Whitesands

In the summer of 1959 Richard and I flew out to Mombasa to a new house, the third house we'd had in Cliff Avenue and the one from which my father would retire in 1961. At first it was a disappointment - well, anything would be after the last time we'd been out, in 1957, when our parents lived at the Hoey House, right on the beach at Nyali, see post here - but instead we found old friends and spent our holiday in the company of a wonderful group of young people.

For reasons best known to her, and even though Richard and I were very happy, my mother decided that the family should get away together, so she booked a rondavel at Whitesands Hotel to the north of Mombasa which, like the Hoey house, was right on the beach.

The short break was a disaster. As my mother wrote in her Life of my father, "I think it was on these holidays that we went up to Whitesands for a weekend so as to be right on the beach and swim and paddle as much as we liked. Dad did this very grudgingly as he didn't like the beach, never bathed, and couldn't understand how we liked sand in our food." As far as Richard and I were concerned, while we enjoyed the beach we would probably have preferred to the back in Mombasa with our friends. And I know my mother was very unhappy.

The hotel still exists today, but much changed from the simple place we remember - a link to today's Sorova Whitesands Hotel is here.

Ernest Haylett's Last Years

My father, left, with his father Ernest in the garden at the Wanstead house, was working in the west end of London for a company which imported dress materials, such as laces, from France, a job his mother had found him. She always considered him to be delicate and felt that he could cope with the work. Ernest had other ideas. He organised Cecil a job as an office boy with his old company, Scruttons, who, although they had sold their ships, retained their interests on the docks, mainly in providing labour. My father enjoyed this work much more, particularly as his employer was very good to him, often lending him his season ticket to the Oval so he could go to watch cricket.

Ernest Haylett expected more of him so found Cecil another, much more ambitious job - with a ship’s agency in Port Sudan, working for a Greek called Contimichaelos Darke. My father left England in 1923 and worked in Port Sudan for five years, where he saw his father (pictured together above in 1924) whenever he came through on his ship.

In 1928 Ernest felt that his son should move again, so he obtained him a job with T.B.F. Davis in Beira.

In 1930 Ernest's ship Defender (below) called at Beira, and on going aboard Cecil found him very ill, so ill that the Chief Officer was very concerned for him. He had an ulcer and found eating anything difficult, so the Chief used to mix him condensed milk with a shot of whisky.

The old man became much worse on the voyage home after leaving Cape Town and the Chief obtained permission to divert to Madeira where Captain Haylett was admitted to hospital. He was eventually put aboard Highland Princess, a Royal Mail ship, whose captain volunteered to take him to England, but he died in the English Channel. Cecil always regretted that his mother insisted on Ernest's body being brought home instead of being buried at sea.

Ernest's grave is in the City of London cemetery in Wanstead, east London.

Kilchoan Holidays

In 1992 Elizabeth attended a dinner at Magdalen College at which she met a fellow Cambridge student who was due to do her teaching practice at The Plume school and was looking for lodgings in Maldon. On the strength of what we earned from Susan staying with us, our 1993 summer holiday was the most ambitious holiday yet, the location - a small village on the west coast of Scotland called Kilchoan - chosen by David. Although Katy had left home we invited everyone and, somewhat to our surprise, the whole family came.

We took a croft house - Mull View, above - for a week and travelled up by train to Inverness, where we hired a Discovery to take us to Kilchoan. The weather was surprisingly good for August, though....

....as happens on the west coast, there were a few duller days - this is the beach near Mingary Castle.

This holiday changed the course of our lives for we fell in love with Ardnamurchan and, as a result, came back....

....as often as we possibly could, even buying a car, a lovely white Volvo 240 automatic estate, that enabled us to do the run north from Essex in just under 12 hours.

Lizzie was still based at home so she sometimes came up with us, David came during his holidays, and we also took a cottage on two occasions with our long-time friends, the Hizzards.

This is beach cricket at Sanna with David, Rachael and the Hizzards. By this time we were seriously thinking of moving up to the west coast. Then, on one of our visits to Sanna, I fell into conversation with a woman who told us that the shop in Kilchoan was for sale. We took a look at it but found it in very poor condition so decided not to show any further interest, looking instead at a number of other businesses locally, none of which suited us.

A Cold May

It's been so cold for May that some of the early insects haven't been able to cope. This peacock butterfly lay collapsed on a grass verge but....

....recovered a little in the warmth of my hand.

Despite the cold some species are appearing. This is the first brimstone moth I have ever seen, hiding under an overhang of the sea wall as if it knew that....

....one of the heavy thundershowers that are due to bring an improvement to the current temperatures was about to burst around us.

For some, cold or rain, the business of attracting a mate and setting up home has to continue. This reed bunting was singing from a vantage point above one of the fleets that drain the local marshes.

Edith Haylett

Ernest married Edith King who came from Winterton in Norfolk. This picture of Edith must have been very special as it was the one Ernest kept in his wallet, which my father gave to me, and it was also....

....used in a pair of small paintings of her and Ernest, done on ivory in 1956, long after Ernest was dead.

The only pub in Winterton today is this one, The Fisherman's Return, so perhaps Edith worked here.

Edith and Ernest had five children. Frank was the oldest, and my father Cecil was followed by Kenneth, Dorothy and Hilda. The family lived in Leytonstone, East London, where Cecil and the younger children were born, but when Ernest became master of his own ship....

....they moved to a much bigger house, 57 Belgrave Road, in Wanstead. My father said that he could remember a zeppelin coming over the Wanstead house, picked out by searchlights, during the First World War.

In this picture, I don't know who the two ladies are in dark clothes but Dorothy (Dolly) is at left, Hilda is sitting, Edith is at centre back, and the lady at right is Ernest's sister, Katie.

In Cecil's ‘Life’ which my mother wrote, she describes the undercurrents in this household in detail. Edith had a hard time controlling five children when Ernest was away at sea for weeks at a time, with Kenneth the most difficult. I think these prolonged absences of his father's was one reason why my father was so against my going to sea.

To give some idea of the regime, at mealtimes Edith would sit at the head of the table with a cane at her right hand. Their plates had to be cleared otherwise they weren’t allowed to get down from table. Serious transgressions, which mainly involved Kenneth, were reported to Ernest when he came home. Picture shows Edith with Dolly, right, and Hilda. It was taken in June 1919, in their garden in Wanstead.

Cecil seems to have got on well with Frank but had a particular affection for Hilda who was, physically, very similar to him. I remember Hilda well. She was a lovely lady, very elegant and always smiling. She is seen here at right, with her mother Edith. She worked in the same company as her oldest brother Frank, the Prudential. Sadly, she died at a relatively early age, of cancer.

While I do not remember my grandfather, I do my grandmother. She lived her last years with her oldest son Frank and his wife Grace (above, with Edith) in their flat at Rivermead Court in Fulham.

The Rhiwbach Slate Quarry

The Rhiwbach slate quarry at Cwm Penmachno in Conway lies at the head of the Machno valley. A few miles away lies Betwys-y-Coed. It was a sunny bank holiday Monday when we visited and Betwys was crowded. In the hours we explored the area round the mine we saw five other people.

It's another of those places I loved exploring. There are some 200 years of visible history here, and many more probably buried, so it's rich ground for a fertile imagination.

The most evident sign of the mining are the thousands of tonnes of spoil which are piled across several hillsides. If this is the spoil, one wonders how much finished slate went away to market.

The mine goes down some eight levels underground, most of it now flooded after being abandoned in the 1950s.

Slate must be an almost unique product in that it can also be used to construct a high proportion of the factory buildings where it was cut. As can be seen, the works site is extensive. The engine house in the foreground powered the slate wagons, and the finished slate was taken out by the Rhiwbach Tramway to the Ffestiniog Railway at Blaenau Ffestiniog from where it travelled to a wharf at Porthmadog. From there, I would imagine, it went across the world.

Because the works was so remote the men and their families lived on site, in some of the buildings seen in the background. There was a school and a shop. Sitting in the buildings one could see them all occupied. The day e were  there their occupant was a female hen harrier.

Many thanks to Rachael for taking us there. There's more about the Rhiwbach site here.

The Summers of 1992 - 1994

My children will have to correct me if I have some of my dates wrong but it seems to me that a great deal happened in the summers of 1992-4. For a start, Elizabeth graduated from Cambridge having read architecture at Sidney Sussex - the picture shows her at the graduation ceremony which took place in beautiful weather.

Katy took her A levels in 1992 and, although she had the option of going up to university, chose to go into industry, accepting a job at the French chemical company Rhone-Poulenc. Picture shows her in 1994.

David, who had followed Katy to our local comprehensive, The Plume, won an assisted place at Felsted, a public school in north Essex.

Rachael continued to demonstrate how a modern young lady dressed both formally and....

....informally.

The headmaster at The Plume had asked me to introduce geology at 'A' level so at the end of the 1993 summer holidays Gill and I spent a couple of nights in an hotel in Swanage while I collected fossils for the new geology collection.