Barbara Ingham became interested in India and made several visits to the country. She also became involved in the Rural Life Programme.
James George Roche Forlong was born in Lanarkshire, Scotland. He joined the Indian Army in 1843, being appointed to the Engineering Staff, Madras Presidency, in 1847. In 1852 he was appointed as an Engineer in the army based in Myanmar (Burma) and was responsible for creating a road across the mountains from Rahkine State (Arakan) to the Irrawaddy. Through 1858-9 he travelled extensively in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Greece, Italy and Spain. In late 1859 he was appointed a Special Commissioner and Inspector-General of Prisons for the Andaman Islands and Myanmar. His engineering skills took him to Kolkata (1861-20), Darjeeling (1863), the North West Provinces (1864-7), Rajput (1868-71), and Oudh (1872-6). He retired in 1877 and then concentrated on writing on comparative religions. His major works were "Rivers of Life" (1883) and "Faiths of Man: A Cyclopaedia of Religions" which was published posthumously in 1906. He died at home in 1904.
Derek Davis was born on 3 May 1945 and educated at Clifton College, a school renowned for its excellence in classical and modern language teaching. By 1962 he had a Russian A level, had visited Russia and, armed with Hindi-Russian dictionaries and conversational phrasebook, was at Scindia School, Gwalior, where he taught Shakespeare, Dickens and Gerald Durrell to 13-year-olds who would go on to become public servants, generals, admirals, businessmen and academics. He then went up to Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Greats.
During the Oxford long vacation of 1965, he embarked on an overland trek to India via Erzurum and back with his Balliol friend, Christopher Bayly. An unexpected consequence was that the latter changed his proposed research subject from Russian and Eastern European history to work instead (with Professor Sarvepalli Gopal) on South Asia.
His career in the civil service left little time for Pushkin, but on his retirement, he continued to work on his translations of the History of Pugachev and the Journey to Arzrum which was published by the Royal Asiatic Society as a supplement to their Journal in 2022. He also served on the Society's Council and its Finance and Investment Committee.
He died on 8 July 2023.