LAHORE: In the above picture, British Royal Air Force’s Roy Holliday is posing at the Lahore Railway Station while on his journey to Karachi in 1947, days just before the Partition.
On the signboard, the name of Lahore is written in English, Gurmukhi (Punjabi), Hindi and Urdu respectively.
The photo was sent by Mr. Roy Holliday (87 years old now) to Indian journalist and author Naresh Fernandes.
Naresh Fernandes provided the following detail to Project Lahore Team – which is trying to preserve the heritage of Lahore – regarding this photograph and the Roy Holliday memoir:
Roy Holliday was in India with the Royal Air Force just after WW II. Later, he started his career as a musician when he returned to the UK after Independence.
Roy says in his unpublished memoir: “June 1947, three of us, a clarinetist, a trumpet player and myself, made our way to Karachi’s railway station to begin our 24-hour rail journey involving a least one change of train.
“We arrived at Lahore just a little late at 7.30 am, and had a three-hour wait for the train to take us on the next stage of our journey. The time passed very quickly, because the station was thronged with people of all kinds, a very colourful scene in every sense.’’
Project Lahore Team is thankful to Mr. Naresh Fernandes for providing detail about this photograph.
