Edward Enoch Jenkins was born on 8 Feb. 1895 in Cardiff, the son of John Jenkins, an ironmonger’s assistant, and Lucy Jenkins (née Ellis). He was known by his middle name, Enoch. He studied at University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire in Cardiff, before serving in the Royal Field Artillery during World War I. He then studied law at Cambridge, having matriculated at Peterhouse in Oct. 1919, and graduated LL.B. in 1922. He was called to the bar at Gray’s Inn in May 1924 and joined the Colonial Service in 1925. He held administrative and judicial positions in Nyasaland (Malawi), Northern Rhodesia (Zambia, Solicitor General), Fiji (Attorney General) and Nyasaland again (Chief Justice). Jenkins was knighted in 1946 and in the early 1950s was appointed Justice of Appeal for the Court of Appeal for Eastern Africa. In 1929, he married Muriel Alice Ackermann in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). He died on 25 Feb. 1960 at St John, Antigua, while undertaking a revision of the laws of the Leeward Islands.
Muriel Alice Ackermann was born in 1904 in Coulsdon, Surrey, the daughter of Audley Harold Ackermann, a mining engineer, and Alice Myrtia Farnsworth, who had married in California in 1897. Audley was the grandson of the Anglo-German printmaker Rudolph Ackermann (1764-1834). The Ackermanns settled in Southern Rhodesia around the turn of the twentieth century. Muriel, who also referred to herself as Sally, grew up on the family farm, Oliphant Farm, near what is now Kwekwe, Zimbabwe, with periods of schooling in England and South Africa. She studied at Royal Holloway College and in 1929 married the lawyer, Edward Enoch Jenkins. They had two children, Patricia (Pat) and Audley. During the Second World War, Muriel Jenkins served on the staff of the Cypher Office in New Zealand. Her husband died in 1960; Muriel’s date of death is unknown.
Patricia Laidley Rae (née Jenkins) was born in 1933, the daughter of Edward Enoch Jenkins and Muriel Alice Jenkins (née Ackermann). A portrait sculptor, she trained at Bournemouth School of Art, Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town, and Royal College of Art.