A Fortunate Life Read Free

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 mightbe 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-nineteenthcentury. 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