The Hadow family

When I was clearing out my late mother’s house back in 2003, I came across a small photograph album. I vaguely recall that my dad and mum had found this in the loft of the Edwardian house they had moved into, in the late 1960s. It was one of those lovely stone-built houses, near Roundhay Park in Leeds.

I had a closer look at the album. In it were sepia-coloured photos of Raymond Hadow and his wife Dora taken in 1912-13. The photos were mainly of Dora, their mongrel dog Bingo, and interiors of the bungalow they were living in, with lots of English furniture (too much of it), including an upright piano – an interesting glimpse of colonial life, as there were a few other photos showing a lot of turbaned men working on some vast earthworks (in India as it turned out).

Well, I thought, what should I do with this -- throw it into the skip with loads of clutter from my parents’ house, or should I see if I could find a present-day descendant of this couple to send it to?

I brought the album back home with me to Nottingham, and then a few weeks later, I read a newspaper report about the famous polar explorer, Pen Hadow. This was in May 2003, when The Independent reported that he had been stranded for four days after a record 478 mile solo trek from Canada to the North Pole. It was an amazing story.

A short while later I wrote to him to ask if he had any knowledge of Raymond and Dora, and he referred me on to the family historian, who lived in the south of England – a retired army major. The major was most helpful and sent me a chunk of his family tree to look at, listing Raymond and Dora in the middle, surrounded by all their relations, including their two children, who were born pre-WW1… a boy and a girl, plus the names of the people they later married. Wonderful.

Interestingly, Raymond was a civil engineer and a dam builder/irrigation expert, and he achieved high office in the Anglo-Indian government. He was knighted for his services in 1934, on his retirement. I found out a load of info about him in an edition of “Who Was Who” (1961-70). In retirement, he went to live in Fife in Scotland. I searched through over 20 telephone directories to find any relatives with the daughter’s married name, and wrote to the two I found. Fortunately the name was an unusual double-barrelled one. Raymond’s grandson phoned me a day or two later to say he was excited to hear about my find, and that his mother and uncle would love to see the album.

So I posted off the album to be re-united with Raymond’s family – I felt very pleased with the outcome. I never found out how the album ended up in my parents’ house, so that remains a mystery.