TILLEY

Arthur Herbert Tilley

 

Arthur Herbert (Herb) Tilley, elder brother of Edward Tom, was born on 18 June 1873 to Thomas Tilley (1849-1936) and Annie Tyley (1849-1914). He married Edith Anna Look, who was born in 1876 and was the daughter of George and Anna Look, on 1 December 1898 in Ditcheat. During the 1st World War, Herb served as Company Sergeant Major, Warrant Officer Class 2 in the Army Service Corps. The officers and men of the ASC were the unsung heroes of the British Army in the Great War. It was the ASC’s job to provide soldiers food, equipment and ammunition using horses and motor vehicles, railways and waterway.

 

Herb and Edith had 11 children including Philip Lewis who died in Burma at the end of the World War 2.  Their daughter Frances Winifred was offered a job by her uncle, Harold Tilley, who had gone to Brazil to work for the London and Brazilian Bank, which she took up in 1919 (see letter, below, her parents sent on the same boat she sailed on). Winifred was governess to her uncle and aunt's three boys: John, Michael and Peter. When Harold and Doris Tilley returned to England, Winifred stayed in Brazil and taught in various places, including St Paul's School. She married Hugh Cyril Murdoch (born in Leigh, Lancashire, 4 April 1901), who had come out to Brazil in 1929 working for Charles Hahlo (textiles) of Bradford, Yorkshire. He settled in São Paulo having spent the initial two years in Rio. In 1933 he married Frances Winifred in São Paulo. Winifred as she was known gave birth to Norton Lawrence Murdoch on 19 February 1935 in São Paulo and she sadly died the next day.

 

Herb died aged 53 on 14 July 1926 following an operation on a perforated gastric ulcer at the Devizes and District Hospital in Wiltshire exactly a month after Edith died aged 49 of septicaemia and severe anoemia at Forbes Fraser Hospital, Bath, on 14 June. The couple are buried at Edington Priory Church.