FAMOUS PAIR OF BROTHERS

Southland Times, Issue 24438, 19 May 1941, Page 12

FAMOUS PAIR OF BROTHERS

The Cunninghams

LONDON, April 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. Today Andrew is Admiral Sir Andrew Brown Cunningham, Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean; Alan is Lieuten-ant-General Alan Cunningham, commander of the East Africa forces. 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 brotherg 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, alter a long and bitter fight, he saw organs accepted throughout the Church of Scotland. He became the Moderator and principal of St. Mary's Theological College, St. Andrews, 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 for the old Britannia, in those days the equivalent to Dartmouth Naval College, and Alan passed on to Cheltenham College, then the chief preparatory school for 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 LientenantGeneral Sir James Marshal-Cornwall, who is representing the Army of the Middle East in the staff talks with the Turks.

Few of the Cunninghams’ classmates of those days recall much about the young brothers. They were both quiet, a characteristic they have retained.

Sir Andrew and 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 round 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 relations 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.