In 1924, a 33-year-old British woman, the daughter of a bricklayer, settled in Southern California. She claimed that she secretly held a royal title, Lady Mountbatten, had great academic credentials and a wartime honour. Furthermore, she had travelled to practically every country in the world, had lived among cannibals and walked from Lhasa in Tibet to Peking (Beijing), China.
This lady, my Great-Aunt Jill, was obviously deluded. Working for a time as a dental nurse, she stated that her occupation was “world traveller”. A few years later she announced her dream – she was going to rediscover a small tribe of vegetarian dwarf troglodyte peoples living at a great altitude in the Himalayas, descended from a Biblical tribe mentioned in the Old Testament. These remarkable people lived to over 150 years of age.
Jill could find her way around any obstacle. Her determination to achieve her ambition was to involve Anastasia and two Prime Ministers. Refusing to be daunted by a lack of money, she charged ahead to fulfil her dream, becoming a celebrity in both the USA and Canada. The British authorities, who tried to confine her to Britain by cancelling her passport, found that they were dealing with someone who was given accolades by the United States press to match those aristocratic ones– “The most fearless woman in the world” was one, and “The greatest woman speaker of the age” and “The most travelled woman in the world” others. One of her books about the Wild West is still read today and another can be found in prestigious medical libraries and universities. Truth really is stranger than fiction.