Robert Chambers of Edinburgh: Victorian Polymath and Educator

Iris Macfarlane, was born in Quetta, India (now Pakistan) in 1922. She was sent home to England and when she was sixteen was taken out to India in 1939. She learnt Assamese and translated Assamese folk-tales which were published as Tales and Legends from India (1965). She also wrote a children’s novel about her daughters as The Children of Bird God Hill (1967). She studied Assamese and Indian history, which led to a number of articles in History Today, and the book The Black Hole; The Makings
of a Legend (1975).
She moved the Hebridean island of North Uist. There she learnt Gaelic and published a book of translations of folk stories, The Mouth of the Night (1973). She also wrote another children’s story, The Summer of the Lame Seagull (1970). She contributed over thirty articles of a ‘Hebridean Journal’ to the Scotsman recounting life on the croft. These have been published as And We in Dreams; A Hebridean Journal (2017). She wrote a number of short stories which were broadcast on the B.B.C. Later she wrote and an autobiographical history of four generations of her family as Daughters of the Empire: A Memoir of Life and Times in the British Raj (2006; republished 2011). Iris died in Wolverhampton in February 2007. Her selected poems, Love's Legacy, were published in 2017.

Alan Macfarlane was born in Shillong, India, in 1941 and educated at the Dragon School, Sedbergh School, Oxford and London Universities where he received two Master's degrees and two doctorates. He is the author of over forty books, including The Origins of English Individualism (1978) and Letters to Lily: On How the World Works (2005). He has worked in England, Nepal, Japan and China as both an historian and anthropologist. He was elected to the British Academy in 1986 and is now Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and a Life Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.