From the
early 80s I used to have lunch at the City University Club, 50 Cornhill. At the
time, the Club had a reciprocal arrangement with the Travellers Club, 106 Pall
Mall. One of the Travellers members dining under the reciprocal arrangement was
Dr David Hay. We were sitting opposite each other at the Club Table. He asked
me a number of questions – perhaps because I was the only non-European at the
Club Table, and this made him curious. When he got up to go, he said “your
father worked for my father”. It turned out the David’s father was Andrew
Mackenzie Hay, managing director of J H Vavasseur. My father had been a
director of its subsidiary, Vavasseur Trading Company, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).
Another member
of the Travellers Club who sat opposite me at lunch said he had been a soldier
who fought in World War II. He said he had been based in Ceylon. He too asked
me several questions about my family. When he got up to leave, he said “Your
grandfather arranged for Mountbatten’s headquarters to be set-up in Kandy and
for a crate of wine to be delivered monthly from Colombo to Kandy.”
Earlier, when
I asked about joining the City University Club, the Committee Member dealing
with new applicants, David Crockford, spoke with me. He seemed somewhat
cautious as I was non-European and the Club did not have any non-European
members. He said ‘I understand you are from Ceylon. When I was at Sandhurst
there was a Ceylonese who trained there – Tony Anghie. I replied that Tony had
been junior to my father at school and I had met him. There were no further questions,
and I became a member.
I attended a
meeting related to South Asian Concern organised by Ram Gidoomal. One attendee
was a lady called Ruth Bradby. I mentioned to her that the secondary school I
attended, Royal College, Colombo had a principal called E L Bradby and that
there was and annual rugby match between Royal and Trinity College, Kandy for a
trophy called the Brady Shield. Ruth said “He was my grandfather”.
I follow
journalist Ali Fortescue on Twitter. I communicated with her to explain that
the Hon Seymour Fortescue and I had worked in Barclays and that we had met
later at an FSA Annual Meeting and had lunch a few days later. Also that he now
lived in Italy. She replied via twitter “He is my father”.
I was
walking past the house behind ours. The people who had lived there over forty
years (David and Pauline Fellows) had
sold and moved to the seaside. One of the new occupants was in front of the
house. I stopped and spoke to her. She said that in addition to her family her
mother Aurelia was staying with her. I was surprised – my (now late) mother’s
first names included Aurelia. Later I met Aurelia again at a coffee morning.
When I
finished at Cambridge I worked in menswear at Joshua Taylors, a local department
store during the summer of 1973 prior to going to Imperial College, London to
do an MSc. Whilst working at the store when I was selling a pair of trousers
the customer asked me about my origins and said ‘we have one of our homes in
Ceylon’. It was Group Captain Leonard Cheshire from the 617 Squadron (the Dam
Busters) and he was referring to a Cheshire Home. One of the other students
working in the store was Anthony MacWhirter. Years later I met him when he was
working for Debevoise and Plimpton and I was providing some technical
assistance to the firm. When we had lunch, It turned out that his father had
captained boxing at Cambridge when my father’s friend Chris de Saram was
captain of Oxford University boxing.
A few years
ago, at a Leander Club lunch I heard the name Pilgrim–Morris. I went round to
speak to the gentlemen and said that I had come across a John Pilgrim-Morris in
1969 in Colombo when he was rowing for the RAF Singapore and pulled his boat
in. He said somewhat sternly ‘You never got in touch with me after you came to
the UK’. It was the same man!
