As I was sitting in a concert in a church last week my eye was caught by a brass plaque on the wall above the pulpit. It was a memorial to a long dead worthy of that church. What first caught my eye was the man's name... Abercromby Dior. Now there is a name ahead of his time - not just one but two designer labels in one person! The Scottish custom of using a surname as a first name was alive and well over 100 years ago.
What next attracted my attention to the plaque was that under the name was the phrase "Bengal Civil Service". He died in 1879 so it would seem that in the mid nineteenth century he was active in Bengal. The British Empire is very often viewed today with regret rather than celebration. Yet here in this simple plaque in a small Scottish village church was mention of a man who probably gave the best years of his life far from home in what would have been an insanitary and inhospitable place because of a sense of Christian duty. He was though of highly by the church to merit the plaque and so my guess is that he saw his Christian duty to be to bring order and civilisation through the empire.
There was much in the British Empire that was not good but very often today we loose sight of the many dedicated individuals who used the mechanisms of their time to try, in their own small way, to make the world a better place. I believe it is important not to forget that the history we share with many other parts of the world is like all life - a mixture of the good and the bad.
