Dame Judi Dench has discovered her mother’s mystery Irish family hailed from landed gentry near Dublin Airport.
“It was Co. Dublin in the parish of Swords. It was quite a substantial big house so they would have been a well-to-do family. Handwritten records of land kept by the Office of the Ulster King of Arms of the landed families in Ireland had notes on her Bolton ancestors, who married into a Danish family back in the 1700s.
In Trinity College in Dublin, battlefields historian Peter Barton reveals how his first gallantry medal was awarded after his first taste of battle action in March 1917, when he came under heavy German shelling in Ypres in Belgium. Seven months later on October 14th, 1917, his second medal came after a raid on the German trenches south of Arras near the Hindenburg Line, Reginald Dench, now an acting captain, is charged with organising a raid to survey German trenches to get vital intelligence.
Judi discovered her father’s lifelong knee injury stemmed from this time when he damaged his leg during training exercises in Trinity College delaying his deployment.