FAMOUS PAIR

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24605, 13 May 1941, Page 8

FAMOUS PAIR

ADMIRAL AND GENERAL THE CUNNINGHAMS NOTED GRAND-PARENT LONDON, Apl. 16. Nearly 50 years ago a Scots professor of anatomy at Trinity College, Dublin, sent his son Andrew to Edinburgh Academy with the instruction: “You’re going into the Navy.” A few years later he packed younger son Alan off to the same school, also with a final word about his future career. “You’re going into the Army.” Did ever a father choose more wisely for his sons? asks the Sunday Express. To-day Andrew is Admiral Sir Andrew

Browne Cunningham, Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean; Alan is Lieuten-ant-general Sir Alan Cunningham, who at any moment now may be at the gates of Addis Ababa. Between them they have given Mussolini more headaches than a dictator could have dreamed of a year ago. At Taranto, Sardinia, Genoa, and Matapan, the Libyan coast, and in a dozen other lesser actions, the admiral has shown the hollow mockery of the claim to “Mare Nostrum.” And General Alan, by his phenomenal sweep from Kenya through Harar, and across the Addis Ababa railway at Diredawa, has made a brotherly contribution to the crumbling of a ramshackle empire. Scottish Church Dispute The father who made this prophetic decision was Professor D. J. Cunningham, who held the Chair of Anatomy at Trinity College before going to Edinburgh to’ a similar appointment. He was a son of the manse —and of a fighting parson at that. It may be that the two brothers who are now doing so much to roll up Mussolini’s imperial map inherited their fighting spirit from their grandfather, Dr John Cunningham, D.D., LL.D., a famous, and at one time notorious, minister of the Church of Scotland. Dr Cunningham was the man who introduced instrumental music into the Scottish Church. That was in 1867 at Crieff, where he was the parish minister. The Crieff organ case was for a time the outstanding controversy of the church. His congregation was split over the innovation, which some called the invention of the devil, and the dispute went before the General Assembly of the Church, which voted against Cunningham. But he stuck to his organ, and after a long and bitter fight, he saw organs accepted throughout the Church of Scotland. He becan.e the moderator and principal of St. Mary’s Theological College, St. Andrew’s, and a prolific writer of church history. His grandsons have preferred .making history. Training Days Recalled These two boys who went to Edinburgh Academy did not stay long. After two years Andrew left to go to

Stubbington House, Fareham. Hampshire, to prepare tor the old Britannia, in those days the equivalent to Dartmouth Naval College, and Alan passed on to Cheltenham College, then the chief preparatory school tor Woolwich Military Academy. But during their brief stay at Edinburgh Academy they belonged to a remarkable group of class-mates. In those years it was also the school of Admiral Sir Percy Noble, now commanding the western approaches in the Battle of the Atlantic; Admiral Thompson, recently commander-in-chief Rosyth, and now at the Admiralty, and Lieutenant-general Sir James Mar-shall-Cornwall, who is representing the Army of the Middle East in the staff talks with the Turks. Few of the Cunninghams’ class-mates of those days recall much about the young brothers. They were both quiet, a characteristic they have retained. , , Sir 1 Andrew end Sir Percy Noble were in the same junior sports squad which practised for the annual school

sports on the famous Raeburn Place grounds. A Fine Runner In these events Alan distinguished himself as a runner—almost a foretaste of when he pushed 370 miles in a month from Kenya through Italian Somaliland. None of their old classmates can now recall whether the boys were still at the academy when the class in advanced studies groaned over Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall.” From their father they learned fishing both in Irish and Scottish streams, and are enthusiastic anglers. Alan, an accomplished rider to hounds, has the reputation of making a garden wherever he is stationed. He made one at Portsmouth, and is accredited with having flower beds around the battery in his command. His people are wondering if his roses will flourish at Addis Ababa. The brothers have another thing in common. They have always shunned the limelight. Friends, and even intimate relatives in Edinburgh, complain that Sir Andrew, in his refusal to talk about his great work with the destroyers in the last war—when he won the D.S.O. three times—is both of the Silent Scot and the Silent Service.