Cyril Ray, who died in 1991, was best known in his latter years as a writer on wine. He wrote books about Bollinger, Chateau Lafite-Rothschild and Chateau Mouton-Rothschild, among others. However, his back-story is interesting.
Born in Lancashire in 1908, the son of an optician, he went to Manchester Grammar School and Jesus College Oxford. He left Jesus after a year to get a job when his family could no longer pay for him. He had a succession of jobs: teaching, working in a riding school, a short service commission in the RAF, working in a shop and running a cinema in Manchester. Through this last job he got to know reporters on The Manchester Guardian and in 1936 he was taken on as a reporter.
At the outbreak of war he became one of the paper’s war correspondents covering the North Africa landings in 1942 and the Eighth Army’s Italian campaign. On one occasion he assumed temporary command of a Canadian platoon in Italy when its officer and senior NCOs had been put out of action for which he was mentioned in dispatches. In 1944 he moved to the BBC as correspondent with the American airborne assault on Nijmegen and with the Third Army into Germany. There, too, he displayed conspicuous courage, and received an American army citation. After the war he returned to conventional journalism serving as a correspondent in Rome and Moscow between spells in London.
He was a socialist and resigned from The Spectator in 1962 when its then proprietor, Ian Gilmour, stood for Parliament as a Conservative. We will see how his interest in writing about wine came about tomorrow.
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Walter and Alfred Gilbey were two of the sons of the owner and often driver of a coach running between Bishop’s Stortford and London. The railways put paid to that business and they had to make their own way in life. They volunteered for civilian service in the Crimean War and on their return set up as retailers of wines and spirits in London. They were doubtless helped by their elder brother, Henry, who was already established as a wholesale wine-merchant. Henry, incidentally, is my great-great grandfather. His daughter, Ada Kate, married my great-grandfather in 1887.
To be continued tomorrow.