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privately-printed family tree, Anna died three years later. But I can find no record of her death in London. Then I see in an Eastbourne newspaper that she was buried at the Glasgow Necropolis. So I write to the General Register Office for Scotland in Edinburgh which sends me her death certificate.
    Is it possible to be shocked by something that happened over a hundred years ago? I do feel a jolt as I read that Anna Eliza Holroyd, my great-grandmother, committed ‘suicide by carbolic acid’ at 29 Arlington Street, Glasgow, on 7 January 1880. She was aged thirty, that is twenty-eight years younger than her husband. This Arlington Street address was the home of her uncle, William Smith, an accountant, and his wife. But the ‘informant’ on the death certificate two days later is Charles Holroyd, her husband. This suggests that she had travelled to Scotland alone and that he went up from Eastbourne on hearing the dreadful news, leaving his two sons, Pat and Fraser, aged five and four, and his daughter Norah, who was a couple of weeks short of her third birthday, at home. Were they ever told of their mother’s suicide? No whisper of it reached my father, I am sure, or came down to the rest of the family. There is no photograph of her anywhere.
    Carbolic acid was used as a strong domestic disinfectant which cleaned by its caustic action. Anna would have died through internal burning. What can have driven her to do such an unimaginably painful thing, to kill herself when she had three very young children? There is no report of her suicide in the Scottish newspapers (there was a more dramatic suicide in Glasgow that day by an unnamed woman who threw herself from a bridge in Jamaica Street on the stroke of midnight). Nor is there any fatal accident inquiry concerning Anna on record. She left no Will or inventory, no testamentary deeds. There is simply no living memory of this tragedy, simply a trail of speculation.
    Having lived most of her life in India, Anna may well have found it difficult to settle at Eastbourne where she knew no one. The prospect of spending the next twenty years or so as the wife of a retired soldier nearly twice her age cannot have been very appealing. By the beginning of 1880, she could well have been pregnant again and she may have been subject to unrecognised post-natal depression, the prospect of which renewed her feelings of guilt. All this is possible and could form a contributory cause of her death. But none of it provides a convincing explanation for killing herself so appallingly. Where no easy explanations were available, many women who did not have a tenacious hold on life and who found it eventually intolerable were considered to be mentally unstable. I have been unable to find evidence of her being in love with another man, or having had any connection with that other woman, with dark brown hair, whose body was recovered by lowering a boat from the Carrick Castle that January night. Nor is there any evidence of her husband having ill-treated her – otherwise her uncle would surely not have summoned him to Glasgow, or her mother, years later, have sent a wreath ‘in affectionate remembrance’ when Charles Holroyd himself died.
    Anna Eliza, ‘the Beloved Wife of Major Gen Charles Holroyd’, was buried at the Glasgow Necropolis on 10 January 1880. And that must surely be the end of her story. But it is not quite the end. Over seventeen years later a man was buried beside her. His name – one I have never seen before – was John Stewart Paul and he died in June 1897 at the age of sixty-one. Who was this mysterious man? On the gravestone it is written that he was the ‘brother in law of Major Gen Holroyd’. He turns out to be Anna’s uncle by marriage (the husband of her mother’s sister) who had christened his younger son Charles Holroyd Paul. What can this tell me? It appears that Anna’s family wished to retain the connection with her husband Charles, and that no blame was laid on