From Left to right
Rosalie Hall (nee Powell), Philip Hall, Gertrude Hall's son, Gertrude Hall, Gertrude Hall's daughter, Grandpa John, Auntie Connie, Granny (Riddick?) Hall
Gertrude's children are by the secretary to the Maharajah of Gwalior and are half Indian half English. It must have felt very odd to be a mixed race family in 1912. Poor things, they look worried. The Grand dame on the right is Granny Hall, who after her sea captain husband left her sent my great grandfather to study in Germany. I think his name was Riddick, so Hall must have been her family name. Connie, on Granny Hall's right, became the first woman attorney in South Africa at the prompting of her Mother Rosalie. In front of her is John, the hotelier. I don't know what happened to Gertrude and her children. I presume their descendents live in India. Philip went on to study at Cambridge and invented a process for changing coal into oil and died young of emphysema and Rosalie Hall, my great grandmother, and the great grandmother of a whole tribe, was the first woman to be allowed to study science at Bristol, and the woman responsible for (white) women getting the vote in South Africa before they got it in the UK.
The house looks charming. The kind of house you read about in the books of E Nesbit or Charles Dodgeson. I can read a lot into their expressions. Can you?
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