So Great A Man

The Neal saga

The trilogy relates the 200-year Neal family history, beginning in the Scottish borders with the birth of William, and flows through the decades up to 1991.

Finale (1894 to 1991). The family's fortunes take a spiral. Robert Neal's wife Hannah does not care about the disinheritance. She becomes a suffragist. Their son William is killed in action at Ypres in WW1. Robert dies in the post-war influenza pandemic.

Their militant suffragette daughter, Charlotte, volunteers as a VAD (auxiliary nurse). When the war ends, she marries John Forsythe, a pilot.

Years later Charlotte visits her daughter, Elizabeth, in London, where she is training to be a nurse. Tragically, they are both killed in the blitz.

Before losing his life in the St Nazaire raid, their commando son Robert William fathers an illegitimate child, named James McVitie. He becomes a surgeon and bends the rules. Disaster follows.