MY FAB FIVE: 1 The Author
I refer not to a University of Michigan basketball team but to five stalwarts of our family tree to whom my attention was drawn by a single book. Let me explain. A single book maybe, but a large one having over 400 pages and many more illustrations. Its title: The Last Rainbow, an Account of a Lost World and its author: James Christopher Dempsey (1954) #8727 one of my five. From the dust jacket I quote: The Last Rainbow…describes what it was like to grow up in Kenya at the time of the country’s independence from colonial rule in the 1960s. The book describes how the writer’s great grandfather [Hermann Ludwig Eckstein (1847-1893) #6117] became the first citizen of Johannesburg and the head of a firm that ended up controlling over half the mighty Rand. From the ‘Rand Lords’, the scene shifts to the bloody 1st World War campaign in German East Africa and how the writer’s own grandfather [Herman Frederick Eckstein (1889-1953) #6144] came to create a mixed farm in the Subukia Valley in the early 1920s. It was a boy brought up on this farm that later arrested the then Head of the German State in 1945 and is reputed to be the main inspiration for Ian Fleming’s James Bond.
The Last Rainbow is full of surprises not least how members of the author’s family have played their part in numerous military campaigns over a thousand years. In particular, the early history of the SAS culminating in the salvation of The Regiment and the appointment of the author’s great uncle [General Sir Miles Dempsey (1896-1969) #11336], the Commander of the victorious Second Army at D Day as their first Colonel Commandant.
In the last chapter, the incredible story of the author’s own paternal Irish family and their prolonged struggle against Norman and English invaders makes for essential (if not iconic) reading for any member of the ancient O’Dempsey Sept.
And finally, I quote from the book itself: Decades later, I found myself at St. Anne’s Mount in the land of my ancestors. A large gathering of Dempseys from all walks of life sat before me. Local councillors bedecked in their chains of office stood alongside. One gave a speech as indeed did that stalwart of our family history, the splendid P. J. Goode. I was handed a piece of artwork and welcomed back as the Taoiseach after an absence of nearly 300 years.
NB Numbers shown thus #1111 indicate the bearer’s position on the web family tree.
