John Cooper A wealthy landowner of Dulwich Village and Leigh on Sea.  Seducd an 18-year-old parlour maid while a member of a House Party in a big mansion in Dorsetshire. On finding she had conceived, he married her. Bearing in mind the massive gap in their social states this was a big thing to do. They had three daughters: Ruth, Edith and May. I met Granny Cooper when I was five years old in Orpington on coming from India. He died in saving them from a fire.

• Ruth married Duke Higgins and they had four children: Rex, Gladys, Madge and Douglas (Registrar of Births and Deaths).
• Rex Higgins farmed in Kenya at Kigale with the aid of his wife Jay, who became Mayanna’s Godmother. She divorced Rex and took off with Steve Aitcheson for an orange farm in the Transvaal, where she died. The son Michael still farmed in Kenya.
• Gladys married Athur Newman whose legal firm became solicitors to the R.A.C. They probably still are. I know nothing of their numerous progeny, but Gladys (a lively person) died of cancer of the bladder in the middle sixties.
• Madge, who looked like Aileen, and who was both an Alcoholic and a Nympho, married an ex Japanese P.O.W. (prisoner of war) who found her too much for him and committed suicide.
•  Douglas became a copper miner in Northern Rhodesia, had four male offspring, broke his leg while playing rugby football, and died of an embolism. A sad loss. Ken Kemper knew him well.

 Edith married Dr. Charles Newman, one of the first people to identify mustard gas in World War I. A gentle chap, he was sent somewhat round the bend by war and had three goes at murdering his wife.

• They produced Cherry (subject to epileptic fits) who married a Canadian killed in World War II. Last heard of near Bristol – lost contact.
• Norman B………… the son, a brilliant electrical engineer, was the Electrical Liaison Engineer between the French and British Concordes. With his wife and daughter Jackie (Jaqueline) he visited us at Iolus and was last heard of building Italian-designed jets in the Transvaal.

May Cooper married Dr. Reginald Anthony Murphy in Calcutta. He was born in Belfast in 1880. She was born in London in 1886.

Great Grandfather Murphy, whose Christian name I do not know, was a failed potato farmer near Bushmills where the whisky distillery is.

• His one son emigrated to Pennsylvania where he got Jewish partners and formed a tobacco firm.
• His other son, Hugh Davis Murphy became a Canon in the Church of Ireland and as a leading member of the church (and a high grade Freemason) represented it at the coronation of King George V at Westminster Abbey in 1910. Which time my father (Reginald Anthony) was a Sargeant (Surgeon Lt?) in the Surma Valley Light Horse in India in 1911 attended the Dess…. D……….ar.   Hugh Davis Murphy was a clever juggler of stocks and shares and finished up quite wealthy. He was a keen musician and noted for his musical services in his St. Georges Church, Belfast.                           It was this musical involvement which led him to elope with an equally interesting party, Francesca Barbara Burgess, my paternal grandmother and the second daughter of Canon Richard Burgess, a Prebandary of St. Paul’s, whose own church, All Saints Slo... (Sloane?) Square, placed a plaque in his memory when he died in 1885. Richard Burgess had married a formidable female, a Miss Greathead, who was descended from a Norman called Groise-Tete who came over with William The Conqueror. She had Percy blood in her (Alnwick Castle, Duke of Northumberland) and her parental mansion in Warwickshire housed Sarah Siddons as a parlour maid before she became a famous actress. Richard Burgess was born in 1799 and was the anglican Priest who buried the ashes of Percy Bysse Shelley (the poet) outside the walls of Rome in about 1824. Francesca Barbara was a great friend of Garibaldi’s.

Reverting to the Murphys:

• Hugh Davis and Francesca Barbara Murphy had Reginald Anthony as their eldest son.  (Their other children:)
• Ernest Murphy (no issue), who joined the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank and probably died at Barton-on-Sea, Hampshire.
• Gerald, who became a judge in West Africa and died in the war, had a brilliant linguist in son Brian, last heard of a Second-in-Command Ulster Universty Coler….. He had a sister whose name I don’t remember and I don’t know where she is. The youngest son Claude became a draughtsman in Belfast. He was an alcoholic and died gi/ew… without issue. There was also a daughter Florence, (I ) lost contact with her during sickness and moves in S. Ireland.