EYMOON EVER
their seven-day stay they were looked after by two servants and a cook and incurred “medical fees”.
Arriving in India in early spring 1894 Lily provides a graphic account of an elephant shoot: a popular pastime in Victorian times but which is now outlawed.
She describes how a bull elephant charged towards the tree from which she was observing the action before her husband delivered his “death shot”.
The entry reads: “Then after Godfrey getting four shots into him he was first making for my tree and then Godfrey gave him his death shot and he came down close to my tree. He put his trunk in the air and then went down on his knees first. We immediately sent for the coolies [Indian labourers] to cut off his legs and it took six hours to cut his ears, legs, trunk and tail off. He measured 10 feet high, 13 feet long from front to hind legs.”
Not that this gory scene made much of an impact on Lily. In typically unsentimental fashion she reports: “We fished in the evening and had a bottle of champagne for dinner.”
As Connell-Lay says: “The elephant hunt is just gruesome. It’s just a completely different mind set to how we think now.”
Lily inserts a photograph of an elephant in the travel log and from other souvenirs we learn that the couple visited the Taj Mahal and a tea plantation in Sri Lanka.
Their epic journey draws to its end as the couple made their way from India to the Red Sea, up through the Middle East and across the Mediterranean to Italy. The map shows that they returned to England overland through continental Europe and crossed the English Channel, arriving home in May 1894.
A year after the outbreak of the First World War Godfrey was killed. A war memorials register, kept by the Imperial War Museum, shows that he is listed on a plaque in the North Wall of the nave of St Martin’s Church in Bowness On Windermere, Cumbria. The inscription reads: “In Memory of Major Godfrey Armitage, 3rd Battalion The Lancashire Fusiliers, Died 26th November 1915.”
As for Lily, all that is known is that a year after Godfrey’s death she married a baronet called Sir Maurice Bromley-Wilson.
The travel journal, which will be sold on Thursday is expected to fetch £1,000.
“I think the diary could appeal to collectors on so many different levels, there are lots of early photographs from India and Japan that are of interest on their own,” says Connell-Lay. “It’s the complete opposite of modern-day package holidays. She was the ultimate adventurous traveller.”