CLUNIES-ROSS, John 1928-2021
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Richard R
Sep 30, 2021, 4:34:12 AM9/30/21
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My reason for posting this here is that I feel the family are on a par at least with a gentry family, but I'd be interested in other views...
Obit in the Times of 30 April 2021:
E X T R A C T
John Clunies-Ross obituary
Former ruler of the Cocos Islands, as well as the sole employer, landlord and magistrate, who once hosted a visit from the Queen
John Clunies-Ross, a 39-year-old Scottish sailor, was returning from a business trip to the East Indies in 1825. He had intended to explore Christmas Island, but the weather turned bad and instead he chanced upon an atoll 530 miles to the west, a horseshoe-shaped group of 24 tiny coral islands with pristine white beaches and waving coconut palms.
Now known as the Cocos Keeling Islands, this Indian Ocean idyll had been sighted in 1609 by William Keeling, a British sea captain with the East India Company, but Keeling did not wait around. Clunies-Ross had other ideas: he raised the Union Jack, claimed the territory for George IV and Great Britain, and dug wells, intending to return later.
...Charles Darwin visited in 1836 on HMS Beagle and found the population “nominally in a state of freedom as regards their personal treatment, but in most other points they are considered slaves”. Thirty years later Queen Victoria granted the islands to the Clunies-Ross family and their “heirs, successors, in perpetuity”...
...Clunies-Ross, a swarthy man of medium height, lived in Oceania House on Home Island, striding around his tiny coral kingdom barefoot with a ceremonial dagger tucked into his belt. ...“The key to the whole bloody business is free or cheap labour,” explained one of the family to a reporter in 1978...
...Two generations of Clunies-Ross men had married Malay girls, but the community had the aspect of a feudal estate...
...In 1978 Australia demanded that Clunies-Ross sell the islands. He wanted A$35 million, but was paid A$6.75 million (£2.5 million) under threat of expropriation. He was allowed to retain his home and five hectares of land on Home Island, but his family’s control of the Cocos Islands and their people was over.
John Cecil Clunies-Ross was born in 1928, the third of five children of John Sidney Clunies-Ross, the fourth “king” of the Cocos, and his wife Rose (née Nash), a Cockney cashier who was 25 years younger than her husband; he also had four half-siblings from his father’s previous relationship with Uliana Jacobson...
...At Oxford he met Daphne Parkinson, from Lancashire. They were married in London in 1951 and she left for the islands soon afterwards... The family’s rule was variously described as paternalistic, benevolent despotism and enlightened colonialism, and over the years myths grew up around the so-called “kings of the Cocos”...
...Daphne died in 2013 and Clunies-Ross is survived by their five children: Linda, Joy, John, Andrew and Ninan. John, known as Johnny, was heir to the Cocos and still calls the islands home, making a living from breeding giant clams and selling them to the aquarium trade in Europe and the US. The man who would have been king told the BBC in 2007 that he had originally been upset when his family’s reign came to an end. “I was 21 and I’d been brought up to do the job,” he said. “But even in the old man’s time, it had become anachronistic. It had to change.”
John Clunies-Ross, ruler of the Cocos Islands, was born on November 29, 1928. He died on September 13, 2021, aged 92
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/john-clunies-ross-obituary-kvwhh9tgc
Obit in the Times of 30 April 2021:
E X T R A C T
John Clunies-Ross obituary
Former ruler of the Cocos Islands, as well as the sole employer, landlord and magistrate, who once hosted a visit from the Queen
John Clunies-Ross, a 39-year-old Scottish sailor, was returning from a business trip to the East Indies in 1825. He had intended to explore Christmas Island, but the weather turned bad and instead he chanced upon an atoll 530 miles to the west, a horseshoe-shaped group of 24 tiny coral islands with pristine white beaches and waving coconut palms.
Now known as the Cocos Keeling Islands, this Indian Ocean idyll had been sighted in 1609 by William Keeling, a British sea captain with the East India Company, but Keeling did not wait around. Clunies-Ross had other ideas: he raised the Union Jack, claimed the territory for George IV and Great Britain, and dug wells, intending to return later.
...Charles Darwin visited in 1836 on HMS Beagle and found the population “nominally in a state of freedom as regards their personal treatment, but in most other points they are considered slaves”. Thirty years later Queen Victoria granted the islands to the Clunies-Ross family and their “heirs, successors, in perpetuity”...
...Clunies-Ross, a swarthy man of medium height, lived in Oceania House on Home Island, striding around his tiny coral kingdom barefoot with a ceremonial dagger tucked into his belt. ...“The key to the whole bloody business is free or cheap labour,” explained one of the family to a reporter in 1978...
...Two generations of Clunies-Ross men had married Malay girls, but the community had the aspect of a feudal estate...
...In 1978 Australia demanded that Clunies-Ross sell the islands. He wanted A$35 million, but was paid A$6.75 million (£2.5 million) under threat of expropriation. He was allowed to retain his home and five hectares of land on Home Island, but his family’s control of the Cocos Islands and their people was over.
John Cecil Clunies-Ross was born in 1928, the third of five children of John Sidney Clunies-Ross, the fourth “king” of the Cocos, and his wife Rose (née Nash), a Cockney cashier who was 25 years younger than her husband; he also had four half-siblings from his father’s previous relationship with Uliana Jacobson...
...At Oxford he met Daphne Parkinson, from Lancashire. They were married in London in 1951 and she left for the islands soon afterwards... The family’s rule was variously described as paternalistic, benevolent despotism and enlightened colonialism, and over the years myths grew up around the so-called “kings of the Cocos”...
...Daphne died in 2013 and Clunies-Ross is survived by their five children: Linda, Joy, John, Andrew and Ninan. John, known as Johnny, was heir to the Cocos and still calls the islands home, making a living from breeding giant clams and selling them to the aquarium trade in Europe and the US. The man who would have been king told the BBC in 2007 that he had originally been upset when his family’s reign came to an end. “I was 21 and I’d been brought up to do the job,” he said. “But even in the old man’s time, it had become anachronistic. It had to change.”
John Clunies-Ross, ruler of the Cocos Islands, was born on November 29, 1928. He died on September 13, 2021, aged 92
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/john-clunies-ross-obituary-kvwhh9tgc
www.maltagenealogy.com
Sep 30, 2021, 9:39:35 PM9/30/21
to Peerage News
Glad they recognise him as a Former ruler of the islands. In actual fact, the family were Princes and reign much longer then any modern establish monarchies such as Albania, Romania, Yugoslavia, etc and yet are not given the privilege of Princes... Maybe due to their lack of royal or noble intermarriages.
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