My father, Richard Dean, known as Dick, was born in 1887 at the Manor House near the village of Upholland in Lancashire, where his father, John, lived the life of a prosperous squire. The Dean family had lived in the area for many generations and the name comes from the nearby village of Dean; it means a valley or dell. John Dean's eldest child, Ellen, aged sixteen, was accidentally shot by a gamekeeper in 1894 and died a few days later. The game-keeper did not recover from the accident and died shortly afterwards. At the end of the Boer War, in 1901, there was a major slump in the value of farm produce and John Dean found himself in serious debt. In June 1902 he shot himself, accidentally or on purpose no one is quite sure. He left four sons and two daughters.

In 1902, following his father's death, Dick, now aged fifteen, had to leave Upholland Grammar School. He went to work for Parr's Bank, which later amalgamated with the Westminster Bank, in the nearby town of Wigan, at a salary of £20 a year, out of which he had to pay his train fare from Upholland. Dick's mother, Ann, and later his youngest brother, Joe, continued to farm Prescott Farm, which alone remained from the Manor House estate.

In August 1914, the first week of the Great War, Dick joined the cavalry, thinking, as many did, that the war would be over in a few months. He was extremely short-sighted, having inherited myopia from his mother, Ann Kerfoot. To pass the eyesight test for the army, Dick learned by heart the ‘Snellen Type’, the letters used in a standard eye test. Unfortunately – or I should say fortunately – during his basic training on horseback at Aldershot he rode straight at the colonel whom he could not see. His severe myopia was discovered and he was discharged from the army and returned to work at the bank. This near accident undoubtedly saved his life since there was little chance of survival for those cavalry charging German machine-guns.