Trace and Tell your Family's Empire Stories
Introduction
My father and mother's families both arrived in India in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. I was born in Calcutta on 15 August 1935, 12 years exactly before independence.
Browser by chapter
My mother Esmee's family worked in the mica and coal mines in the state of Bihar (about 200 miles from Calcutta). My father, Frank, owned some copper mines and eventually he began working for my grandfather, mining mica.
My father and mother met in Kodahma. They were married and moved to Calcutta, where I was born in 1935. My father died in 1937 and my mother and I moved to one of my aunt's places, in Hazaribagh.
Hazaribagh ("hazari" meaning 1,000 and "bagh" meaning tigers) was known for its tigers in those days.
I saw two very close. On one occasion we were driving round a place called Canary Hill, and we looked up to see a tiger about 30 feet up on a rock, staring down at us. We went home to get cameras and when we returned, the tiger was still there. As we watched, it jumped off the rock and went into its cave.
A year later, we were driving around Canary Hill again when we spotted a tiger in the middle of the road. It had just killed an animal and was carrying it off.
Whenever we drove between our two houses (one in Hazaribagh and one in Kodahma, about 60 miles apart) we could see the eyes of various animals shining at night in the headlights. We were there from when I was around 4 until I was 12 years old.
