Celebrating the end of war at the Great Eastern Hotel, Calcutta

The hotel, then known as the Great Eastern Hotel where this image was taken is now called the Lalit Great Eastern Hotel. An extremely popular place, the colonial era hotel was originally established as a confectionary shop and then grew into a grand and plush hotel in the early 1840s, a time when Calcutta was the top seat of the East India Company.

The last European principal of a forest college

My father J.H Longrigg (seated in Black) was brought up in North London and was a graduate of Cambridge University. During the British reign and with high popularity, demand and pay for British officers in India he decided to join the Indian Forest Service in 1912. In 1924, while vacationing in Switzerland on a skiing holiday he met my mother, they fell in love and got married quite quickly.