General rather than specific information

[YorksClare]

Dear All

I understand that I would need to be a closer living relative to two people I would like to know more about, and those who are closer are less likely to try to research them. However, I would be satisfied to NOT know anything more specific about the two people in question if I could at least find out the basics. I hope to illustrate what I mean:

I know from a record someone else looked up for me that my great grandad James Walsh was a clerk in the British Army out in West Bengal, between at least 1890 and 1900. I have no idea which part of the army he worked for, or what they were doing out there (apart from generally ripping off the locals by encouraging inflationary property rentals while simultaneously suppressing wages, and stealing their natural resources such as cotton by forbidding them from making it into cloth and shipping it raw back to Lancashire/Belfast instead and then shipping the woven cloth back, thus inflating the price of woven material exponentially out of the locals' affordability, etc). Hey ho, the British Raj...

The second is my grandma Hilda May Pollock, who worked on "communications of some sort, we're not exactly sure because she daredn't break the official secrets act even to tell Grandad" somewhere near Rutland/Oakham in WWII. I would be happy to know more generally what division of the military she was likely to belong to, if anyone might coincidentally have researched this, and what their "comms" were about. We have all watched WWII films showing those beautiful calm ladies in their smart uniforms with their radio headsets and shuffleboard maps covered in boats and planes. I really hope she was such a glamour-puss, but I also know things were not anything like as polished as the films! I do know that after the war she worked with one of the first computers near Manchester, which took up fully two rooms. She wasn't at Bltechley which was the famous end of the secret data war effort, but may have seen some interesting things in her time.

Does anyone even know of handy contacts who could start me off? Grandad's memory is starting to get a little unreliable, so he may remember which team Grandma was working in, but he was genuinely unaware of much beyond that. They were both very dedicated to their wartime duties. Grandad, BTW, was ground crew training staff on the Lancaster bombers at Rutland. From what I know of that, there were mostly an American Air Force contingent at that base, but my information about Grandad is sketchy at best, for the same reasons as I don't know much about Grandma... He keeps it rather close to his chest!

[SRD]

Grandma may have been at Luffenham or Cottesmore.

[gardener]

Hi
When did your grandparents marry? Are you able to contact any of your grandma's old friends? Bridesmaids perhaps? I have done much better getting info from women then men and your grandmother might have let something slip.

[YorksClare]

Thank you - Cottesmore rings a distant bell. I might try searching that and see if I can find which parts of the RAF worked from there, and what they did.

Grandma was a very shy lady, and rarely spoke to us. She was an only child, and when I knew her was about 200 miles from her childhood friends, and a good 150 miles from the base she worked at during the war. They married down there in a very small and understated ceremony. We don't even have any photographs or anything. They might have already been expecting my auntie, and so were quite coy about the whole situation. It wouldn't have been a problem, but Grandad's demobilisation was delayed several times, adding to the pressures on time for organising or choosing when (or where) to get married.

I think that the women in the family, if there were any left, would be a great resource. They tend to recall historical details that are small but somehow have a lot of significance when you ask about things 70 years later!