The Dawkins family have been members of the Chipping Norton set since the early eighteenth century, when my great-great-great-great-grandfather Henry Dawkins MP built a family mausoleum in St Mary’s Church for, in the words of the inscription on the memorial tablet (below), ‘himself and his heirs’. Brompton’s 1774 portrait of Henry’s family serves as backdrop to a family photograph taken in Over Norton house around 1958. My Grandfather Dawkins, with his pink Leander tie, sits between his wife Enid and his daughter-in-law Diana. My sister Sarah is in front of him; uncle Bill is behind him between Uncle Colyear and me. My father is on the far left. My mother is between Enid and Colyear’s wife Barbara.
Is Zuleika Dobson among the spectators on the college barge as my grandfather Clinton G. E. Dawkins, leaning forward, prepares to row for Balliol?
My grandfather’s education as an undergraduate (right) was supported by his uncle (later Sir) Clinton Edward Dawkins (left), whose freethinking views were celebrated in the Balliol Rhymes.
My father (left) and his rugby-playing brother Bill (right) followed their father and several other Dawkinses to Balliol after an idyllic childhood in the forests of Burma.
Above: The Smythies family at Dolton, Devon. Top: my paternal grandmother Enid, with dog and book, sits by her mother (in the very fine hat), brother Evelyn (with tennis racquet) and father (in panama hat), along with two unidentified guests. Bottom: Smythies cousins around 1923. Sitting on the ground, from right to left, are Bill, Yorick, John and Yorick’s sister Belinda. Colyear is in his mother’s arms.
Evelyn Smythies’ wife Olive was known as ‘Tiger Lady’ from her disagreeable hobby of shooting tigers. Her son, my father’s first cousin Bertram Smythies, took a less destructive and more literary interest in the natural world.
My maternal grandfather ‘Bill’ Ladner (seated third from left in the picture at top), was among a group of naval officers sent to Ceylon to help build a wireless station during the First World War. Was the dog the station mascot? It seems to be the same dog my grandmother Connie is petting. The family returned to England when my mother Jean (bottom right) was three.
They lived in Essex (right: my mother has her arms around a little friend) and spent their holidays at Mullion in Cornwall: here on the beach my Aunt Diana is holding hands with her mother and sister.
Above, my grandfather Ladner, a wireless engineer employed by Marconi and the author of the standard textbook on short wave wireless communication, demonstrates some equipment to visiting Arab royalty. He first met my grandmother in Cornwall while working at the Poldhu Wireless Station. Some of the thick slates used by the station as insulated instrument boards ended up as paving stones at our family house at the neighbouring Mullion Cove.