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- After the death of his mother in 1906, he was sent to boarding school at Marist Brothers College in Uitenhage. A highly traumatic episode in his young life, according to family lore.
When his father remarried to Amy Currie Thorne, born Philips, the story goes, the two Fuller children felt that they were the second-class children in the new family, having to sleep in an outside shelter while the Thorne child or children had quarters inside the main house.
After school he worked for a time as an articled clerk with a firm of lawyers in Stutterheim.
Joined the Kaffrarian Rifles and fought in East Africa during World War I, taking several bullets while trying to resupply his men with ammunition in 1916, an action that earned him the DCM. He had to spend 11 months recuperating in Wynberg military hospital.
After the war, his former job in Stutterheim being no longer available, he obtained a post in the Justice Department of the new South African administration that was being set up in South West Africa (now Namibia), which Germany had lost during the war and which had been given to the Union of South Africa to govern under a League of Nations mandate. He worked initially as an administrative clerk in Windhoek, Swakopmund and Okahandja.
At the latter place he met and married a young woman named Anna Susanna Vercueil, with whom he had in common the fact that their fathers were both stock inspectors but obviously much more, for they remained together until the end, "Annie", as he called her, even caring faithfully for him over the last 15 years or so when his memory deserted him utterly. They were married for 65 years until his death in 1987.
Annie's father, too, had moved to South West Africa after obtaining a post in the new South African administration.
Ryno remained in the civil service, eventually becoming a magistrate and returning in that capacity to South Africa, where he presided over courts in Ladysmith, Uitenhage, Barkly East and, finally, Springbok in Namaqualand, to which he was transferred after being promoted to senior magistrate in 1948. After retiring in 1956 he joined the nearby O'okiep Copper Company as manager of staff affairs.
Retired from this job in the early 1960s, when he and Annie bought a house in the coastal town of Hermanus that soon became a favourite holiday haunt for their children and grandchildren.
He died at this house, 21 Mossie Avenue, in 1987 at the age of 94.
His gravestone inscription in the Hermanus cemetery reads: "He died as he lived: Everyone's friend."
Sources for Ryno Neville Fuller
Birth date: Mother's death notice MOOC 6\9\542 Ref. 658. Also parish records of St. Barnabas, Stutterheim.
Death: His death notice is No. 3860 of 1987, listed at http:\\www.e-family.co.za
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