My father, Walter Garner, who has died aged 89, was a successful businessman whose character and outlook were much influenced by his wartime experiences as an evacuee from London.
He was born in Battersea, south-west London, son of Florence (nee Barrett), a seamstress, and Walter Garner, a bus conductor, later an inspector, with London Transport. In 1939, my father won a junior county scholarship to Sir Walter St John’s school, “Sinjuns”, in Battersea. The school was relocated to Godalming in Surrey for the duration of the second world war, taking over part of Godalming county school and Charterhouse school.
He later wrote down his recollections of Godalming for his granddaughter’s school project. He stayed first at Park Hatch, an estate near Godalming, where the ranger enlisted the Sinjuns boys as beaters and carriers in a deer cull. The ranger gave him a hoof, which he kept.
Later the boys moved in to the town. People everywhere were in uniform, with three Canadian army camps in the area. He helped to dig an anti-tank ditch and remembered with affection the buzz of the Tiger Moth biplanes training RAF pilots.
There were “shortages of everything”. On one occasion an old boy – then piloting planes across the Atlantic – brought real bananas from the US as a prop for the school play. Walter found raw carrots to be a good substitute for sweets and always liked their taste.
On D-day he saw hundreds of planes in the air, some pulling gliders, all heading for France. It was all too often that the headmaster would announce at morning assembly the death in action of an old boy they all knew.
Walter returned to his parents and sister Joyce in Battersea in 1944. After the war, he did national service in the Royal Engineers and worked for Unilever before joining the sports and shoe company Dunkelman & Son (DASCO), where he became sports director. He left to start his own business, Hammers-Lee Sport, in 1982.
He met Lily Hammersley on the boating lake in Battersea Park, and they married in 1952, going on to have two children, Jane and me. It was perhaps out of a sense of his own disrupted schooldays that my father greatly valued education, encouraging my sister and me in our own careers.
He gave up full-time work in the late 90s when Lily became ill with lupus, and he cared for her until her death in 2009. Walter is survived by Jane and me, and by three granddaughters, Alice, Kate and Rachel.
