In my mother's 'Life' she wrote of her first encounter with my father, "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 at work on time. Dad was standing on the step, in his smart shantung suit, with his hand on his back, the way I have seen Romney stand occasionally."
Little wonder, then, that one of the watercolours in her possession when she died was this one of the English Club doorway. The club was the centre of social life for many of the Europeans stationed in Zanzibar, and my mother writes about it frequently. As a woman she couldn't be a member but she had a contract to have her evening meal prepared there and brought over to her flat, but she was often the guest of young men - who didn't have to pay for her meal! As best I can tell, my father arrived in Zanzibar in March 1936.
When my mother returned to Zanzibar in 1975 with her great friend Bunch Jones, who had been the driver on that day and the Assistant Schoolmistress at the Arab Girls' School in Zanzibar during the 1930s, she took this picture. By then, the English Club had been replaced by an hotel which....
....when we visited Zanzibar in 2012, was still there, though it had been tidied up and changed its name slightly.
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