Arthur Collishaw's Tables

We are very bad consumers. I fear that, if everyone was like us, manufacturing industry would long ago have ground to a halt.

Arthur's tables are a good example. We acquired them fifty years ago. They're crudely made, stained by years of use, and a bit wobbly on their legs, yet we have kept them. They do a perfectly good job while, at the same time, reminding us of happy days in our past.

We bought them off the Reverend Arthur Collishaw who was chaplain and teacher at Bernard Mizeki College in Southern Rhodesia in 1963 when I first went there, and was working with David Witt at St Anne's, Goto, in the Wedza Reserve, when Gill and I went out to Rhodesia together in 1967.

He wasn't your usual man of the cloth. He was great fun, a wonderful colleague, one of the sort of down-to-earth clergymen who were often washed up in remote places like the bush of Southern Rhodesia. He had come to  Southern Rhodesia at the invitation of Peter Canham, Bernard Mizeki's first head. Peter had known Arthur in the Gold Coast, now Ghana, where Peter had been a civil servant. From Ghana, Arthur had moved to Nyasaland, now Malawi.

Arthur was responsible for getting Gill more drunk than I have ever seen her, on brandy and vermouth, on an afternoon when David and I had gone fishing and Bibi and Gill had walked over the road to visit Arthur. David had to carry Gill home and, for a time, we rather feared for her life.

When Arthur returned to his beloved Ghana in 1968 we bought some of his belongings, including these two small side tables.

The last we heard of Arthur was in a card from Jean Farrant who reported that he was now frail and was about to retire to a home for clergy in East Grinstead.