“Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.”

/ LUCY MAUD MONTGOMERY /

 29 JANUARY 2022

Memories of Nick De Cateret

by NICK DE CATERET
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My wife and I decided to visit Mauritius this June (2022) and whilst doing research on the internet we came across Donald's book. He was godfather to my youngest brother. To start at the beginning, Colonel and Mrs A.G.de Carteret and three young boys arrived in Mauritius sometime in 1954 and we lived at Abercrombie House in Vacoas. My father was the Officer Commanding Troops...
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 16 August 2019

Jim Macdonald’s ‘Memories’ (c1995)

by Jim macdonald
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In the mid-1990s Jim produced a short biography which he called ‘Memories’; here is the text in full. On the 11th August 1925 at 8am I was born at Bernera, Rose Hill, the same house in which my father had been born in 1890. Bernera, Rose Hill was my grandfather’s house which he had bought after retiring from the sea in 1887. It was a French colonial house having been built…
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 16 August 2019

Memories of My Boyhood in Mauritius in the 1950s & early 1960s, & some nicknames in the Taylor family

by John Collingridge, (son of Joan Elizabeth Collingridge, née Taylor)
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It was with very great delight that I read Donald’s book “They Met In Mauritius”. It has been a sheer delight to browse through and to see again many of those who peopled my happy childhood in Mauritius, many of whom I have not seen by face in over fifty years…Aunty Lizzie, for example. And so very nice to hear echoed the stories that Mum use to often tell me; and to see…
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 16 August 2019

Jack Smith

by Sheila Dawes
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After he retired from the firm, Jack and his wife Marthe moved to Paris. My father, Gordon Richardson, wrote about his Uncle Jack in his memoirs with much affection. He takes up their tale. “They fled from Bordeaux when France was overrun and occupied by Germans forces. They left most of their possessions in store in Paris. Most of their valuable items were looted…
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 16 August 2019

Where are the descendants of Mary Ann Rose Smith ?

by Sheila Dawes (& others)
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Her descendants are dispersed worldwide. Her son James married Elizabeth Pritchard in Wales.  They had four children; the eldest born in Carnarvon in 1927 was Mary and was followed by George, Geoffrey, and Alec. Mary married Tony Clarke in Newborough Church on the 15th February 1947.  She and her family emigrated to Australia following her father and brothers…
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 16 August 2019

Descendants of Mary Ann Rose Smith (James Smith’s only daughter)

bY Duncan Richardson, Barbados, West Indies. (2014)
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My paternal grandmother was Mary Anna Rose Smith, James Smith’s only daughter and my grandfather was George Richardson. I am the eldest son of their youngest son George Richardson. George Richardson Snr. had been working in Swakopmund, in German South West Africa [present day Namibia] in 1914 when the Great War commenced. He was…
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 16 August 2019

Mary Ann Rose Smith

by Sheila Dawes (Mary’s granddaughter)
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Mary Anna Rose Smith was born in Mauritius at 7.15am on the morning of the 12th July 1874 in Labourdonnais Street, Port Louis. William Thomas, her first husband, came from Newborough (Niwbwrch) in Anglesey. His father was described as a farmer of 30 acres in the 1881 census, living at Cae Coch (Red Field) in his farmhouse. William was born in 1867 and decided…
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 16 August 2019

Murdo Macdonald’s Obituary

from the Queenslander, Brisbane, May 18th 1938
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FINAL PORT OF CALL OF LAST SEA-BARON; “SKIPPER.” CAPTAIN Murdo Stewart MacDonald, whose death occurred in Mauritius on March 4, was known to the whole of the nautical world, and to very many thousands of ship lovers, as the last of the sea-barons, and for some years he was the only man left alive who had commanded a China Tea clipper, one of those…
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 16 August 2019

They Met in Mauritius: Volume 2: The Members of the Family who left Mauritius

by donald taylor
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INTRODUCTION - The following is a list of those who left Mauritius together with a few notes of what happened to them and where they eventually settled down. The list does not pretend to be complete and the notes are very sketchy. The descendants of May and Percy Taylor have provided fairly comprehensive notes, but others have not. So this must be…
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