Planters, Rubber, and the Lives Beyond the Cantonments There was a different kind of life lived on the edges of British India, far from the stations and the cantonments and the railway lines. It was the life of the planter, a man who held a…
One Family’s Witness In August 1946, as the British Raj entered its final months, a wave of communal killing swept through Bengal. In Calcutta, perhaps four thousand people died in four days of systematic violence, though some estimates put the number far higher. The event…
Three families find India through the army In the spring of 1823, a young man named Jonathan Chadwick walked into a recruiting office in Huddersfield and joined the army, as the saying goes, he chose to ‘take the shilling‘. The recruitment papers say he was…
Old passports are valuable family history records because they preserve much more than a person’s identity. They record where a person was living when the passport was issued, how they described themselves, and often where they travelled afterwards. My mother’s passport is important for another…
In the early twentieth century, British commercial expansion into Burma created new opportunities for men seeking employment beyond India. Among them was my grandfather, Cecil James Chadwick, who in 1906 established a rubber plantation on King Island in the Mergui Archipelago, off the southern coast…
He looks directly and confidently into the camera. He does not smile and neither does the woman by his side. She is short in stature, wearing a patterned white dress and leaning slightly into his shoulder. He is dressed in the winter uniform of an…
William Barren was my 3x great grandfather. He went to India in 1805 as a private in the 1st Battalion of the the 69th Regiment of Foot, later rising to the rank of sergeant. When the regiment went back to England, William remained behind and…