Book of Imperial and Commonwealth Obituaries (The Daily Telegraph Book of Obituaries) - Hardcover

For this new collection, David Twiston-Davies has selected the most fascinating Imperial and Commonwealth obituaries published in The Daily Telegraph over the last twenty years.

Many senior representatives of the imperial high noon had passed on by the mid-1980s but there were still some remarkable figures who would have been recognizable to Queen Victoria, such as Sir Rex Niven of Nigeria. There are a host of colorful diplomats such as Sir Michael Weir, the British ambassador in Egypt, who started out as a resident in Arab states and was responsible for escorting a sheik to the Queen’s Coronation in 1953.

Other figures featured are Michael Thwaites, the Australian poet, naval officer and Communist spycatcher; Terry Peck, the local policeman who spied for the Paras in the Falklands and then fought with them at Mount Longdon; and the Earl of Egmont, an Alberta farm boy whose father inherited £300,000 in 1929 and who came over to live in Britain.

The stories of these characters beautifully illustrate the way the Imperial influence spread British culture around the world in the form of practices, traditions and history, sometimes positively and deliberately, often unconsciously and sometimes even in the face of considerable hostility.

This compilation is divided up by regions, beginning with India, followed by the dominions Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and concluding with the individual colonies in Africa and the South Seas, as well as the North and South Poles.