A Fortunate Life (2 page)

T
HEY WERE A PRETTY RUM LOT
, my ancestors. Four themes run steadily through the nine unbroken generations that my brother Mark has managed to trace, back to the middle of the eighteenth century: the public service, India, Ireland and adventurism.

The earliest Ashdown root we know of goes back through a family of land agents in Shropshire to an innkeeper and his wife in Shifnal, and the link to the Welsh Marches remained strong right down to my father’s time. The family’s earlier attempts to raise themselves up to the middle class were rather erratic and largely focused on the Midlands. By the 1850s, however, they had dispersed towards London, where my paternal great-grandfather, John Ashdown, set up as an architect – and apparently a rather good one, for I remember from my youth that one of my parents’ treasured possessions was the silver medal for the Inigo Jones Prize which he won. It was he who anchored the family firmly in the middle classes. He married a Charlotte Durham, who was the daughter of a Buckinghamshire land agent and had pretensions to descent from a long line with noble connections originating in Scotland. It was he who, following the middle-class practice of the time, began adding the name ‘Durham’ to the plainer ‘Ashdown’ to mark this, at best, extremely distant and probably dubious aristocratic connection. To this day, the male Ashdown line carries the name Durham as a third Christian name.

John Ashdown was one of the chief architects involved in laying out the town plan for Victorian Llandudno and later worked for South Eastern Railways. Apparently he designed all the stations from Victoria to Folkestone and may well have had a hand in No. 4 Cowley Street, then the Headquarters of South Eastern Railway and now serving the same function for the Liberal Democrats. He also, I fear, bore at least some responsibility for St Pancras Station, for I have seen his sketches of it in a book of his drawings. He lost all his fortune in the great South Eastern Railway crash of the late 1800s, which might
be viewed as appropriate retribution for his part in that horrible confection of brick and Victorian fancy.

My grandfather, his son, was educated at Heidelberg at the height of the era of student duelling and often used to regale us with gory tales of sawdust sabre fights in the taverns of the city. He, too, must have done well, for he later became the companion of the young Earl of Warwick and accompanied him on a Grand Tour of Europe, before gaining a much-sought-after place in the Indian Civil Service, starting off as a District Officer in the Punjab and rising to become the Inspector General of Police for what was then known as United Provinces, now Uttar Pradesh. My grandmother died when my father was eight years old, at which time he was sent away to school in England, where he was placed under the guardianship of an uncle, the huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ Vicar of Snitterfield in Warwickshire (one of the other waifs from the Raj sheltered by this country parson at the time was Vivien Leigh, the star of
Gone with the Wind
, with whom my father appears to have had an early romantic connection).

My father did not see his father again until the age of nineteen, when the latter returned to England for home leave just as my father was finishing his officer training at Sandhurst. My grandfather retired to Guernsey in 1927, the same year as my father left England to join a Punjabi regiment of the Indian Army, their ships, according to family legend, literally passing on the passage.

To be honest, I am not at all sure that the Ashdowns, as a whole, were very nice people – my father excepted. They tended to have nasty tempers, a strong streak of snobbishness and, as far as the Ashdown women were concerned, a marked capacity for being catty, especially to those they considered below them in social standing.

My paternal grandmother’s bloodline was at once more romantic and rather wilder than that of my grandfather. One of her great uncles declares his profession in the 1851 Covent Garden census as the entrepreneurial combination of ‘boot maker and brothel keeper’, presumably having discovered that attending to clients’ boots whilst they were otherwise occupied was a good way to add value to a thriving business. By the time she was born, however, her branch of the family, the Cliffords, were firmly rooted in India. The Cliffords were plantation Irish and Catholic to the core. It is through them that my line runs back to Daniel O’Connell, the father of Irish nationalism, emancipator of the Catholics and generally roguish politician of the mid-nineteenth
century. In 1995 the Irish government got to hear of this connection and put on a little Press event to mark it when I was visiting them in December of that year. Afterwards they sent me off to see the great man’s grave in Glasnevin Cemetery outside Dublin. On the way the driver said in a thick Dublin accent, ‘I gadder dat you are the descendant of the great Dan O’Connell?’ I confirmed that I was. He replied ‘Do you know what dey used to say about him?’ I knew perfectly well that they called him ‘The Liberator’, but I wanted him to tell me that, so I pretended I didn’t. ‘Dey used to say dat you couldn’t trow a stone over an orphanage wall but you’d hit one of his children!’ It was the best put down I have ever endured. Clearly, being able to claim descent from O’Connell was a less exclusive distinction than I had supposed.

O’Connell’s granddaughter, Anna Mary Fitzsimmons, married Richard Clifford, my great-grandfather on the maternal side and followed him to India. She wrote a Victorian monograph
On the March
, describing the life of an Indian Army officer’s wife in the second half of the nineteenth century, which I still have. The Cliffords were, with exceptions, more steadily illustrious than the Ashdowns. My fifth great-grand-uncle by the Clifford line was the celebrated traveller, orientalist and Chinese expert, Sir George Staunton, who accompanied Lord McCartney as one of the first British emissaries to the Manchu (Qing) Emperors in Peking in 1793 and was the inventor (or, to be precise, discoverer) of Earl Grey tea. The Indian branch of the family was established by his great nephew William Henry, whose father served with variable distinction in an Irish Regiment, the 3rd Dragoon Guards, in Wellington’s Peninsular army (he was at one time imprisoned for being absent without leave as result of a female entanglement). William Henry, his son, was born in Wexford 1800 and later went to India as an Irish soldier-adventurer with the East India Company. He first comes to notice in 1825, for being cashiered from his regiment, the Madras Cavalry, and exiled from India to Hong Kong as a result of a fight over a woman. Apparently he was provoked over breakfast by a fellow officer.

(It seems that for the military there is something especially provocative about being insulted over breakfast which does not apply to other meals. I once saw a grizzled and much respected veteran of the war-time SBS
*
and former Colditz prisoner tip a bowl of porridge
over a startled Guards officer in his own mess. Apparently, in the Guards, it is – or was – the tradition that, if an officer wore his hat to breakfast, it was meant as a signal that he didn’t want to be talked to. My SBS friend having collected his porridge plumped himself down next to a Guards officer just so attired and said a cheery ‘hullo’. Receiving no response he said it again and then, with increasing menace, a third and fourth time. The recipient of this cheery greeting then said in a very drawly upper-crust voice, ‘Don’t y’know, old man, that in the Guards the tradition is that, if we don’t want to be spoken to at breakfast we wear a hat.’ To which my friend replied, with a growl, ‘In the Royal Marines the tradition is that if we are rude at breakfast we get to wear a plate of porridge,’ and tipped the lot over his head.)

Anyway, the authorities in India in the early nineteenth century seem to have taken the view that William Henry’s offence was mitigated by the fact that the provocation took place over breakfast and duly reinstated him, after a helpful intervention from his illustrious relative ‘Chinese’ Staunton. In 1832 he made the sea journey back to India with someone else’s wife (who he eventually married) and founded the Clifford dynasty in India, which lasted until the British left nearly a century and a half later.

Being Irish and therefore dedicated to the proposition that a good story should not be spoiled by too much concern for the truth, the Cliffords have handed down many legends which would be fun to believe, but for which I can find no evidence. For instance, one of my female ancestors supposedly left Peshawar in the autumn 1841 to join her husband in Kabul and was one of the very few to avoid the wholesale slaughter of the British which we know as the ‘Massacre in the Snows’ and which, in January 1842, brought the First Afghan War to a disastrous end. The story (for which, I repeat, I can find not a shred of evidence) gets even more romantic: she was said to have crossed the Himalayas back into India in the company of a doctor whom she eventually ran off with (the early Cliffords seem to have had rather a tendency to untidy private lives).

Solidity, however, was a definite feature of my mothers’ ancestors, the Hudsons. The Hudsons were as steady, Protestant and Northern Irish as the Cliffords were wild, Catholic and from the South. They came to Ulster with the Cromwellian plantation from, we think, Northumbria.
The first Hudson we know of was Robert, who lived in the little County Down market town of Rathfriland, under the shadow of the Mourne Mountains. He, like my Ashdown ancestor from Pimlico (and at about the same time), was a boot-and shoemaker by trade – though we may be certain that, as a good Northern Ireland Presbyterian, he did not combine this with a brothel-keeping sideline. Succeeding Hudsons were variously musical reed-makers, grocers, and auctioneers and valuers. My grandfather, Robert Hudson, whose sisters were missionaries in China and India, must have done rather well for himself, for the three Rathfriland houses in which he lived reveal a steady progression up the middle-class ladder. He combined his profession as Rathfriland’s auctioneer and valuer with that of newsagent, bookshop-owner, cycle agent and occasional dancing master, while still finding time to play in the local hockey team, train the church choir, serve on the local School Management Committee, conduct the choral society, be married twice and sire, in all, twelve children. His second wife, my maternal grandmother, was a Hollingsworth. They came over to Ireland, probably also from Northumberland, in the 1660s, were fiercely Protestant and served as clergy with the army of William of Orange.

My grandfather was largely self-educated, a great believer in the Victorian virtue of self-improvement, and deeply engaged in the affairs of his local community. It is his strong Northern Irish genes that sweep all before them and march largely unchecked through all his grandchildren and my children, right down to my grandson, all of us carrying his indelible mark of a robust frame, a tendency to run to weight, a broad forehead, deep-set eyes and a marked cleft in the chin. He was said to have an extraordinary feel for glass, which he valued for Christies, and to have been an expert in fine furniture, apparently able to assess the age, date and value of a friend’s dining table simply by running his hands along its underside during dinner. He must have been quite progressive, because he went to Paris in 1898 and returned with the first car in Ireland, an Orient Express. It was described in a book of the time as ‘petrol-driven, single-cylinder, leather belt, Brampton chains, 36-inch black wheels and costing
£
210 [sic]’. On my office wall, I have a picture of him sitting in it, outside his stable in Rathfriland in the last year of the nineteenth century. He was fascinated by automobiles and all that went with them, and predicted, in the face of some derision, that they would completely reshape the way society worked. His capacity to predict the future was not, however,
flawless. He was once approached by a Belfast friend called John Boyd Dunlop, who told him of his new invention, the pneumatic tyre, and asked him if he would like to join with him in a manufacturing enterprise to produce them. My grandfather took one look at his friend’s new contraption, declared it would never work and declined.

He is described in a book of Rathfriland reminiscences of the time as being widely read with a well stocked library and as someone who, being ‘forceful of personality, … influenced most of the cultural and social side of life in the district’. His funeral oration adds that, though a weak church-goer, he was a strong Mason. His portrait, in the full regalia of his Lodge (looking, to be honest, rather like a Sicilian bandit), still hangs in the Masonic Hall in Rathfriland. He was also involved in local politics, being at one stage a member of the Irish Liberal party (a fact I did not discover until I was a Liberal MP). Although a Mason, he hated the Orange Lodge. My mother used to tell me that, during the ‘troubles’ of 1917–1920, when the Protestant Black and Tans rampaged through the countryside and she could see Catholic farms burning from her bedroom window, he took considerable risks to give shelter to Catholic families in his home. But he was a good Ulsterman and was amongst the quarter of a million men and women who signed the Ulster Covenant of September 1912 against Home Rule.