Soldier, toymaker, globetrotter . . . the baronet’s son who broke the mould

MY FATHER was born with a strong non-conformist streak: as a young boy, he would repeatedly greet his mother’s admonishments to wear braces for dinner by brazenly sporting a belt instead.

The second son of Sir Edward Oswald Every, the 11th baronet of Egginton, he was blessed with a life of privilege and a childhood spent between the family seat, Egginton Hall near Derby, another rambling home on the Berkshire Downs and a splendid London townhouse.

Father always insisted his first memory was, as a toddler in London, hearing the muffled rumble of the guns of World War I from across the Channel in 1918.

By the time of World War II, after Harrow and London University, he saw active service of his own. Dispatched first to India, then Burma, he was charged with supervising a battalion of mules carrying reinforcements to the troops (he’s pictured in his military uniform). Never had he met such prima donnas, he later recalled, although he liked to say he always got the better of his stubborn animal charges.

Despite what he referred to as a couple of ‘close encounters’ with the Japanese, Father narrowly avoided capture, although he succumbed to a bout of malaria so severe it nearly killed him.

What a grey, dismal and wet place England seemed to him once he returned. And so, much to his parents’ disapproval, he took himself off to Cape Town, where in the space of two years he met, married and divorced my mother and became dad to me, his only daughter.

The end of my parents’ brief marriage was not without acrimony and initially I saw him only at weekends. Then, aged 14, I went to live with him permanently in Vanderbijlpark outside Johannesburg, where he was the architect and town planner. I discovered Dad worked hard and played hard — there was certainly no shortage of girlfriends — and had many varied hobbies, one of which became a rather surprising moneymaking enterprise. His architect’s eye had been fascinated by a marionette someone had brought me from Hamleys toyshop in London, and soon he was making his own to sell to fascinated locals. Over time, that morphed into putting on his own shows, featuring local Afrikaans characters who jostled happily alongside more traditional fairytale figures such as Hansel and Gretel. In his early 50s, Dad decided to move closer to England and his family, settling on the Algarve in Portugal, where he purchased his dream home in 1967. Back then, it was a very different place to what it is now and my father was only the sixth person in a 40-mile stretch of coast to own a car. The mail was delivered to the mayor — who also happened to run the local cafe — and kept in a shoebox. Father set up as a landscape gardener, developing a passion for water lilies that, over the years, would see him lauded as an expert.

He still found plenty of time to travel, visiting almost every country and continent. Nothing fazed him — not even sleeping in a youth hostel in Vietnam that had rats falling from holes in the roof on to his face while he slept.

For his 90th birthday, he wanted the family to gather in the disputed territory of Kashmir, a place he’d fallen in love with — there were no takers for that, sadly! By the time his centenary came around, he contented himself with a celebration in London and then the Algarve.

Despite his age, he was still putting us all to shame: adding up figures faster than I could enter them into a calculator, and following stock markets on his iPad.

At 102, he fell and broke a hip and it is testament to his optimism and strength of will that he lived for another six months, firmly believing he’d get back to working in his beloved garden.

What a wonderful, remarkable, true English gentleman he was. Charles every was born January 20, 1916, died June 15, 2018, aged 102.