102 – My grandfather’s secrets
Margurite Mumford, and my Grandfather Bert Scott, Ooty & Bombay. 1930s
Image & Text contributed by Jason Scott Tilly, United Kingdom
I will never be sure if my grandfather Bert Scott, would have wanted me or anyone else to find these negatives;
They were his secrets for all of his adult life. He had after all kept them very safe, hidden from the moment he left India.
Bert Scott, (lower right) was my grandfather, and he was born in Bangalore in 1915. He was educated at Bishop Cottons school and he joined the Times of India in 1936 as a press photographer, where he worked until the outbreak of World War II.
With trouble brewing during Indo-Pak Partition, he and his family fled and he left his whole life behind; his country of birth, India, his friends and home. Travelling with minimum luggage would have been conditional so he chose to take only the necessary in just a few metal trunks.
Inside one of those trunks were several photo albums and pocket-sized blue negative holders that I came across many years later in my grandparent’s cupboard in 2006, a few years after Bert, my grandfather passed away. The little blue pocket-books held as many memories as it did negatives, about 100 precious moments of reflected light captured on film of our family and of some places where they had lived, but inside one particular folded grease proof sleeve were four negatives that were cut up into single frames and they were of one particular young lady; of a Margurite Mumford, a beautiful young Anglo Indian girl.
I remember one Sunday when he was alive, sitting with his photograph albums on my lap, my grandmother looked at me and stated, in a tone which sounded somewhat incongrously jealous for a woman in her late seventies, “those books are just full of photographs of his ex-girlfriends!”. My grandpa who was sitting across us, either didn’t hear the remark or chose to ignore it – the Snooker on television providing a timely distraction.
After he passed away, I found an extraordinary number of photographs of Margurite. The photographs of her are always infused with a certain playfulness during day trips to the beach or picnics by the river. There is something so obviously personal and intimate about the images. Margurite clearly loved to play to the camera or to be more precise she loved playing up for the photographer, flirting with both the camera and the man whose eye followed her through the lens. The books did have many photographs of other beautiful young women of the Raj too, but the intimacy I saw in Margurite’s images proved to me that only she was actually a girlfriend of my grandpa before he met my grandmother.
As time wore on, I became more intrigued as to whom Margurite really was. I wondered why their romance had ended. I spent hours scouring the internet in the faint hope that I might be able to find someone from her family with whom I could share her beautiful photographs. With not a clue in sight, eventually my hope began to wane but I never stopped wondering about her.
Only recently while pouring over the pages of the albums for the nth time, I noticed a faded scribble “Margurite ‘Lovedale’” by a photograph. Intrigued as to what the word ‘Lovedale’ meant I returned once again to the internet and within seconds I was on to something. Lovedale is the nickname of the Lawrence Memorial Military School in the town of ‘Ooty’ in the Niligiri Hills. My great-grandfather, Algernon Edwin Scott, had a summer-house in Ooty and my grandpa would spend weekends with him whilst he was studying at St Josephs College in Kannur. Ooty would have been the place where he must have met Margurite!
Perhaps, college sweethearts; They kept their relationship going from their first meeting in the south Indian Hills of the Deccan Plateau to the humid coastal city of Bombay where my grandpa had begun working for the Times of India. I know from the amount of photographs that I have found, that the couple took days out to Juhu beach and the Hanging Gardens on Malabar hill along with trips out to the Ghats outside of Bombay. What was most obvious is how much Margurite meant to my grandpa because he kept the negatives separate from all of the others that he had saved. The memories held on film, of Margurite seem different to the rest, they seem more personal, more intimate.
I immediately contacted the school in Ooty. They in turn put me in touch with ex-pupils who although now in their late eighties and nineties were still in touch with one another. My search led me to a woman in America, Moira who very kindly informed me that she was still in touch with one of Margurite’s sisters, Gladys, who also lived in America. I was soon sharing these images with Gladys and she remembered my grandpa very well. She let me know that Margurite was still alive and living in New Zealand, but she was now ninety-six years of age and living in an old people’s home. Her memory had dimmed, but she was physically quite well. I was then put in touch with Alecia, Margurite’s daughter and I began sending them pictures of the young Margurite – images I presume they had never even imagined existed.
In my eagerness and excitement at re-uniting people with a ‘more than half -a-century-ago’ memory, I also sent a photograph of my grandpa. I was told Margurite’s poignantly hopeful reaction was simply, “Is Bertie here?”. My grandpa was indeed the love of her life. But her family had to leave India during Partition, she had then married an Irishman and moved to New Zealand.
It had been obvious to me all along, by the very nature of the photographs, that they were in love, that they both meant an awful lot to each other. Proof, if it were needed, of the indelible nature of first love.
96 – He always said that he lost his hair due to the heat in India
My father Sydney with his colleague at a club in India or Pakistan. Circa 1944
Image and Text contributed by Dave, Bristol, England
This is a picture of my father Sydney (Sid) and a colleague having a drink at a hotel or club somewhere in India or Pakistan during World War 2. He was was as an airplane mechanic with the RAF (Royal Air Force). He is the one with a cigarette and he would have been about 27 years old at the time.
He was also in the RAF football team and used to say that they sometimes flew 1000 miles just for a football game, this was during wartime and there must have been rationing, but it serves as an example perhaps of the british attitude at the time, towards sport.
My father Sydney was born in Liverpool, England around 1916 and had two older brothers and two older sisters. His father died when he was a child and he was brought up by his older brothers Joe and John.
He volunteered for armed service when the war (WWII) broke out in 1939 and was able to choose which service he wanted, which was the RAF. He failed his medical exam to be a pilot due to problems with his ears and became an aircraft mechanic dealing, I’d presume with air engines.
He was posted to Detling Airdrome in East Anglia, it was a coastal command airfield, but they were attacked in summer 1940 by the German airforce and about 67 RAF personel were killed. His squadron was then posted to India and I believe they went there by ship in either 1940 or 1941.
When in India, they were ‘posted’ or stationed in many different locations, he didn’t talk much about it but I do know he was in Hyderabad at some stage, and it was before partition. He always said that he lost his hair (he went partially bald) due to the heat in India. The main enemy in India during WWII were the Japanese coming through Burma, but I don’t think my father was ever on the front line. He returned to England after the war, around 1945 and never went back. He met my mother at a dance after the war, in Liverpool. He passed away died in 1979.
83 – The mythical Uncle Bunnu.
The Cordeiro Siblings. Alec (Bunnu), May and Beatrice. Karachi (now Pakistan). Circa 1910
Image and Text contributed by Naresh Fernandes, Author, Bombay
The picture, photographed sometime around 1910, is the childhood image of my grand-uncle Alec Cordeiro, fondly called Bunnu. Next to him is my Grand-aunt May and my Grandmother Beatrice.
It isn’t clear when and how exactly my ancestors got to Karachi, but it seems that they’d been there for four generations. Like most Goans, they left looking for work: the Portuguese didn’t establish any industry in Goa, so hundreds and thousands had to seek work in other places. There were sharp discussions in the family about whether our ancestor Santan Vaz had made his money running a liquor distributorship or a booze joint.
My paternal great-grandfather, Xavier Cordeiro, was a postmaster general in Karachi. His son-in-law, my grandfather, Alfred Fernandes, moved to Karachi from Burma during World War II. He’d been working for the Burma Railways and had to leave when the Japanese invaded in 1941. So he and his wife, my grandmother, Beatrice (standing right), decided to return to their family’s home in Karachi. In only a few years, the entire family pulled up their roots from the city in which they’d lived for four generations to take their chances in India, a few months before Partition in 1947.
Though my father was only nine when the family left Karachi, his elder siblings had more vivid memories : trips between Bombay and Karachi were made on ferries named the Saraswati and the Sabarmati (“they were like little tubs, we all got seasick”) ; relatives having leisurely evenings at the Karachi Goan Association (KGA), “gin and lime was the favourite drink”, and the enterprising nature of the Karachi Goan community -“they even owned a flour mill!” From my grandmother’s stories, it appeared that everyone in the family had spent a lot of time at the KGA. After all, it was right opposite their bungalow in Depot Lines. That bungalow, sold months before Partition, has long been replaced by a characterless block of apartments.
When we were children, my cousins and I could have been forgiven for thinking that our great-uncle’s first name was “Poor”. That, was how my grandmother and her sisters referred to their only brother each time he came up in conversation, “Ah, poor Bunnu,” they’d sigh whenever someone mentioned their Cambridge-educated sibling who’d chosen to stay put in Karachi at Partition. The somewhat embarrassed tone in which his three sisters talked about him left Bunnu obscured by a whiff of mystery—even scandal.
If there’s one thing I knew about Uncle Bunnu, it’s that he spent a great deal of time at the bar of KGA. Friends joked that the committee of Karachi Goan Association had once made a decision to sack the chowkidar (guard). He wasn’t really needed since Bunnu Cordeiro never seemed to leave the building.
When I finally made a visit to Karachi in November 2011, I met 92-year-old Rita de Souza. She’d been in school with all three of my grand-relatives. She displayed all the discretion you’d expect of a woman of her breeding, but under my badgering, was gradually lulled into talking about my great-uncle. “Ah, poor Bunnu,” she eventually sighed. “He was quite a talker.” She let slip an anecdote relating to the time Bunnu was at Cambridge in the 1920s. “He was disappointed in love,” Rita de Souza said. “He was quite keen on a woman when he was in England, but his mother heard of it and made him exit the situation post-haste.” That’s all she remembered about him.
Others too remembered Bunnu. “He’d tell us about the libraries in Cambridge, where you’d have to maintain pin-drop silence,” a third-cousin said. “‘What would happen if you had a cough?’ we’d ask. He’d reply, ‘If you had a cough, courtesy would require that you didn’t visit the library.’”
At one recent family get-together, the conversation turned to Bunnu. It would be difficult to send mail over the border after each India Pakistan war, so Bunnu’s letters were infrequent. But sometimes, perhaps to remind everyone of his real name, Alec, he’d sign himself as “Sikander”—the sub-continental name for Alexander the Great. “He called his three sisters ‘the gangsters’,” someone recalled. “When he was in England, they sent him a childhood photo of the four of them and he said, ‘I’m not coming home. If I do, I’ll have to take care of them.’”
My aunt Margaret corroborated the story I’d been told in Karachi. Evidently, Bunnu had refused to return to Karachi because he’d fallen in love with an Englishwoman. His mother, Mary, who wanted him to marry a Goan, was horrified. She “picked up her skirts and took the next boat to England”. The conclave was divided on what happened next. Either my great-grandmother “grabbed his ear and dragged him right back home” or “he sent her right home without even allowing her a day to see the sights, but promised to return soon”. At any rate, Bunnu was back in Karachi by the mid-1930s and would remain a KGA Bar fixture for the rest of his life.
Uncle Bunnu never married, held a job for long or seen his sisters after 1947. Later he moved into an old folks home in Karachi. No one in the extended family seemed to have a recent photograph of him. I’d always held the impression that Uncle Bunnu had drunk himself to death, but considering that he was 80 when he died, he didn’t do it very efficiently. By the time he passed away in 1984, Bunnu had become more like a hazy myth to his younger Indian relatives than a real person.
The old folks home in which Bunnu had spent his last years is located in one corner of Cincinnatus Town. Cincinnatus Town was unnervingly familiar. Many of the older homes had been built in the 1930s, exactly at the time the pocket of Bandra in which I live had been constructed and with the same coastal-city architectural features. Parts of Garden East (Cincinnatus Town) resembled the now-demolished landscapes of my childhood. They were filled with the kind of teakwood furniture you find in older Bombay homes and had identical Catholic iconography. My ancestors, yes, they’d been dead for decades, but as we discussed them in Bombay, six decades and 900 kms away, they were warm, breathing presences, as real and as resolute as Karachi.
An unedited version of this narrative can be found here.
78 – She left everything behind in Scotland to an unknown future in India
My Grandmother, Sydney Gorrie, on her wedding day. Lahore (now Pakistan). December 1923
Image and Text contributed by Janet MacLeod Trotter, United Kingdom
This is a photo of my Scottish maternal grandmother, Sydney Gorrie (nee Easterbrook) on her wedding day in December 1923. She and my grandfather, Robert Gorrie, were married in a cathedral in Lahore (now Pakistan). She looks beautiful but perhaps to me, also slightly apprehensive. This may be because she hadn’t seen her fiancé in over a year and had just travelled out by ship with her parents from Edinburgh, Scotland to get married. For some time their home was in Lahore (now Pakistan) which my grandmother enjoyed.
Robert Gorrie fondly called Bob, a veteran of the World War I and survivor of trench warfare, had secured a job with the Indian Forestry Service, as a conservator of forests. Sydney was an only child and had left behind home and extended family in Edinburgh, Scotland for an unknown future trekking around the Himalayan foothills with her new husband. Bob was enthusiastic about trees and conservation and became an expert on soil erosion. He worked all over Punjab and the remote foothills of the Himalayas, and my grandmother would have to plan and organise camping trips for a month or so at a time.
When my mother was born, she was taken along too; her pram hoisted onto poles and carried along jungle paths. According to his Work Records, Scottish Bob was “a tiger for work” but was impatient with the bureaucracy and criticised for being outspoken. My granny would sigh that she was constantly having to ‘smooth the ruffled feathers’ of the administrators. He was also based at the forestry college in Dehradun (now Uttar Pradesh) where he taught and also where their second son, my uncle, Donald was born. I think he was more popular with the students as some of them kept in touch with him until much later in life.
Before World War II broke out, granny’s father’s illness had her visit home in Edinburgh. My mother and her two brothers went to school back in Scotland, and were looked after by grandparents and lots of doting aunties! Bob stayed back in India, and did not see his family for over six years, and after Partition he worked for the new Pakistan government for a while.
In retirement in Edinburgh, my brothers and I used to love visiting their house – we would join Granddad for early morning yoga kind of exercises in the sitting-room. He would point to a picture on the wall of a grinning man in a large hat and say it was of him eating porridge in India. It was only years later I discovered it was a copy from a Degas painting of a farmer drinking from a bowl of soup!
My grandparents’ stories were the inspiration for my own trip to India. When I was 18, I went overland in a bus to Kathmandu via Pakistan and India. In Lahore I sent my granny a postcard (my grandfather has passed away by then). What I didn’t know was that she had had a stroke and was in the hospital. The last time my mother saw her alive was the day my postcard arrived. She was able to read it to Granny, and although she couldn’t speak in reply, she knew that I had got there. I, on the other hand grew up to become an author and wrote a mystery novel based on my overland trip in the 1970s, called The Vanishing of Ruth.
72 – The man who was mistaken for a spy
My maternal grandfather, Samuel John Souri, Singapore. 1942
Image and text contributed by Sandhya Rakesh, Bangalore
My maternal grandfather, Mr. Samuel John Souri was born to Mr & Mrs Rev. JJ Souri (Reverend) in Ananthapur district of Andhra Pradesh. He had two sisters & three brothers. After he completed his studies in Ananthapur he began working in the Collectorate. At the advise of his cousin’s wife, he learnt Stenography (Short Hand) and found a job with the British as Chief Clerk in Singapore in the late 1930s.
My mother, his daughter, Joyce, tells me that once when he was called out for an urgent meeting, in a hurry he forgot his footwear, but when he went back to collect it, the sentry at the gate refused to allow him in because the British might think him to be a spy.
My grandfather spent many years in Singapore working for the British, during the World War II. He also had six children, all of whom received Singaporean citizenships. After a few years, when the British were defeated at the Battle of Singapore he moved back to India, sending the family ahead by a few months.
A diabetic patient, he passed away very suddenly, failing to eat some food after an insulin shot. My mother remembers that it was when she was in college. I do regret never having the opportunity to see and spend time with this very interesting and great man.
55 – Six generations of a British Family in India, one of whom was a Photographer for Times of India.
(Left) My Great Great Grandparents Edwin Ebenezer Scott (1850-1931) & Emily Good Andre (1862-1946), Bangalore, 1915. (Right) My Great grandparents, Algernon Edwin Scott & Desiree Leferve with my Grandfather, Bert Scott as a two or three year old boy. Cannanore, Karnataka. 1919
Image and Text contributed by Jason Scott Tilley, Birmingham UK
These are two photographs from My Grandfather Bert Scott’s family photographic archive. The photograph on the left, of my Great Great Grandparents Edwin and Emily Scott was taken on Christmas day in 1925 at 3, Campbell road, Richmond Town, Bangalore, our family’s house which was one of the old British Bungalows and has sadly like many of the rest, been demolished. On the old ground now stands St Philomenas hospital, right in the very heart of Bangalore.
On the right, are my great grandparents Algernon Edwin Scott and Desiree Leferve with my Grandfather, Bert Scott as a two or three year old boy, the image was taken in 1919 in Cannanore, Karnataka. (now Kannur and in the state of Kerala)
My family came to India in 1798 when James Scott Savory joined the East India Company as a writer of the Records of state. He was the second assistant under the Collector of Krisnagearry (Krishnagiri). Edwin Ebenezer (left image) is his great great grandson. From the church death records at St. Marks Cathedral in Bangalore it states that Edwin Ebenezer was the Assistant commisioner of Salt in South India.
Bert Scott, (little boy on the right) was my Grandfather, and he was born in Bangalore in 1915. He went to Bishop Cottons school before he joined the Times of India in 1936 as a press photographer.
Son of Algernon Edwin Scott and Desiree Marie Louise Josephene Leferve, (she was the daughter of a French professor of English from Pondicherry). Algernon Scott (Bert’s father) worked for the ‘Salt and Abkeri’ before he joined the army and went to Mesopatamia region from 1916-1919. After Algernon Scott left Mesopotamia he then went to the North West Frontier province until 1921 when he was discharged as Lieutenant. In 1925 he joined Burmah Oil company until 1933 he worked at Caltex until the out break of War.
My Grandfather Bert Scott, whom I fondly call ‘Grandpa’, was mainly brought up by his Grandparents, this must have been because his parents were away much of the time. He was educated at the famous ‘Eaton of the East’, Bishop Cottons school in Bangalore and then at St. Joseph’s college in Cannanore on the way up to Ooty in the Nilgiri’s. In 1936 he took a job as a press photographer at the Times of India Newspaper in Bombay where he worked until the out break of World War II. He initially joined up as a ‘Gunner’ but soon took the Job as Head photographer for the Indian Army during the second world war where he worked out of GHQ New Delhi (Now Parliament), His duties include photographing ceremonies and Japanese positions behind enemy lines in Burma.
My grandfather married his Bride, Doll Miles at the church of redemption in New Delhi and 1943 and my Mother Anne Scott was born later that year in Amritsar, Punjab, whilst he was away on active duty during the war. He was in position on 14th August 1947 to photograph the hand over of Power and watched as the Mountbattens left Vicregal lodge (now Rashtrapati Bhavan). During the troubles of partition, because my family were Anglo Indian, they fled from Delhi to Bombay, and then took a ship to the new country of Pakistan where in November of that same year they left for a new life in the United Kingdom.
For more images via Jason please click here
49 – The man who sold Polka Dots to the World
The Goregaon Gram Panchayat Ration Staff, on the occasion of Gudi Padwa. Bombay, Maharashtra. 1949
Image and text contributed by Umang Shah, Mumbai
This photograph was taken on the occasion of Gudi Padwa. Sitting left most is my Great Grandfather, Mr. Tulsidas K. Shah. He was born in Mangrol, Saurashtra, near Junagad district, Gujarat. He was brought up by his aunt when his parents passed away. As a teenager, he went to Bombay and started working as a peon in a cloth shop at Mangaldas market, near Princess street. He lived right above the shop. My Great grandfather was sharp & ambitious and he soon became a co-partner of the same shop. Their business was printing ‘Polka Dots‘ on cotton clothes. A style very much in demand world wide at the time. With increasing demands for textile exports during the World War II, their business boomed, they prospered and were hailed as the no. 1 in their business. We are told that his wife and children bought and wore new clothes everyday!
My grandfather tells me that his father were born with a ‘golden spoon’. However, after 2 years the downfall began. Now that the World War II had ended, they suffered huge losses in the business (It had earlier given a huge boost to the sagging textile industry of Gujarat and Maharashtra). His partners fled. But my great grandfather being an honest man, stayed on and paid all the debt by himself. But it wasn’t without problems; the strain had affected him mentally and he went back to Mangrol for some years.
In 1945, he returned to Bombay with his family and started working in the Ration shop of the Goregaon Gram Panchyat. At the time, Goregaon was not a part of Bombay, as it is now. His job was to put stamps on the Ration Cards. He was a very hardworking and principled man his whole life, adds my grandfather.
