June 2nd 2025

Sir Neville 'Kim' Hall's Childhood Memoirs

In my November blog of 2017 I wrote about the unpublished childhood memoirs of my great-uncle Kim and put up the first chapter in the WTDW Original Articles section of this website.  I said that I would be posting the subsequent fifteen chapters 'over the coming months' and started well with chapters 2, 3 and 4 put up in January, March and May 2018 respectively.  There then followed an embarrassing lull before chapter 5 was posted eighteen months later in November 2019.  It has been on my conscience since then to complete the task and I have finally done so, more than seven years later!  Chapters 6 to 19 are now on the WTDW Original Articles page as a single document.

If I am completely honest, I have found Great-uncle Kim's style of writing to be frustrating in that many of his recollections seem to promise interest but sadly fall short, partly because of a lack of information.  It is almost as if he believes that the reader has some foreknowledge of his life, and one is left desperately wanting him to explain outcomes in more detail.

As I mentioned in my November 2018 blog, his childhood was blighted by chronic illness that had a profound effect on his education.  He had extremely robust and healthy older and younger brothers, Bobby and Douglas, which cannot have helped although he does not ever describe himself as being bitter about this and was clearly very proud of their subsequent achievements.  What does become clear, however, is that he was desperately spoilt by his parents and was subsequently, what would now be described as, a 'difficult child' refusing to be taught any subject that did not interest him.  This did little to enamour him to his teachers and he frequently refers to the fact that he was not liked by his masters, which appears to have given him perverse pleasure, most obvious in chapter 9 but also mentioned elsewhere in his recollections.  In his final chapter, he says that there was "no doubt that the short time that I spent at Oundle was my salvation" but, once again. we are left guessing as to how and why.

I will leave those who wish to read his memoirs in full to do so.  There are interesting chapters on Keith Marischal, a Scottish Baronial Country House at which he stayed (chapter 8), and Dunglass, the ancestral home of the Halls for 232 years from 1687 (chapter 9).  There are also several interesting turns of phrase that I had to Google, the most delightful of which was 'to tap someone's claret' (end of chapter 11), which means to hit someone and bloody their nose; something that his father encouraged him to do to any Liberal supporter at school at the time of one of the general elections held in 1911!