Jack "Bush" Forrest

Old Cambrian Society

Jack "Bush" Forrest in the mid-1950s

Photogallery Jack "Bush" Forrest in the mid-1950s

Photos & text sent in by Meri Forrest

On 3rd July 2005, Webmaster received an e-mail message from Meri Forrest, widow of Jocelyn Martin Forrest who had been a pupil of the Prince of Wales School from 1949 to 1954.
Jocelyn's father was Jack "Bush" Forrest who was Deputy Headmaster at the School

Jack Raymond Forrest (nickname at the Prince of Wales School was Bush)
Born: 27th October 1898
At age 19 Jack enlisted for the Great War in 1917. He fought in the British army and spent some time as a prisoner. In 1919 after the war he was sent with the British forces in Dublin after the uprising there.

Later he went as a teacher to Kenya, about 1930, where he met Marjorie May Burge and they married in 1934. They only had one son Jocelyn Martin born 1937 in Nairobi, as she had RH negative blood. Marjorie taught Latin and French and Jack taught Mathematics and he was a Deputy Headmaster at the Prince of Wales School, Nairobi.

Jack was back in the army in World war II as North Africa was a strategic area at that time. Jack ended up as a LT. Colonel.

Jack and Marjorie returned to the UK just after the Mau Mau crisis as Joc had started at Oxford University.

In 1972, after Marjorie died, Jack (Bush) remarried and retired to South Africa and died there in 1976.

Jocelyn Martin Forrest came out to Western Australia in 1959 after doing a law degree at Oriel College, Oxford and being called to the Bar. At a dance in Perth, he met Meri Emma Wheeler, art teacher, in 1959 at the Embassy Ballroom and we married in 1960. He worked in prosecutions at The Crown Law Dept until he became a Magistrate in 1970. His first posting was Carnarvon in our north west where he had once a month to fly to Exmouth, Derby and Wyndham in our far north. Joc was at one time Magistrate at Pinjarra, Mandurah and Rockingham. He was also a Civil Service arbitrator for some years before this position was abolished by a change of government. We have four children and three grandsons.