Mayflower II, built in 1955-6 and currently under restoration in Mystic, Connecticut, prior to its planned return to Plymouth in time for the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the original Mayflower in 1620. The Fortune, which brought Thomas Prence and 33 other settlers to Plymouth Colony in the following year, was only one-third the size of this ship.
This pedigree chart was published in a 1942 book entitled Personal Religion by Douglas Clyde Macintosh, a Professor of Theology and the Philosophy of Religion at Yale University who used his own family history in England and colonial America to illustrate the association between non-conformism and what he termed ‘personal religion’. He was the grandson of Cotton Mather Everett, at the bottom of the chart, a ship’s physician with the East India Company who settled in 1832 in Canada ...
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My account a few postings back of the military career of Captain Thomas Edward Gordon, 14th Light Dragoons (my great-great-great grandfather), has led me to look at the careers of two of his wife’s uncles, one an officer in the East India Company Army and the other in the British cavalry. Together the careers of these three men cover most of the big wars of the earlier part of Victoria's reign– the first Anglo-Sikh War of 1845-6 and the second of 1848-9, the Crimean War of 1854-6 and the Indian Mutiny of 1857-9. They encompass some of the most glorified moments of war in the Victorian age, epitomised in Crimea by the 'Thin Red Line' of the 93rd Highlanders and the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava ...
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Unnamed photo of First World War date presumed to show six men of the 9th Lancers, including Private John F. Lofts (photographer unknown, but stamped as a postcard on reverse).
I have a considerable family connection with the 9th Lancers, one of the oldest British cavalry regiments of the line – my maternal grandfather Tom Verrinder and his brother Edgar served with the regiment during the First World War, and on my father’s side my great-great uncle Major Edward Robertson Gordon was with the regiment during the Boer War, commanding it briefly in 1901 (and co-authoring the Diary of the 9th (Q.R.) Lancers during the South African Campaign, 1899-1902) ...
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A woodcut from John Campbell’s A Personal Narrative of Thirteen Years Service amongst the Wild Tribes of Khondistan for the Suppression of Human Sacrifice, published in 1864.
In my novel The Tiger Warrior, set partly in India during the Victorian period, Lieutenant John Howard of the Madras Sappers takes cover with his men on an armoured river steamer deep in the jungle of southern India, part of a force deployed against a tribal rebellion in the Rumpa district of the eastern Ghats in 1879. As bullets spatter off the metal plating, Howard watches a horrifying ritual unfold among the rebels gathered on the opposite river bank, one that leads him to pick up a rifle and take a course of action that he could never have thought imaginable ...
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'Rheinfels' by H.J. Gibbins (watercolour, approx. 22 by 29 cm).
The painting above is by Henry James Gibbins, a prolific amateur watercolourist who exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1871. In his professional life Henry was a hairdresser, perfumer and purveyor of European fabrics and other finery, operating for many years from 7 King Street, St James, London, adjacent to the auction house Christie’s ...
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