Hester Muriel McInnes was born on 26 June 1897 at Newcastle Circus, The Park in Nottingham and baptised at Nottingham, St. George on 25 July. She was the third child of Malcolm James Rowley Dunstan, a county council official, and his wife, an artist named Edith Rose Turner, who was the 2x great-granddaughter of the brother of Joseph Turner, the landscape painter. In 1902, the family moved to Wye in Kent, where Malcolm became the principal of the South-Eastern Agricultural College. During the war, between 1915 and 1916, Hester helped organise a 28-bed reception hospital at the college.

On 4 November 1916, Hester married Cyril Hart Collins, an officer in the Royal Flying Corps, at St. Mark’s Parish Church in Regents Park, London, with a son named Roy born in Wye the following year. Two daughters, Susan and Patience, were born in 1919 and 1922, respectively. The family went to live in Otford; however, in 1929, Cyril divorced Hester, and she subsequently remarried the same year to George Tronson McInnes, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. In 1933, another daughter named Bridget was born in Trottiscliffe, and at some point before the war, George and Hester moved to Yotes Cottage and, finally, Huntsman’s Lodge in Wrotham Heath.

On 15 October 1940, while visiting her mother at Wrotham Heath House, Hester lost her life in the air raid that devastated the area and claimed the lives of eleven local people. At the time, she was sitting in an armchair in front of the fire when the explosion outside sent a shock wave through the property and killed her. Jack ‘Boy’ Bowen, who witnessed the aftermath of the attack, recalled that ‘the people in the house barely had a scratch on them, and were still sitting as if asleep’.

Locally, Hester was well-known for her kindness and took an interest in many good causes. During the war, she reputedly ran a soup kitchen for army drivers from Huntsman’s Lodge. A villager later said, ‘She kept an open house, and many whom she befriended thought a great deal of her’.

Photograph of Hester and Telegram courtesy of Edward Dunstan.