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This book, about real people, was intended to be about quite different ones. In her postscript, Helena Drysdale, the travel writer, says that her initial purpose had been to write a biography of her great-great-grandfather Sir George Bowen, who was a serial governor of colonies — Queensland, New Zealand, Victoria, Mauritius, Hong Kong.
Through all these governorships he kept elaborate scrapbooks, and by far the largest concerned New Zealand. In this one Drysdale’s eye was caught by a cutting about the Maori murder of Bamber Gascoigne, his wife and their children, in 1869. ‘This unusual name happened to be that of my cousin, the celebrated writer and quizmaster.’
She then found that three relatives of the murdered Gascoignes had written unpublished memoirs, sent from New Zealand to Bamber Gascoigne after their owners had seen him on television in the 1970s, and Bamber passed them on to her.
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