Keele 1966 - 1967

The summer of 1966 was a busy one. Gill took her finals in French and German and came out with a 2:1. I had to spend time mapping my geology field area on the Roaches, near Leek in Staffordshire, and also had to attend a geology field trip in the Pyrenees. Our wedding was arranged for August 6th, and Gill worked at the local pub while she made her wedding dress.

We were married in the very pretty church in Cranham village. My extended family spent the previous night at The Bear at Rodborough, where my parents entertained Gill's to dinner after which my family retired to the bar until the late hours of early morning. I was woken by my father who brought me a gin and tonic to get me started on the day.

The weather was not kind, and Richard Keach, my best man's car, in which we travelled to the wedding, broke down in Stroud - but a very understanding garage got it quickly back on the road.

The photo above shows us at Cranham church, with my parents at left, Gill's at right, Ann Sumner, Gill's bridesmaid, and my best man, Richard Keach.

It was a large wedding with all the formalities. As well as the immediate families and close friends, Gill's father, as chief executive of Gloucester County Council, invited people from the Council some of whom Gill didn't know - but they were very generous with their gifts.

The reception was in a marquee in the grounds of Gill's home, Cranham Close. Despite the generous quantities of alcohol I had consumed both the previous evening and continued to enjoy at the reception, I drove us to Hay on Wye for the first night of our honeymoon. We continued the honeymoon at an hotel in Dolwyddelan, a small village in Snowdonia where I had attended a geology field trip. Being North Wales, it rained a fair bit but we didn't mind.

Keele had a policy of discouraging undergraduates from living off campus unless married or pregnant. We took a flat over a shop in Stone, a small market town to the south of Stoke-on-Trent and about half an hour from the university, an arrangement which I far preferred to living on campus. Gill had obtained a post as a teacher in the local convent, a job she hated partly because of the atmosphere in the school, partly because her hearing loss was beginning to affect her.

Despite that, we were happy at 14A Radford Street, just up from the Joules brewery. Brian and Val were frequent visitors and, with my grant and Gill's handsome salary of £960 per annum, we felt well-off.

'The Boys'

'The Boys' weren't boys at all, they were grown men, the servants who worked for us around the house. They cleaned the place, they did the laundry, they polished shoes, brass and silver-work, they tended the garden, they cooked and served the meals, they woke us in the morning with the tea tray, they babysat Richard and I when our parents went out in the evening.

When we first came to Mombasa we employed two, a cook and Ouma, the houseboy, who later became our cook and stayed with us until we left. By the time we moved to the third house in Cliff Avenue, our last house in Mombasa, we were cared for by four - from left to right, Mlalo, Ouma, Saidi - who always wore a red fez - and Kitetu. This picture was taken in 1959.

Ouma was a Jaluo from the Lakes. He lived on the premises and was joined at times by his wife and several children who normally stayed at their little farm, or shamba. The oldest was Barasa, and we came to know him well. Ouma was a bit of a dandy but a very intelligent man who, given different circumstances, would have gone far in life. He had a fine sense of humour and was incredibly good to Richard and I, for at times we teased him.

His dishes were legendary. He had been taught to cook by my mother but he picked up recipes from all over the place. While he could produce a classic English meal like roast lamb and mint sauce, he was at his best with fish. I will never forget his fish with cheese sauce, nor the way he would cycle down to the fish market on my mother's black Raleigh bicycle and come back with a live lobster or two in the front basket, to plunge them into boiling water.

Saidi (left) was a coast Swahili, a reserved man who waited at table, served drinks on the veranda or in the sitting room, cleaned the principle rooms, and brought tea to the upstairs veranda just before six and gently roused us so we could drink it and watch the sun rise over the sea.

Kitetu (right) was the dhobi boy who did our washing, and ironed it with a large iron filled with glowing charcoal. A quiet, unassuming man, Kitetu was also responsible for cleaning the brass ornaments, including the big Arab tray, using half a lemon and dirt. Saidi and Kitetu polished the downstairs floor which was red-painted concrete. They each had two coconut husks which they stood on and slid around the floor, singing as they worked.

Saidi and Kitetu served at meals, and served drinks on the veranda. At such times they wore a khanzu, and red cummerbund and fez.

Mlalo was the garden boy. He may have been the most lowly of the four but I spent hours with him, squatting next to him as he manicured the pathetic grass of the lawn or as he tended his eternally-burning bonfire. I was attracted by his simplicity, by the slow process of conversation with him, and by his sudden laughter. I teased him: if I found a chameleon I would bring it to him, knowing full well that he was terrified of them. It was Mlalo who made our catapults, a new one for each holiday, which we used to kill small birds.

Saidi and Ouma both spoke good English but all conversation with the boys was in KiSwahili.

My mother was responsible for the staff and it is a credit to her management that we had a minimal turnover. We trusted them implicitly, even through the times of Mau Mau when many worried about their servants. As far as I was concerned, they always seemed to be part of the family.

Letters Home

In all the years I was at school in England I wrote to my parents weekly. I never spoke to them on the telephone - it was impossibly expensive - and I am only aware of one occasion when my parents sent a telegram, or 'cable' as they called it, and that was not to me but to the Glengorse headmaster when I sent my first letter home to the wrong address.

At Glengorse all the boys were sat down in silence each Sunday morning in the house room to write to our parents. They were checked by the master on duty and corrected or, if necessary, rewritten. This is one of the few surviving letters from that time, written in October 1955 when I was ten. My parents were on their way to England with Richard on leave, but would leave him at Glengorse for the spring term.

We were told never to write anything that might worry our parents. Had we done so, the letter would have been torn up. So the contents are utterly bland.

Although there was no requirement to do so, I continued to write home once a week from Bradfield. This air letter is fairly typical. It continues for half a page on the other side. While there was much more in these letters they continued to be determinedly positive, despite the fact that they weren't checked by anyone.

The letter is dated 19th July 1959 at the end of my first year at the school, the last letter before I flew back to Mombasa for the summer holidays. During that year I had experienced and witnessed some horrific bullying. It was institutional, all-pervasive, sometimes sadistic. Some boys suffered particularly badly - fortunately, I wasn't one - and all one could do was to give these unfortumates what support was possible. None of this ever appeared in a letter.

The habit of writing to my parents continued through my university days and well into my twenties, when Gill and I were abroad. Almost all these letters are in the old Arab chest.

The Aeroplanes

The first 'plane on which I travelled alone to school in England, in 1954, was a Hermes, a four-engined propellor-driven aircraft in BOAC livery. I 'celebrated' my birthday in Mombasa on Saturday 2nd January so....

....from the timetable I might have caught flight BA162 on either Tuesday 5th or Thursday 7th, leaving Nairobi Eastleigh at 09.00 and arriving, via Entebbe, Khartoum, Cairo and Rome, at Heathrow the following day at 10.10. At each stop the passengers disembarked during the scheduled refuelling and drinks were served in the airport lounge. This should have taken an hour although, over the years of these journeys, some of these stopovers were often far longer.

The Handley Page Hermes was a development of the military Hastings, an aircraft rushed into service shortly after the Second World War to fulfil the need for transports during the Berlin Airlift. As a passenger 'plane the Hermes was noisy and unreliable, so it often arrived late, but it was far quicker than the Solent flying boat it replaced, which had taken three days to reach the East African coast from Southampton.

The Hermes did not last long in service, giving way to the no less noisy but slightly more reliable Canadair Argonaut. My England-bound flight on an Argonaut in September 1955 shed a large part of the port outer engine over the Mediterranean. The captain was quick to walk down the aisle and reassure the passengers, and we learned from one of the air hostesses that we really didn't need to worry: the captain had flown Lancasters over Berlin during the war and had lost much bigger lumps off his machine.

However, the damage meant we had to stay the night in a very posh Rome hotel. The children on board, of which there were many in the same circumstance as me, took advantage of the situation by running amok in the hotel - I have happy memories of repeated slides down the ornate bannister into the foyer - so the staff hired a coach in which they could confine us while they drove us round and round the city until we were exhausted.

In its turn the Argonaut was replaced on BOAC's routes by....

....the 'whispering giant', the Bristol Britannia, the first 'plane on which it was possible to balance a pencil on its end. The Britannia, with its turboprop engines, was a huge step forward, quieter, reliable and comfortable.

I subsequently flew in a Constellation, an American aircraft, and, with some excitement, in my first jet, a De Havilland Comet 4. The last 'plane in which Richard and I flew as unaccompanied schoolboys was a Boeing 707.

The UK international flights came in to Nairobi and we connected to Mombasa either by car, a rough journey down what was still a mainly dirt road, by overnight train, which was very comfortable, or by air. The workhorse of the local air routes was East African Airways' Douglas DC-3 Dakota. The above picture was taken by my mother. There is no caption but I suspect that it was the one time when Richard and I flew to Nairobi with my father, when we hit the worst thermal I have ever experienced as we came in to land at Embakasi airport.

Many thanks to Tony Chetham for pictures of the Argonaut  Hermes.

Maths Test

The old Arab chest keeps revealing its treasures. Mixed up in a pile of letters which date to the middle 1960s was this scrap of paper, a maths test which, at a guess, I took when I was about five while at Mombasa European Primary School.

I seem to have started the test well on the simple addition and subtraction of single digits but things started to go wrong with the first answer which involved tens as well as units, where I transposed the digits, making 14 into 41.

Multiplication obviously floored me. I love the 2 x 6 = 6, but it indicates that I had no concept of what multiplication was.

The teacher's comment is so revealing. "He can do + & - of tens and units, but was so worried today he didn't have time to do them." So I worried then, have continued to worry ever since, and have passed this talent on to some of my children.

Gill in France

Gill studied both French and German at 'O' level and, as part of her course, in 1958 went on a school-arranged group exchange to families in Chateauroux. Gill went to the home of Genevieve Langlois, one of five children who lived with their parents....

....in a large, detached house within walking distance of the town centre. During this holiday the group visited several chateaus in the Loire and Paris, and went to Versailles.

Gloucester High School for Girls had a connection with Chateauroux so Pauline's penfriend also lived in the town. Gill visited the family - Pauline's friend Michelle Laurent is on the left in this photo.

The Rogers family took a holiday in France - picture shows Gill, right, with Bea and Pauline somewhere on the French coast. During the holiday they....

....stayed with the Laurent family in Chateauroux. Bea and Don stayed in their flat while Pauline, Gill and Michelle slept in a caravan in someone's drive.

The Laurents owned a flat in Biarritz where Pauline and Gill stayed in 1962 while Gill was waiting for her 'A' Level results. Her father sent them by telegram - an A in French, an A in German and a C in Latin. She had also passed scholarship German which won her a state scholarship to university. This was the last year they were awarded, so the honours board in the school hall records Pauline and Gill as winning the last two scholarships.

The Third Cliff Avenue House

In the summer of 1959 Richard and I returned to Mombasa. We were disappointed that it wasn't to the Hoey House at Nyali - it seemed that nothing could possibly beat it - but the African Mercantile manager's house....

....was no disappointment. It was towards the end of Cliff Avenue, and overlooked the Mombasa seafront, the golf course, the channel along which the ships approached Kilindini, and a projection of the reef called the Andromache Reef, onto which the great seas of the Indian Ocean broke in a welter of foam.

Because there wasn't a beach on which to spend our day we had to find other amusement, and we found it in rediscovering our friends - the Chethams, Sollys, Ashworths, Champions, Milnes.... We played tennis at the Sports Club. We all had bikes so we roamed the town, spent time bartering for Kamba carvings along Salim and Kilindini Roads, and for kikois in the African markets, and explored the forgotten parts of the island. Our parents helped by organising trips to the Swimming Club and to the beaches to the north and south of Mombasa.

We also spent a great deal of time at the house. Its veranda looked out at the view but behind it was the sitting room in which my father had the first HMV stereo gramophone in East Africa - the African Mercantile was agents for HMV - so we spent hours playing records. We listened to 'pop', Elvis, Connie Francis, Buddy Holly, but we also enjoyed my father's collection of classical music, particularly Rimsky Korsakov's 'Scheherazade', Dvorjak's 'New World', and Holst's 'The Planets'. We sat on the veranda and the servants brought us Coca Colas, which my mother bought by the crate, roasted cashews, raw peanuts, and raisins.

The ships passed so close we could wave to people we recognised on deck. When one of my father's ships came in - this is a Harrison Line ship - and if the captain was a particular friend, we would hang coloured towels from the upstairs veranda as a signal to him; and, in due course, he would come to lunch and, more often than not, we would go aboard ship.

We returned to this lovely house for the 1960 and 1961 summer holidays.

Bradfield 1958

Amongst the many things I have found which my mother kept in the old Arab chest is the slip of paper my parents received announcing the results of my Common Entrance examination - the test taken by all those seeking a place at a public school. Although both my maternal grandfather and my mother's brother had gone to Harrow, I had been put down to go to Bradfield College in Berkshire where cousins of my mother's, the Humphries, had gone. The results surprise me in their variability - 98% for geometry yet 47% for algebra - and in how well I did in subjects I hated, such as Latin.

So in the autumn of 1958, at the age of 13, I started at Bradfield. After Glengorse, it seemed huge, but from the moment I arrived I knew I would like the place. That said, life there for the first years was tough. Bullying was rife, some of it violent. The prefects wielded the cane. First years were assigned to a senior boy as his 'fag', to clean his shoes, lay the fire in his study, and do just about anything else he told us to. The common room in which we existed was bare and cold, the dormitories freezing, but the food was much better than at Glengorse, and in our own time we were free to roam in a way we'd never been allowed to there - we even brought our bikes and rode around the countryside.

The picture shows the 'House' to which I was assigned, 'D' House, consisting of some fifty boys aged from 13 to 18. It shared with 'G' House a large building on top of a hill about half-a-mile from the main school buildings. Our housemaster was Andrew Gimson whom I always found very fair.

We participated in some sort of physical activity on six afternoons of the week. Some of the sports were compulsory. This included cross-country running, which led up to the annual steeplechase in which, as well as fighting our way across muddy fields, we ended up climbing a weir of the River Pang which flowed through the school grounds. A large range of other sports was available, including squash, fives, tennis, shooting - at which I always did well - and archery.

The school was a soccer school and I worked my way from the house teams to the school teams, ending up in the second eleven. In the summer cricket and athletics were compulsory but I spent as much time as possible....

....at the school swimming pool. The contrast to Mombasa was stark: the pool was filled by the River Pang flowing in at one end and out at the other, so the water was permanently cold. Despite this, I made the school swimming team.

The school pushed its more able pupils hard. At an early stage someone decided that I should specialise in the sciences, so at age 15 I took five 'O' levels - English Grammar, English Literature, Maths, Latin and French - and then started three 'A' levels, Maths, Physics and Chemistry, taking them at age 17. As a consequence, I ended up with no qualification in subjects which would later interest me, and which I would teach - particularly History and Geography.

Keele 1964/65

In the short time between returning from North Africa and going back to Keele, my parents moved, from the rented cottage in Appledore to Gawthorpe, a large red-brick, semi-detached house on the outskirts of the village of Guestling, near Hastings.

I returned to Keele in the October of 1964 to read joint honours in Geology and Political Institutions, the Geology because I had so enjoyed the first year subsidiary course, the politics because, after gaining a distinction in my History subsidiary, the History Department refused to accept me on the grounds that I didn't even have 'O' level in the subject.

I went back to playing soccer, where I was the club's secretary and, while usually playing for the second eleven, did appear in the firsts, and rugby, but I saw less of the dismal Saturday night hops and the Union bar as I now had the Land Rover. I drank in the Newcastle pubs - and cheerfully drove back to Keele. I spent time in local night spots like the Hempstalls, which had good groups playing, I went to a couple of dire dance halls. I propped up the Union bar most weekday evenings and I did go to some of the hops. It was at them that I began to take a rather more serious interest in Gill Rogers - see earlier post here.

By the spring term 1965 I was visiting her home, at Cranham in the Cotswolds. When we went to Gloucestershire we drove in her very smart Morris 1000 but to visit Gawthorpe we hitched as far as the outskirts of London, and caught the train down to Hastings.

I still wasn't working very hard despite the fact that I was enjoying the subjects and the combination of geology and politics worked well. I spent much of the day on the geology and did the reading for the politics in the evening. My trouble was that I was still frustrated by being cooped up on such a small campus where everyone knew everyone else's business.

By the summer term I was spending time in the Staffordshire Peak District carrying out a geological survey in the Roaches area to the north of Leek. While staying at a boarding house in Leek....

....I met a travelling salesman for the Mars group called Brian Jones along with his girlfriend Val, and the four of us became very good friends. Brian had a smart car, a Cortina estate, and a memorable Saturday in June was spent driving up the M6 to Blackpool to sample the local beer, with the Byrds' version of 'Mr Tambourine Man' and The Mamas & The Papas 'Monday, Monday' playing loudly on the radio.

At the beginning of June Gill and I became engaged. Gill's parents, Don and Bea, were very good about our getting engaged at such a young age - I was nineteen, Gill twenty - but my parents weren't as understanding and it was some years before Gill was fully reconciled with them.

As already recounted, I failed my geology exams in the summer term, but re-took them in the summer vac and passed. During that vac we had a short camping holiday at Solva in Pembrokeshire and another in Italy. At the time I was still using the Kowa camera I had bought in Aden even though it persistently failed to wind the film on, so took two exposures on each piece of film, with some interesting results.

The Hoey House - 1957

After spending the summer holidays of 1956 in England we were desperate to return to Mombasa in 1957 - but we had moved, off Mombasa island to the Nyali Estate along the coast to the north. My father had been promoted but the African Mercantile manager's house in Cliff Avenue needed extensive repairs so we had to make do with a rented house - but what a house!

It had been built by a 'white hunter', Cecil Hoey (more about him here). It was on a large plot by the sea, built in a slight curve with all the rooms facing onto a veranda, from which....

....the view looked across a lawn with scattered palm trees beyond which lay a white-sand beach and the sea; and beyond the beach lay a lagoon protected, two miles out, by a coral reef. For two small boys, this was paradise. The calm beauty of the place even seemed to affect my father, who was never normally willing to mow a lawn, let alone try to repair the mower.

All Richard and I wanted to do was to spend our time on the beach. No-one else bothered us on it. At high tide the waves could be fierce but we swam in them, or sat in our rubber inner tubes and bounced across them, and low tide exposed miles of rock pools filled with sea creatures. We collected shells. We walked along the high tide line picking up exotic flotsam from across the ocean. We made boats out of coconut husks and crewed them with hermit crabs. It was as much as our mother could do to persuade us to come indoors to eat and sleep.

We certainly didn't want to spend time in town, and seeing friends seemed much less important than getting out onto the beach. We did some of the usual things, like visit Tsavo East game park, but we didn't go to the Chini Club or Swimming Club as much - we didn't need to. Even Tsavo wasn't as wonderful as usual: a herd of buffalo came visiting the Hoey House, and green monkeys were often in the trees.

We gathered for sundowners on the veranda and watched the yellow weaver birds come to the bird bath. After supper we retired to bedrooms which opened on to the veranda, and slept with the doors open so we could hear the sea: there was a night watchman, who had been Hoey's gun bearer. He was armed with a wicked-looking, curved sword but he slept peacefully on a couch at the end of the veranda.

It was a wonderful holiday, which made the idea of returning to England even more horrible. I remember Richard and I sitting with our parents on the curved section of veranda which can be seen in the picture behind my father begging them not to send us back. Our pleas and tears made no difference. When it came to it we packed our suitcases, climbed meekly into the car and left this beautiful house.

The Swimming Club

In her 'Life' my mother wrote, "After Sunday School the boys and I would return to the house and get our tricycles and my bike and swimming suits and go down to the Chini Club for a swim before returning to the house for lunch. Or we would go right down to the landing stage and get a rowing boat to take us across to the Swimming Club where we would eat our lunch which we took with us, and spend the afternoon swimming and playing in the sand, usually with the Solly boys and Margaret who sometimes took us over in her car. Dad would come later, having been at the Sports Club watching cricket, and take us home in the car."

This picture looks back across the Old Port to the Old Town, with a number of dhows at anchor. The Swimming Club's raft is at centre, with a line of tyres which acted as a safety line if someone was swept away by the current.

We were rowed across in a small boat - seen at left - which came in to....

....the end of the Swimming Club pier - one of the boats can be seen near the pier. The club building was set up back from the beach and always seemed rather dark and damp. Occasionally, if it rained heavily, we were forced to take shelter there, which we didn't enjoy. It had one attraction to some members of the community: it had the only fruit machine.

The beach wasn't as good as those along the coast but we spent many happy hours on it. This picture shows us with the John (left) and Mark Solly. The yacht is mine. Called Defender after my grandfather's ship, it was made for me by one of the Harrison Line engineers.

Sometimes there were events at the Club. This group photo was taken on the steps of the club house.

The top three pictures are by kind permission of Tony Chetham, with my thanks, but he also sends a more recent picture of the Swimming Club: only the ruins of the pier remain.

First Passport

Until I was nine I had travelled on my mother and father's passports so I had to have my own when I went to school in England. It was issued in Mombasa on 10th December 1953 ready for my departure in early January 1954.

It used to be a very smart old-style, cardboard covered British passport but the gold of the royal coat-of-arms has been worn off the front and the black material of the cover is sticky.

As with so many things, it lived for years in the old Arab chest. Packaged with it are two subsequent passports along with other documents one had to have, such as a little yellow World Health Organisation booklet which contained records of yellow fever, smallpox, typhus, cholera and other vaccinations.

It was a Kenya passport so was issued by the governor on behalf of the Queen. In those days a stamp was affixed as a receipt for the payment made for the passport, a mere £1 - and what a beautiful King George VI stamp it is. The bit in blue at bottom right is important: I was born in Tanganyika, a UN Trust Territory, so had automatic right to pass full UK citizenship to any of my children who, like Katy, were also born abroad. This would not have been the case had I been born in Kenya, a colony.

When issued, the passport was valid for five years and was duly renewed, so it finally expired in December 1963. Even though it was a Kenya passport and my parents lived there, in order to return to the country I had to have....

....a valid re-entry pass. These were stamped into the back of the passport, and each lasted for two years.

The body of the passport contains the immigration stamps each time I entered Kenya. British immigration didn't stamp it, nor did Kenya normally stamp it each time I left, but on the occasion that our 'plane broke down in Rome and we were delayed for 24 hours while parts were flown out from England, the Italian authorities recorded both my entry and departure.

Plains Garter Snakes

Camrose, Alberta, as with so many Canadian towns and cities, does its best to provide its inhabitants and their visitors with miles of trails to walk in summer and ski in winter. The one we most enjoyed when we visited in May 2017 ran south from the city centre along the banks of the Stoney Creek, passing under a fine example of a trestle bridge over which the modern Canadian Pacific railroad still passes.

Downstream from the bridge the trail became increasingly rough and deserted but we were thoroughly enjoying our walk when....

....we started noticing snakes which had been lying sunning themselves on the trail and which, at our approach, rather reluctantly slipped away into the undergrowth.

They were plains garter snakes, a common snake in the area which, while they are poisonous, are harmless to humans.

I write about this today for no reason other than that a picture of the snake came suddenly, and for no good reason, to mind as we walked today in soft Suffolk countryside in which, even after a year of ramblings, we have yet to come across anything more poisonous than a toad.