2 OF 7 
Sir William Crawford Currie
2 of 7 portraits of Sir William Crawford Currie
© National Portrait Gallery, London
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Sir William Crawford Currie
by Walter Stoneman
bromide print, August 1942
7 3/4 in. x 5 3/8 in. (197 mm x 137 mm)
Commissioned, 1942
Photographs Collection
NPG x164381
Sitterback to top
- Sir William Crawford Currie (1884-1961), Shipowner; Director of Peninsula & Oriental/ British India Steam Navigation Companies. Sitter in 7 portraits.
Artistback to top
- Walter Stoneman (1876-1958), Photographer. Artist or producer associated with 18527 portraits, Sitter in 8 portraits.
Events of 1942back to top
Current affairs
The Oxford Committee for Famine Relief is founded in Oxford with the aim of sending food through the Allied blockade of Nazi-Occupied Greece. The organisation continued after the war to relieve suffering as a result of the war in Europe, and eventually to help distressed peoples internationally. It gradually became known as Oxfam, after its telegraph address, and is now one of the largest international development and aid agencies.Art and science
Desert Island Discs is broadcast for the first time. Each week a famous guest is invited to select which eight pieces of music they would choose to take if they were castaway on an island. The show is still going and is the longest running music programme on radio.Enid Blyton publishes her first Famous Five children's book: Five On A Treasure Island.
International
The Allied forces sign the 'Declaration by United Nations', pledging the signatories to fight together until the end of the war and establishing an international organisation with the aim of upholding world peace and security with Sir Gladwyn Jebb as the first Secretary General.In Berlin, senior Nazis plan the 'Final Solution' to exterminate European Jews, and start building death camps to carry it out.
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Francis Barnett Wallace
08 February 2017, 09:01
My name is Francis Barnett Wallace and my maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Quinn nee Crawford, was born in Edinburgh in the late 1880s into a wealthy ship-owning family. The founder of the family's connection with shipping was a Captain James Currie who was a master-mariner in the spice trade to the Indies towards the middle of the nineteenth century. The family was also involved in shipbuilding on the Clyde.
Sometime around the turn of the century Elizabeth formed a romantic attachment to a common shipwright working in one of the family's yards and despite the disapproval of her relations - all the greater since the man, James Quinn, was both Irish and Catholic - they married and on his dismissal left to set up home in East Belfast where he managed despite his religion to get employment in Harland & Wolff.
My grandmother was disowned by her family and for years had little contact with them, with the possible exception of a great-aunt; it was she who bequeathed the sum of £30,000 to my grandmother in and around the year 1920. Prior to that the family had lived the typically poor hand-to-mouth existence of the Catholic working-class in the Short Strand area where my mother was born and spent her early childhood.
The only other thing I know re Grandma Quinn's original family is that the above mentioned Captain Currie returned from one of his trips to the Spice Islands with a wife, Kitty-Una D'Ager Currie who was of mixed Dutch-Malay origin.
I can't be sure, but I believe I am related in some way to Sir William. Is there any way this could be confirmed?