1698 days ago
Thanks to my cousin H, I stumble across this Pathe News clip from 1946 as three British Cabinet ministers headed to India for talks on partition. Accompanying them was the Foreign Office Press Officer, my great Aunt Eleanor Booker. She is the rather pretty young woman (she would, I think, have been 28) in the third row at the start. Later on that trip she sat in on meetings with Mountbatten, Gandhi, Jinnah etc. She was, I think, the last person alive who was at the partition talks. Another moment she witnessed in her career, about which she rarely talked, was aboard HMS Tiger in 1963. The clip seems so incredibly dated and is below.
2672 days ago
My wife is younger than I am and her social set here in Bristol is younger than she is and thus on New Year's Eve I found myself with a group of folks in their mid thirties. I shall be 49 in ten days time. There were a stack of babies and young children there and one adult opined "it is just as if everyone is having babies, is it a Bristol thing?" No, dippy snowflake, it is a function of how old you are.
3303 days ago
The Mrs touches down in Delhi tomorrow morning and that and a film we watched last night set me thinking about all those family links to India strteching back to 1856: Knatchbull-Hugeson, Eleanor Booker, the Ilbert Bill and my grandmother Margaret Booker. A personal family tour through history podcast.
