A Long Engagement

Helen and Cecil became engaged the evening before he embarked for home leave, the 12th October 1936, even though he was determined they should not to do so until he had met Helen's parents.  They exchanged rings: Cecil gave Helen the signet ring which was his 21st birthday present, and Helen gave him a ring with the Wilson crest which she had always worn on her little finger. Cecil was very upset when he lost it on the return voyage, but she continued to wear his ring for the rest of her life.

Cecil's leave was an unhappy one. He felt he was ill-treated by Helen's family, particularly her mother and older sister Christian, both of whom, he felt, had been very rude to him. Helen's mother also wrote to Mr. McElderry, Helen’s boss in Zanzibar, demanding why he had allowed her to get engaged. Cecil was furious.

Cecil returned from home leave in February 1937 and spent a couple of days in Zanzibar with Helen before starting work in Mombasa. He brought with him an engagement ring which he had purchased with his brother-in-law, Dick's help, two diamonds on a twisted white gold band, known as a 'kiss ring'. In her turn, Helen lost this while on the beach: she always suspected that a crab had taken it.

By June Cecil was ill with malaria. It was the first time he had contracted the disease, and the doctors were worried about his chest. X-rays showed a patch on his lungs and the doctors advised Cecil's boss, Arthur Crisp, that he probably had TB and should be sent home for treatment. About the same time Helen received a letter from her mother saying that her father was very ill and Noel had managed to get him into University College Hospital, where she was doing her medical training. Helen's mother insisted that she needed to come home, so they decided that Helen should give in her notice and she sailed on the Llanstephan Castle in August. Cecil followed her on the Jaggersfontein, a Dutch ship on which he formed a life-long love of Bols gin. When Helen met the ship in Dover Roads Cecil was busy drinking in the bar and, as she described it, "saying farewell to his lady friends."

Cecil saw three specialists who all said he had not got TB so in November he returned to Zanzibar on the Malda while Helen stayed in England helping to nurse her father until his death on the 8th December, 1937, after which she travelled back to Zanzibar on the Llangibby Castle.

In late 1938 Helen's mother announced that she and Christian were coming out to Zanzibar, arriving just before Christmas, to see her married. Cecil said that nothing would induce him to marry Helen while her mother and Christian were in Zanzibar. Despite this, they sailed out on the Llangibby Castle via Cape Town. Fortunately Christian met Micky Vigne on the voyage and by the time they reached Cape Town they were engaged. Despite this, the two women continued on the ship to Zanzibar so they could get Christian’s trousseau together. In order to accommodate them Helen arranged to sleep in a friend's flat leaving her flat free for her mother and Christian. They stayed in Zanzibar over Christmas while Christian's trousseau was made and finally, to Cecil's great relief, went south to Beira and from there to Bulawayo where Christian was married.

In November 1939 Helen went on local leave with two friends, and when she returned Helen and Cecil decided that, as he was now perfectly fit, they should get married.

A Million-Pound View

I have been fortunate enough to live in two houses which had million-pound views. This is the view from one, the house at the end of Cliffe Avenue in Mombasa in which I lived during the last two holidays of my time in East Africa, in 1960 and 1961. It looked almost due east so, from the upstairs veranda from which this picture was taken, we would drink our early morning tea and watch dawn break across the Indian Ocean.

The view looked across the golf course, with its brown greens made of beaten lateritic earth; across the coast road, Azania Avenue; and across a narrow coral fringing reef to the main channel along which the larger ships approached Kilindini harbour - a merchant ship is seen leaving port. Two white-sailed jahazis are visible heading for the other harbour, the Old Port.

The 'elephant' is the remains of the wreck of the Ahmadi which came ashore in 1909 below the lighthouse at Ras Serani headland, just off the picture to the left, while a local attraction, the Florida Club, is just off picture to the right.

When my parents left Mombasa in 1961 their great friend, John Hall, painted them this picture in which he exercised a little artistic license to show part of the front garden with the bird bath being visited by a yellow weaver bird, and also the great Andromache reef which protected the approach to Kilindini and across which the great ocean swell destroyed itself in a maelstrom of white-capped breakers, the boom of that destruction a background to every moment lived in that lovely house.

Bannockburn House Trust

My mother's grandfather, Alexander Wilson, 'The Colonel', bought Bannockburn House in 1883 and held it for over twenty years until he died. One of the items I inherited from my mother was....

....a small oil painting showing the rear of the house, which had a lighter and more pleasing aspect. It shows it as it may have looked after it was built in 1675 and before the Colonel added a....

....rather ugly extension in 1884. At the same time he remodelled the front porch.

Recently the house has been taken over in a community buyout, so it is now being restored by the Bannockburn House Trust - their website is here.

I was contacted by Hugh McCusker, one of the Trust's members, and was very pleased to pass to him some pictures of items of interest which came from my mother. At a recent gathering of Trust members....

....Hugh displayed them, and he has....

....put a number of the photographs in frames on the mantelpiece in the dining room of the house.

Hugh has also been able to send me pictures of some of the Wilsons. We concluded that this one is Christian Littlejohn Wilson, the Colonel's second daughter.

That the house is being restored by the community is wonderful news, as is one of their aims - to set up a museum which will, amongst other things, celebrate the Wilsons' contribution to the development of tartan weaving in Bannockburn.

Helen & Cecil

Soon after the Zanzibar riot, in early 1936, Cecil arrived in Zanzibar for his second spell there. In the 'Life' Helen wrote for Richard and me she describes the first time she saw him. "Bunch and I used to meet at her car about 7.15am to go to work, she clasping her topi [hat] and a piece of toast. I well remember the morning when we drove up Suicide Alley and standing outside the English Club was Dad. Bunch shouted, "Cecil,” and waved, and we drove on in a rush as usual to be on time. Dad was standing on the step, in his smart shantung suit, with his hand on his back.

"A few evenings later Bunch and I were invited to the AMCo quarters for the farewell party to Wade [the man Cecil was taking over from]. The third time I met Dad was at a party given by Dicky Thomson of the National Bank of India. We talked the whole evening and decided we ought to get engaged! That was February." Yet Helen wrote that she was still mourning the death of Ian Rolleston, the assistant District Commissioner killed in the Zanzibar riot, at the end of February.

My mother had a watercolour of what was then the English Club door - top picture. Today the building houses the Africa House Hotel.

Helen and Cecil saw each other almost daily during the months that followed. Haji, Helen's 'house boy', brought a tray with her mid-morning tea to the office each day but he now called at the AMCo office en route and....

....collected a note from Cecil, written on a tiny piece of paper, and she sent her reply when the tray went back to her flat. Sadly, I don't have any of my mother's notes but one of my father's still exists. It reads, "Dear Helen, I have only just left E.T.C. - delayed owing to heavy rain. I will call for you at about 8.10pm which I....

....hope will not inconvenience you. Yours pro tem and very, very, very truly. Cecil."

They were obviously very happy together and very in love, but some of their friends were concerned about the match. Bunch Jones, who was unwell and ended up in hospital, who was a good friend of both of them, was worried because Helen was ten years younger than Cecil and, she felt, very naive. Bunch was sufficiently ill to be invalided 'home' to the UK but, before she left, she warned Helen not to get too involved. Later Bunch told her that Cecil wrote to her at Capetown to tell her he was serious and was going to take care of her.

'The India I Knew'

Most of the books which line the shelves of the room we call our office are in reasonably good condition but this one takes first prize for the worst. The spine has gone, the back cover has fallen off and one can tell it has seen tropical climes because silverfish have bored neat holes through its covers and pages.

The book was my mother's and the reason she had it was that....

....its author was her uncle, husband of her mother's older sister Lilian, after whom, I have always assumed, my mother was given her second name.

Sir Stanley had much to write about having spent fifty years in India, rising from a cub reporter to own and edit one of India's most prestigious newspapers, the Times of India.

It's a hard book to read today as Stanley wrote it with all the confident arrogance of a very influential British Imperial sahib. Perhaps this is best shown in its few illustrations, the first of which is of a dancing girl. What this says about the man I leave to you but....

....it leaves me with the same puzzlement as the only picture of the man himself, which is with an admiring woman pinning a buttonhole to his lapel.

One of the colour plates shows his house. The caption at bottom left reads The Hollow. To Mrs Stanley Reed with all good wishes. Perhaps it is Lil standing on the veranda. In 1919 my mother with her mother and two sisters travelled from Burma to spend three months with Stanley and Lil in Delhi so may have stayed in this house.

As an illustration of 'Modern India' Sir Stanley included this pictures of the offices of his paper and....

....to illustrate industrial India he chose a photo of the Tata steel works. I wonder what he would have felt had he known that, a hundred years later, Tata would own much of what was once British Steel as well as the Jaguar and Land Rover marques.

As a small boy I was terrified of Sir Stanley. Later, as a teenager, I sometimes had lunch with him, either in the restaurant which was on the ground floor of the block of flats where he lived or at his London club, the Atheneum. The last time I saw him I took Gill along to introduce her to the grand old man.

He was always very good to me: that I was able to buy a Land Rover to travel into the Sahara was because he gave me £500 - a great deal of money in those days - towards our expedition on condition that I wrote regularly to tell him how we were faring; and I am also certain that it was money from him which enabled my parents to send Richard and I to prep and public schools in England.

New Moon

This was last night's new moon, seen from our back gate across the stubble of the recently harvested barley. Ritually, I nodded to it seven times to bring me a lunar month's good luck, relieved that I hadn't first seen it through glass, which removes the luck.

I was taught these and a whole collection of other weird rituals by my deeply-religious Scots mother. I have no idea where she got them from - though I suspect her mother - but, while I have lost the faith she fought so hard to inculcate in me, I haven't shaken off the superstitions.

Worse, I have collected some additional ones as I have moved through life. So, at some point in our stay on Ardnamurchan, I was told that one should ensure that the witches were kept at bay by planting a rowan at each entry to one's property, advice which I followed both when we built our new house in Scotland and since we have been here in Suffolk.

I lingered for a few minutes as the reds grew fiercer, watching a bat criss-cross the sky as it worked for insects and listening to its squeaks muted against the deep rumble of the traffic along the A14.

The Zanzibar Riot, 1936

The life which Helen was beginning to enjoy in Zanzibar, which included learning to ride, was brought to a sudden and very sad end by the riot which occurred on Friday 7th February, 1936. The rioters were the Manga Arabs, fierce, proud and aggressive men most of whom came down from the Gulf by dhow to spend a year or so in Zanzibar making some money before returning home. A number of things upset them. One was the introduction of the East African currency of shillings and cents in place of rupees, annas and pice. Although the Government had taken some trouble to prepare the population for the change, the Manga Arabs disliked it.

A second difficulty was that the Agricultural Department was trying to improve the quality of copra so that it would attract a better price for the producers. Copra is the inner white lining of the coconut after it is dried in the sun. The department thought that it had made it clear that any copra brought to market which was not up to the new standard would be rejected, and this had happened to the crops which some of the Manga Arabs had tried to trade. Finally, it was the height of the hot season when tempers frayed and Zanzibar town was muggy and airless.

On that Friday the Arabs had come into town to attend the mosque services but instead made their way to the office of the Produce Inspector where he was was attacked. One blow from a sword lifted his scalp from the forehead backwards. Fortunately, he managed escape next door to the Clove Growers Association office.

Other European officials who went to parley with the Arabs were also attacked and injured but were rescued. However, Ian Rolleston, the Assistant District Commissioner, was killed. The police contingent, which was based out of the town, finally arrived and, in a confrontation with the rioters, killed several of them with the loss of one of their NCOs.

By this time all other Europeans in the town had gathered at the Beit al Ajaib and were being guarded by police but the expected attack never materialised, the Manga Arabs dispersing of their own accord. Helen was busy encoding cables, including one to Dar-es-Salaam which brought police reinforcements that evening.

By Saturday morning the town was returning to its normal routines but Helen continued to work, amongst other things encoding a long cable to the Secretary of State at the Colonial Office detailing what had happened. Subsequently, a Board of Enquiry was set up under a Judge Fretz with Helen present at its meetings to take the minutes and type up the report - note the kind words about Helen's work in the final paragraph of the report, below.

The events of that day and the days that followed were particularly hard for Helen. As she wrote, years later, "I celebrated my birthday on the 28th February having dinner with Bunch, and I remember weeping and being comforted by her, for I had been rather fond of Ian Rolleston."