Stories about my Mother 7
Growing up with them, I cannot imagine my grandparents on my father’s side of the family ever having been apart. On my mother’s side, however, for my life, I cannot imagine those two grandparents ever having been together. I have pictures of them standing next to each other, so I know that they were, but in them, they’re never looking at each other.
Before she married my grandfather in 1933, my grandmother’s life is a mystery to me. Given how much information and material I have on everyone else, I’m surprised. I hope that I can uncover some more.
The year before their wedding, she appeared onstage in a production of a play called Hawk Island put on by the Bombay Amateur Dramatic Society. I have the playbill. Hawk Island was a murder-mystery play written by Henry Irving Young and produced on Broadway in 1929. There, it starred an up-and-coming young actor named Clark Gable. According to the playbill, in Bombay, Miss Doris Burrows, my grandmother, played the part of Harriet Cooper. The role had been originated in New York by one Miss Olga Lee.
Before that, while I know that she was born in Bombay on December 4, 1907, the only other thing I know for certain is that she, her mother, and her much younger sister Pam traveled to London from India on the ship Mandala arriving on April 18, 1927. That I found on a ship manifest online.
She obviously then returned to India because she and my grandfather Geoffrey were married in Bombay on January 26, 1933. Even in the wedding pictures, they are both looking forward. My grandfather looks happy. My grandmother looks… uncertain. Perhaps I’m reading too much into her expression because I know where their marriage is heading.
After graduating from Corpus Christi college at Oxford, having passed his Civil Service exam with flying colors, my grandfather arrived in India and became an assistant Collector in Bombay.
Originally, the British East India Company created the position of Collector to do exactly what it sounds like - collect money. Local farmers and merchants alike were taxed on just about anything you can imagine. When they couldn’t make payments, their lands and property were confiscated and absorbed first into the Company but eventually into the Crown, itself. A large percentage of the money taken from the population in this way was then used to buy goods from the Indians to resell them in England. The British were getting these goods for free since they were using the Indian’s money to buy them, so anything they made selling to the British public was pure profit. There was a steady stream of Indian wealth into English coffers for centuries.
Collectors were assigned to districts. Within these districts, they also operated as magistrates. They were the ultimate authority on any financial dispute that arose. In addition, they were responsible for running local elections and keeping the peace. The Superintendent of Police, Inspector General of Jails, the Surgeon General, forestry officials, and engineering managers all had to report to the Collector. As part of his training, my grandfather studied Hindi law while he was at Oxford.
My grandfather worked his way up the Civil Service ladder. In May of 1928, he was made Deputy Commissioner. The following year, in September, he became the Under Secretary to the Government, Home Department. In 1932, he became a member of the Legislative Council and then, finally, in 1933, the year he married my grandmother, he became a Collector in his own right. In 1937 he was assigned to the province of Sind, which is now part of Pakistan, and then in 1939, he was promoted to be the Collector of Bombay.
My uncle Michael appeared towards the end of 1933. My mother arrived in 1935 and my aunt Barbara arrived in 1937. The kids had a nanny named… well, Nanny, is the best my mother can remember. There were also plenty of Indian servants to go around. There’s a picture from a birthday party of the children on a merry-go-round made up of live ponies. Trotting behind each pony is a servant making sure their chubby young charges don’t fall off.
My grandmother lived for social gatherings and society while my grandfather had little interest in either. His stutter made him shy. With their position came many obligations. They had to entertain visiting dignitaries which I bet she loved and he dreaded. On one of his visits, Doris played golf with the Aga Khan. Aga Khan is a hereditary title held by the Imam of the Nizari Isma-ili Shias, an Islamic sect. Historically, the Aga Khan was one of the few Arabic leaders recognized by the British Raj as a “Prince.” The first Aga Khan helped the British in several skirmishes in the nineteenth century so in gratitude he was recognized by the Crown. In truth, the British found having a powerful Muslim ally very useful. He was the only religious leader in India under the British who was granted his own gun salute. Grandma Doris’s golf game would have been with the first Aga Khan’s grandson, Sir Sultan Mohammed Shah.
I remember hearing that she’d also played golf with Noel Coward, but nobody, now, will corroborate that story. Coward doesn’t seem to have been in India while Doris was there, but he did tour South Africa in 1944 as part of the War Effort so maybe they played there. A love of golf is one of the things that Doris and Geoffrey had in common. I wonder if that’s how they met.
In the very early 1940s, with World War II underway, and the final push by the Indians towards gaining their independence from Britain, my grandmother took my mother and her siblings to South Africa. My grandfather stayed behind until after 1947 to facilitate the British handover of power back to the Indian people.
My mother remembers the trip. She must have been five or six years old. In India, they had all been forced to wear topees or pith helmets because of the searing sun. As they sailed across the Indian ocean, whether they asked permission from my grandmother or not, all three kids flung their topees into the sea, thrilled to get rid of them. Someone on the crew spotted the beige helmets floating in the ocean and reported it to the captain. The ship was then forced to change course and zigzag all the way to South Africa in case German U-boats discovered the hats and realized they were sailing across the ocean. The maneuver added several days to their voyage.
They arrived in South Africa and stayed in Cape Town until Grandfather joined them. They then settled in Grahamstown which is on the eastern side of the country. That was the house my sister and I lived in when we were little.
My grandmother never adjusted to the provincial life that she found in Grahamstown. She and her sister Pam opened a fancy dress shop on the High Street. She wanted to bring some class to the farmer’s wives she saw coming into town to shop. Not surprisingly, it failed spectacularly. When my grandfather arrived, he applied for a job in the Steel industry but was turned down. He was a year or two away from retirement, but the British government gave its Indian civil servants the option to retire early so he did.
Gone were the garden parties, concerts, and banquets. Gone were the fancy dances with visiting dignitaries and soon, gone was my grandmother. With a flourish, she left him. She and Geoffrey divorced in 1948. She would go on to marry two more men, William Griffiths, and Bill Harris. Griff, as he was called, died before I was born. Bill Harris, I remember. They lived in a small but nice house in Johannesburg. Unfortunately, the thing I remember most about Bill was that once while he was squeezing behind me at dinner, he spilled some red wine on my denim jacket. I say remember most, but really, I don’t remember anything else about him at all.
Bill passed away and Doris lived on her own for a while and worked as a secretary for somebody at Pfizer. It was at this point in her life that we saw her last. She had a little white dog named Socks. Finally, she asked Geoffrey if she could move back in with him, and he agreed. On her way down to Grahamstown, she wrecked her car. The policeman asked her what had happened, and she replied, “Well, the road went funny, and off I went!” Other than totaling the car, she and Socks were fine.
In a letter to my mother, my grandfather wrote, “Doris has now been here for a week and has settled down. She has bought a new car, a Mazda, which was delivered to her today. She talks too much but I have learnt not to listen to much of her flow of words. She has made my meals much more interesting as she has good ideas about food and cooking, and she has brought her television, so that we can now watch television in the evening. Barbara was quite wrong in describing her as an alcoholic, as in the whole week she has drunk nothing more exciting than orange squash.”
My grandfather died in 1982 but Doris lived on until 1990. Sadly, she suffered from dementia which was already starting to become apparent when we last visited her. Eventually, my aunt moved her into a nursing home.
After a bit of prompting, my mother remembered the school in England that Doris had gone to - Cheltenham. I’ve written to them to see what information they might have on her early days. I think that she must have taken whatever pictures she had of herself with her when she left Geoffrey. Somewhere along the line they must have gotten lost. Perhaps one of my cousins has something. The thing about digging around in the family trenches is that you never really get to the bottom. There’s always more to dig and more bits of history to find sift through.
As much as I cannot begin to imagine what they were like as a couple, I do like the image of them sitting on the sofa watching television. My deaf grandfather tuning out the noise and watching the images flicker in front of him while my grandmother happily prattles on. Like all the photographs I have of them, they would both be looking forward and not at each other, but at least they’d be together.
What an amazing post! So much history explained. Love reading your stories.
The details and pictures you have really fill in so many gaps about my grandparents, Richard. It’s just fabulous to have it so well told. Thank you🙏