Ursula Graham Bower

Ursula Violet Graham Bower MBE (later known as U. V. G. Betts) (15 May 1914 – 12 November 1988), was one of the pioneer anthropologists in the Naga Hills between 1937 and 1946 and a guerrilla fighter against the Japanese in Burma from 1942 to 1945.

Early life and family

Born in 1914 in England, the daughter of Commander John Graham Bower, RN (1886–1940), Ursula Bower was educated at Roedean School; a shortage of family funds prevented her from finishing her school education and achieving her goal of reading archaeology at Oxford. On her father's remarriage in 1932, Bower became the stepdaughter of children's writer Barbara Euphan Todd, the creator of the fictional scarecrow Worzel Gummidge. In the same year she travelled to Canada.

Early travels

She first visited India and, more specifically, the Naga Hills and Manipur, in 1937, at the invitation of Alexa Macdonald, whom she had met while on holiday on Skye, and who was staying with her brother who worked in the Indian Civil Service in Imphal. It was a trip where her mother had hoped she would meet a nice husband. Instead, she fell in love with the Naga Hills and their tribes. Bower returned alone to India in 1939 "to potter about with a few cameras and do a bit of medical work, maybe write a book". She spent some years as an anthropologist among the Nagas of the Naga Hills. She took more than a thousand photographs documenting the lives of local tribes which were later used in a comparative study.