Hello lovely humans.

I wrote you a lovely long bit of wiffle-waffle about how my old dad Robert Lee moved from India to Nigeria when he was 10 at the partition of India in 1947, and how my awful-awesome Boo Boo Nana (Eileen)1 travelled alone from there to Liverpool in 1958 and headed for Notting Hill to find a place for the family to live. I talked about my dad’s respect for that baller move and how he told me about her brave journey with a note of awe in his voice.

But then I tried to fact check the story, and discovered none of it quite matched up with Ancestry’s ship manifests and whatnot. So, either he got the details wrong, or I have. And because, to my unending sadness, I lost all the interviews I recorded with him before he died, I’ve decided just to get right to the meat of the piece, which is this:

Why am I called KJ Lyttleton?

When my dad joined the Royal Navy at 152 he joined the training ship Arethusa. Here it is.

One day, he was called into the office (I’m sure that’s not the right term) by some senior person (as you can probably tell, I am now bored of fact-checking this email and will continue to be incredibly woolly on any detail involving naval ranks or terms or I’ll never finish writing it.)

“Lee,” the…I want to say officer? or maybe Captain? hollered. “Come in here and explain yourself.”

My dad dutifully entered.

“Why have you told us your name is Lee?” said the Captain.

“It is, sir,” said my dad.

“No it isn’t,” said the Captain.

“Yes it is,” said my father.

“No, it isn’t,” said the Captain. “Look here. It’s Lyttleton Lee.”

My dad looked at where the senior naval person was pointing. Some official document or other pronounced my dad’s legal name was Lyttleton Lee. My dad was flummoxed. Apparently, This was something his father had neglected to tell him.

But worse than that was the realisation this meant something truly dreadful. If his name really was Lyttleton Lee, he was about to have a whole heap of sewing to do. Why? Because the Navy made sailors hand embroider their names into every item of clothing. This meant young Bob would now have to embroider “Lyttleton Lee” on his entire wardrobe.

No ta, says father dear, and heads straight off to change his legal name to Lee, which while less noble-sounding (common if anything), was at least a snappier sew.

And that was the end of our long-lost surname.

Who was this Lyttleton person?

Usually when you get a double barrel it’s because someone was fancy enough or stubborn enough to want their name added to the patriarchial mix. I have spent many hours on Ancestry over the years and there are two puzzles I cannot solve: who the hell Boo Boo Nana’s mother was, and who the original Lyttleton was.

Small sidebar about Agnes

Beyond her name (Agnes Jayne Jasper) and marriage date, I cannot discover much about great-granny at all. Her father’s name is on the marriage certificate, but then the lead goes cold. Boo Boo Nana once told me that Agnes’s family were Armenian refugees, but being a tiny brown racist, that woman would say anything in order to pretend not to be mixed race Indian and frequently changed her story.

Both of my grandparents were what is called Anglo-Indian, which I have mentioned before means something specific in India: namely a group of mixed-race Christians descended from the first male British settlers and their Indian wives or mistresses. But then the fun-loving Victorians came along to spoil things, as was their wont, and put the kybosh on mixed marriages leaving the Anglo-Indians cut off and limited to marrying only within their own community (because they wanted to stay whiter than their Indian cousins).

Although the Anglo-Indians often referred to the UK as “home” many families hadn’t set foot on the British Isles for generations. A lot came to the UK at the partition, but there is still a small group of Anglo-Indians (or Indian-Anglos) living in India.

The BBC writes about them from time to time. Here is one example: Is the sun setting on the Anglo-Indian community? (BBC)

So where Agnes Jayne came from, I do not know. It’s strange that she has so few details about her. Jasper isn’t an Anglicised Armenian name (last time I checked the Armenian register it didn’t come up) and by the time she was born, Indian records (certainly for the other Anglo–Indians in grandparents’ genealogy) were pretty good, so she should be easier to find. But she isn’t.

What I do know about her is she looked like this.

Back to the Lyttleton crew

So I can’t find much about Agnes Jasper and I’m equally flummoxed by where this Lyttleton sprang from.

Today, as I was about to post this, I fished out my Great-Great Grandfather’s marriage certificate to Harriett Chipchase (née Strange). I’m far from an expert (as I think you’ll have noticed) but it looks like Lyttleton was maybe his middle name? Certainly his dad is listed as Lewis Lee, and he certainly didn’t marry a Lyttleton. Perhaps that’s what happened: Lewis decided to add a bit of pizzazz to his son’s name and added a tribute to Lord Lyttelton (which is usually spelled with a “Y” and an “EL”, but is seen every which way in documents). Perhaps later family members then appended this fancy middle name to their surname.

Or maybe Lewis married a Lyttleton (I don’t have his wife’s name) and gave his children a double-barreller that his grandchildren immediately forgot about. It’s weird that I couldn’t find Lewis Lee’s marriage certificate or any information about his wife. A lot of what I entered in the genealogy websites is stuff my older sister discovered for a school project when she was a teenager, and I’m sure getting click-happy on Ancestry just starts to introduce errors. Maybe one day I’ll stump up the cash and delve back into the Ancestry archives…

So anyway…

Lyttleton just seemed like an obvious choice for a pen name. I’d wanted to be Katherine Lyttleton, but it’s a long name to stick on a book cover, and a lot of men still avoid books written by women, so I went with a sexless KJ. And thus was KJ Lyttleton born.

Was that interesting to anyone but me and my relatives? I don’t know. But people asked, so now you know!

PS. Actually, there’s a third mystery

And that is: who was Shy Zaoy?

One ancestor, Robert Montague Strange – son of Sir Robert Strange and Lady Isabella Lumisden (the poshest people in my tree and the original white settler of the crew, who kicked things off right back in the early 1700s) – left all his money to “my girl Shy Zaoy,” but that isn’t a name in any country I could find. Perplexity tells me “"Shy Zaoy" is most likely an Anglicized or mis-transcribed version of a local, Eurasian, or Chinese name, reflecting the diverse and multicultural environment of colonial India,” but it also didn’t really know.

Strange was, for a while, the hot favourite for my pen name. I mean, what a great surname! But I decided there were too many Strange authors out there, whereas there are scant few Lyttletons. Plus, it sounds well posh, even if it isn’t spelled like the Lords Lyttelton.

Book news

I’ve been doing all sorts of late, but the most important bits of news I have are: Book 3 in the Aldhill Mystery series is coming along nicely, and I have decided to try to release my Maz Star comedy novel before August so I can enter it into the Kindle Storyteller award. I can’t imagine it will do anything at all in the competition, since comedy books almost never get prizes, but it DEFINITELY won’t win anything if I don’t enter it. Plus, it’s a good deadline. And I need deadlines.

If anyone wants an advance reader copy to review, hit reply or leave me a comment and I will organise sending one once I’ve finished the edits. If you like Jasper Fforde, Terry Pratchett, Barry J Hutchison or… dare I say it?… the meastro himself, Douglas Adams, Maz Star might raise a few chuckles at least. I’ll write more about it soon and show off the cover properly.

Anyway, I hope you’re all well and happy? I’ve been having a very nice time, singing lots of songs, gardening and writing (and – thankfully – working on a lot of paid writing projects as well).

Until next time!

Katie Lee / KJ Lyttleton