Posted by Tim Johns on June 23, 1996 at 12:46:34:
In Reply to: Re: Who was T. Altounyan? posted by Brigit Sanders on June 22, 1996 at 20:14:22:
The archaeologist Johns you remember in Jerusalem
would certainly have been my uncle Dick! The
family returned to the U.K. at the end of the
Mandate so it must have been around 1949 or 1950
that my aunt Molly told me the then startling news
that there was a real-life family on whom the
Walkers were based: that their name was Altounyan:
that 'John' was in fact a girl: and that though by
then he was quite a bit older, Roger was recognis-
ably the Roger of the novels. I would then have
been 12 or 13 years old, and was too young and too
polite to quiz my aunt for further details: as a
result it is only now, since I discovered TARS via
the Word-wide Web, that I have learned about the
nature of the relationship between AR and the
Altounyan family. As to the Emmanuel link, I
should have guessed that if one Altounyan went
there, there might well be others, as the College
valued family connexions (in the case of my
family, for example, my uncle Dick, my father, my
cousins Richard and Adam, and myself were all
"Emma men"). I should also have guessed that Dora,
as daughter of W.G.Collingwood and sister of
R.G.Collingwood, would have had an interest in
archaeology . . .
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