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 chapterThe house where Diana's parents lived in Bikaner is now derelict, but when she visited she could see where the veranda was, looking out on to the beautiful garden. Diana could remember spending a lot of her early life on that veranda, as she and her brother were forbidden to go out beyond the wall.
With the bungalow came a small army of servants to wait on the family, relieving Diana's mother of the daily chores she would have had to do back in Doncaster. The servants lived in poor-quality accommodation at the back of the house. This was typical of life across the Empire.
Diana remembers that later, with the civil rights movement in America raising awareness of racial equality, she asked her mother how they could have allowed Indian servants to live in such conditions. But for Beryl, at the time there was no guilt in having servants. To her, and to thousands of other British women, that was simply the way things were.
