population exchanges

Here is my my family’s link to Thessaloniki: my soldier grandfather, Colonel ‘Mickey’ Gallagher. This tiny photograph, pasted in my Grandmother's album, is labelled as 'Mickey in Gallipoli'. He was part of the British divisions sent to Thessaloniki, I think in September 1916.

He was a professional soldier who fought in the Nigerian Campaign ( where he won the D.S.O.), the Boer War, Gallipoli, the Bulgarian Retreat, and the Battle of the Somme. He was the result of huge ‘population exchanges’, descended from Irish who migrated in the early 1800s from Ireland to India, to find employment in the East India Company, and subsequently like so many Irish, ending up in the British Army fighting on behalf of the British Empire.

All Empires are full of contradictions and paradoxes, and the role of the Roman Catholic Irish in the British Army is one of them.

His father and mother and all his brothers and sisters were born in Hyderebad, India and this nearly cost me my British passport when Margaret Thatcher brought in a new Immigration Bill designed to cull claims for British nationality.

Here is Mickey with my grandmother, my mother and uncle, taken in Cyprus in 1915. My mother was born and brought up in Cyprus, in a cosmopolitan life where Greek and Turkish friends mingled in her parents' house, where she was first married in the Maronite church of Nicosia, and where in 1942, because of fears that Germany would invade Cyprus, she was evacuated with her 2 year old son to Jerusalem, Jaffa, Cairo, and eventually Nairobi, Kenya.

In old family photographs the image is resonant with questions and answers about our identity, our place in the world, and our place within our own communities. We are also looking at absences. My mother, aged 94, is the only one left from this family group.

I reflect on this photograph taken of Mickey on a hillside somewhere in Greece, gazing into a future where I am making art about family photographs.