John Cherry INKSON b. 28 January 1917 Mary's Cottages, Monkstown Farm, Monkstown, Dublin
John Cherry [Jack] was the third child of George Harborow b. 29 Sep 1873 and Bridget Mary née Keatinge. At the time of his birth, the family would have been living in Lewisham, south east London, but perhaps George Harborow was at sea, Bridget Mary opted to travel 'home' to Ireland for his birth.
The mystery is his whereabouts in 1921 where he doesn't appear in the English census of that year even though the rest of the family does.
He followed his father into the Union Castle Line as a sea-going librarian but then joined the RAF where he stayed for the rest of his working life. It was while at sea that he probably met Joan Ismay Meaker, his future wife. She had been working in South Africa as a children's nanny and came home, aged 17, on the Warwick Castle in May 1935.
John Cherry doesn't appear in the 1939 register either but that was probably because he was in the RAF.
Although John Cherry knew Joan Ismay early on [and, it is rumoured, was even engaged to her], in the chaos of WWII she married a naval Lieutenant, Lawrence Edson Toogood, in April 1943. Just one year later he died when his motor torpedo boat, MTB 671, was sunk by gunfire from German destroyers off Cape Barfleur, part of the Cherbourg Peninsula.
John Cherry married Joan Ismay in the last quarter of 1945. Their family life would have been peripatetic as he was posted around the world with the RAF.
In the end John Cherry divorced Joan Ismay or vice versa. He subsequently remarried, possibly Margaret L B Hale in 1984, but there is no certainty to that.
