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Catherine Anderson at her home near Penrith

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ProfileCATHERINE ANDERSON

Catherine Anderson and her late fiancé, Australian photo-journalist Angus McDonald, shared a profound love of Asia. This month a book of Angus’s work is published and an accompanying exhibition has its preview at Rheged. Here

Catherine, who is Penrith and The Border MP Rory Stewart’s chief-of-staff, tells her own fascinating story to promote Angus’s work and a trust in his name

WORDS MARY INGHAM PHOTOGRAPHY PHIL RIGBY

As I’m writing this, Catherine Anderson is in Burma (Myanmar), setting up the first project financed by the grant-making foundation she has established in the name of her late fiancé, Angus McDonald, an Australian photo-journalist.

Angus died in February last year, aged 50, having been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer 11 months earlier. His last major project was a photo-essay documenting India’s remote narrow-gauge railways and his book, India’s Disappearing Railways: A Photographic Journey is published in hardback this month.

Catherine, 39, who is chief-of-staff to Penrith and The Border MP, author, and Afghan expert Rory Stewart, has edited the book and is curating an accompanying photographic exhibition at the Royal Geographical Society in London. A preview exhibition takes place this month at Rheged, near Penrith, where Catherine is also delivering a lecture.

“Angus would never have promoted himself in his lifetime in the way I can now,” says Catherine, who is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

She and her Saluki, Griselda, have greeted me warmly at the gate of her cottage near Penrith - “Salukis are Bedouin dogs, a touch of the Middle East in Cumbria” – but Catherine makes it clear how much she values her privacy and that she is only telling her own, extraordinary story to help Angus’s work gains the recognition it merits.

The first project supported by The Angus McDonald Trust will build a medical training clinic in lower Burma. Angus died in Burma during a brief remission which allowed him to travel there with Catherine.

“He was covering the first Irrawaddy Literature festival, which was under the patronage of Aung San

Suu Kyi [democracy champion and opposition leader],” says Catherine. For his first book, The Five Foot Road, Angus had followed in the footsteps of Victorian explorer GE Morrison – ‘Morrison of Peking’ – from China to Burma. It was in 1994 and the strictures imposed by the military junta in Burma had prevented Angus completing the journey as he he’d intended so he was keen to go back. But nearly three weeks into a planned month’s trip, Angus was tiring and he died at the airport before he and Catherine could return to the UK.

“I was alone in Rangoon [Yangon] with my fiancé in a hospital morgue,” says Catherine. “I just had to sort things out and took the decision, with his family’s agreement, to have Angus cremated.”

An English woman Catherine knew at the World Bank came to her rescue and put her in touch with the Free Funeral Services Society (FFSS), a charity set up by supporters of Aung San Suu Kyi and a Burmese actor to provide funerals for anyone in need.

“It turned out to be a beautiful service,” says Catherine. “Angus wasn’t a Buddhist but he had lived for many years in Buddhist societies so we had a Buddhist service with myself and a few family and friends. The charity sent 100 volunteers to represent those who couldn’t be there and there were flowers everywhere.”

The Angus McDonald Trust was set up after Angus’s family and friends raised $50,000 to give to FFSS, which acts as an umbrella charity for many different projects.

Catherine and Angus had met when they were both living in the Tibetan exile community of the Dalai Lama in Mcleodganj in the western Indian Himalaya and had been friends for a long time before getting together as a couple in the year before Angus’s cancer diagnosis.

Catherine says that she, Angus and Rory Stewart are ‘third culture kids’ (TCKs) – children raised

Changing lives

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outside the culture of their birth parents. Her father was an economist and historian who went into teaching and was involved in developing the Interna-tional Baccalaureate. She was born in Edinburgh, spent her early years in Oxford and was schooled mainly in Italy and Vienna before gaining a degree in modern European languages at Durham University – by which time her parents were running a United World College in Norway.

“I’ve always been a bit of a floater, with Persians, Indians and Scandinavians among my best friends,” says Catherine.

After graduating, she abandoned her initial ambition to become a vet to work as an agent for screen writers and theatre directors. “It was good fun but I was promoted very quickly and saw my life flash in front of me,” says Catherine. “But it was a great grounding in legal and social skills.”

She had always been politically engaged and applied for a Fulbright Scholarship to study for an MA in international relations at Georgetown University in Washington DC. In the meantime, she decided to go to India to help rebuild schools on the salt flats in Gujarat, which had been devastated in the 2001 earthquake.

She went out to India in 2002, planning to spend a year before doing her MA, but stayed until 2008. She moved up into the mountains and became involved with the Tibetan exile community, at first teaching

English to nuns and monks then setting up an NGO, the Fairtrade manufacturing outlet Kokonor, which grew to train and employ more than 30 seamstresses from Tibet and won several major production contracts with Western designers.

“The women had been born in Tibet and had crossed into Nepal to see the Dalai Lama in exile then couldn’t get back,” says Catherine. “They’d landed up in India, the place where Buddha spread his teaching, but it was a culture shock. Their lives were very hard and the climate was very different and many contracted malaria and TB.”

Catherine says an amazing, though somewhat weird, community had been carved out in Mcleod-ganj: “It had been given to the Dalai Lama by Nehru in the late Fifties and was full of Tibetans, Kashmiri,

Top: Catherine with her Saluki, Griselda; above: Angus and Catherine at Inya Lake, Yangon, Burma, in February 2013

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Catherine Anderson

celebrity Buddhists, and backpackers.“Angus and I separately fell in love

with it and it was my home for almost six years. It was stunningly beautiful but harsh during the monsoon.”

When her father died in 2008, Catherine knew a chapter in her life was coming to a close and, intending to pursue her long-delayed MA in politics, set about gaining experience in the UK’s 2010 election. “My mother lives in the Borders and I’d heard Rory was a candidate,” says Catherine.

She sold Kokonor to an Australian woman and went on to run Rory Stewart’s election campaign: “We were a ragtag crew united by a belief that he was a genuinely good person who had seen the world and wanted change. When your horizons broaden, you want to leave the world a little better and if you are lucky enough, you can.

“For my generation, party politics is an odd concept – our beliefs can’t be pigeon-holed and Rory represented a lot of how I felt about how to make things change.”

After winning the Penrith and The Border seat, Rory offered Catherine a permanent job and she has worked with him since, heading up a team of five or six. She says Rory’s priority is to deal with constitu-ents in need and that no two days are the same. She might be focusing on the smart meter energy saving project Rory initiated in Wigton, representing him at a meeting with councillors, researching issues he is raising in Parliament, briefing him on matters related to the Defence Select Committee, which he chairs, or organising press interviews.

Her MA remains on hold and, when Angus became ill, she also deferred her placement after being awarded a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellow-ship in 2012 to research the funding of community-led civic projects in rural India.

She says working with Rory on the Big Society and the devolving of responsibility to communities struck a chord echoed in what The Angus McDonald Trust is doing to support charities working in public health in the more remote parts of south-east Asia, where Angus lived and travelled. “We are not imposing our views – we are finding local charities which need money.”

Catherine has recently completed her memoir, A Death in Yangon and for her next book plans to follow Angus’s 1994 journey, which will also raise the Trust’s profile.

“There will come a point in my life where the Trust will take over,” says Catherine.

“My heart has always been in Asia and always will be. But working with a British politician in Cumbria is an amazing experience and the longest time I’ve spent in England.”

Catherine’s writing and editing is all done in her free time – “I’m a workaholic” – and she says promoting Angus’s work makes her very happy. “Living in Buddhist communities for so long has made me quite philosophical about the concept of death.”

Angus and the Dalai Lama at Mcleodganj in 2001

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Angus McDonald spent five years on and off photographing narrow gauge railways in India, 10 of which are featured in the book.

The 250-plus photographs capture the vitality of the railways, their socio-cultural value to the communities they link, and the beauty of the landscape. Angus also recorded the lives of the people who ride the lines, work on them, and live alongside them.

India’s Disappearing Railways: A Photographic Journey (Carlton Books, £30) is published on November 20. It has a foreword by Sir Mark Tully and commendations by Michael Palin and Rory Stewart MP.

An accompanying exhibition of Angus’s images previews at Rheged, near Penrith

from November 8-20 and is at the Royal Geographical Society in London from December 1-22 and January 6-9.

On Friday November 14 Catherine delivers a lecture at Rheged, illustrated with Angus’s images and hosted by the North Western Region of the RGS. Non-members welcome. www.rgs.org

Celebrated historian and BBC broadcaster Michael Wood (The Story of India) will be delivering a lecture, Travels in India, in aid of the Trust at the RGS’s 700-seater Ondaatje Theatre on Wednesday, December 17 to which all are invited. See www.travels-in-india.eventbrite.com

Proceeds from the book and exhibition will go to The Angus McDonald Trust. www.angusmcdonaldtrust.org

‘When your

horizons broaden, you want

to leave the world a

little better and if you are lucky enough, you can’

India’s Disappearing Railways

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