Category: Pre-WW2

When we first heard the King’s speech on the wireless, it was really a celebration of the Empire and its reinforcement, tightening the ties. My first recollection of Empire Day, although I know it was celebrated in most schools in England, was when it was celebrated in Livingstone. Unsurprisingly it was a ‘great day’, which started with some form of
military ceremony presided over by the Governor of Northern Rhodesia, followed by presents, games, and finishing with a bun fight for the children.

There was no doubt the early indoctrination of patriotic ideals and the strength of the bond between most of the population and the Crown was a feature of English life before the war, and never more so than in 1935 when we had The Jubilee, the Royal Funeral and then the Coronation of George VI. On the actual days of celebration there were sporadic street parties, and all the towns and villages were decked out. The papers had a field day with special editions and school children were involved up to the hilt. All the Crowned Heads of Europe and the potentates of the Empire were assembled and London was agog. Souvenirs were on sale everywhere and the London County Council (LCC) gave every child a commemorative EPNS spoon and an embossed or painted mug for both occasions and, in the case of the Jubilee, there was a separate parade by the King and Queen and all the panoply down The Mall at about midday especially for the children.. Public transport and special coaches brought the children there. Stalls, toilets and first aid stations had been erected in the Park and the youngsters had to be in place quite early. I was there, in the front row halfway down the Mall and constantly there was something to watch. For the first hour the excitement was enough but then we would see troops of soldiers on horseback, police on horseback and other people passing and re-passing, and each time a cheer would go up. The trees, lamp standards and the streets were decorated with flags and bunting from the real celebration and the atmosphere was electric. For whatever reason, patriotism was tangible.

On a purely personal level I regret the advice given to the Royals to come off their dais and try to meet the commoners on the same level. Their own history should have warned of the pitfalls awaiting them, and if they had only followed the progress of the Continental Press, after all they are fluent in the languages, they would have seen where it would all lead. Changing course, no matter how or when, will never retrieve what, in effect, we have all lost. The Dutch achieved the change, but I suspect their press is either more controlled or less aggressive.

The Severely Maligned London County Council
Londoners prized the LCC because of its Avant Garde approach to community care in all senses and aspects. The parks in Greater London, which were generally called ‘The Common’ by the locals, were valued and widely used. Well before ’33, when I sat the examination , the LCC had introduced a form of the Eleven Plus into the Public Elementary School system and I believe the general public were delighted and thought the LCC was advanced in its educational policies. There was no concern for the children being subjected to strain, everyone was only too glad to get the opportunity to have a chance of subsidised further education, instead of leaving at fourteen to become apprenticed, to work behind a counter or lean on a shovel. That it introduced segregation and consequently another category to the class system was evident, possibly resented by a few of the relegated, but accepted as a necessary ill by the majority. I still believe the LCC was right. In retrospect, there is no doubt that there was stress, there were times when tears were the order of the evening, when rows developed over nothing more serious than the answer to a homework question, but those times returned again after the Eleven Plus, they had to for all but geniuses. It is automatically part of the examination ethos and assessment is unlikely to convince an employer of an applicant’s ability An interesting highlight on this last view was the widely held notion among candidates for professional posts, right up until the ’80’s that appointment boards throughout the country, were more impressed by the number of institutions a candidate belonged to rather than either his experience or the quality of those same institutions. It seems that examinations have a psychological effect on employers. I think the LCC were first to use occupational psychology. About 1937/8 I attended aptitude tests, intelligence testing, the solving of problems and practical tests such as reassembling a mortise lock. They decided I was suited to Architecture – I became a Civil Engineer – close!

Returning to a British school in 1930 seemed totally alien from what I had experienced in Africa. The hours were different, I had to walk over a mile each way to school, morning and afternoon and the classes were bigger. When I arrived we worked with rooms lighted by gaslight in winter afternoons and, worst of all, I was out of my depth through losing two whole years of schooling. I sat next to a boy who constantly wet himself and there was a permanent aroma. We were not allowed to change seats because it saved the teacher calling the roll twice a day, as we sat in alphabetical order – unfortunately. I remember one teacher who had come from New Zealand and who seemed only to teach Maori customs. She had us making endless native huts and constantly drawing maps of the place.

There was a strong amateur dramatic interest in the school with end of term plays and it was about this time that I learned sword dancing. The swords were made in the school woodwork shop, where the woodwork master was not averse to throwing bad work at the head of the poor incompetent who had made it, and he rarely missed. The dance called for eight participants and as we danced round we put the swords to our shoulders, and with a good deal of pushing and wrestling, twisting and turning, we managed to get the swords locked together to form an octagon, rather like a large Jewish Star. The whole shape was held in the air by one sword, by the team leader; when it was lowered the swords were withdrawn with a flourish, clashed together high in the centre, like the thin spire of a church and then the dance continued. We gave exhibitions, why I never quite understood, because it was a very dull dance, every bit as dull as Morris Dancing, especially as we were too young to get well oiled before we started. I suppose that was the main difference. I also became re-acquainted with discipline. (See Sex & Child Abuse) Nowadays young people seem to think for themselves more than we did, they are more cynical and less malleable, or do I imagine that?

Believe it or not, it was an honour to be ink monitor. Can one think of any greater example of brain washing than to make a child actually want to go to school earlier on Monday morning and stay later on Friday afternoon than his compatriots, get his hands filthy dirty with an almost permanent stain and perhaps ruin a perfectly good shirt into the bargain, while he washes out a whole boxful of grungy, chipped, china inkwells of their coagulated mess, then mixes the astringent smelling powder and finally refills them. Not content with that he has to carry the trayful up several flights of stairs and place two in each desk with the inevitable spillage and further chore of cleaning up, all the time worried in case this great honour is taken from him.

There were the art classes where the inept were cheek-by-jowl with the insouciant, and plagued by the competent who always came just when things were going wrong, with words like ‘Isn’t that nice,’ said with all the insincerity of a street pedlar, hurriedly followed by an entreating ‘Come and see mine’, a plea for praise and perhaps a statement of insecurity. It was strange that in a school where none were undernourished, why the licence to have biscuits and hot Bovril after a swim in the swimming bath of a neighbouring school, was such a great inducement that few, if any, brought notes of excuse. That was the era of cigarette cards. No one failed to collect them, but some collected them for a strange game like a coconut shy. The boys had areas along the playground wall marked out rather like the Oche for darts. Against the wall were propped cigarette cards at intervals and the players would stand at different lines, depending on the distance from the wall, and by flicking a card of their own, from between their fingers, they had to try to fell a cigarette card leaning against the wall. If successful, one received a number of cards equivalent to the offer for each line, say two, three or even ten if it was a back line. There were tricks of course. The stall holders would bend the cards slightly so they arched away from the wall and were thus stiffer to hit. The throwers, – or I suppose, the suckers – would use stiff cards because they flew better and harder and they also adopted a scything technique so they could fell more than one target card at a time, to the annoyance of the stall holder.There were no lollipop ladies; policemen were stationed at crossing points and held the hands of the smaller children as they crossed the traffic in flocks. The children vied for the favours of the policeman and most policemen reciprocated by giving the appearance of being interested in their stories.

My Aunt became a Christian Scientist, influenced by an artist friend who lived in Manchester. She passed her ideas on to my mother and after a while my mother became a wishy-washy version herself, never quite at the heart of the movement, but reading a lot, which was a necessity, because Mrs Mary Baker-Eddy based the whole concept on a philosophical dissertation. In short, the theory, as I understood it then, stated that as we, according to the bible, were made in the image and likeness of God, there could be no such thing as matter, and if that was accepted, then there could be no sickness as that was brought about by the degeneration of matter, which, of course, did not exist. The big fallacy to that theory, but I was too young at the time to see it, was the question of who had thought up matter in the first place? They would probably say the Devil, but then who and more importantly why had he been thought up? Deep stuff! Ultimately too much for yours truly. The one part of the whole scenario I found disturbing was my mother’s illness culminating in death. She had contracted cancer and because of her beliefs made no call upon the Health Service.

With my Aunt a mover and shaker in the local CS church and my mother a willing, if part-time, acolyte, it was pretty well ordained that I would have to attend, and as I had tried everything else I had no valid excuse for back-sliding. I was enrolled in the Sunday School. The parishioners, if one could call them that when they hailed from a number of electoral parishes, were drawn from the ‘haves’, rather than the ‘have-nots’. It was and still is very much a middle-class religion and certainly a degree in philosophy would help in understanding the finer points of its doctrine. In my case I was a have-not, tagging along as a ‘have’ on the coat tails of my Aunt, so I had to mind my P’s and Q’s – although my Aunt would never have seen it that way.

I think the only real experience I have brought with me from those years is the memory of the hours I spent contemplating the balcony in the church hall where we held the Sunday School before joining the adults in the main body of the church to hear the readings from the Bible ‘with key to the scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy’. ‘Why the balcony?’ you might ask, and it would be a fair question.

Our teacher was extolling the merits of mind over matter and the fact that everything was a figment of our imagination because we were one with God and so we were a figment of his imagination and therefore our thoughts were his thoughts, so everything was OK. (Are you with me so far?) I completely understood what she was getting at although my interpretation was a little different. To me she and the rest of the class did not exist, I had just conjured them up in a sort of dream. It therefore followed, according to her theory, which, of course had to be really mine, by definition, that if I chose to go up to the balcony and jump off I would land like a feather and be no worse. So I put it to her and she said that was true, providing – there is always a ‘providing’ – providing I had enough faith. From then on I kept trying to assess exactly how much faith it would take to achieve the impossible, but I never had quite enough to put it to the test. From then on I steadily edged toward agnosticism and then atheism and Sundays became a day of rest.

Throw art y’moldies! This was the period when people went everywhere in charabancs, those overblown, single-deck buses with their thin tyres and great over-hang at the back. Derby Day, early in June, was a great outing in our part of South London, especially as it was on the route directly to Epsom Downs. There was a lot of talk about the race and every year there was a tremendous fair at the course, it attracted crowds of all ages and classes. I don’t know if the custom still exists, but when I was a child, we would go to Balham High Road to see the charabancs coming back from the races. The passengers were in high spirits, streaming coloured paper out of the windows and as the traffic was slow due to its volume, there was time for interchange between the people on the bus and the people lining the road. We were there in crowds; the atmosphere was almost like that at the Coronation. People were shouting and laughing and children used to call out ‘Frow art y’ mouldy coppers!’, one assumed that the winners were so well heeled a few coppers meant nothing to them. A window on the bus would open and a fistful of coppers would descend in a hail on to the pavement and then there would be a scrum between those whom my Gran called the ‘gutter-snipes’ for what they could grab. I was not allowed to join in, I had merely to observe and enjoy the ambience, although I suspect she found it hard when a fistful would land at our feet. Sometimes dolls and stuffed toy animals would come sailing out, won at the funfair, and often sweets too. The excitement felt by the gutter-snipes and the returning gamblers was contagious and had to be experienced to be appreciated, what with the heads and smiling faces leaning out of the bus windows and the cross talk between the pavement watchers and the passengers, it was almost as if we had all been there to see the races. As I got older I used to go to see the return of the revellers on my own. There was no chance of missing the event, the roars of the crowd as another fleet of busses passed at the top of the road was alarm enough.

DEAL – The Big Catch. My mother’s family, her uncles and aunts, all lived in or near Deal, where I went for short holidays with an aunt. The whole atmosphere was a revelation, they were all so ebullient, so full of fun, nothing was too much trouble, and meal-time was like a feast with everyone talking at once and the place filled with men. It was a new world. The family business was still going and they had this huge house with an immense garden at the bottom of which they kept chickens. I had already been blooded in Africa, so when my great uncle instructed me in how to pull a chicken’s neck, while I know I hated the idea, I did not flinch. I suffer from what the French call the English Disease. I think I could dispatch a human quicker than an animal, sometimes I think, with more reason. My cousin was about ten years my senior but he took me under his wing during that visit. He showed me his BSA 0.22 rifle, a powerful gun, and demonstrated how, with three shots he could shoot the stem off a pear hanging at the top of a huge tree and drop the fruit. It never occurred to me then to wonder where the bullets finished up. The rifle had belonged to the boy next door who had foolishly been using bottles for target practice when one piece of glass had ricocheted back into his eye and permanently blinded it. I was allowed to shoot at the stems of pears too, but with no success, except it gave me a love of target shooting I have never lost. It was on an earlier holiday, before going to Africa, that I discovered how considerate and resourceful families can be when they set out to entertain, and how much fun can be had when they are all together. My Great Uncle suggested we should go fishing off Deal pier. They bought me a line, sinkers and hooks, and a rectangular wooden frame on which the fishing line is wound. The whole lot probably cost sixpence. Off we set. We went to the very end of Deal Pier for deep water and they showed me how to bait a line with a worm and throw it over the rail. I was barely the height of the top rail, if that, and had difficulty seeing where the line finished. They explained that when I felt a tug on the line, which was the fish biting, I was to tug back and then wait to allow the hook to catch the fish, then if it tugged again I was to haul in the fish, which I did, several times, going home as proud as Punch with the string of fish I had caught. It was only years later that my aunt told me that the others had been standing on the lower tier of the pier, tugging the line and putting on fish they had bought at a fish shop. Many a time I have fished since and been exhilarated with my catch, but never since did fishing give me the thrill those few fish, which in truth I had not caught, did that day.

Rugby Was Certainly A Culture Shock Prior to leaving England for Africa, the only male member of our family whom I had any regular contact with was my grandfather and he was rarely in the house when I was awake. Hence I had never heard of Rugby, as in those days it was mostly a Public School activity. The horizon of women rarely rose above ladylike pursuits, add to this the fact that playing in the street was anathema to our family, for these reasons I was only vaguely aware of the games real people played. My first real run in with life in the raw came about almost as soon as we had arrived in Livingstone, it was a rugby match.
Most of the civil servants were hand-picked which meant Oxbridge, if not that, then Public School, so the prevalent games were rugby, golf and tennis in that order. Hence, as a matter of course, we attended a rugby match at the first opportunity. I hadn’t a clue what was going on, I recognised the ground was hard because I was standing on it and if I had had any doubts to the fact, when two or three of the players, including the dentist, were carried off with broken bones or concussion, I had ample proof. It was an impressive introduction to Africa.

The Case Of The Surgical Saw I loved the sensation of the sand under my bare feet and when out of parental gaze I would kick off my shoes and run about barefoot. Totally daft behaviour, there were all sorts of grubs and creatures just waiting for lunch, and, of course, I paid the penalty, I contracted a sore on the instep of my left foot which would not heal. Years later Willie, my mother, told me it was Beri Beri, but I think she must have been mistaken. We had no private medicine, there were doctors provided by our avuncular Colonial Service and they operated from the hospital. If you were sick you went there unless you were too sick, and then they came to you. I had earlier contracted a severe and persistent case of malaria, so I was well versed in the habits of our local medical profession.

The sore made itself a nuisance at about the time my brother was born, so Willie had her hands full and as I knew most of the medicals socially as well as professionally, she sent me up to the hospital on my own for treatment. As I remember it, there was little to choose between the architectural design of the hospital and our bungalow, just a few extra stabs with the bungalow rubber stamp and hey presto, a drawing for a hospital. Someone or other must have told me to wait because I was seated on the veranda at the back of the hospital kicking my heels and looking round me. People passed and spoke and so time moved on until a doctor stopped, looked at me and said something like ‘I won’t be long’, and disappeared, only to reappear with a bone-saw in his hand. It was similar to the things butchers use, a coarse version of a hacksaw. ‘Won’t be long, Jack,’ he said brandishing the saw and smiling from ear to ear like a pantomime demon, ‘When I’ve finished with this chap you’re next,’ and he gave another flourish with the saw and disappeared.

Aged seven plus, I was no coward, but I let out a screech and my feet barely touched the ground as I ran crying all the way home. Some joke! The fact that I remember it is not surprising, it is still vivid. What I really wonder is whether it really had any long term affect on me. I probably had nightmares for a day or two, but at that age, I believe there was too much going on for it to be taken seriously and I’m sure my parents were not too bothered. Jung, Adler, Freud and litigation were not on everyone’s lips and in those days, it was probably all treated as a silly prank. Pity! Today I’m sure I’d have been scarred for life and only compensation in six figures could possibly assuage the hurt.

To most boys coming from my background, religion was a means to an end rather than an end in itself. It was an entr?e into the Scouting Movement, which, was church affiliated, offered bun fights and picnics’ in lieu of TV On cold wet winter evenings, apart from the Cubs and Scouts, there was the CCC, Children’s Christian Circle. Held in a barren church hall with rows and rows of hard chairs, we sat to be entertained by missionaries, back from all corners of the world, with lantern slides of people in strange landsc with even stranger habits, such as having wooden plates in their lower lips or fingernails which seemed to go on for ever and clearly made life a plague. If we were enticed beyond the attraction of the eccentric, it could only have been by something cheap and innocuous like a glass of orange squash at half-time, Missionary Societies were hard up. Our church had had a change of vicar, the new one hailed from Ireland, that place off Wales where music hall artists came from.

The night which changed my religious outlook was totally unheralded. It was the usual CCC night, wet, cold and dank, with little heating and the regular crescendo of noise. We were awaiting the arrival of the speaker and the vicar to introduce him. I was cocked up comfortably on the back legs of my chair, my feet on the rails of the one in front, chatting happily,. The new vicar appeared. He looked round, and started to walk down the centre aisle surveying the rabble. I took little notice of him – was just aware of his presence, so did not recognise Nemesis when it arrived. My first intimation was when I disappeared over the back of my chair to hit the floorwith a thump. When he had approached, the vicar had asked, “Would you do that at home?” – indicating the feet on the rails and the tipped up chair. Truthful to the point of being, in the eyes of the vicar, impertinent and unrepentant, I had said I would, which was true, at which instant the vicar’s fist struck and struck hard. What followed that evening was a blur but in spite of the combined efforts of my mother, and Miss Batley, my Sunday school teacher, I ended my association with our church. I was sorry. I loved church on Sunday, listening to the bobs, doubles and trebles being rung by the full peal. I was a bugler, drummer and patrol leader in the Scouts, I would miss the fun of it all.. In spite of the ‘turning the other cheek’ bit, Miss Batley was hammering on about, I believed that Christianity’s preaching of ‘love thy neighbour’ should start at source and not be interpreted as a thump in the chest. “Enough already!” It was worse than I had anticipated. By not attending church parades I was then chucked out of the church Troop, I was a pariah – I was unacceptable, by inference unclean! For a while I mooched about on Sundays with my heathen friends, but Mother finally put her foot down and demanded that I must attend church, any church, so I and the heathens inaugurated the Religious Round.

The Religious Round It shows the cohesion we had as a group, told to attend; the others decided to accompany me. We would turn up at a meeting, it might have been Sunday School or a church service. At each new venue, the greetings we got were amazing. To find a small group of boys, aged about eleven, turning up on the doorstep, un-coerced, was probably unheard of. We, in turn, found it amazing, that so many sects could preach the same message in so many different ways. On one occasion, we went up some stairs to a scruffy loft, where the chap in charge was an ex-Canadian Mounted Policeman we all knew. He, as usual, was in the Mounty dress uniform, green-khaki trousers with a yellow stripe down the sides of the legs, polished riding boots and a blue jacket with chain-mail epaulettes but for once no wide-brimmed hat – incongruous, to say the least. We always attended for a few weeks, reading and discussing the handouts on our way home. Whether we learned much I cannot say, but I think many of the protracted arguments with Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses on the front doorstep in later life might show that some of the teaching had been absorbed, along with growing scepticism, agnosticism and general apathy, leading to atheism.

We went out of our way to sample all we could; the one we liked best was the Salvation Army. They sat us in the front pew, opposite the roaring brass, and it was fantastic. There was an atmosphere almost akin to hysteria that was infectious. Looking back in retrospect, it was the street corner service transferred indoors. Of all the religious groups I have come in contact with, I believe they are among the most selfless, and their contribution to the lot of the stranded serviceman was invaluable in its intrinsic if not religious sense, and I will always be grateful. Presumably now the cardboard-city dwellers are the recipients of their care as we were during the war.

Home from school at midday in Livingstone, most likely with no homework, I had a long afternoon to put in. On several occasions a few friends and I would go outside the limits placed by our parents, out through the tall grasses of the Veldt, along the wide deep drainage ditches waiting in their dusty state for the next onslaught of the monsoon rains. It was exciting creeping down these excavations, knowing full well there were snakes there, because our parents had told us that was the reason we were not to trespass outside the town boundary. Across this arid pasture we went until we neared the abattoir, another no-go area. It was here we spied on the Africans slaughtering the pigs. The act certainly didn’t conform to Government regulations; it was more a tribal game. They would release a pig. give it a stab to urge it on its way, then some of the men would run with it until they managed to kill it with a knife. We seem to have been unaffected by this brutal barbarism. I was horrified for the sake of the pigs, while I was left with a mental snapshot, it did not affect me otherwise, no nightmares and no aversion to blood, This was not the only killing I was to observe. In retrospect I realise that the Africans’ values were unsurprisingly different from those of the whites. On one occasion, shortly after I arrived, one of the servants asked me if I would like to see the chicken being killed, the one destined for the table that day. The family reared chickens for eggs and meat in the compound at the back of the house. I assume I acquiesced because I became party to a demonstration of decapitation and the sight of a headless chicken running round the compound until it fell, already dead. This I still see in graphic 3D.

Until I started thinking more deeply concerning those days, I had not realised how much death was taken for granted in that environment. On one occasion I saw from a distance the witch doctor who was brought in for the ritual killing of several people and would ultimately be hanged, himself. I saw a snake killed on the step of the bungalow merely because it was poisonous. I went to the Zambezi to see my father bring in the bodies of several crocodiles, which had been killed because they were thought to be lying in wait for Africans watering their cattle. Both oxen and herders had become the reptile’s prey, swept off their feet by a swipe of a tail and then drowned. These huge creatures lived on an island in the river and took their kills there to bury them for eating later. The white men were rowed out on the river in small boats to shoot the crocs in the water and then, when they were sure the reptiles were dead they would be tied on to the boat and towed ashore. My father and his friends would then stand around while their servants skinned the beasts. I remembered that the smell of raw crocodile was one of the foulest smells I had ever encountered.

All this took place at what was referred to as ‘the bathing place’. An area of cleared River Zambezi riverbank with two rectangular huts in the style of native dwellings, used as changing rooms for the whites – by the men and ladies. In Africa, at that time, white women were all ladies, irrespective of their antecedents or proclivities. As far as I could see, the whole aspect of life as a member of the Raj was like being a member of a select, upper class British club. There were rules, which one only broke on penalty of being black-balled, so one conformed – how one conformed. The actual bathing was done in the Zambezi itself. I assume that an inlet in the bank reduced the velocity of the river to nearly nothing at that point. I have no recollection of currents being a problem. The main river was only about two miles from the Victoria Falls at that point so the velocity in the main stream must have been quite high. To protect the bathers from the ever present threat of crocodiles, wire netting on poles formed the perimeter of the pool, held to the bottom by stones, a crude system which later proved fatal for a friend of mine. At Madeira, on our way home we read of the death by drowning of a school friend who had been lost in the swimming pool. Apparently he had not been seen for a while and when the men went to look for him fearing him drowned, his body was not within the enclosure, but they did find the wire netting had been breached very badly. The assumption was that a crocodile had entered, drowned the boy and left with him. From an age when I could reason cause and effect, I had been astounded that the whites would have permitted the Africans to water their oxen and cattle beside the bathing place, it was tantamount to training the crocodiles, and the death of the school boy had not been a unique case. We later heard that that was the end of bathing in the Zambezi. Incidentally, no one ever called crocodiles anything but crocs