"Ain't It Funny How Time Slips Away" — Willie Nelson

George Ramsay Acland Mills (1896-1972)

Oh, my.  It's been quite a long time since I've posted!  My sister, Betsy, has been diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer and it's inoperable.  If you have a prayer to spare, I would be most grateful if you would use it on Betsy's behalf.  Thank you...

I recently read a comment here at Who Is George Mills? stating: "Sam, I wished you'd put a link to your very first post on the home page, so readers could start at the beginning of your story."

The comment is from Jim Harris, an authority on Lady Dorothy Mills (author, traveler, and George's once-sister-in-law) , and I've often wondered how one would go back to the beginning here without endlessly clicking the "Older Posts" link at the bottom of this screen.

Here's a link that should approximate this blog's very beginnings if you scroll down the page:

http://www.whoisgeorgemills.com/search?updated-max=2010-03-15T16:38:00-04:00&max-results=20&start=293&by-date=false

Thanks for the comment, Jim!

Gallery 3: The Artwork of John Harris

Welcome to our third gallery art here at Who Is George Mills?

1939 brought the third book of George Mills into existence, Minor and Major, published in London by Geo. G. Harrap and Co., Ltd. It was published in the same size and in the same format as Mills's preceding book, King Willow, published by Harrap in 1938: Four full-page black line illustrations, a full-colour frontispiece, and various embellishments throughout the cover and first few pages. The format, down the the hand-lettered titles, is identical to Willow. [Click any illustration to enlarge it.]

While not strictly a sequel, some of the boys from King Willow do, in fact, appear in Minor and Major, albeit briefly.

This time around, however, the illustrator is not one of the Brocks, C. E. or H. M., but John Harris. Trying to find background information on a "John Harris" rivals what it once had been like looking for George Mills, so nothing is known of his background.


His watercolour work pales—quite literally—next to the colourful paintings of the Brocks. But watercolour is not the best Harris has to offer.





Harris's pen and ink work is of a similar character as that of H. M. Brock, at least in so far as his black line drawings have some of the flavor of an engraving.Still, Harris's talented hand is uneven. While each of the full page illustrations requires different aesthetic attributes in describing various scenes in the story, I might have surmised that two, or ever three, different draughtsmen had executed the four full-page illustrations.

Harris is more than competent, but following the Brock brothers, his work appears of lesser quality by comparison. They would be a tough act to follow, even for an above average chap like Harris.


"All right, it's only me" (Page 61)



"The headmaster threw open the door" (Page 109)



"All right, just you jolly well wait and see, Sandy" (Page 139)



"Competitors for the 440 come her at once" (Page 211)


Check in next time, when we'll take a look at Oxford University Press's 1950 reprinting of Meredith and Co. See you then!

The 'Who Is George Mills?' Mailbag, January 2011

Here at whoisgeorgemills.com, we haven't dug into the old mail bag recently, so let's take a look at what's been going on way down in the mail room where all comments messages are handled by my crack staff!


• Here's something from Richard, who left a comment on the post "Finding Parkfield...": Just been trying to find location of Wick & Parkfield School which I attended from 1961 to 1963. It was indeed the building which is now Downlands Park Nursing Home. It was run by Bill and Pat Halstead. The main cricket pitch was on the sloping field near the miniature railway track - we had to go round there to collect missing cricket balls.

- Richard Miller

Thanks for the first-hand experience and additional details about Parkfield [above, left], Richard. It's always greatly appreciated!


• Leading Lady Dororthy Mills aficionado, Jim Harris, left a new comment on the recent post "Steyning Mansions Hotel, Eastern Terrace, Brighton...": Wonderful detective work. I can picture Lady Mills staying at Steyning Mansions Hotel. So, no record of the hotel after 1958?

By the way, are you watching Downton Abbey on Masterpiece (PBS)? It takes place in 1912 and is about an Earl who only had three daughters and must leave his estate to a distant cousin. The middle daughter reminds me of Lady Mills.

Wouldn't the story of Lady Dorothy Mills make a great Masterpiece series?

For our friends across the pond who may not be aware, Masterpiece Theatre is televised here on Sunday evenings. Also for those far-off friends, the last two Sunday evenings have featured the American football playoffs as well! While I'm a lover of lavish BBC productions, I'm also fond of watching sweaty 300-pound titans engaged in high-speed collisions and sundry mayhem on a frozen field called a gridiron, live, in High Definition!

I've recorded the Downton Abbey series to watch later, and it's of particular interest to me as Downton is the locale of Winds Cottage where the brother of our George Mills, author Arthur Mills, and his second wife, Monica, spent the last years of his life gardening, golfing, and writing the occasional crime novel.

And, by the way, I do think the life of Lady Dorothy [pictured, left] would make a fabulous Masterpiece!


• My dear friend Jennifer in Philadelphia weighs in with this great addition to our investigation:

Give me a burial location and I’ll request a photo.

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=64660799

Jen is the smartest person I know when it comes to fathoming deeply into genealogies. She's set up this webpage to help find the location of the burial site of George Mills [see the screenshot, right], and I really appreciate it.

Who knows? We may even end up with more photos of George posted there!


• Finally, Mary left a comment on the post "Sidebar: Considering the Life of Sir Robert Hart a...": I can tell you a bit more about Sir Robert Hart, Evelyn's father, and his family. I am preparing a book for the Hong Kong University Press on him and his relationship with my own ancestors.

Evelyn "Evey" Hart later married and became Evelyn Beauclerk, mother of the wife of George Mills, Vera Louise Beauclerk Mills.

She also wrote: "I am just doing something on Evie. Do you know how many children she had, when she died, and from which are you descended?"

I'm no relation to the Harts or Beauclerks, but I did let Mary know the following:

From what I've gathered, Evelyn Amy Hart was born 31 December 1869 in Beijing and died 10 June 1933 in Kensington, London. Her children were Vera Louise Beauclerk (21 December 1893 - 5 January 1942) and Hilda de Vere Beauclerk (21 January 1895 - 16 September 1964).

Hilda married Miles Malcolm Atchison from Ganges, British Columbia, Canada, of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service on 21 June 1933 [11 days after Evey's death] and eventually moved to Canada where Hilda passed away in 1964. They had two children, Elizabeth Anne (b. 22 March 1936), and Hilda Etain (b. 9 October 1937).

During WW II, Hilda and Miles were held in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. Hilda worked in the camp's kitchens and did much to help her fellow prisoners, but lost a finger in doing so. Apparently she was admired by everyone there for her bravery.

On 23 April 1925, Vera married George Ramsay Acland Mills (b. 1 Oct 1896; d. 1972), only son of Revd. Barton Reginald Vaughan Mills, Vicar of Bude Haven, Cornwall, 1891-1901 and Assistant Chaplain of Royal Chapel of the Savoy 1901-08 (by his second wife Elizabeth Edith "Edie" Ramsay, only daughter of Sir George Dalhousie Ramsay, CB). They had no children.

Vera passed away in Exmoor in 1942 while her husband, George, was serving as a 46-year-old 2nd lieutenant in the Royal Pay Corps. He'd returned to the service in 1940 after serving as an infantry corporal in WW I. George resigned his commission in 1943 due to ill-health. He had been a boys' preparatory schoolmaster in both England and Switzerland from the late 1920s through the mid 1930s and was the author of four books: the children's novels Meredith and Co. (1933), King Willow (1938), and Minor and Major (1939), and the children's religious biography Saint Thomas of Canterbury (1939).

Vera was also the sister-in-law of adventure and crime novelist Arthur Hobart Mills (George's half-brother) and Arthur's wife, Lady Dorothy Mills (née Walpole), a novelist, explorer, and renowned travel writer.


I thought that it would be worth including the above profile after discussing Vera's 1942 passing just yesterday.

Well, that about empties the old George Mills mail sack. Thank you to everyone who's made my work a bit [and sometimes a great deal] easier. Please accept my warmest appreciation, and do keep reading!

The Lady Dorothy Mills Award (1965)

Sometimes I feel like a seagull picking over the remains of the same old beached flounder, time and again. I try to set aside some time every day to run at least one George Mills-related internet search, and most often I fail to come up with anything new. Sometimes, though, I rearrange the search terms or try google.co.uk instead of google.com and I do find a morsel, and it's very exciting: Yesterday I discovered a fringe reference to "M. Kalab," who had been awarded the Lady Dorothy Mills Award in 1965 for a proposed Cambodian village project.

I e-mailed the Royal Geographical Society about it before retiring last evening, and returned from lunch to find this reply waiting for me:


RE: "Lady Dorothy Mills award"
Sent: Monday, April 26, 2010 11:51 AM

Dear Mr Williams

Thank you for your enquiry regarding the above award. According to our records, Lady Dorothy Mills was formally elected to the Fellowship of the Society on 3 November 1930.

I have found a couple of key references to the later award in the Society’s ‘Geographical Journal’ (GJ).

The first appeared in the ‘Society’s News’ column in the GJ 127(3), Sept. 1961, p.383, with the announcement of a bequest:

“LADY DOROTHY MILLS AWARD. As a result of a bequest of the late Lady Dorothy Mills, Fellow of the Society, an award has been established of £1000 to be made to a young woman traveller who is also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. The award will be made in the form of a grant covering one or more years and will be primarily for a project involving travel of an adventurous kind rather than projects purely for academic research”.

This bequest was awarded only once, to the Milada Kalab you mention. The award was made at the Society’s AGM of 14 June 1965 (reported in the GJ 131(3), Sept, 1965, p436), with the President Sir Dudley Stamp in the chair:

“The President: Now, finally we come to a unique award. It is the Lady Dorothy Mills Award, provided for under a bequest from the late Dorothy Mills. It can only be presented once and it goes, and carries with it £1000, to Miss Milada Kalab, at present Lecturer in Geography at Durham University. The award is to enable a young woman Fellow of the Society to travel and undertake geographical work, and Miss Kalab proposes to spend a year in research in field-work in Cambodia, where she will study village life and social organization in the hilly areas. The Lady Dorothy Mills Award is thus an award for work which will be done in the future, and not for past endeavour. In presenting this award to Miss Kalab, I give her also the Society’s best wishes for the success of her work.
Miss M. Kalab: Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen: I wish to thank the Council of the Royal Geographical Society for giving me this award and I should like also to express my gratefulness to the late Lady Dorothy Mills for having instituted this grant. I feel very humble here at being the only person who has yet to deserve the award she is getting, and I can only hope that I shall do some worthwhile piece of work in Cambodia. I hope too I shall be able to talk to you about it on some future occasion, and to tell you of some exciting adventures. Thank you very much”.

She in fact reported back to the Society in a paper entitled “Study of a Cambodian village”, which appeared in the GJ, 134(4), Dec. 1968, pp.521-537.

And although we hold four of Lady Dorothy Mills’ own works (monographs) from the 1920s, we do not have any biographical or obituary works on her, so I’m afraid that we cannot provide any further background information on this individual ourselves.

Hope this helps.

Yours sincerely,

Jan Turner
Deputy Librarian
RGS-IBG


Thank you for your prompt reply, Jan!

I guess it's really no earth-shattering bit of information: Upon her passing in 1959, Lady Dorothy left £1000 to fund some future project by "a young woman traveller who is also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society."

I'm never sure of past exchange rates, or rates of inflation, buying power, earning power, and the like, but I'll wager that £1000 in 1959 went a lot farther than it would today—and it's still nothing to thumb one's nose at these days. It was very thoughtful and foresighted of her to create the one-time award.

I suppose what really surprised me, though, was that she was not formally elected a fellow of the RGS until 3 November 1930, especially since they had been holding several monographs of hers in their collection since the 1920s.

From the point of view of today, it would seem a natural that she'd have been embraced by the Society. I do wonder, however, how her exploits were viewed at the time. Admittedly, they were probably less scientific and more "popular culture" in their overall nature than was perhaps seen as appropriate.

I'll admit I'm uncertain of what the climate of the Society might have been towards a woman who carefully researched, observed, and documented the ancestries, religions, languages, and social customs of the various peoples of coastal and West Saharan Africa for her books—as well as having freely discussed scratching her mosquito bites bloody, wrangling seamy hotel managers for semi-decent rooms, and being forced to wear an embarrassingly silly-looking sun hat around in public in those same texts.

Any thoughts?

[Many thanks to James Wallace Harris (ladydorothymills.com) for the wonderfully dramatic image of Lady Dorothy you see at the top, left!]

Minor and Major Arrives via Royal Mail!

Many thanks to Heather at Peakirk Books in Nr Fakenham, Norfolk, not only for the information she provided me earlier via e-mail, but for the edition of Minor and Major by George Mills that arrived today!

While the first edition, illustrated by John Harris, in the British Library is dated 1939, this edition predictably carries no date nor the name of the illustrator(s). Once again, exactly as in my edition of King Willow by Mills, we find it was published by Spring Books, Spring House, Spring Place, London NW5, and printed in Czechoslovakia.

The title page and dust jacket proclaim it to be part of the "Fanfare Series", and many other titles in the series—including King Willow—are listed. Among them are: The Clue in the Castle, The Missing Speed Ace, Backstage with Peggy, The Rawhide Kid, The Savages on Gale Island, The Rivals of Rookwood, The Island Mystery, The Secret of the Study, Holiday Adventure, The Riddle of the Blue Moon, and Speed Dermot.

This edition has 240 pages, a full-colour, unsigned frontispiece [the lustre of which is diminished by having been printed on matte paper] and four black-and-white illustrations throughout. The unsigned full-colour illustration on the dust jacket is not the same one found inside the text.

The dimensions of the book, exactly the same as Fanfare Series companion King Willow, may have been conceived by one Benedict Thomas—something we'll examine in a subsequent post!

I have a copy of Meredith and Co., already noted as being part of something called the "Viscount Series" and having been published by a house suspiciously similar in all ways to "Spring Books". That edition is also undated, but has a gift inscription written by the original owner apparently dating it as at least having been purchased 1957.

The other two nearly identical editions suggest they have been modified from Meredith's slightly larger format. That also suggests they are both more recent than 1957—moving their publication dates into my own lifetime, having been born in 1958.

King Willow and Minor and Major, even more so than Meredith and Co., have an appearance similar to vintage 1946-1965 [5th format] editions of the Hardy Boys mystery series I'd seen and read in the 1960s.

Using 1958 as a target date, selected for both its proximity to 1957's Meredith and Co. reprint and it being the year of my birth, let's say Mills was paid directly for the rights to also reprint King Willow and Minor and Major. Unless the books were published posthumously, he'd have been earning an income from his 1930's written work virtually through 1960—assuming they had stayed available on booksellers' shelves for a year or two.

This is all suppostion, but we'd have to imagine George Mills, at this point in our investigation still a self-proclaimed Preparatory School Master, likely living somewhere in the U.K., in his early sixties [61 years old on 18 August, 1958, my own birth date] and still trading on his years teaching at prep schools during the worldwide Great Depression.

Or is it merely the heirs of George Mills who're reaping the benefits from these reprints, or perhaps his wife, Vera?

New information that was delayed by an incorrect spelling provides more insight into the answer to the above question…