Amid the avalanche of news stories from the past week, there was one in particular that stood out for our family.

It involved Cambridge University PhD student Rishi Rajpopat, who attracted headlines worldwide for solving a grammatical puzzle that has long perplexed scholars of the ancient language of Sanskrit.

Earlier this year, it was Sanskrit that made an unexpected appearance while I was researching a film, commissioned by the Royal Photographic Society, marking the 150th birthday of Percy R. Salmon, FRPS.

As a teenager in the 1880s, Salmon served for several years on the domestic staff of Professor E.B. (Edward Byles) Cowell, Cambridge University’s first Professor of Sanskrit.

The 1891 UK Census records that Salmon, my wife’s great-great-uncle, had risen to the rank of ‘footman.’

He left the city soon afterwards and embarked on a long and successful career as a photographer, journalist and author.

Sadly, our research failed to shed any further light on the working relationship between Messrs. Salmon and Cowell.

However, we did make a pilgrimage to Scroope Terrace, a grade 2 listed terrace of Cambridge townhouses, where Cowell lived as a Fellow of Corpus Christi College.

Though the house numbering system may have changed in the years since Prof. Cowell lived at number 10, counting the surviving doors along the terrace brings you to this section of the terrace.

It gives an idea of the elegant and grand circumstances in which Prof. Cowell lived as a Cambridge don and the location of Percy R. Salmon’s working life as a young man.

The RPS film about Percy R. Salmon’s life contains a section covering his time in Cambridge (beginning at 2.38).