Newsletter 17 .pub - The Binns Family

The Brett Binns Family
Edward Brett Binns was the subject of a brief article in the
Autumn News Letter of 2007 (Issue 14) and investigations
have now established further connections.
It is now known that his grandfather, Joseph Binns,
was born in about 1814 in Aberdare, Glamorgan,
Wales. Joseph, who like his brothers, Watkin, Francis,
and John, was a blacksmith in Tipton, Staffordshire,
married Mary Hill and they brought up eight children in
Tipton. Interestingly between 1852 and 1858, their
three youngest children appear to have been born in
Monmouthshire, Wales.The eldest of their children
was John Binns (born c.1839) who in 1862, in Newport,
Wales, married Catherine Brett (born c. 1840 in
Wales). They lived in Pelsall, Staffordshire where he
had a career as a mechanical engineer. The birth of
their third child Edward Brett Binns was registered as
Edward Brett in West Bromwich in September Quarter
1867 and, as described in Issue 14, he was brought
up in Wales by his grandfather Edward Brett. Edward
Brett had Irish connections and it is interesting to
speculate that Joseph Binns, his paternal grandfather,
who was born in Aberdare, might have had an Irish
father.The story of the Brett Binns family is further enhanced
by the addition of the following thumbnail
sketch of Clarence Edward Brett Binns (I9984), contributed
by Rex Needle and previously published in
“Prominent People of Bourne”
“Many of us long for the adventurous life but circumstances
usually dictate that we settle for the routine,
ending up with a family and mortgage much the same
as everyone else. Tales of faraway places, acts of
derring-do and even heroism are therefore all the
more appealing when we read about them from the
comfort of the armchair and few of us can deny that
our lives would have been much richer if only we had
been prepared to have taken more chances when
young .Reading about the career of Clarence Edward
Brett Binns is particularly exciting because he was a
soldier, traveller and sportsman whose life story reads
like an episode from Boy’s Own Paper yet he died
quietly and almost forgotten in Bourne over 30 years
ago.
He was born at Grimsthorpe House, Grimsthorpe, Lincolnshire,
on 16th November 1897, son of Edward
Richard Binns who was estate agent to the first and
second earls of Ancaster. (Edward Richard Binns
worked for the Ancaster family for sixty years)
Clarence was educated at Charterhouse, one of Britain’s
most exclusive public schools based at Godalming,
Surrey, and after volunteering for military
service during the Great War of 1914-18, he was
commissioned in the King’s Own Royal Lancashire
Regiment, attaining the rank of captain and fighting
at Passchendale in Flanders between July and November
1917 which was among the bloodiest battles
of the war. He subsequently transferred to the newly
-formed Royal Flying Corps as a flight-lieutenant,
working as an observer, and during 500 hours of
flying time he crashed three times but escaped serious
injury. At the war’s end, he was appointed a
member of the special commission convened to find
the bodies of personnel from the RFC killed in action.
Returning to civilian life, he went to the Middle East
as an executive of the Persian Oil Company (now
the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company), surviving a serious
attack of typhoid fever before moving to Malaya as a
rubber planter for fifteen years and becoming one of
the pioneers in the production of palm oil. In 1936,
he moved to take over a 7,000 acre plantation in the
Northern Shan State of Burma where he employed
1,000 workers on the production of tung oil, used in
dyes, stains and wood varnish, and it was here, at
Maymyo, a colonial hill station, that he married his
wife Phyllis who had flown out from England to join
him.
The Second World War started in 1939 and when
the Japanese invaded Burma in 1942, the couple
lost their livelihood and all of their belongings. Mrs
Binns managed to escape by plane to England while
he trekked to safety in India and for three months his
wife did not know whether he was dead or alive. For
his work with the part time military forces while in
Malaya, Mr Binns was subsequently awarded the
T e r r i t o r i a l D e c o r a t i o n .
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