Bamber Gascoigne was married for 57 years, to Christiana, daughter of civil servant, Alfred Henry Ditchburn, CBE. He met Christiana at Cambridge. They lived in Richmond, London, from the late 1960s.
Christiana is an artist working in ceramics, silks and other media. Gascoigne was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2018 Birthday Honours for Services of the Arts.
Bamber was the author of Murgatreud’s Empire, a 1972 satirical novel concerning an entrepreneur who finds an island of pygmies, and trades them arms for treasure, recreating the development of European medieval weaponry and armour. This was originally written as a script, although the play was abandoned because of the impossibility of finishing suitable performers for a cast of forty pygmies.
Bamber was the writer and presenter for the TV series of six The Great Moghuls (1990), a study of the Mughal Empire of India. The series was based on Bamber’s 1971 book of the same name, which features photographs by his wife.