BACSA Committee Members were very sorry to hear that Caroline Whitehead, a long-standing member and enthusiastic supporter of BACSA, had died on 31 August. Here Rosie Llewellyn-Jones recalls her life and much-appreciated voluntary work for BACSA:
‘BACSA members will be saddened to learn of Caroline Whitehead’s death last month at the age of 95. She was an active member of the Association until the last couple of years, not only manning the book-stall at general meetings but also involved behind the scenes. It was to Caroline that BACSA’s founder Theon Wilkinson turned when he himself entered his final days. Both lived near each other in Putney, south west London and Caroline took over the task of storing and selling the large number of second-hand books donated to the Association that raised funds for restoration work.
It was Caroline’s many trips to India, where she supported a school, that got her interested in BACSA according to her niece, Marina Luttrell. On one of Caroline’s trips, in 1986, the tour leader, Lady Penelope Betjeman died suddenly in a remote area of northern India and was cremated Hindu-style in the absence of any viable transport. Caroline’s diary of the tour recorded the event.
Born in 1931 in Abergavenny, south-east Wales, Caroline spent some of the war years in South Africa, then trained in Bristol as a social worker, working with children, mainly adolescents, for the rest of her working life. This took her to a number of hospitals and care centres, including one in Missouri, in the USA, Cirencester in Gloucestershire and finally Wandsworth where she moved to in 1986. There she became involved with the local Neighbourhood Watch and the Putney Society.
Caroline became an Executive member of BACSA in the summer of 1998 and she took on two specific roles: Family History and Monumental Inscriptions. The latter is the archival record of Britons who, having served in South Asia, mainly in the Indian sub-continent, returned to Britain and are memorialised here. Family History was a bi-product of BACSA that collected a number of genealogical studies now in our Archives at the British Library, St Pancras. With the establishment of our sister organisation Families in British India Society (FIBIS) in 1998, stories and enquiries about such families gradually migrated there from BACSA. When pursuing queries and following up leads, Caroline could often be found in the India Office Library on the third floor of the British Library. People who knew her and who used the Library regularly used to look out for her and the cheerful wave from her table.
It was the death of another BACSA Executive member, Merilyn Hywel-Jones in 2016 that led to Caroline’s further tasks. Merilyn had not only collected a large amount of material about British cemeteries in the Middle East but had also compiled a number of ‘cemetery maps’. These were not maps of cemeteries but maps of where old British cemeteries were located in Indian towns and cities. Before the arrival of Google maps and GPS it could be difficult to find them and instructions for taxi-drivers to the ‘gora kabristan’ often met with baffled looks. All of this material, together with the second-hand books, went into two large sheds at her Putney home.
Caroline was a great asset to BACSA for many years, not only for the work she did for the Association but also for her helpful and regular presence at its public meetings. She was a delight to talk to, often over a cup of her favourite black coffee, never imposing her own views, but listening sympathetically to others. She will be much missed’.
Rosie Llewellyn-Jones
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(Suggestions for BACSA website news items, volunteering opportunities and diary entries, are always welcome – please send them to ‘comms@bacsa.org.uk’.)