The Silver Salver

This silver salver was presented to my father at a dinner in London after he retired from East Africa in 1961.

It came from the directors of the Liverpool-based shipping line Thomas & James Harrison. Ernest, my father's father, had been a captain in the Harrison Line and it was through him that my father got a post with a ships' agent in Port Sudan in the early 1920s. In the years between then and his retirement, he had looked after Harrison ships in Port Sudan, Beira, Zanzibar, Dar-es-Salaam and Mombasa.

My father was immensely proud of the salver, as he was of all his work as a ships' agent. However, what made the presentation particularly moving for him was the inclusion in the inscription of the word 'friend'.

Over the years my father met many of Harrison's directors and several stayed with my parents in Mombasa and Dar-es-Salaam when they were on tour. Mark Graham, whose signature is seen here, was Harrison's first representative on the East Coast and worked with my father in Mombasa, where they became close friends. He later became a director, and when I was looking for a way to get out to Southern Rhodesia in 1963, my father approached Mark Graham who offered me passage to Cape Town as a 'supernumery' on Harrison's Arbitrator.

While my parents were in Mombasa, Colonel and Mrs. Harrison - his signature is also on the salver -  stayed with them for a few days. My mother writes, "He was very lame and couldn’t walk far so the ship had a sedan chair arrangement into which he got and was then hoisted by a crane and lowered on to the dock."