Guy Simonds - Family Background

Family Background

Guy was born in Bury St Edmunds, England on April 23, 1903.

Simonds came from a military family: his great-grandfather had been in the Honourable East India Company, and his grandfather had been a major general. The Simonds family was related to Ivor Maxse and Lord Milner. On his maternal side, his grandfather William Easton was a wealthy Virginian horse breeder, who had moved to England, renting Ixworth Abbey. Eleanor "Nellie" Easton, his mother, was one of five daughters, of which four married army officers.

His father Cecil, a major, resigned from the army in fall 1911 (when Guy was 9) and moved his family to British Columbia, working as a surveyor for a railroad. Cecil's expectations of having his own survey company were frustrated by the requirement to pass local professional examinations. Re-joining the army at the start of World War I, Cecil was wounded in 1918, and demobilized in 1919 with the rank of colonel. The family spent the war in a rented house in Victoria. Guy's mother sold family possessions to make ends meet. Guy had to quit school for two years at age fourteen to help support the family. Graham speculates that the period of fatherlessness made him a "loner" and self-reliant.

Simonds had three siblings, Cicely, Peter and Eric. Eric (anecdotally an excellent rifle shot, having won prizes at Bisley) became a test pilot, but died in an air accident in July 1937 in England. Cicely worked as a secretary in the admiralty during the war. She and her daughter were killed by a V-1 (flying bomb) attack in June 1944.