Mrs Holt's reference letter for Nancie, 1930.

Disaster as the wadi floods

Life in Baghdad gets even more exciting

Nancie enjoyed playing tennis and swimming in the River Tigris. On one occasion the Tigris and the Euphrates burst their banks and met somewhere south of Baghdad and Nancie was able to boast that she had swum in both rivers simultaneously!

The High Commissioner at the time was Sir Francis Humphrys. Nancie met Sir Kinahan Cornwallis and a Major ? who knew T.E.Lawrence. He always came to the fancy dress ball dressed as a Kurdish rebel.

Nancie remembered one particular garden party in the grounds of the German Billet, when the palm trees were decorated with fairy lights. There were banana trees growing in the gardens and the gardener planted some loofah plants to make a pergola. Nancie had never seen anything grow so rapidly. In less than two months the plants were six feet high and they were able to pick the loofahs which were then dried out and peeled, ready for use in the bath!

The great day came when they were to leave to travel home. Not the easy was for them, of course but blazing the trail overland via Kirkuk, Mosul, Nisibin and Istambul.

By this time the family had grown with the birth of James Alexis Neville Holt who was born in Baghdad. He was Nancie's pride and joy and she always considered him her 'first baby'. Mrs Holt employed an Ayah to look after him but Nancie was delighted to share in his care. Deidre and Gay were very attached to her, by now and she to them, but James, known affectionately as 'Jan' always had a special place in her heart.

Mrs Holt was always late for everything and Major Holt was trying to get her to the station on time. She knew the train wouldn't depart without them but her husband was anxious not to delay it unduly. Eventually they all made it to the station and boarded their special carriage. After several hours they reached Kirkuk and got into a car in a convoy headed for Mosul.

Something held up their departure so they were the last car to leave. The first river they came to was too swollen to cross. The other cars had got across before the rain had come and caused the wadi to flood. By this time it was getting dark and Major Holt didn't want them to spend the night there because of roving bands of nomads. The driver decided to risk crossing but as they reached the middle of the river the engine stopped. They were stuck, with the water lapping through the floorboards: Mrs Holt, Deidre, Gay, Nancie and baby James. Major Holt and the driver got out and tried to push the car but to no avail.

Major Holt decided to set off on foot, with the driver, to look for help in the nearest village. Nancie and the others were left in the car, in the dark, in the middle of the swirling river. Had it rained again they could have been washed away. They whiled away the time by eating some cold chicken that they had brought with them. Nancie had no memory of being afraid.

After a couple of hours Major Holt returned with about twenty evil-looking men in Kurdish robes. They manhandled the car out of the river and then scrambled onto the roof and sides of the car. Major Holt had to sweep them off the car, like flies, with his open hand!

In a short time we reached a mud village, which was surrounded by a mud wall, with an aperture in it, serving as an entrance. Mrs Holt stayed in the car with the three children and Major Holt and Nancie entered the main hut; he, to dry his trousers and she to make the baby's food.  In the centre of the hut was a heap of burning wood, with the smoke curling up and through a hole in the roof. All around them were huddled sleeping and snoring figures.  A man brought them some black, Turkish coffee. While they were drinking it and doing what had to be done, suddenly a crowd of women came in. Nancie describes them as 'all the women of the harem'. They were chattering away in a dialect that Major Holt did not understand. They felt Nancie's arms and touched her hair and face and seemed really amused. Eventually, stepping over the sleeping bodies they found their way out of the darkened, smoky hut and back to the others waiting in the car. Nancie had managed to prepare the food for the baby. They slept, or tried to sleep in the car until dawn when they slipped away, hopefully unnoticed.

The night before Major Holt had told the Chief that they would be rewarded once the party reached Mosul. He told them that they had no money on them just in case they were murdered for it, as he knew that some white people had been killed a few months earlier, for their belongings. At least he hoped that they understood his Kurdish!  Halfway to Mosul they were met by a posse of horsemen who had come looking for them. Their non-appearance at Mosul with the rest of the convoy had caused quite a stir. Once safely at their destination they all had baths and the children were tucked up in bed. The adults also caught up on a bit of sleep and realised that they'd had a lucky escape from a very dangerous situation.  Nancie wrote about this in 1976, but her memories of the events were as fresh as if it had happened the day before.

I recently discovered that Major Holt had got into a similar situation not long after he married when he decided to drive from Damascus to Baghdad across the desert with no road to follow. His party set out in a couple of model T Fords with enough water and petrol, they hoped, to get them to Baghdad. In the second car were Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote 'The Little House on the Prairie' and a Travel journalist called B.D.MacDonald.

They got lost and were getting low on both water and petrol. Mrs Holt lost her wedding ring at one point and they spent time searching for it in the sand! Eventually they found themselves only 10 miles from Rutbah. Sighting two men with camels Major Holt approached them. The rest of the party crossed their fingers that these men were not bandits. At night they had slept with rifles at the ready and someone on guard at all times. Luckily the men were friendly and took them to the nearest village where they were able to refill their water bottles.

The unexpected visitors were entertained and a sheep was duly killed and cooked in their honour but the desperately poor Saluba tribesmen were very nervous and feared that bandits might come and attack the visitors while they were in the village and rob them as well, so the visitors were asked to leave after they had eaten. They slept again, in the cars with someone on guard all night, reaching Baghdad safely on the sixth day. There may have been more adventures in the intervening eight years for Major 'Desert' Holt, as he was known, but let us return to Nancie's journey, coming home from Baghdad, in 1930.

The journey was resumed by car the next day as far as Nisibin where they boarded the train to Istambul (now Constantinople). After a couple of hours Nancie was surprised to hear a commotion in the corridor and Major Holt rushed in and covered her with a blanket. He told her she was very ill and she was not to speak to anyone. Poor Nancie was mystified but did as she was told. You didn't argue with Major Holt. He was quite excitable and could be somewhat aggressive.

Later the mystery was explained. Nancie's passport had gone missing and the Turkish authorities wanted to put her off the train. He managed to persuade them that he could get another passport at the next town that the train stopped at. The train was, indeed, held up, whilst he rushed off to the British Consulate to get a temporary passport organised. (It did help that he was in charge of the entire railway network!)

Nancie found out later that the lead driver of their convoy had handed over all the passports except hers. She was very lucky that she had been allowed to carry on with her journey. Major Holt would tease her forever after, saying that the driver must have fancied her and wanted to keep her passport with the photo.

Nancie and the Holt Family spent a few days in Istambul. She remembers vividly seeing a familiar figure on the landing stage as they waited for the ferryboat one day. It was 'Charlie Chaplin', walking about on the pier in his inimitable way. She presumed it wasn't the real one but who knows? Maybe it was!

From Istambul they took the train (probably the Arlberg Orient Express) across Europe, passing through Sophia, Belgrade and Budapest. Nancie remembered being told that Buda was on one side and Pest on the other. She was unimpressed with the Blue Danube and thought it looked very grey and murky. It didn't live up to the romantic 'blue' image at all.

Northern Italy was amazing, she thought, with its huge mountains, topped with snow, and lakes with castles on them, and tiny villages on the mountain slopes.

The journey through Switzerland, at night, with the lights twinkling on the lake below appealed to her more, as the train followed the ' terrifying route round the edge of the mountains'. The route included the Simplon Tunnel where an electric engine took them through.

After a few days in Paris, Major Holt and his wife set off for a month in Spain, leaving Nancie to take the three children back to England. She was accompanied by Major Holt's father who, she said, was in his seventies and not a lot of help. She once told me that she felt she had four children to look after! He was in charge of the tickets. They caught the boat train from Paris to Le Havre and boarded the night-boat for Southampton. James was 15 months old by this time and the girls maybe 7 and 5. Everyone thought she was the Mother and she coped very well, although she missed the extra pair of hands that the Ayah had provided in Baghdad.  They managed a few hours sleep in bunks in a communal cabin.

They were met at Southampton by Major Holt's sister, a Mrs Godfrey. They all set off for Woodbury Salterton, in Devon where Nancie and the children had rooms in a cottage near Mrs Godfrey's house. Nancie's Mother travelled down from Scotland to spend a week with her and, no doubt to hear about all her adventures to date.

Christine Adeline J Holt, the eldest of the Holt children, was called after her Mother, Sophia Adeline Holt, nee Litton. Born in 1884 she was followed by Gabrielle Ines (1886), Alec Horace Edward Litton (Major Holt), 1887, Isabel Norah S. Holt, 1889, Evelyn Maude N. Holt 1890, Kathleen Mary Holt 1891 and Donald Stewart Holt (Lieutenant-Colonel), 1895. Their Father, Horace Henry Holt, was also a Civil Engineer, born in 1856 so would be about 74 when he travelled back to England with Nancie and the little ones. Christine married Brian Godfrey and had two children, Rosemary and Norah.

Nancie visits The Eternal Fires and the arch at Ctesiphon

Sometimes they went north by train. They once went to Kirkuk where the storks nested on most of the rooftops. They visited the 'Eternal Fires' at Baba Gurgur, which can be seen from Kirkuk. Nancie walked between the knee- high and waist-high flames and tried to stamp them out. (No Health and Safety nonsense in those days!). She thought the ground between them felt very brittle and hollow.  Fed by chemicals in the ground they have been burning for centuries and are reputed to be the fiery furnace into which King Nebuchadnezzar cast Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.

Another favourite outing was to Ctesiphon, about thirty miles south of Baghdad. There stands the oldest and highest unsupported man-made arch in the world. Even today despite having been partially demolished it is still an impressive sight. Renovations are in progress as I write this in 2015 but back in 1930 it was a most stunning bit of architecture, standing alone in the desert with no other building for many miles.

The German Billet was on the east side of the river where most of the Railway officials lived. To get to the main shopping area Nancie had to cross the Maude Bridge. The main emporium was called 'Orosdibachs'. During the festival of Ramadan they were not allowed to cross the bridge 'because of the unrest amongst the native Baghdadis'. I'm not quite sure whether she means they were celebrating in the streets or what. There was a 'Railways Club' for the people who worked for the railway but the main British Club was on the Baghdad side of the river and was called " Alwiyah".  Gertrude Bell, the famous 'Arabist' who was Chief Assistant to the British High Commissioner, had founded this club a few years earlier. It had a large swimming pool and other facilities.

Life in Baghdad 1929

The house they were to live in was the top floor flat of a large brick-built building called The German Billet. The heat meant that at night they would sleep outside on the stone balcony. Every evening, at dusk, the two houseboys, Saduk and Jaffa, would splash the stone floor of the balcony with water to cool it down before the family and Nancie went to bed under their protective mosquito nets.

Nancie was quite healthy and managed to avoid the worst of the usual ailments such as 'Baghdad Boils' and 'Greenfly Fever', Typhus, Typhoid etc .I think she meant 'Sandfly Fever' which, like Baghdad Boils, is a form of Leishmaniasis when an insect bite introduces parasites into the blood. Serving soldiers in Iraq, today, still suffer from these.  Nancie was amazed, herself, that she didn't catch anything, after the quantity of filthy River Tigris water that she swallowed when Major Holt was teaching her to swim!

While they were out there the young red-haired wife of Dr Woodman died of Typhoid. Nancie and the girls and Mrs Holt had had tea with her only two weeks earlier. Mrs Woodman had been a friend of Nancie's cousin, Daisy Renwick, wife of Professor Renwick of Edinburgh University.

(There's that small world again.)

The Holt Family had their own personal railway carriage, since Major Alex Holt was Chief Engineer of Baghdad Railways. This could be attached to any train and contained living, sleeping and cooking/washing facilities. When they got to their destination they would be unhitched and left in a siding. Nancie didn't like to hear the jackals and other wildlife prowling around outside their 'wagons-lits'. That must have taken her back to the train trip across Canada when she was four.

On one occasion the train took them south, to Diwaniyah, to visit some friends of the Holts, called Dillon. Nancie experienced her first sandstorm while they were staying at the Dillons' house. Without any warning 'everything turned to night and in the seconds it took to close all the windows, everything indoors was covered with a film of sand'. She found it very frightening and couldn't imagine what would have happened had they been outside at the time. 

At the time of their visit a new policy was being introduced on using inmates of the prison to tend the gardens and the fields around the house where they were staying. For every five prisoners there was a guard, armed with a fierce-looking rifle. Nancie found the guards more terrifying than the prisoners!

While she was in Diwaniyah Nancie met an Iraqi lady called Mrs J. J. Raleigh and corresponded with her for many years. This lady had married a British man and had a son by him. He had then left her. Nancie thought he was English or Irish but she later wrote to Nancie back in England, asking her to buy a complete kilt outfit for her son so I suspect she'd married a Scotsman. Nancie had to decline, as highland outfits were as expensive then as they are today.   

Sometimes they went north by train. They once went to Kirkuk where the storks nested on most of the rooftops. They visited the 'Eternal Fires' at Baba Gurgur, which can be seen from Kirkuk. Nancie walked between the knee- high and waist-high flames and tried to stamp them out. (No Health and Safety nonsense in those days!). She thought the ground between them felt very brittle and hollow.  Fed by chemicals in the ground they have been burning for centuries and are reputed to be the fiery furnace into which King Nebuchadnezzar cast Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.

Another favourite outing was to Ctesiphon, about thirty miles south of Baghdad. There stands the oldest and highest unsupported man-made arch in the world. Even today despite having been partially demolished it is still an impressive sight. Renovations are in progress as I write this in 2015 but back in 1930 it was a most stunning bit of architecture, standing alone in the desert with no other building for many miles.

The German Billet was on the east side of the river where most of the Railway officials lived. To get to the main shopping area Nancie had to cross the Maude Bridge. The main emporium was called 'Orosdibachs'. During the festival of Ramadan they were not allowed to cross the bridge 'because of the unrest amongst the native Baghdadis'. I'm not quite sure whether she means they were celebrating in the streets or what. There was a 'Railways Club' for the people who worked for the railway but the main British Club was on the Baghdad side of the river and was called " Alwiyah".  Gertrude Bell, the famous 'Arabist' who was Chief Assistant to the British High Commissioner, had founded this club a few years earlier. It had a large swimming pool and other facilities.

Major Holt waits for the plane to land at Baghdad

Nancie mourned the crew of The City of Jerusalem for the rest of her life. She had got to know them on the flight from Gaza to Baghdad, especially when they had lunch together at the re-fuelling stop at Rutbah Wells.
She also realised that it could just as easily have happened to them. Flying over the desert was still a very risky undertaking.
The pilot who lost his life at Jask, Captain Albert E.Woodbridge, was famous for having wounded the German ace, Baron Von Richthoven, better known as The Red Baron, during an aerial battle in the First World War. The Baron received a bullet-wound in the head from which he never fully recovered.
Captain Woodbridge was one of the many surviving British pilots who joined Imperial Airways after the end of the First World War and helped to establish the Postal Route from London to Karachi in the 1920s.
It was a risky job, often involving emergency landings in the desert, brushes with wild tribesmen and dangerous weather conditions like sandstorms. Flying at night was particularly hazardous and if the flight was delayed until darkness fell this meant using flares on landing, both on the ground and on the wings of the plane. The planes were not able to carry enough fuel to get right across the desert to Baghdad, hence the halfway re-fuelling stop.
After a couple of hours at Rutbah Wells, Nancie's plane took off for Baghdad where Major Holt was awaiting their arrival. As they neared the city Mrs Holt pointed out the rivers Tigris and Euphrates and various other landmarks. The plane began to go up and down, rather erratically and the occupants began to be sick It would swoop upwards and then plunge downwards and Nancie missed seeing some of the sights.
Meanwhile Major Holt was watching from Baghdad Airport and thought he was about to lose his entire family as he saw the plane plunge earthwards only to rise again. He was, in fact , ill for some days afterwards, as a result of this experience. Meanwhile, on the plane, Nancie and co were too busy being sick to worry too much. Eventually the crew managed to get the plane safely onto the ground and the weary passengers stepped out into the searing heat of Iraq in the month of June.

Tragic Plane crash at Jask 1929

Three months later, the City of Jerusalem was to crash at Jask, on the Persian Gulf with the loss of  two crew and one passenger. The plane caught fire on landing due to the use of wing flares because it was late in arriving.  Nancie told us about the accident and thought that all the crew had been killed but that was not the case. The details are all available on line and also the newspaper report which I reproduce here, courtesy of The Times Newspaper.

Nancie flies to Baghdad with the Holts

During their stay in Haifa, Nancie befriended an Italian family called Campaneilla, a Colonel and his very attractive wife and their ten children. It must have been at this time that she swam in the Dead Sea which she told us was so salty, that it was impossible to sink when you swam in it. Oddly she doesn't mention this in her own memoirs.
After spending the month of May in Haifa, they drove to Gaza, also on the coast, where they were to board the plane to Baghdad. They stayed for two nights, in huts, on the airfield, with huge planes taxi-ing just outside their windows. The seashore at Gaza was just miles and miles of sand and rolling waves with not a soul in sight. Nancie thought it was probably very different by the time she was writing about it more than forty years later.
They boarded the Imperial Airways bi-plane which was called The City of Jerusalem. Nancie was as she puts it 'over-awed at the immensity of it'.

Nancie was sitting towards the back of the plane and after about ten minutes of flying a pair of legs appeared through an aperture further forward and a uniformed figure dropped down and walked up the aisle to Nancie. "You're weighing the tail down," he told her. "You'll have to come and sit further forward." At first she thought he was joking but he directed her to a seat in front of everyone else. She didn't like the sensation of walking up the plane as she felt she might go through the floor.
She then had to sit, looking at a notice, right in front of her nose, which declared, "No smoking. Not even Kensitas!".She could see the propellors, right outside the window, and the noise made it impossible to converse.I still have the note that she exchanged with Mrs Holt on the flight. The motion of the plane was 'like going over waves'. This was due, someone told her, to the 'desert pattern', presumably caused by the contours of the dunes below. After a few hours they landed in the desert at Rutbah, to refuel. The passengers and crew all had a picnic lunch together and Nancie enjoyed getting to know them.
The above photo is from an amazing collection of old photographs at The Library of Congress, in the USA. Despite some damage they are a wonderful record of aviation in the 1920s.

Nancie dances with the Turkish gentlemen in Istanbul

From Venice Nancie, Mrs Holt and the girls took a slow train which stopped at Trieste, Zagreb, Belgrade, Sophia and finally reached Scutari, in Istanbul. They spent a week there in a hotel run by two very corpulent Turkish gentlemen who wore fezes. One evening they invited Nancie to go down to their private drawing room for coffee, on her own. They then asked her to dance with them. She wasn't very keen as they had  rather large paunches. However she complied but as she told this story many times to us as children, she really felt that Mrs Holt should not have left her unchaperoned in such circumstances. Luckily for her, the two Turks were 'gentlemen' and she survived unscathed! Nancie had many dancing partners in later years and in many different parts of the world but this experience stayed with her all her life.
Nancie took the girls exploring and went to see the famous Sancta Sophia Mosque, which dominated the city then, as, no doubt,  it does today.  Built in 537 AD this amazing building was first a Greek Orthodox Church and later an imperial mosque, subsequently becoming a museum in 1935. The vast dome appears to hover above the nave and the mosaics are superb. However, in 1929 it was still a mosque so non-muslim visitors were probably not allowed access.
From Istanbul they carried on to Aleppo, by train. There they switched to a hire car with a Syrian driver. The drive down the coast was a complete nightmare, apparently, but at Aleppo they set off in another car with a different (and hopefully,  better driver!). Nancie was interested to see Tyre and Sidon,  names she recognised from the Bible. They enjoyed this last part of the journey to Haifa. Nancie points out that Haifa had no harbour in those days and they drove alongside a beautiful sandy seashore.
The party stayed in a hotel at first, right on the seashore and had a wonderful time swimming in the sea which had excellent surf. On one occasion  Nancie got out of her depth and had to be rescued by some young men who were playing polo on the other side of the groin. Her adventures could well have ended at this point!
Later they moved to a German 'Hospice' run by 'The Sisters of Mercy' as Nancie put it in her memoirs.They were actually ' The Sisters of Charity of St Charles Borromeo'. ( This institution began in Nancy, in France, in the seventeenth century and today has seven autonomous branches worldwide, the main one being in Austria.)
The nuns at the hospice used to make some rather nice puff biscuits and one day when Nancie bit into one she found her mouth was full of ants - not a very pleasant sensation. ( No jokes about 'I'm a Celebrity', please) It clearly made a lasting impression on her as she reminisced, some forty years later.
On one occasion Nancie was not well and the German Doctor who examined her insisted that she must have bought some ice cream from a 'wayside vendor'. She vehemently denied this and was most indignant when he refused to believe her. She always claimed that this was her first experience of  'an unpleasant German'.
The hospice had a very large, walled garden, full of  beautiful flowers, trees and plants, which swarmed with bees and the sisters made their own honey.
Nancie says that the sun never stopped shining for the whole month they were there. She thought May was probably the loveliest month of all in Palestine. It was hot but not unbearably so. They also bathed in the River Jordan and Nancie brought home a bottle of water which was later lost. It was intended for the baptism of her first baby!
They climbed up Mount Carmel to visit the Cave of Elijah which is halfway up the mountain and went to the ancient historical site of  Petra, The Rose City.  Nancie was still only sixteen.

From Marseilles to Istambul, via Venice

Nancie had great fun exploring Marseilles with Gay and Deidre. They hopped on the trams and took the funicular railway up to the church of Notre Dame de la Garde which overlooked the town and could be seen by sailors far out at sea on the Mediterranean. It was the first Catholic church that she had been in and she was shocked to see the shops selling trinkets in the doorways and precincts of the church: a sight she'd never seen before.
In her diary she comments, 'The girls were very pretty.' They adored their Father and soon forged a great bond with Nancie. As a rule they were very well behaved but when their Mother was around their behaviour deteriorated and they could be quite disruptive.
While she was in Marseilles Nancie bought a French dictionary, which was to prove very useful in the years that followed. Not speaking French was a barrier to making friends of her own age and she was already feeling homesick. She was still only sixteen, after all.
At the end of their month in Marseilles they set off, on a slow train, along the Riviera , to Venice. At various stations along the route friends of the Holts met the train : Toulon, Cannes, Ventimiglia and Genoa. When they reached Venice they boarded a motorboat which took them along the Gran Canal to The Royal Danieli Hotel. This is still one of the most prestigious hotels in Venice, even today.  Nancie was slightly disappointed in the 'rather mucky-looking canals'! However, once inside The Danieli she was very impressed with the marble floors and staircases of the one-time royal palace. Every pillar and every wall was covered in fabulous mosaics.It must have felt like a dream to a young Scots girl who had hardly ever left her village, apart from trips to the cinema in Glasgow!
She was suitably impressed by the golden horses in St Mark's Square and the supports to prevent the inevitable sinking. On a postcard to her Mother, back in Scotland she wrote, 'Spent five hours here, today. It's a beautiful place. Got your letter all right. The weather is beautiful. We are just waiting on our gondola to take us back to the train. Will be in train 48 hours before arriving Constantinople. Cheerio just now.
 Love, Nancie'.
As they travelled further from home the chances of a letter from friends and family became much less so Nancie began to feel even more homesick.

From Kilmacolm to Baghdad

Nancie did well at school. She loved helping the younger children and would have gone on to be a Teacher, herself, had she been able to. Sadly, due to her family circumstances, she could not afford further studies so, at the age of  fifteen, she left school and after completing a night school class in shorthand and book-keeping, went to work at Hurry Brothers, an electrical firm, based in Greenock. This meant she must have travelled there each day. Office-work was rather dull and boring for Nancie so when she heard about a job looking after children, which might involve travel abroad, she jumped at the chance.
Nancie was invited to go up to Arisaig to meet Mrs Holt, her prospective employer. Her husband, Major Alec H L Holt was in charge of Baghdad Railways and they needed a Governess for their two little girls, Gay and Deidre, aged five and four.
Nancie stayed in a cottage in Arisaig with some local people which had no electricity or running water. She had a candle to light her way to bed. The next day she was interviewed by Mrs Holt and said she was seventeen. Mrs Holt offered her the job and she accepted. The job involved travelling to Baghdad, in Iraq so  Nancie had to apply for a passport and had to admit that she was only sixteen. Mrs Holt didn't seem to mind at all.
A week later, in the March of 1929 Nancie left Glasgow Central Station and went to London by train. She met up with the Holt family and they spent two weeks in a service flat near St. James' Park..She claimed that each time she left home for foreign parts she cried all the way to London! She lived for the day that she could go home to her Mother. Little did she know at that time that this was the first of many such journeys abroad that she would undertake over the next twelve years. Many adventures lay ahead for this young scots girl from a little village in Renfrewshire. Luckily Nancie wrote and received a lot of letters and kept diaries, many of which still survive.
She met lots of people , from all walks of life and made many life-long friends with whom she corresponded over the years. Nancie had a strong faith and was convinced that God looked after her and protected her.She was happy to worship in any denomination's place of worship and, having been brought up as a Scottish Presbyterian, ended her life as a Roman Catholic. Her main reason for converting was so that she could take communion in the Nazareth House Nursing Home where she went to live after the death of her beloved husband, Jack.
The young sixteen-year old Nancie of 1929 did not know what the future held, as she enjoyed the luxurious life-style of the Holts, in London. The service flats had servants and a communal restaurant. Nancie had a wonderful time, exploring London and taking the two little girls for walks in the London parks.
As Chief Engineer of Baghdad Railways Major Holt was allowed special concessions on all railways so when they eventually set off for Marseilles, it was in relative luxury, with 'wagons-lits' . At night the seats were turned into beds and they also had private washing facilities. The party consisted of Major Holt, Mrs Holt, Nancie and the two little girls, Gay and Deidre.
Major Holt left them once they reached Marseilles to get to Baghdad 'the quick way' (presumably by air?).Nancie and the others spent a whole month in Marseilles, at the Hotel Terminus, by the station. Nancie was left with a free hand to entertain the girls while Mrs Holt visited friends.

Nancie goes out into the big, wide, world

The first of these photographs was taken about 1916 or 1917. I'm not sure if it was taken before or after the death of their Father but  Nancie, Bill and Nell do not look very happy.  The second one is from about  1920 and although all three look fairly serious the two girls are beginning to blossom. It's best clothes and bows in the hair for them and a suit with a collar for Bill.

Rosemount, Kilmacolm, Renfrewshire

First I must apologise for giving the wrong year for the marriage of Mary Holmes and William Thomson. Thanks to my brother, David Huntingford for pointing this out. Mary was the daughter of Peter Holmes, Farmer at Priestside Farm, Kilmacolm. William lived on the next farm, West Kilbride, where he worked for his uncle, Arthur Lang. They married in 1912 and sailed off to Canada to a new life together.
I found the following on Ancestry.com passenger lists;

29th March 1912 "Cassandra" Glasgow to New Brunswick, Canada

William Thomson 42, Farmer, Protestant
Mary Thomson 30, wife, Housewife

31st October 1916 "Pretorian" Montreal to Glasgow

Wm Thomson 46, Farmer
Mary Thomson 34
Nancy Thomson 4
Nellie Thomson 2
Wm Thomson 1

This is the house next door to theirs in Vancouver where a family called Hall lived. Nancie is sitting on the wall. Mrs Hall came to visit Mary some years later at Rosemount.

The Family Return to Kilmacolm, Renfrewshire, Scotland

Sadly, Nancie's Father, William Thomson, died at Rosebank,  Kilmacolm, in January 1917, aged 47, leaving his widow, Mary, with three little ones under the age of five. She never remarried and always said that the five years she was married were the happiest years of her life. However, from then on, life was a great financial struggle.There was no income support in those days, no pension and only other members of the extended family to help.
Much of Nancie and Nell's childhood was spent being 'farmed out' to relatives. At least then Mary didn't have to worry about feeding them! Clothes were mostly 'hand me downs' from older cousins. Mary took in a lodger who paid enough to cover her own rent. By this time she was living in the bottom half of Rosemount, opposite The Auld Kirk,on the Port Glasgow Road.She lived here until her death in 1958. At one point, in the 1920s,  she even moved out and rented the house to someone while she ran a hairdressing business with one of her sisters at Ashton House, Gourock.
Several of Mary's sisters did not marry. I think there was a dearth of marriageable young men after the ravages of the First World War.No doubt the post-war influenza epidemic only made the situation worse.

My Mother always told me that she would never have got married to anyone if it had not been for Hitler and the Second World War.Luckily she decided to marry my Father or I would not be here writing this!
There is a lovely photograph of my parents, Nancie and Jack Huntingford, at the gate of their house, Fairford. They re-named it thus after they moved in, during the 1940s .In the photograph both of them are happily smiling behind the name on the gate. It was only many years later that I realised why they chose this name for their home, where they spent over 60 very happy years.
My Mother wrote her memoirs and left several diaries and many letters from which I have pieced together what is essentially her biography. It is a wonderful love story of two people and the friends they made on their journey through life. I would like to share it with you but first I have to go back in time to Nancie's  beginnings.

A Brave New World and a Family Tragedy

Nancie's parents, William and Mary Thomson, lived in adjoining farms in the Scottish village of  Kilmacolm, in Renfrewshire. William had gone to live with his Grandfather after the early death of both of his parents. He worked very hard on the farm , which was called West Kilbride. He helped first his Grandfather, Arthur Lang and then his uncle, also Arthur Lang to breed Clydesdale horses. Mary Holmes lived at Priestside Farm, nearby, where she helped to look after her brothers and sisters after the death of her Mother. The Doctor had warned Peter Holmes that having any more children could kill his wife, Margaret Rodger (nee Paul) but sadly she died, shortly after, giving birth to her tenth child.
Mary and William married in 1914 and sailed off on the Cassandra  to a new life in Canada where William hoped to farm and breed horses as before. They followed a Kilmacolm  friend of William's, called Dunlop and found a house in Vancouver City. William found work delivering milk for a dairy and soon Nancie, their first baby, arrived, followed swiftly by Nell and then Bill.
William may have found his new responsibilities stressful : a wife and three small children who had to be fed and clothes. His hard-earned savings began to dwindle and then, disaster struck. He suffered a brain haemorrhage and was hospitalised. With no income for several months, the nest egg disappeared and the only thing to do was to get the family home to Scotland.
Apparently the Freemasons, of which he was a member, made all the arrangements and William came home, paralysed from his stroke, in the autumn of 1916. Nancie was only four but she remembered the train journey from Vancouver to Montreal. Certain things stuck in her memory such as being helped up to the top bunk by the kindly  black train attendant. She told us that the noise of the wolves in the woods really frightened her.
William's brother, Arthur Thomson and his wife, Elizabeth (nee Carlisle) travelled from their home in Cleveland, Ohio, to see them onto The Pretorian, the boat that was to take them back to Scotland. The young couple had no children at that point and were so charmed by Nell, with her ringlets and smiling face that they wanted to keep her! No such offer was made for Nancie, who was a plainer child, with straight hair and, on photographs of the time, a permanent frown. Bill was a blonde, blue eyed baby at that time. Mary refused their kind offer but must have been very worried as to how she was going to cope.