Testaments of Youth

Of the other Dill brothers, Marcus Graham Dill, who met John Rowe Dill just before his death, survived the conflagration, and pursued his medical career in Edinburgh. He died in 1966. He was married to Elizabeth Barnwell. They had no children.

Alfred Vincent Dill graduated from Edinburgh University and also became a doctor, yet another family member following in the footsteps of Seneca and John Hadzor so many years before.

It is not clear which of the Dill sisters it would have been who worked on the hospital ship,  as a V.A.D (Voluntary Aid Detachment) nurse, bringing the wounded back from France. 

But, of these sisters (Agnes, Louisa, and Hessy Foster), Agnes Rose Dill (1887-1927) eventually married Edward Wickham Jones and moved to South Norwood. They had a daughter, Shirley Wickham Jones, who was born in 1924. 

With the Dill sisters as well as brothers involved in the war, the story starts to look quite similar to the memories so vividly and movingly recounted by another V.A.D nurse, Vera Brittain in Testament of Youth, and detailing her journey from unquestioning patriotism to pacifism. We do not know from what shifting perspectives Samuel Marcus Dill and Agnes Rowe viewed the Great War as it proceeded, but Brittain's work gives valuable clues as to how those perspectives changed both at the Front and at home, as the war just ran on and on, and the casualty figures mounted to a level never seen before in the history of human conflict.