My paternal great-grandparents
He was a Protestant born in Stocken and she, a good Catholic girl. They were not allowed to marry, but the Catholic priest was so fond of the pair that he agreed to marry them and was removed from the parish as a result. Appendix A : a description of their courting and marriage
My paternal grandparents
My grandfather was the last of sixteen children and emigrated from Switzerland to London with his young French wife, in about 1885. By the end of the century he was known as the king of the silk trade in London. Unlike anyone else in the silk trade, it seems, he realized that Queen Victoria must die one day so he had stockpiles of black bombazine in warehouses all over the country, ready for the day she died. When she did so in 1901 he became very rich, but in 1910, after speculating on the stock market, he lost everything and went to New York to start again. As soon as he found somewhere to live, a top floor apartment in Queen’s, New York, with a fine view, his wife and children joined him except for Andrew, who was studying at the time in Geneva and did not go with the rest of the family. Subsequently they all became US citizens apart from my father who returned to England in 1914. In that year grandmother dropped dead climbing the stairs to the apartment in Queen’s, NY, and of greater public significance, the 1st World War broke out.
My maternal great-grandfather
WTR Preston was a politician and journalist who became a commercial attaché in Japan for the Canadian government of McKenzie King. He had a reputation for being contentious and this quality prevented him, so I understood from my mother, from being more successful than he was. He was responsible for a newspaper article, criticising the commander of the Canadian Expeditionary Force at Mons. He maintained that unnecessary lives had been wasted by an order to attack on November 10/11th 1918, moments before the Armistice was to be announced. General Currie sued him and the newspaper for libel and won. Another not altogether admirable quality may well have saved his life: he was seemingly a ‘last minute merchant’. Booked in a first-class cabin on the maiden voyage of the Titanic, on his way back from Japan where he had been Canadian trade commissioner, he arrived five minutes after the great ship cast off at Southampton. The Master was telegraphed but refused to slow down in order to allow a tender to bring him alongside: he was not going to risk his record- breaking crossing for the sake of one dilatory 1st class passenger.