For almost 200 years there had been a doctor resident in Bow. I was the twenty-ninth.
This is our story
THE MEDICAL GENTLEMEN OF BOW
The family of William Robert Warren, Surgeon of Bow: his children
Only the first three of William and Emma Warren's children survived to adulthood.
Their eldest,
Frances Hicks, married
Mottram Fellowes Andrew.
John Warren was born in Bow in 1843. He attended boarding school in Crediton, but after the death of his mother when he was 13, he was educated at the Royal Medical Benevolent College in Epsom. From there he went to St John's College Oxford (BA 1868). He was Domestic Chaplain to the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos before being appointed Vicar of Stowe in Buckinghamshire in 1875. In about 1900 he resigned that post and went to Oregon in USA where he worked in the Episcopal Church for about six years. He then returned to Scotland and was Chaplain in charge of Altyre (near Gordonstoun) until 1912. Altyre was the estate of the Gordon-Cumming family. (In 1890 Sir William Gordon Cumming was disgraced after allegedly cheating at a baccarat game involving the Prince of Wales.)
He married Ann Broom (whose parents farmed at Uffculme) in 1869. They had six children. Two of his sons emigrated to Oregon where they farmed.
Ann and John Warren died in Redhill, Surrey, in 1908 and 1916 respectively.
William de Mey Warren was born in Bow in 1844. He too went to school in Crediton and to the Royal Medical Benevolent College.
After a while in the Navy he emigrated to Australia. He married Selina Jane Cornish Horrell, a distant cousin, in St Kilda, now part of Melbourne, in 1884. He made enough money to build the Gracedale Guesthouse in Healesville Victoria, but had to sell it in 1892, after which he was the agent for the hotel. He died in 1910 aged 66. His son (Rev Hubert Ernest de Mey Warren b1885) was a missionary amongst the aborigines in Groote Eylandt, Northern Territory but died in a plane crash in 1934 in the Bass Strait when flying from Tasmania to Melbourne.
Hubert Warren's son (and William Warren of Bow's great grandson) David Ronald de Mey Warren (1925-2010) is famed as the inventor of the aircraft's "Black Box".
