'The India I Knew'

Most of the books which line the shelves of the room we call our office are in reasonably good condition but this one takes first prize for the worst. The spine has gone, the back cover has fallen off and one can tell it has seen tropical climes because silverfish have bored neat holes through its covers and pages.

The book was my mother's and the reason she had it was that....

....its author was her uncle, husband of her mother's older sister Lilian, after whom, I have always assumed, my mother was given her second name.

Sir Stanley had much to write about having spent fifty years in India, rising from a cub reporter to own and edit one of India's most prestigious newspapers, the Times of India.

It's a hard book to read today as Stanley wrote it with all the confident arrogance of a very influential British Imperial sahib. Perhaps this is best shown in its few illustrations, the first of which is of a dancing girl. What this says about the man I leave to you but....

....it leaves me with the same puzzlement as the only picture of the man himself, which is with an admiring woman pinning a buttonhole to his lapel.

One of the colour plates shows his house. The caption at bottom left reads The Hollow. To Mrs Stanley Reed with all good wishes. Perhaps it is Lil standing on the veranda. In 1919 my mother with her mother and two sisters travelled from Burma to spend three months with Stanley and Lil in Delhi so may have stayed in this house.

As an illustration of 'Modern India' Sir Stanley included this pictures of the offices of his paper and....

....to illustrate industrial India he chose a photo of the Tata steel works. I wonder what he would have felt had he known that, a hundred years later, Tata would own much of what was once British Steel as well as the Jaguar and Land Rover marques.

As a small boy I was terrified of Sir Stanley. Later, as a teenager, I sometimes had lunch with him, either in the restaurant which was on the ground floor of the block of flats where he lived or at his London club, the Atheneum. The last time I saw him I took Gill along to introduce her to the grand old man.

He was always very good to me: that I was able to buy a Land Rover to travel into the Sahara was because he gave me £500 - a great deal of money in those days - towards our expedition on condition that I wrote regularly to tell him how we were faring; and I am also certain that it was money from him which enabled my parents to send Richard and I to prep and public schools in England.