Alumna unearths revolutionary story

When SSEES graduate and former Student Union President, Claire Melvin (1985-88), began researching her Belfast family history, the last thing she expected was to be getting out her old college books and corresponding with people across the globe about Russian and Austro-Hungarian history to try to piece together the story of her great granny’s sister, Annie Molloy.

Claire’s family had a painting of Annie, a seamstress from the Falls Road area of Belfast, and knew she’d lived in ‘Russia’, but as she’d rarely talked of her time there, they knew little of her story.

At SSEES, Claire had studied the history of Russia (with Olga Crisp) and the Austro-Hungarian Empire (with Laszlo Peter & Trevor Thomas) but had no idea her own family history was so tied up with these subjects.

A lead from a man in Belfast who’d been researching the Molloy family enabled her to find out about the family of Annie’s husband, George Perkins. They were Canadians from Petrolia in Ontario, who had played a major role in the development of the oil industry in and around Lviv (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Ukraine), but also in other parts of Eastern Europe, including Romania and less successfully in Croatia. 

Through contacts with people in the US, Claire discovered books had been written about the family by a Canadian oil historian. The Perkins family had founded a company called Perkins Macintosh Perkins in 1885 in Galicia. This company, Soviet owned after the Second World War is still operating as the Ukrainian subsidiary of Discovery Drilling Equipment.Petrolia is known as Canada’s ‘Victorian oil town’. The oil there soon ran out. As a result many of the families, including the Perkins, known as the ‘hard oilers’, ended up using their drilling skills to set up the oil industry in other parts of the world, such as the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Central America.

There were also family memoirs and a collection of photographs, which helped to show what life had been like in Galicia before the First World War and when war broke out in 1914. 

‘I discovered Annie and her husband, as British passport holders (she was born in Belfast and he was born in Canada), had found themselves designated enemy aliens trapped on the Eastern front as the Russian army invaded Galicia in 1914. Then, after fleeing to Kiev in 1915 during the Second Battle of Lemberg, they had then got caught up in the Russian Revolution.’

‘I found out that Annie's husband, George Perkins, who, having been brought up in Galicia, spoke many languages and worked for Reuters in London in the Second World War, also worked as a journalist in Vladivostok, running an English language column in a Russian newspaper while the Allies were there. If anyone has come across it while researching the archives in Vladivostok, I'd be interested to find out more about that.’

 ‘The story was like a jigsaw …which needed joining up. For example, there was some correspondence that had been sent to the oil museum in Petrolia from Stuart Ramsay Tompkins, who went on to become a Russian historian but had been with the Canadian army in Vladivostok. He wanted to try and find his oil man friend Mr Perkins, but only my mum knew which Mr Perkins had been in Vladivostok. Tompkins’ book helped give good descriptions of life there at the time and timescales. I even found out that Bernard Pares, whose bust I had walked past every day at SSEES, had been in Vladivostok around the same time as they had.’

Claire has worked in legal publishing for over 20 years and is currently Head of Halsbury’s Laws of England and Stair ‘Laws of Scotland, with Lexis Nexis. After uncovering this tale she decided to turn her hand to fiction and has written a novel based on Annie Molloy’s story, called To Hell or Vladivostok.

To Hell or Vladivostok is available to purchase on Kindle and Barnes & Noble