Two Beaches

This photograph, taken in 1949, shows my brother, Richard, at left and myself at right - I don't know who the other small boy is. We're on a beach near Dar-es-Salaam. Its sands are white; away to the left is a shallow lagoon and, far out, can be seen the white line of the ocean breaking on a coral reef; a warm breeze whispers through the casuarinas behind us.

This was taken in May 1950 on Dover beach during 'home leave'. The beach is shingle, the sea the mud-blue of the Channel; and the weather is cool - or, perhaps, these two small boys just aren't used to English temperatures.

Special Dragonflies

I spend a fair amount of my time wandering the countryside looking for, and trying to take pictures of the local dragonflies, so it makes a pleasant change when, instead, one comes calling on us. Yesterday, this beauty was perched on a small shrub called a nine bark, right next to where we sit on the terrace at the end of the garden, and didn't seem at all bothered when I approached very close to take his picture.

In fact, he seemed to like our company as he came back later in the day and perched on a toadflax even closer to where we were sitting.

What is irritating is that I'm not sure what species he/she is. My best guess is that he's an immature male southern migrant hawker. If that's what he is, I'm rather pleased as they are not a common species and are very localised in the east of England and north Kent.

Later in the day we went walking along the track that follows the King's Fleet to the Deben estuary, when we saw several other hawkers, including this one. Again, he's a bit special as I think he's a male brown hawker. If that's what he is, this is the first good picture I have of the male of this species.

One of the others we came across was this female migrant hawker - a different species from the southern migrant hawker.

Different dragonfly species can be remarkably similar. This adds interest but does mean that I have to spend a great deal of time on the internet trying to work out what some of them are and, even when I have come to a conclusion, I'm really not sure whether I'm right.

Alexander Wilson, 'The Colonel'

Alexander Wilson, 1835-1906, ‘The Colonel’, was my mother, Helen’s grandfather. When he first joined the firm, the William Wilson & Son weaving business was doing well, so by 1865 the company had probably reached the peak of its success. The business was described in Nimmo’s History of Stirlingshire, IIIrd Edition, 1880, as, “spinning, dying and weaving of carpets, tweeds and tartans…. The value of the annual production is £80,000 and the number of persons employed is 500 to 600.”

He was colonel - an honorary title - of the Stirlingshire Volunteers and captain of the Scottish Shooting Team. He led Scotland’s winning teams at the international rifle shooting competitions in the 1880s - in those days held at Wimbledon - which, until then, had been dominated by the English. 

In 1859 he married Helen Pearson Galbraith (1837-1919), daughter of Col. W Galbraith, Town Clerk of Stirling. 

In 1883 the Colonel bought Bannockburn House. He made several additions and changes to the house, including a new porch entrance and extension to the library and office. As well as an oil painting of the house, we have a description of it and of other houses in the village and a copy of the 1862 Ordnance Survey map showing the main buildings in Bannockburn belonging to the Wilsons.

The Colonel and Helen had six children. This picture shows the first five - the youngest, Helen's father George, isn’t here, so this picture would have been taken around or before 1874 when he was born. They are, from left, Alexander (Dan), William (Ben), Helen, Christian and Eliza (Dizzy).

This picture shows his three daughters, Christian, Eliza and Helen in later life. The one on the right interests me, firstly because she was called Helen, secondly because she is so like my mother Helen, who was named after her, and thirdly because she married a Douglas Mitchell, and Gill’s mother was a Mitchell.

By the time the Colonel died in 1906 the business was in trouble. It passed into the hands of his older sons, William (Ben) of Viewvale and Alexander (Dan), who sold Bannockburn House in 1910. They tried to revive the business but finally closed it down in 1926.

The Malachite Dragons

The two small, green dragons we have are beautiful pieces. They're about 12cm high and came from my mother's uncle Stanley who had been the editor of the Times of India and who retired to England a very rich man. The dragons themselves have been carved out of malachite, a natural copper carbonate hydroxide mineral which is a deep, rich colour and often slightly banded, while the bases are supposed to be of rose wood.

We don't know where they came from. They might be Chinese but, as far as I know, great uncle Stanley never travelled to China. When my mother had some of her items valued by Christies the valuer didn't know what they were and put a tentative value of £190 on the pair.

Sadly, they are both damaged, which isn't surprising as some of the carving is very fine and malachite is brittle. A whole piece came away at '1' and was inexpertly glued back in place while the crest, '2', is missing.

Fortunately, we have the flower broken off at '3' but I hesitate to use glue on it.

I'm very fond of the dragons partly because I have a huge respect for the skilled craftsmen who carved them. Carving malachite must have been a dispiriting business as it would have broken so easily.

A Humid Day

We had a pleasant garden at the back of our bungalow in Jamaica. Not only were we able to grow our own fruit and vegetables but there were also pawpaw, banana and mango trees. The mangos served a dual purpose, giving some very good fruit and plenty of deep shade.

I was finished in school by 1.30pm having started before seven, so we - picture shows Elizabeth and Gill with the bump that was Katy - would relax in the coolness of the garden through the heat of the day. I'm not very good at doing nothing so one way I whiled away my time was to sit under one of the mangoes and read. We were fortunate that Kingston had an excellent public library which seemed, in the history section, to specialise in America's war in the Pacific, so I became quite an expert on battles such as the Coral Sea, Midway and Guadalcanal.

I wasn't the only one who found time hanging on his hands. Rick, the Art teacher who lived with his family in number 3, also had to be up and doing things, so I recall one day when Rick and I went round and painted all the gate posts, each house with different colours.

All this came to mind as we sat in our garden today in what, by English standards, is the fairly high temperature of 28C in the shade. But, as in Jamaica, it's the humidity which makes a day seem hot and muggy, and today is humid. There have been other similarities to Jamaica. Three times it has started to rain, big drops splashing on the paving stones, only for it to stop as suddenly as it started.

Not that we're in need of rain. We had a terrific thunderstorm last night which has made up for weeks of semi-drought and there's more forecast for the next few days.

A Dragonfly Year

It's a year since I began to take a serious interest in recording the dragonflies in this part of Suffolk, spurred on by an increasing realisation that this was a truly fascinating group and well-represented in the small ponds and fleets of this part of the world. I had taken pictures of them before, and made half-hearted and often inaccurate attempts to identify them - this four-spotted chaser is a species which occurs both in western Scotland and in Canada.

As time has worn on so we're finding species which we first saw a year ago, and which are starting to reappear. This species, the common darter, lived up to its name last summer and autumn and is back again in good numbers. I'm getting better at knowing both how to identify them at a distance and at attracting them within camera range. This young male was tempted to settle in our garden by a strategically-placed bamboo cane.

With the temperature at 28C I spent over an hour this afternoon standing on the footbridge over the King's Fleet, one of the best places for dragonfly-spotting. A first sighting of another species from last year was....

....of this pair of ruddy darters joined in a wheel.

A little patience usually produces a picture of a dragonfly but some of the males of the larger species pose a technical problem which I haven't solved: they're so anxious to find a mate that they don't land, so any picture has to be of them on-the-move. So, if you can find him in the picture, this is a male brown hawker. I have a good picture of a female but I have yet to find a male prepared to perch for a portrait.

There were three or four male emperor dragonflies patrolling up and down the fleet but only one stopped to catch his breath, and then he only perched for a moment. He's had a tough time: look at his left hind wing.

Some hawkers are much more willing to perch and allow one to approach. On my way home, having failed to catch a good picture of any of the larger dragonflies along the fleet, I saw this male common hawker clinging to a hedgerow along a roadside, hardly bothered by the passing traffic.

Building the Wilson Business

The next two generations of Wilsons, Alexander Wilson (1771 - 1849) and William Wilson (1800 - 1865) continued to build up the business along the banks of the Bannockburn, following the example of their father and grandfather in hard work and business shrewdness. In 1806 the business was in receipt of a grant to help finance the installation of spinning machinery. They also invested in land, William buying homes for his sons, Viewvale for William, who married Eliza Liddell in 1832, and Hillpark for John, who married Catherine McMiking in 1833. Each son also inherited a farm.

Picture shows Spittal's bridge in Bannockburn. The plaque has a pair of shears, symbol of the weavers.

The Wilsons built houses for their employees in The Brae (above) and continued to extend the range of tartans they were producing, most of them designed to order rather than based on historical material. Their designs were recorded in Wilson’s ‘Key Pattern’ books of 1819 and 1840.

This is one of them, the Gunn tartan of 1831. It was an early tartan originally named after Janet, Alexander's mother, but the pattern was reassigned to 'Gunn'. This happened with many of the early designs.

With demand so high, Wilsons produced additional tartans for many of the clans. Thus the Gunn tartan most commonly found in the shops today is shown above - it's called 'Gunn Ancient'.

Over the course of the 19th century, the link between the clan and the tartan that bore its name grew in the minds and hearts of the wearers of the kilt. In the year 1800, there were about 90 named tartans. Today there are over 2500.

Pampered

Most of the lodges or camps at which we have stayed during our visits to Tanzania have set out to make their guests feel relaxed, and none does it better than a small lodge south of Dar-es-Salaam called Ras Kutani. This is well illustrated by the loungers on the beach, set in pairs well apart and each with a woven matting awning. The loungers and tables are made by local craftsmen and are very comfortable.

Being a guest at such a place is a horribly pampered existence. Take, for example, the little blue flag lying on the sand. To order another drink one simply reaches out an arm to stick it vertically into the sand, after which a cheerful man will come out and ask you what you want.

I can't lie on a lounger like this for long. It seems a terrible waste of a chance to live a life of luxury but I have to be up and doing things - but I confess that the one thing which will draw me back into the awning's shade is a glass of Tusker lager.

Whisky, Long

My father liked his whisky. In his day, the refinement of single malts were unknown to the general whisky drinker so he enjoyed blends. One of his favourites was White Horse, which was fortunate as, in his East African days, the African Mercantile, of which he was general manager, was agents for White Horse.

I drink my fancy single malts with a dash of water. Had whisky been drunk like that in the heat of the East African coast, the drinker would have been flat on his/her back in minutes. So whisky was taken 'long', that is, with plenty of water, a habit my father brought 'home' with him when he retired to England. This was my father's whisky glass, made of paper-thin glass with a pattern around the top, and....

....this is the last-remaining of our ebony coasters, on which that whisky glass would often have sat.

The Leaning Palm

A palm tree leans across the white sands of a tropical beach. It once stood proudly vertical until a high tide undermined its roots and it almost fell. It recovered; and then slowly it turned its crown upwards again, seeking the sky.

Far out across the lagoon with its shifting shades of aquamarine and indigo lies the white line of the reef. There, pressed on by the constant trade winds, the relentless swell of an ocean breaks across a coral rampart. Day and night, the tree hears this destruction as a distant, never-ending boom.

It is late afternoon. The heat of the day has subsided. Shadows stretch across the sand. As the sun sinks behind Africa....

....the skies turn red with the sunset.

It's the end of another perfect day in a place that is as close to paradise as it is possible to reach.

Early Wilson History

The Wilsons were a long-established Scottish family of which my mother, Helen Lilian Wilson, was intensely proud. The Bannockburn Wilsons were of the Gunn Clan, and she often wore a Gunn brooch - sadly, one of the many things that disappeared in her last years.

The Gunns have a Norse origin, descended from pirates who settled in the far north of Scotland around Caithness. In the 15th Century they were involved in a bloody feud with the Keiths. The daughter of Lachlan Gunn was carried off by a Keith to Ackergill where she threw herself from the top of a tower. Following a desperate but indecisive battle at Thurso the Gunns were defeated on the Muir of Tannach in 1438.

In 1464 the two sides agreed to settle their dispute amicably but the Keiths treacherously attacked the Gunns and cut them to pieces, after which most of the Gunns migrated to Sutherland.

At some point 'our' Wilsons migrated south to settle in Bannockburn, Stirlingshire. The earliest record of a Wilson in our family is of John Wilson, described as 'Burgess and neighbour in Stirling'. His son, also John Wilson, married Jean Christie in December 1727, their first son, William, having been born the previous July, according to the Old Parochial registers of St Ninians and Stirling, ‘in fornication’.

The Wilsons of Bannockburn became weavers and tartan manufacturers. William Wilson, the son of John Wilson and Jean Christie, 1727-97, was the founder of the Wilson manufacturing dynasty. His business, William Wilson and Son, was fully established in the village of Bannockburn by about 1759 and was not to be wound up until 1926.

There has been much dispute about the origin of the clan tartans but it is obvious that the tartan existed for many years before 1745, the colours not being connected to clans but varying according to the vegetable dyes available in the different districts. For example, one of the earliest tartans, one collected by the Wilsons during their researches, was the Lochaber tartan, above.

Following the ending of the Jacobite uprising at the Battle of Culloden in 1746 the tartan was outlawed. The suppression of the tartan lasted for thirty-six years with the result that many of the traditional patterns and manufacturing methods were lost. It was the literary resurgence in Scotland, led by men like Sir Walter Scott, which encouraged their return. King George IV and Queen Victoria were proud to wear the tartan.

William Wilson and Son were in the forefront of the development of the new tartans. The early ‘district’ tartans - examples of which include Lochaber, Crieff, Old Huntley, Glenorchy, Old and New Gallowater, Locheil and Perth - were based on the Wilsons’ historical research. This included travelling around the country collecting specimens of tartan but these were quickly overtaken by a wealth of new, invented patterns most of which were attached to Clan names. The seminal Wilson’s ‘Key Pattern’ books of 1819 and 1840 showed how the numbers of patterns increased. The company went on to design and make tartans for the Highland Regiments, for example the Black Watch (above), that were raised to fight the wars in Europe and the Empire.

On the Beach

This picture shows my mother and father on the beach at Nyali. Sadly, they are out of focus and the beach, for Nyali, is not at its best. The sun is full on their backs so it's late afternoon or early evening.

Nyali beach is usually blue sky, white coral sand with sea that's turquoise clear but, after a storm and a high tide has washed up seaweed all over it, it can be a bit of a mess. In the heat, the seaweed then rots, so an unpleasant smell is added to the mix.

The picture was taken in 1957 when we had the Hoey House, a beautiful bungalow which was set just back from the beach. While Richard, my mother and I spent as much time on it as possible, my father didn't like beaches so very rarely joined us, so I have no idea why he's sitting there, particularly when the beach is far from its best.

Identifying African Game

We used to visit game parks regularly when we were children growing up in Mombasa. Tsavo East was only a few hours' drive away so usually we went for the day, leaving at 3am and getting home very late.

I remember my mother buying this little book - it's about 6" by 4" and has 64 pages - at the gates of the park, where we always asked the 'askari' on duty what game had been seen recently and where.

This is my mother's handwriting in the front. That it records we were in the park for two days means that this was the one occasion I can remember when we stayed overnight, at one of the small houses at Aruba dam. The little book cost 6/50 - six shillings and fifty cents.

This is its title and that we bought the book reminds me that, before we had it, we had no way of accurately identifying the more unusual game we saw, which seems a great pity as Tsavo had a wealth of different species within its huge area.

The layout is very simple and, although all the pictures are in black-and-white, the detail was quite sufficient for us to identify the animals.

My mother wrote about that trip in her diary. We went with the Halls and the Yonges and stayed in the three houses at Aruba. The most memorable event occurred early on the second morning: we had set off from the houses for the Tsavo river when we ran into a herd of buffalo which must have numbered in the hundreds. I have only seen a comparable herd once since....

....in 2011 in the Selous Reserve in Tanzania.

Seasonal Insects

There are some beautiful insects around at the moment. Some are common ones, like this small tortoiseshell, but what makes it special is how clean and new-looking it is, which isn't surprising as....

....there are plenty of their caterpillars busy demolishing the local nettles.

This beauty is a comma with its very characteristic frayed wing....

 ....and this bright caterpillar will, hopefully, become a spectacular cinnebar moth.

However, the most impressive of the recent insects is this one, which was about 5cm long and sleeping peacefully on the post which holds up the local allotment gate. It's a privet hawk moth,

Hilda Haylett

Hilda, at left in this picture with sister Dorothy and mother Edith, was the youngest of the five children of Edith and Ernest Haylett, born in 1909.

My mother, in her biography of my father, wrote, "Cecil said when a baby was due the boys were sent off to stay with a relative who ran the Missions to Seamen somewhere down in the Thames dockland area. It was a gloomy house next to the Mission to which they had to go for services.

"Cecil used to tell of arriving home from such an exile and going into the sitting room and just being stopped in time from sitting on the new baby lying on the couch. He said it was Hilda, and he was always devoted to her.

"They were alike, in build and complexion, Frank and Kenneth being more thick-set, and Dolly the odd one out, dark with brown eyes."

In this picture, taken at Wanstead flats, Hilda is at right with Edith centre and Dolly second from left.

I know little of Hilda's early life until she started work, when she continued to live at home. As far as I know, she joined her oldest brother, Frank, in the Prudential insurance company right from the start. She was certainly working for the Prudential when her mother died in 1955. By 1956, when we spent our summer holiday in Cornwall, Hilda had a flat at Hassocks which was near where her sister Dolly and Dolly's husband Dick lived in Brighton, and Hilda travelled up to London each day with Dick.

Hilda was very elegant, with good dress sense. My mother wrote that, when Cecil returned to Zanzibar from home leave in February 1937 when they were engaged, and spent a couple of days in Zanzibar before starting work in Mombasa, "....he brought with him the engagement ring he had purchased with Dick's help, two diamonds on a twisted white gold band, known as a 'kiss ring', and a lovely evening gown which Hilda had chosen, ice blue with diamante straps and a little train...."

Hilda is seen here with her mother.

When I was christened in the cathedral in Dar-es-Salaam, my father insisted on being a godfather, the other being my mother's brother Sandy, while Mona Dunlop and Hilda were my godmothers, even though none of these could be present.

Hilda died in 1958. My mother wrote,"It was obvious that Cecil was very upset after the loss of Hilda as they had always been great friends, and it had been very sad to see Hilda dying of cancer. She had an operation in the Brighton hospital where Elsie Maynard, my old friend, was matron, and Elsie wrote to me to say that there was little hope, so Cecil was prepared."