PREFACE

(Archibald) Douglas, the second son of Alfred Ernest Gordon and his wife, Ada Marion (née Fellows) was born on 14th April 1888 and was baptised at St. Mary Abbots, Kensington, London. According to the genealogist J M Bullock: “The Gordons are said to have come out of Scotland early in the 18th century owing to involvement in the 1715 Rising. Coming, however, to solid facts it can only be said that the first documented member of the family was Alexander (1742-1823), the son of George Gordon (1715-1745) and his wife, Hannah Herbert (1721-1811)1, who was born in Wapping on 10 August 1742. He was the founder, in 1769, of the famous distillery of that name.” His grandson, Charles (1814 - 1899), should have been a wealthy man but, according to his son Alfred, “instead of attending to the Gin business, he constantly drew out capital for other foolish schemes and inventions, always unsuccessful, and the business eventually passed into other hands, leaving his sons and daughters to earn their livings as best they could”.

This Charles, the grandfather of Douglas, had a great aunt who was Lady Nelson (née Nisbet / Herbert), and an uncle, John Rolfe Gordon, who, as a Cornet in the 18th Hussars, fought at Waterloo and had two horses shot under him. He later retired to Montpellier and was a friend of the American publicist Pinckney Sumner. Charles’s cousin, Rev. Osborne Gordon BD, was involved in the pre-Raphaelite movement and was tutor to several illustrious men including John Ruskin and the future King Edward VII and a friend of the mathematician and author Lewis Carroll. Douglas Gordon’s grandmother, the wife of Charles, was a Newton, born in Barrackpore, Bengal and descended from an uncle, possibly John, of Sir Isaac. Her father, Major-General Thomas Newton of the Honourable East India Company Service, Bengal Establishment, served in the third Mahratta War and the first Burmese War and died in 1842 in Mussoorie, India. He lost in the Ganges all the papers of Lord Portsmouth sent by his brother George that supported his claim to, or attempt to buy, the farm cottage where Sir Isaac was born.

In the 1890s the family moved to Bedford when his parents decided to educate Douglas and his brother, Herbert, at the Grammar School, as it then was. Herbert joined the Hong Kong bank in China and Douglas joined the Indian police in Bengal. Sir Douglas Gordon, he was knighted in 1943, died on 21st September 1966, having left his memoirs unfinished. Information about his subsequent career from 1936 appears in the various appendices.

The author’s daughter-in-law, Jean Gordon, typed the original memoir manuscripts while on leave in UK from India. If any further chapters had been drafted, Jean was unable to find any manuscripts when she returned to UK in 1967, the year after the author’s death. The author’s eldest son, Donald Fellows Gordon, deposited in the Cambridge Centre for South Asian Studies a copy of some of the original manuscript drafts, against which this edition has been proofed, as well as the typed drafts of the manuscript. He also deposited other papers, some of which are included here as appendices. The author’s grandson and heir, Ian Douglas Gordon, digitised the manuscript for this publication, added the footnotes and illustrations, and compiled the appendices and index. No changes have been made to the original text. For example, contemporary but now outmoded words such as Asiatic instead of Asian and Mohammedan instead of Muslim have been retained as originally written

1  Family records state his mother was Sarah Herbert (?1719 – 5 Sep 1785) sister of Hannah who was married to William Osborne.