Great excitement last week! It looks as though we’ve found some more details about Douglas Bruce! Well, I can’t take any credit for that – my friend Mary, who’s keen on genealogy, seems to have unearthed him via the census of 1901 and 1911 – more of this below.
If you’re new to this blog, and you’d like to find out what this is all about, it’ll probably help you to scroll down to the first post about the Mystery Challenge,in which I’m asking readers to help me find out more about the love letters from 1920’s China:

I’ve said that I’ll be posting more transcripts of the letters, so here is the second in the series (The tantalising thing is that there’s no way of telling which other letters might have been sent in between, especially as Bessie doesn’t give any dates, just the day of the week.)
Dear Bruce
Your note came last night and might have been a real letter because a coolie delivered it right into my own hand – and how I wish it had been! I needed something yesterday.
Don’t worry I’m not going to burden you with the intimate details of my latest family row. And if you ever catch me working the self-pity gag, please remind me forcibly that I’m not getting any more than I deserve. Sometimes I lose my “sense of perspective” and think I’m more to be pitied than scorned, but I do honestly try to keep away from that point of view.
I gave Margaret your message and we shall love to come Saturday if there is anything doing. I’m not sure about Jimmy yet but will let you know in a day or so. If he doesn’t come and you are going to bring us home, will you spend the night, and Sunday? I wish you were coming for tea today - Jimmy’s gone to Canton. Nuff sed
Those last two words, ‘nuff sed’ seem more like current slang (or text-speak) than something written more than 90 years ago. My efficient copy editor, Liz Broomfield of Libro Editing picked on this phrase as being incompatible with that period, as she hadn’t realised this was part of the real letter.

This short note gives us a hint that Bessie’s marriage was going through a tricky patch (”my latest family row”). The mention of Margaret shows that she was still part of Bessie’s deepening friendship with Bruce, and that everything was apparently all above board on the surface as her husband, Jimmy was included in the invitation. Although Bessie invites Bruce to ‘spend the night, and Sunday’, I don’t think this meant what it sounds like to us, as Jimmy would be at home too on that Saturday. (This picture shows Bruce as best man at a wedding, but this woman is not likely to be Bessie, though it could possibly be Margaret.)

So who was Douglas Bruce? The dates I’ve mentioned in previous posts, indicated that he was in his early twenties in 1916. In my post of 9th January, you can see that I thought his middle name was ‘Gregg’ – or at least a nickname that Bessie had sometimes used. (The full text of that letter will be posted here soon). My friend’s search for a Douglas Gragg Bruce, born in the right decade, drew a blank, but now it seems that his middle name was Gordon.

I wouldn’t have had the faintest idea of where to start searching so I was very grateful when Mary agreed to do this for me. I didn’t know that there are different companies who can help provide information (at a cost, as they have had to purchase various archives She used Ancestry.co.uk and Findmypast.co.uk, and discovered that some other family has recently been trying to record their own family tree –
the Tighe and Weston family, and they had uncovered an entry for
Douglas Gordon Bruce
Birth 11 June 1892 in Chiswick, Middlesex*, London

(This picture comes from this site) His father , Charles Stoddard Bruce, was born in 1854 in Edinburgh Currie, Midlothian Edinburgh, and died in 1905. Charles married Kate Holmes in 1878, and they produced 7 children. All of these dates of births and deaths are listed on that page.

Lists of Dates? How boring!

I used to think that, but not now that I’ve realised how many stories are buried just below the surface.

Douglas Bruce was only 13 when his father died. What impact did that make on him? His only brother, Charles Edward Bruce was 8 years older than him, but died in 1920, aged 36. Douglas Bruce would have been in China that year – would he have gone back to England for his funeral? Would Bessie have comforted him for the loss of his brother?

The 1901 census shows Douglas Bruce at 8 years old, living with his parents and siblings in Chiswick, in the Ecclesiastical parish of Turnham Green. He was the baby of the family, and it wouldn’t be surprising if at least some of his 5 big sisters pampered him a bit. I can imagine him twisting them round his little finger, and continued with this approach to older women as an adult - especially when you read Bessie’s letters to him (‘and you so young and all’).

The 1911 census confirms that he was on good terms with at least one of his sisters, as Douglas Gordon Bruce appears as a resident in the house of his sister, Edith May Penelope Bruce (1886 – 1938) and his brother-in-law, Douglas Robert Finnis, living at 66 Barrowgate Road in Chiswick, possibly in one of these semi-detached houses (not very sympathetically developed!)

Douglas was eighteen at that time, and his occupation is given as Clerk to Public Company. This position would have been a stepping stone towards his job with the Asiatic Petroleum Company (South China) The earliest records that I have of him in China is 1915.

Mary has unearthed a few more interesting dates, which I’ll write about next time along with another of those letters.
* Those of you who know London might think I’ve made an error by saying that Chiswick was in Middlesex on the census of 1901 and 1911 - but at that time, it would have been different.