A woman researching the life of her grandfather who died during the First World War discovered her family were related to well-known British figures.

Mimi Romilly was searching for a photo of her grandfather Frederick Romilly who was killed five days before the end of the Great War for her mother Irene.

Irene, was the orphaned daughter of Frederick and his wife Gertrude, who died of tuberculosis in 1918.

With both her parents now dead, Irene was left with her three sisters in an orphanage in Chase Farm, Enfield.

Irene would run away when she was 14 and never see her family again - She would later become a hotel telephonist and an anti-war poet.

She eventually married Ali Mohammed Abbas, one of the men who helped found Pakistan.

In her investigations Mimi would discover the Romilly clan were descended from French Huguenots who fled to Britain in the 1600s and traced her line all the way back to Samuel Romilly, a barrister instrumental in the abolition of slavery.

Through Samuel’s descendants she found out her family had married into the Mitford family.

Her distant cousin, Esmond Romilly, was a nephew of Winston Churchill and married Jessica Mitford, who was an investigative journalist whose sister, Diana, married British fascist leader Oswald Mosley

Mimi Romilly, of Parliament Hill, Camden, said: “It’s exciting, it’s like a soap opera when I keep finding new things about my family.

“They were some of the first refugees.

“In many ways I look at my family and my ancestors and I see that we have walked in their footsteps.

“It’s like a rollercoaster ride.”

But she regrets that her mother – who herself played a part in history – was not aware of the family’s connections.

She added: “I’m so proud of the achievements of my family and as to what they stood for.

“It’s just so sad that the war deprived my family of that history, my mother never knew about any of this.”