The Unfortunate Lunatic was Tess Redgrave’s paternal great grandfather. He wasn’t always known by that name, of course. He was Christopher Macalister, chemist of Invercargill, a husband and father, sandy-haired with ‘ruddy cheeks and soft blue eyes’. He suffered from ill health and died in 1893, ‘at the early age of thirty-three’. Tess knew nothing about him. Her paternal grandmother she did know personally, knew her troubles and the whispers of madness. Tess herself had bouts of the black dog occasionally, given blue pills, ‘mother’s little helpers’, for anxiety at school. Then, in her mid-thirties and suffering clinical depression, she began to wonder about the possibility of an inherited aspect to her mental condition. With her journalist’s nose for getting to the bottom of things, she went in search of her ancestors.
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The Unfortunate Lunatic, by Tess Redgrave
