While this trip has ended the connection is ongoing. When I wrote my blog about Clunies-Ross on Cocos (Keeling) Islands, a few friends responded with personal memories and events. I am always looking for the connections between my two worlds and who on earth would have expected this one …

The Kings of Cocos, Clunies-Ross and the Ross-Clunis in Cyprus are from one family in the Shetlands. Robert Clunies married Elizabeth Ross in the Shetland Islands in 1786.

Robert Chattan Clunis, is the Cypriot connection. I found his name from a FB posting by Cypriot Memories The Hallouminati. His middle name, Chattan is a Scottish clan.

Over successive generations, some descendants hyphenated the name as Clunies-Ross (such as the rulers of the Cocos Islands ), while Robert’s family in South Africa recorded it as Ross-Clunis. Despite the shuffled word order and spelling variations, they are branches of the same family tree.

John Clunies-Ross went to sea as a Scottish captain. In the 1820s, he landed on the uninhabited Cocos Keeling Islands in the Indian Ocean. He settled there with his family and Malay workers, establishing a self-ruled kingdom. His descendants became the famous Kings of the Cocos Islands keeping the double-barrel name Clunies- Ross.

Robert Clunies-Ross’s line moved southward through England and eventually established themselves in Cape Town, South Africa. Over generations, this branch modified the word order to Ross-Clunis. It is from this line that the police officer Robert Chattan Ross-Clunis (born c. 1906 in Cape Town, later serving prominently in colonial Cyprus), directly descend. As Nicosia’s police commissioner, Ross-Clunis was on the frontline of managing the colonial state’s counterinsurgency, curfews, and security protocols.
Robert served as a senior British colonial official during an incredibly turbulent era in Cyprus. He married Aliki Tsepis and they had two sons, Andrew and Nicholas. They loved Larnaca and built the famous Clunis Castle which was a very well known landmark on the island. Sadly now demolished.

There are two descendants of both sides of this family. One living on West island – “Johnny” George Clunies Ross, born 1957, who runs a clam production company, walks around barefoot and is a well known personality on the island.

On the Cypriot side Annelise Ross-Clunis, an artist illustrator whose father was Andrew, son of Robert and she has a Swedish mother.She has exhibited her art and illustrations in Cyprus but lives in Malmo, Sweden.

My search started with Google but was more productive with AI. Of course verifying it all would be a whole different task but for the moment I am happy to accept this version of history.

It is indeed a very small world with unexpected and wonderful connections.