Oxshott War Memorials - WWII - Major Frederic Julian Doelberg

His grand-daughter Raine Bryant writes: Julian Frederic Doelberg born on 16th November 1901 and registered in the Lewisham District, Kent. He was the son of an English lady and a German. His father became a naturalised Briton in 1906.

His Service Number was 18318. Army records show his passing of the Associate Membership Examination of the Institution of Electrical Engineers in 1922. Serving in the Royal Engineers he was stationed in Singapore in 1934 to build the Changi barracks - which became the notorious Japanese prison camp in WW2.

After recall to the UK in 1936 due to the war threat he moved his wife Leslie, and daughter Anne to 12 Clockhouse Mead, Oxshott. Anne attended Bevendeen School.

He went on holiday to Germany with his wife during which he visited German relatives and spied on German military installations. It is understood that this spying was at his own initiative and proved to be of great help to the Allied cause.

Julian Frederic Doelberg
source: Raine Bryant

On the setting up of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers he transferred to this unit and was eventually posted to Crete with a reduction in rank to captain for a special mission. This is understood to be the demolition of bridges and other installations to delay the advance of the German forces during the Allied evacuation.

During this evacuation he was killed on 29th April 1941 by the Axis strafing of a boat in which he was repairing the engine in order that more Allied servicemen could leave. His grave is in the Phaleron War Cemetery between Piraeus and Athens airport.

He invented a silent loo flush and bullet-proof tyre, and tried to work out a way to save lives in a submarine tipped up and stuck in the mud off the English coast. (This is most likely the HMS Thetis in June 1939, as my mother remembers him with models and air pipes in the bath, trying to find a way to rescue it, without luck. She would have been aged 7). Some of his college exercise books and instruments are now owned by the British Science Museum.

Anne married and also lived in Clockhouse Mead in the last house on the left. Her two children also went to Bevendeen. Anne died 2008 in Cobham.

His name was spelt wrongly on the War Memorial on the Heath, but I managed to get a stonemason to change it in 2007, just before my mother died, as it had upset her and her mother ever since it was erected. I wonder if there is any way of preserving the stone as the whole memorial is getting very weathered now.