Nat Gould

Cecil Henry Brent Good

Cecil Henry Brent Good was born on 12 April 1880 at Fawley, Hythe in Hampshire, the son of the Reverend John Henry Good, Vicar of Hythe and his wife Elizabeth Anne nee Hamond. He was educated at Abingdon Grammar School in Berkshire (1).

In 1908 he was appointed from the Hampshire (Carabiners) Imperial Yeomanry to the Hampshire Regiment retaining his rank of Second Lieutenant (2). He was promoted to Captain in 1919 (3) and later to the rank of Major.

He married Irene Fillingham Saxby in 1911 at Abingdon, Berkshire (4).

Their daughter was Cecily Audrey Good, who was born in 1914 and died in 2009. She married Sir Basil Gould in 1948 and became Cecily, Lady Gould.

Major Good was a keen yachtsman, a mainstay of the Royal Solent Yacht Club, and for a time its Commodore. In 1920 he saw Gossip on the slip of a Lymington boatyard. She was a thirteen-ton gaff-rigged cutter built in 1899 by P. Harris of Rowhedge in Essex, and sister ship to Firecrest, the yacht in which Alain Gerbault made the first single-handed crossing of the Atlantic from east to west in 1923. He bought Gossip and sailed her home across the Solent to Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight.

He was known to his family as "Dombom". In her book Gossip: the Biography of a Yacht Cecily Gould wrote of her father "Dombom was a gentle master. He seldom shouted or swore at us, which is why we were happy to crew for him after 50 years together." The book is as much a biography of Major Good as it is of the yacht.

Cecil Henry Brent Good died in 1976.

(1) Census Returns 1881 and 1901.

(2) The London Gazette dated 25 August 1908, 6225.

(3) Supplement to The London Gazette dated 4 September 1908.

(4) Irene Fillingham Saxby was born in Abingdon in 1891, the daughter of George Saxby and his wife nee Emily Ellen Fletcher. He was a brewery director of Abingdon, born in 1852 at West Dean in Sussex. His wife was born in 1848 in Dalston, London. (Census Return 1901.)