A Fortunate Life Read Free Page A

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 porridgeover 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