Drury's Background and Peacetime Life

Noël Edmund Drury was born on 24 December 1883 in Upper Rathmines on the southern edge of the city of Dublin. His first name probably came, as was often traditional, from the coincidence of his birth with Christmas. His parents, John Girdwood Drury and Frances Mary Drury (née Figgis), married just over a year before, on 30 November 1882, at Dublin's Adelaide Road Presbyterian Church. John was about ten years older than Frances. It seems likely that the house in which Noël Drury was born, Glen-na-Smoil, was his mother's family home, since she had been living there at the time of her marriage. On his marriage certificate, John Drury was described as a ‘merchant’ living at Kenilworth House. The fathers of the bride and groom were also merchants. Specifically, John Drury's business was paper manufacturing, having taken over the running of the Swift Brook Papermill at Saggart, County Dublin, in 1880. Paper had been made on the site since 1785 by the McDonnell family, who had converted a flour mill, and the company which the Drury family would run at Saggart retained the original name: John McDonnell and Company Limited. The Drury family ran the business until 1926.

Noël Drury appears to have had two younger brothers and no sisters. The first brother was Kenneth Kirkpatrick Drury, born on 18 May 1885, by which time the family was living close to the papermill at Swift Brook in Saggart, County Dublin. They were joined by the paternally named John Girdwood Drury, born on 9 January 1895 at Swift Brook House, who became known as ‘Jack’. Their mother died aged 41 in 1895 of a form of carcinoma. Drury was sent away to school in England: Mill Hill School, on the north-west edge of London, in the third term of 1899, and Jack also later attended the school. It had been founded in 1807 to provide a nonconformist alternative to the so-called ‘public’ schools which required those attending to be Anglicans, and was therefore an obvious destination for a Presbyterian. At Mill Hill, Drury was a member of School House and left in July 1901. He was a Monitor (the name given to senior Prefects) and played in the 2nd XV (rugby) and the cricket 3rd XI. He seems also to have been the first Captain of Cycling.