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down to his great-great-grandson Thomas George Stoney (1808–1886), who had five sons, the eldest inheriting the lands and the rest dispersing to various parts of the expanding empire. The third son was a hydraulic engineer, who designed sluices for the Thames, the Manchester Ship Canal and the Nile; the fifth emigrated to New Zealand, and the fourth, Edward Waller Stoney (1844-1931), Alan’s maternal grandfather, went to India as an engineer. There he amassed a considerable fortune, becoming chief engineer of the Madras and Southern Mahratta Railway, responsible for the construction of the Tangabudra bridge, and the invention of Stoney’s Patent Silent Punkah-Wheel.
    A hard-headed, grumpy man, Edward Stoney married Sarah Crawford from another Anglo-Irish family, and they had two sons and two daughters. Of these, Richard followed his father as an engineer in India, EdwardCrawford was a Major in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and Evelyn married an Anglo-Irish Major Kirwan of the Indian Army. Alan’s mother, Ethel Sara Stoney, was born at Podanur, Madras, on 18 November 1881.
    Although the Stoney family did not lack for funds, her early life was as grim as that of Julius Turing. All four Stoney children were sent back to Ireland to be educated. It was a pattern familiar to British India, whose children’s loveless lives were part of the price of the Empire. They were landed upon their uncle William Crawford, a bank manager of County Clare, with two children of his own by a first marriage and four by a second. It was not a place for affection or attention. The Crawfords moved to Dublin in 1891, where Ethel dutifully went to school each day on the horse-bus, crushed by a regimen that permitted her a mean threepence for lunch. At seventeen, she was transferred to Cheltenham Ladies College, ‘to get rid of her brogue,’ and there she endured the legendary Miss Beale and Miss Buss, and the indignity of being the Irish product of the railway and the bank among the offspring of the English gentry. There remained a flickering dream of culture and freedom in Ethel Stoney’s heart and for six months she was sent, at her own request, to study music and art at the Sorbonne. The brief experiment was vitiated by the discovery that French snobbery and Grundyism could equal that of the British Isles. So when in 1900 she returned with her elder sister Evie to her parents’ grand bungalow in Coonoor, it was to an India which represented an end to petty privation, but left her knowing that there was a world of knowledge from which she had been forever excluded.
    For seven years, Ethel and Evie led the life of young ladies of Coonoor – driving out in carriages to leave visiting cards, painting in water-colours, appearing in amateur theatricals and attending formal dinners and balls in the lavish and stifling manner of the day. Once her father took the family on holiday to Kashmir, where Ethel fell in love with a missionary doctor, and he with her. But the match was forbidden, for the missionary had no money. Duty triumphed over love, and she remained in the marriage market. And thus the scene was set, in the spring of 1907, for the meeting of Julius Turing and Ethel Stoney on board the homebound ship.
    They had taken the Pacific route, and the romance was under way before they reached Japan. Here Julius took her out to dinner and wickedly instructed the Japanese waiter to ‘bring beer and keep on bringing beer until I tell you to stop.’ Though an abstemious man, he knew when to live it up. He made a formal proposal to Edward Stoney for Ethel’s hand, and this time, he being a proud, impressive young man in the ‘heaven-born’ ICS, it was successful. The beer story, however, did not impress his future father-in-law, who lectured Ethel upon the prospect of life with a reckless drunkard. Together they crossed the Pacific and the United States, where they spent some time in the Yellowstone National Park, shocked by the familiarity of