Annie
Andrew worked for many years for a family based in Rangoon. I don’t know how, but he managed to leave employment as a servant and set up his own business. He was an English speaker, with an English name, and this probably helped. It took him some years to build up cash reserves and contacts but he was doing reasonable well for himself. In that time he met and married a local girl by the name of Annie Luckett. Annie was mixed race – her mother was Burmese and her father was an English Sea Captain. 1910 saw the arrival of their first baby, a girl named Edna. Shortly after this, the Austin Morris car company was formed and this was to turn out to be a very important development for the family. Back in the UK, Austin Morris’ first factory opened in 1913 in Cowley, near Oxford. They began production of two models, eventually expanding to production of 4 or 5 by 1915. Being the days of the Raj, there was huge demand for cars in Burma too – all the Brits wanted what their friends had in England, and so Andrew managed to obtain one of the only licenses in Burma to sell Austin Morris cars to expats. By 1917, Andrew had his own car showroom in an upmarket part of Rangoon. The year also saw the birth of he and Annie’s second child, Rennie.
