Miles Palmer-Wilson

One of my favourite photographs. It is of my mother's brother, Miles. Educated at Eton and Oxford, where he read PPE, Miles trained as a barrister. He gave it all up to travel around the world. By the time Miles settled down, my parents had undergone a divorce. My father, an investment banker, threw himself into a career on Wall Street, whilst my mother split for a drug-infested hippy commune outside San Francisco. I was sent to live with Miles at his house in London and farms in Berkshire and Connecticut. Miles surfed competitively and won the Rondebosch International Surf Invitational held at Jameson Bay in South Africa in 1965. In this photograph he is pictured with his first wife, Jani, the daughter of a prominent Rhodesian Front politician. Miles today divides his time between a house near the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and an estate in Fairfield County, Connecticut, where he spends his days beagling and trout fishing. He is known throughout the East Coast for the cut of his Tweed. I look back on my time with Uncle Miles with appreciation and affectionate regard.