A Friendship

In amongst the few photographs I have of our time in Dar-es-Salaam there are no less than four which record a weekend the family spent with Ruth and Martin Lux, a reflection of how important this couple were to my parents. In her 'Life' of my father, remembering the time early in the Second World War when they moved from Zanzibar to Dar-es-Salaam, my mother wrote, "The first friends we made in Dar were Ruth and Martin Lux, and very good friends they were to us. Martin was a German Jew who, with his parents and brother, a doctor, had escaped from Germany and moved to London. Martin had been taken on by the Old East Africa Trading Company and had married Ruth, a London Jewess, before sailing for Dar." In another part she wrote, "Ruth (above, left, with my mother) was a secretary and worked for one of the smaller firms, possibly Dalgety’s."

She also wrote, "Martin was very clever and had soon mastered the intricacies of the hides and skins business and was a help to Dad." This refers to the early years of the war when my father's firm, the African Mercantile, was very short of senior staff, with the result that my father found himself having to deal, amongst other things, with the purchase and export of Tanganyikan hides and skins, which weren't of very good quality and about which he freely admitted he knew nothing.

Judging by Richard's age, the weekend the pictures were taken must have been towards the end of our time in Dar. My mother wrote, "Martin and Ruth had a banda (a small, very basic cottage) on the south coast and we went over several times to spend the weekend with them, bathing and relaxing."

The fourth picture from that weekend is of me, not looking very happy and dressed to look, to our modern eyes, quite ridiculous. However, I'm sure of one thing: once I was released by the photographer, I would have drifted happily off to play on that glorious beach.

They saw the Luxes again, both in East Africa and in England. Martin Lux helped my mother get a job in London the year she stayed in England to take us on holiday to Cornwall, and they saw them again soon after they retired.  Then the friendship must have lapsed because I don't remember seeing them in the later years of my parents' lives.