Seeing Royalty

On the occasion of Her Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee I thought I’d blip these 2 gentlemen.

I mentioned the other day that my paternal grandmother came from Dundee. If you go further up the line you reach the gentleman on the right. He is John Henderson Duffus and he is my great great grandfather. He was born in 1815 and died in 1896. He was a leading figure in the temperance movement in Dundee. (I don’t follow him in that respect).

When young he went to London to do his tailor’s apprenticeship and while there saw Queen Victoria‘s coronation in 1837.

In the picture on the left is his son John from his first marriage. John Duffus became a missionary in Madagascar in the 1860s and later became a translator for the Queen of Madagascar’s envoys. He became an envoy for that Queen to Queen Victoria and was presented to her at Buckingham Palace. In her diary she remarked on the plain attire of the delegation. John Duffus was scheduled to then go to Paris to meet Napoleon III but due apparently to diplomatic sensitivities that meeting was cancelled. John eventually settled in America. The only manuscript of his memoirs is in the Library of Congress and our son hopes to get to see it in April. It is thanks to him that we know all of this!).

Apart from my own very very brief meeting with the Queen at an event at Buckingham Palace, my father’s cousin Bill used to meet Her Majesty from time to time in the 1950s. But that’s for another blip.