Beryl de Galleani Nearly 100 with a bucketful of stories to tell about her past


97-year-old Beryl de Galleani was born in Malaysia and travelled to nursery school in a rickshaw. Aged six she was brought to England and was educated in two different boarding schools and by a governess in Scotland. She became a driver in London during World War Two and was outside Buckingham Palace on D Day waving at the King and Winston Churchill. She got married, helped run a pig farm, a hotel, and finally retired to Dartmouth. Now she spends her days watching the Dart from her picture window in Above Town. Steph Woolvin has been finding out more…


her friend on the phone about “a marvellous lunch” she has been to this week. She lives in a beautiful house overlooking the river with the sun beaming into her living room. You wouldn’t think she was nearly 100 with a bucketful of stories to tell about her past. “One of my best memories was shouting “We want the King!” standing outside Buckingham Palace on D Day. There were thousands and thousands of us in that crowd,” she says. Beryl remembers meeting at The Berkeley Hotel and going out onto the streets: “Someone picked me up and put me and a friend on the roof of a van. We bumped along The Mall; it was so exciting.” When war broke out Beryl was


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sent to the War Office in London to work for FANY - First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. She drove a staff car and would take top brass to various destinations in the capital and around Britain. “We got a month’s training in Camberley, then it was straight into the job. I enjoyed the responsibility and I loved being in London. I made plenty of new


petit, dainty figure with a pearly voice, Beryl de Galleani is sat on her sofa chatting to


friends - the other girls and I would go out all the time after work and would often go to the Ritz for dinner as a three course meal was only five shillings, we felt like millionaires!” She says they got used to the bombing and general war life and thought nothing of walking along with tin hats and gas masks. “I lived near Sloane Square and I remember looking out the


“All in all I can’t complain. I’ve had a pretty interesting life!”


top floor window one day and seeing my first doodlebug. I heard a funny noise and saw what looked like a tiny aeroplane with flames coming out of its tail. I later learnt it was a mini flying bomb sent from Germany. You were always okay until the doodlebug cut out, that meant it had ran out of fuel. You had five seconds to run before it would fall and explode. So many people said the war was the happiest time of their lives; girls got important jobs for once and people met their husbands but I lost so many friends


in that war - we were constantly receiving news of another poor soul who had lost his life. My age group was pretty much wiped out.” Beryl was born in a place called


Batugajah in Malaysia. Her father was sent out there after World War One to create new tin mines. They weren’t out there very long before moving again to Kuala Lumpur. “I liked it there very much. My sister Shirley was 18 months younger and we had so much fun playing together, it was bliss for children. We went to a nursery school called Miss Skinners and were taken by rickshaw. All the children were English, like us, they had dads working over there too.” When children reached the age of six they had to leave the nursery so the sisters were sent to England and spent the next 10 years living with different relations whilst their parents stayed out in Kuala Lumpur. “We stayed on the edge of


Exmoor and were sent to boarding school – it was a sad little place, everyone was miserable because their parents were miles away, we all had that in common. Everyone went home at holidays and weekends to grandmothers, aunts or cousins.”


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