When Alison’s maternal grandmother, Londoner, Winifred O’Donnell, was buried in Dublin in 1972, her family knew her as a mother who had once, many years before, lived in China for a time, and been a glamorous singer under the stage name of Nina Leigh, in London’s West End in the early 1920s.

Mindful of the strong bond through their careers in music, and curious about the gaps in her Baby Book, she decided to search for her grandmother’s real identity. After several years of research, she discovered that Nina was a bigamist who had been forced to abandon her first family in favour of her second, a decision that was to destroy her peace of mind. Alison followed Nina’s trail from a ship passenger list in 1919, piecing together her grandmother’s upbringing and marriage, leading eventually to an abandoned daughter, Betty, a deceased son, Raymond, and four grandchildren.

Nina’s first family dealt with the loss of a mother and grandmother, and the second family coped with the knowledge that their beloved mother and grandmother had left her two young children behind. A strong-willed character, Nina had tried to maintain occasional contact with the children for several years at a distance, fearful that her father would track her down and expose her in an action that would have devastated both families.

Back in 1911, Walter James Leigh, whom she met at a tennis club in London, courted the fifteen year-old Winnie assiduously. Walter was ambitious to forge a career either in America or China. He claimed to have been born of American parents who had died in the Boxer Rebellion. Archibald Little, a well-known explorer and merchant living in China with his wife Alicia, herself a prolific author, feminist and co-founder of the Anti-Footbinding Society later adopted him. Winnie’s father Charles William Shears, who worked for the GPO in London for 41 years, was suspicious and mistrustful of the ‘foreign-looking’ young man who spoke Chinese and wanted to take his daughter far away. They married, without his consent, when Winnie was 18 and after ten months their son was born.

Armed with an inheritance of £500 from his adoptive father, Walter left London for a clerical appointment in Hankow, travelling some six months ahead of his wife and child. During the journey he was shipwrecked by a German U-Boat at the end of 1915. He declared himself an American but the U.S. authorities at Port Said quickly discovered that there was no trace of his nationality entitlement in their records in Washington. He stated that he would be able to produce the evidence to prove his claim once he reached Shanghai, and although he was allowed to proceed, he was never granted U.S. citizenship. Within a year his wife wanted to return to England, and Walter, for reasons not known, found himself persona non grata in their social circle. Letters written in the 1930s, long after Nina had disappeared into her second life, indicate that Walter was a ‘brute’. A DNA test conducted on his daughter Betty, now almost 86, which was organised by the BBC during the making of the documentary Mother of Pearl, part of the Family Ties series, showed her to be a quarter East Asian; a fact that had long been suspected. The likely significance of this is that Walter possibly had one Chinese parent, a fact he desperately sought to conceal. Mixed-race children living in China in the early part of the twentieth century were not accepted in any of the foreign concessions.

In the early 1920s Nina met and fell in love with Major P.S.G. O’Donnell, a Bandmaster and Director of Music with the Royal Marines, and latterly of the famed BBC Military Band (1927-1943), a role he took over from his brother Bertie. He knew his third wife (his first died in childbirth leaving him with a sickly child who died at the age of 9) had been disowned by her parents but was unaware that she had a husband and two children. He went to his grave in 1945 unaware of the full facts of her past existence. P.S.G. married his second wife, an Irish Catholic violinist in India, but a few years later, unable to bear the cold climate of England, she left him. P.S.G. and Nina had three children before, finally, he was able to gain a divorce in 1928. He then married Nina in a secret ceremony at Hampstead Registry Office, unaware that she was a bigamist. Nina maintained her silence and for some years she tried to keep contact with her mother Ellen and with the two children who were being raised by their grandparents. Eventually, she was forced to cut her ties with relatives and friends from her past to protect her new identity as the wife of a prominent conductor.

Percival Sylvester George O’Donnell, loving husband and father, was also eldest brother to Bertram Walton and Rudolph Peter. Together they made up a triumvirate virtually unparalleled in the world of military music. They toured the world with Kings, Princes and Generals, and were all decorated on the same day in 1921 for their services to the Crown. Alison’s grandfather, P.S.G. taught the Prince of Wales to play guitar, Bertie taught him the ukulele and Rudy played tennis with King George. P.S.G. accompanied the future Edward VII on his tour of Canada. The Prince’s letters to his mistress Freda Dudley Ward, during that tour, were later published and serialised in The Daily Mail. Rudy led the prestigious R.A.F. Central Band during the years of WWII and when B. Walton died prematurely in 1939, his death was front page news in The Evening News.

Although Nina tried to find Walter’s whereabouts, he withdrew his support from his wife and children in 1922, slipping away into North-West China. He was last reported, from NARA files, living and working in Shanghai in 1941, just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He was not interned by the Japanese but it is not know what became of him. Nina never breathed a word of her previous existence to anyone. Widowed at fifty and compelled to turn her back on her grieving mother, lost children, friends and extended family, she eventually fled to Ireland in 1946 to escape the past that threatened to catch up with her. Her glamour fading and her beautiful outfits ravaged in a flood in one of the series of basement flats she occupied with her unmarried daughter Paula in her twilight years, Nina, spent her last years reading, knitting and hobbling arthritically to do a little grocery shopping, spending what little she had on a few treats for her grandchildren.

Both families had an album each of wonderful photographs of Winifred/Nina, the two halves of which were brought together during a series of family reunions in the year 2000. There are also a number of letters written by Walter, Raymond and a friend of Winnie’s in Shanghai, which have survived the years. Alison has written a book with her grandmother as the central theme and included the emotive song, Mother of Pearl on her new album.

Alison also spent some years researching her paternal lines, tracing some of her Bools and spousal ancestors back to middle England, circa 1700, and the O’Donnells to Rahoon in Galway during the first half of the nineteenth century, before poverty and lack of opportunity following the years of the Famine drove her fourteen-year-old great-grandfather to seek his fortune with the British Army in India.