Zanzibar Wedding Reception

My parents' wedding, on Friday 18th January 1940, took place in Zanzibar cathedral but, as I wrote in the blog entry in which I described that day - link here - the wedding photos followed at the reception at Mnazi Mmoja, just to the south of Stone Town.

What I had forgotten in that post was that my mother's album contains a photograph of the reception tea party at the McElderry's house....

....which some forty people attended. The group on the left-hand table are the same as appear in the wedding photograph, namely....

....clockwise from my father at left, Molly McElderry, Father Weigall, Margaret McElderry, bridesmaid, John McLellan, best man, SBB McElderry, who gave my mother away, Sir John Hall, the Resident, and my mother.

Now that I have these people right, I would love to know who the other 30+ people were. In her writings, my mother mentions so many people she knew in Zanzibar, and this picture will include some of her and my father's closest friends. Further, as a keen letter-writer, she kept in touch with many of her Zanzibar friends over the years, both in East Africa and in the UK, so I might even have met some of them.

My thanks to Mark Gimson, one of the McElderrys' grandsons, for tidying up the third photo.

Misty Littleferry

The forecast has been good for the last couple of days with a promise of sunshine and very light winds from the east - the worst direction as they can bring in a sea mist, the haar, from the air's contact with the still-cold North Sea waters. The haar's been around for two days and it hung around throughout our two-hour wander along the beach at Littleferry, where.... 

....there was precious little to see other than a few waders - oystercatchers and ringed plovers - gulls and small groups of eider, so we....

....walked back along the links, where there was rather more happening.

For a start, we found the first heath milkwort of the season in amongst the damp grasses and....

....this very pretty pink flower which, frustratingly, I've been unable to identify.

Near it we found two eggs lying amid the grass stalks, one broken, almost certainly those of a skylark, but there was no sign of a nest nearby.

Sun!

Much to the consternation of some residents, who had forgotten what the bright orange object in the sky was, the sun came out yesterday afternoon and gave us a beautiful evening. This is the skating pond which, despite a cold winter, never froze over enough to be used, with brown trout rising to take flies from a recent hatch, flies which will also....

....be welcome food for this, the first damselfly of the year, a large red. Seeing it was a surprise as we didn't find the first dragon- or damselfly last year until 1st June, so this one is early, particularly  considering the recent temperatures.

Also out on the waters was Mrs Mallard. We don't know if it's the same female as we saw last year but she, too, had only two ducklings.

Here's a surprise, a brown-lipped snail at the top of a gorse bush, which must have been a prickly journey. One wonders whether there was a purpose for so much effort or whether, like human mountaineers on Everest, the snail climbed it just because it was there.

Finally, here is a welcome find, the first common lizard we've seen in Sutherland, camouflaged as a root on the side of a ditch. I'm surprised they're so scarce. Perhaps it's a bit cold for them here, although there are plenty of the drystone walls which make such good homes for them.

SBB McElderry Biography

One of the people who had a huge influence on the course of my mother's life was SBB McElderry, Chief Secretary in the colonial administration in Zanzibar when she first went out there in 1935. It was he who appointed her to the post of office assistant in the Zanzibar secretariat and supported her when she, very indiscreetly, spoke to a reporter at the Daily Express the day she sailed from London.

Later, McElderry gave my mother away at her wedding, and the reception was at the McElderry's house.

Nigel Wenban-Smith is Boyd McElderry's grandson, son of Ruth Wenban-Smith, Boyd's eldest daughter, through whom Helen first heard that the post was becoming available.

Nigel has written a biography of his grandfather which he has generously allowed me to publish. It tells the story of a remarkable man and makes me appreciate how very fortunate my mother was in having his help and encouragement.

Nigel's biography of Boyd McElderry can be downloaded here.

Picture shows Boyd McElderry at his daughter Kathleen's wedding in 1945, courtesy Mark Gimson.

Two-and-a-Half Squirrels

This morning we walked up to visit the most northerly population of Scottish red squirrels in their forest fastness above Dunrobin Castle - if, that is, the single individual we've seen each time we've visited in the past counts as a 'population'.

Happily, he or she was at home but stayed high in its favourite Douglas fir. Even when it deigned to descend it still....

....kept itself hidden, peering at us as if, even from thirty metres up, it didn't trust us. However....

....it slowly, tantalisingly, came lower in the tree until it was suddenly joined....

....by a second. According to Mrs MW there may even have been a third but, since I didn't see it, we'll count it as a half.

Happily, the two are easily distinguished, the second squirrel having a brown tail while the first has an unusually pale one.

Brown Tail stayed high but Pale Tail made a tentative approach to one of the feeding boxes low down in the tree, finally deciding we were innocuous enough to....

....open the lid and select something to eat.

We then had the pleasure of watching it for some time. As long as we moved around slowly it didn't seem bothered by us, which suggests it has a regular supply of visitors, which isn't surprising as these are very attractive animals to watch.

This is Pale Tail on the alert, prompted by a woodpecker drumming on a nearby tree.

There is a second population above the local cottage hospital at the southern end of the village but we have yet to see any of its members. Both groups were introduced at the end of last year. At least the Dunrobin pair have managed to survive what has been a long, cold and damp winter.

Loch Lunndaidh

This was the Golspie Burn yesterday afternoon after twenty-four hours that brought almost an inch of rain so our choice of walks this morning was limited by the muddiness of the paths. One good all-weather walk leads from Drummuie through forestry onto open moorland and to Loch Lunndaidh, so we took it in the hope of seeing an osprey, although....

....even this track had more than its usual share of standing water. The puddle in the foreground here was of interest in that it contained....

....no fewer than five smooth newts which had reached it from the ditch to the right. Why they so favoured a shallow puddle rather than the much more concealing ditch seems a bit of a mystery but another puddle also had newts in it so these newts must favour shallow water for something. Courting?

Spring - if a season with this weather may be termed spring - is at the stage where finds of the 'first' of wildflower species come thick and fast. This is the first of a particular favourite of mine, common butterwort, as it's beauty masks a secret: it's an insectivore.

As we approached Loch Lunndaidh we thought we spotted what we had come in the hope of seeing....

....but.... is it an osprey? Unfortunately the sighting was of the bird in silhouette at some distance and, to be honest, I can't be sure that it is an osprey rather than a buzzard.

Larger Bird News

The last time we saw a guinea fowl was in Saadani National Park in Tanzania but this one is resident, along with a partner, at Golspie Tower farm where their main job seems to be to make a lot of noise, something at which guinea fowl excel.

Also resident on the farm is this cock pheasant which, when we saw him, was parading around in full view in the middle of a large field. It shows how sadly this area is lacking in top predators not only to persuade pheasants to keep their heads down but also to reduce the number of crows and gulls that infest it.

By contrast, his wife was right at the side of the field, very close to the road where we were walking. Her reaction to our approach was to crouch down and pretend we couldn't see her. I'm pleased we could - she may be dressed in muted colours but she's very prettily patterned.

Our morning was made by the arrival on one of our many peanut feeders of a great spotted woodpecker which not only enjoyed a hearty meal but also came back for seconds. The small birds don't like him: while he was on the feeder they made themselves scarce.

Ernest Haylett"s Death Certificate.

My father's old Arab chest, bought off the nahoda (captain) of a dhow in Zanzibar harbour, continues to reveal items from our family's history. The other day I found this, the death certificate issued for Captain Ernest Haylett when his body arrived in the UK at the beginning of October 1930. As can be seen, he died on 30th September 1930 at sea aboard a mail-carrying ship, the Highland Princess, and the internet soon produced.... 

....a picture of the ship. Taken in 1932, she's seen here in the colours of the Nelson Line, the funnel from top being black-white-black-white-red. In that year she was bought by the Royal Mail Line but she was carrying mail in 1930 on the London - Vigo - Las Palmas - Rio de Janeiro - Montevideo - Buenos Aires route served by the company.

This is the location at sea, latitude 44.58ºN longitude 8.04ºW, where he died. The ship would have just left Vigo, which is to the south of La Coruna. Normally the captain would have buried Ernest at sea but my grandmother insisted the body be brought back to England, and he was buried in the City of London cemetery in Wanstead, close to where she lived.

One of the causes of Ernest's death is recorded as colitis. My father told me that Ernest had suffered from ulcers for years and was reduced in his last days to a diet of milk and whisky. Ulcerative colitis is now thought to be an autoimmune disease. The main symptoms when a flare-up occurs are recurring diarrhoea, which may contain blood, mucus or pus, tummy pain, and the need to empty your bowels frequently; and these may be brought on by stress. See NHS website here.

Wet Woodland Walks

For the last two days the wind has been firmly in the northeast drawing cold, damp air from Norway down across the North Sea into northern Scotland. In the face of winds at force four to five, persistent rain, and temperatures struggling to reach 7C, we've walked in the protection of the woodlands that surround Golspie. Yesterday we spent an hour or so wandering through the woods around Dunrobin Castle where the bluebells are nearing their best before....

....coming down to the coast and, with the wind and rain now behind us, following the beach back to town.

There wasn't much to see in the way of shore birds but, where we expected to see them we instead....

....found swallows, huddling down on the sand. I can only think that, with a severe lack of flying insects, they were doing this to conserve energy. Certainly, we were able to approach very close before, reluctantly, they took off. With the weather today, if anything, colder and wetter that yesterday, we also noticed an almost total lack swallows and martins on the wing.

Today's walk was in Balblair Wood near Littleferry. Had the sun been out this would have been a cheerful picture illustrating, as it does, the one plant that seems to be thriving in this miserable weather: gorse.

Much of the walk was along the shore of Loch Fleet where we hoped to see an osprey. In the event we saw very little. In this picture a small group of eider are attended by a couple of gulls and a cormorant, but elsewhere on the loch all we could find was the occasional curlew, a dozen or so shelduck, in pairs, a few mallard and, on the rapidly flooding sandbanks on the far side of the loch, about fifty seals.

The weather promises to improve tomorrow. It can hardly get much worse.

Washing my Ears

This morning I washed my ears, something I don't do too often partly because it reminds me of one of the disciplines of my prep school all those years ago. Other than the most senior pupils we slept in dormitories of ten or more beds. The beds had steel frames and steel springs which squeaked, the latter usually damaged by people jumping on them so the kapok mattresses sagged; they were pretty lumpy anyway and their cotton covers had often been stained when some unhappy small boy had wet them. For bedclothes we had a thin underblanket, then lower and upper sheets, then another blanket, one of those grey army-type blankets with coloured cotton stitching at both ends. We were expected to provide additional bedding, usually in the form of a miserably thin quilt which frequently slid off the bed. I used to double the upper blanket to try to increase the warmth but one of my abiding memories of Glengorse was of being cold in bed. Both the upper and lower bedclothes were made with 'hospital corners'.

When the bell to get up was rung we all trooped through to the wash room which, like the dormitory, was freezing in winter as there was no heating, where we did our teeth, scrubbed our hands, necks, faces and - very important - our ears. We then dressed, made our beds, and stood beside them until one of the matrons came round to inspect. Hands out in front, fingers together; when she nodded, we turned them over. She then looked at our face and, on a nod, we turned to expose our right ear, then our left. She might pull an ear to inspect it closely. If they were dirty comments were made about growing potatoes in them, and we were sent back to the wash room to try again. Finally she would inspect the bed to make sure it was correctly made; if it wasn't it would be stripped and we had to start again.

I hated this regime yet accepted it. I'm not usually a particularly philosophical person but I saw no point in kicking against it. My parents were 5,000 miles away and my only communication with them a weekly air letter which one of the masters read and checked before it was sealed and posted. I had nowhere to run away to, no-one with whom I could share my unhappiness: weakness was despised. The best thing to do was get on with life and count down the days until the summer holiday when I would be back sleeping in a sweat-soaked bed wearing nothing but a kikoi round my waist and surrounded by a mosquito net.

I'm in rugby kit in this picture. Rugby was the spring term sport so there are probably about four months to go until I boarded the aeroplane. My ears stick out, perhaps from the pulling they had from the matrons.

Fungal Weather

It has been raining here, a lot. The place drips with water. The ground squelches underfoot. Our seeds germinate, the first leaves poke their heads above the earth and then turn round and dive back down. If George appears on his statue it is only briefly, and then wreathed in good Scottish mist; and, as one would expect....

 

....the fungi absolutely love it.

This is spring, for Goodness' sake. Fungi are autumnal things. 

I take their pictures, my camera wet, and then try to identify them. Occasionally, I think I succeed. This may be Parasola plicatilis, also known, to confuse us, as Parasola plicatilis; or, in English, umbrella inky cap.

This one is very delicate, almost felty, and should be easy to identify. It isn't, but it's so pretty I might keep trying. 

These ones are the fungal versions of little brown jobs. They live in meadowland by Dunrobin caste and should be identifiable. I've given up.

This intriguing slimy mess on a rotten log should, again, be easy to find. It may be a variety of witches' butter but it's too gelatinous and lacks form. Another for me to shrug my shoulders at.

This.... I'm not even sure it's a fungus. It's growing on a dead gorse branch that's been marinating in a  ditch of peaty water all winter. The lower part is white, the upper bright yellow. If it isn't a fungus I haven't a clue what it is.

I like to live in an ordered world, where everything is nearly labelled and knows its place. Fungi frustrate me.