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Mapping the Past: A Search for Five Brothers at the Edge of Empire
‘Patsy, what are you going to be when you grow up? Well?’
'A Royal Engineer, Daddy. A Royal Engineer!’
Charles Drazin knew little about his mother's father – only that he had been a military surveyor who mapped great swathes of the British Empire. But when his mother was told that she was dying, it prompted recollections of her early life that she had never confided before: of the village in the west of Ireland where she had grown up, and of her father, whose death changed the life of an eight-year-old girl for ever.
Soon afterwards her own death left her son to go through alone the relics of her life. They included a box of old photographs, a battered suitcase stamped with the initials of the grandfather he had never known, and the service records of Patrick’s brothers, who, like him, had all enlisted in the Royal Engineers as the nineteenth century became the twentieth. So began an extraordinary journey of discovery that took him from the age of Queen Victoria to the battlefields of the Western Front.
Mapping the Past is the story of five brothers who, mapping the world, lived up to the Royal Engineers’ motto of Everywhere. It is the story of Ireland, and of the Empire from which it broke away. It is the story of conflict, war and its aftermath. And, most of all, it is the story of memory, endlessly carrying the past, for better or worse, into our present and future. It is an imaginative, intimate and powerful work of history, by a writer of rare power.
'A Royal Engineer, Daddy. A Royal Engineer!’
Charles Drazin knew little about his mother's father – only that he had been a military surveyor who mapped great swathes of the British Empire. But when his mother was told that she was dying, it prompted recollections of her early life that she had never confided before: of the village in the west of Ireland where she had grown up, and of her father, whose death changed the life of an eight-year-old girl for ever.
Soon afterwards her own death left her son to go through alone the relics of her life. They included a box of old photographs, a battered suitcase stamped with the initials of the grandfather he had never known, and the service records of Patrick’s brothers, who, like him, had all enlisted in the Royal Engineers as the nineteenth century became the twentieth. So began an extraordinary journey of discovery that took him from the age of Queen Victoria to the battlefields of the Western Front.
Mapping the Past is the story of five brothers who, mapping the world, lived up to the Royal Engineers’ motto of Everywhere. It is the story of Ireland, and of the Empire from which it broke away. It is the story of conflict, war and its aftermath. And, most of all, it is the story of memory, endlessly carrying the past, for better or worse, into our present and future. It is an imaginative, intimate and powerful work of history, by a writer of rare power.
416 pages, Hardcover
Published September 27, 2016
17 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 15, 2020
Fascinating history of the Royal Engineers intertwined with Irish and family history. The scope and breadth of the book is wide and well researched. He has made the search for his five uncles a personal tribute to their army careers and the influence of the RE on their Irish lives. It is not a particularly easy read but very worthwhile, slightly biased, I am married to an ex Royal Engineer
February 14, 2019
This book contains some fascinating history, l just wish it had focused more on the family members the author was supposed to be writing about. I read this book because I'm trying to research my Irish family from the same time period and hoped to find a story about someone doing something similar. Instead to focus was more on the military history of the British empire and where the family for into it.
July 20, 2017
Far from being a search for the 5 brothers, whose lives are barely touched, this is more a potted military history of the regiments the brothers signed up for. Along the way there are some interesting historical points, particularly on the Irish/English conflict but certainly not what I was expecting from the blurb
November 22, 2018
A family history investigation of Drazin's Irish grandfather and great-uncles who served with the Royal Engineers. Interesting, but very tangential.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews