When the Scottish comedian Billy Connolly appeared on the television programme Who Do You Think You Are? he discovered to his amazement that there was an Indian in his family tree. His great-great-grandfather was an Irish labourer who enlisted in the British Army in 1856 and was sent to India, making him one of thousands of Britons who ended up in India by accident, someone who had never planned to go there. While in India he married the daughter of another Irish soldier. Her mother was Indian. The extraordinary thing was that no one in Connolly’s family had told him of his Indian ancestry.

Literary Review

Sep 2018

Categories

Jane Ridley

Prime Minister’s Pet

Full of Heirs and Graces

Wanderlust

Rex Whistler Painted Her Hall

Hythe Society

Grand Dame of Downing Street

Treachery at the Palace

From the Sewers

Knole Me Tangere

Passage from India

Building Jerusalem in the Home Countries

Where’s Wallis?

Welfare & Warfare

Woman in Black

Winds of Change

Unhappy Valley

Eminence Rose

Alpha Female

Day of the Spinster

Our Woman in Number 10

The Righteous Reformer

Chilblains and Petticoats

The Goat and the Pussycat

Dancing on a Volcano