While reading for the bar at the Kings Inns in Dublin John George supported himself by acting as editorial assistant to Charles Diamond, the proprietor of the "Irish Nationalist", and whilst Diamond was in prison for publishing an article entitled "KILLING NO MURDER" J.G. was left in complete charge of the paper. The printing works were destroyed one night in an explosion which J.G. attributed to the bursting of a boiler but which Diamond insisted was caused by a bomb planted by the staff of the Freeman's Journal and as a result the circulation of the 'Nationalist' increased very greatly. J.G. was doing reasonably well at the bar when he had a brief involving a contract with a French firm. No interpreter was available in court and none of the French witnesses spoke English and J.G. was called upon to act, most irregularly, as both counsel and interpreter. His instructing solicitor, Sir Thomas Barclay, a leading member of the British commercial community in Paris, was much impressed by this performance and felt that J.G. if qualified as a French avocat would be of great use to him in Paris. He swept aside all protests that J.G. had no means beyond his earnings at the bar, was engaged to be married and could not face the three or four years in France without income which it would take him to qualify, by offering him the secretaryship of the British Chamber of Commerce in Paris at a salary far beyond the earnings of the most prosperous of Irish barristers.

He married Maud, daughter of John and Mary McAllen of Killarney, and went to Paris where his work did much to further the Entente Cordiale and for this the French government proposed to make him the first Briton to receive the Legion of Honour. He was however ordered by the British Ambassador to refuse this on the grounds that there was no British decoration of comparably low status which could be conferred French subjects, a decision which infuriated the French authorities and undid much of the good which J.G. had managed to do. This and other incidents decided him to leave France and accept the secretaryship of one of the merchant banks which had been offered to him, but a couple of years in Lombard Street convinced him that banking was not his metier. For the next few years he supported himself by journalism being a regular contributor to the Fortnightly, Contemporary, Nineteenth Century and other reviews, the London correspondent of the Stampa of Milan (for which he frequently wrote leading articles in Italian) and of one of the Montreal papers, and also resumed his employment with Charles Diamond as his London representative. In that last capacity he had the use of the office in the Strand which Diamond shared with Bernard Shaw, then secretary of the Fabian Society. It was J.G.'s responsibility to ensure that when Fabian committees were meeting the blinds should be pulled down in order that female Fabians might not be offended by the sight of the nude male figures with which Epstein had embellished the office of the B.M.A. on the other side of the Strand. Epstein's model for these, by the way, was W.R.Titterton, who in later years was a close friend of the Colcloughs.

Though he had not qualified as an avocat while in France he had obtained a thorough understanding of the Code Napoleon and that was the field in which he practiced when he transferred to the English bar, being 'called' by the Middle Temple in 1905. In 1910 he was consulted by a public works contractor - Norton Griffiths - over problems arising in Chile from the building of the Longitudinal Railway, and he agreed to go to Santiago to deal with an arbitration and negotiations with the Chilean government. He expected to be away about five months but it was five years before he got back to London. After a year his wife and family disposed of their Bloomsbury home and joined him but Santiago in 1911 was certainly no place for young children. Small-pox and cholera were endemic, the water-supply was intermittent and undrinkable, milk was delivered on the door-step direct from the infected cow into the customer's jug by old women who all had cow-pox themselves, rats swarmed everywhere. The infant who had been born just after her father's departure for Chile developed cholera but survived; the second daughter died of some complaint which the Chilean doctor was quite unable to diagnose or treat; the eldest daughter survived Santiago by only twenty years but during that time was able to enjoy a hilarious existence as an art student first in London and then at the Academie Julien in Paris, becoming a very competent water-colourist and etcher and being employed between increasing periods of invalidism in various commercial studios.

On getting back to London J.G. did not return to the bar, but spent his time clearing up legal problems for Norton Griffiths ranging from liability for his destruction of the Romanian oil wells in the face of the German advance to trespass by the construction of army hutted camps on the wrong site in Shropshire. Griffiths, when his friend Lord Rhondda was in trouble, recommended him to consult J.G.. Rhondda who was a member of the War Cabinet was also chairman and virtual owner of a number of collieries which had from the beginning of the war been exporting South Wales Steam coal to various neutral countries and in particular to Argentina. This coal was then loaded on small neutral coasting vessels which would rendezvous with the German commerce raiders Emden and the others and in fact before the battle of the Falklands the German fleet had been coaled with the best South Wales Steam Coal provided by Lord Rhondda. If formal representations were made to the neutral countries concerned or the matter leaked out to Horatio Bottomley and his paper 'John Bull' the scandal would wreck the War Cabinet so J.G. was asked to go out to Buenos Aires and nose round to see if anything could be done. Three days after his arrival there the coal wharf on which immense quantities of the coal were stacked caught fire. The cause was spontaneous combustion but neither Lord Rhondda nor any of the German agents in Buenos Aires thought for a moment that it was anything but the work of J.G.. When he had a dagger flung at him which missed by an inch and stuck into a door which he was passing and a number of pistol shots fired at him he felt that the time had come for him to leave Argentina, and on Lord Rhondda's instructions he proceeded to Rio de Janeiro where he made a very lengthy stay occupying a suite in the city's most expensive hotel but what he was doing there, apart from adding Portuguese to his fluent Spanish, is not known. With the Russian revolution Lord Rhondda was in further trouble. He was the joint owner with one R. Martens of the Comptoir Franco Anglo Russe in the Avenue de l'Opera in Paris and with the outbreak of the revolution it became apparent to Rhondda that his partner was a Bolshevik agent, and that the Comptoir was being used by him as a centre for Soviet underground activities and a place where arrangements could be made for the purchase and shipment to Russia by devious routes of warlike stores of various kinds.

Martens suddenly disappeared and Rhonda's instruction was that the business should be wound up and the premises disposed of. J.G. found that Martens as cover for his political activities had built up a very profitable trading concern extending to all parts of the world - the importation of Australian rabbit-skins for Paris couturiers to convert into mink and chinchilla was one of its more surprising side lines - and though he had no knowledge or experience of such business J.G prevailed upon Lord Rhondda to let him take it over. For a few years the business prospered immensely. The family took up their residence first in a hotel in the Rue de la Paix and then in a flat in the Boulevard Haussman, but then it collapsed and J.G. was back again with Norton Griffiths clearing up the legal tangles which had arisen over the building of the harbour of St Paul de Loanda in Angoland. After that he became resident legal adviser to the Government's consulting engineers, dying in 1947 in his chambers in the Temple.

JG's son John Richard was born in Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury in 1905 His first schooling was in Santiago, his father having moved to Chile. Returning to England in 1912, by way of Cape Horn, on the S.S. Victoria, his first paid employment was 6d. for tallying wool sacks in Port Stanley. He went to Westminster School and while there his parents moved to Paris. He spent his holidays with many of his relations, fleeing Germany with his mother's sister in 1914 (who had married a Nuremberg paper manufacturer William Lohner)  and staying in Cork with his aunt Nora  whose son had the dubious distinction of being beaten to death by the Christian Brothers in Limerick. He had many stories of his uncle Patrick McAllen who was an ardent fenian and took him on gun running adventures up the Clyde in a yacht that flew an ensign of his own design - The Independent Irish Navy - during the troubles.

He studied at the L.S.E. and was awarded a degree in Geography. While there he became a life fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. In 1925, with the collapse of his father's fortunes, he had to pay for his own education and help to support his sisters and parents. Being short of bedrooms he made a permanent shake down in the bath in their chambers in Middle Temple Lane. He entered St. Catherine's College, Cambridge to study law and at the same time was earning a living running the office of the external registrar of London University, travelling down from Cambridge every morning on the train and returning to his tutorials in the evening. On graduating he got a job as a bank clerk, drawing a salary of 5 guineas a week, firstly in the Moscow Novgorod Bank and then in the National Bank of South Africa (which was taken over by Barclays while he was there.). Much of his time was spent scrubbing labels of origin off gold bars. At the same time he was writing for various magazines, including Blackwoods, and studying for the Bar.

In 1930 he joined the staff of Chesterton's G.K.'s Weekly and became an active member of Chesterton's Distributist League, whose unofficial headquarters were The Devreux Arms, off the Strand. From their commune at Langenhoe Manor on the Essex marshes he set off on many inshore maritime adventures. One of the more remarkable instances of public agitation in which he was involved was the Flying Inn campaign; as a gesture of defiance against the shorter licensing hours they travelled the country after closing time distributing free beer outside public houses. As secretary of The Roads Improvement Association he drafted the first edition of the Highway Code.

On qualifying as a barrister he joined Hesketh William's chambers, specialising in crime. His experiences gave him a jaundiced view of police methods, which he retained throughout his life. Strongly anti-facist, he foresaw the Second War and signed up for the territorial army in the Inns of Court Regiment - "The Devil's Own", for which he achieved a certain notoriety in the cartoons of the Evening Standard as the only barrister in that regiment. Resisting the invitation of a half Jewish Nazi German cousin (who was last heard of in Egypt just after the war) to meet Herr Hitler at the Nuremberg rally, he was commissioned in the regular army at the outbreak of war in the Leicestershire Yeomanry.

He was given the command of the 4th Horse Cavalry Training Company at Shornecliffe, a mounted anti-aircraft unit. He found himself in charge of the ground defences of the fleet air-arm aerodrome at Lympne on Romney Marsh with a troop of horsed machine gunners with Vickers guns on packs. Much trouble arose from the inability of the horses, and their riders, to understand that they were deemed to be aboard a ship at sea and that the quarter-deck was inviolate as the runway. For a short time those four Vickers guns with one belt of ammunition each were the only armed forces between the Germans on the French coast and the line of Medway, but when at the beginning of 1942 the regiment was disbanded some embarrassment arose from the fact that the machine-gun troop was possessed of twelve guns and about a million rounds of ammunition without any record of the issue to them of a gun or a single round of ammunition since their formation in 1939. No explanation was forthcoming except that the officer responsible had served in the Devil's Own. While there he led the last mounted cavalry charge on British soil against the crew of a German bomber who had emptied their machine guns down the village street before crashing, destroying a drey load of beer. After a spell in charge of logistics at Retford Barracks and at Welbeck Abbey (where he caused some consternation by supplying The Duke of Portland's game keepers with phosphor and tracer bullets from partially used aircraft machine gun belts), he was moved to the War Office where he was given the job of winding up the Cavalry of The Line, which consisted of himself and the Arab Irregular Horse. As a statistician he discovered that General Montgomery, who was then in charge of Home Command, was extraordinarily inefficient and as a result of many memos and rows with Monty himself was in some degree responsible for blighting his own promotion prospects and having Montgomery transferred to Africa. During the Blitz his chambers in the Temple were destroyed and with them his collection of antiquarian books which included a Chaucer edition of the Canterbury Tales picked up on a barrow in the Farringdon Road. In 1943 he married Joyce, daughter of George F. Kingham, Q.C., of the Middle Temple and Wareside. In 1944 he became, by redemption, a freeman of the Worshipful Company of Drapers, drawing on his rights as a descendant of the last Colclough to have been a member. He remained an active member of the company and became a member of the Livery in 1960. At the end of the war he was promoted to acting Colonel and sent to Nuremberg as a defence counsel for the post war courts martial.

On demobilisation he stood as Liberal candidate for North Kensington in the 1945 election and from 1946 - 1951 was secretary of the Sanitary Inspector's Association and libel vetter for the Daily Express, walking up to its office's from his chambers in Middle Temple Lane every night after dinner. In 1951 he stood as Liberal candidate in Brighton & Hove. In 1952 he moved to Waltham Abbey, Essex to a house which had been Roger Casement's home before the First War. In that year he joined Wigan's chancery chambers in Lincoln's Inn, having had to give up his career at the Criminal Bar due to deafness caused by an exploding gun magazine during the war - so he tried the Chancery Bar on the erroneous supposition that all Chancery barristers and judges are deaf. When Wigan died at his desk and was only discovered 24 hours later with a row cups of cold tea in front of him, Dick decided to move and in 1956 became a full time lecturer at the Brixton School of Building. There he remained till 1981, publishing in 1967 a seminal work "The Construction Industry of Great Britain". As a lecturer his deafness did not trouble him. If students asked questions he answered the questions which they should have asked at that point, so saving a lot of time and allowing excellent progress to be made in working through the curriculum No respecter of authority he often found himself at loggerheads with bureaucracy and for his 25 years at the School of Building (which became the Polytechnic of the South Bank) he was a free legal advice bureau for the entire student population, dealing with problems from immigration to driving offences.

He was examiner of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors for 52 years as well as examining for the Institute of Auctioneers and Estate Agents and Clerks of Works Institute, whose papers he marked till 1990. He was an ardent member of the Latin Mass Society.

In 1981 he moved with Joyce to Ireland to join their sons who had bought a completely derelict country house in Laois, that had been originally built by Henry Grattan in 1770. Proudly wearing his Clerks of Works helmet he took, at the age of 74, to a new career of builder's labourer until the house was sufficiently habitable to unpack his books. Then he set to on the family genealogy, mastering the art of computer science. At the time of his death he was also working on a life of St Augustine.

John Richard married in 1943 Joyce, daughter of G.F.Kingham K.C., a Bencher of the Middle Temple and herself a student of the Inn, and had a daughter and two sons. The daughter Anne, a mathematician in the Department of Numeracy at the Hackney Technical College, married Leonard Cooper, formerly of the Colonial Forestry Service. John Patrick, the eldest son after qualifying as an architect at Cambridge and working for some time largely on ecclesiastical restoration work - he was for a short time assistant architect in charge of St.Pauls Cathedral - took a Diploma in Conservation at York and migrated to Ireland where in addition to being architect to the Kilkenny Diocese responsible for the maintenance and restoration of churches and parsonage houses, he has with much ordinary domestic and commercial building work been responsible for the restoration of many buildings of the Georgian period. The younger son, John Nicholas George, after a short career as a lawyer with the Inland Revenue, moved to Dublin and took up writing. He is much concerned with the preservation of the country houses of Ireland, developing their tourist potential. He is married to Alix, daughter of  Meryl Gardner (nee Duffin) of Danesfort, Belfast and the late Michael Inglis-Gardner of Tipperary and great grand daughter of Sir Robert Gardner,  founder of the Dublin accountancy firm Craig Gardner. Alix is well known for her cookery school and her writings on food. They have two sons, John Anthony and Patrick Finn.

J.G.'s youngest daughter, Constance, whilst an undergraduate at Westfield College, made a runaway marriage with Anthony, the artist son of Alderman Frank Rye, Chairman of the L.C.C., the Metropolitan Water Board and half a dozen other bodies. She has a son and a daughter and half-a-dozen grandchildren and has devoted much of her life to struggling for the preservation of Gilbert White's Selborne where she lived. Anthony published a number of books of verse before his death in 196- and these have in recent years become the subject of a cult in Japan with the consequence of innumerable Japanese pilgrims to Selborne not to the home of Gilbert White but to that of Anthony Rye.

George Frederick Kingham was the son of William Kingham, an engineer, and was probably born on September 3, 1876.  The family name is common in Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Berkshire, though their origins probably lie in the village of Kingham in Oxfordshire.  At the age of 16 he ran off with the 20 year old Eliza (Lila) Emily Pook and married her on June 4, 1893 at St Pancras. He got a job as a clerk in the chambers of William Bates Ferguson. Ferguson encouraged him to study and in due course he qualified as a barrister and became a K.C of the Middle Temple and a bankruptcy expert.   Of his parents little is known at present but his sister Anne, who never married, was a secretary at Scotland Yard in the 1920s for "The Big Five".    She died in the 1960s in St Leonards.  George Kingham bought Mardocks Lodge in Wareside, Herts, as his country house, but lived mostly in the Middle Temple in Pump Court.  He also owned a cottage called Gravel Pit Hall where his sister in law Phoebe Bullock lived and on her death in 1944 his daughter and son in law moved in.   He had two children who survived to adulthood, Joyce and George William Ambrose Kingham.  George was born on  May 24, 1895 and killed November 9, 1917, whilst serving in The Buffs,  off the Shetland Isles in a torpedo attack.  His body was washed ashore and buried locally, but his engraved sword and other effects were forwarded by a local farmer to his father in London and after the war he was re-interred in a family plot in Willisden Cemetery.

Eliza Emily (known as Lila)  Pook was the daughter of John Francis Pook (b abt 1847), who moved from Devon to London where he married Eliza Dennis in September 1869 at Marlebourne.  John Francis Pook's father, Francis, was a butler in Devon.   In 1881 according to the census he was living at 381 New North Rd, Islington, and described himself as an oilman.  They had three daughters - Emily (Lila) Eliza b 1875, Edith Nora, 1876 and Jessie 1878.  By 1893 John Pook was a grocer of 34 Southampton Row, Holborn.  The father and grandfather of Eliza Dennis were both named George Reuben Dennis and were grocers in the St Pancras area of London.