'Bear'

This is my bear. I have no idea when I got him or who gave him to me or, really, anything about him - not even his name - except that he's been with me a very long time and has travelled the world with me.

He has a lovely face with a slightly lopsided smile on it, as if, despite the loss of one eye, he knows exactly what's going on and what I'm thinking.

Life hasn't been easy for 'Bear' and he bears the scars of heavy use. For anything with less fortitude and less loved, that gaping hole in his leg would have been terminal.

He's a very aristocratic bear. He was made by Chad Valley who were 'By Appointment - Toy Makers', though it doean't actually say who they were 'by appointment' to.

However, 'Bear' wasn't my first bear. This picture, taken in Leytonstone when we were on leave in 1946, shows me with another bear. At some point, this bear was lost and 'Bear' replaced him.

'Bear' could never have travelled to school with me in all those grim years I was in England - I'd have been laughed at by fellow pupils - so he must have waited in Mombasa for my return. Later he became one of the inhabitants of the little brown case.

He and Gill's Buster now live together in gentle retirement in a very comfy woven basket.

Deserts

The term 'desert' in relation to a landscape tends to mean a hot, dry place with very little in the way of vegetation or other forms of life, so places like the Sahara and the Namib spring to mind. In an earlier, and perhaps more correct English sense, it meant a place which was deserted of human life, so might equally refer to Antarctica or the northern Canadian tundra.

There is something utterly beautiful about a hot, dry desert. Perhaps it is its simplicity, that it is land stripped to the bone; perhaps it is the silence, the sense of vastness, perhaps it is the colours, less at midday when the intensity of the light bleeds them out of the landscape, more in the clean light of dawn or the dusty light of evening; perhaps it is its emptiness, a place where one can be utterly alone with oneself; certainly it is the wonder of the desert night sky, where the stars burn so bright and close one feels one could reach out and touch them. Perhaps, too, a desert's beauty also lies in a sense of awe, that it is a terribly dangerous place, a place where man must tread only with the utmost wariness.

I have seen two of the world's great deserts, the Sahara and the Namib. I spent time in the Sahara when I was hitch-hiking in North Africa, time sitting by the side of a road with nothing to look at but a barren landscape, time spent hunkered down under the heat, time spent appreciating my puniness against its magnificence. The Namib I visited for a few days, enough to remember and to wish we could have stayed longer.

In both deserts there was something very special indeed about those places where the land met a greater desert - in the older sense of the word - the sea, and where it also met the sky, so three deserts met; and the breakers which washed onto the beach mixed their three elements together, earth, air and water.

Cecil in Port Sudan - 2

Cecil had very few photographs and those he had were mounted in an album which had been used before. Most of the Port Sudan pictures, many of which are post cards, have no captions, but the few that are there give some idea of daily life.

Cecil lived in a 'mess' (above) with other young men working in Port Sudan.

One of the comments he made about the Port Sudan mess is that it was very well furnished with furniture from England. This is the dining room with one of the residents sitting at the table with a servant standing behind him.

The caption to this picture, taken in the mess, is 'Me'. It doesn't look much like my father but the brass tray in the foreground is very similar to the one of his which I still have.

The caption to this photo reads, "Sunday morning picnic in the hills 6 miles inland. Early morning - had to be back by 8.30 to avoid the heat. Phillips (centre, with his children) was manager, Welsh, a nasty piece of work. Joe Carlsson (left) was my friend and a wonderful violin player. Joe played in our dance orchestra and was a customs officer, also a first class pianist. Had little work to do so entertained the passengers as often as possible to pick up a girlfriend." Cecil is at right.

The caption to this photograph in Cecil's album states that two British naval sloops were permanently stationed in Port Sudan to control the slave trade which was still active in the Red Sea.

There are several post cards from Aden in the album, which suggests that, at some point in his time in Port Sudan, Cecil crossed the Red Sea to visit it.

Ernest Haylett’s ship called regularly at Port Sudan so he must have seen that his son, for all the pressure, was enjoying himself. However, the overwork resulted in Cecil becoming so ill that, in 1927, he had to be set home to England with suspected stomach ulcers, the doctor fearing he might not survive the voyage. He did, the problem was diagnosed as appendicitis and, after an operation and a well-earned holiday, he returned to Port Sudan.

Leaving The Plume - 1

By the end of 1996, when I left, I had been at The Plume for over fifteen years. I felt at home there, very much part of the furniture, but an active and, I hope, effective teacher. I sought to set standards: if there was a rule, like not wearing rings in school, it should be enforced, so I went round with small brown envelopes in my pocket into which the offending object could be put when it was confiscated for a month.

I had worked well with the head, Alan Bilby. He understood I liked constant challenge so moved my area of responsibility frequently. So, for example, having started as head of curriculum 11-14 I became head of middle school, then responsible for the buildings when we went grant maintained, and finally head of sixth form; as a senior teacher I was a member of the senior management team; I wrote software to help sort students into their preferred subject options; and I continued to be an active trade unionist. But the time and energy spent in constant management exercises detracted from the one thing I loved....

....which was the actual teaching. This is a picture taken in the geology lab with my first 'A' level geology group, one of the best classes I taught in my thirty years in the profession. The picture was taken for the sixth form brochure and it is the only one I have of me doing my teaching job.

Teaching geology meant going on field trips. This is the same sixth form class on their upper sixth trip, to Shropshire, in 1996: we stayed at Preston Montford Field Studies Centre while studying the superb geology of Shropshire, which I had explored while at Ludlow Grammar School in the early 1970s.

Three things confirmed my decision that I should leave. My union, the NAS/UWT, published some research which suggested that, if a male teacher did his full 40 years at the chalk-face, he could expect to enjoy two years' retirement. Then Peter Came, left, a wonderful teacher, began to show signs of strain and was persuaded to retire, only to die within a few months of leaving. Finally, I wanted to create more time in which to write.

The Parkgate

This picture is one of two in my old album which show ships which had just passed in front of our last house in Mombasa, at the end of Cliff Avenue, and are entering Kilindini harbour. Beyond her and to the left are the breakers of the Andromache reef, and the headland behind her is Ras Mwa Kisinga. The photo is little different from the other one, which is on the same page of the album, because two tugs are in attendance.

This intrigued me. Tugs didn't normally escort vessels into Mombasa harbour unless there was a problem, so I looked up  the list of 'Strandings & Salvage on the Kenya Coast 1799 - 2017' in Kevin Patience's excellent book Shipwrecks  and Salvage on the East African Coast, and found the story of the Parkgate.

Her master sent out an emergency call on 4th September 1960 from a position 900 miles north of Mombasa following a breakdown of her engines, and was towed into port by one of my father's ships, the Harrison Line Journalist....

....which is the ship in the other picture (above). The two pictures were taken on the same day. I hadn't noticed it before but in this one the tow line can be seen extending from the stern of Journalist.

The two ships arrived in Mombasa on 17th September. Under the insurer's 'no cure, no pay' agreement, Harrisons was awarded £15,000 for the salvage, of which £5,000 went to the crew.

The tug to the right is East African Railway & Harbour's Nyati while the one to the left is the EAR&H Kongoni.

A Bear Called Buster

Buster is Gill's teddy bear. He dates back to when Gill was nine, 1953, when she had a tonsillectomy in Gloucester Hospital and her granny, who lived in Bexhill, felt she needed cheering up.

So Granny Mitchell, who was in her sixties, walked from Bexhill to Hastings and back, a total distance of something like ten miles, to buy Buster - picture shows her with Gill when Gill was two.

Buster joined Gill's sister Pauline's bear, Binny, in the household at Estcourt Road, Gloucester. Considering his age - he's 66 human years which must be at least twice as many in bear years - he's in remarkably good condition. Gill did look after Binny for a while but doesn't know what happened to her.

Buster is now in comfortable retirement with us having seen a a fair bit of the world.

Cecil in Port Sudan - 1

Ernest Haylett saw that Cecil wouldn't make much progress at Scruttons so he found him a job with a ship’s agents in Port Sudan (above). He called at Scruttons' office to tell his son that the owner, a Greek called Contimichaelos Darke, was coming to England and would interview him. Cecil met him and was given the job. Before he left, his boss at Scruttons was good enough to organise him some valuable work experience in London docks.

Both father and son knew that Edith would be bitterly opposed to her 'delicate' son disappearing off to a place as outlandish as the Sudan, to work for a foreigner, so neither said anything until all the arrangements were made. As expected, she was furious but accepted what was a fait accompli, kitted him out with - mostly inappropriate - tropical gear, and saw him off at Liverpool. The move was the making of him. Cecil left England in 1923, aged 21.

Port Sudan is on the Red Sea coast of Sudan and was its main port. The heat is extreme, with summer temperatures regularly over 40C, the highest ever recorded being 48.6C. Judging by the main street, the town itself must have been a bleak place in 1923.

This picture shows the shipping agency offices in Port Sudan, one of which, presumably, was where Cecil learned the skills he would use for the next 38 years on the east coast of Africa. Large shipping companies might have their own offices in important ports, but in small ports most entrusted their interests to a shipping agency.

The agent’s job was to look after the ship from the moment it came in to harbour until the moment it left, dealing with both passengers and cargo. The cargo had to be obtained, usually from up-country and against stiff competition, transported to the coast and, through stevedoring companies, loaded onto the ship.

Cecil learned to take pride in watching one of ‘his’ ships leave port loaded down to the Plimsoll Line: ie, as full as she could safely be.

Port Sudan was a 24-hour port, with ships arriving and leaving at all hours of day and night, so Cecil worked impossibly long hours. When he went out to a ship as it approached port, he often had to climb aboard up a steel ladder: he soon learned to wear gloves, for the steelwork of the ship was so hot the crew could fry an egg on it. His job was get the cargo for Port Sudan unloaded, the goods from the Sudan loaded, the ship filled with the bunkers (coal) it needed, and turned around as quickly as possible.

While most of the few pictures of Post Sudan in Cecil's album are post cards, this is a photograph of work on the docks, and one wonders whether Cecil is one of the men in it. Cecil was exploited by Contimichaelos Darke simply because he was conscientious and good at his job. In particular, he had a talent for dealing with people, be they the local Fuzzy-Wuzzies (as he called them) who worked the ships, the stevedore company, the captains, many of whom were arrogant, or his Greek boss.