Surgeon Rear-Admiral Thomas Tendron Jeans CMG MB MRCS LRCP RN (1871–1938) was a doctor, and a decorated British Naval officer, who translated some of his experience into boy's adventure books.
His parents were Thomas Mark Jeans (1842–1902),[1] a Crown Surveyor of Taxes[note 1] and Elizabeth Ellen Filer (c. 1843 – 1930),[2] a merchant's daughter, who had married in Croydon or 12 February 1867.
[4] He studied medicine at Owens College, a regional affiliate of the University of London and at the Manchester Royal Infirmary.
[7] In his autobiography, Jeans notes that most of those joining the Royal Navy medical service when he did had been educated, like him, at the London Schools.
[9] After four months' initial orientation training at Royal Naval Hospital at Haslar, Jeans was assigned to the Torpedo School Ship H.M.S.
[13] After initially treating the wounded brought down from the front, Jeans was landed on 1 February 1900 and advanced with the Naval Brigade on the Orange Free State.
[15] He was promoted to Staff Surgeon on 16 May 1902, and joined H.M.S Ariadne, the Flagship of the North American and West Indies Squadron.
[16] While on the Ariadne he saw service in the Venezuelan crisis of 1902–1903 The ship was paid off on 11 August 1905,[9] and Jeans privately printed his Ward-room diary H.M.S.
He wrote this book inspired by a remark in Truth that none of the writers of modern boy's adventure stories, seemed to be familiar with the navy.
[note 3][23][24][9][22] The start of the First World War saw Jeans's ship engaged in convoy work between Bombay and Aden.
[25] Jeans was now posted as the Principal Medical Officer of the Portsmouth Naval Barracks for the next fifteen months,[26] until he was appointed to the hospital ship Soudan on 24 August 1917 and remained on her until 20 March 1919.
She still retained her civilian crew, and Jeans spent the rest of the war at anchor with the Grand Fleet.
[27] Jeans was on 8 May 1919 appointed in charge of the Naval Hospital at the Cape of Good Hope and he sailed from Plymouth with his wife in June.
[30] He was promoted Surgeon Captain on 30 June 1922 and took charge of the Surgical Division of the Naval Hospital at Plymouth.
The year after his death she was working in a senior nursing position[note 11] at the Cray Valley Hospital, which has had a somewhat chequered history.
However, what marked him out from his peers was that he only wrote juvenile fiction about themes that he had direct experience of, whether it was piracy of the Chinese coast, insurrection, or gun-running in the Gulf of Aden.