To Ronnie Johnson from Bill Smyth ( [email protected])

I am writing to give you some information about descendants of the Pereira family of Bangalore. I was looking on the Internet for Bangalore Pereiras and particularly my wifes grandparents Francis Bormel Pereira and Mary Gertrude Hennessy and came across links to some of your pages and after some difficulties because the address had changed I have finally been able to read them with some fascination.

My wife is the daughter of Dr. Patrick Howard Hennessy (Pereira) which makes her a second cousin of Cora Pereira, although she was born about 30 years after Cora died.

PHH's birth certificate shows his father's profession as Honorary Surgeon, and is annotated to show that he changed his name to Hennessy on the 10th of June 1907. Of the ones we know about, some of his brothers did the same and some did not. Manning stayed Pereira, but Joe and Harry changed. Harry does not appear on your list of the children of Francis Bormel, unless Harry was a nickname not related to his given name. He was a Jesuit and my wife's godfather. She corresponded with him in Bangalore before she went to university in the mid 1940s. He was offered a professorship at a German university, which he refused. The Jesuits at Bangalore might well have some record of him.

PHH (Paddy), Manning and Joe all trained as doctors at least partly in England and Paddy and Manning paid for Joes training. Paddy joined the Colonial Medical Service and spent most of his career in Malaya, Manning practised in England and Joe was a lieutenant colonel in the Royal Indian Army Medical Service (I may have got that title wrong), before retiring to England, the Isle of Wight in fact.

Paddy started his colonial career in Hong Kong and then moved to Malaya. He married Gladys Antoinette Hetherington (Tony) in 1915. She was a nurse whom he had met in England. The story my wife vaguely remembers is that he wrote to her from Malaya to ask her to marry him. They met in Ceylon to get married and Harry persuaded her to become a Catholic on the way. Anyway the indisputable fact is that she did become a Catholic and they were married in Ceylon, at the Mission of Kotahina by the Missionary Apostolic whose signature looks like J.B. Meary, on the 15th of August 1915, which might give some weight to the speculation that the Pereiras came from Ceylon. However the witnesses were not Pereiras. The other story is that their ship was chased around the Indian Ocean by a German gunboat.

Paddy was the Medical Superintendent of the hospital at Ipoh. We visited it in 1982 when I was working in Hong Kong and were just in time to see the last of the old hospital buildings before they were demolished. Paddy and Tony had three children, born at six year intervals. Desmond Howard was born in 1916 and tragically died in 1941, when he was a medical student. Angela Mary was born in 1922, served in the Women's Royal Naval Service during the Second World War, and when it ended gave up her place at Oxford to marry E.L.G. Burton. They have four children and three grandchildren and now live in Beaminster, Dorset. Eva (Nick) was born in 1928 and was only a few months old when her mother brought the children back to England. In 1938 Paddy retired and became permanently based in Worthing in Sussex. He actually had temporary appointments, until some time in the 1950s, at St. Bartholemews Hospital which was evacuated to Friern Barnet, north of London, because of the war. He died in 1961. Tony died in1966. Nick was educated at the convent of the Ladies of Sion in Worthing and at King's College, London, where she read English. I met her in 1949, the year after I came to England from Ireland, and we were married in 1952. We have three children and seven grandchildren and have lived in Guildford, Surrey, about 35miles SW of London since 1956.

Manning had two children, John born about 1922 and Sheila (Sherry) born about 1924. Sheila and my wife were friends. She married an American called Lorne Payne serving in the air force in England and went to America some time in the mid to late 1950s. In 1979 I was at a conference in New York and as she was living in New York State I telephoned her to see if I could see her. It turned out that they were about five hundred miles from New York and that was the last we heard of her.

Joe had four children; Peter, Sheila, David and Christopher. My wife knew David when she was at university in London.

This seems on re-reading to be a rather badly organised account, but it may help to fill in your information about the Pereiras. If I get any more I will e-mail you again.

Best wishes from Bill Smyth

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Thought for the Day:" Blessed are you poor, For yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, For you shall be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, For you shall laugh. Blessed are you when men hate you, And when they exclude you, And revile you, and cast out your name as evil, For the Son of Man's sake. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy! For indeed your reward is great in heaven, Fon in the manner their fathers did to the prophets. But woe to you who are rich, For you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full, For you shall hunger. Woe to you who laugh now, For you shall mourn and weep. Woe to you when all men speak well of you, For so did they fathers to the false prophets." Holy Bible: Luke 6:20-26

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