GEORGE GEE
Who was George Gee?
Family Tree
Funeral reports say that he was born at Ripley in Derbyshire right on the edge of the Derbyshire Dales where his father Samuel Gee was a small builder and eventually created one of the biggest and best known constructional concerns in Great Britain.
The 1901 census shows his father at age 43 was married to Annie age 41 and they had four children: Ada Helen age 14, George age 12, John 10 and Wilfred 2 they also had Samuels mother Catherine age 83 living with them.
The 1911 census shows George as a 23 year old joiner in the construction industry married for three years to his wife Mary who was 23 and born in Driffield, Yorkshire at that time they had two boys Francis Norman Gee who was 2 years 11 months (Whoops-married just in time!) and Ronald Julian Gee who was 10 months old.
In 1926 he stood as a candidate for Derby Town Council but was defeated.
George went to London as a representative of Gee Walker & Slater in 1923 it is said that he made lots of money developing Hackney Marshes crucially learning the art of “pile driving” which lead to contracts for the Adelphi Theatre and Embankment Project.
When the Adam Brothers had developed the Embankment in the 1700’s it almost bankrupted them. In the 1930’s when the houses in the steep streets down from the Adelphi Theatre to the Thames Embankment started slipping down towards the Thames, George was in there with his pile driving and sorting out the problem and rebuilding parts of the area including the old Adelphi Theatre which he knocked down and built a new Adelphi Theatre.
He carefully saved the bricks from the old theatre which ended up in 1938/39 being used to build his state of the art dairy complex at Warren Farm, Little Horwood. A prized Robert Adam fireplace that he installed in his newly built Manor House in Little Horwood was in later years when split up into apartments was sold by its owner for £250,000 after buying his apartment for £250,000.
Newspaper cuttings after his death on the 24th February 1943 say that he also constructed the Saville Theatre, Lansdown House, in Berkley Square and the London County Hall extension.
They say his firm had rendered great service to the War Effort by building aerodromes and undertaking other constructional work of considerable magnitude and he was owner of thousands of acres of farmland in the Home Counties. In 1935 he was associated with the gift of £20,000 to Derbyshire Royal Infirmary for an erection of a new block of buildings in memory of his father Samuel Gee to be known as “The Gee Block”.
In 1936 he made the double Atlantic crossing as a passenger on the German Airship Hindenburg.
1937/38he hired the White House and stables at Little Horwood as a hunting lodge for the winter hunting season with the Whaddon Chase Hunt.
During that time he bought 1000 acres of farmland all on high ground where masts were later erected including Warren Farm where my father and mother worked and Manor Farm where the signals camp was erected which was connected with Whaddon Hall. His son also bought the farm at Creslow near Whitchurch at the top of a steep hill where another set of radio masts were erected.
There was huge activity in Little Horwood and he put out a story in the village that he had struck a bet with Lord Rothschild of £1000 that he would build a new manor house with stables and occupy before the new hunting season. We know that huge brick orders at Calvert Brickworks bound for London were diverted to Little Horwood via Swanbourne station.
Just as Captain Ridley’s Shooting Party was the cover for Bletchley Park so George Gees Hunting Party was the cover for all the activity in the Little Horwood outpost activity. Indeed we know from an electrician who worked for Bletchley Park that a huge new electricity supply pipe was set up in the middle of the old Manor Farmhouse for the purpose of running “The Bombe Machines” if anything happened to Bletchley Park.
George Gee soon had 3000 pigs and also a superb newly erected state of the art dairy at Warren Farm, Little Horwood, much of it built with bricks from the Old Adelphi Theatre in London which Gee had rebuilt in the 1930’s. Gee had made a great deal of money developing Hackney Marshes where he learned the art of “Pile Driving” in construction, so when the Adam Brothers construction of the Embankment and it’s buildings started slipping downhill into the Thames in the 1930’s he rebuilt much of the Area with his Pile Driving Techniques and when he built his Manor House at Little Horwood he put in his own “Adam Fireplace”, dare I say nicked from his redevelopment.
I have a photo of my mother delivering churns of milk from the Warren Farm Dairy to the officer’s mess at Manor Farm.
Gee created local food supplies not only for Little Horwood Signals but also for Whaddon Hall and the airfield he built for RAF Little Horwood and the local area generally, so probably Bletchley Park as well. He used train loads of bomb damage from London as foundations for the airfield.
Later Gee employed land girls of which my mother was one and Italian prisoners of war on the farms and created huge employment in the local area.
My father was in Little Horwood Home Guard who used George Gee’s top floor of his Mansion to survey the whole parish and they used Gee’s stables as their depot. Every Sunday morning they went to Whaddon Hall for Drill and Rifle Target Practice.
Gee had also built on the signals camp a huge brick building camouflaged by trees at the signals camp, the front of which was a vehicle maintenance and repair shop, but at the rear was the Radio Workshop where radio sets for agents were assembled, just as at Whaddon Hall.
Geoffrey Pigeons book “The Secret Wireless Wars” says almost everything that happened with wireless activities passed through Richard Gambia Parry’s desk and we know he always loved hunting but he needed someone with resources to construct things quickly and provide food supplies and that man was his hunting mate George Gee, not only with a huge construction company but also married to his second wife Polly who was the daughter of an American Property Multimillionaire.
Also in funeral reports it was said that he farmed on a large scale with holdings in Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire and Sussex and had converted a good deal of land to food production. He was a noted breeder of Ayrshire and Friesian Cattle, Middle and Large White Pigs.
He was president of several agricultural associations in North Bucks as well as president of the Winslow Horse Society. His last act was a donation of £250 to the Wolverton Urban District Appeal for the Merchant Navy Comforts Fund in thanksgiving for the safe return of his wife from America.
What Sort of Personality was George Gee?
The reverend Guy Tearle chaplain to the forces said at his funeral “I have known George for 25 years”, and then he said with exceptional eloquence and directness “George Gee was a tremendous realist who was absolutely free from all shallow pettiness and selfish sham”. “He intensely disliked fulsome flattery or extravagant eulogy”, “a figure of tremendous personality and vitality whom god had given a brain as clear as crystal”. “Many knew him for his undoubted genius as a captain of industry and as a builder and architect of a large industrial concern, his grasp of public affairs and his generous support to agricultural science. A big man in body, intellect and outlook free from that spirit of contempt which some men showed for men who were not so well endowed as they. He had a great sense of humour and his laughter was infectious but never in any circumstances had he heard him tell a lewd joke”.
His youngest son Flight Lieutenant George Michael Gee had been taken prisoner in April 1942 so was absent from the funeral but he subsequently escaped and was about 15 months behind enemy lines before he was able to reach the allied lines in Italy in December 1944. He married in Pattishall church in January 1945 a Miss Betty Shead. Earlier in the war George Michael Gee had been fined 15 shillings for using a motor vehicle the lights on which were not adequately screened in March 1940. His father was fined 15 shillings for allowing the vehicle to be used in that condition and was ordered to pay 15 shillings costs, the expenses of a Winslow police officer who was a witness.
His elder son Francis Norman Gee of Wakefield Lawn of Potterspury married Sheila Jackson-Stopps of Wood Burcote Court, Towcester at St. Georges, Hanover Square.
He was named executor in his fathers Will which was proved in Llandudno and totalled £600,000 and he had been left the land at Little Horwood after his father’s death.
In 1951 Francis Norman Gee was found shot dead in a wood on his estate at Potterspury with a shotgun near at hand. He left a widow and a two year old son.
At his funeral in June 1951 at Little Horwood it was said that he was a racehorse owner who farmed 3000 acres, he hunted with the Whaddon Chase and in May been appointed joint Master of the Grafton Hunt. He was buried in his father’s grave at Little Horwood with a huge replica of his father’s manor house as a grave stone which alas has been left to decay.
George’s middle son Ronald had occupied Creslow Manor where radio masts were erected to pass messages to the Generals in Europe and where the Whaddon Chase Hunt met regularly both before the war and after the war. The wireless aerials were used by Hanslope Park until 1993.
In 1953 Ronald went missing and after extensive police searches with dogs and dragging ponds and he was found in a “Stuke” of straw having shot himself. Rumours were that he was involved in a financial scandal where he had sold the farm back to the Government naming his own price and leased it back to himself for a peppercorn rent. He is buried in Hoggeston churchyard.