On 4 September 2021, Susan Kearney, the daughter of an American GI stationed in Bodmin, and his wife, who he met while she was a trainee nurse at the town’s Emergency Medical Service Hospital during the Second World War, joined us via Zoom, live from the USA to deliver a talk about her parent’s romance. This personal story casts light on life in Bodmin during the American build-up to the D-Day Invasion, the intermingling of the lives of the American troops and local Cornish people, and the story of British war brides in general.
During the Second World War, after landing in Glasgow and 7 months of intensive training at Tidworth in Wiltshire, 15,000 men of the US Army 29th Infantry were marched to Devon and Cornwall. About 2,000 of these soldiers were housed at Victoria Barracks, Bodmin from July 1943 until their departure in the lead up to D-Day in May/June 1944. For a year, these strange-sounding, youthful, restless, homesick soldiers mixed with local people, sharing the uncertainty of life together with dances, parades, movies, talent nights, parties, blackouts and air raids, joys and dreams, fears and sorrows. It is this world that set the stage for roughly 70,000 marriages between US soldiers and British women, including the love story of Susan’s parents, Frank J. Kearney and Edith Doreen Govier.
Our speaker Susan Kearney is a retired English teacher who grew up in the Philadelphia area where her dad came from. In the 1970s she started to research her dad’s Irish lineage and then worked on her mother’s deep agricultural lineage in Devon and Cornwall. Upon retiring, she studied archival methods and volunteered at the Pennsylvania Historical Society. She is ever grateful for the rich history that came together the day the fates placed her parents on that street in Bodmin where they met, without which their first child born in 1948 and finally a dual citizen as of 2018, would not be here to dig into all this good history.