I have been most encouraged by the recent response to my AOTM article and especially by Monica D’Cruz’s beautiful comments that emphasises how little is known about the senior generations of Anglo-Indians, either in India or abroad, who contributed so much to shape a unique culture that identifies us today.  On emigration to distant shores, they perpetuated this uniqueness and ensured that, in many a foreign land (to use that inimitable English phrase), there will always be a corner that will forever be Anglo-Indian.

The need to chronicle the dedication and contribution by so many unsung AI heroes is beyond question.  ‘Men of Harlech - Land of our Fathers’ would have equally befitted our granddads, uncles, dads and brothers. And not forgetting the women who ran their homes, signed the call book, packed the line boxes, filled the ‘tiffin’ carriers, nursed in hospitals, taught in countless railway schools and oiled the cogs of business and industry in the cities with their indispensable secretarial skills. 

They have not had the opportunity to publicize their life and experiences simply because they have faded into the background, age and infirmities have taken their toll or they believe their lives were uneventful and ordinary. Most times this is as far from the truth as one can get.

In an age of accessible and convenient communication, this untapped wealth of knowledge must not be allowed to pass unrecorded. Due recognition must be given to the undeniable and unalienable fact that India, past and present, unites us all; white, brown and khaki, wherever or whatever we now are. Our descendants, it is hoped, will recall with uninhibited pride, their association with India, jewel or no jewel in the crown. As a community, on the cusp of fragmentation and questionably oblivion, this omission will tantamount to a dereliction of duty to those who seek, will seek and, hopefully, will find and treasure from ‘whence I came’.

In this context, I have had a most pleasant experience just recently when a most casual genealogical link was established with the DeBrass and D’Brass families. My wife Hazel, whose mother was a D’Brass, received an e-mail from a lady living in Denmark, married to a Dane, making inquiries about the D’ or deBrass family with links to South India. No tangible evidence of relationship could be found other than in the similarity of name. Hazel remembered her grandfather, a retired railwayman on the Bengal Nagpur Railway stationed at Vizag having mentioned that he was born in Mettapalyam, a small railway post at the foothills of the Nilgiris. This was enough to establish a tenuous link and an invitation to visit Denmark was soon received and, needless to say, instantly taken up. A new kaleidoscope of human experience was waiting for us in Aalburg, a town in Jutland, Northern Denmark. There we were to meet Lynn and Benny Pedersen and to see, first hand, the courage and tenacity of a young Anglo-Indian woman, who was lifted out of the casual warmth of India, to love and live in the rigid bone-chilling cold of Viking Denmark.

Elise Lynn DeBrass Pedersen, the middle of three children, was born on Nov 30, 1941 in Bangalore to Cecil DeBrass and Valerie Masters. Losing their father and breadwinner at an early age honed the family in the virtues of frugality and opportunity through education, that was to see Lynn and her two brothers, Peter and Kevin, excel in their chosen careers. Both the DeBrass and Masters were well know Anglo-Indian families in the South; high achievers by any stretch of the imagination.

After the death of her father, the family settled in Fraser Town, Bangalore and her mother, Mrs Valerie Brass (Masters), began teaching at St. Germains High School.

After high school Lynn joined the Army Nursing Corps, commissioned as a Lieutenant and saw service in various military hospitals throughout India.

Benny was born in Denmark on May 9, 1944, trained as a mechanical engineer when he answered a call for volunteers to set up a Danish funded dairy project in Bangalore. This decision graphically illustrates Benny’s caring nature and precipitated an event that was to change his and a young woman’s life forever. 

He met Lynn at a Catholic club social in July 1968 and a world-wind romance began that was quite quickly and naturally the talk of the town. They were married in Bangalore by Rev. Fr. Roland Masters SJ, Lynn’s uncle who, in the early ‘50’s, was my English teacher at Campion, Trichinopoly. They arrived to start married life in Denmark on July 4, 1969. Needless to say, Lynn was received with much scepticism by Benny’s family, but she was all the rage in town with the local newspapers, agog, when a local boy brought a beautiful oriental girl home as his bride. But the fairy story had to end sometime and the enormity of living in a non-English speaking Northern European country was soon to present the problems that most of us are familiar with today.

Wedding Day - May 10, 1969  St.Patrick’s Church, Richmond Town, Bangalore

Benny soon joined the local authority water company but Lynn had to start at square one; learning the language so as to quickly put her nursing skills to good use, to fit into the local community. Lynn was determined to make her marriage work, to make Denmark her home. By the end of 1970 she had passed the basic examinations set by the Danish Nursing Authority and began her eventful nursing career that was to take up the next 33 years of her life. In 1978, after the birth of her two sons, she was selected for advanced nursing studies at the University of Aahus where she gained a BSc in 1980 and soon after was appointed as sister tutor at the prestigious School of Nursing, Aaborg. Doors opened after this and a most satisfying career ensued until her retirement in 2004. 

Life was no less stressful for Benny either. He had to climb the ladder again on his return from India andwork around the commitments that Lynn had taken on in her pursuit of her nursing career that took her away from the family for weeks at a time. Benny understood that Lynn had a point to prove and was man enough to accept the challenge. Their two boys, Peter and Kim have been the beneficiaries of their parents’ ethic of high achievement. Kim, now  33, with a Master’s in International Politics and Law works in Switzerland and Peter, now 29, with a Master’s in Datamatics, Business and Management works in Amsterdam. The world’s their oyster.

Benny, Kim, Peter and Lynn with Peter’s girlfriend  

Benny is transfixed by his love of India and all things India to the extent that he always wears a ’lungi – a type of dhoti’ around the house. He has immersed himself in tracing Lynn’s family roots and her larger than life family around the world.

Benny in a ‘lungi’

We also had the great pleasure of meeting another Anglo-Indian girl, Cheryl Rouse and her husband Ernest, a former major in the Danish Air Force, now close friends of Benny and Lynn. Cheryl hails from another one horse railway town, Jalarapet, in South India. She came to Denmark in the late ‘70’s to teach English in a local Aaburg school, loved it, married, and stayed.

Ernest & Cheryl

She also went through the familiar loop but with typical AI tenacity, achieved a fluency in Danish that eventually led to a degree in Clinical Physiology and has never looked back. She and her husband visit India frequently and Ernest insists on staying at her mother’s in Jalarapet.

He husband, like Benny, exudes a love of India that is truly edifying and sometimes one is so ashamed that, as native-born Indians, we were so depreciative of so much that was and is Indian. Perhaps it has taken us to live abroad to appreciate that we are not just ‘Anglo’ but ‘Indian’ as well. 

To round off a most exhilarating experience, a footnote must be added that Lynn’s two brothers, Peter and Kevin, after graduating from the Indian Defence Academy, were commissioned into the Indian Navy. Peter served as a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm aboard the INS Vikrant, commanded this flagship of the Indian Navy and retired as a Rear-Admiral.  Kevin specialised in naval architecture, gaining a series of engineering degrees from Royal Naval Colleges in England and eventually retired as a commodore.

Lynn with brothers Peter (L) and Kevin

What a family, what achievements and what fulfilling lives to write about. It’s been my pleasure.

More please!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

 Ed Haliburn

 A Few thoughts taken from his biography

Letters from America was first broadcast in 1945 with 29 pieces, some being composites of a number of original talks on radio, on subjects as varied as the cowboy-philosopher Will Rogers to the heartwarming story of a stolen baby; from the history of the Spanish in California, Abraham Lincoln, the Civil and two world wars, to the early Harvard computer and much beyond.

It is a record of 60 years of Anglo-American misunderstanding and one man’s tireless efforts over that time to put the record straight. His lifelong crusade is encapsulated in a most profound and far reaching observation that is relevant today as when it was first wrote.

His life-long love affair with America, then a mostly unknown country, was first aroused by the tragedy of the Titanic disaster, the casual disregard of the high toll of immigrant fatalities, to the day the first ‘Doughboy soldier’ was billeted in his mother’s boarding house in the seaside resort of Blackpool, England when in 1917, America entered the First World War.

The turning point that was to change his life however was when he chanced upon a post card sent to a young soldier by his mother. It showed the Statue of Liberty and the inscription on the Statue kindled a spark that was to take him to Oxford, the BBC and on to America as the BBC correspondent for the next four decades.    

 Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

Here are a few excerpts. I like to share them with you and hope you enjoy them as much as I did. Love them or hate them but ignore them is impossible.    

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The Special Relationship

Behind these talks is a simple and unchanging belief – it is unassailable fact that, no matter how much we scream and kick at each other, we cannot break up the home. Not for any sentimental reason – not for any persuasive moonshine about our common origins – but because it simply isn’t realistic any more to consider breaking up. We may dislike each other heartily, but we can no longer afford the luxury of acting on that dislike. Whether they like it or not, Britain and America are mixed together in a test-tube – the irreducible elements of an indissoluble union.

English As She Is Spoke

A broadcast based on his Harvard researches made a number of bold assertions on the premise that English as it is spoken in America derives from the speech of 17^th century settlers .It was the then socially accepted standard of the South of England. Not only is the American speech historically an older speech, but it also means that if Chaucer were alive today, he would have much more difficulty understanding his very great –grandson in Hampstead, North London than he would have understanding a very great-cousin in Milwaukee, USA.

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A Befitting Salutation To His Better Half  

What (the casual visitor) cannot see, which strikes me who am deep in this sort of thing, is that the woman’s pleasure, her standard of elegance and such leisure that she enjoys, is gained at the expense of her own slavery. ‘Come back tomorrow morning’, I feel like saying to those scrutinizing visitors, or ‘what a pity you didn’t turn up an hour before supper, and see the labour and the imagination that made your evening so pleasant.’ 

A Love Of Life

Even the prospect of early annihilation should not keep us from making the best of our days on this unhappy planet. And it would be a crime against Nature for any generation to take the world’s crisis so solemnly that it puts off enjoying those things for which we were presumably designed in the first place and which the gravest statesmen and the hoarsest politician hope to make available to all men in the end: I mean the opportunity to do good works, to fall in love, to enjoy friends, to sit under a leafy tree, to read, to hit a ball and most of all to bounce a bonny baby on one’s knee. 

In The Interests of The Joe Public

‘The Patient has the Floor’ featured talking about American History to the State Department, the Role of the Soldier to the West Point Academy and on the subject of Medical Jargon at the annual convocation of the Mayo Clinic graduate school.

It was the job of a journalist, he suggested be the social link between the expert and the public: he therefore intended to speak up for the public. He spoke on the subject of medical jargon, issuing a plea to young clinicians to avoid the self-serving obfuscations of their profession and treat with deep suspicion each passing medical fashion.  If cholesterol was as dangerous as it was cracked up to be why was there any adult alive in Britain today?

Drawing upon his childhood memories of Blackpool, Lancashire he ruminated ‘ of all the civilized countries the British are connoisseurs of animal fats, with their morning toast and eggs bubbling in bacon fat, their biscuits at 11o’clock, their lunch of meat and potatoes and worse, suet, then tea and biscuits and cake at 3 o’clock, and dinner with more meat, bread and potatoes topped off with a pudding and perhaps an emergency snack of cheese and biscuits to guarantee coming safely through the night.’

This experience had emboldened him to offer advice to a new generation of doctors and only partly in jest: should not every profession undergo a parallel course in basic English!!!!

Feted By Congress

On Sept 25, 1974 Alistair Cooke was paid a signal honour, only the third non-American born to do so, the others being Lafayette and Winston Churchill to be congratulated by the joint Houses of Congress. The main theme of his address, as befitted such a hazardous time in the nation’s affairs, he recalled the heroes of the Revolution: heroes on both sides of the Atlantic.

There was a danger he said ‘ in sentimentalizing history, or teaching it as a continual clash between good guys and bad guys, between America and Britain , the white man and the black, industry and labour, between them and us. If the forthcoming bicentennial celebrations were to be conducted on such a simplistic basis, they would turn into an orgy of self-righteousness in which every man who signed the Declaration of Independence is at this time being measured for a halo or worse still for a tee-shirt. History – all history – was more complex than that and, if taught in all its variety, young people might learn that courage and cowardice know no natural or racial frontiers and when we say a man or woman is a credit to their race we should mean, no more and no less, than the whole human race.

He concluded that it seemed a happy coincidence that 200 years after the first Congress had met as a team of watchdogs eager to corner a tyrannical executive, this House should have made it possible for us to say without complacency and with some legitimate pride   ‘ I have seen the past – and it works’

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My Country, My Country I think This Of Thee

Cooke’s patriotism and love of his adopted country was solely tested many times; from the ecstasy at the end of the Second World War, the breathtaking vision of the Marshall Plan that raised a battered and broken Europe from it’s knees, the Berlin Airlift that fed a vanquished and helpless foe, the idealism of defending Korea, the hope and glory of Kennedy, the vision of Camelot to the despair and agony of Viet Nam and Watergate.

His one abiding solace in times of national soul searching and despair, his Act of the Apostles as it were, lay enshrined in Abraham Lincoln’s immortal Gettysburg address  that never failed to reinforce his love and an unshakeable belief in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

 The Gettysburg Address

Nov. 19, 1863 Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting place for those who died here that the nation might live. This we may, in all propriety do. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have hallowed it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is rather for us the living, we here be dedicated to the great task remaining before us–that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion–that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” Abraham Lincoln

The End

And on his 90^th birthday commenting on the growing shortage of friends ‘ I touch wood every morning and a Scotch at night’

The moral of THE FRYING PAN

A young man called Peter invited his mother for dinner, during the
course of the meal, his mother couldn’t help but notice how handsome
Peter’s flatmate, Simon, was.

She had long been suspicious of a relationship between the two, and
this only made her more curious.

Over the course of the evening, while watching the two interact, she
started to wonder if there was more between Peter and his flatmate
than met the eye.

Reading his mum’s thoughts, Peter volunteered, “I know what you must be
thinking, but I assure you, Simon & I are just flatmates”.

About a week later, Simon came to Peter saying, “Ever since your mother came
to dinner, I’ve been unable to find the frying pan, you don’t suppose she
took it do you?” “Well I doubt it, but I’ll e-mail her just to be sure”
said Peter. So he sat down and wrote:

DEAR MOTHER,

I’M NOT SAYING THAT YOU “DID” TAKE THE FRYING PAN FROM MY HOUSE,
I’M NOT SAYING THAT YOU “DID NOT” TAKE THE FRYING PAN BUT THE FACT REMAINS
THAT IT HAS BEEN MISSING EVER SINCE YOU WERE HERE FOR DINNER.

LOVE PETER

Several days later, Peter received an email from his mother which
read:

DEAR SON,

I’M NOT SAYING THAT YOU “DO” SLEEP WITH SIMON, AND I’M NOT SAYING THAT YOU
“DO NOT” SLEEP WITH SIMON, BUT THE FACT REMAINS THAT IF HE WAS SLEEPING IN
HIS OWN BED, HE WOULD HAVE FOUND THE FRYING PAN BY NOW.

LOVE MUM