The Hampshire Family Historian | Volume 50 No.1 | June 2023

Searchers

his most famous book, The Soul of a People, about the Burmese, their society and their faith, which is still in print today. Perhaps more surprisingly, his death certificate also contained errors, three of them - his age, name and date of death - which were corrected in August 1917. Amy Edith TYRREL , a nurse from Grosvenor House, Southampton was present at the death, so presumably his health had been poor for a while. But earlier that day Harold Fielding Hall had had another visitor, a London solicitor, Herbert Bowring LAWFORD . He’d been summoned to draw up a new will. Harold had been estranged from his wife for some years, though he maintained occasional contact with his two children, Margaret, ten and John who had just celebrated his ninth birthday. The new will made no mention of wife or children. Instead, everything was to go to Nancy, the four year old daughter of his cousin, Thomas Cyril MYERS , a dentist living in Eastbourne. Perhaps because Thomas Cyril was notoriously inept with money, Harold appointed the Public Trustee as executor to the will, and ‘to invest the residue and stand possessed of the same in trust’ for his heir, little Nancy MYERS . The money was significant because by the time she was 21, Nancy Myers, beneficiary of this death bed change of will, was a Bohemian art school drop out, living in Fitzrovia. She had been unable to finish her studies at the Slade through lack of funds - her parents had not told her about the money that would soon be hers. She was already involved with a young estate agent with ambitions to be a

poet: Lawrence DURRELL . The Harold Fielding Hall money helped pay for their years in Corfu - immortalised by him in Prospero’s Cell and by his younger brother Gerald in My Family and Other Animals. It also paid for publication of works by Henry MILLER and Anaïs Nin in Paris before the war. So that deathbed decision in the Bell Inn, Brook, was significant for more than just his immediate family. Nancy Myers was my mother and I wrote about her marriage to Lawrence Durrell in Amateurs in Eden, Portrait of a Bohemian Marriage which was published by Virago in 2012, the centenary of Durrell’s and her birth. Harold Fielding Hall and his legacy were mentioned there but the mystery of why he had changed his will hours before his death has never been solved. Now I am writing about him, and his extraordinarily complicated and vivid life, both in Burma and in England. I am getting closer to providing a plausible explanation for what happened. Some of the answers, I am sure, are to be found in his connection with the New Forest. For the last years of his life he seems to have had no permanent home. He usually gave his address as 4 Essex Court, which was a firm of barristers (now Essex Court) near the Middle Temple. Occasional letters are from a small hotel in Chagford, Devon and the Grand Hotel, Torquay. And of course, the Bell Inn. Had he been there for days, months, or even longer? Or, since the nurse was from Grosvenor House in Southampton, had he only just turned up there? Who were the owners of the Bell Inn and have any records of their business in 1917 survived? Continued at the bottom of page 25

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