Early Memories: Burma India England

Early Memories

Burma, India, England

Copywrite © Reginald Tripp

ISBN 978-0-244-57851-0

Chapter 1  - Father’s Early Life in England

The origins of the name Tripp are not really known. There is a tradition that the family name was previously Howard and that at the Siege of Boulogne in either 1492 by Henry VII or in 1544 by Henry VIII.

…King Harry being there ask’d Lord Howard’s 5th son how took y town and Castle. Howard answered I tripp’d up y Walls. Saith his Majesty Tripp shall be thy name, and no longer Howard and Hon him with y scaling Ladder for his Bend.

Although we have a heraldic device including a scaling ladder it is probable that the story and the device itself are entirely made up and spurious. There is no proof that there was any siege of Boulogne or of this story at any other siege. None the less this is a photo of our Family Crest which hangs on the walls of Hugh and Hilary Tripp’s house in Somerset. Old surnames often reflect trades or places or events so an ancestor might well have tripped over something or even a castle wall. Perhaps he did.

There is another tradition that the Tripps came from Cornwall. There are indeed a lot of Tripps living in Cornwall today – the Penzance telephone directory is full of Tripps – but again there is no definitive proof that we came from this part of the world, although it may explain why we all seem to love Cornwall so much. But then so many people do love Cornwall.

There is, or was, a Tripp House in Amsterdam so maybe our family came from there. There was also Wolfgang Von Tripp a famous German racing driver of the 1950’s so maybe we have German aristocratic descendants; Von is an aristocratic designation. There is also a Lake Tripp in the South Island of New Zealand (it changed its name to Lake Tekapo, I think) but as NZ was discovered only in 1769 by Captain Cook it is not the origin of our name but the lake was named by an ancestor who emigrated there. Julia and I saw Lake Tripp on the map when we were in New Zealand in 1978.

As a matter of interest Abel Tasman, a Dutchman, was really the first person to see New Zealand in the 1640’s after he had visited Tasmania which is named after him. Stormy weather blew him off course & he missed Australia completely which must have  annoyed the Dutch a century later when Captain Cook discovered Australia on 29th April 1770, after discovering New Zealand. I had a friend at St Andrew’s School named Tasman who said he was descended from Abel Tasman.

At one stage at the height of the Cold War in the late 1950’s and 1960’s when the threat of nuclear war was very real our father did seriously consider emigrating to New Zealand with us all. But we moved instead to Four Marks in Hampshire which is about 50 miles from the centre of London and outside the radius of instant obliteration from a Hydrogen bomb – or so our father reasoned. A slow death from fall-out was not properly understood in those almost innocent days, despite Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Our father, Louis Upton Graham Tripp was born in Isleworth, Middlesex on 5th January 1887 to a middle-class family many of whom were ordained into the Church of England. At various times Tripps or Sandbergs or other ancestors were Vicars at Petworth in Sussex: at South Warnborough in Hampshire: at Altarnun in Cornwall. This is a view of the Church at Alternun.

There have also been Tripps or Sandbergs as Vicars in Northrepps in Norfolk & in many other places. We have ancestors who were at one time or another Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London & even the Roman Catholic Bishop of Wimbledon.

The Vicarage at Altarnun is near the famous Jamaica Inn on the A30 in Cornwall and is supposedly haunted by the ghost of the mistress of The Rev Robert Henry Tripp (1816 – 1897) our Great Great Grandfather who was Vicar there. The ghost is of a maid who was supposedly seduced by the Rev & then abandoned. House maids were fair game, often willingly, for those upstairs & preyed upon by sons of the family seeking experience or by lonely bachelors. In despair she killed herself by jumping out of a window. Leslie claims to have felt her presence & even seen her, but I have had no such luck. Robert Henry Tripp is buried in the Churchyard.

Sky TV made a programme in the late 1990’s about haunted houses & the Vicarage at Altarnun featured. Unfortunately, nothing was felt or seen or heard by their television crew.

The Rev Robert Henry Tripp was the Father of William Blomfield Tripp (1843 - 1919) who married Rose Harriet Sandberg (1850-1909). She was the daughter of Maria Sandberg (see below). Our Father was their second son after William Howard Sandberg (1886 1973). His younger brother was the Rev Noel Francis (1888 -1975) Father of our cousin Mimi who died in 2019. Father’s younger sister, Iris Mary Sinclair (1890 -1971) never married & became a nun. She visited us once or twice in Lymington House but I don’t remember her at all.

I have cousins most of whom are so much older than I am. I was not born till my father was 55 years old & to his second wife (maybe third wife see later), because of this & the fact that I spent 25 years working in the Far East, I have had little contact with cousins & only recently met our half-brother, Adrian (born in 1929) & our half-sister Yvonne.

This is thought to be a photo of Sarah Maria Sandberg née Graham. our Great Great Grandmother probably our most interesting recent forebear who was born in Russia in 1814 to a British Diplomat. She married The Rev Paul Louis Sandberg (1819-1886) who was born in Prussia (now Germany) and later Rector of the Church in Northrepps in Norfolk. It was their daughter Rose Harriet Sandberg (1850-1909) who married our Grandfather William Blomfield Tripp (1843-1919) – see preceding paragraph.

Sarah Maria Graham was a religious lady who wrote many religious books and spoke 7 languages – English, Russian, German, Italian, Latin, Greek and while living in India she learnt Hindustani. She translated many Greek and Latin Classics into English as well as Hindustani texts into English and vice versa. She was renowned enough to have had an obituary in The Times when she died on April 22nd 1903. She obviously led an interesting life.

I hope one day someone in the family will research her life properly and write about her.

Our Father’s early days were spent in Isleworth at the house in Spring Grove they called Northrepps after the village of the same name in Norfolk where his Grandfather had been the rector. Isleworth was then an idyllic country retreat not yet part of the London suburbs nor bedevilled by Heathrow airport. Spring Grove was an elegant residential area with graceful Georgian houses in large plots of land. When the railways came the railway station nearby was originally called 'Spring Grove & Isleworth'. Our father & his sister Iris often went on holiday to Looe in Cornwall from where they sent dutiful postcards back to their Father. We have one dated 5th September 1907. This is it.

Looe has always been part of our family tradition and continues to have an emotional hold on us even today, despite it having changed so much for the worse. In the 1950’s we used to stay in that lovely hotel right on the beach, The Boscarn Hotel. Catching the first glimpse of the Looe River as we drive in brings a warm feeling of happiness & holidays. But some local councillors destroyed this idyll by allowing a drab, solid, square, bland pub to be built in place of the unique front entrance. The Hotel no longer exists; it is now individual flats. The Councillors who allowed this & other monstrosities to happen in Looe should be hung out to dry. They succeeded in destroying Looe from a lovely seaside holiday resort & fishing port into what is now a ghastly down-market disaster full of Birmingham bus drivers as our brother-in-law (John McAlear) once described it. Despite that, we still all go there whenever we can as the emotional feeling still remains of what it was when we had happy holidays there.

(Louis Upton Graham Tripp aged about 20)

Both our father’s brothers went to Cambridge University, Emmanuel College and Queens College but he never did for some reason, maybe he was not bright enough or the family ran out of money.

When his Mother, Rose Harriet died on 25th Sept 1909 she left to Iris her only daughter..…my real and personal property, jewellery, and furniture that I have power to leave free from marital control…. To her two sons she left £100 each, not much but it was then about the equivalent of the annual wage of a skilled worker, a bricklayer perhaps. They probably spent this sum on wine, women and song as teen agers are wont to do rather than thinking of the future. Much later, in the 1920’s father did buy what we still call Our Land in Looe, a short way upstream on the Looe River. Frankly Our Land is a useless 2 or 3 acres of steeply sloping field on the banks of what is only a tidal stream. The only benefit is that there is a fresh water spring and a Telegraph Pole erected by the local electric company or the GPO which used to bring in an income of £1 a year! I’m not sure what happened to this enormous income but somehow it seemed to have stopped when our Mother died in 1998.

In his youth, maybe even still a teenager, our father fell in love with an unsuitable girl, so the story goes, and family pressure forced him to abandon her. As a result, in late 1906, he decided to go abroad to forget her. He got a job to go to Jamaica in the West Indies with the Colonial Bank but before he could travel out there, the massive 1907 Jamaican earthquake destroyed nearly all the buildings, killed 1,000 people, made 10,000 people homeless & caused damage of about £1 billion, in today’s money. I wonder if this earthquake in Jamaica was in any way an indirect result of the even more massive earthquake that had virtually destroyed San Francisco a few months earlier in April 1906. Maybe. In any case his appointment to the Colonial Bank in Jamaica was cancelled and his life took a completely different path.

Instead in  early 1909 he sailed for Burma and Rangoon to join the Danish company of Fabricus & Co. Immediately on arrival he got a telegram to say his Mother had died. It was devastating news but too late as it would take too long to go back to England. He stayed in Rangoon. Later, when we were children he always seemed reluctant to celebrate his birthday and Mother told us that it was actually on his birthday, January 5th that his Mother had died so he was always sad rather than happy on his birthday.

The family already had tenuous connections with India as many ancestors had gone out there in business and as missionaries. Burma was part of the British Empire under the control of the Viceroy in India. (see next chapter)

Chapter 2 - Burma  History & Geography

Burma is a surprisingly large country, larger than any country in Europe, even France or Germany and three times the size of the UK. It is only just a bit smaller than Borneo the third largest island in the world after Greenland and New Guinea. In spite of its size it is physically cut off from its neighbours by mountains, jungles and the sea so it is a natural geographical entity although you may not think so from a cursory glance at a map. The Burmese people, made up of Burmans 68%, Karens 10% and Shans 8%, live mainly in the fertile plains of the Irawaddy, the Sittang and the Salween basins which are encircled by a horse-shoe shaped arc of mountains and hills which are covered in thick, almost impenetrable jungle with the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea forming barriers on the seaward side.

Probably because of this geographical isolation, the people of Burma throughout its history have been inward looking and self- sufficient. There has been a continuous Buddhist State of Burma under a succession of Kings for a thousand years or more. As a measure of its inward looking isolation the ancient capital City of  Sri Kshetra was once known as the Centre of the Universe. Burma’s or Myanmar’s present disdain for the outside world therefore is only a reflection of its past.

Modern westerners know very little about Burma, even so most people know roughly where it is and have heard of the world famous site of Pagan with its multitude of beautiful pagodas and particularly the Shwedigon or Shwezigon Pagoda. And most people have heard of Mandalay, if only because of the Bob Hope and Bing Crosby film the Road to Mandalay.

The British began trading with Burma, mainly for teak, in the early part of the 19th Century via India. After a succession of disputes and skirmishes culminating in a succession of Anglo Burmese Wars, the Kingdom of Ava as Northern Burma was known was formally annexed and then in 1886, the year before our father was born, incidentally, the whole of Burma became a province of the British-Indian Empire.

The last King of Burma, King Thibaw Min, from the Royal Dynasty of Konbaung, and his Queen Supayalat ruled the Kingdom of Ava from his magnificent Palace at Mandalay. When he was ousted in 1885 there was turbulent and brutal fighting by the drunken British troops and his Palace was looted and destroyed including his extensive library. He continued to rule as a puppet King in some luxury and freedom but in name only. Real power was now in the hands of the British Colonial administrators reporting directly to the British Viceroy in India.

It is rather a sad story to write about the fate of the last King and his family. He had four daughters. The eldest became pregnant with their Diwan the Indian gatekeeper. As if that was not scandal enough the Diwan was already a married man with a family. The British community were apparently even more shocked at this than the Burmese. Eventually King Thibaw and Queen Supayalat were reconciled with their daughter and their granddaughter, nicknamed Baisu who was loved by them. Poor Baisu however, ended up living penniless in the slums of Bombay till she was in her 90’s only dying early in the 21st Century. By all accounts she was always a charming and kind and once very beautiful lady.

The Shwebo Palace where the King lived built in 1753

The second Princess also fell in love with an unsuitable man and eloped. She sought refuge with Mrs Head, the wife of the British District Collector. The king sent his chauffeur driven Model T Ford to collect her but she refused to return. The fate of this second Princess is a mystery but it is rumoured from her estranged family – all her relatives disowned her – that she & her husband may have retired to a dairy farm near Darjeeling in India & lived happily ever after. The poor old King suffered a heart attack a few weeks later & died. This was in 1916 when he was only 56 years old. The Royal Dynasty in Burma was never to be reinstated.

His youngest daughter Princess Hteik Tin Ma Lat (born Calcutta 1894. Died Rangoon 1965) was well educated and the most beautiful. Someone much later said of her "She sat on the sofa, a beautiful woman, in a blue silk skirt and a jacket of white lawn, her complexion corn-coloured, her eyes large and brilliant, and with exquisite hands.

When she was 16, it was thought she might marry Willhelm, the Crown Prince of Prussia when he visited in 1910. He was related to our own Royal Family. He later said that she was the most striking woman he had met on his Eastern tour. Nothing came of it however. Then the heir apparent of Nepal (some accounts say Sikkim), Prithvi Bir Bikram Shah Devand, fell in love with her which was easy because of her education, charm and good looks.’ They were due to be married in Rangoon in Jan 1915  when she turned 21 but unfortunately he died in suspicious circumstances in December the year before aged only 35.

She did at last marry Herbert Bellamy (1878 -1957) in October 1921. It seems to have been a strange choice for such a high born lady but who knows? He was a horse breeder, bookmaker in India, Batavia (now Indonesia) and Singapore. He was also the Manager of Maymyo Racecourse in Burma. He collected orchids. They had one daughter. This is a picture of her with her daughter Princess Yadana Nat Mei.

When the last King Thibaw died, his court was more or less disbanded. Most of the extensive Royal line ended up in obscurity either in Bombay or elsewhere in India or unrecognised in Burma in Mandalay or Maymyo. With no special pensions or legal status, they became poorer & poorer & sunk into oblivion. In effect they disappeared from history especially as there has never been any Monarchist movement to reinstate them. In the 1960’s the grandson of the last King was asked by the ruling army clique to appear in public at an anti-communist rally. The army were surprised & worried at his popular acclaim and no member of the deposed Royal Family was ever asked to appear in public again.

Our father’s first wife, Minnie, claimed to have Burmese Royal blood in her veins as also did Lindsay Green, wife of our friend Roger Green. Who knows? It is possible as the Royal line and their descendants were extensive.

The method of British rule in Burma was the same as in India. A diverse population of around 25 million was governed by a remarkably small number of Collectors and Residents who were often very young – still in their 20’s and seconded from the elite Indian