Exclusive: The much-loved actor travelled halfway across the world to find out whether a hunch his dad had about his past was true
Toby Jones goes on a massive voyage of discovery for Who Do You Think You Are?(Image: CREDIT LINE:BBC / Wall to Wall Media Ltd / Stephen Perry)
Toby Jones has told of his delight at discovering that his late father’s conviction that he had Indian heritage was true.
Delving into his family tree for Who Do You Think You Are?, the actor discovered that his great x 3 grandmother Mary was described as Indo-British on her marriage certificate in 1821, meaning that one of her parents must have been Indian.
“That’s so wonderful because I was told as a child by my father that there was this connection, that there was some Indian heritage that we had, and one of the questions I had on this journey was – where did this idea come from?” he said. “I’m not sure that I thought he was making it up, but I wondered if he was exaggerating it.”
Toby, best known for his Bafta-winning turn in comedy The Detectorists and also for his titular role in ITV drama Mr Bates Versus the Post Office, said that growing up he and his two brothers would tease their father, Freddie, about his “romantic” notion of having an exotic bloodline.
“My dad was absolutely convinced he had some Indian ancestry which we all slightly took the mickey out of, because he was a romantic,” Toby explained. “He loved other cultures and the idea that he might have some other ancestry, I think would have been absolutely fantastic for him.
“He felt a kinship with Indian culture and we’d all take that with a pinch of salt and think that he was projecting it because that’s what he wanted to happen.”
In the BBC programme, which airs on Thursday, Toby admits he knows nothing of his father’s side of the family beyond his grandparents, Charlie and Ida. But after discovering that his great x 2 grandmother Jane had been born in India, he is thrilled to go back to the country he last visited as an 18-year-old in the 1980s.
His travels take him from the potteries in Stoke on Trent, which is where his actor dad grew up, to Northern India, as he follows in the footsteps of his great, great grandfather John Jones. John was a private in the British army when he and Jane married in 1855, living in Meerut, near to Delhi.
In Meerut, Toby meets writer Gillian Wright, who explains how John came to India from Stoke. Military records show John enlisted in Newcastle-under-Lyme and a memoir written by an officer paints a vivid picture of John’s journey on foot over 500-miles from Calcutta to his station in the north.
In 1857, John was among the first troops sent to quash the 1857 Uprising against the rule of the British East India Company, now known as the First War of Indian Independence.
A staggering 800,000 Indians are thought to have perished and many soldiers also lost their lives. By 1860, having been injured, John was back in Stoke-on-Trent with Jane, working as a labourer. There is a great deal of sadness in the story when he discovers the Jane, aged 31 in 1860, had previously been widowed and that all four of the children she had with her first husband seem likely to have died in childhood or infancy, with at least two of them succumbing to cholera.
He finds out that Jane had been born in India, with her father Samuel Burns also in the military. One expert Toby meets tells him Samuel’s mixed-race wife Mary was “most likely” to have had a British father and an Indian mother.
Toby, 59, is given the result of a DNA test he has already taken for the programme’s research team and learns that while he is 87% English, he is also 1% Indian. “Well, I’m very proud of that 1%,” he declared. “I know for a fact that it was a big part of my father’s sense of himself.”
After making the episode he said he had a lot to process. “It’s amazing to have the past tilled over like this and to meet, even obliquely, these people who I knew nothing about.”
Toby, who has two daughters Madeleine and Holly with wife Karen, said that discovering his dad’s theory about his Indian ancestry was correct felt “vey moving”. “That was the most thrilling thing I found out,” he added. “It was always a bit of a joke in our family that my father couldn’t prove anything, but he constantly claimed a connection with India.”
Freddie died in 2019. “I’m a little sad that I can’t go back to him with hard scientific fact but I also know he wouldn’t have cared anyway – he knew who he was – and I’m really enthusiastic to share it with my own children.”
– Toby Jones’ episode of Who Do You Think You Are? airs on Thursday 16 July, BBC1, 9pm
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