William Gill - Acknowledgements

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am very grateful to everybody who assisted in production of this volume. Special thanks are due to the Royal Geographical Society for allowing access to William Gill’s travel diaries and permission to quote from them. The R.G.S.’s archives assistant, Huw Thomas, was particularly helpful.

Credit is also due to the staff of the British Library at Euston for their assistance in accessing William Gill’s paper on the Chinese army and his father’s books of early photographs of India, and for permission to reproduce certain pictures from the latter. Mr Michael Gandy of the Society of Genealogists has my gratitude for his commissioned research into the Gill family history.

My mother, Mrs Winefride Hadland, a great-niece of William Gill, provided a considerable amount of material that she obtained in the mid 1980s through the kind assistance of Miss E. D. Norris, assistant librarian of the Royal Engineers Corps Library, Chatham and Martin Jones, the archivist of Brighton College. I would also like to thank my uncle, Major Charles Sealey, a great-nephew of William Gill, for lending me his copy of the concise version of Gill’s book, The River of Golden Sand, which originally belonged to William Gill’s half-sister Mildred, my great-great-grandmother.

Finally, I wish to thank my former colleague Mr Brian Shergold, a Friend of St Paul’s cathedral, who back in the mid 1980s showed me William Gill’s tomb and memorial in the crypt of that great London church, and who provided other information, including the excerpt from Verger Green's diary.

PRIMARY SOURCES

1. WILLIAM GILL DOCUMENTS IN THE ARCHIVES OF THE ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY

Travel Diaries

RGS ARCHIVES – Gill, W.J. Special Collection
WJG 1: Constantinople – 27th March to 30th September 1879
WJG 2: India, Marri Expedition, Persia, Russia – 20th August 1880 to 1st April 1881
WJG 3: Newspaper cuttings (very comprehensive)
WJG 4: Tripoli – 18th October 1881 to 16th June 1882
WJG 5-6: China, Burma, India – 28th June 1876 to 17th April 1877. Includes set of printed maps of his travels.
WJG 7: China - concertina-style notebook in slip case listing place names and notes about officials and troop deployments. Includes place names in Chinese characters.