His father was an English tea planter born in South Africa; his mother, half British, half Danish, was born in India.
On 19 December of that year he married Iona Mhari Natalie Elliot, whose father has been a tea planter in Assam.
On his first visit to the mountain in 1913 while in the Army, he disguised himself as an Indian tea planter and made his first abortive excursion into Tibet.
Her husband, Siva Prasad Borooah, a leading tea planter, founded the Assamese weekly, Sadinya Baatori, in 1930.
Born in 1940 in India, where his father was a second-generation tea planter, he was sent ‘home’ to boarding school in England at the age of six.