Chavasse, Double VC

Leafing through the annual magazine of Liverpool College one day in 1989, I realized for the first time that Noel Chavasse was one of the school’s most famous Old Boys. A few days later, in Liverpool Cathedral, though I must have passed it hundreds of times, I noticed the carved memorial to Bishop Francis James Chavasse, founder of the building. The two facts came together in my mind in an instant that I can still recall. From that moment my search for Noel Chavasse’s story and its realization in this book were inevitable.

 From the very beginning of my research I have received the most generous and unstinting help, from individuals and from organizations, that any author could wish for.

 Firstly, I owe an enormous debt to the Chavasse family; to Edgar Chavasse, whose enthusiastic response to my early tentative enquiries about his uncle Noel was the means of opening many doors. He first pointed me in the direction of the archive of Noel’s letters and other family papers held in the Bodleian Library in Oxford; he read the typescript and made many valuable suggestions, and allowed me to peruse and quote from his father Bernard’s papers. He and his wife Helen entertained me at their home, responding with a keen interest to my questions. A similar welcome was accorded me by Mr and Mrs John Chavasse in Oxford, where I was allowed access to many of his father Christopher’s volumes of family photographs and boxes of papers, and to the papers of his aunts May and Marjorie, and by Miss Lois Foster-Carter in Yorkshire, who lent me documents and photographs relating to her mother, Noel’s sister Dorothea.