Trace and Tell your Family's Empire Stories
Introduction
Diana Rigg, 1960s icon of TV, film and stage, is best known for playing Emma Peel in the Avengers and Tracy Di Vicenzo, the only woman whom James Bond married.
What is less well known about her is that she grew up in India, the daughter of a railway engineer in the final days of the British Raj. In Episode One of Empire's Children she retraces her family's journey to India to discover more about their life.
Her father was employed by Maharaja Ganga Singh on the Rajasthan railway and was to work there for more than 20 years. But the Indian independence movement was already gathering pace. British rule, which had been maintained in India for over 300 years, would soon be swept away, forcing Louis and his family to return to a changed Britain.
Browser by chapterDiana's father, Louis Rigg, was born in Doncaster in 1903 when the British Empire was at its height, but he was an unlikely candidate to work in India. His father worked for the railways and their house was originally a railway cottage. Diana's grandfather on her mother's side was the manager of the gentlemen's department of the Co-op. Diana believes this led her mother's family to look down on her father's.
Louis went to a technical grammar school in Doncaster which specialised in training people for vocational skills and careers. At 15 he began an engineering apprenticeship with the local railway before gaining an apprenticeship with the Great Northern Railway in 1921.
Before the early 1920s there had been 122 individual railway companies in Britain, but around this time that the government decided to reorganise them into just four umbrella companies. The rationalisation led to the loss of many jobs just at the time Louis was finishing his apprenticeship.
