John Anton – nicknamed Jack – was 29 when he died in India, three months before he was due to come home on leave after four years working there.

The anguish this caused his family was so great that 90 years later, as his nephew, I am impelled to create this website to honour his life and work, and as a resting place for all the photos and letters that have come down to me.

I am the last person alive who was able to speak to anyone who knew him.

Like all attempts to rewrite the past, one regrets missed opportunities to question those who knew him.

Why didn’t I ask my mother to write down all she knew about her brother Jack? After all, I was named after him.

My uncle, Peter Tydeman, was married to my mother’s younger sister, Isabel. In his old age, I attempted to question him as he knew Uncle Jack, but he was reluctant to say anything about the past and the only piece of information he did give me proved to be untrue; he said Jack went to Dean Close School in Cheltenham, but they had no record of him there.

The main emotional feeling that was passed on to me as a little boy in the 1940s, was that he was the last hope for the family fortunes, after the financial collapse of his father, William. He had been a wealthy banker with his own private bank in Bristol. At the apex of his career, he had owned streets in Bristol and the 8,000-acre Balmacara Estate near Kyle of Lochalsh in north-west Scotland. He had been reduced to working as a door-to-door insurance salesman.

The family were very poor by their standards, though they still owned the Regency property, 63 Pittville Lawn in Cheltenham and a shop in Gloucester.

Jack Anton was going to work hard and retrieve the family fortune in India. His letters home breathe his love for his family and how he was going to look after them. His father had died seven months before he did, having been an invalid for some time.

Jack died of a combination of malaria and hepatitis. His final resting place is a cemetery in Barrackpore, a suburb of Calcutta. I will let his photographs and letters tell his story.

Farewell Uncle Jack.