How very moving it is to read about my grandparents when they were children. Only one of them survived into my lifetime – what a time-travel miracle it is to see them at the beginning of their lives, thanks to the 1921 census.

On June 19, 1921, Robin Mount, my paternal grandfather, was 14 and at Eton College. In the “Relationship to head” section, he is charmingly described as an “inmate” at the school. Because he was at boarding school, the “Person making return” was his housemaster, CHK Marten Esq. His older brother, William Mount (David Cameron’s grandfather, incidentally), 16, was another “inmate”.

Their parents, Sir William Mount, Conservative MP for Newbury, and Lady Mount, were away at their family home, Wasing Place, Berkshire. Also in the house were nine servants. How the servants’ names whisk you back to a forgotten age: Walter Reginald Harris, Herbert Lewis Beaman, Mira Chandler, Clara Matilda Dean, Edith Esmaralda Jeffery, Agnes McGeorge, Pashli Jane Andrews and Florence Elizabeth Wild.

I thought my grandfather had been born in Berkshire. Wrong! I discovered he was born in London. What yawning gaps the census fills.

Back then, WWI’s deep wounds were fresh. My great-grandfather, the Earl of Longford, had been killed at Gallipoli in 1915. So his youngest daughter, Lady Julia Pakenham (later to marry Robin Mount), seven, lived in a fatherless household in 1921. She was at North Aston Hall, Oxfordshire, with her mother and three sisters, Pansy, Mary and Violet. Rather than going to school, they had a governess, Edith Mary Lavingdon, described as a “spinster, 46”. Her two brothers, the Earl of Longford and Frank Pakenham (later the prison reformer, Lord Longford), were inmates at Eton too. Also at North Aston were five servants: a footman, hall boy, housemaid, nursemaid and scullery boy.

My maternal grandfather, Archie Lucas, was also an inmate at Eton. His younger sister, Elizabeth, 12, was living at home in Hanover Square, London, with her parents, William and Beatrice Lucas. They had seven servants, ranging in age from 15 to 61.

I could find no record of my maternal grandmother, Nina Grenfell, then 16, or her father, Field Marshal Lord Grenfell (after whom Grenfell Tower was named), who had just turned 80 in 1921. He fathered my granny at 63. How I wish to know more about them. The magical census can’t fill all the mysterious gaps in our family histories.

The records capture a moment before my family fell apart

Rowan Pelling