© Windamere Hotel, 2024. All rights reserved.
Many of you who come to India are keenly interested in the past and some of you have Raj connections. There are incidents in your life, or in the lives of your relations in the India of old, that give you pleasure to recall. And it is to you that we address this message: please share your memory of the Raj with those who did not have the luck to be there. A paragraph or two, or a longer account, with photos if any, would do nicely thank you. Send us your Raj memories and we shall be glad to include your recollections in our Memory Book.
"We fell in love with your hotel on arrival – the warm welcome, the décor of the rooms, the coal fire in the grate and the atmosphere of an age gone by. It must surely be one of the best hotels in the world – at least in our experience it is."
"I have only very happy memories of my childhood during the time of World War 2 and The Raj. Ayah and bearer seemed always to be playing and spoiling us children."
"In my memory the snows of Kanchenjunga were always visible forming a backdrop to our lives. That life seemed to be so free after a restricted upbringing in England."
"My memories of India during the Raj – 1940-44 – are of great happiness and personal freedom. Released from our almost Victorian regime at school in England to the amazing freedom we were allowed in Darjeeling was incredible."
"My childhood memories of India are very scattered – an elephant coming to our home in Assam to take me for a ride every morning – pineapples growing in the hillsides – brilliant colours everywhere – sitting at table with our legs and feet in bags to keep off mosquitoes – taking two days to travel to school, waiting for trains that could run up to a day late."
"My early memories of Darjeeling were my mother saying 'Oh to get to Darjeeling was so wonderful'. It was not only how she said it but her complete relaxation as if now, everything will be alright."
"I was born in Nagpur in what was then Central India in 1933 and left India in 1947 after partition. We were the fourth generation on my father's side and third generation on my mother's to have lived here."
"I was born in Darjeeling on 27 July 1928. My father L.G. Pinnell was in the I.C.S. in Bengal."
"We have made a number of trips to the sub-continent, always with great enjoyment. This is, however, our first visit to Darjeeling. We came because my father, Alec Sandys, had visited Darjeeling as a young man and the visit had a profound effect on him. Many were the time that he talked about the life and the hospitality that he found on the hill, and the majesty of Kanchenjunga."
"I came to Darjeeling on the 3rd of March 1928 with my husband Major J.E.E. Packard of the 2nd Battalion, the King's Own Royal Regiment from Rawalpindi where the regiment was stationed. He had been seconded to the Staff Command based in Calcutta where we had a flat in the Fort for the winter months. The whole staff came up from March to October making their headquarters at Jalapahar."
"In October 1940 the New School was founded in Calcutta to cater for children of both sexes evacuated from Britain to join their parents who were already in India. Most of them had long sea voyages around the Cape of Good Hope and the arrival in India was the end of one adventure and the beginning of another."
© Windamere Hotel, 2024. All rights reserved.