He looks directly and confidently into the camera. He does not smile and neither does the woman by his side. She is short in stature, wearing a patterned white dress and leaning slightly into his shoulder. He is dressed in the winter uniform of an Apothecary of the Madras Army and has on a dark blue patrol jacket with gilt buttons and stand-up red collar and cuffs. The couple’s dress and demeanour suggest that this is an important occasion. The […]
My grandfather vanished. He walked out of his house in Madras one day and was never seen again. Someone said he was seen getting into a carriage with a young woman. Others thought he might have been mugged and murdered. My mother thought he had PTSD from a yachting accident. My grandmother engaged private detectives and even reported his disappearance to Scotland Yard but no trace of him was found. After years of trying to find him my grandmother reluctantly […]
According to my grandmother, her father-in-law William Robinson had a falling out with one of the sons of his first marriage and this resulted in his will being contested. I’m not sure why anyone would want to contest a will like the one he left as it simply left his estate to his wife, a fairly normal testamentary disposition. Here is the will. I was fooled by the bit that gave his address as 39 Dharamtolla Street, Calcutta (now Dharmatalla […]
William Barren was my 3x great grandfather. He went to India in 1805 as a private in the 1st Battalion of the the 69th Regiment of Foot, later rising to the rank of sergeant. When the regiment went back to England, William remained behind and joined the Madras European Regiment. William married in Bangalore in 1816. His wife’s first name was Elizabeth but no surname is given on the marriage record. It has been suggested to me that this was […]
A silver-plated tea set has been in my family since the start of the 20th century (Figure 1). I will briefly examine its provenance and then discuss its personal and social significance. Finally, I will offer some thoughts about its possible future. The tea set is silvery metal and includes a teapot, sugar bowl, and milk jug. Each object has the same engraved pattern of interlocking leaves around a central shield. The shield on one side is engraved with the […]
Old passports can be a great source of information. The featured photo is from my father’s passport, issued in 1924 when he was 21 years old. It was issued in Naini Tal, India (what was he doing there?) and the entries include Ceylon, Hong Kong and Canada, where he lived and worked for a while.
Cecil James Chadwick managed a rubber plantation in Burma at the turn of the 20th century. Here is a newspaper report of the time announcing the setting up of the company that ran it.
Our house in Wazir Munzil Road had a large garden and in the centre of the garden there was a bed of marigolds. Lying on my stomach in front of the marigolds I imagined them to be a forest, which indeed they were to a small boy of seven. I decided to explore this forest and with a razor blade that I stole from my father’s shaving kit I cut a path through the marigolds, one forest tree at a […]
There was a sadness about Elizabeth Dillon. My grandmother Lilian, her daughter-in-law, observed that she never saw her smile.[1] The cause of her unhappiness lay in her childhood circumstances and a life often marked by sorrow. Elizabeth was born in Ireland and went to India with her parents when she was a child.[2] In 1857, a census of residents of the Agra Fort in India found young Elizabeth there by herself in the Agra convent.[3] How she came to be […]
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