Memoir of the Career of Thomas Edward Rogers [‎2r] (3/118)

I was six years old and had just arrived in Ulster from Tyneside when I
first heard of India. My father’s work (he built ships, his pride the
Lusitania’s sister ship, the Mauretania) had taken him from River Tyne to River
Foyle and me to school in Londonderry. One day in 1919 I walked down a certain
Lawrence Hill to the school, Foyle College where I heard how the hill was named.
A century before, the three Lawrence brothers who all won fame in India were
pupils. Sir George and Sir Henry began as soldiers of the East India Company.
Their younger brother, John was an East India Company civil servant who became
Lord Lawrence and Viceroy of India. A fellow pupil of the brothers was
Robert Montgomery who became Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab and was the
grandfather of Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, 'Monty'.
As John Lawrence had died forty and Robert Montgomery only thirty years
before, the school's memory of the famous quartet was green enough. But it only
came to life for me when Colin Montgomery came to Foyle in the early twenties.
He was the younger brother of Monty and my first memory of him is when he read
the lesson in church. This was the small Anglican church dramatically dwarfed
by the towering Roman Catholic cathedral of St. Eugene's just across the road.
My young ear, used only to the Tyneside and Londonderry brogue, found Colin's
southern English drawl a thing apart from another country. His exotic presence
stood out in that homely Ulster congregation which itself was in some way still
the exotic heir of Protestant settlers from over the water who had remained
unassimilated to the city's large Catholic majority flocking in and out of mass
across the way. I read years later how Viceroy John Lawrence referred at the
Lahore Durbar A public or private audience held by a high-ranking British colonial representative (e.g. Viceroy, Governor-General, or member of the British royal family). of 1865 to the early Protestant struggle against Catholic odds in
Ulster. He told how it had inspired him in his own battle against odds to put
down the Indian Mutiny. His words reminded me how my own time in Ulster had
prepared me for India.