Eleanor Hopkinson, wife of the last British political officer and resident in Sikkim, who was one of the very few western women to have travelled extensively in the old Tibet, has died at the age of 101. According to the obituary, in Gangtok she found that the residency, supposedly a private house, was always full of visitors; her husband and his predecessor had been posted there alone, so they liked plenty of people around.

By the end of their posting, Sikkim was regarded as an outpost on the fringe of the empire and received no recognition. Eleanor recalled that friends in England thought they had been making a fortune and living very well, 'which was far from the case. We were simply doing our duty'.

On Sep 1, 1948, Arthur Hopkinson handed over his post to his Indian successor. Eleanor's entry in her diary for that day reads like an epitaph for the British Raj: 'Today we are no longer masters of the residency.'