 They had two sons.Bernays joined the Army as a sapper in 1942 and was commissioned as a subaltern into the Movement Control Section of the Royal Engineers in January 1943; according to Who's Who he was promoted to Captain in 1944, although his casualty record with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, by whom he is commemorated on the Cassino Memorial in Italy, lists his rank as Lieutenant.After he died in a plane crash in the Adriatic Sea in January 1945, while flying from Italy to Greece as part of a parliamentary delegation to visit British troops, no by-election was called, and the Bristol North seat remained vacant until the 1945 general election, when it was won by the Labour candidate William Coldrick.