My Ancestors — My Father’s Camelot

The Barker line is the oldest we can trace. The family chart takes it back to colonial Massachusetts, to John Barker, born in Andover in 1690, and Barnabas Barker, born in Marshfield, Plymouth Colony, in 1688.

By the 1840s the family had moved west. John Barker (1814–1878) married Cordelia Collamer at Michigan City, Indiana, in 1841 and went into the business of building railway cars. Diana wrote that while Pullman made passenger cars, Barker made the box cars that carried cattle from the prairies to the Chicago stockyards. The family firm was the Haskell & Barker Car Company, and in 1885 its treasurer was John’s son-in-law, John Wesley Ogden.

The Richardsons of Halifax

My great-great-great-grandparents

According to Diana, the Richardsons came from St Mary’s Isle in Kirkcudbright, in south-west Scotland, and reached Canada in the first half of the nineteenth century. James Richardson, born in 1801, was a government shipping agent in Liverpool; one of his brothers did the same work in Livorno. In 1832 James married Louisa Sophia Clark in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and their six children were born at Studley House in Halifax.

The youngest, James Banning, was born on 23 November 1843. Soon afterwards his parents took him to England, where James died, at Birkenhead, in 1844. Louisa brought the baby home to Canada.

The Archdeacon

My great-great-grandparents

James Banning Richardson was educated in Halifax and at King’s College, took holy orders, and spent the rest of his life in charge of a fine parish in London, Ontario, where he became an archdeacon. It was said that he could have been a bishop but preferred to stay with his parish. From time to time he preached in England to raise money for poorer Canadian parishes.

He married a widow, Mary Jane Hartshorne, born a Tremaine. Her ancestors had come to Canada from Devon and, as Loyalists, from the United States after the Revolution. They had eight children, four sons and four daughters: three born in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, one in Hamilton and four in London, Ontario. Their second son, Harold Ashton, was my great-grandfather.

Sergeant Ogden

My great-great-grandparents, on my great-grandmother’s side

John Wesley Ogden, from an old carte de visite.

John Wesley Ogden was born on 19 May 1842 in Clarendon, Orleans County, New York. In the Civil War he served with Company B of the 12th Indiana Infantry and rose to quartermaster sergeant. Afterwards he settled in Charleston, Illinois, where he became a merchant and banker and was elected mayor. His first wife died in 1872, leaving him two sons.

In 1874 he moved to Chicago, and on 9 May 1876 he married Anna S. Barker. Their daughter Marion, my great-grandmother, was born in 1878. By 1885 he was treasurer of the Haskell & Barker Car Company. That August, after years of illness, he died at his mother-in-law’s house on Michigan Avenue, aged forty-three. The Chicago Tribune called him a genial gentleman, very popular among those who knew him. He lies in the family crypt at Rosehill Cemetery. His son Wesley was born a few weeks after his death.

Anna married again in 1887, to Frederick Carlton Austin, and died in Hamburg in 1922.

The J. W. Ogden crypt, Rosehill Cemetery, Chicago.

The crypt lid: “John Wesley Ogden, born May 19, 1842, Clarendon, Orleans Co., N.Y. Died August 24, 1885.”

Harold Ashton Richardson and Marion Ogden

My great-grandparents

Harold Ashton Richardson, H.A.R. to Diana, was born in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, in 1872. He joined the Bank of Montreal and was sent to Toronto, where he shared rooms with a well-known Canadian humorist whose name Diana had forgotten. Then he tried his luck in the United States.

In Chicago he met Marion Ogden, a much-courted heiress who had been painted in Paris by Benjamin-Constant. Her mother and stepfather were not keen on a young man from Canada, so when the three of them set off on a world tour, H.A.R. went too and made himself indispensable. When that got him nowhere, he had a cable sent to himself, supposedly from the bathroom-fittings firm he represented, recalling him to America. It worked. They married in Calcutta Cathedral on 1 February 1904; her stepfather gave her away, but her mother would not attend. The Viceroy lent them his rail car for the journey to their honeymoon in Darjeeling.

They settled first in Santa Barbara, where Barbara was born in 1905, followed by a son, Ogden. By 1910 they were in England, where my grandfather was born, and Mariana two years later. H.A.R. tried to interest the Admiralty, under Winston Churchill, in a patent for armour plate, and stood for Parliament as a Conservative in the north of England, without success at either. While he was salmon fishing in Norway he lost heavily on the stock exchange, and Marion’s mother insisted they return to America, where a trust was set up.

The family settled in South Carolina, near Augusta, Georgia, and in the First World War H.A.R. threw himself into fund-raising pageants. H.A.R. and Marion died together in a car accident; the Barker chart dates it to March 1955.

He was a natural showman.Diana

My grandfather, Banning

Harold Banning Richardson, born in Windsor, England, on 24 September 1910

My grandfather as a young man, probably in his Princeton or Cambridge years. Restored from a photocopy Diana made.

Banning went to prep school in Aiken, South Carolina, loved tennis, swimming and riding, and went on to the Lawrenceville School and Princeton. His schooling was interrupted only once. In Canada, a car his brother was driving went off the road and Banning was thrown out; he tried to help a girl passenger before he collapsed with a fractured skull, and was operated on in Montreal by Wilder Penfield, the leading brain surgeon of the day. His mother, who had a taste for séances, then took him to a psychic healer in New York, until Ogden’s wife called the medium a fraud.

From Princeton he went to Cambridge, took his degree and set out to study the countries and religions of Asia. Cambridge ran a mission in Delhi, and through it he became a lecturer at St Stephen’s College, then inside the walls of old Delhi. The salary was small, but a yearly gift from his godmother, a cousin, made the life possible. He was popular with his students and took up adult education, helping to found an All India Adult Education Society, inspired partly by his admiration for Mahatma Gandhi.

In 1939 he moved to Government College, Lahore, and then became Principal of Holkar College in Indore and later the state’s Education Minister. During the war he rejoined the army and worked in public relations in Delhi, editing a newspaper for the troops of South East Asia Command; his old head injury kept him from active service. In 1945 he went to San Francisco as an aide to Sir Feroz Khan Noon at the conference that drew up the United Nations Charter, and on the way home won a promise from Clement Attlee of a seat to fight. That summer he stood for Labour in an old Liberal seat and did well.

Indian independence ended his work there, and the family returned to England. He wrote a novel about India that found no publisher, worked for a pharmaceutical firm and then a stockbroker, and, having left Labour for the Liberals, stood again in the west of England in 1950 and 1951. Soon after his parents’ deaths he moved the family to Toronto. My grandmother’s own account, below, tells the rest.

My grandfather (back, left) walking with Mahatma Gandhi’s party in India. The print had faded almost to white; this is as much as could be recovered.

Your grandfather was a gifted man, a fine teacher who never found the same creative outlet in his later working life.Diana

My grandmother’s family

Johnson, Arnott, Eckstein and Pitt, told from the oldest generation down

The Ecksteins of Stuttgart

My great-great-great-grandparents

Diana’s grandfather Hermann Eckstein was the son of a Lutheran pastor in Stuttgart. A family photograph taken there in 1905, after the pastor’s death, shows his widow with her sons Wilhelm, who was in business in the city; Friedrich, later Sir Frederick Eckstein, baronet, who took Hermann’s place in South Africa in 1893; and Adolf, an artist. Hermann’s widow, Minnie, is in the picture too.

The Eckstein family in Stuttgart, 1905. Standing, from left: Wilhelm, Friedrich (later Sir Frederick Eckstein), Aunt Agatha and Adolf. Seated are Minnie, Adolf’s wife Caroline, the pastor’s widow, Anna Eckstein and Friedrich’s wife; the note does not give their order.

The Pitts

My great-great-great-grandparents

Minnie Pitt, later Mrs Hermann Eckstein, with her sisters. The note does not say which of the three is Minnie.

Minnie Diana Pitt was born in South Africa in 1865. Diana knew little of her early life beyond one family story: on a trek, the Pitt wagons sank while crossing a river, and the boys, one of them Minnie’s father, were saved, but their own father drowned. Minnie’s mother was a Campbell, said to be a niece of the poet Thomas Campbell, and her brother rode as a courier for the Ecksteins. An older family note even claims a distant cousinship with William Pitt, but with a question mark. Both are family tradition rather than established fact.

Hermann and Minnie Eckstein

My great-great-grandparents

Hermann Ludwig Eckstein (1847–1893) was one of the Randlords, the mining magnates of Johannesburg’s gold fields. A family note on their engagement photograph says they became engaged at Kimberley in 1880, though that may be too early: Minnie was born in 1865, and their children were born between 1889 and 1893. The family long believed that, had he lived, he might have prevented the Jameson Raid, but Diana later learned that he had already moved to the firm’s London office years before. He died in 1893 without a will.

They had five children: Herman, who went to Eton and the 17th Lancers and later farmed and trained polo ponies in Kenya; a son who died in infancy; Ludwig, born after his father’s death, who farmed in Kenya and died of wounds in East Africa in the First World War; and two daughters, the younger of them Lily, my great-grandmother.

Minnie never liked her name and in later life was known as Diana, which is how the name came down to my grandmother. She stayed a widow for many years, then in 1905 married the explorer Ralph Cobbold against her family’s wishes; the marriage ended in divorce. She died in London, at 10 Hans Crescent, in 1936. At her house near Newbury her son Herman staged mock safaris for the grandchildren with his stepfather’s big-game trophies. She arranged the flowers at St Bartholomew-the-Great in Smithfield, London, where her memorial stone lies in the aisle.

My grandmother was certainly a beauty and was still good looking in old age.Diana

Hermann Ludwig Eckstein and Minnie Diana Pitt, photographed on their engagement at Kimberley, South Africa. The note on the back says 1880, which may be too early.

Minnie Pitt with a tennis racket, before her marriage.

Minnie Eckstein in her dress and court plumes, photographed before she presented her daughters at court. Diana told the historian Geoffrey Wheatcroft that a picture of her grandmother in his book, captioned as a wedding portrait, was really taken at this time.

Minnie Eckstein with her youngest son, Ludwig, who was born after his father’s death.

William and Rosina Johnson

My great-great-grandparents

William Johnson (1841–1899) came from Hampshire and was a captain in the 6th (Inniskilling) Dragoons. On 30 October 1872 he married Rosina Arnott, a daughter of Sir John Arnott, baronet, born on 16 August 1852. They raised a large family in the Cotswolds, at Bourton-on-the-Water and later at Fern Bank, Oddington, near Moreton-in-Marsh. William died in 1899, and Rosina on Christmas Day 1926. During the First World War the magazine Irish Life photographed Rosina as a mother who had given six sons to the service of king and country.

One of them, Dudley Graham Johnson (1884–1975), won the Victoria Cross at the Sambre Canal on 4 November 1918 and rose to major-general. Another, Eric Arnott Johnson, fought at the Battle of the Falkland Islands in 1914, moved to the Royal Air Force after the war and served through the Second World War; he once flew a plane to India for the Viceroy and became his air ADC.

William Johnson with four of his sons. Diana named Raymond and Leslie in the back row, and Victor and William in front.

Rosina Johnson, born Arnott, in evening dress.

Dudley Johnson VC with his family. From left: Marguerite Daisy Johnson; Rosina Johnson, his mother; Dudley; Eric Johnson, behind him; Peter Johnson; Marie Johnson, holding Peter’s hand; and Lily Johnson, born Eckstein, behind her.

Probably Dudley Graham Johnson, photographed in London during the First World War. The family recognises him from the street photograph above, though his cap badge here, which looks like a lion standing on a crown, differs from the round badge he wears there.

Wing Commander Eric Arnott Johnson, Raymond’s brother, wearing RAF pilot’s wings.

A family group from about 1900, credited to Fred Gegg. The note filed with it names Raymond’s family at Great Rissington, but the clothes are too early for that; it may show the Johnsons a generation earlier.

Raymond and Lily Johnson

My great-grandparents

Raymond Bazley Johnson was born on 30 January 1877. He trained as an officer cadet with the Suffolk Yeomanry and, in his early twenties, sailed for the Boer War with the Inniskillings. Seconded to Rimington’s scouts, he was mentioned in dispatches several times and won the DSO. Diana still had his war diaries in 1988.

He married Lily Eckstein at Newbury, Berkshire, in 1912. She had sailed from South Africa as a three-year-old, and her sister Hilda had married Raymond’s brother Leslie in 1910; the two couples had nine children between them. That year Captain and Mrs Raymond Johnson were living at Hillside, Little Compton, and riding with the Heythrop Hunt. Their children were Diana, born at Hillside in January 1914, Lilah, born in 1915, and Michael.

In the First World War Raymond spent a year in naval uniform with the Admiralty’s armoured cars, a force Diana credited to Winston Churchill, and later served as a captain and acting colonel. Lilah was nursing in the Second World War when she died in 1942. Raymond died on 17 November 1948.

Raymond Johnson as an officer cadet with the Suffolk Yeomanry, photographed in camp by P. Damant of Colchester.

Lily Eckstein in court dress, with the white plumes worn for presentation at court.

Raymond and Lily Johnson on their wedding day.

Captain and Mrs Raymond Johnson setting out with the Heythrop Hunt from Hillside, Little Compton, in 1912.

Raymond Johnson in uniform during the First World War, when he served as a captain and acting colonel.

My grandmother as a baby in the arms of her father, Raymond Johnson, in the naval uniform he wore for a year during the First World War.

Lilah Mervyn Johnson (1915–1942), Diana’s sister.

Lilah Johnson in nursing uniform. Diana noted that she was nursing during the Second World War.

Probably my grandmother with her father, Raymond Johnson, at the races. The back of the print is a French postcard, so it was most likely taken at a racecourse in France, some time before his death in 1948.

Not yet identified

Two officers from the family albums, marked only as Johnsons

These two portraits came to me marked only as Johnsons. William and Rosina had several sons who served as officers, so each could be one of the brothers. The white-plumed helmet fits the 6th (Inniskilling) Dragoons, the regiment of William and Raymond. If anyone in the family can name them, I will add their names here.

An officer in a braided cavalry coat, wearing medal ribbons. Not yet identified.

An officer in full cavalry dress with a plumed helmet. Not yet identified; the white plume fits the Inniskilling Dragoons.

Banning and Diana

London, India, England and Canada

My grandmother, Diana Johnson, in the 1930s.

My grandmother was born at Hillside, Little Compton, on 18 January 1914, and grew up in England with her sister, Lilah, and her brother, Michael, surrounded by grandmothers, uncles, aunts and cousins, with family as far away as Ireland, Germany, South Africa and Kenya. In the 1930s she studied in London, staying with her grandmother Minnie. She met Banning in his last year at Cambridge, and again whenever he passed through England on leave from India.

My aunt Sarah as a little girl, photographed at The Study, a portrait studio in Indore.

They became engaged early in 1937. His family wanted them to wait a year, but Banning talked them round, and they were married in London on 27 July 1937 by two of his Cambridge mentors, the Reverend Alec Vidler and Dean Wynn, later Bishop of Ely. The Richardsons came in full force.

Their married life began in India, where Banning taught at three colleges. Joanna was born near Cambridge during a spell in England. A son, Raymond, was born in Lahore in December 1939 and died of pneumonia there as a baby. Rhea, my mother, and Sarah were born in Indore. In the war years the family wintered in Delhi, in borrowed houses and once in barracks for naval wives. After independence in 1947 they came back to England on a troopship, and in the mid-1950s they emigrated to Toronto.

Banning and Diana’s wedding, London, 27 July 1937. The bridesmaids are not yet identified.

Banning and Diana divorced in 1966. In 1967 she married Brandon Barringer of Villanova, Pennsylvania, who also had three daughters. They moved to Wayne, Pennsylvania, in 1973 and lived there together until Brandon died in 1991. Diana stayed on in their house in Wayne, and it was from there that she sent me the history on this page.

She died peacefully at home on 9 August 2015, at the age of 101. Her family remembered her for her kindness and generosity, her interest in family, friends and the affairs of the world, and her love of nature, science and the arts.

Diana and Brandon Barringer at “Ashwood” on Sunday, 13 April 1969.

Diana and Brandon Barringer in Fort Lauderdale, with a very large fish.

In Diana’s words

The history she wrote for me, and her 1988 letter about her grandfather

These are Diana’s own words, with only her typing slips corrected. Her history of my grandfather’s family runs to twelve typed pages. Of her letter to Geoffrey Wheatcroft, author of The Randlords, only the first two pages survive.

Her history of my grandfather’s familyTwelve typed pages, written at my request

YOUR GRANDFATHER HAROLD BANNING RICHARDSON (I will refer to him as Banning throughout) AND HIS FAMILY.

As far as I know the Richardsons arrived in Canada in the first half of the 19th century. The family came from St Mary's Isle in Kirkcudbright in Southwest Scotland.

Banning's great-grandfather, James Richardson (born 1801) was a Government shipping agent in Liverpool, England. One of his brothers, also a shipping agent, was based in Livorno (Leghorn) Italy. James married Louisa Sophia Clark (born 1812) in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1832.

Halifax was an important seaport town in a very Scottish part of Canada; no doubt his work there was in connection with the shipping agency.

The Richardsons had six children born at Studley House, Halifax, the youngest of whom was James Banning Richardson born on the 23rd of November, 1843. His parents, James and Louisa, travelled to England sometime between 1843 and 1844, taking their baby with them. James Richardson died in 1844 in Birkenhead, which is a suburb of Liverpool. After her husband died Louisa returned to Canada with James Banning.

The boy was educated in Halifax, going on from school to King's College. He took Holy Orders in the Episcopal Church, eventually becoming a minister. As a mature clergyman he was in charge of a fine parish in London, Ontario, where he remained for the rest of his life and became an archdeacon. It is said that he could have become a bishop, but that he preferred to stay in his parish.

He would go to England from time to time to preach in order to raise money for the poorer Canadian parishes. This period is detailed in the records of his church where he was much admired.

He married a widow, Mary Jane Hartshorne, who had one son from her previous marriage. They had eight children; four sons and four daughters. The first three were born in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, one in Hamilton, Ontario, and four in London, Ontario.

Banning's grandmother Mary's family name was Tremaine. Some of her ancestors had come to Canada from Devon and some as Loyalists from the United States after the Revolutionary War. The latter were given grants of land by the Canadian government. The first family member to have received a grant was a Colonel Boggs whose wife, Mary Morris, was from New Jersey and Philadelphia.

Harold Ashton, your great grandfather, was the second son (I will refer to him as H.A.R.). He joined the Bank of Montreal and was sent to Toronto, where he roomed with a well known Canadian humorist, whose name I have forgotten.

After a while he decided that he had better prospects in the United States. In Chicago he met Marion Ogden, a much courted heiress, and joined the throng of young men who vied for her interest. She was a very good looking girl and remained so all her life, having a very upright carriage and fine eyes. She had travelled in Europe with her mother and while in Paris had been painted by a well known artist, Benjamin Constant. He was also painting the Princess of Wales and had painted a portrait of Queen Victoria.

Marion was the daughter of the late John Wesley Ogden and Anna Barker, whose father had been a partner of Pullman. Whereas Pullman made passenger cars, Barker made box cars which brought the cattle from the prairies to the stock yards of Chicago, as well as corn and other goods to that growing city.

Marion's mother and her stepfather, Frederick Austin, were not too keen on this young man from Canada as a prospective son-in-law, but H.A.R. took the initiative and followed them when they, all three, went on a world tour. He made himself indispensable, judging from the diary that Marion kept of the voyage to Egypt and to India. He took charge of the travelling details and had the "red carpet" out for them at all the stopping places. He became impatient with the lack of progress in his marriage prospects so he had a cable sent to himself, supposedly from the firm of bathroom fittings that he was representing, recalling him to America. This brought matters to a head, and Marion's parents finally gave their consent, and a wedding was arranged. This took place in Calcutta Cathedral. Her stepfather gave her away, but her mother would not attend the ceremony.

The Viceroy of India lent the young couple his rail car to carry them to the rail head for Darjeeling where they were to spend their honeymoon in the hills.

On their return to the United States, they settled in Santa Barbara, California where their daughter, Barbara, was born, followed later by a son, Ogden Barker. They soon moved to England where Banning and Mariana were born.

H.A.R. hoped to interest the British Navy in a patent he held for extra strong tooled steel for armour plating. The inventor of the process was a German. H.A.R. was hoping that Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, and also with his American connections, would be interested, but the Admiralty turned him down. He held other patents, but seemed unable to market them. He also dabbled in politics and the stock market. He stood for Parliament in the north of England as a Conservative. His Canadian citizenship gave him the right to stand in England, but he was unsuccessful.

He went to Norway to fish for salmon and while there he was sold short on the stock exchange. Marion's mother insisted that they return to the United States where a trust was created, and from then on H.A.R. had less financial freedom.

The family settled in South Carolina not far from Augusta, Georgia. World War I broke out and H.A.R. threw himself into fund raising pageants and other projects. He was a natural showman. Banning went to prep school in Aiken, South Carolina. He was interested in sports: tennis, swimming and horsemanship. He then went on to Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, and on to Princeton where he obtained a first class degree. The only break in his schooling came after a serious car accident in Canada. His brother was driving a group of young people when the car went off the road. Banning was thrown out. He tried to help a girl passenger before he passed out with a badly fractured head. He was operated on in Montreal by the leading brain surgeon of the day, Dr. Wilder Penfield, and slowly recovered. His mother, who had been constantly at his bedside, decided to take him to see a psychic healer in New York. She was interested in seances, and this man had told her that her son had a growth on his heart which was impeding his recovery and which could be removed by psychic healing. Ogden's wife, a determined and imperious young woman from Montreal, disrupted the seance, calling the medium a fraud.

From Princeton, Banning went to Cambridge which he thoroughly enjoyed, making many friends and mixing his time there with social life in London.

He received a Bachelor of Arts degree and wished to go out east to study Asian countries and religions. Cambridge had a mission in Delhi, evangelical, educational, and medical. So, Banning was able to start with a job as lecturer at St Stephen's College, one of India's premier colleges, at that time located in old Delhi, within the city gates.

The salary was not large, but Banning was able to take the job because his godmother and cousin had always given him an annual monetary gift as she had to his brother and sisters. This enabled him to travel more and later to marry.

Banning and your grandmother, Diana, met during his last year at Cambridge and again when he passed through England on his way to and from Canada on vacation from India. They became engaged early in 1937. His family wanted them to wait a year, because his parents had already visited England that spring, but he finally persuaded them, and the wedding took place on July 27th of that year. His family arrived in full force for the wedding in London. The ceremony was performed by two of his spiritual advisors from Cambridge: his college mentor the Reverend Alec Vidler and Dean Wynn, who later became the Bishop of Ely.

Banning enjoyed his years at St Stephen's. He had a following among the students. He was certainly more outgoing than most of his colleagues and was interested in their lives.

He became interested in adult education, seeing that for India's future this would be very important. He helped to found, with another colleague, an "All India Adult Education Society" to tap into the independent efforts being made throughout India on that subject. His admiration for Mahatma Gandhi, who was interested in this work also, inspired him.

Banning did not know that his contract with St Stephen's would be terminated in 1939, but he did obtain another post at Government College Lahore in the Punjab. The family went to England for a few months where Joanna was born near Cambridge. Then they travelled to Lahore where they lived for two years and where their son, Raymond, was born December, 1939.

During the second summer in Lahore their son died of pneumonia. At the same time Banning was offered the job of Principal of Holkar College in Indore State in Central India, a college affiliated with the University of Agra. This came about through the efforts of two of his old students whose father was the Prime Minister of the State.

World War II had broken out in 1939. Banning had registered as a British citizen, and was told that he would not be called up, because his work in India was deemed important. His brother Ogden joined the Canadian Black Watch.

Banning loved his job in Indore where both Rhea and Sarah were born. He was put in charge of education, becoming Education Minister after he had found a successor for his job as principal for Holkar College, Dr. John Raju, an old colleague. This turned out to be a bad appointment as Raju became a divisive element and was not a good financial administrator; another man had to be found.

The Maharaja of Indore was in his thirties and had had part of his education at Oxford. He had faith in Banning's ability. The state was ahead of many similar states in agriculture, medicine and education. When the Maharaja went to the U.S. in the middle of the war to obtain a divorce from his first American wife, he put a regent in his place. The man, also a Mahratta, from a neighboring but smaller state, was something of a rogue. Banning, seeing that he would get no support for the various educational projects in his field of work, decided to reapply to the army and was then attached to the Department of Public Relations in Delhi. His previous head injury and a later knee injury precluded active service. While in Delhi, he edited and wrote for a newspaper for the troops in the S.E. Asia Command, which covered the Burma engagements.

The family spent two winters in Delhi, first in old Delhi and then in a borrowed house in New Delhi and then in a barracks for naval wives. Housing for families was in short supply.

At the end of the war in Europe, the Indian Government Minister of Defense, Sir Feroz Khan Noon, was sent to represent India at the conference to be held in San Francisco for the drawing up of the Charter for the founding of the United Nations. Sir Feroz needed an aide and asked for Banning to be temporarily released from the army in Delhi so as to join his staff. He knew of Banning's American connections. Banning had many friends in New York and again some in San Francisco, and this proved useful.

On his way back from the conference, Banning met the leader of the British Labour Party, Clement Attlee, and was able to obtain the promise of a constituency to fight for in the first post-war parliamentary election in England. The Liberal Party won the seat — an old Liberal seat, but Banning did well.

He returned to India and eventually to Indore after the Maharaja had asked for his release from the army. At this time, when India's independence was finally approaching, he became very interested in the political life of the Princely States. Several of the Princes hoped to get a better settlement with the Government of India, and Banning, ever optimistic, worked with his Maharaja's Government to this end, not realising that both the Viceroy and the Congress Party had no intention of allowing this to happen.

With independence, Banning's work in India ended. One of the early directives of the new Indian Government to the Princes was to tell them to dismiss their European advisors. His family had preceded him to England after they finally were successful in getting a passage on a troop ship sending families back to England.

They found a house not far from London, having first to rent one for a few months. Banning was writing a novel about India, but did not find a publisher, and therefore looked for a job. An old friend from India, who had long been in the pharmaceutical business, found a place for him, and they eventually moved to London. His interest in politics was as keen as ever. He left the Labour Party, because he disagreed with its policy of Government ownership of the coal and steel industries and railways, and joined the Liberal Party. He got permission from the firm to take leave to fight in the next election, and worked in the west of England. He did well, but not well enough. The Government fell within the year, so another election followed. This time the pharmaceutical firm would not allow him a second leave, so he joined a stockbroking firm. He did not win the seat.

During the time in London, he persuaded his father to allow his brother Ogden, who was having troubles with alcoholism, to come to London where Banning had discovered a doctor who owned a nursing home where he treated this problem with a new drug. Ogden agreed to take the treatment. While undergoing it, he met Phyllis Martin from Australia, who was one of the doctor's preferred nurses, and fell in love with her and married her. His parents, who came on their usual annual visit to England, were angry with him for not warning them of his plan to marry. The pressure induced him to return to drinking and again having to return for treatment.

Soon after this, his parents died in a car accident, and Banning decided that his family should move to Canada. His elder sister, Barbara, had lived in Quebec Province for many years, and his younger sister, Mariana, had a summer house nearby. He had several cousins in Toronto where we were going to live, because he was joining a stockbroking firm there. His three living aunts, his father's sisters, lived in Nova Scotia, Ottawa, and Toronto. They all welcomed him with open arms. They also offered interesting and often advantageous contacts in this country where he had never before had a permanent home.

Stockbroking was not a good environment for him. He was too romantic and optimistic for clear judgement and lacked a basic training in this field. This led to financial losses, which he hid, and into instability in which alcoholism played a major part. As you know his marriage broke up. Although he married again, it was a disaster and he became seriously ill and spent many years in a special nursing home. His godmother made this possible by setting up an account designated for his permanent care.

Your grandfather was a gifted man, a fine teacher who never found the same creative outlet in his later working life. Like many with histrionic ability, which often leads to politics, the church, teaching and the stage, his gifts were in that direction. He loved the theatre and took every opportunity to take part in it: from school and college, in amateur groups in India and in London, and also encouraged his daughters in this interest. He had, by worldly standards, a very advantageous start in life. His successes in school and in college were spectacular.

He had problems with his father who wished to control him; something his siblings, also, suffered from. H.A.R. would have liked his son to have been successful in business and in politics, and he gave him money to help his political aspirations. He did not like his working in India where Banning managed to make a life of his own choosing. Banning was a seeker then, for meaning in his life and in his work.

I have found it difficult to write this, but I felt that you wanted to know more about this grandfather whom you really rarely, or for some of you, never met, who was loved by many friends and family members.

The early family history I learned from hearsay and from research.

You have many Richardson cousins whom you may meet some day; interesting and active people. You belong to a big clan through your grandfather. His brother Ogden had two children by his first marriage: Andria, who died in the 1970s, and Gordon, who lives in Texas and runs an insurance business. He had two sons, Peter and Jamie, with his second wife, who live in Nova Scotia. His sister Barbara, who was an expert on early Canadian furniture, died in the late 1980s. His sister Mariana had two children in her first marriage. There are many other cousins descended from the sisters of H.A.R. One day your paths may cross with some of them.

I hope that this history fills some gaps in your knowledge of your ancestors, and particularly of your grandfather.

Her letter to Geoffrey WheatcroftWayne, Pennsylvania, 4 March 1988 (the first two pages)

Dear Mr. Wheatcroft,

I owe you thanks as well as compliments for the fascinating history of "The Randlords," compliments for the detail and research and for the verve of presentation, and my personal thanks for filling in some of the gaps in my knowledge of the life of my grandfather, Herman Eckstein.

I came on your book by way of The New York Times Book Review at the right moment because my grandchildren were asking me for a family history. It is not that they are interested in genealogy as such but, I think, because they have lived away from their parental roots in different parts of the world and are now curious to know more about them.

I have told them that they must accept the fact that family memory is sometimes faulty and that families often adhere to myths as well as to proven tales.

One myth that does not stand up is that, had my grandfather lived longer, he would have been successful in preventing the hot heads from proceeding with the policies that led to the Jameson Raid; this partly because he was level headed and a good negotiator, and partly because he was supposed to have had a better relationship with Kruger than most of his colleagues. I now know that he had been translated to the London office some years before this catalytic event which set the scene for the resulting war.

My grandparents had five children, three sons, one who died in infancy and one a posthumous child, and two daughters. My mother was their younger daughter. She was only three when the family left South Africa and remembered the stormy voyage. She always spoke warmly of her father and I gathered that he was loved and respected by his family.

The eldest son, Herman, went to Eton and then joined the 17th Lancers. He was a good rider and a polo player. Whilst with his regiment in India he contracted a fever, akin to polio, which left him with a damaged leg. In spite of this he rejoined his regiment in France and later was in Ireland during "The Troubles."

After the war he went to Kenya to settle his late brother's affairs and fell in love with the country, married, raised a family, which included two stepchildren, farmed and trained polo ponies. His younger brother, Ludwig, had, after leaving Eton, trained at an agricultural college and gone to farm in Kenya. During the war he joined the King's African Rifles, under General Smuts, and died of wounds received in the campaign fighting the renowned Von Lettow.

My mother and her sister married two brothers, Leslie and Raymond Johnson, and had nine children between them.

My grandmother was certainly a beauty and was still good looking in old age. I saw more of her in her last years when I stayed with her whilst studying in London, and accompanied her many times when she arranged the flowers at the Priory Church of St. Bartholomew the Great at Smithfield. Her memorial stone lies in the aisle. The photograph, in your book, of my grandparents together is the best I have seen. I will try to obtain a copy from the Johannesburg public library. The one of my grandmother, supposedly taken on her wedding day, was taken much later when she was presented at court prior to presenting her daughters.

She remained a widow for many years and then married Ralph Cobbold in spite of family opposition. He was an ex-soldier, an explorer and big game shot, and the author of a book, "Innermost Asia," the record of a journey from India into Chinese and Russian Turkestan. The marriage ended in divorce. They had one son, a fine cricketer who captained Eton and played for Cambridge. He was also an excellent shot. He became managing director of Justerini & Brooks and remained with the firm until he retired, apart from war service in World War II. He died in September 1987.

Of my grandmother's early days I know little apart from the tales of survival of the Pitt family during a trek; the boys, one of whom was her father, were saved when their wagons sank, crossing a river, when their father drowned. Her mother was a Campbell and, I was told, a niece of the poet Thomas Campbell. Her brother rode courier for Ecksteins.

My grandmother disliked her given name "Minnie" and was known in later years as Diana, a name passed to several of her descendants.

I gleaned quite a lot of information from A.P. Cartwright's book "The Corner House," a somewhat romanticized tale. What was news to me was that my grandfather had died intestate. This was a strange slip for a man known for his meticulous accounts and written reports. I know that his brother Frederick, and his partners, those who assumed trusteeship, decided to sell all his "speculative shares," those he had in the mines. He had great faith in the deep levels and, I believe, paid an American mining engineer himself to report on their possible future. Members of the firm became millionaires. I can only assume that the mining shares became theirs.

My grandmother was left well off but lost quite a lot at the outbreak of the Great War due to her advisors not taking her out of her German investments.

Herman's son, Anthony, lives in Scotland. His children are all in the medical profession. His younger sister, Mrs. Michael Dempsey, was the last to leave Kenya, and now lives in East Anglia [typed "East Augha"].

My other connection with South Africa was through my father, Raymond Johnson, who with his regiment the VI [typed "IV"] Inniskillings, sailed to Capetown from Queenstown.

For a young man barely twenty, and a good rider, the Boer War was certainly the most adventurous period of his life. He was seconded to Colonel Rimington's scouts and I heard many stories of his exploits. He was mentioned in dispatches several times and was awarded the D.S.O. I still have his war diaries.

My godmother, Daphne Heyberger, daughter of J.B. Taylor, who lived in France for many years, who was a fine artist, and who went to live in Ireland after her husband's death, joining her sister Iris Boyd Rochfort, said that she would never live in South Africa again after experiencing conditions on a visit after World War II.

My uncle, Herman Eckstein, was probably the most like his father. I remember his fine bass baritone and his great laugh and his kindness to his small nephews and nieces, and I can still visualize the mock safaris he would arrange for us in the grounds of my grandmother's house near Newbury, using the big game trophies of his stepfather (which my grandmother had banished to cabinets in a corridor leading to the gun room) with the help …

[The surviving pages end here.]

The photographs

Restored so far; more are on the way

Sources and corrections

What we checked, and what we changed

Where the facts come from

Diana’s typed history of my grandfather’s family (late 1980s)
Diana’s letter to Geoffrey Wheatcroft (4 March 1988; first two pages)
Diana’s handwritten notes on her photographs
The Barker family chart
John Wesley Ogden’s obituary, Chicago Tribune, 26 August 1885, and his crypt at Rosehill Cemetery
Published records of Major-General Dudley Graham Johnson VC
My grandfather’s birth certificate
Diana’s obituary, 2015
Burke’s Peerage and the Cobbold Family History Trust family tree, as given on thepeerage.com and the Trust’s own site
Family records, and the Cobbold Family History Trust tree, for Raymond Johnson’s dates

What we corrected

My grandfather was born in Windsor, England, not London, Ontario, as the Barker chart says. His birth certificate and Diana’s history agree.
John Wesley Ogden was born on 19 May 1842 and died on 24 August 1885, as his crypt and obituary say; the chart has 14 May and 25 August.
H.A.R. and Marion share a date of death because they died together.
Ludwig Eckstein died in the First World War; one of Diana’s notes says the Second.
Raymond’s regiment was the 6th (Inniskilling) Dragoons; the 1988 letter’s “IV” is a typing slip.
Little Compton has long been officially in Warwickshire, at the corner where it meets Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire; Diana and her obituary both call it Gloucestershire.
The album note on the photograph of Diana and Brandon reads “Sunday 13 April 69”, and 13 April 1969 was indeed a Sunday. They married in 1967, so it is not their wedding day.
The names on the back of the street photograph were written behind each person, so they read in mirror image; read that way, every name matches its person.
The note filed with the Fred Gegg family group names Raymond’s family, but the photograph is about twenty years too early for that.
Diana’s notes count the “greats” from different starting points. On this page every relationship is counted from me.

Where the sources disagree

Diana’s obituary says the family emigrated to Toronto in 1954. Her history says the move came after H.A.R. and Marion’s deaths, which the Barker chart dates to March 1955.
The obituary says all three daughters were born in India; Diana’s history says Joanna was born near Cambridge.
The Cobbold family tree gives Lily’s dates as 1892–1917. Diana wrote that her mother often spoke of Hermann, which suggests Lily lived well beyond 1917.
The Cobbold family tree gives Raymond and Lily’s wedding as 11 February 1912, with a question mark; that day was a Sunday, an unusual day for an English wedding.
The Cobbold family tree gives Diana’s death as 9 September 2015. Her obituary says Sunday, 9 August 2015, and 9 August 2015 was indeed a Sunday, so this page follows the obituary. The tree also gives her full name as Diana Vivien Raymond Johnson.
The note on the back of Hermann and Minnie’s engagement photograph dates it to 1880, but Minnie was born in 1865 and their first child in 1889, so the engagement was probably later.

Family tradition, not yet confirmed

That Minnie’s mother was a niece of the poet Thomas Campbell, and that the Pitts were cousins of William Pitt.
That Sir John Arnott founded The Irish Times and sat for Cork.
The name of the Canadian humorist who shared rooms with H.A.R.
That the officer photographed in London is Dudley Johnson. The family recognises him, but his cap badge differs from the one in the street photograph.