My Parents' Return to England

My parents left Mombasa in October 1961, a month after Richard and I flew back to school, but not before one of the shipping companies for which my father had been agent, the French line Messageries Maritimes, had treated them to a trip to Madagascar, Mauritius and Reunion on the Ferdinand de Lessops as a 'thank you' for all they had done.

My father travelled back to the UK on one of the Union Castle twelve-passenger ships, via Suez. It was a trip he had done many times before during his forty years on the East African coast, and he had always had a good time, but my mother wrote that it was, "with a very unfriendly captain, so I don’t think he enjoyed the voyage very much."

My mother chose a much more ambitious route, taking the train to Kampala in Uganda and then following the Nile downstream from Lake Victoria to Cairo. Most of the journey was by river steamer, of which this one, The Murchison, was one.

Throughout the journey she was the only European woman on the boat but she thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Amongst other things, she saw the great monuments at Abu Simbel, a couple of years before they were raised to the top of the cliff to avoid them being flooded by the rising waters behind the new Aswan high dam.

She left Mombasa on 28th October and arrived in London on 21st November 1961, having spent a couple of days in Athens. She had been in Africa for twenty-six years.

Helen's account of the journey, along with her voyage out to Zanzibar in 1935, is here.