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Major General Keer was a brief resident of the town after a colonial career.  In 1891 he, his wife Eliza, and a daughter Honoria were lodging with Miss Harriett Pearce at Ash Villa in Fore Street.  How long he stayed in the town is not clear and by 1901 he, his wife and another daughter Louisa were living in Malvern Link in Worcestershire.

Jonathan Keer was born in Raydon Suffolk and he was educated in Colchester (1).  He applied for a cadetship in the East India Company army in 1844/5 and became an ensign in 1845.  He was promoted to Lieutenant in 1853 and was in the 60th Native Infantry which was at Umballa and the regiment showed signs of disaffection at the time of the Indian Mutiny; promotion to Captain followed in 1861 and to Major in 1866, and in that year he was Deputy Assistant Commissary General 1st Class in Saugor (2).  He was made Lieutenant Colonel in 1871 and became an honorary Major General when he retired in May 1880.  He married his wife Eliza Somerville in the Free Church of Scotland in Calcutta in 1877 (3).

General Keer and his wife then lived in Canada where Mrs Keer was actively involved in social work setting up The Toronto Mission that worked with the poor of the city (4).  Another daughter Olga, born in India and educated in England, was a graduate of the Boston City Hospital, and she lived with her parents in St. Catherine’s until they returned to England around 1897.  Olga later was posted to Egypt, England (1894-99), and South Africa where she received medals for her work during the Boer War, before she returned to Canada and became Matron in Chief of the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service in Toronto in 1905 (5).

After time in Budleigh Salterton and Malvern, Jonathan and his wife moved to Glasgow, (Eliza was from a Scottish family) and they died in Glasgow in 1907 and 1921 respectively and are buried in the Western Necropolis.

Their daughter Honoria Somerville Kerr was born in Toronto in December 1883 and she studied medicine in Glasgow from 1903 and graduated MB ChB in 1910.  She served in WW1 and received the Croix du Guerre, French Medaille d’Honneur and the Serbian Order of St. Sava, and subsequently had a distinguished medical career (6).  She died in London in 1969. 

Compiled and Researched by Roger Lendon, © 2010

(1)1841 census

(2)Hart’s Army List

(3)The papers of Honoria Somerville Keer. See http://cheshire.cent.gla.ac.uk/

(4)Extract from the Huron Expositor, Dec 12 1890

(5)The Canadian Nurse, Vol.6, January 1910

(6)www.123people.co.uk/

91 BS-B-00025 Biography any