<\/p>
In 2004, on assignment in Saudi Arabia, BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner was shot six times by terrorists. \u201cI\u2019ve got to survive for the sake of my family,\u201d he remembers telling himself. The attack left him partly paralysed and reliant on a wheelchair.<\/p>
It\u2019s perhaps no surprise then to discover that Frank values bravery and stoicism, virtues he associates with his late mother, Grace. \u201cShe was only the third woman to get into the Foreign Office, and she had to fight a lot of sexism and prejudice,\u201d he says. But although his mother was his \u201chero\u201d, Frank knows surprisingly little about her family history. Did her forebears really come over to England with the Normans as she claimed?<\/p>
Before Frank even attempts to go so far back in history, he first learns more about the life of his great grandfather, Professor George Rolleston, a man Frank\u2019s maternal grandfather, John, never talked about. George, it turns out, is an illustrious ancestor to have, a professor in physiology, anatomy and zoology who corresponded with Charles Darwin, and whose bust can be found at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History<\/a>.<\/p> Yet, as Frank puts it bluntly when the 1881 census records<\/a> show George absent from the family home, \u201cDid he do a runner?\u201d The truth is far sadder. Grievously ill and convalescing on the continent, George returned home because his wife, Grace (for whom Frank\u2019s mother was named), was ill. Letters suggest he wasn\u2019t strong enough to travel. He died in 1881, but even attempting the journey suggests stoicism and bravery.<\/p>