partition

1704 days ago

Great Aunt Eleanor Booker on Pathe News 1946, her time at a great moment in history

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.

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