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Records of the Northern Bury family do not go back very far. However, from my father's papers I have found that the Bury Grammar School was founded by a Henry Bury in 1625. He also left ten pounds to Manchester Grammar school for the purchase of books.
There is a report that Richard Cobden founded a Baptist chapel in the village of Sabden Under Pendle Hill, south of Manchester. It seems that it was built by James and John Bury of Accrington in 1798.
More papers show that Henry Bury of 3, Parsonage, top of Albert Street, Manchester, established in 1851 (formerly of Adelphi Works, Salford), sold steam heated chests for heating lithographs and copper plates.
A certificate of patent was issued to Henry Bury, machinery broker, of 45, Port House, Piccadilly, Manchester, for a combined glazing and embossing calendar for finishing cuffs, collars, fronts, printed show cards, fancy Christmas cards, labels, tickets, etcetera on January 29th 1896. Thus was my father's father.
Henry Bury had four sons, Henry (my father), James, Charles and Harold and one daughter, Ada. His wife died when they were still quite young. He was unable to care for them so they all went to America as indentured servants. A person in America paid their passage, and then they had to work for them to pay off the debt.
My father was born in 1875, so this must have been around 1890. My father told me that he worked on ranches in the summers, and studied during the winters, getting a place in McMaster's University in Montreal. I think it was mostly in the wheat belt in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. He aimed to become a minister. However, his father died and he had to return to Manchester to see to his affairs. It seems that his father developed a paranoid psychosis and accused his partner and others of cheating him. He was eventually taken to Strangeways asylum where he died.
My father continued his studies at Owen's College, which later became Manchester University, and obtained a BA in divinity. After this he did some peripatetic preaching around the country. One place was the chapel at Reading where he met my mother. Finally he became the preacher of Astley Bridge Baptist Chapel in Bolton. He married my mother in 1911/12 and they lived at "Ingleton", Seymore Road, Astley Bridge.
My mother, Bessie May Hill, was one of a large, middle class family. Her father, Ebenezer Hill was a leather merchant, originally from Northamptonshire. He had a thriving wholesale leather business in Reading, selling leather to local cobblers, and a shop in the High Street selling leather goods. He had married twice and had four sons and three daughters. My mother was the eldest daughter of his first wife whose maiden name was Saunders, (the origin of my middle name). They seem to have had a happy family life and were brought up as strict Baptists.
In early life the eldest son developed a psychosis and was put in a mental hospital and forgotten as was the way of things in those days. The youngest girl, my Aunt Laura, was very clever and was one of the first women to get a place at Oxford University where she got a degree in Classics and English and became a High School teacher. She later developed a psychosis which took the form of a religious mania and eventually had to go to hospital.
By now attitudes had changed and she was supported by the family and visited regularly, particularly by my mother. After her menopause she recovered enough to be able to live independently, supported by a family trust fund. After old Ebenezer died, the two sides of the family quarrelled bitterly over the business in Reading, E.Hill & Sons.It's now W.H.Smiths. My mother's siblings were Hedley, Bernard, Leonard and Pricilla and Laura the last two by Ebenezer's second wife.
I was born on the sixth day in February in 1913 in Bolton. My earliest memories are of life during the first world war. I have no recollection of my father until after the war finished. He had gone to France as a minister on behalf of the Y.M.C.A.to minister to the troops. Later he joined the army as a Padre. My mother returned to Reading and lived with her sister Elsie at 12, Hamilton Road. They were joined by other sisters and some sisters in law.
They tended to come and go as their men came home on leave or were wounded. I was very conscious of the tension in the house in those days. The sight of a telegram boy on his bicycle evoked pangs of anxiety in all who beheld him. Everyone feared him stopping at their door. Aah, the Horror! Was he wounded, missing or killed?. Fortunately, as far as I can remember only one of their men was killed.
One day I developed a rash and the doctor diagnosed it as "German" measles and I nearly died of fright when he said it. The word conjured visions of ravening murderous creatures who killed little children and used their fat to grease their bullets. The war propaganda at that time was particularly frightening for children. One time we stayed a few days in Clapton in North London with Aunty Pris. Late one night we were hurried down into the cellar because the Zeppelins were overhead. Next morning we went up the street and saw a great hole in the middle of the road. There was a tramline rail spiraling out of it into the air. I was deeply impressed by the violence and power it must have taken to do that.
On another occasion my mother took me to Bovington Camp on Salisbury Plain to see my father before his regiment left for France. The veterinary surgeon took my mother and I for a ride in the country on his horse and trap. I wanted a piece of bracken for some reason and he went to get some. He cut his hand trying to break a piece off and bled profusely. I had the distinct impression that he was displeased with me.
At the passing out parade I waived my Union Jack enthusiastically and caused an officer's horse to shy, throwing him off. His arm broke and after that I was considered a menace to the British Army. I was afflicted with guilt and obliged to stay in the background.
I have a delightful memory of visiting relations in a village near Reading, possibly Kingsclere. They were the village bakers. The old brick oven was filled with brushwood and lit. When the flames died down, the ashes were raked out and the loaves put in on wooden spades. When the oven was opened about an hour later, the aroma was so delicious that I can still smell it today. Also, I can still taste the Lardy cakes they made with the left over dough.
My cousin Bobby was six months older than I, and wild. We got into all sorts of scrapes together especially after drinking bee wine which Aunty Elsie always had brewing in the kitchen. She used to scream at us but we took no notice. Once, Bobby put a large worm down the back of my neck which caused me to dislike worms for a long time afterwards.
After the Armistice parades through town with bands and tanks and so on, I started school in the infants department of the Girls High School where my elder cousin Joan went. All I can remember about that was learning to sew.
My happiest memories were of punting on the river: picnic hampers full of goodies, a gramophone with a large horn and grownups wearing straw boaters. It was always warm with the sun shining and the bees buzzing as we floated along beneath the willows. My particular delight was negotiating the locks and helping with the manipulating of the sluices and gates. In those days the locks of the Thames had the most beautiful gardens.
In the evenings, men visited and I remember the sounds of boisterous parties drifting up to my bedroom. I don't remember my father from this time. I think he was still in Italy. At the end of the war there was some tragedy when a hospital blew up, killing many war casualties. This may have delayed his return home.
My first memory of my father was when I was about five years old. A strange man walked in and my mother rushed to embrace him. I felt completely excluded. It suddenly seemed that my mother's love, that I had enjoyed exclusively, was transferred to this menacing strange rival. Later he picked me up and made a fuss of me but my hostility remained undiminished. I was a little mollified by gifts of chocolate which was a real luxury then and an orange picked in Italy which still had its stalk and leaves on.
My mother had never been happy in the north so my father obtained a ministry in Pokesdown Baptist Chapel in Bournemouthe and we moved to a little semi detached house in Malmesbury Park Road in Southbourne. I went to a small "Dame School", Miss Grey's, near the sea front. I don't remember much about what we learned, but I do remember often having to stand in a corner with a dunce's hat on, which then was the standard punishment and much feared.
After much pleading I got my very first pen knife which I used to show off with in the play ground. This helped me just a little with my self confidence. Sometimes, when the weather was good, I played truant, spending the day on the beach. I spoiled it one day though, when I was late going home and my father came looking for me. I couldn't get away with it any more.
I enjoyed my time with the Martins. Mr.Martin was a sidesman at the chapel, and he had a large jolly wife and lots of children, and had a chalet on the beach where we spent our summer holidays catching little fish, climbing and falling down the cliffs, eating sandwiches, cakes and ice-cream, all with sand in, helping the fishermen pull in the nets, and buying fish from them.
Freddy Martin and I had to attend Sunday school every Sunday at the chapel. We were taught Bible stories by big girls. But Freddy and I were not good pupils and gave the poor girls a terrible time, climbing on the pews and disrupting the class.
A painful memory was of the birth of my brother, Morley when I was six. I have vivid memories of hearing my mother groaning in the next room that night. I didn't know what was happening to her, and I was bewildered and frightened. My Auntie Norah stayed with me and tried to explain things to me. I remember that my mother was attended by a Portuguese Doctor named Dr.Costa. I felt very hostile towards him, thinking he had caused the pain. He had a daughter whom I liked very much before then, but I went off her after that.
During the war, my father's chief work, was comforting the wounded and the dying in military hospitals. He saw some terrible suffering, and he gradually came to question the existence of a merciful God. He started questioning what he was doing. I remember he often used children's stories, which I was reading, or having read to me, as a basis for his sermons. But he altered them to draw a moral from them. This used to annoy me, because I thought he should tell them properly. He finally decided to give up the ministry. I remember him saying that he wished he had been a doctor, and not a priest, as he would then be much more used to his fellow men.
After the war, the Lloyd George government worried about how to find work for the thousands of serviceman leaving the army, and having found out how important it was for a country to provide its own food, (the U-Boats had been very successful in cutting off our food supplies). They decided to get the County Councils to start ex- serviceman's smallholdings, buying up unused land, and dividing it into holdings of about 3 to 5 acres, and letting them at a subsidised rent to ex-servicemen. They also built houses on them. My father decided that this would provide him with an alternative employment to his present one. So he applied for a three acre holding in the parish of Holdenhurst, north of the town. His experience in Canada would be useful, as he and his brother Charlie, had built barns and houses on homesteads in Canada. Charlie who was still single, agreed to come over and help. This would be in 1920.
They bought two wooden clapboard huts, built by German prisoners of war. They were built in sections for easy transportation. Two huts were placed on brick foundations, about three feet high, and ten feet apart, the space between being roofed over with a flat roof. The bungalow was called Squirrel Bank', as Red Squirrels lived in the trees surrounding the site. In the meantime, I was sent to the local council school, to get toughened up for attending the Village School when we moved.
This was quite a cultural shock. I could hardly understand the local speech, and my speech made the other children laugh at me. Many of them were very ill-dressed, and smelly, and very ill-disciplined, and rough. I had a rather traumatic time at first, especially as I was praised by teachers for my good behaviour. Anyway, I learned to hold my own in time.
I loved going down to the holding, at the weekends and holidays. My job being to fetch tools, and hold nails. A Bricklayer was employed to lay the foundations, and the chimney. He also built the well and the cesspit, and put in the drains. After that it was mostly carpentry, which dad and Uncle Charlie did themselves.
I was about nine years old, when we moved in and started cultivating, and planting, and building a barn, and poultry houses. Up until then, eggs had tended to come from farmyard hens. But the idea of rearing hens, intensively, in special buildings, with special feed, had been introduced and poultry and egg production seemed the best use for a small amount of land.
I loved country life. I wandered off by myself, exploring the country lanes, and finding bird's nests, and exploring pond life. Taking bird eggs was not illegal then, and I built up quite a good collection of bird's eggs. I explored the ponds with a net. I captured crested newts, and caddis flies, and dragonfly larva. And after someone had given me an Entomologist's microscope, I identified hydra, paramecia, water nymphs, and all the other fascinating pond life.
I caught rabbits in snares. I remember once, setting snares in a copse where partridges were nesting on land used for shooting, and being spotted by the Gamekeeper and being marched off the land with a shotgun in my back. I was really scared.
Once I found some baby owls, who had been thrown out of the nest by village boys. One was still alive, and I took it home, and put it in an empty rabbit hutch, and fed it on dead chicks. We hatched chicks in incubators and about five percent died within three days. After a few days, I found the remains of mice in the wire netting and, watching at night, found that the mother had located it, and fed it each night through the wire. I took it out for flying lessons each day, and eventually, it flew away. After that, I often saw it sitting near the house.
Another regular sport was at harvest time. When the binder was cutting the last little strip of corn in the middle of the field, all the rabbits bolted, and we stood around with dogs, and heavy sticks, and killed as many as we could.
When a small holder was about to kill a pig, all the village children went along to see it. Afterwards, you might be given some chitterlings to eat. They were the intestines, which would be washed, and then boiled in the water that was being heated in a cauldron to shave off the bristles. Chitterlings were considered a great treat.
Bill Bligdon, the ploughman, came to plough the cornfield each autumn. He had two lovely Shire horses, and I was allowed to ride on them on the way home, which was great fun.
At home, I had an increasing number of chores. I used to hate pumping the water from the well into the cistern on the roof but I liked feeding the poultry, and gathering the eggs. We grew a lot of soft fruit, and picking was rather boring and back-aching, especially the strawberries.
Sometimes the gypsies who lived in the New Forest came and bought the crop for five pounds or so and picked them to sell at the road side. As I got older, and went to secondary school, I was involved in more of the work, and on Saturdays I accompanied my parents, with bicycles laden with baskets of eggs, and dressed chickens, fruit and vegetables, delivering them to our customers in the town. Originally, they were the congregation of the chapel, but the number of customers grew because the fresh food that we sold, became popular.
Later, we got a Trojan car to do the rounds. This was called the Poor Man's Ford. It had a Two Stroke engine, an epicyclic gear, solid rubber tyres, and it was very uncomfortable. It could also be used to pull the hay rake in the field.
Killing and plucking and drawing the chickens, six to twelve each Friday, was another chore I didn't mind. But I hated cleaning the dropping boards in the henhouse every Sunday morning. We had about two thousand hens at times.
The smallholder's Association purchased a binder, at one time, to cut the corn. Generally we grew oats or buckwheat to feed the poultry. And we had to borrow a horse from Mr Woodvine next door. The trouble was, when it came to my turn to use the binder, it often wasn't working, as no-one was responsible for its maintenance.
Threshing in the autumn was a great event. The threshing machine came to our field, pulled by a great steam engine, which provided the power. It was hired at so much an hour, so we had to put the oats trough as fast as possible, feeding the sheaves in at one end, and bagging the grain at the other. It was very hot work. We always seemed to have hot summers then.
When the hens were four years old, they didn't lay so well, so were sold at Ringwood Market. They were taken in crates, twelve hens in each. The buyers were generally Jewish poulterers, who came from London's East end. It was great fun listening to the exchange of banter, between the local country Hampshire folk, and the sharp Jewish merchants.
For some years, I kept a goat. I used to stake it out in the headlands, or wherever there was browsing available, supplementing it with oats in the winter. I milked it before going to school, and again in the evening. My mother paid me a penny a pint for the milk.
The village school in Holdenhurst, had 100 pupils, divide into three classes, the babies, the juniors, and the seniors. I started in the juniors. The teacher was Miss Roberts. We all hated her. She came to school on a sit-up bike. She had dark hair, worn in buns over each ear. She was very thin, and had a shrill voice, and when she was angry, could be heard from right down the road. She often got angry, and used her ruler to chastise wrongdoers. We sat two to a desk, and I sat next to Eady, the Gamekeeper's daughter. She kept me amused by showing me, under the desk, how many petticoats she wore.
Cottages were not very well heated in those days. And every body wore more clothes than today, always including woollen underwear, even in the summer. At first, I was a oddity to the village children, and I had a small bike to go the two miles to school. The village children were very envious, and after school they wanted to try riding it. And if I protested, they sat on me while they took turns having rides. Later, it got too small for me, and I preferred to walk. There was the usual school bully, who tormented me at first. But one day in a rage, I charged him, head down, and got him in the solar plexus, then lifting my head quickly, I caught him in the chin, breaking two of his teeth. After that, he left me well alone, and I was a bit of a hero with the other boys. Sometimes, in the winter, the lane was flooded and I stayed at home.
The village shop, sold a wonderful selection of gobstoppers, liquorice sticks in sherbet and Mackintosh Toffee. There were also packets of five Woodbines for tuppence, which we clubbed together to buy, along with a halfpenny box of matches, and smoked them behind a hedge. In the summer after school, many of us would go down to the river Stour at the end of the field and bathe. There was a pool at one point, deep and still, where we learned to swim. Afterwards, we lay in the grass to dry off. Bathing costumes were an unknown sophistication in the village. The boys competed to see who could get the best erection, and were applauded by the girls.
Once, when we were scrumping in the vicar's orchard we were caught by the village bobby. He reported us to our parents. Actually he was quite a nice man, and I was friendly with his two children. Sometimes, I went to their house, which was one of the few "Cobb" cottages left. It had an earth floor, mud and straw walls and a thatched roof that overhung the walls to keep the worst of the rain off. It was whitewashed inside and out, every year and was an annual event in the village.
Other annual events, were the garden party at the 'Big House', Heron Court. There was a colony of Herons in the tall trees in the estate, which belonged to Lord Malmesbury. There were stalls and coconut shies, a gypsy fortune-teller and ice- cream. Later, after the villagers had left, there was dancing for the "nobs" in the great hall.
The flower and vegetable show was held in a field at Throop and was much more fun with a brass band playing, bowling for a pig, and a beer tent. The Small Holders Association, of which my father was chairman, had an annual get-together in the chapel hall at Throop. They took it in turn to go on the stage and have a go at singing, telling jokes, playing instruments, conjuring or recitations. And eating, of course.
Throop and Holdenhurst were twin villages. Holdenhurst was older and had a church while Throop had the mill and a chapel. Both my parents are buried there.
My two closest companions at this time were Bob Sharples and Leslie Tombs. Leslie was a quiet, studious boy who later became a pharmacist. He had a bicycle and we used to go off cycling in the New Forest.
We once came across a gypsy encampment, deep in the forest. It consisted of about ten "benders" frames of stout sticks bent over and covered with canvas. In the centre was a large fire which was kept permanently alight.
Bob came from an unhappy home. His mother was a war widow. She kept house for her brother who was an asthmatic. He was unpopular in the village and had a nasty temper. Bob had an elder sister who was a bit promiscuous. At age sixteen, she had a baby which, it was said, was fathered by her uncle.
Another boy at the school, Reuben, was the son of a village blacksmith. He was educationally subnormal. He served as the village idiot and was occasionally tormented by the other children. I was teasing him once when his father came upon us. He gave me a good cuff round the ear. I was abject with shame. Reuben was killed in the war, trying to stop a runaway horse, and became a local hero.
When I went up to the senior class, we were taught by Miss Sparrow, the headmistress. She was a marvellous teacher who combined strictness with understanding and I learned a great deal from her. I was week on "sums" so she gave me private tuition once a week while the exams were approaching. No doubt, My father paid her. Also taking these lessons was a girl called Trixy Osbourne, whose mother ran the post office. Miss Sparrow tried to broaden our horizons, as a class, by taking us on trips.
We went to the 1924 Empire exhibition at White City and to see John Logie Baird demonstrate his first television transmitter in London. We took a flight on an Handley Page airplane with Imperial Airways. It used to do a daily trip from Croyden to Paris, the first regular commercial flights ever. Our jaunt lasted about twenty minutes and it was quite breathtaking to look down on the roofs and gardens of London. I could see a pigsty where the pigs looked like maggots in a matchbox. Miss Sparrow also took us to the cinema to see Nanook Of The North, a film about the life of Eskimos in northern Canada. This was the first ever documentary film.
At the age of eleven one could sit an examination for a "junior county scholarship" and go to a secondary school. Six of us passed the examination but only Trixy and Myself took it up. The nearest secondary school of Hampshire County Council was at Brockenhurst. That meant a cycle ride to the railway station and a walk at the other end. This meant leaving for school before seven in the morning and not returning until seven in the evening.
Fortunately, the rapidly expanding borough of Bournemouthe had, some years before, negotiated for the Holdenhurst village common land in order to create a municipal golf course. In return, they provided the village with a district nurse and a place at each of two schools, the boys secondary school and the girls high school. No one had bothered to take advantage of this offer so far. I went to the school for an interview with Mr.Bull, the deputy head and was accepted. I remember that in my interview, Mr.Bull asked me "if a kipper and a half cost three halfpence, how much would a dozen cost?" He seemed quite surprised that I knew the answer. I knew it because my father had once asked me the same question as a joke.
Trixy got into the girls' high school.
I found the going rather tough in a big, all boys school. Uniform was compulsory as were games on Saturday afternoons. I was let off the O.T.C.because of the distance I had to travel from home; at least, I think that was the reason. I had a three mile cycle route which included a steep hill. If I was lucky with the timing, I would catch a Sentinel steam lorry at the bottom and hang on the tail board for a tow up the hill. Recently, I was delighted to find, when I came to live in Shrewsbury, that Sentinel have been making lorries until fairly recently,(1988), mainly for export.
I found that I had a natural aptitude for science subjects and loved chemistry and physics. French wasn't too bad as we had a good French teacher who taught us to speak by phonetics before starting to read and write. I hated grammar and Latin. I thought Latin a complete waste of time until much later, when I came to grappling with Latin based languages. Our Latin readers were Illiad and the Oddessey which gave me a smattering of Greek history. I was glad to be able to drop Latin two years later.
The history master was a hopeless teacher who gave out duplicated sheets which we had to copy. They were full of the dry facts of date, battles and treaties. I was put off history for a long time, though I'm now spending a lot of time catching up. Geography I liked but for some reason the geography master didn't like me.
At one examination he accused me of cheating. It was universal in the school to have "cribs" hidden about one's person. Some boys had developed it into a fine art. On this occasion I had a tiny note, in my cuff, of a vital date I had difficulty memorising. I was unable to point out that everyone else was doing the same thing only worse, because that would be sneaking. I was so infuriated by the injustice of it all that I refused his demand for an apology. He ordered me to stand outside the staff room until I apologised. I still refused and, for several weeks, I spent the morning break standing outside the staff room. He gave up eventually but I still feel anger at the memory of that injustice.
I was a mediocre scholar and frequently got detention for not doing homework or being late for school. I didn't mind detention which was on Saturday afternoons, since I hated games and what was a punishment for the other boys was for me a chance to get some of my homework out of the way. Three detentions in a row meant the "whack": caning on the hand by the headmaster. This was horrible, not so much for the pain as for the indignity.
I must have rebelled at times as I remember being thrashed by my father with his "Sam Brown" belt. He was constantly criticizing my reports from school and pushing me to "pull up my socks". I developed a feeling of inadequacy and thought there must be something wrong with me. I never really got on with him or had a frank discussion with him. Looking back after his death I very much regret this as he was obviously doing his best for me and provided the opportunity for a good education. He had an ambition for me to study medicine which was what he had wished he had done himself.
When I took my School Certificate examinations I did much better than anyone expected. Some of the teachers were quite astonished at the results. The truth was that I learned a great deal outside the school. My observations of nature in all its aspects during my country meanderings helped me to understand the way nature works. Also, my father had a very good library and I read avidly, devouring all the important writers of the time, particularly Shaw and Wells. A series of books giving resumes of "the worlds great books" gave me a wide, if superficial, knowledge of literature. I also read the News Chronicle and Reynold News regularly. They were the most liberal of the papers in those days. My Aunt Laurie who was teaching at the time, often came to stay with us and she took an interest in my education, lending me books like "The stories of Homer for children".
I was still at school when the 1926 general strike occurred. Boys who came to school by train or tram were unable to attend but I had to keep on going as I was cycling. There were no bus services in those days. I remember the election that followed the strike as we held a mock election in school. A senior boy, Dudley Barker, stood as Labour candidate which was very brave of him as Bournemouthe, then as now, was a bastion of Toryism. It is interesting that in spite of this the borough council was very progressive and pursued policies of which a socialist would have been proud. All the main services were public enterprises: trams, piers, beach cafes, deck chairs, public baths, golf course, concert halls, ice rink, municipal orchestra. The ice rink was one of the first in the country and was very popular. My father who had played ice hockey in Canada formed an ice hockey team. I learned to skate quite well.
When I was at medical school and home for Christmas, I went skating on a pond in the golf links. On the way home my skates, which I'd hung over the handle bars of my bike, caught in the front wheel and I took a header into the curbstone. I regained conscientious three days later in hospital. My memory was completely blank. I did not even know my name. It was a very strange feeling. Most of my memory gradually returned, starting with early childhood and progressing toward the then present. I came to within three weeks of the accident and then stopped. Those three weeks are still a complete mystery to me. I use this as an excuse for my bad memory today.
Having passed my General Schools Examination at Matriculation level, I was eligible to go to University. It was 1930 and my father took me to London to visit with a doctor friend of his whom he had worked with during the war. He was in charge of the Venereal Disease Department at St.Thomas's Hospital. He told me that I must first pass the premedical examination in chemistry, physics and biology. It was arranged that I could do this cheaply at Chelsea Polytechnic.
It is interesting to note that this VD department was a pioneering effort, the only other treatment available at that time being the Seaman's Hospital in Liverpool. Before the first world war no respectable doctor would treat VD as it was regarded as a punishment inflicted on the wicked by God. However, during the war in France, It was found that VD was causing more casualties than the enemy, so the War Office was forced to start VD clinics. These were now beginning to become acceptable.
There was now the question of how to pay for my education. There were no grants in those days. Fortunately, my mother's father, old Ebenezer Hill, had left a fund of debentures in his firm of E.Hill and Son in Reading which was to be spent on the education of his grandchildren. In the meantime my mother was getting a small income from the interest which enabled us to survive in the difficult time of the Great Depression in the late twenties and early thirties. My cousins were sent to public schools with their share but my father had other ideas. A search was made to see what scholarships were available. There were quite a few for the sons of pecunious churchmen, but they were all for Church of England. Nothing existed to help nonconformists.
My cousin Jack had stayed at a hostel in London where his father sent him to get some business experience in one of the big stores before joining the business. It was called Regnal House, headquarters of the Regnal League, the senior branch of the Boys Brigade, run by an ex "Toc'H" Padre in Eccleston Street near Victoria Station. It is now a post office. We were expected to take part in prayer meetings and Christian discussion each week. These were not compulsory. There were about fifty young men there, some were students and others were young business men, working in offices and shops. We each had a small cubicle to sleep in. There was a dining room for breakfast and evening meals, a comfortable lounge, a billiard room and a study room. It was all very nicely run and civilised and a good base for a country bumpkin like me to get to know a wicked city without being in danger. I went home often at weekends and for holidays between terms.
At the hostel I met interesting people including Marcus who was working for Marconi on wireless technology at the leading edge of development in the field. Marcus had a motorbike on which he went home to Cheltenham at weekends. I later bought his old bike, which was a Phelon and Moore six horsepower, for five pounds. Soon after that he had an accident on his new one. He crashed into a car that shot out of side road along the then new Great West Road. There were no crash helmets in those days and his skull was stove in. Although he survived, he suffered damage to his frontal lobes and this changed him from a pleasant and considerate young man into an animal.
One older and more sophisticated chap used to talk to me about art and music and so on. He started coming to my cubicle in the evenings and when he put his hand on my knee I realised that he must be a homosexual. The first one I had ever come across. I disabused him of any misunderstanding he may have had about me but he remained a pleasant companion.
While there I joined a hockey club called "Spencer's". I found that I enjoyed hockey and it provided the exercise that I missed when not working on the smallholding. Later, at college, I joined the boxing club but this wasn't a success because every time I was hit on the nose I bled so profusely that I and my opponent were both covered in blood.
I was at the hostel when Ramsey McDonald formed a national government. During the election campaign which was very bitter, Duff Cooper was our local candidate and he brought his wife along with him to talk with us. Lady Diana was one of these famous aristocratic beauties and a leader of the fashionable London scene. It was my first encounter with this world. I must admit she was very impressive in both intelligence and beauty. A "smasher".
I walked through Eton Square and Sloane Square and down King's Street to Chelsea Polytechnic each day. King's Street was a run down slummy sort of place in those days, not at all the fashionable area it has now become. It was very nice to be free of the school discipline and to be able to work as one liked. I very much liked the biology as I had not done it at school and my knowledge gained at home made it seem easier.
In the collage I met interesting people from all sorts of backgrounds and I began to explore London and what it had to offer. One man was a great help to me. He was older, about thirty, and had made enough money in business, selling shoes, that he was able to realise his ambition of studying medicine. He was Jewish and he introduced me to the fascinating places in the East End of the city. Also to the concerts and in particular to the "Last night of the Proms" which was an inspiring experience.
After we moved to Squirrel Bank my father, who had always insisted on me attending Sunday school, let me choose what to do and I never went again or even thought much about religion. While I was in London I decided to make up my mind once and for all. I took advantage of the many churches available and went to services at many of the most famous. I visited Kingsway Hall, Westminster Abbey, Central Hall, Westminster Cathedral, the Russian Orthodox Church and many other denominations. In the end I decided they were not for me. I also explored the museums, especially the science museum. At the end of the year I failed the premedical exam.
It was thought that I would do better at a proper college so I chose Kings College in the Strand. I was now feeling quite at home in London and didn't go home at weekends so much although I often went to stay at Cuffly in Hertfordshire instead with Uncle Jack and Aunt Pricilla and my cousins Molly, Dick, Patrick and Gordon. They were all younger than me, Gordon only a baby then. We went for long country walks and Auntie Pris produced lovely meals - they were very kind to me. It was a second home for me and a great help. When they grew up Molly was in the W.R.E.N.s and then married a surgeon at the Middlesex Hospital and after having two lovely little daughters she died of a brain haemorrhage. Dick became an estate agent and a very good rugby player in spite of being diabetic. Patrick and Gordon qualified as dentists and Patrick later took a medical degree and became a professor of facio-maxillary surgery at London Hospital.
Facilities were much better at King's and next year I passed my premedical exam and started on my preclinical studies: anatomy, physiology, organic chemistry (now called biochemistry) and bacteriology. Human anatomy was a new subject for me although we had dissected various animals in the premedical studies. About twenty bodies were laid out in the anatomy laboratory on slabs, reeking of formaldehyde. They were the bodies of paupers who had died in work houses and had no relatives to claim them. Four of us shared one body.
Physiology was good fun, seeing the blood flow in rabbit's ears, testing reflexes in frogs, oxygen metabolism etc. We all needed to have a skeleton. I was lucky to get quite a good one for only seven pounds. It caused quite a lot of alarm and amusement when I took it to the hostel.
Each morning I left the hostel as the Royal Guard were marching from Chelsea Barracks and I marched with them down Buckingham Palace Road and then, leaving them at the palace, I marched on down the Mall, through Trafalgar Square and along the Strand to King's College. At King's I made friends with Charles Moynihan. He invited me to come and live with him. He and his mother lived in a flat in Northumberland Avenue near St. Marylebone Station. She was Spanish and his father was in the banana trade in the Canary Islands. They were separated and she didn't get much of an allowance so she supplemented it by taking a lodger and giving Spanish lessons. One of her pupils was St.Chalmers Mitchell who later became well known for his book "My house in Malaga". No cooking was done in the flat other than a continental breakfast. They ate all their meals in cafes and restaurants.
I had hardly ever eaten out before, and Charles introduced me to the delights and advantages of cheap cafes, generally catering for taxi drivers. He had never lived anywhere but central London and was quite ignorant of the countryside. I took him on cycling holidays round Hampshire, Dorset and Devon with a tent and introduced him to country life which he greatly appreciated. He took me with him sometimes, to his elder brother's studio to see his pictures. This was Rodrigo Moynihan who was a fashionable artist at the time. He painted a portrait of Princess Elizabeth who is now queen.
We remained good friends after parting to do our clinical training, I to King's College Hospital and he to Westminster Hospital. He was in love with a New Zealand girl named Mary and he planned to marry her as soon as he qualified. The easiest way to get a good salary directly one had qualified was to join the Royal Army Medical Corps which he did. Unfortunately, he was sent to Malaysia and was one of the first casualties when the Japanese attacked.
In those days the East End was inhabited mainly by Jewish families who had fled from Europe where pogroms against them were increasing, particularly in Russia, Poland and Latvia. Others fled later to escape the Russian revolution. Some had established successful businesses in England and could afford to send their sons to university, many choosing medicine, so there were quite a few in my year.
It was now the period 1933-34 and Oswald Mosley's National Front Fascist movement was springing up in response to social unrest caused by the economic slump and the high unemployment. The fascist fanatics, called Blackshirts, regularly marched through the East End, breaking Jewish shop windows and attacking any Jews who resisted them. In response to this treatment and given the original reasons for their immigration, most of my Jewish friends were very left wing.
There was a Socialist Society at the college and most of the members were medical, many of them being Jewish. It was affiliated to the University Labour Federation which covered all the colleges in London. I was secretary in our college for some time.
We invited John Strachey to come and speak at our meeting. I met him and took him into the college canteen for a cup of tea before the meeting, hoping to have an interesting conversation, but all he was interested in was ogling the female students.
We asked Wal Hannington to another. He was the secretary of the Unemployed Workers Union which had been set up by the Trades Union Council to organise the Hunger Marchers from places in Wales and the North.
Reactionary students, mostly in the engineering department, got to hear of it and turned out in force to prevent him getting into the college. A fierce battle ensued in the quad and the porters called the police to rescue him. Our meeting never took place and there were quite a few black eyes being sported for the next few days.
Unemployment pay was completely inadequate to keep a family, particularly as it was means tested. There were many hunger marches but the best known one came from Jarrow. When they arrived they were suffering with badly blistered feet and many other disabilities and we medical students set up first aid posts to treat them. We also worked with the "Committee Against Malnutrition" founded by LeGros Clark, a famous nutritionist who had been blinded in the first world war.
Research sponsored by the British Medical Association had concluded that at least five shillings per week was necessary to feed a child even if the mother was a skilled shopper and cook. On the other hand the government maintained that four shillings and sixpence was sufficient for each child dependant of an unemployed worker without other means.
As more Jewish people arrived in London, the Blackshirts increased their attacks on them and the police did nothing to prevent it. The socialists and communists moved in to try and prevent the fascist marches. There were bloody battles and we set up first aid posts to attend to the injured. When Mosley held his big rally in Olympia Stadium, thousands of protesters demonstrated in Thurloe Square and the police attacked them. We again set out to help the wounded, some of whom were severely injured and had to be sent to hospitals.
It was becoming increasingly obvious that Fascism was spreading through Europe and we were hearing of the nasty things that were going on in Italy and Germany from student refugees and friends. The Soviet Union and the Communists were the only people who seemed to be opposing it. Thinking people were flocking to join the Communist Party. I was recruited by a fellow student, Eddie Winkleman. Many well known intellectuals joined including J.B.S.Haldane, Anders, Day Louis, Christopher Isherwood, Ralph Fox, John Cornford, Anthony Blunt, Dennis Healey and so on.
A Socialist Medical Association had been formed by a group of left wing doctors about this time. Edith Summerskill M.P.was amongst the founders. She invited some of us students to her house and we eventually formed the Inter Hospital Socialist Society to bring together all the medical hospital students.
The Inter Hospital Socialist Society was an organisation of socialist medical students. We worked closely with the Socialist Medical Association. We criticised the medical services which were based on private General Practitioners and nursing homes and voluntary hospitals funded by charity and "flag" days. These were stuffed by the local GPs who did not necessarily have specialist qualifications. Only the teaching hospitals and the big city hospitals had specialists.
Wage earners were covered by the "panel" who collected an insurance charge which was deducted from their wages directly. This enabled them to join the GP's "panel" and they could receive treatment without having to pay a fee.
Women and children were not covered, but could belong to the "Hospital Savings Society" by paying sixpence a week, a lot of money in those days, and this would get them into to hospital if necessary. The old Poor Law Infirmaries were still in service for the infirm elderly, the severely disabled and the mentally ill. They were still run on Dickensian lines and were greatly feared. We conceived the idea of a publicly funded service free at the time of need and this seeded the philosophy of the National Health Service.
I had spent too much time on political activities and failed my organic chemistry exam. I was summoned to the office of the dean and given a serious warning that if I didn't mend my ways I would be expelled. Fortunately, at the second attempt I passed. I had a choice of Hospitals. Kings provided the preclinical training for several hospitals - Kings College Hospital, Westminster Hospital and Charing Cross among them. I chose the first.
Students from Oxford and Cambridge also did their clinical studies at London hospitals so I met a whole lot of new friends: Tom Parker Pat Stonehouse, Bob Harris, Frank Tyrer, Stanley Rush, Shiela Spencer, Hugh Faulkner, Harry Bast, Richard Doll, Sammy Radzan and Marzook Kadar.
We were all activists in the Inter Hospital Socialist Society (I.H.S.S.). J.B.S.Haldane who was working at University College and Dr.David Frost from Coney Hatch "lunatic asylum" were a great help to us. In the Hospital we were organised into "firms" headed by the "consultant" who worked voluntarily for the hospital for one or two days a week but lived by his practice at Harley Street. This arrangement gave him status and although most of his patients were treated in private hospitals, he was able to get them into King's if they preferred. It also helped him to develop his skills on the common patients in the hospital which was supported by charities.
Brewers gave generously and our wards were named after them: Charington Ward, Guinness Ward, etc. and by flag days. The Almoner interviewed the patients to discover their financial circumstances and they were charged accordingly. The poorest were treated free.
The pecking order among the medical staff ran as follows: at the top was the consultant. He had a registrar who assisted him while he was studying for a specialist qualification. He was not paid, but the consultant would refer some of his private patients to him so that he could receive a small income. Next came the houseman, newly qualified, who worked for his keep and a small salary paid by the hospital. He would have various house jobs in different departments, gaining experience. And then came the students, six or eight of whom were attached to each firm.
Students attended at out patients and did the preliminary history taking and examinations of each patient and then reported their findings and possible diagnosis to the consultant or registrar and the diagnosis and possible treatment was discussed. Interesting patients were seen by the whole firm and would be the subject of a great deal of discussion and learning. In some firms patients would be treated almost like inanimate objects while others would show sensitivity and consideration.
When patients were admitted students again did the preliminary history and examination and this was followed up at ward rounds with the consultant, registrar or the houseman. One did a six month stint at each of the departments of surgery, medicine and gynaecology and three months with minor specialists like ear nose and throat, ophthalmics, orthopaedics, bacteriology and so on. In between these were regular lectures. We still had to do regular stints in the out patients department.
Since many people could not afford to see doctors, they would come to out patients for help. Crowds would accumulate in a very large waiting room early each morning, sitting on benches until they could be seen to. Some days would bring more than others like Saturday, and patients might wait the whole day to be seen. Students saw them first and dealt with simple matters like stitching or referring them to nurses for poultices or dressings and writing out prescriptions to take to the dispensary.
More serious cases were seen by the houseman. If an ambulance arrived and the person was brought in dead (B.I.D.), the houseman on duty was in luck as he would be required to appear at the inquest and get a fee of five pounds. He was then expected to buy a "B.I.D." cake for the people on duty in casualty.
Incidents that have stayed in my memory from those days include the first lesson we had in how to examine a heart - look, feel and listen: LOOK at the chest and neck and note the nature of the pulsations in the jugular veins. Place the hand over the cardiac area and FEEL the beat of the heart and if there is a valve defect one feels a "thrill" due to the eddies in the blood flow. LISTEN with a stethoscope and hear if there are any abnormal heart sounds. Having thus instructed us, the houseman took us to the cubicle to see our first patient, a rather pretty young lady ready for examination. I was asked to do the examination. Looking did not reveal any abnormality that I could see so I placed my hand below her left breast and distinctly felt something abnormal and hesitated.
"Well, what do you feel?" said the registrar.
"Please Sir, I feel a thrill!" I had to confess.
Suppressed hilarity followed and I blushed in acute embarrassment.
Funny things happened in out patients like the man with gonorrhoea. He swore that he acquired the infection riding on a donkey on Hampstead Heath and there was another who thought he was dying of debility because he had married a few months earlier and his bride wanted sex at least once a week.
Less amusing but instructive was an illustration of the will to live. There was a patient of mine on the ward who had terminal cancer and we all thought he would be dead in a couple of weeks. When I broke the news to him he refused to accept it and said that he would not agree to die. By shear will power he kept himself alive much longer than anybody thought possible.
A little girl of ten years only was dying of mitral stenosis - cardiac valve disease. Her parents were told and they immediately told her that she was going to heaven to be with Jesus as though she would welcome the news. Of course, she was terrified and spent her last two weeks stricken with fear, a lesson to me to temper the truth with some compassion.
During our midwifery we were required to attend at least twenty births in the district. On one occasion I was called to an address in Brixton which I had some difficulty in finding. When I arrived a large Irish midwife was in a small room with the expectant mother on a bed and the midwife was holding the babies head from coming out with her foot pressed against the opposite wall. Upon seeing me she said "Thank goodness you've come. I've been holding the baby in for ten minutes so you could deliver it."
There was a shortage of births in the district at the time. Some of the students were sent over to Dublin to the famous Lying In Hospital - the Rotunda. It was a time of "the troubles" and students came back with wonderful stories about Dublin. When they went out at night to a case they had to be accompanied by a porter with a white flag, otherwise they ran the risk of being shot by the rebels. After the birth they had to drink the traditional tumbler of whiskey with the family.
The students at Kings were divided into several distinct camps. The largest camp were typical public school, generally sons of doctors, and their interests lay in "rugger" and Poker playing. The other groups were foreigners, socialists and women - Kings were pioneers in taking a few women; the only other place was the Royal Free which was all women. There was a smaller group of people funded by the missionary societies who were training as medical missionaries.
The Poker school spent all their time playing poker in the common room and always failed their exams and seemed to be permanent residents. I think the authorities tolerated them because of the fees they brought in to finance the hospital.
I needed to be nearer the hospital now so I moved into digs in Stockwell Park Road with an Irish friend, Victor Passmore from Donegal. He was quite mad and he supplemented his income by playing drums in circuses and dance bands.
The digs were run by a Welsh couple. She had previously been married to a German and had two sons but was now married to a Welshman with a milk round. The younger son, sixteen, was mad about the music of Strauss and was forever playing his music on the gramophone. There were also two South African pharmacy students in residence. South Africa was still a colony then and students regularly came to England for their university education. Queen Mary's Hospital gave scholarships to South Africans who were good rugby players.
Later, I moved to Angel Road, Brixton. Being before the day of the Afro-Carribeans, it was inhabited mostly by the Irish with a sprinkling of music hall actors and prostitutes. I saw some of the seedier side of city life there. I got to know some of the Irish who frequented the local pub, The Angel. Once, I got involved in a St.Patrick's day party that lasted forty-eight hours. At one point I nearly got a knife in my back from a drunk who thought I was paying too much attention to his girlfriend.
I remember one of the other lodgers whose girlfriend came to stay with him at the weekends. He used to regale us with crude descriptions of what he got up to in bed and then one day he came down to breakfast and announced that Jesus Christ had visited him during the night and admonished him for his wicked ways. He repented and later we heard that he had gone back to his wife and children.
Hugh Faulkner acquired a house in Store Street in Bloomsbury and let rooms to fellow socialist students and this became an informal headquarters for the Inter Hospital Socialist Society. I moved in with them. There were about six of us and we all put money into a food fund and took it in turns to do the cooking. Bob Harries was a Yorkshireman who always counted the potatoes because he was afraid that he might not get his fair share. It became a standing joke but it all worked out very well.
Later Tom Parker, Patrick Stonehouse and myself got together and rented a flat near the Oval at Stockwell. We had a room each on the top floor of a three story Victorian house with a sink and gas stove on the landing. There was a communal bathroom for all the flats. This had a huge Brass hot water geyser which hissed and puffed out clouds of steam in a most alarming manner. We took it in turn to cook, living mostly on bacon and eggs.
The ground floor was occupied by a nice retired couple who were very helpful to us. We sometimes came home at night, having forgotten our door key but there was always a light in the basement and the woman living there would let us in.
One day we found a parcel on the door step. It was labelled "The scotch whore's drawers". We hadn't realised it before but the woman in the basement must have been the local prostitute and we were being mistaken for her clients.
We had to work jolly hard at the hospital with the patients and doing a lot of reading and we didn't have the long holidays like those we had at Kings College. We generally managed to get a day or two free at the weekends and a group of us, led by Frank Tyrer went off hiking. A few shillings would take us on the train to Sussex, Surrey or Kent where we spent the day walking in the country. Regulars on these trips were Pat Stonehouse, Stanley Rush, Bob Harris and various other members of the I.H.S.S. Dorothy Hodson, who had got to know Frank when they were both in Cambridge, and her friend May Sloane, both came along too. Stanley Rush was a very large chap with a wonderful repertoire of bawdy songs. During the summer holidays we sometimes went hitch-hiking, going up to Scotland or the Lake district, walking in the hills and sleeping in youth hostels. Once or twice, some of us hitch- hiked in Northern France. Some people did extensive journeys. Alan Tyrer hitch- hiked all the way to Moscow and, selling some of his clothes there, raised enough money to fly back.
We also did our duty by the Communist Party. There were cells in the various colleges. We attended lessons in Marxism under Jack Cohen, student organiser. We sold Daily Workers on street corners. We attended meetings and demonstrations, in fact looking back, I can't think how we found time to do all these things. Also I occasionally helped Krishna Menon get out the weekly news sheet India Today. This was mostly turning the handle of the Roneo duplicating machine. We frequently used to meet in restaurants in Charlotte Street. Krishna later became foreign minister in the first government of free India. Pandit Nehru was Prime Minister.
I didn't get home very often in those days and one Christmas I went home and found that My mother's health had deteriorated badly. She was asthmatic and exceedingly thin. I got her into Kings College Hospital under the asthma specialist Dr.Livingstone. Many tests were carried out but apart from the asthma all they could find was a "dropped stomach". Looking back now, I think she must have been suffering from Addison's disease which hadn't been properly recognised then but is now easily treatable with cortisone. She was prescribed injections of adrenalin and these aborted her attacks quite successfully for many years.
My mother was a gentle person on the surface but very strong within. She worked very hard for years in the house. Housework in those days was very different from today with our modern conveniences. We largely lived off the land and this meant much extra work for my mother as well as helping out with the harvesting and marketing of the produce.
Father found an au-pair girl to help my mother in the house. Her name was Nadia Nobokov and she was from Tallin in Estonia. When I next went home I found that she was a nymphomaniac. She seduced me and, I suspect, my father as well. My mother found out and turned her out. She got a job in London and contacted me when I went back and I continued a rather unsatisfactory relationship with her for a while. Eventually she was caught shoplifting and, being brought before the magistrate's court, was deported. I took her down to the docks and put her on a Russian timber boat on which a passage had been arranged for her by the police.
I guess that her sexual needs would have been catered for on that voyage, judging from what I could see of that motley crew. Back in London, relationships in our group were developing and some paring off occurred. May Sloane and Stanley Rush started sleeping together. Dorothy was with Frank Tyrer but May moved over to Frank and Dorothy and I were paired off. I was rather frightened of females but I suppose my experience with Nadia had whetted my appetite and I grew bolder and we had a stable relationship until we got married when war broke out.
Dorothy was working in "His Master's Voice" record shop in Regent Street. She loved music and was very good at her job. She earned five pounds a week, which was a good wage in those days, and sent home one pound to help her mother. Dorothy's father, who had been head gardener for Morcombe Borough Council, had a leg amputated and could no longer work. He drank a lot and his small pension was completely inadequate. We used to go to the Saddler's Wells Opera when funds permitted. Dorothy always went to see her favourite singer, Joan Cross, when she was singing.
Eventually, the final examinations loomed ahead and we had to drop everything and swot, swot and swot. Pat Tom and I quizzed each other every evening, checking facts, diagnostics, therapeutics and prognosis until the small hours. The examinations started in Examination Hall in Queen Square and lasted just over a week. Then there was an interval before we were called for our viva voce. I was lucky. The questions I got were the ones I knew the answers to. Part of the swotting had been going through past papers and trying to work out which were the most likely to come up that year and concentrating on them.
Then an interminable wait, trying not to think about it, until the results finally arrived. Queen Square was full of students and when the results were posted up there was a mad rush to get close enough to read them. When, at last, I managed to see them, I had, amazingly, passed. The happiest moment I can remember - it was as if a great cloud suddenly lifted and the sunshine came flooding in and I was walking on air. That was July 1937. Some weeks later we were summoned in batches of about twenty to the Royal College of Surgeons to take the Hippocratic Oath. I had now qualified as a member of the Royal College of Surgeons and Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians. These were the qualifications necessary to practice medicine. It was best to go on and get the slightly more prestigious qualifications of M.B.and B.S., the university qualifications but money was getting short and I needed to start earning. Also I thought I would like to volunteer for the Spanish Medical Aid Unit.
To understand my interest in politics at the time, it is necessary to sketch in the events that were taking place in Europe at that time which made thinking people realise that the whole of Europe was in danger of being taken over by a German and Italian Fascist empire bent on imposing a brutal dictatorship, intolerant of weaker nations and peoples and embarking on an attempt to conquer the whole of Europe and Asia by intrigue and threats and finally by force of arms. The very harsh terms imposed on the Germans after the first world war which deprived Germany of its industrial heart in the Rhineland and Ruhr began to cause a great deal of resentment in the late twenties. The democratic Weimer Parliament asked for the removal of some of measures but were refused. This resentment was one of the causes of the growth of the NAZI movement led by Hitler. When Hitler reoccupied the lands, the allied governments made no attempt to stop him, so that he became very popular in Germany.
In Italy, Mussolini had formed the Fascist movement, and marched in Rome and declared himself absolute ruler. He invaded Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) using mustard gas on naked natives. Haille Selassi the emperor appealed to the League of Nations which had been set up after the war to form a common front against any aggression. Unfortunately, the League of Nations could not agree on any actions. Hoare, the British foreign minister and Level, the French foreign minister, after months of debate agreed to Italy having most of Abyssinia. Much of the English press largely owned by Lord Rothermere praised the two dictators for bringing law and order to their countries, and making the trains run on time in Italy.
Japan was developing a strong army, and had invaded China about this time too. Hitler, Mussolini and Japan formed the anticomintern alliance with the aim of fighting communism. Then Franco entered the fray, invading Spain from Morocco to overthrow Spain's first democratically elected government.
Hitler invaded Austria having had the Austrian chancellor Dolfuss murdered, and declared it part of the greater Reich. At Munich, Chamberlain agrees that Hitler can annexe the Sudatenland, the Czechoslovakian border in which all the Czech defences were situated so that later he could invade the country with no resistance.
Meanwhile in Spain, Chamberlain obtained the nonintervention pact to prevent any other nation supplying arms or other aid to either side in Spain. This is rigorously imposed on any aid to the Spanish government, even to the extent of making it illegal to enter Spain to help the government. At the same time, Germany is bombing the Spanish towns, and supplying military advisors, and the Italians are providing large numbers of troops. The Italians even sunk a British submarine in the Mediterranean in error, but the British government did not do anything about it. The British government had already allowed Nazi Germany to rebuild its war fleet, and even gave it a loan to do so.
At home, there was high unemployment and discontent led to hunger marches coming down to London from the north, and also many youths joining Moseley's Black shirts, who marched through the east end of London protected by the police. Britain at this time was by far the best armed country in Europe, so could dominate the other European countries. The Fascist, and the Nazi regimes naturally saw the British foreign policy as encouraging them to continue with their aggressive policies, presumably hoping they would attack the USSR.
Those of us who took the trouble to find out what was going on, realised that if Franco won in Spain, a very large part of Europe would be under a right wing dictatorship and further conquest and wars would be inevitable. Thus Spain was seen to be the last hope we had of stopping Fascism and the threat of European war. The Russian foreign minister, Maisky, was constantly pleading with the League of Nations to intervene and at Munich they said they were willing to help defend Czechoslovakia, and the French said they would, but Chamberlain persuaded the French to withdraw their offer, and so the Russians realised that they would be isolated, and in a trap, so they also pulled out.
Hitler had already cleared the way for an attack on Poland by claiming Danzig and parts of Lithuania because many of the inhabitants were of German descent. Fortunately by the time that Hitler was ready to invade, the faction of the Tory party led, I think, by Churchill, pointed out that a Germany in possession of all the resources of Russia, could take over the whole of Europe, including ourselves.
I had attended many meetings and rallies aimed at alerting the people to the dangers that lay ahead if the spread of Fascism was not halted. Brigaders and refugees coming from Spain reported on the nature of the Franco led revolt, increasing the sum of evidence of what was happening in Germany and Italy, by the way of murder and torture of opponents of the regime, and in Germany the beginning of the extermination of Jews and other minorities, convinced us that if the Fascists won in Spain there was little chance of avoiding a world war - Japan had also invaded China.
As C.Day Lewis the poet said, "Our eyes were open and we saw no other way." I applied to the committee for Spanish Medical Aid to be sent to Spain. These were volunteer doctors and nurses from this, and many other countries. I was told that I needed more experience before I would be of use. So I obtained a job at the Belgrave Hospital for Children which was a "satellite" of Kings College Hospital, to work as surgical houseman under a surgeon I had worked with at Kings, Cecil Wakley, later Sir Cecil Wakley, president of the Royal College of Surgeons. Belgrave Hospital for children was just near the Oval, a Victorian structure with a hundred beds staffed by three house officers, one surgical (me) and two medical. A full time secretary, a receptionist, an almoner, a pathologist one day a week, a radiologist mornings only, consultants who had consulting rooms in Harley street came in to do an out patient session and a ward round or operations once a week. The surgeons I worked for were Cecil Wakley, the general surgeon and R.A.Ramsey, who specialised in pyloric stenosis, Geoffrey Bateman, ear nose and throat, B.A.Burns, orthopaedics and Bishop Harman, eyes.
We hospital officers were on duty twenty four hours a day, seven days a week for six months for which we were paid sixty pounds plus food, lodgings and beer courtesy of Tolemacs (a very good brew). If we took time off, we had to arrange cover with each other. I was unlucky being the only surgical officer.
Going to the cinema was a major source of relaxation. I had to tell Sister which cinema I was going to and at the box office I would have to let them know which seat I was in, and if I was needed Sister would telephone the cinema and a message was flashed on the screen or the attendant came and found me and I rushed back to the hospital on my bicycle.
I had to arrange an operating list for each surgeon for his day from the waiting list and send out notices for the patient to come in on the previous morning and then examine then to see if they were fit for surgery. If they were not, or if they failed to appear, I got on my bike and rounded up the next on the list.
On operating day I had to see that all the preparations were made for the operation, and then assist. As I became more experienced the surgeon left me to do the simple ones. Mr.Burns, on several occasions rang up when his operating day came, and said he had lunched rather well with Lord so and so, and didn't feel up to operating. I read out his operating list, and he told me which ones I could do myself, and which he would come and do next day.
One of the house physicians generally gave the anaesthetic, but sometimes I had to. Mr Bateman, the ear nose and throat surgeon, and Mr Ramsey, each did a session of Tonsillectomies, for which the London county council paid them seven shillings and sixpence a time. I gave the anaesthetic, which consisted of spraying ethyl chloride on a mask held on the child's face, while a nurse held the child down. Ramsey was always in such a hurry that the child was barely unconscious before he began. Bateman, who was a very nice chap, taught me the technique and allowed me to do some. After they had gone, I was left with a ward of about twelve small children, with various degrees of bleeding. It was a bit like a slaughter house at times. Sometimes, I had to get up at night to deal with a bad bleeder. The nurses were very good however, and dealt with most of it for the two days the children were in the ward.
Mr Ramsey had developed a technique for dealing with pyloric stenosis. I received calls from all over the south east, from GP's asking for a baby to be admitted for Mr Ramsey's operation. It was quite a simple really, if you had a steady hand, consisting of cutting through the pyloric muscle without touching the mucosa. He used a dummy dipped in port wine as an anaesthetic. Ramsey was a rather pompous ass. I didn't get on well with him, and he was the only one who didn't give me a good reference when I left.
Bishop Harman, the ophthalmologist, was very helpful and I enjoyed helping him with his operations which were mainly for squints. Cecil Wakley, who did most of the general surgery, helped me a great deal and was very reassuring when I made my bad mistake - we had a three month old baby with an umbilical hernia treated in the usual way which was strapping a penny over it. However, it was not responding to treatment, so Wakley decided to operate and sew it up. Next day a child was admitted with a septic throat which turned out to be diphtheria, a major killer in those days. I sent it to the local fever hospital and swabbed the other children in the ward. I discovered several had the bug in their throats including the baby, so next day I sent all of them to the fever hospital. A few days later, the baby was sent back. I took another swab and under the microscope I saw a typical diphtheria bacillus, so I again sent it back to the fever hospital. Next day the local medical officer of health came to see me, and explained that they had decided that the bacillus was an "avirulent" strain and harmless.
As students we never saw infectious diseases, as they went to the fever hospitals, and although we learnt about bacteria, I had never heard of avirulent strains (ones that did not produce the poisons that killed). Unfortunately the baby developed paralytic illia, and died due to all the ambulance journeys and moving about. I felt terrible about this, especially when the parents visited and I had to tell them, but much to my astonishment, instead of accusing me of killing their baby, they thanked me for all the trouble I had gone to try and save the child. I was staggered, and have learned since that relatives' reactions to death are quite unpredictable. This was before the days of immunisations, antibiotics and modern drugs, and mortality amongst children in the poorer areas like Stockwell and Brixton was high.
Infection of the ears starting from infected tonsils was very common and often called for a mastoidectomy. Impetigo and blepharitis were common and difficult to treat as they were really the result of malnutrition. Osteomyelitis often followed broken bones, and many children died of mitral stenosis after an attack of scarlet fever.
Many people could not afford to go to the doctor, and the panel only covered workers, and not their wives and children so our outpatients was always full. The almoner interviewed the parents and got what money she could from them. We had a very dedicated nursing staff. The sister in charge of the surgical ward was a fat, jolly Irish woman and the children all loved her.
One perk the nurses had was theatre tickets. Sometimes a theatre had tickets returned and they sent them to the hospital for the nurses. My favourite nurse, "Pig" Rangley, when she could get two tickets, took me along with her. I always remember seeing Peggy Ashcroft as a young girl on the stage - I think it was in a Tennessee Williams play "Morning becomes Electra". Nurses had to be back by ten in the evening according to the rules. So if one got back after that there was the fun of trying to smuggle them in when the night sister was out of the way, which wasn't easy. In the hospital kitchen there was always a very large rice pudding in the oven with a nice brown crust. If one got in late or was called out in the night one could feast on it which I liked very much.
At the end of my six month stint, I was accepted by the Spanish Medical Aid Committee and went off for a week's holiday youth hostelling in the Scottish Highlands with Dorothy and Pat. My passport was altered as at that time it was illegal to go to the Republican Spain except for "humanitarian" purposes. Instead of Her Majesty requesting the bearer travel without let or hindrance, Her Majesty refused all responsibility for me. Professor Marak then gave me TAB inoculations and I was sent to Moss Brothers to get a uniform.
On May 1st 1938 I reported at Victoria Station and met Roy Pool, our courier with several large cases of medical supplies and two nurses, Margaret Powell and Nan Green who were returning to Spain after a short leave. We took a couchette to Perpignon in the south of France where we went to a small hotel for the night. We had a meal, and of course there was wine on the table. It was my first taste of wine, and I thought it was very poor substitute for beer.
We were woken at two o'clock in the morning by the police bursting into the bedroom. We were cross questioned, but were able to convince them in the end that we were legitimate. Next day we took the Michelin, a small local diesel tram with rubber tyres so that it was a very smooth ride which served rural areas in France in those days, and arrived at a small village Perthues on the Spanish border. We walked to a chain across the high street, which was the border, and saw Winifred Bates waiting for us on the other side. We presented our passports to the gendarmes and then to the Spanish militia and were allowed through.
I had a funny feeling as I stepped onto Spanish soil. There was no going back now. I was committed to the fate of Spain.
News was not good. The British Battalion had received severe casualties in the fighting at Ebro. France's troops had reached the Mediterranean coast between Barcelona and Valencia so that the government forces had been cut in two. Also Hitler had annexed Austria, and was threatening Czechoslovakia and the outlook for democracy was pretty bleak.
Winifred took us in her car to Barcelona, via Gerona, and Mataro. This is the part of Spain now known as the Costa Brava, the wild coast. It was beautiful then, with small fishing villages, and wild rocky cliffs and little narrow lanes through the forests.
We arrived at the British Medical Aid Headquarters in Barcelona. In was a flat, very overcrowded, where we had to sleep on the floor. It was very hot, and I didn't sleep very well. There were frequent air raids, both in the day and night, mostly directed at the port, so we were never hit.
Mussolini had taken possession of the Ballearic Islands, Minorca, Majorca, etc. and from there, Italian planes did not have far to come. One knew when a raid was coming, because the electricity was cut off and all the trams stopped. One evening I went to see Bill Rust, the editor of the Daily Worker, who was staying in Barcelona near the docks. I got to the flat safely and stayed with him till the raid was over. It was nice to be with someone who was used to having bombs exploding all round, and finding he had survived. It gave one confidence for future occasions.
At the end of the week I was called to the chief medical officer of the Ministry of Defence, who spoke good English and was posted to a hospital near Gerona named Farnes de la Selva, it was originally named Santa Colomba. But due to the anti clericalism of the republicans, that name had been dropped. The church was strongly in support of the Franco revolution, so many priests had fled and churches were vandalised.
The hospital was a spa hotel where the rich went to take the waters, so it was very well suited as a hospital. It was up in the hills near Gerona in beautiful surroundings. It had been first used as a convalescent home but had been upgraded to take the wounded. They arrived having had first aid treatment at the front line hospitals at Vick and Mataro.
The staff, when I arrived, consisted of the Director, Edmund Voegel from New York, Chief nurse Anna from Austria, Doctor Glazer, a German. Dr Myers who was Austrian, suffered from some undiagnosed illness so that he was more patient than doctor. We also had a polish woman pathologist, a Spanish "Practicante" who was a medical student. An English nurse, Eileen Sparling, who had been working in a Barcelona hospital when the war broke out, and a several other nurses from, Canada, Algeria and Spain, whose names I can't remember. There were also about six untrained Spanish "chica's". An English girl, Rosalind Smythe, a personnel officer, who was a friend of Winifred Bates, made herself useful in various ways.
Later, personnel changed. A new superintendent Rhodes was from Bulgaria or Romania, a Spanish chief nurse named Carmen, a Chinese doctor named Owen (that's what it sounded like and later I realised that his name was O-Wen), and a Czechoslovakian, Max Laufer.
The patients were about half Spanish, and the rest American, British, French, Belgian, Polish, German, Austrian, Dutch, Czechoslovakian, Yugoslavian, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Canadian, Moroccan, Cuban Portuguese, Italian, New Zealanders, Australian, and Abyssinian.
At first, we were taking in patients from the front line hospitals who were well on the way to recovery. My special interests were the casualties treated by the "Truater method" of enclosing the whole of a shattered limb in plaster. The flesh wounds then, got no dressing (no antibiotics then), a a lot of puss was generated inside the plaster. The smell was terrible, but the puss appeared to have a healing effect, and when we opened the plasters that had been on long enough for the bone to knit, it was full of maggots, but clean and healthy. Those with plenty of maggots healed much better than those without, so they must have some healing enzyme. The trouble was, that sometimes the maggots caused itching and when they dropped out, as sometimes they did, the patients were rather frightened that they were being eaten alive.
After the casualties from the Ebro fighting there was a lull and the hospitals and casualty clearing stations to the west closed. When the Franco troops made their next push forward, we had casualties direct. The fighting was sporadic and we coped. We lacked an X-ray machine which was not very helpful. The local doctor in the town allowed us to use his machine occasionally, but the difficulty of getting film made this a rather rare event.
Another problem was that food was running out. We had a bowl of hot milk for breakfast and during the day bread which was a grey colour and made from any grain that happened to be available; not much wheat but barley, sorgum, chalk, peanut flour, etc. Chick peas and salted cod fish was our main dish, helped down with peppers and occasionally mule meat. The mule meat was much too tough to just eat but one could chew it and get out most of the nourishment.
I had a bout of dysentery and was not able to eat for some time and I got so thin my clothes hung as though on a hat stand.
Of the patients I remember some were Americans from Lincoln Washington Brigade who got caught in a surprise attack. One was a negro, apparently an influential member of the communist party. He had been shot in the head and his optic nerve had been severed rendering him completely blind. We had a job preventing him from committing suicide.
A Jewish tailor from New York had both legs blown off by a land mine just a few days after arriving in Spain. A young Spanish boy of seventeen whose leg we had to amputate cried for his mother all the time. He died later in a typhoid fever.
A Cockney taxi driver who came in with some nasty flesh wounds in his legs. After a few days he found he could walk again so when we would not discharge him, he deserted and tried to get back to his unit but was arrested by the military police and was brought back. We imprisoned him in a stable until he was fit.
Another character turned out to be one of the Carritt family, (a poet) who had some sort of injury and tried to persuade us that he was fit by lying on his back and waving his legs in the air.
A welsh man by the name of Bryn Jenkins came in to the hospital with a leg full of pieces of shrapnel received when his ammunition lorry got blown up. I managed to get all the pieces out and he was very grateful and as soon as he could, he made himself useful round the hospital and as we were short staffed at that time we kept him on as a medical orderly. During the second world war he became a major in the R.A.M.C.in Burma.
A sad case was a young French student who was a tank driver whose tank had blown up. The shock to his brain had left him like a zombie, hardly able to speak or do anything for himself. A happier memory was of a captain who was a gypsy who played wonderful gypsy music on his guitar all day. Another worrying case was that of a Norwegian boy with a wound in his arm that developed into gas gangrene. I tried desperately to get some anti gangrene serum but none was available. He did not speak any English and he thought I was not doing enough to help him. He turned against me and started throwing chairs and things at me and he had to be restrained. This was near the end and soon after that all the patients were sent to Barcelona for repatriation. I often wonder if he survived but I doubt it.
There was a home for war orphans in the town which I visited regularly once a week. They drew pictures illustrating their experiences and gave them to me. The war was near the end now and things were looking desperate. Russia had ceased to send aid and food was short.
On the International front the Non Intervention Committee would not reach an agreement on the Russian demand that all foreign personnel should be withdrawn so the Spanish Government decided to withdraw the International Brigade from the front in the hope that this would put pressure on Germany and Italy. In the event Italy did withdraw ten thousand troops but replaced them later with eleven thousand four hundred.
Our patients were evacuated to Barcelona Hospital. I was sent to join the British Battalion. Before I left the hospital the, communist cell committee at the hospital sent a letter to Jose Diaz, the general secretary of the Spanish Communist Party recommending me for the order of the Red Banner for devotion to duty.
The Battalion was billeted in Ripoll, a small picturesque town situated in the foothills of the Pyrenees. It was now November and at that altitude very cold. We were short of clothing and blankets and the blankets we had were lousy. Most of the men were used to lice and had developed a technique of going over blankets and clothes each day with a lighted cigarette burning the lice where they hide in the seams. I suffered terribly at first until I learned what to do.
I had an old stable as a sick bay in which I cared for about half a dozen cases of typhoid. There was no treatment for typhoid then, except good nursing. There was no doctor in the town and I was asked to see local patients, mostly with tuberculosis. Again at that time there was no treatment except good nursing and good food which was not available.
I got to know Sam Wild, the battalion commander and others whose names escape me for the moment. They were two hundred strong, somewhat depleted having lost over five hundred killed. We had been in Ripoll for about a month when we went to Barcelona where there was a big rally of all the International Brigaders of all nationalities in the Plaza de Catalunia before they joined the train to France.
I stayed behind with the nurses and other medical personnel and joined the ambulance train provided by the Red Cross a few days later. It was an ordinary train with seats. The very ill lay on the seats with blankets. It was now December and as we went north it became very cold and there were not enough blankets so we all became very distressed.
At the Port Bon frontier station, Andre Marte made a rather long farewell speech from the platform which didn't help much. At the first station in France we stopped and were given a meal of cold mutton and haricot beans. After what we had become used to, it was delicious. After the meal I wandered down the platform and, as there was no barrier, being a small country station, I was soon outside. A gendarme must have spotted me for I was quickly apprehended and led to the station with a pistol in my back.
After a long slow journey through the night we eventually arrived in Paris where we were met by a fleet of ambulances which took all the British to the British hospital, which I think it was called the Hereford Hospital. I handed over to the English doctor in charge. We were met by Roy Poole whom I knew slightly. By now I was so exhausted that my memory of that time is somewhat impaired. Anyway, I was taken to a bistro and had a meal with Mary Mcarthy, the American Writer, who quizzed me about my experiences but I couldn't have been much help to her because I fell asleep during the meal.
I suppose I slept somewhere that night but I've no idea where. Next day I went to the hospital to see how the patients were. A few were in very bad shape after the journey and some had developed frost bite in their toes during the train journey because of the thin useless and scarce blankets which offered hardly any protection, especially to those so ill as not to be able to move. We decided that some of the men were unfit to travel further. The walking wounded, the nurses and myself took the train to London.
We arrived just too late for Christmas and I slept that night in Hugh and Joan Faulkner's flat in Bloomsbury. Dorothy came to join me and I went home to Bournemouthe. I was very thin and very tired. I don't remember much about the period during which I regained my strength. Dysentery and malnutrition really take it out of you. When I had recovered, I went to see Dr.Somerville Hastings who was president of the Socialist Medical Association and chairman of the London County Council Health Committee. The L.C.C.H.C. had taken over the old poor law infirmaries and workhouses under the 1929 Act and upgraded some of them into municipal hospitals. He found me a job as senior house surgeon at Lewisham Hospital.
The place was run by a Medical superintendent who was a crusty old Scotsman, the senior surgeon, myself and a junior surgical houseman. Most of the time this post was vacant but we did have a woman for part of the time.
We had a very busy time. I remember one bank holiday weekend when all the holiday traffic was returning from the South East, a series of road accidents kept us in the theatre for twenty four hours non stop. We were kept going by a new wonder drug called amphetamine which was to be used extensively during the second world war. It was regarded as a dangerous drug.
I had been in the job four about four or five months when I received a telegram from my mother saying that Dad had been taken into hospital with acute clonic obstruction. I asked for leave of absence and dashed down to Boscome Hospital. The surgeon showed me the X-ray and a colostomy was performed right away. The next day Dad had a massive pulmonary embolus and died within twenty four hours. He was sixty five. I must confess that to my surprise I felt no great grief.
Neither Morley nor myself got on very well with Dad. For my part I think he had antagonised me by pushing me too hard. Looking back, I am now very grateful to him for spurring me on though he could have done it more effectively by being more tactful. He castigated me for my lack of academic progress at times to such an extent that I resolved never to do that to any of my children should I ever have any. Dad was buried at the Nonconformist chapel in Throop.
I remained at Squirrel Bank for several weeks, settling my father's affairs, selling off stock etc. I remember there were several hundredweight of fine cauliflowers which I just could not sell and I finally had to dump them. My father had a very old Morris Cowley tractor which was getting a bit worn and which was heavy to drive. My mother couldn't manage it. I thought she should have a car as it was a long way into the town for her to cycle. We got a small "Standard" and I endevoured to teach her to drive. It soon became obvious that she couldn't get the hang of it so I used the car myself. My mother was left with a small income which she could just about live on. I think it was under two hundred pounds a year which seems like very little today but pensioners were living on ten shillings (5Op) a week at that time.
My mother took in a nice young man as a lodger so as not to be alone in the house. He was a scientist working at the local aircraft establishment and was called Malcolm. He was working on the development of radar was to become so important in the war, later on. Unfortunately, he developed Eales disease and went blind sometime later.
I did two weeks locum for my mother's GP while he went off to do a refresher course. His wife did not go with him and she was in charge of finance. She kept a strict eye on me, making sure that I recorded all the consultations and visits, so that she could send out monthly bills to patients.
I did a locum for a doctor in Wandsworth for two weeks and then a longer locum in Great Yarmouth. This was for a partnership of four doctors who took it in turns to go for a holiday, so I was there for the whole of the summer of 1939 and got to know Yarmouth very well. In those days there were no specialists in small town hospitals. The local GPs looked after their hospitalised patients with just one houseman in charge. His name was Jack Campbell. The hospital was financed by local subscriptions and fund raising flag days and the almoner got what she could from patients who were not subscribers.
My work was a mixture of general practice and hospital work and I found it very interesting. Great Yarmouth was a major herring port then and as the fleet followed the herring down the coast from Aberdeen, the "fisher girls" followed. They gutted the fish to make kippers and bloaters. They were a rough lot. They had to work fast to earn a good wage so their hands were covered in raw scars and they constantly came to the surgery with cuts that needed stitching.
They didn't wait to be attended to but walked straight into the surgery or knocked loudly on the door and demanded immediate attention. They spoke an Aberdeen dialect which was difficult to understand and a lot of them got drunk at night. They were tolerated because they were only there for two or three weeks and they were important to the local economy. Jack Campbell knew one of the girls in the chorus that was performing on the pier that year so we had some interesting company in our spare time.
When I had finished with that practice, another GP who lived nearby, asked me to do a locum for him. When I mentioned this, to the chaps I had just been working for, they were a bit worried as there was a lot of head hunting in those days and they were frightened that some of their patients might follow me and go to the other practice. I had to promise that I would not in future see any of their patients or discuss their methods of practice.
The new GP had a very clever system in his dispensary. Shelves of bottles of winchesters labelled: chest, kidney, colds, headaches, etc. Another self had colouring agents; red, green, yellow, etc., another of flavours: aniseed, peppermint, sugar, bitter, etc. By mixing these he could produce a wide variety of medicine to suit each patient and each recipe was recorded in the patient's notes. Woe betide you if a patient got the wrong colour or flavour.
In fact most of the drugs used then were harmless placebos and served to reassure patients. There were no modern drugs like those we are familiar with today. For instance bromide was the standard sedative or tranquillizer while strychnine was used as a stimulant or tonic. Morphine was the standard drug for relieving pain and extract of senna for constipation, ipicacuana for coughs. Drugs were measured out in ounces and drams.
The summer of 1939 was very sunny and the town was full of holiday makers and there were caravans all along the coast. The effect of Chamberlain's return from Munich with the message that he had "achieved peace in our time" fooled the public into a sense of relief and there was a generally happy-go-lucky air. However, on the continent, sinister events were taking place. The British government had recognised Franco's mob as the legitimate government of Spain in February and fighting ceased in April with thousands of refugees crossing the Pyrenees into south eastern France where they were put into concentration camps along with the International Brigaders from countries that had Fascist governments and could not return - i.e. Rumania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Austria.
Hitler had annexed Bohemia, Moravia and parts of Lithuania. Mussolini annexed Albania. Chamberlain signed a defence treaty with Poland. Japan invaded China. War now seemed inevitable. The Territorial Army was mobilised as was the Navy. Conscription was legalised. The Home Guard, "Dad's Army", was formed. Then, on September 1st, Germany having invaded Poland, Chamberlain declared war.
Suddenly the holidays came to an end. All the holiday makers disappeared. War emergency plans were implemented. The Civil Defence Act was brought into force. First aid posts were opened. Air Raid Wardens were established. The GP I was working for came back from holiday.
The Local Medical Officer of Health was taken ill with an inoperable cancer. His deputy had taken over but he urgently needed help as a lot of government directives had fallen on his desk relating to civil defence. He had heard of my presence in the town and asked me to help him. I assumed that I would soon be called up so this would be a useful stopgap job.
I was put in charge of the infectious diseases hospital and the school medical service. Dorothy and I thought we were unlikely to survive the war so we decided to get married and have what time we could together. We rented a nice little house on the cliffs at Gorleston for a very small rent because a lot of people were leaving this very exposed east coast for safer (so they thought) places and there were a lot of empty houses.
I found the work very interesting. We had an out break of diphtheria just as I started work and this kept me very busy. The only treatments we had for diphtheria then were steam kettles, serum made from human blood and tracheotomy. The serum was very difficult to get so it was used only in the most severe cases. I spent many nights pumping serum into children and performing tracheotomies. We had a scarlet fever ward, this was still a serious disease, and a whooping cough ward. We next had an outbreak of cerebrospinal meningitis at the army camp nearby. The occurrence of meningitis is often associated with the crowding together of people from many different places with insufficient space between beds. It always happens in war time in crowded barracks. It so happened that I read an article in the "Practitioner" by Professor Banks reporting on a trial he had conducted in Cairo with a drug made by May and Baker which had magically cured a lot of cases of meningitis which was still fatal in over fifty percent of cases. I immediately got in touch with May and Baker and they sent me a supply of M&B/693. It worked like magic. One of the most exciting things I can remember was seeing, within a few days, all of those people getting better.
I remember in particular one case, that of a second lieutenant who was desperately ill. He was a member of the Vasey family, nephew of the man known as "The White Raja of Sarawak". His family sent a top Harley Street physician to see him. He was astounded by the results I was getting. We only had one death and that was a woman who, because she had become very delirious, was thought to be a mental case and sent to the infirmary. By the time a correct diagnosis was made she was too far gone to be saved.
I took school health clinics, treating children for what was regarded as mild ailments then such as blepharitis, otitis media and impetigo. We were not allowed to give medicine for other ailments because it was "taking the bread out of the GP's mouths". Also, I had a laboratory in a little hut in the hospital grounds from which I provided a bacteriological service for the area, examining throat swabs, urine samples and sputum for suspected TB. Sometimes I did the TB clinic.
The deputy who was now in charge retained the duties of Port Medical Officer. Most of the ships coming in were timber boats from Finland and Russia and Scandinavia and, by tradition, the P.M.O.was always entertained in the captain's cabin with a generous drink of Vodka or Slivovitch, a privilege that he was not willing to share.
Another job I had was training the staff of the first aid posts. One problem we had was the Yarmouth Rows. This was a section of the town near the harbour where the medieval housing remained and all the poorest people lived. The Rows were so narrow that ambulances could not enter to collect casualties. We designed a little cart which would carry two stretchers and had several made. They were never used in my time but were used later when the area was bombed.
I received a letter from Max Laufer who had married a Spanish girl called Edelmira. They were in a concentration camp at Argeles Sur Mere just north of the Spanish frontier and living in terrible conditions. She was expecting a baby. They had been among those who fled before Franco's troops on their final assault. They crossed the Pyrenees and were taken prisoner by the French authorities and taken to the camp which was situated in a landscape populated mostly by sand dunes. Max was a Czech and could not go home.
I also got a letter from a Chinese doctor, Dr.O.Wen. An organisation to help the refugees from Europe to get to this country had been formed at that time. I got in touch with them and they arranged for them to come to England on condition that I accepted full responsibility for their keep while they were here. Sadly, Dr.O.Wen was not accepted.
Max and Edelmira arrived at Victoria Station where I met them and their two week old baby two days before war was declared. They came to live with us at Yarmouth. It was a bit cramped and there were some difficulties. I was not earning all that much. They were badly undernourished and had scabies and Edelmira became hysterical at times. However we had some good times as well.
Max always carried his violin wherever he went and he and Dorothy loved to entertain with musical evenings, she playing the piano. One of the friends we made at that time was a policeman. He was a very nice chap and we did not at the time realised that he had been assigned to watch us for any signs of political activism. Max and Edelmira lived with us for about a year. Edelmira was only about eighteen and had been traumatised by her experiences running from Franco's troops and her stay in the French prison camp where she gave birth. She never quite recovered her equilibrium and was reluctant to leave the house. The tendency was made worse by her difficulty learning English. The baby's name was Jose. Years later he became one of Czechoslovakia's top pop stars and possessed the only Jaguar in that country.
The government ordered the evacuation of large cities, particularly London. We had a telegram from the Home Office to say that mothers with children under five and children of school age would be arriving in Yarmouth within the next three days and we were required to find accommodation for them. I forget how many hundreds there were. We commandeered all the large buildings and distributed the emergency stores of blankets, etc. We set up canteens and more first aid posts. Fortunately, the materials had been supplied when the war emergency was first declared and plans worked out.
On the day, two of the Eagle paddle steamers that used to take trippers to Southend, arrived at the pier full of expectant mothers and children. It was a very hot day and many of them were suffering from sunburn and sea sickness. Many of the children looked as though they had scarlet fever and some of the expectant mums started having pains. However, when they got settled, they recovered and there was no immediate epidemic.
The billeting officers now got busy and allocated them to spare accommodation. Before they went to their hosts all the children had to have a medical examination most of which I did. Many of the children had scabies and all had lice. We set up two or three cleansing stations in which children were cleaned under showers and treated with benzol-benzoate. Their clothing was then sterilised in a steam oven at the fever hospital.
We now began to get the occasional air raid, generally single fighter plains flying along the coast to reconnoitre our defences. They also dropped the occasional small bomb and strafed the towns. Fortunately, nobody was seriously injured while I was there. The army protected important buildings with sandbag walls. One day I was very grateful for these because the hospital was strafed and by ducking behind the sandbags I evaded the bullets.
After Dunkirk, the east coast was declared an evacuation area so all the refugees that had been sent to Yarmouth had to be moved again together with the local children. We also were instructed to empty the local general hospital to make way for war casualties. All patients who could possibly be sent home were sent and the others were to be evacuated.
We received a telegram from the government instructing us to have all hospital evacuees on stretchers on the platform of the railway station in the small hours of the morning. About midday a goods train arrived fitted with brackets on which the stretchers were placed. We never Knew what happened to them but there were rumours that some of them ended up at Liverpool infirmary and several had died on the journey.
After that Yarmouth was like a ghost town so I went to the RAF recruiting office and asked to join. I was told that doctors would be called up as and when required. I answered a advert in the BMJ and was appointed assistant medical officer in the west riding of Yorkshire.
Max and Edelmira went to stay with friends in London and Dorothy and I got into the car and drove to Wakefield, Yorkshire. When we got to Wakefield, we went to a cafe to eat and during the meal we looked at a map of Yorkshire to see where we were and when we left there was a policeman at the door waiting for us. He said that someone had reported us as being suspicious characters, the reason being that we were pouring over a map and speaking in foreign accents. We were able to convince him that we were not German spies.
We rented a little cottage in Bessacarr near the mining village of Rossington where I was to be in charge of the school medical service and child welfare service in the rural district of Doncaster. After a while the Laufers joined us but by now he was allowed to work as a stretcher bearer in a first aid post in Doncaster. Later the government decided that doctors who were refugees from occupied countries would be put on a temporary register and be allowed to practice. Max got a job in Pinderfields Hospital in Wakefield so they left us, much to our mutual relief.
My mother, who was still suffering badly from asthma, came to live with us. This was a period of intense air raids and Bournemouthe had been attacked several times. Squirrel Bank was let to a group of three German couples who were Social Democrats and had escaped from Germany and were being looked after by an organisation run by Mrs.Churchill. Later, they were interned on the Isle of Mann with all the other enemy aliens.
It was about this time that we received a notice that Morley, my brother, had been taken prisoner by the Italian troops at Tobruk. He was in a prisoner of war cage in the desert for some time and was infected with malaria and was sent to a hospital in Pisa, Italy were he spent much of his time. We were able to send him "POW" parcels once a month. When Italy was invaded by the allies his POW camp was transferred to Germany where he had a terrible time doing a hard labouring job in a sugar factory while he was still weak from the effects of the malaria.
The area I worked in was part of the south Yorkshire coal fields which had suffered a great deal of unemployment and poverty. The war had increased the demand for coal so that most men were back at work by now but the years of poverty had left its mark and pay was still very poor. The main diet of the children was bread and lard. A meal of sorts was prepared once a week containing some sort of meat, very often a poached rabbit but this was only for the wage earner. The wives and children were probably allowed some if possible.
With the outbreak of war, school milk had been introduced and cost a halfpenny per third of a pint. It was free to any child who was certified as malnourished by the school doctor. As I went round the schools I certified about three quarters of them. It wasn't long before the authority found it was more expensive to collect the halfpennies than to supply the milk so all the milk was made free. School meals were then started but were means tested and only the better off had to pay.
I was put in touch with a man called Jock Kane who was secretary of the local branch of the miner's union. A remarkable man working in a pit called "Yorkshire Main" at Armthorpe. He had started working in the pits at Lanarkshire at the age of twelve and was entirely self-educated. He was at one time a member of the central committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain. He taught Marxist theory at the local branch of the party and I learned more about politics from him than any other person. He had a wonderful wife named Betty and two lovely children. I used to go with him to the miner's welfare club where all the men wore their cloth caps and drank vast quantities of beer and talked politics. Not like they are today where the women are allowed in and floor shows are provided.
After the war when the mines were nationalised, Jock was given the job of welfare officer on the coal board but after a while he felt he was losing touch with his mining comrades and returned to the pit. He was not physically strong and suffered badly from stomach ulcers. He died prematurely a few years later.
Another interesting character in the party, "Pa" Hodson, invalided out of the Boar War and went down the pits. He was black listed after the general strike. He eked out a living making bread. Getting up at five in the morning and delivering his bread to his customers with a box cart made from an old pram. All his children were party members. Another character I remember was the chairman of the urban district of Thorne. He also had been black list in 1926 and he lived on the dole and spent his live in the public library reading history. He took me down mines and explained to me all about the mining industry. Later he became the local MP. His name was John Kelly.
Another of my activities was with the Local Home Guard, "Dad's Army" where I was given the rank of Major. I trained stretcher bearers in first aid and we went out on manoeuvres and I learned to use a Bren gun. It was great fun and I was quite good at it and I learned to strip and rebuild it.
Another local doctor came to help me. He was in charge of the local TB clinic. His name was Berty Mann. We found that we shared the same political outlook as did Betty, his wife so we became great friends.
Next door to them Lived a Mr. and Mrs.Cousins. Frank Cousins was the secretary of the local branch of the Transport and General Workers Union and also became great friends. Later Frank became general secretary of the TGWU and Minister of Technology in the first Wilson Government.
When Russia entered the war people started an "Aid For Russia" campaign. The Soviet Army was being heavily punished at the time and our troops were not very active. I was asked by the mayor to address a meeting on behalf of the campaign at the local Granada cinema. It was my first experience of addressing a large audience through a microphone and I was very frightened.
Another memory of those days were the bombers stationed at Finingly. Our cottage happened to be very near the air field and we were woken every night by the returning bombers. Halifaxes and/or Wellingtons I think, returning from raids over Germany.
One night there was a terrific crash very near our cottage. A badly damaged plane had just not quite made it to the runway and it crashed in flames. I rushed out to see if I could save any of the crew. The heat was so intense that I couldn't get anywhere near and the ammunition was exploding all over the place. I became conscious of the smell of roast pork so I knew that the crew must all have perished.
Our first child named David was born in a nursing home in Doncaster. Dorothy was attended by a local surgeon who doubled up as an obstetrician. He had to use forceps and the baby suffered a brain haemorrhage and died within the week. The care at the nursing home, I thought, left much to be desired. A week later Dorothy developed pelvic peritonitis and was in great pain. She went into the local Infectious diseases hospital and lay flat for six weeks. This was the only treatment available at the time as antibiotics had not yet been invented. Fortunately she made a complete recovery.
Another interesting experience was have Professor Haldane to stay with us for a couple of nights while he was inspecting air raid shelters which he claimed were not properly built. He was trying to get the government to alter their specifications. He was a very entertaining guest with very interesting stories to tell.
At last I was called up by the army in October 1942. I had to report to the Royal Army Medical Corps Barracks in Leeds, where they tried to make doctors into soldiers. My squad consisted of twenty to thirty doctors who were put in the charge of a guards corporal who drilled us in army ways - how and when to salute, how to march in step, and all the other things that soldiers must do.
We were a terrible trial for the poor man. There were tall Scottish surgeons and fat little Jewish psychiatrists and a sprinkling of women. Keeping in step as we marched up and down, wheel to the left, wheel to the right and about turn was quite beyond our abilities.
He entertained us with the most terrible oaths but as we were above him in rank he always ended with a loud "SIR!". Map reading exercises terminated in being taken in a coach to the middle of the Yorkshire moors on a moonless night with maps and compasses and a map reference which, if we arrived at before five a.m., we would get a lift back to the barracks, otherwise we would have to find our own way back to Leeds. By helping each other, we all managed to make it. We also had to line up for TAB inoculations and the day after, while we were suffering from the reaction and feeling very ill, we had to do a ten mile route march. We suspected that all the non-medical personnel were getting their own back in anticipation of when they received their own injections. We also had to experience gas in a chamber without the benefit of masks. It caused terrible nausea and I just wanted to lie down and die. It wore off in twenty minutes or so.
We had lectures on military law, the King's regulations and the official secrets act. We took aptitude tests to see if any of us possessed special abilities. We then had a week in the field sanitation unit learning about purifying water, disposal of excreta, health inspections aimed at safeguarding the health of large numbers of people living in rough conditions. This was the most useful bit of our education and I wished that I had been able to learn it before going to Spain. We were all issued with battle-dress and sent on a week's leave during which time we had to obtain our own officer's dress uniform for which we received an allowance. My first posting was to The Seventh Manchester Regiment, stationed at Richmond in Yorkshire. A series of Nisson huts set in a sea of mud.
Life in a Nisson hut is Hell. It was mid-winter. The hut was heated by an iron stove set in the middle of the floor, fuelled with coke which caused a great deal of sulphurous smoke. We were woken by reveille at six each morning upon which everyone lit up a cigarette and started coughing.
By this time the stove had gone out and it was bloody cold. Then there was the cue outside the cookhouse. Fortunately for me, as and officer I went instead to the officer's mess which was quite comfortable, especially with a batman to look after you. For my first few weeks I was in constant trouble because I had never worn any head wear since leaving school so I never remembered to put my hat on and was therefore improperly dressed.
At the end of about ten days we were moved to an unknown destination. We sent a whole day and a night on a train going very slowly and constantly stopping. Early next morning, we arrived at a station labelled Dornoch on the East coast of Sutherland, North of Inverness. It was January 1st. We waited on the train for something to happen but nothing did. All morning the town appeared to be completely uninhabited, however, toward midday an occasional figure staggering across the road waving a bottle - a most suitable introduction to life in Scotland.
It was the tradition in this regiment to play football on a Sunday afternoon. The first contact we had with the locals was an official reprimand from the provost for breaking the Sabbath. Most of the men were housed in an enormous hotel overlooking the golf course for which Dornoch was famous. The officer's mess was a very pleasant large house where we were all very comfortable. After a few weeks we seemed to be nicely settled in so Dorothy came up to join me and found digs at the post office.
Later, we shared a house with another couple, Peter and Joy Goldblume. He was a rather mad lieutenant with a pretty wife from Dorothy's home town of Preston, Lancashire and they got on very well. Dorothy made friends with two old ladies who lived in the castle. They were very good to us and often gave us fresh salmon caught by the gilly. It was a lovely place and we enjoyed life very much. We went to parties where we were taught Scottish reels.
I had an medical inspection room in the hotel where I took sick parades, vaccinations, inoculations, etc. I had a regular RAMC sergeant to help me but he was a bit of a nuisance as he was a bit of a know-it-all and sometimes did things against my instructions. One day I found that a message had been received asking me to do a sick parade for the Women's Auxiliary Force camp nearby. He arranged for them to come in the afternoons when I was not there and was doing the parade himself. Fortunately I was able to get him posted elsewhere.
I found that there was a small hospital in Golspie which was run by a very helpful doctor which was very useful because we had some cases of meningitis which I was able to diagnose quickly because of my previous experience. The other patients in the hospital were a Jamaicans who had been recruited to work on defence installations. They could not withstand the Scottish climate and the doctor told me they were dying like flies of Pneumonia.
There was a group of men who always fell out on route marches because of their feet, so I tried a bit of therapy on them by taking them each morning for a run in bare feet along the lovely sands of the beach. Also I used an old army trick, about which I had heard, of getting them to soak their army boots overnight in a bucket of water until the leather was soft and pliable and then doing a route march until they were dry when they had moulded themselves to the exact shape of their feet. I had quite a success with this idea. This regiment was armed with machine guns and bren guns mounted on trucks which could be used as light ack-ack against low flying planes. I was issued with a service revolver "to protect the wounded". We shot at gulls for target practice but very seldom hit any.
In May 1943 the regiment was disbanded and I was sent to join the third mountain regiment which was stationed further down the coast just north of Inverness. It was a very interesting regiment left over from the North West Frontier wars with the Afgans and other lesser breeds. They were armed with the old screw guns that were used in the Himalayan mountains in the last century. They were small seven inch Howitzers which could be disassembled and carried by mules. Number one mule carried the barrel, number two the breach, number three the trail, number four the wheels and five the ammunition. The batteries competed with one another and it was amazing how quickly they could take them apart and put them together. The trouble was that, although they were ideal for rocky mountains, in Scotland where so much of the country is covered with soggy bogs the small feet of the mules often caused them to sink up to their bellies and we spent a great deal of our time pulling them out.
I had two mules which carried my medical panniers. The men were a tough lot - specially selected as A+. The officers had horses and were recruited from the county Yeomenry and county gentlemen from the hunting fraternity. There were men who were professional jockeys and stable boys.
I was given a nice little chestnut mare who was thought to be well behaved as I had no riding experience. I did not enjoy riding very much and generally preferred to walk, leading her. In fact the horses were not much use in our circumstance and were used mainly for recreation. One of the officers also had a pack of beagles.
We had a veterinary officer named McLoud of Sky. He was very proud of his ancestry and had great knowledge of Scottish history and could recite many famous ballads including, of course, the works of Robert Burns.
Our colonel was named Tremenhere, a Cornishman, but he was week and not a good leader.
Benjy was the second in command. He was the only other officer who had his wife with him. They were a nice couple and Benjy liked talking politics and we had many a fierce argument.
Tom was a champion steeple chaser. He knew all there was to know about horses and he could make a horse do anything he wanted. Unfortunately, he couldn't do anything else.
Henry Peto was the adjutant, a very nice man and very efficient. He really ran the show.
Frank Dossiter joined us later as padre. We became great friends. He was famous for the fact that he could never keep his puttees up. All the regular officers had riding britches and riding boots which they bought themselves. They were very expensive and Frank and myself as attached officers not forced to buy them and we used the Bedford Cord britches and puttees. The fact that Frank couldn't keep his puttees up, and I always forgot to put my hat on, led to us being excluded from all ceremonial parades.
At first we were stationed in Ballater in the Dee valley a few miles from Balmoral Castle. It was at the end of the railway from Aberdeen. It went no further because Queen Victoria would not allow railway tracks to cross her estates. The Royal train stopped at Ballater and the Queen changed to her coach to for the final leg to the castle.
We did some very tough training in the Cairngorms, regularly marching thirty miles a day. In the winter we did arctic warfare training. Eight men shared a tent. Two men shared one primas stove. Each man carried two days rations, sleeping bag, palliasse, snow shoes and snow goggles. Also a gas cape and a snow shovel.
The rations we carried consisted of oatmeal, pemmican, tea, condensed milk, jam, plain biscuits, chocolate and toilet paper (crackly). We found the best way of eating this lot was to put it all into a billy can and heat it up on the primas stove. The main use for the primas stoves, however was to thaw out ones boots in the mornings as they were always frozen hard as iron. We did our arctic warfare training in Glen Shee, learning to sky and walk on soft snow in snowshoes, My stretcher bearers experimented with putting stretchers on skies and lowering casualties down the mountains in Robert Jones whole body splints.
We learned not to touch any metal object with bare hands otherwise one's skin would freeze to the surface and be torn off. We had several cases of frost bite but we were able to successfully defrost all of them except one case, and that was the sergeant major who was too proud to report sick. He lost a big toe.
One of the things we learned was to dig snow holes for the purpose of getting out of the cold wind which could save your life in an emergency. Your body's heat is reflected back from the white snow. I went one stage further and got my stretcher bearers to build a large igloo in which I held my sick parades. With one candle burning inside, the igloo's interior is held at zero degree centigrade which, in the circumstances, is very comfortable.
The advantage of being up in the highlands was that there was no food rationing. We lived well indeed. We made contact with the Canadian forestry corps who were cutting timber. They were very hospitable and their log cabins, which they built themselves, were very warm and comfortable. The rivers were full of salmon and by throwing a stick of dynamite in a pool, they had a regular supply of fresh salmon which they shared with us. In return we supplied them with venison. This was because the red deer were becoming a nuisance to the farmers so we occasionally dropped a shell in a herd. A messy business.
One very interesting exercise in which we were involved was called Golieth in which we were facing the Norwegian Army consisting of men who had escaped when Hitler invaded Norway. Incidentally, we had a Norwegian officer attached to regiment as a liaison officer. No arrangement had been made to supply mock casualties so I had nothing to do. I wandered off, looking for mountain hares in their white winter pelts. On turning a corner I found myself in a ravine facing a group of men, who, I realised, were the "enemy". I was taken prisoner and the leader of the group informed me that he was Crown Prince Olaf of Norway and commander-in- chief of the Norwegian Army. He gave me a good telling off and released me. I was very intrigued years later when I met him again when he presented the Nobel prize for the International Physicians movement against nuclear weapons. I had remembered him as a tall, very impressive man but he was now older and plumper.
The following winter we were stationed in Aberdeen. After we were settled in Ballater I found lodgings for Dorothy and she came to join me. Dorothy had to register for war work. Women without children had to register for work. The only work available was forestry work on the royal estate. Mostly clearing weeds from around young trees. It was a healthy life and Dorothy benefited greatly. She was anxious to try for another baby but hadn't succeeded in getting pregnant so I took her to see Professor Dougal Baird who was a pioneer in antenatal care. He was also a member of the Socialist Medical Association and subsequently I went to meetings of the association in Aberdeen. He found she had some blockage in her fallopian tubes which he was able to deal with.
One night I was woken to go to the phone and received a message from the police in Doncaster who informed me that my mother had died suddenly. She and Dorothy's mother had gone to live at our little cottage in Bessicar. I obtained a week's compassionate leave and went down to Bessicar, informed all the family and arranged the funeral at Throop Congregational Chapel. She was sixty one years old and died of heart failure during an attack of asthma. She was buried next to my father at Throop Congregational Chapel. Hedly and Ada, Bernard and Pricilla, my mother's brothers and sisters, attended. Hedley and Ada had just lost their only son who was training as an RAF pilot.
When the regiment arrived in Edinburgh we were stationed at Redford Barracks, home of the Scotts Greys. It was ideal for us as there was plenty of stabling for mules and horses and the officer's mess was magnificent. We dined in style from the regimental silver, being careful always to pass the port to the left. Unfortunately, because we had lived in such healthy surroundings, we seemed to have lost our immunities and fell prey to such as influenza, tonsillitis and later on most of the men acquired gonorrhoea.
Dorothy found some nice digs but she found the strict rationing in Edinburgh not to her liking. What was very pleasant was the fact that we could go to the theatre where we saw some very good plays and operas. In the spring we went back to Glen Shee. The four Batteries were rather scattered along the glen but happily, I found a shooting hut halfway along the glen which I commandeered as a small hospital, staffed by one stretcher bearer from each battery with my bombardier Lofty Morris, in charge. There were several small rooms in which they could sleep and a larger room which we turned into a six bed ward. This was very useful as we were a long way from the nearest hospital.
I was able to get an ambulance from the Royal Army Service Corps and this was a great help. Local people, as is common in Scotland, used the "postie" for transport. This was a large post office van which took passengers as well as post.
We caught small trout in the stream and fried them in oatmeal for breakfast. Lofty helped the local sheep farmers by biting off the lamb's testicles which he brought home and fried. Through him I got to know the local farmer called Sandy McLoud and his wife Dian. He had a large sheep run around Creag-Nu-Brudich, a substantial mountain. They were both very friendly and agreed to take Dorothy as a lodger.
With my little hospital set up and staff which I trained to a high degree of efficiency, I had plenty of time on my hands and I became Sandy's assistant shepherd. I went out each day, up the mountain with Sandy and his two dogs, rescuing sheep that were stuck on rocky ledges and so on, and when lambing started, helping yews in trouble and giving the lambs an injection of anti dysentery vaccine. Later, there was dipping and shearing which was a cooperative effort by all the farmers in the glen getting together and going round from farm to farm. These sessions always ended with a feast prepared by the wife of the currently benefiting farmer. A lamb was slaughtered for the occasion. There was also the traditional suet pudding and lots of whiskey. We used the old fashioned hand sheers for sheering which were difficult to handle but I got quite good at it in the end.
Foot rot was very prevalent in the wet weather and I tried out various remedies from my stock of drugs including M&B 693, but I had no success. Apart from the occasional lamb, the McLouds lived on rabbit which was a terrible plague at that time, spoiling the grazing for the sheep. Sandy reckoned that five rabbits ate the same grass as one sheep and spent a lot of time shooting with his little .22 rifle. He was such a good shot that he reckoned to hit two rabbits with every shot. They were pretty thick on the ground. I occasionally borrowed the gun and had a go myself. I was alright at it but nowhere near as good as Sandy.
One day I came face to face with a wild cat who happened to be stalking the same rabbit as myself. It was a very impressive animal and I was quite frightened at first, wondering if it might attack me. We were eyeball to eyeball for a time before he decided to retreat.
Another animal that was common in the glen were the capercallies which is a large bird like a turkey. They made a terrible noise during the breeding season. Occasionally the glen folk got together with the folk from the next glen,"Isla" and had an evening of highland dancing. They walked or skied if there was snow, from miles around. It went on until dawn. Unfortunately all the pipers were in the army and we had to make do with an accordion. Between dances there were traditional songs and story telling and, of course this was all helped along with plenty of beer and whiskey.
When Dorothy came near her time she went to an officer's maternity home at Adlington Hall in Cheshire. When Julian was born in August, I was somewhere in the Cairngorms on an exercise and I heard the news on a field radio telephone. Fortunately, I had a bottle of medicinal brandy in my pannier on the mule so I was able to celebrate the happy event with the other men.
Later that year, we moved again to the Muir of Ord which was north of Inverness. I found a lodging for Dorothy and Julian with the Excise man of the local distillery. Julian was out in the garden in his pram in the nice weather and sometimes we found a small bottle under his pillow. It was, of course, raw spirit, placed there by the kind excise man. It was very strong stuff and good in cold weather.
One of my duties, at this time, was to attend to the needs of other small detachments in the vicinity, also to inspect prisoner of war camps. They had their own medical officers who were answerable to me, not that I ever needed to intervene in any way. The Italian camps were very relaxed and happy places as the Italians were glad to be out of the war. You could spot them from afar as the barbed wire fences were festooned with drying spaghetti. Like all units, they were supplied with flour but they chose to make spaghetti of it instead of bread.
The German camps were quite different. As you entered, you were saluted smartly with clicking heels and everything was in apple pie order, in contrast with the British guards who were a rather sloppy lot.
When the crossing of the Rhine was being planned, somebody had the bright idea that our guns could be put in ducks to cross the river and then be reassembled in strategic places, this being possible because they were easily manhandled. Major McNair actually managed to carry them up to the tops of buildings, completely outwitting the Germans who could not believe that cannons were firing from so high above them. He received a Military Cross for his trouble.
I was not involved in it. Unfortunately, there were casualties, one lieutenant and one dispatch rider were killed. Soon after Victory in Europe Day, we were informed that we would be going to the East and we were sent on embarkation leave.
I took Dorothy and Julian to Squirrel Bank. While we were there, my brother Morley appeared at the gate. He had arrived back after his long imprisonment in Italy and Germany. I was so happy that I'd been able to see him before I had to go overseas.
We left Muir of Ord at six a.m. on the seventh of June. We waited for a train that was four and a half hours late. We slept all the way to Perth, where had a cup of tea. We arrived in Grenock at three thirty and went straight on the tender which took us out to the M.S.Sobieski, anchored in the Roads. She was a polish boat built to take the immigrants from Gadinia to South America. She was 11,500 tonnes. Officers had four birth cabins. The men were crowded into the troop decks in hammocks. It was very crowded and some of the men had to sleep on the floor.
There were two small hospitals on board, one for the troops and another for the crew and civilian passengers, also one dispensary. Next day I had a very big sick parade. I think the men, having seen their quarters, hoped I would be able to find something wrong with them so they wouldn't have to go. We then had action stations practice and finally set sail at five thirty p.m.
In addition to the regiment, we had a mixed bag of officers and other ranks rejoining units after leave. Also civilian diplomats returning to stations they had to leave during the war in Europe. Also fifty Queen Alexandria military nurses. Crossing the Bay of Biscay, we ran into a severe storm and most people were sea sick, including me. Two floating mines were spotted and carefully avoided and there was a rumour that an albatross was following us.
Some of the men down below were so ill that I had to go down and try and help them. The stench of vomit was unbearable. How the men survived, I couldn't think. After the storm we ran into fog. The fog horn was blasting away all the time and the noise was quite shattering. Wartime regulations were still in force and every body had to carry round with them a life jacket, a red lamp and a haversack of emergency rations. I decided that I would never want to go on a cruise.
Five days later we were approaching Gibralta and the Seas were calm. The sun was hot and we were able to relax. I noticed on a brass plaque, that the boat had been built on Tyneside and had taken part in operations at Salerno, Anzio and Sicily.
The captain of the ship was "morning for his country" and he did not allow any alcohol on the boat or any music. So, we had to think about how to keep the men happy during the voyage. They played Housey-housey, now called Bingo, without the prizes. I had to give talks on malaria control and the dangers of cholera and other tropical diseases and over exposure to the sun. One or two of the civilians with special interests gave talks on their subjects and we also arranged "brains trusts".
It was now terribly hot below decks as the captain refused to open the portholes because there were still a lot of mines in the Mediterranean and open portholes would make the ship sink faster. We were the first boat to cross the Mediterranean without any escort.
Watching the dolphins that followed the ship was quite interesting and there was a small swimming pool on the after deck which we took turns to use. I now got to know some of the other passengers, particularly some of the Czechs. One was had been in the International Brigade and had been interned in a concentration camp in Gurs until a Czech army had been formed in France. From there he came to England and joined the R.A.F. I found that the Checks were still very angry at the way that Chamberlin had handed them over to Hitler at Munich.
We were now allowed to change into our tropical khaki uniform which was much more comfortable. I found that quite a lot of the men were due for typhoid boosters and that kept me busy for a couple of days. I developed a sinus infection which gave me a high temperature so I lay down on my bunk. One man had a haematemasis and the other had a pneumonia. The captain phoned Port Side and when we arrived there the port medical officer came and evacuated them.
The ship was quickly surrounded by a cluster of boats carrying fruit and vegetables. The traders came up on deck and the steward bargained with them. I remember one boat full of yellow melons which was winched up on deck and emptied and we all had a slice of delicious melon for breakfast every day. Hawkers also came on deck with dirty postcards and children dived for coins thrown to them. Most of the men and some of the civilians disembarked here and we managed to smuggle some bottles of Egyptian beer aboard. Next day we sailed into the Suez Canal.
It was now June which is the hottest month of the year and we had a following wind and one sat on the deck in the shade if you could find any, with nothing but shorts on and still the sweat poured off. It was difficult to read because the sweat dripped off the end of my nose onto the pages. Troops, stationed along the canal side were swimming and they shouted to us that we were going the wrong way. When we got through the Red Sea and into the Indian Ocean the Monsoon winds were beginning to blow and the temperature dropped so that it was quite pleasant on deck and, watching the flying fishes was entertaining. One day the crew did a gun practice, firing all the cannons in turn.
We arrived in Bombay at eleven thirty in the morning on the twenty seventh of June, 1944. The harbour was crowded and we had to wait two days before we could dock. The monsoon winds suddenly became very strong and we had to wait even longer before we could start unloading. This was done by coolies walking up and down the gang planks carrying enormous loads on their heads. The work continued all night by floodlight.
We disembarked after three days at the dockside and went by truck directly to the station. My first impression of India, as seen from the back of an open truck, was quite favourable. The area round the station being a wealthy area with houses and blocks of flats, quite reminiscent of Italy with nice gardens with tropical trees and flowers and very clean. The first class compartments, occupied by the officers, had four births, a shower and fan. The third class, occupied by the troops, had narrow, hard bunks. It was class distinction with a vengeance.
When we got to the outskirts of the city the scene was very different. Squalid, over crowded tenements, between which were hovels constructed with bamboo, corrugated iron and tarpaulin. Cows and goats and bullock carts everywhere. During the journey the monsoon rains started in earnest and everywhere was rushing water and mud.
On arrival at the transit camp at Dulali, we were housed in large huts with smaller single cubicles for single officers. We had a good dinner in the mess and I ate my first mango. We were then issued with mosquito nets, a tin bowl and a padlock. They told us that as the monsoon had just started, the cobras would be coming out of their holes so we should be very careful to avoid being bitten. Unfortunately, the lighting in the compound was very poor and things were popping up and hitting our legs which we thought might be cobras and I was terrified. However, on closer inspection they were large frogs. It was still rather frightening though, because it could still be a cobra.
One day I got a lift into Bombay and wondered round the city. In the centre most people seemed to be well dressed and well fed. There were lots of people in cars and Garries, horse drawn carriages, which were the main means of transport in the towns. The women in gaily coloured saris looked very beautiful. Then there were the little open fronted shops which were often workshops as well and you saw artisans making things in leather or brass or silver or selling fruit, vegetables or grain.
In the poorer districts people were sleeping on the pavements and naked children were everywhere. I was attracted by a small crowd that had gathered around a conjurer. He started with charming a snake and then he did some amazing tricks like putting a small girl into a wicker basket, curled up so that she could hardly move and closed the lid. He then thrust a sword through the basket repeatedly. Needless to say, she emerged unharmed. A lot of other tricks followed which completely baffled me. Meanwhile, his assistant went round the crowd collecting rupees. We were in Dulali for about two weeks.
Local rural life seemed to depend on three different animals, bullocks which pulled the cart, the major means of transport for both goods and people, the cows that wandered where they liked as they were holy animals and sometimes they would lie down in the road and the traffic would have to go round them. No one would dream of moving them or even be rude to them. They were milked regularly, however, by the local people who generally drank it sour or made it into ghee. The third animal was the buffalo. These were large black beasts with large horns which looked very menacing but in fact were extremely gentle creatures. They were often led around by small children with a rope. They were used for pulling ploughs. When they were not doing this, they stood in the water or rolled in the mud. Also they produced a very rich milk almost like cream. All these animals had egrets sitting on them. They kept the animals clear of ticks and other parasites.
We were able to go into Bombay several times to have lunch at the Taj Mahal Hotel. Also to the cinema where we saw the "Mrs.Parkinson" film. We also had drinks at the cricket club, a very important place. We found a very nice restaurant which was part of a chain called "Parisian Dairies". They had a speciality which consisted of a large glass of cold strong coffee with buffalo cream on top and drunk through a straw. We gorged ourselves on lovely juicy stakes which we missed in England.
On days when it was not raining, millions of insects would appear. There were beetles and crickets and enormous cockroaches, and fire flies lit up the trees at night. In the last few days we had a bad outbreak of dysentery so I arranged to give a talk on tropical hygiene and I made sure that the officers heard it too.
One of the Indian bearers, servants, came to see me, obviously very ill. I sent him to the local British hospital but they would not admit him. There did not appear to be any hospital for the local natives so I did what I could for him with the limited means at my disposal. Next day we left and I never knew what became of him.
Next day we boarded the train and two days later, arrived at Sucundrabad in the state of Hydrabad. From there, we went by truck to a clearing in the jungle about sixty mile to the south. In the clearing were huts made of a bamboo frame covered with palm thatch. Officers had small individual ones and the men had larger ones that they slept about a dozen men.
One could make one's self very comfortable but one trouble was with tiny mites which bred in the thatch and dropped onto the mosquito net and some got through and caused one to wake up itching like mad. Another hazard was white ants which seemed to be able to eat almost anything. I left a pair of tennis shoes under my charpoy (a bed made of bamboo and string). In the morning, only the rubber souls were left.
My batman unfolded my canvas bath outside the basher and brought me a bucket of tepid water each morning. The surroundings were very beautiful, tropical trees and shrubs with beautiful flowers and sandy paths leading to small local villages. At first the jungle noises at night were rather frightening. It seemed to start with a panther making a kill, generally of a monkey. The other monkeys would then start chattering and screaming and then it would be picked up by other animals and then gradually dies down so that one can get to sleep again.
We gradually got ourselves organised again. A local Indian "contractor" set up a canteen. We recruited "sweepers" to look after the latrines and "dobhies" to do the washing. "Char wallas" attached themselves to us to supply us with drinks of tea at all hours. The water supply was provided by the Army Hygiene Unit who pumped water up from wells and filtered it through canvas into the water carts and then added chlorine.
We were able to buy fruit locally - bananas, mangoes, pineapples, walnuts, etc. We employed a "consama" to cook in the officer's mess. He was very good and we had some delicious Indian food and also some nice cakes. Sunday lunch was special. After the Sunday service, we played volley ball to work up a good sweat after which we had a bath and went into the mess dressed just in shorts. Normally you had to be "properly dressed" to go into the mess. We then had a lovely hot curry and spent the afternoon sleeping it off. It was July by now and very hot.
The paddy fields of mud were now a brilliant green as the rice began to grow. There was plenty of wild life around, lizards chameleons, tree rats like squirrels but black and white, monkeys and a large iguana who lived in a hollow tree near the cookhouse who kept the area clean by scavenging. He was called Percy. We also saw the occasional snake. There was a pond not far away with a rock on the edge. I sometimes sat on the rock and watched the wild life come to drink, particularly the snakes of all shapes and sizes.
There were, of course, plenty of nasty insects including scorpions which liked to hide in your shoes at night so one had to be careful to shake them out in the morning. Bengie was bitten by one once and was in terrible pain. I gave him an injection of anaesthetic into the site and he soon recovered. One day as we were sitting at the dining table having a meal, a green snake emerged from the roof thatch and slithered along the length of the table followed by several offspring. She quickly disappeared to our relief.
When we came to India we left all the mules and horses behind and were equipped with American jeeps to haul the guns. We also left Frank Dossiter behind and had a new padre, a Welshman named Hughes. I was allocated a large hut which we divided into a medical inspection room and a six bedded sick bay with the help of bamboo and army blankets.
One of my regular duties was the "short arm" inspection to identify cases of gonorrhoea. I found that there was an increase in the number of cases. I decided that it would be necessary to inspect the attached Indian personnel. At first this caused a great deal of indignation and offence but I insisted that it should be done. In in fact there was no infection among them.
We heard rumours of where the infection was coming from and a search squad was sent out and found an encampment nearby with several women in the charge of a pimp. They were quickly sent packing. The women were so filthy and hideous that it was difficult to imagine that any man could want them.
One day a local villager brought a sick child to see me after sick parade which I took every morning. Naturally, I treated the boy and next day, several turned up and by the end of the week there was a large crowd waiting for me which I could not possibly cope with. Very reluctantly, I had to send them away. Some had terrible disabilities such as poliomyelitis, Osteomyelitis, fevers, broken bones, blindness and dysentery. Dysentery occurred in spite of all our precautions.
A new drug became available called Sulphaguanadine which was recommended in cases of dysentery so I decided to try it out. I prescribed some for our adjutant. Unfortunately, he developed haematuria which was potentially fatal. I was able to get him into hospital and have him "washed out" and he survived. I found out afterwards that, although I had warned him to drink extra fluids, he had not done so, being a tea totaller whose intake of fluid was much lower than usual.
One of our cooks developed poliomyelitis and died in hospital. I was expecting that we would have an out break of polio but much to my relief we had no further cases in spite of the fact that he was handling the food. Another health hazard we had to deal with were the wild dogs who raided the camp at night and could be carrying rabies or other diseases. Besides, they scattered the rubbish bins around. We got together a shooting party and hunted them down which provided some much welcomed sport. The British General Hospital (tented), was only a few miles away. They were short of staff and I was asked to help out, part time.
Colonel Tremenhere agreed to this and later on a young medical officer was found to act as my locum to the regiment and I moved into the hospital full time. This was a very welcome move. I had a thirty bedded ward and there was an operating theatre, a pathology lab, and some nursing sisters.
Most of the patients were malarial. One case had black fever, a more serious form of malaria, who died in spite of all our efforts. We also had cases of amoebic dysentery and injuries (generally football). We also had one case of a man who had stepped on a Russel Viper and been bitten. He died because there had been a long delay getting him to the hospital. There were also one or two psychiatric cases. One of these was a young lad who had received news of his mother's death and had tried to commit suicide.
I enjoyed the company at the hospital. It made a change from the regiment. One thing about the regiment that struck me was that most of the officers came from the "huntin' shootin' fishin'" classes with whom I did not have much in common. I had noticed that when new officers came, the response of the men was most respectful to those who came from the public school system even though they were not nearly as competent as those who had risen from the ranks. It must have had something to do with that indefinable air of being 'born to rule' imparted by the public school system.
My new colleagues were much more compatible. I particularly remember the poker school we had in the evenings. Because we were playing with rupees, which didn't seem like real money, my natural meanness was somewhat allayed and I became quit a good poker player.
While I was still at the hospital, the signal corps gave us the results of the "Khaki election", so called because such a high proportion of the voters were in uniform at that time. The result put Labour in power. In the hospital mess there was jubilation but the locum at the regiment told me that when he applauded the result he nearly got kicked out of the mess.
At the beginning of August there was a report of cholera in the area and we had a busy time making sure that all the men were up to date with their inoculations and then round up all the local attached personnel, i.e. sweepers, cooks, dobhies etc. and inoculate them. This pleased them very much as this protection was not available to the native population.
On August 14th 1945 we heard that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima and destroyed the whole city. Soon afterwards the Japanese surrendered. Later in the month we were able celebrate Victory over Japan day for which purpose we were issued with a hundred and forty seven live ducks and several pigs on the hoof.
I still visited the regiment frequently and joined in the feasting and also we had a visit from the "Three Arts Ballet Company" sent by "ENSA". It was lovely to have such a contrast with the life style we were living at the time. It was also a pleasure to entertain all the lovely girls in the mess after the performance. It was about this time that I sent Julian his first birthday card. Life now became more relaxed, there being no point in further training. The enemy was now boredom. Many troops had been sent East after victory in Europe and now there was the problem of sending them back again. There was, however, a need for occupation troops in those countries overrun by the Japanese and for Japan itself.
Recreation and sport of various kinds were encouraged. Also, further education was offered by the Army Education Corps. I played a lot of hockey which was very popular in India. We played against Indian teams on hard mud pitches. They played bare footed and could always outrun us and we never won a match that I can remember. There were a lot of football matches between different units at which our regiment did very well. The only team that managed to beat us were the Royal Scott's.
An Indian sport which was popular was holding scorpion fights. Two scorpions were put in a circle about two feet across and paraffin was poured round the edge of the circle and lit. The scorpions attacked each other and bets were placed on the outcome. Housey-housey was popular in the evenings.
Transport was now made available for recreational purposes. We visited one of the larger villages where they made carpets. The looms were very primitive, made of bamboo and string but they created marvellous, beautifully patterned carpets.
In Sucundrabad, officers were made honorary members of the "club". Every town in India has a place where the British upper classes gather and officers are always made members. There was a lovely swimming pool which we used a lot. There was also a good bar and mess. We also found a missionary center that had a swimming pool where the men were invited to swim.
We were able visit Hydrabad and visit the many old forts and temples. In one fort we found an old cannon dated 1620 and made in Rotterdam. We also found a large mosque full of coffins containing the Nizan's family, going back many generations.
In the zoo which was in the palace gardens, there were some very tame tigresses who rubbed up against the bars of their case so that you could stroke them, upon which they purred like big moggies. There were some fascinating shops which were also workshops and one saw silver and goldsmiths working and displaying their wares.
We went to a local cinema. The film was an historical romance which is popular in India. The manager got some boys who spoke English, to sit next to us, translating.
We got shoes made by a "mouchi". He drew an outline of my foot on a piece of paper and next day they were ready to wear, just like that! I got Dorothy to send outlines of her feet and he made some for her too. They cost 25 rupees.
All over India there are large reservoirs built by the Moguls to hold the monsoon water for irrigation later. They were always referred to as tanks. I once came across some naval divers practising near our camp. They were using the old fashioned diving suits with lead boots and a heavy screw on helmets with little portholes in them. They allowed me to have a go. It was very eerie in the murky water. I didn't stay down very long as I got a terrible pain in my left ear because of the pressure.
In October I was posted to the Sixth Field Ambulance which had just returned from Burma and were stationed in Visapur, about sixty miles east of Poona. It was hilly country and a much cooler climate rather like the Yorkshire moors, except that it was growing millet and maze. This was a very different experience for me. The men were Chindits who had been fighting in the Burmese jungle and were seasoned warriors. They wore Australian bush hats.
My work now was administrative and not medical. As a company commander I had to take parades, doing inspections, supervising stretcher drills, passing sentence on wrongdoers, sending them to the guard house and taking pay parades.
The unit was shrinking fast as the men reached their demob numbers and left for home. My fellow officers were a very nice bunch and had learned how to make themselves comfortable in unpromising situations. We had a cook who was an ex-London chief, a gramophone, and a good radio set.
I was also put in charge of sports and had to organise football matches and other activities. After a few weeks, I was asked to go and take over as Medical Officer of the First battalion of the Royal Devonshires as they had lost their MO. They were a posh lot and had their regimental silver with them and kept a very traditional mess and very strict discipline. Fortunately, I was not there for long as they were sent home and I was sent back to the Field Ambulance.
One of my duties as an MO was to inspect the canteen provided by the contractor. I notified the local contractor that I intended to inspect his premises on the following day. When I went to my tent in the evening, there was a wonderful spread of fruit and cakes and a bottle of whiskey.
There was no indication of where it came from but it was well known that contractors generally tried to sweeten you up with a gift of some sort. The practice was to take the gift and haul the man over the coals for his lack of hygiene. I heard that this particular man was very successful at bribery. He used to take the bigwigs on tiger hunts on elephants.
On December the first, I got a call from A.D.M.S., Bombay Command, to say I was needed to take over a casualty clearing station which had been manned by an Indian field ambulance which was being disbanded. I was to take with me a skeleton staff of men waiting for repatriation. The CRS was about sixty miles away on the other side of Poona. I went down to reconnoitre and stayed overnight with the field ambulance. The CO was a Goanese named Colonel Lopez, who was going back to his practice in Bangalor. Major Roy was returning to his practice in Rangoon. Captain Batu was going to look for a job.
They were all very charming chaps and fervent congress supporters. Next day I made arrangements with the local contractor to have the kitchens altered from Indian to British and to draw British rations and engage sweepers etc. That evening we had a very nice Indian meal, vegetarian because they were all Hindus. Then after two nights - back to the field ambulance through Poona where there was a big Indian National Congress rally taking place. There were seething crowds with flags and banners saying "British go home!". There was a lot of anti British emotion at this time because the members of the Indian National Army were being tried for treachery. The Indian National Army consisted of men who had gone over to the Japanese and formed an independent army to fight for a free India.
The following day I set off to Karakvalse with twelve men, two ambulances and one truck. The Indians were impatient to be gone and wanted me to sign for the equipment and stock before we had properly counted and checked it all. Later I found that we were short on the list, especially the blankets. I was terribly afraid that my pay would be docked but in the prevailing state of chaos they never caught up with me. I found a nice Chinese restaurant in Poona, delicious fu chu and chop suey. I was now managing chop sticks without difficulty.
I received information that my old regiment was being disbanded. I had just got everything nicely sorted out when we had orders to rejoin the field ambulance in Bombay. I took charge of a convoy of thirty vehicles and took them to the docks at Bombay Harbour. We were told that a boat was due to arrive to take us to Hong Kong but it didn't turn up and we had to doss down in the "godowns" (warehouses) with rats running over us all night. Three days later we were told that plans had been changed and it had been decided that we would be going home instead.
We emptied the CO's car of luggage and drove round Bombay, exploring, going to cinemas and restaurants. We heard about an up-market brothel (officer's only). It was said that it had a wonderful selection of girls of all colours and nationalities. Some of the chaps decided to go and have a look. I was tempted but backed out at the last minute (I'd seen far too much VD already). Looking back, I rather regret it as it would have been an interesting experience.
Next morning I heard that my demob number had come up and I was to report to the British General Hospital in Poona. After handing over to my replacement, I took the first train available. The hospital was a permanent one surrounded by lovely flower gardens and gracious trees. I had a bedroom all to myself and a proper bed and a dressing table and a wardrobe and I was able to have a hot bath. Another boon was that the room was mosquito proof and I was able to sleep without my mosquito net for the first time. These were luxuries that I really wallowed in after so long under canvas. The air transit camp was full so I had to stay at the hospital for several days and I was given a ward to look after.
I found they were mostly mental patients and I spent a lot of time with a very vociferous schizophrenic who had weird theories about the nature of the universe. I then transferred to the air transit camp at Bombay. We were accommodated in very overcrowded conditions, three tier bunks and terrible food. They showed us films but they were not worth watching. Christmas came and went and there was still no word of when we would leave for home.
It was while I was at the Air Trooping Transit camp that I met Alan Pote. He had been in charge of the blood transfusion unit in northern India. He received a message from a Dr.Carve of the Deccan Institute asking if it was possible to obtain blood group testing serum. She was doing some anthropological research on the races of India. I went with him to see her. She was a very formidable lady with degrees in archaeology and anthropology from Berlin university.
We were invited to her home for an evening to meet her family. She had a very gentle husband who was a doctor of medicine and several children. They were strict Brains and we had a delightful vegetarian meal with sour milk to drink. Chairs were provided although they would normally have sat on the floor to eat. The eldest daughter, in her early teens, played music on the sitar. We had a most interesting evening hearing all about Hindu philosophy. Later in the week we had an invitation from her to accompany her to a small Raja state in the Western Ghats, a chain of mountains on the western side of India. We ascertained that it was unlikely that we would get a flight home in the next week so we accepted.
The journey was by train and we were met at the station in this little state, probably about the size of an English county, by some bearded and sandaled young men looking rather like LSE students. They told us they were the Regency Council who had been appointed to run the state, the old Raja having died and his eldest son not yet being of age - you had to be at least nine to run a state. The old Raja was very backward in his ideas and they were busy trying to modernise the state by building roads and reservoirs and so on. During excavations some unusual objects, obviously old and not native, were discovered. They wanted Dr.Carve to identify them.
We were accommodated in the guest house attached to the Royal Palace and waited on by many servants in splendid uniforms. It was a lovely place. Being in the hills, it was not tropical and they even had apple trees in the grounds. The air was clean and cool and it was almost like being at home. We stayed two nights. The objects that had been unearthed were classical Greek pottery and statuettes indicating how far east the Ancient Greeks had been trading.
Dr.Carve took us to an old Indian temple. We saw the outer courtyard and then the inner courtyard with all the statues of the gods and people praying. Dr.Carve went into the inner sanctum where we were not allowed and she prayed to the god of travel to ensure that we arrived home safely. When she came out she gave us each a little round sweetmeat. It consisted of cows milk and urine and honey. It tasted quite nice.
In January, I left India in an old Dacota plane packed in like sardines, sitting on temporary canvas seats with our packs on our knees. We flew as far as Bahrain on the first hop and stayed the night. I wondered around that evening and found a small group of Arabs sitting under the date palms eating dates and they invited me to join them. Freshly picked dates are quite different from the dried ones that we get in England - juicy and delicious.
Next day we flew to Tel Aviv over the Iranian desert. There had been some rain for the first time for several years and the desert was covered in flowers. We spent the night in barracks surrounded by barbed wire. This was during the period of the terrorist attacks by the Bergon Israeli independence movement. Next day's flight took us to a desert airfield near Tripoli where we spent the night in tents. There was a sand storm during the night which was very frightening and we were very late getting away next day and landed up in a former Italian airport in Sardinia. It was probably one of the airfields from which Mussolini's planes had bombed us in Barcelona during the Spanish civil war. A nice thought.
From there to Orley airport in Paris. Here, as we taxied into the terminal, we collided with a fuel bowser and bent a wing. So we had three days in a Parisian hotel used by the RAF. It was bitterly cold. The fountains were frozen up and we were still in tropical uniforms but to compensate, we had good solid English food and entertainment at the Follies Bergiere which helped to relieve our suffering. Then Home to Lineham Airport in Wiltshire and then by coach to London.
Back in England I had three weeks leave. Getting home after nine months away was exciting but my memory of that time is now very blurred.
I was recalled at the end of my leave and sent to an officer's demobilization centre at Exeter in Somerset. Not to be demobbed myself, but to do a final medical examination of all officers being demobbed to see if they had any wounds or illnesses or any disabilities caused by their war service. It was necessary to record these and assess the degree of disability for the purpose of disability pensions.
The unit received one day's ration and messing allowance for each man processed. They hardly ever stayed longer than was absolutely necessary to so we had a very wealthy mess. The amount of money became embarrassing so we had to keep on reducing the price of booze and had a party every night. There was a military hospital nearby with some very nice nurses who we used to invite. I had the use of an ambulance which could be used to fetch the girls and take them home again - all highly illegal of course. I had one unpleasant incident. I was assisted by an RAMC sergeant who fell violently in love with me. One evening he got very drunk and was such a nuisance that I had to have him arrested and later he was transferred away.
Dorothy was still living at Squirrel Bank. She had bought an old Singer car with a free-wheel. She used to motor over from Squirrel Bank every week end and we stayed at a hotel. We came across old friends from the Manchester regiment in Dornock. Sid and Nancy Goldman who was stationed with the paratroops nearby. He had Nancy with him and we had some very pleasant weekends together in the countryside of Somerset and Devon.
I always remember coming back late at night when the car's lights failed. There was no traffic about so we drove on slowly all of a sudden we came to a lane with thick hedges which were glowing with little lights. There were thousands of glow worms in the hedges. We picked several dozen of them and put them in the head lights and we got home safely.
I got my army discharge on the May 27th 1946. I was one of the very lucky ones. I enjoyed myself immensely in the highlands of Scotland and my time in India was full of interest. I was never near any fighting, never had any serious illness and generally had pleasant companions. The only things I didn't like was taking sick parades at six o'clock in the morning and stand to at dawn when we were on exercises on the top of a Scottish mountain when it was ten degrees below zero.
Back in "civvy street", at first seemed very strange as I was on my own and having to make my own decisions individually rather than collectively within a restricted framework. I remember meeting Bob Sharples who I had been with me at the village school. He was standing on a street corner looking lost. I asked him what he was going to do now that the war was over. He said "that's my trouble, I've got so used to just doing what I was told to do in the army that I can't seem to make decisions myself anymore and I can't make up my mind about anything."
I had no trouble in making up my mind. I decided that after my short experience in public health work, in the early part of the war, that preventing ill health made much more sense than treating it. Also this was before student grants were available, so there was no way in which I could continue studying to get my FRCS, needed for a career in surgery or to buy a general practice. So I asked to be taken back by the West Riding County Council. This also had the advantage that they would then make up my superannuation contributions not paid during my military service. I found that I was eligible for a short further education grant to continue my professional education interrupted by military service. So I decided to go to the London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene and get my diploma in public health. This meant living in London.
We found a large Victorian house in Prince Arthur Road, Hampstead and we were able to buy the last seven years of a ninety year lease for about seven hundred pounds. Morley was in Reading University studying art so we agreed to sell Squirrel Bank and the land and divide the proceeds. They fetched about £1600 altogether. After I had passed my Diploma of public health examination we moved back to Yorkshire and I sold Prince Arthur Road to Morley for the same price that we gave for it. He was very lucky, as two years later, by act of parliament, lease holders were given the right to purchase the freehold of their properties at official valuation price. While we were living at Prince Arthur Road, Julian attended a nursery school started by Anna Freud. Dorothy was now expecting Vicky and I had a lot of studying to do and Julian was becoming a bit of a handful. In April 1946 Vicky was born at the New End Hospital (now incorporated in the Royal Free).
The DPH course was very interesting. We learned statistics using mechanical calculators, the forerunners of the present computers. We learned control methods of infectious diseases, food hygiene, industrial hygiene, nutrition and the laws relating to public health and housing. We did our practical work in Stepney in the east end. It was rather different to what I remembered as a student. Much of the old slum areas had been flattened by the bombing and there were still piles of rubble everywhere.
The London county council had commenced building blocks of flats, each with a modern kitchen, water laid on indoors, indoor lavatories, large windows and the local inhabitants were thrilled with them. Although they would seem very undesirable today, for people who had been brought up in the slum housing with outside lavatories and outside water supplies and only a dirty old range to supply the heat, they seemed like heaven.
I sold Daily Workers outside Hampstead underground station on Saturday mornings. These were happy times. Fascism had been defeated and a Labour government was in power. The prospect of achieving socialism by evolution rather than by revolution seemed real.
When I had passed my Diploma of Public Health examination, I applied to go back to the West Riding of Yorkshire. The Riding was now divided into districts consisting of a group of local authorities with the District Medical Officer acting MOH to each district and also be in charge of the County Council Health Services in the division. I started as Deputy Medical Officer to Dr.Watts.
The division consisted of Rotherham, Kiveton Park and Maltby Rural Districts. Dr.Watts was an Edinburgh man with memories of bare footed children of that city and he had started a boot fund to see that all the school children had good stout shoes to go to school in. It was not much required by then. There was full employment and good wages in the mining districts at that time. The food rationing and subsidies during the war had produced a generation much healthier than the pre-war generation. So much so that in some schools the desks had to be replaced by much larger ones. Here I learned all about local government, writing reports for committees and answering councillor's questions. In the districts I did school inspections, immunizations and antinatal clinics. I also inspected houses thought to be unfit for habitation under the Housing Acts.
We had a nice little modern house in a mining village called Maltby. Rowena was born here in the local maternity hospital. It was nice to renew my involvement with the Yorkshire mining folk. The councillors were generally either members of the Labour party or the Communist Party. Soon after I arrived we had an out break of smallpox and we had to reopen the old smallpox hospital and start a vaccination campaign. Fortunately, we had no deaths. Later we had a polio epidemic. While working in the Rotherham area as the medical officer of health of the small district of Thorne, I was asked to take over as temporary Medical Officer of Health. The current incumbent was a very old man and his outlook was very out of date. He still told people to hang sheets soaked in carbolic over the doorways of sick rooms to stop the germs getting out. Also he had done nothing about diphtheria immunization.
The chairman of Thorne Council was an ex-miner who had been banned after the great pit strike of 1926. He spent his time studying in the local library and living on the dole. He used to take me down the local pits and I got to know all about the life of a miner at first hand.
Re-organization of the county districts resulted in a vacancy in Saddleworth where my old friend Pat Stonehouse had taken over the family practice. I applied and got the job as MOH. We found a large Victorian house in Lees, just over the border in Lancashire. We also acquired a vacant plot next door to it which made a wonderful garden for the children. It had a swing and a sand pit and a cricket pitch. Julian, Vicky and Rowena were growing fast. We used to go for long walks over the Saddleworth moors at weekends. Julian started at the local Junior School in Cooper Street.
We soon made friends through Pat who was still single. He introduced me to a group of chaps who met regularly at the local Coach and Horses to discuss various aspects of the world and its inhabitants, ranging from geology to politics. Pat lived in the family house with his mother - a large stone mansion on the top of the hill in a village called Delph. In the square opposite the house was a monument dedicated to his grandfather, a much loved physician and father figure to the local community. I had often stayed in the house with Pat when we were students and remembered his two bachelor uncles who ran the practice then. They were both very eccentric.
Pat told us wonderful stories about his family. For instance they had employed a gardener/chauffeur who tried to hang himself in the garage on each full moon. Somebody always had to be around to help him. When he got older, he became blind so when the Ramsdens visited friends, one of the uncles drove the limousine up to the gates of the house to be visited and then the chauffeur took the wheel and under directions from the uncles, drove it up the drive to the front door.
Mrs.Stonehouse was a chain smoker and she used a cigarette holder. Often, in the evenings, when we were talking, she would take the stub out of her holder and put it in her handbag and throw the holder into the fire. While we were there, she found it very difficult to cope with this large mansion and moved into a smaller house in Greenfield where Pat, now married to Marguerite lives.
I rejoined the Socialist Medical Association and became secretary of the North West Branch which covered part of Yorkshire and all of Lancashire. This was still 1946. The National Health Service Bill had been passed and would become law in April 1947. There was still some opposition from general practitioners.
We supplied speakers to interested groups to make sure that people knew what it was all about. Generally they were local Labour Parties, trade councils and various women's organizations. When I couldn't find a speaker, I had to do the lectures myself which often kept me very busy. When the acts became law, people flocked to their doctors surgeries to register under the act and family practitioners had to join the practitioner's committees in order to get paid and very soon all opposition faded away.
Putting the act into operation entailed arranging for some new services such as the home help service, taking over the district nursing services from the voluntary committees. In the hospitals, almoners whose job it had been to collect as much money as possible from the patients now had the job of helping the patients with any financial or other problems they had as a result of their illness. Also it was possible to pay local GPs to carry out immunisations and to man child welfare clinics. We also had a sunlight clinic where children considered to be in poor health were exposed to measured doses of ultra violet light. Rickets, which had been so common in the north, was still much in evidence among the older population. I was lucky in finding an excellent staff.
For local district "sanitary" services, I was answerable to the health committee of Saddleworth District Council, working in close cooperation with the sanitary inspector. For the county council services I was responsible to professor Brockington. We had monthly meetings of all thirty-three divisions in Wakefield to discuss policy. One local problem that I had was that it was always very difficult when a mother, who was having a baby, needed to go into hospital because the local hospital was just over the border in Lancashire which meant that the child born there could never play cricket for Yorkshire.
A law had just been passed to eliminate tuberculosis in cattle and to insist on clean milk so I did a lot of farm visits explaining to farmers who had cattle. I always remember one difficult farmer who told me that "If God meant us to drink clean milk he would have put the udder at'tother end a' coo". We had some new smoke regulations whereby emission of black smoke for more than a certain time became an punishable offence. This involved visiting the local mills and I became interested in industrial health and took a short course in industrial medicine at Manchester University.
We visited a firm that manufactured aniline dyes. One of the intermediate products was being handled manually and conveyed around in wheelbarrows. Research had shown that it was highly toxic and men handling the stuff had a more than fifty percent chance of dying of cancer of the bladder. The men were informed of this and then told that if they continued with their work for another year, until a new plant had been built, they would be paid double wages. Much to my amazement nearly all the men volunteered to continue.
One of Pat's friends, John Kenworthy, owned the woollen mill in the town of Uppermill, became a great friend. John and Molly were very hospitable and we had some delightful musical evenings at their home. John was a good pianist and Molly and John's sisters were good singers. I often called in at the mill when I was in Uppermill and sometimes went round the mill with John. The girls would be leaning over their looms and as we walked along John pinched each bottom and got the response "Morning Mister John." There was a very nice canteen in the mill where I often went for lunch. Unfortunately, man made fibres were being introduced at that time and in the late seventies, we heard that he had gone bankrupt.
Saddleworth was well situated for us to see a number of other old friends. Berty and Betty Mann were in Halifax and Frank and May Tyrer were in Chorley. We also got to know a left wing family in Greenfield by the name of Cole who had children of similar age to ours.
In August 1952 there was an outbreak of a new disease affecting young children particularly, characterised by acute abdominal pain which was often confused with appendicitis. It was diagnosed first on the island of Bornholm in Holland. I decided to do a study of it as very little was known about it at that time. I contacted Dr.Tobin at the Public Health Laboratory in Manchester. We were able to establish that it was caused by a coxsackie virus. We published our results in the Lancet.
Dorothy found coping with the three children very difficult and it was difficult to find domestic help. Eventually we managed to find a young German woman through some agency. How she managed to get to this country we never found out. She was very German and a firm disciplinarian and very strict with the children who didn't like her very much.
She left us for a job in a day nursery. Fortunately, Dorothy was able to get help from a very nice young woman who acted as a dress maker for Mrs.Stonehouse. Her name was Margaret Buckley and she was very good with the children and it gave Dorothy a lot more freedom and we were actually able to go away on short holidays, knowing that the kids would be well looked after. One interesting trip that we did was to Czechoslovakia.
Soon after the war there was a terrible disaster at Gresford colliery in North Wales. Over two hundred miners lost their lives. Miners from many countries subscribed to the relief fund including Czech Miners. Czech currency could not be converted into Stirling at that time so it was arranged that they would provide hospitality in Czechoslovakia for British trade unionists to have a holiday there and the money they paid would go to that fund instead.
We were allowed to go as they recognised the BMA as a trade union. We were a very mixed group of about fifty people all belonging to a union of some kind, including such people as Margery Pollit whose husband, Harry, had recently died. We went by train through a devastated Europe and stayed in a hotel at Marrianabad which was the famous holiday place of all the crowned heads of Europe who went there to "take the waters". The hotel was changed into a training place for hotel staff so the food and service were very good except that we got rather tired of goose. We visited many of the lovely old towns and we spent several days in Prague which is an extremely beautiful old town. There was an open air theatre in the forest where we went to see a performance of the ballet "The Kiss" by Smetana. We also made a visit to Lidice, a village that the Germans had destroyed during the war because they thought that some of the villagers were plotting to kill the local "Gauliter". They shot a hundred and seventy three men and ninety eight children and sent all the women to labour camps. They had just completed building a new village but the ruins of the old one were left as a memorial.
I tried to make contact with Czech comrades that I had known in Spain. I found that Max Laufer was working in a Chinese hospital, but I met Dr.Kisch who was obviously unhappy. There seemed to have been a quarrel between the International Brigaders but I could not find out why. Dorothy had not been very happy in Saddleworth and wanted to get down South so I applied for a job in Bedfordshire and was accepted as a Divisional Medical Officer. It was 1953.
About this time Bryn Jenkins, who was living in Malvern and was married to Mary with two boys, got in touch with me and asked if I would join him in a trip to Spain. He had made friends with a Spanish chap called Francisco P.Nevaro who was teaching Spanish at Malvern Girls school. He had been a journalist who had supported the Spanish Government during the Spanish Civil war and had managed to escape to England. He was anxious to go and see his mother in Madrid but was afraid that he would be arrested. He thought that if he went as a tourist with other people he would escape recognition. Bryn and another chap called George who was in Bulmers Cider Company, had agreed to go with them but they needed another person with a reliable car, something I had recently purchased. I agreed, and we drove through France non-stop, taking turns at the wheel. We did stop briefly in Chartre to watch the sunrise through the rose window in the cathedral there. It was a most beautiful sight.
We crossed the border at Hendye and continued to San Sebastion to call on a friend of Francesco's who was a doctor. He was a pleasant chap and we had a long talk about the new national health service in Britain. We also had a lovely meal of pilafs and then slept the night in his private nursing home attended by nuns. There were no nurses as such in Spain then. We then drove down to Madrid and booked in at an hotel on the Gran Via. We spent several days exploring Madrid under Francesco's directions, seeing the Prado gallery and we visited many bodegas in the old part of the town. They were more like an English pub than I have seen anywhere else outside England except that we drank wine and not beer and the wine was kept in skins at the back of the bar. On the bar were a range of "tapas" to which you help one's self while drinking. The tapas ranged from olives and peanuts to roasted sparrows or other small birds.
In the streets were vendors offering a very nice cold sweet drink called "orchatas" made with tiger nuts and honey. We went to look at the university that had been the site of the fierce battle where Franco's troops had been turned back by the people of Madrid. Many of the buildings still bore evidence of the violence of the event.
One evening Francesco invited us to visit his old mother. We went down an unlit street named Calle'Libertad in the old part of Madrid. We came to a very old studded courtyard door with a smaller pedestrian door set into it. Francesco clapped his hands and very soon a small bent man came running down the street to us. He carried a lantern, a short spear and a huge bunch of very large keys which he used to open the door and let us into the large cobbled courtyard with staircases leading up to the apartments. We went up one of them and were greeted by a very old lady dressed all in black. She was charming in spite of the fact that she knew no English and entertained us with sherry.
We went on and spent a few days in Valencia and then back to pick up Francesco. This of course was the old Spain before the advent of popular tourism. Under Franco, the population were kept in order by a very large number of "Guardia civil". Francesco was always very frightened when we saw a car with "PMN" on the number plate, he kept his head well down. He told us that the locals translated "PMN" as "Para me mucar" which means "for my wife". At that time they were still shooting anyone they found who had been on the government side.
Spain still had a peasant economy. There were few cars on the roads and many of the roads were unpaved. Transport outside the towns was by donkey or mule with bullocks to pull the ploughs and reapers. I remember on one occasion chickens ran across the road near a small farmhouse and I ran over one of them. The peasant came out of his house and Francesco said "Don't offer him any money or he will be offended." The man came over and apologised that his chicken had got in my way. At one place we stopped at, we met an itinerant "Practicante" who was visiting the villages in the sierras on his donkey. A Practicante was an unqualified doctor who had learned how to treat various ailments from an older Practicante as a sort of apprentice. There were no qualified doctors in these areas. The peasants could never have afforded to pay a doctor anyway. He told us that he was often paid in king with chickens or other local produce.
We purchased another old Victorian house in Lansdowne Road and I started as a District Medical Officer for the districts of Kempston, Dunstable, Leighton Buzzard and Luton Rural districts and also Divisional Medical Officer for the County Council for those districts. The County Medical Officer was Bill Brothwood who came from Wellington in Shropshire. He was very pleasant to work with as were the rest of the staff including John Harvey his deputy who was also county medical officer to the East of the county. There were numerous other assistant medical officers.
The North part of the county was the charge of Dr.Darlow. There were other assistant medical officers who did most of the clinical work in the child welfare clinics and the school health service. During my time in Bedfordshire, I was given various other responsibilities such as the infant welfare service, the school health service, the ambulance service, the mental health service, etc.
During this time, medicine and particularly preventive medicine and health care was making rapid strides. Polio Myelitis was a new hazard and the Sabine Vaccine was introduced. We worked very hard to get all the children vaccinated as quickly as possible and then made inoculation available to the public. I was asked arrange to have all the workers vaccinated at Vauxhall Motor works. Later, the Salk vaccine became available which made life a lot easier because it was stable and did not have to be kept refrigerated so it was very much easier to arrange vaccination sessions for the general public. An inoculation against tuberculosis also became available and we organised a program to have all the children inoculated.
Dr.Sharp, MOH of the town of Bedford conducted a diabetic survey to identify, with a urine test, people who were at risk of developing diabetes so that treatment could be started early. Another advance was introduced by the medical officer of North and South Shields. He found that the incidence of dental decay in children of North Shields was greater than that in South Shields. The only difference which could account for this was that there was a greater amount of fluoride dissolved in the water of South Shields. Trials soon established that this was indeed the cause and the Ministry of Health advised for all the local authorities to adjust the amount of fluoride in the water supply to one part per million. This gave us a bit of a problem in Bedfordshire as the fumes from the numerous brick kilns contained a lot of fluoride which was causing the cattle around the brickworks to develops "Fossy jaw". It was therefore thought that the human population was ingesting a lot of fluoride as well. We were able to establish however that the fluoride which poisoned the cattle came from the dust that settled on the pasture rather than from the fumes in the air. A survey, which was organised by the chief dental officer, found no sign of the characteristic effects of fluoride overdose except in families who were still using well water from the Bedfordshire clay. The survey aroused a great deal of interest and people in the area of the brick works started complaining about the objectionable fumes emanating therefrom and I was asked to investigate.
I consulted with experts on atmospheric pollution and we arranged to have "smoke detectors" set up in various parts of the county. Eventually our results showed that the pollution was not dangerous and the smoke around the brickworks was no worse than that around a small town. However, we put pressure on the brickwork companies to reduce their emissions from their chimneys. They experimented with various types of scrubber but I don't remember that they were very successful.
The brickworks were always short of labour as there was a tremendous demand for bricks to replace houses destroyed during the war. It was hard and dirty work and the kilns had to be manned day and night. Most of the workforce, when I arrived, were European voluntary workers who had worked for the Germans during the war and were unhappy about returning to their native lands. Most were Poles and Yugoslavs. They gradually left for better jobs and were replaced by Italian immigrants.
After the Hungarian rising, Hungarian refugees came over here and many found work in the brickworks. Later still Pakistanis and Indian were recruited and Bedford became the most cosmopolitan town in all of England. An Italian Consulate was set up in Bedford with a welfare worker named Violetta Cowcceno and a doctor named Geno Obertelli both of whom became good friends of ours. I was co-opted onto the milk sub-committee of the County Agricultural Committee so I sometimes visited farmers as I did when we were in Saddleworth but this time I was accompanied by the County milk officer who took regular samples of milk and had them tested for TB and cleanliness.
Another interest I pursued was deaf children and I pioneered a service to detect hearing disabilities in children of all ages, but particularly in babies as it had been demonstrated that the earlier it was detected, the better they responded to treatment. There was a professor in Manchester who, with his wife, had developed techniques for treating young children and had developed very effective audiometers. I asked the health committee to start up a service to train all our health visitors in the technique for early detection which consisted of making noises of various pitches near the babies ear while it was distracted by something else, to see if there was any reaction. The noises were of a spoon touching the side of a cup or paper being rustled and so on. For older children we acquired the new kind of audiometers. We soon found it was necessary to employ a full time audiologist and a full time teacher of the deaf.
Another job I had was lecturing midwives and training ambulance personnel in first aid. I think I was the first person in England to obtain a "Resuscitanne" from Sweden. She was a life size doll with lungs, to enable people to learn mouth to mouth resuscitation.
Another of my jobs was doing medical examinations on police recruits. The two incidents that I can remember in connection with this were one perfectly healthy lad as far as I could detect, who dropped dead a week later after a training run. This is a thing that happens from time to time for no apparent reason, however it did make me feel rather bad although no blame was attached to me. The other incident was when a new chief constable was being appointed. The selection committee ended up with two applicants of equal merit between whom they could not decide. They sent them back to me and asked me, in effect, to find something wrong with one of them, which I failed to do.
Ampthill Rural District Council asked me to investigate the objectionable smells which were coming from a farm which had just started breeding battery hens. I found that the complaints were well justified as the man evidently didn't really know what he was doing. The council took him to court and had his business closed down. I thought that I must have made an enemy for life but much to my surprise, a year later he came up to me and thanked me for doing him a good turn. He had been bought up by Ross and Company who had made him manager of the firm with all the latest technology and he was happily drawing a very good salary.
During the war when families were evacuated from city slums, it was found that some of the evacuees were very ignorant and had difficulty in holding down a job or looking after their children. They constantly needed the support of welfare workers and health visitors. They were often homeless. The county Council decided to set up a service to find these "problem families" temporary housing where they would be supervised by special welfare workers. The welfare worker appointed in my division was an ex-Salvation Army Officer.
We housed them in some wooden buildings that had been an army camp. He seemed to be doing a good job but, unfortunately, we received a report from the police that they had arrested him for soliciting in a public lavatory and we were obliged to sack him.
Another disturbing incident which occurred in Dunstable was when a Dr.Waterlow was our psychiatrist at the child guidance clinic. She was the sister of Professor Waterlow. She was very conscientious and good at her job but she came up against a seven year old boy who was an extreme psychopath and completely without any sense of right or wrong. He did terrible things of which he boasted expecting praise. The things he did were not violent but were destructive. Judy Waterlow became obsessed with him to such an extent that when she failed to make any progress with him she despaired and committed suicide.
One of the things I enjoyed doing was working with the deputy county architect, Bill Walmsly, drawing up plans for new clinics in Bedford, Sandy and Ampthill. Unfortunately, he died suddenly which was very sad as he was a grand chap. Another enjoyable duty was attending the annual conferences of the Royal Society for Health which gave one a week's holiday in Brighton, Bournemouthe or Blackpool.
While I was working in the Biggleswade area, we had an outbreak of severe coughs amongst the children in Sandy. I could not make out what was behind it because we had been using the new Whooping cough vaccine for some time. So I sent throat swabs to Dr.Lane at the Public Health Laboratory and he confirmed that it was a strain of whooping cough. We used a vaccine made by Glaxo. I reported this to them but they were very defensive so I sent a report to the Lancet who printed it and later I was asked to contribute to a symposium in London on the question of Whooping cough vaccination. It turned out eventually that the virus was very complex and one element in the vaccine was missing. This was eventually sorted out and we had no further trouble with the vaccine except that there were occasional reports of brain damage after vaccination but they were few and far between and a very small price to pay for the many thousands of children who were saved by being vaccinated.
Having seen the plight of some children that we came across amongst the problem families, I started a scheme to send deprived children away for holidays. The children's officer, Miss Coucher joined me in the scheme and so did my bank manager, Sir Reginald Pearson who was the general manager at Vauxhall Motors in Luton and who was also the High Sheriff of Bedfordshire. We obtained charitable status and we wrote begging letters to all the prominent people and firms in the area and it gave us sufficient resources to take children to the seaside, generally Sheringham where the Norfolk education Authority allowed us to use a large secondary school near the coast. The visits would last one or two weeks. These were children who had never seen the sea or even had a holiday before. I recruited helpers from amongst probation officers, school teachers and welfare workers.
When the Telford Development Corporation was set up in Shropshire I found that Sir Reginald Pearson was the chairman of the Development Board and he told me that as far as he knew, the scheme was still running! At about the same time, Dorothy decided to join the Save The Children Fund and found a shop which was vacant and belonged to the council. She persuaded them to give the fund a tenancy and thus founded Bedford's first charity shop for the Save The Children Fund and got Frances Hobday to help her. The shop was very successful and she recruited help from her many friends.
The Coles had left Saddleworth and come to live in Wellingborough and we saw quite a lot of them. We often went on camping holidays with them.
One was particularly memorable at Rosseli on the Gower peninsula. When we arrived, it was very windy so I selected a sheltered place to put up the tents. It must have been the site of an old quarry and we turned in not fearing that our tent might be blown away. However, we were woken up in the middle of the night to find that the "Lilos" we were sleeping on were floating in several inches of water. A lot of our bedding and clothing was wet but we were able to find enough to wrap round us and we spent the rest of the night in the cars. We found, next day, that it was the night of the "Lynmouth disaster", when a whole village on the other side of the Bristol channel was washed into the sea.
We often went camping in Sheringham on the North Norfolk coast and during the long summer holidays, we went camping on the continent including the Costa Brava when it was still "Brava" (wild), with just little fishing villages and lots of forests, camping on route in France. Sometimes we went down to the south of France and once we went to Italy via Switzerland. On that occasion, we had planned to cross the Alps through the Sanplant Pass but were stopped at a barrier and told the pass had been closed by an avalanche and we would have to find a different route. We used the Fauke Pass instead. As we went through this pass we found that the recent storms had washed away the road in places and it was an hair raising journey during which we saw just how much spectacular damage had occurred. We found that in those days, travelling on the continent was very cheap and we could have a three or four week holiday for the family at little more than a hundred pounds. That was eight or so week's average pay then. Of course, I was getting more than the average pay otherwise we couldn't have done it.
On one of our holidays we left Vicky with a french family at Verier Du Lak for an exchange with a french girl, Nicole Demolis, who would join us when we came back on our way home. Ms Demolis was a cheese merchant who collected the cheeses made by the farmers up in the Alps. They were cheeses made from goat and sheep's milk. They were very "fragrant". Unfortunately, it was extremely hot in the car even with all the windows open and the "fragrance" became so extreme that we had to throw some of the cheeses out of the car. We continued onto the South of France.
On the way back we picked up Vicky and Nicole as arranged. Unfortunately, this exchange was not a success as Nicole was mad about sport and Vicky had nothing in common with her. The Next year both girls went on an exchange with a French family with two girls whose father was an army surgeon.
We also had a holiday with Brin Jenkins at Chicklana in Anderluthia. He had started up a company in Spain to buy up land and develop it as a holiday resort and we bought a plot with the object of later building a little villa for ourselves. Unfortunately, the builder that he had contracted was an undisclosed bankrupt and the money he got to buy materials was being spent on paying off his debts and the whole thing became a disaster.
By this time Julian was at the Rudolph Steiner school in Kings Langley and his class did an exchange with a class from Freiburg near the Black Forest in Germany. It was his last term in school.
We had a succession of au-pears: One, Monique, was Italian and she later married a local Italian hair dresser. Others were Rosa from Italy and later her friend Mariella who was very clever and went to University and who kept in touch with Dorothy for many years. Vicky and Rowena went to the local Convent school. Julian was an educational problem who would not conform. He went to a local prep school but they didn't do any good so we found a small "Dame school" run by Miss Perkins in a succession of church halls. She helped quite a bit but later we found a special school for difficult pupils in Horncastle run by Dr Bullen. Later on he went to the Steiner school at Kings Langley.
Giles was born in January of 1955. He was a Rhesus baby and needed an immediate blood change. Fortunately, Dr.Easton, the senior consultant at the hospital and a very competent lady obstetrician were on hand and all went well with the transfusion. We found Rowena was almost blind in one eye but the local eye specialist said there was nothing to be done about it but it worried us a great deal. With hindsight I feel that he was wrong but at the time he was so insistent that I was convinced.
After the war, when I was studying for my Diploma of Public Health at the London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, I met up with some of my previous fellow students. One was Larry Collier and another was Sam Leff who was at that time Medical Officer of Health for Hendon. He and Vera, his Russian wife, were getting worried about the so called "A bombs" that the Americans had dropped on Japan. They had formed a small circle of friends who were beginning to protest against the making of any more such bombs. They included Labour members, Quakers, co- operative guild members and communists. This was the beginnings of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
When we got to Bedford I was told that someone who lived in Warwick Avenue was interested in the peace movement and I went round to see him and that is how we came to know Bundy and Betty Hurst. We have been supporters of the Campaign ever since and we went to all the early Aldermarston marches that were led by people such as Cannon Collins and Micheal Foot and Lord Bertram Russel the mathematician. I remember on one occasion that Giles, at the age of about four or five, had persuaded me to buy him a toy pistol and he insisted on having it with him went I carried him on my shoulders and was repeatedly shouting "Bang" during a peace march.
In January 1960, I was nominated by the County Council Association to attend a three month course at Henley Administrative Staff College. It was open to employers of all sorts to send promising employees to fit them for promotion. They came mainly from industry but there were a sprinkling of people from central and local government and the forces. The mix of experience and background made for some very lively debates which were very stimulating. The different outlooks between industry and public service became very apparent in so far as efficiency in industry, based upon profitability, did not apply to the public services which were based on spending money for the public good so that the better the service, the more it cost.
On the whole, we thought that quite a lot of the chaps from industry were ill educated. We received lectures from top business men and trade unionists and bankers. We were divided into firms who were given projects to do which were then presented to the whole college. We had to examine the careers of famous people including such as Cecil Rhodes and Simon Bolivar. We also visited the city, looking at how the banks operated and the stock exchange worked. When we came to discuss the matter of personnel management, I chose to describe the midwifery service which gave rise to a deal of humour.
One notable holiday we had was at Hyeres, near Toulon on the South coast of France. I had lent our caravan to a chap who worked at Shire Hall, the idea being that he would tow it down and leave it at a suitable sight and when he came back he would give us the site pass and we could go down and use it before bringing it back, the idea being that it would save two journeys across France for the caravan. We were having a wonderful holiday until Giles, then aged about three or four, who was playing on the beach, suddenly disappeared. We hunted high and low along the beach in both directions for over an hour and failed to find him. We became really frightened at this point and started asking everybody to help us find him. Eventually some people who had found him miles away down the beach brought him to us. Apparently, he had mistaken the direction we were and ran in the opposite direction, looking for us.
On the way home, towing the caravan, we had just passed through Orange, just north of Avignon, when a large car came round a bend at a terrific speed and smashed into the offside of our car and caravan. It was a terrible shock and the children were screaming with fright. On getting out I found that the front offside wheel of our car had been almost torn away from the chassis and the offside of the caravan had been carried away. The four men in the car that hit us were obviously very drunk. They were very aggressive and accused us of causing the accident by being too near to the centre of the road. We had a terrific shouting match and I don't think I've ever sworn so much in my whole life.
Eventually the police arrived and having ascertained that nobody was injured, they got out their tapes and chalk and marked out the tracks and the positions of the vehicles. They wrote out a report, a copy of which they gave to me. They then left us, saying that they would send us a breakdown vehicle to tow us to a garage in Orange. I lashed the broken side of the caravan with rope so that it could be towed. When we got to the garage, we found that they were only equipped to deal with French cars and there was no way of getting spare parts for a Ford. However, they were very helpful and towed us to a blacksmith's premises where we left it.
By this time we were very tired and hungry and we went to a routier in the town. All the other guest were lorry drivers and they made us very welcome and we had a wonderful french meal and got the children to bed. Next day, a family of high wire walkers arrived to perform in the town square. They had a little girl the same age as Giles and the two children played together all the time we were there.
The blacksmith took three or four days to mend the car. It was a wonderful bit of craftsmanship. He took the front suspension out and hammered each component straight and reassembled it and charged us a surprisingly small sum. In the meantime I made the van as towable as I could and we resumed our journey. When we arrived at Calais, I contacted the AA and they arranged to have the caravan brought over to Dover and we made for home. After a long correspondence, the caravan was written off and the insurance company finally paid for the repairs and for the loss of the caravan.
Vicky and Rowena went to the High School where there was a rather rigid regime. They begged to be allowed to go to the convent school, where they had friends, and did so and were much happier although they still got into trouble regularly. The house next door to us was purchased by a teacher and became Polam Infant School. It happened that Giles was just of school age and we sent him there.
During the first term he was very unhappy and we were asked to postpone his education for another term. He went back quite happily as there was a nice teacher there that he got on with well. Later he went onto Rushmore Prep School for about a year and then we got him into the "Inkey" in Bedford School where he completed his education.
Julian left school when he was sixteen and I took him to a careers advisory consultancy where he took various aptitude tests all of which proved fairly inconclusive so that in the end the report stressed more of his professed interests and recommended photography or surveying since these were outdoor pursuits and Julian had at one point mentioned photography. We found a local photographer who was willing to take on an assistant to work in the shop in Harpur Street and as a darkroom assistant at his home.
One day, we were told by a friend that Julian and a girl called Frankie were making arrangements to get married at Gretna Green. We got in touch with the girl's parents, the Hobdays, a large catholic family and suggested that they were far too immature to get married but much to my surprise the family seemed to welcome the idea and eventually they got married in the normal way at the catholic church in Bedford.
Rowena and Peter Hurst had become "Rockers" and rode around with a motorcycle gang dressed up in black leather with studs and chains and so on and did "tons" (100 mph) on stretches of main road.
Vicky was good at art and got a place in the Art School in Cambridge were she met Razak.
Rowena decided that she wanted to be a children's nurse and chose to go to the Queen Mary's Hospital for Children at Carshalton. Rowena and Peter Hurst got married in October 1967. Rowena, who was still in training, was obliged to keep this secret from the Matron as only single women were thought to be suitable for nursing.
Later, when Razak got his degree at St.John's College, Vicky went out to Malaysia and married Razak according to Moslem rights. Razak's father was Abu Baka Samad who was First Secretary to the Prime Minister, Abdel Rhaman.
Dorothy and I were now on our own except for Giles who was still at Bedford School and things started to go wrong with our marriage and eventually reached the point where we just lived in the same house and hardly spoke together and went our own ways. Gradually I began to notice other women that I had never noticed before and some of them seemed rather nice and several of them returned my interest and I sometimes took one or another of them out to a play or the cinema or a meal. Eventually, after about a year of this, Gladys Herne and I found that we were in love with each other. She was in very much the same situation as myself, her marriage having broken down.
Her husband was very mean with money and also resented her going out to work to earn some of her own but she defied him and took a job as a welfare worker attached to a large school for educationally subnormal children in Kempston where she was very successful, particularly with the Italian families and in getting jobs for children when they left school. Later she started working as a welfare officer for the disabled and also helped me with the children's holiday scheme and we naturally got to know each other very well and we agreed that we wanted to live with each other. Dr.Brothwood was now due to retire and I was included on the list of his possible successors. I thought that this would give me an opportunity to leave Bedfordshire without causing difficulties which would arise if we lived together in Bedford. When I went for my interview, I talked a lot of nonsense and Dr.McLoud got the post instead.
I now started looking for another job and finally got an offer as Medical Officer of Health the North East Salop United District. This was a case where several districts had combined together to employ one Medical Officer of Health between them. I worked out my three months notice introducing "Mac" to the county and then in April the first 1966 we moved to Wellington in Shropshire and found digs with Mr.Davis of 1 Park Street.
I looked around and found a nice flat in a big country house called Admaston Hall run by a lady who lived there while her husband was working as chief of police to one of the small Arab states in the Gulf. He only came home very occasionally and Gladys was able to come and join me there.
Soon after I arrived in Wellington I noticed a rather spectacular hill on the other side of the A5 road from the office where I was installed. I was told that this was the Wrekin and having read Houseman's "Shropshire Lad" I was intrigued and walked up to the top from where there were magnificent views in all directions. I noticed what looked like a little cottage on the north west side of the hill and thought "What a beautiful spot to live!" and went down to have a closer look. I found that it was derelict with most of the windows and doors missing and signs that tramps were regularly using it for shelter and swallows were using it to build their nests in. I speculated on the possibility of it being restored and on closer examination, helped by the local municipal engineer, found that structurally, although it had no damp course, it was remarkably dry and the brickwork was, generally speaking, sound. It was well drained by a gentle slope and a gravel subsoil. The oaken timbers were mostly quite sound. I made inquiries and found that it was owned by the Powis estate. I got in touch with the Factor at Powis Castle but he said that it was going to be demolished in order to extend the arable land on which it stood. I persisted and eventually they said I could have it for nine hundred pounds.
On the other side of the track leading down from the lane to the cottage was a plot of land about a quarter of an acre which was covered in brambles but looked as though it had been a cottage garden at one time. I asked if I could have that as well and they let me have it for £1600. I took out a mortgage from the council under the "Small Dwellings Act" and hired a couple of brickies and a cement mixer. The interior walls of the cottage were covered with old cow hair plaster (sand and lime reinforced with cow's hair) over wooden lathes. We removed the plaster from the outside walls and put in a vertical damp proof course of tar lathing over which we plastered and the inside walls we just had patched up.
We tried to do some plastering ourselves but found it was far too difficult and we had to call in a proper plasterer. The ceiling plaster, was removed, exposing the beams above. Taking down the ceiling plaster was quite a very difficult task as the space between the ceiling and the floor above was filled with very old chaff. This was rotten and clouds of dust rained down on us including various things like mouse nests, clay marbles, Georgian pennies and various other articles which had slipped between the shrunken upstairs floor boards. There was even something that looked like a hinge from a flail. We had the water supply put on from the supply to the cattle trough in the field. We also had a cess pit dug and electricity connected. The brickies mended the tiled roof and repointed all the brickwork outside and demolished the pigsties and the bread ovens to make more room in what was to be our kitchen.
The bricks, which were old handmade bricks, were extremely useful for replacing damaged bricks and building the kitchen out as it was impossible to get bricks to match the original ones. We also had to raise the kitchen floor which was much lower than other floors in the house. In the "dining" room, we removed an enormous black iron range which exposed a lovely Inglenook fireplace. We removed several hundred years of soot and debris and put in a firebasket which Gladys got from Condover Hall. We retained the brick floor and used a lot of "Cardinal polish".
While all this was going on, we found a much nicer flat to live in at Cunnery Road in Church Stretton. By this time Gladys had got a job as assistant teacher at Condover School for the Blind. We both got home from work as early as possible and worked in the evenings as long as daylight permitted and then drove back to Church Stretton. We generally stopped on the way at a little pub to try and rinse the dust from our lungs with a beer.
We got to know the locals quite well there, especially a lovely old man called One-Eyed Jack. He had been a cowman and had lost an eye when a cow poked it out with her horn. He told us some wonderful stories about the local history.
Occasionally, We had our drink at the Long Mind Hotel which was just near our flat. We were in our working clothes and very dirty but they didn't seem to mind. One day we walked in and were invited to take a drink of champagne which was on a table at the entrance. We noticed that all the men were wearing pink coats and the women were dressed to the nines. It was, of course, the South Shropshire Hunt Ball. We did not stay long at the hotel.
As I drove round my territory, I sometimes spotted an old black and white Tudor cottage being demolished. This was before the conservation of our heritage had been legislated for and farmers were building new cottages on the sites of the old ones because it was cheaper than modernising the original ones. Many of the old oak beams that they were pulling down were still quite sound and if I gave the men a fiver or so, they would bring then to the cottage for me. These were useful replacements for the less good timbers in the cottage.
The next winter, Gladys purchased an old caravan and when the kitchen was finished and we could cook in it, we gave up the flat and slept in the caravan. Later, when we had got one of the bedrooms into reasonable shape so that we could sleep indoors. Not long after that we were able to sell the caravan and move in altogether.
We built a patio where we could sit out and planted a Russian vine to cover it, also a glass conservatory where I could propagate plants and then a garage big enough for two cars and a work bench. I started on the garden with a large vegetable patch and a croquet lawn and paths. I had far fewer duties and responsibilities in Shropshire than I had in Bedfordshire so had much more time for other activities.
We joined the adult education classes at Attingham Park and studied Greek and Roman history and also joined the archaeological society. Our tutor was the warden of Attingham Park, Geoffery Toms. He was an inspiring teacher whose enthusiasm was infectious. We went with him on visits to Greece and Italy and became fascinated by the local archaeology. We were told of an iron age fort on the top of the Wrekin that was sacked by the Romans and replaced at a site three miles away, by a large Roman city named Vericonium.
We joined the archaeological Society and I joined in several "digs". We also went on educational holidays to Greece and Italy to study the classical world. We visited Naples and Huculanium and Pompeii, Anpurias, etc. It was very inspired and I thought it a strange mixture of beauty and barbarism.
We stayed in the a hotel at Veco Equenzi on the top of the cliffs. We wanted to swim to in the sea but the beach below us was absolutely filthy but we saw a nice clean beach on the other side of the bay. We approached a fisherman with a boat and he agreed to take us across the bay and fetch us back at five in the afternoon. We had a lovely time on the beach but five o'clock came and went. We got a bit anxious but he eventually arrived and we started to wade out to the boat but this large handsome man jumped out of his boat to sweep Gladys up in his arms to carry her to the boat. She found this a most romantic experience.
Gladys was keen to get professional qualifications to be a social worker and got a place at the Social Work College in London where she qualified as a social worker for the blind and worked full time at Condover. I was asked to join the local Rotary club and found it very useful for getting to know the people who mattered so one knew who to approach to get something done. At this time the Socialist Medical Association had lost its leading members and the Medical Practitioner's Union had become the most important pressure group to continue the development of the National Health Service. Hugh Faulkner, who was a member of the executive committee persuaded me to join him on the committee and I used to go to London to attend their meetings every month.
I used to go up on the train with Dr.Roy who was an Indian and Medical Officer of Health for Sandwell in the West Midlands. Hugh, who had been in Italy during the war and had made friends there with partisans who were generally communists, was asked by the Tuscany Government to help them set up a health service along the lines of the British one. Hugh, who had just resigned from his practice in Campden, went out to Tuscany and decided to go and live there with his wife and devote himself to the project.
Hugh did not know much about preventive medicine and asked me to go over and help him and I stayed with him and his wife Marion for about three months writing up various aspects of preventive medicine and attending meetings of members of the provincial government. I often felt that it was a bit of a waste of time because the committee was made up of an equal number of members of the Communist Party and of the Christian Democrats. They could never agree about anything and it seemed to me that very little progress was being made.
Gladys joined me out there for a couple of weeks and we had a lovely time exploring Tuscany, spending a lot of time in Florence which was our nearest city. We also visited other places such as Siena and Pisa among others. Hugh and Marion were living in an old farmhouse typical of the district where the family lived up stairs and the livestock occupied the ground floor. I was helping Hugh to clean this out so they could have more living space and we had to get rid of a lot of centuries old rotting rubbish, some of which was very dusty and I developed a very nasty lung infection and I felt so ill that I just wanted to get home as soon as possible.
Hugh took me to the railway station in Florence with a good supply of paracetamols and put me on a through train coming from Naples and going to Calais. I was put in a four bunk compartment with three chaps already in it. One of them spoke English so we got to know each other quite well. They were three brothers who were working abroad but had gone back to Naples to celebrate a family wedding and were now returning, one to Germany, one to London and the one who could speak English to Wrexham in Wales. He also spoke Welsh. They were very good company and had a good supply of brandy. When we got to Bolognia, I took to my bunk and didn't wake up until we were half way through France. Gladys describes to friend how she went down to Waterloo to meet me and after all the passengers had gone through the gate, she saw at the other end of the platform three men holding each other up, I being supported by my Italian Comrades.
We took Lyn and Robert for a holiday in Malta, Renting a flat from a local chap who had just bought a house there. We found Malta a very interesting place, full of history dating from the stone temples which predated Stone Henge and came right up to date with the terrible bombardment they got during the second world war from the Italian aeroplanes. There were nice clean beaches and most people spoke English.
Peter and Rowena, who had gone to Canada, made their first trip back to England because they wanted an English dog to take back to Canada. We found them a lovely young border collie at Rattlinghope (pronounced "Ratchup") on the Long Mynd.
In 1974, I took Giles with me to visit Row and Pete in Orleans. They took us round to see the local sights including Upper Canada Village and we went camping in the Gatineaux National Park. Pete had started up on his own, selling motorbikes and servicing them. The dog, not having any sheep to tend, rounded up the motorbikes. They had just bought a house and were trying to furnish it so while they were working, Giles and I made them a dining room table using Bundy's Basement. We made friends with a couple named Sarah and Roy Beard. Sarah was the headmistress in the local primary school. Roy was an architect. They had been, in their youth, very keen mountaineers.
Roy belonged to the Alpine club and because the Alpine club still refused to admit females, Sarah belonged to the Pinnacle Club who had a nice little cottage which they used as a climbing hut on the slopes of Snowdon at Cwmdyli. I sometimes went with Roy to the Alpine club where we did some amateur climbing in Snowdonia. Roy was much older than Sarah and when Roy died we were able to use Cwmdyli. We spent some lovely weekends there exploring Snowdonia.
Our cottage was at the foot of the Wrekin, the well-known hill in Shropshire of which we had a beautiful view. With the beginning of the plans for the new town of Telford, the BBC decided to erect a television mast to serve that part of Shropshire. They had applied for planning permission to put it on the Long Mynd which was the highest of the Shropshire hills. The local branch of the Council for the Protection of Rural England objected to this and suggested that it should go instead on the Wrekin. We immediately protested and got other protesters to form a Wrekin Preservation Committee and a local teacher named George Evans was chairman and my solicitor agreed to represent us at the inquiry and waived his fees.
We lost the fight but our efforts were worthwhile because we got their original plans considerably modified so that the impact was very much reduced. An additional bonus was that we got the BBC to finance a dig in the Iron age fort as a result of which we were able to date the occupation of the fort to about 200 AD. As a result of this I decided that as I couldn't beat them, I would join them and I was able to get enough local support to form an independent branch of the C.P.R.E.for East Shropshire and I remained the Chairman until we left the area in 1986.
Another adventure was with the local Mining and Caving Club. I became friendly with one of the younger members of the Newport Council who was chairman of this club named David Adams. There had been a lot of mining in this area including Roman lead mines and this club had explored them all and had worked out the dates when some of them were in use. He thought that it would be useful to have a doctor with then in case of accidents. I had learned a lot about modern coal mines during my stay in the West Riding and I said I'd have a go. Gladys wanted to come as well.
There was a very interesting pothole in the hills near Wrexham which the club wanted to explore so we went along. The pothole was in fact an old lead mine that had connected up to some natural underground chambers. We were fitted out with miner's helmets and lamps and climbed down a rope ladder about seventy or eighty feet. At the bottom there was a narrow hole leading off down which we slid into the unknown. Actually we were assured that the slope flattened out as it reached the floor of a large cavern. We immediately wondered how we would ever get out again and were told that there were handholds to enable us to climb back out.
It was lovely in the cave with our lamps lighting up the stalactites. There were a series of caverns some of which we had to wriggle through narrow holes to enter. In other places we had to scramble along narrow ledges with a dark void below us. When we got to the last chamber we came out onto the side of a steep cliff, otherwise inaccessible, over looking the valley below us. We then had to make our way back and we were hoisted up the mine shaft by rope. It was a most interesting experience but one that we decided we didn't want to repeat.
In the part of East Shropshire where we live was the site of some of the oldest heavy industry in England known as the Ironbridge Gorge in the valley of the River Seven where Iron was first smelted with the use of coal. Up to that time Charcoal had always been used for this but with the demand for iron from new industries was rapidly running out of trees to make the charcoal. Attempts at using iron had, until that time resulted in failure but when an iron master by the name of Abraham Darby started up here he found that the particular coal in the mines there and the nature of the local limestone enabled him to make cast iron with coke instead of charcoal. He built large furnaces at Coalbrook Dale and was able to mass produce pig iron for industry.
This brought a lot of heavy industry to the area and the building of the first iron bridge in 1779 made Coalbrook Dale internationally famous. In subsequent years the iron industry spread quickly, first to the Black country around Birmingham and then to the world at large. Coalbrook and the gorge were now derelict.
At around 1970 it was decided that this derelict area would be an ideal site for starting up a new town to relieve the overcrowding in the Black Country. We saw it grow over the years and the area is now thriving again, mostly with Japanese factories. As interest in the new town grew, plans started to be drawn up it was realised that here was a living museum of the 18th century. The town was given the name of Telford in memory of Thomas Telford who had been the engineer for the county of Shropshire and was the builder of the Holihead Road amongst many other famous civil engineering projects.
The Telford Development Corporation put money into conservation of the area and it became the Ironbridge Gorge Museum. Local people were recruited as friends of the Museum and they formed the "Friends of the Ironbridge Gorge". Gladys and I joined and the voluntary labour put in by the friends in the early days assured its success.
Another of our activities was rambling. A group of our friends got together and formed the East Shropshire Rambler's Association. One of the first things we did was to organise walks along designated footpaths to preserve their existence by use which maintains the legal protection of the right of way. We did a lot of work removing obstructions but this often involved us in rather too much work. Fortunately we were able to get a grant from the Telford Development Corporation to employ a supervisor and a team of unemployed youngsters to do the heavy work such as building foot bridges and mending styles.
Ceriog Jones and Jean were friends of ours for many years in Bedford. He was a Welshman from Glyn Ceriog - a village just over the welsh boarder on the A5. He had been a communist supporter in his youth but during the war he was in military intelligence and was now an English teacher in the local secondary school.
He was also a valuable member of the local dramatic club and directed many plays. His most remembered one was "Cosmos" presented in the open air. Their son Glyn was a very bright boy and a bit of a rebel and was expected to have a brilliant career.
Ceriog died soon after we got to Shropshire while Glyn was still at High school. One day, after we had been living in the cottage for some years, we got a telephone call from Jean saying that Glyn's girlfriend was pregnant and her parents had turned her out of their home and Jean, who was living in a flat, couldn't accommodate them. She hoped we could help them find somewhere to live in Shropshire since they wished to move to that area.
It so happened that a farmhouse next door to us was vacant and the landlord agreed to let it. Barbara was visibly pregnant and I tried to get Glyn a job but he was never able to hold one down for very long so they lived mainly on Social Security. Barbara was studying for her A levels. Gladys took charge of her and took her to the anti natal clinic and when her pregnancy was advanced, took her into town for maternity shopping. When later Gladys picked her up all she had obtained was a pile of books from the library.
One day Glyn rushed over to tell us that Barbara had taken an overdose of Aspirin tablets so we had to rush her into the hospital. Eventually, the baby arrived and it was a very bonny boy. When the boy was about a year old, Glyn found a job as a house father in an institute for epileptic children in Westmooreland in the Lake District where Barbara produced a baby girl. We didn't see them for quit a while except when Glyn called in on his way to an orienteering competition which was sometimes held on the Wrekin. We next heard of them when we heard that Barbara had obtained a first class degree in English Literature by private study and was now teaching in a private girls school in Colchester.
The next we heard was that they were in Newton Stewart in Scotland where they had bought a farm. They were very keen for us to visit them so one day we decided to take them up on it and motored up, staying overnight at Carlisle. We followed directions as far as we could to a village called Bing. We enquired at the post office and the lady showed us the beginning of the track that led to the farm which was out of sight. Glyn had told us that we could drive up the track but after we had gone a few yards, the hedges were pressing in on the car and scratching it so badly that we had to reverse back and start to walk.
It was about a mile through the mud and the brambles when we nearly gave up. Then we suddenly spotted a tumbledown stone building ahead of us. As Glyn had said, they had now got the roof on and a spare room had been made habitable (just). They lived downstairs which was mostly kitchen and the two children had small bedrooms upstairs.
They were subsisting on what they produced themselves. Glyn had a large vegetable garden, a chicken run with about twenty chickens, and a pigsty in which the sow had just produced twelve tiny piglets. Part of the drainage work was completed but one still had to use planks to get into the house. In the meadow were two cows, which Barbara milked twice a day and with the milk made her own butter and cheese. It seemed that the only food they had to buy was sugar, flour and salt.
At that time the piglets were an important part of their economy as they brought in the cash when they sold in the market. It had been a very wet, cold spring and the pigsty was insufficient to keep the piglets warm so they had to be brought indoors at night. The only placed they could be put was in the porch and since the front door could not be opened the only way in and out for them was through the kitchen, and often while we were having our breakfast, mother pig walked over the planks out of the kitchen followed by the long line of her piglets, and then in the evenings, brought them back into the house.
Bryn the baby, who was now just taking his 'A' levels, and was hoping to get in to Glasgow Medical School, but in the meantime was helping his father repair the farm buildings. The girl, who was a couple of years younger, was hoping to become a speech therapist. We've heard since that both of them have achieved their ambitions.
Aruba is a small island, part of the Netherlands Antilles, twelve miles off the coast of Venezuela. It had always been ruled direct from Holland, but the Arubans wanted their independence. Sam Cole, had been commissioned by the Netherlands government to ascertain if it could be made viable as an independent state. This would take some time, so he rented a bungalow for a year and brought Vicky and Yanina with him. Also he brought his computer, containing his model of the world economy.
It was a lovely little island except for the large American oil refinery at the other end. Its problem was that it hardly ever got any rain, and was dependant upon desalination plant supplied by the oil company. Because of the dryness, the fauna and flora were quite unique. Beautiful emerald Humming-birds were busy sucking nectar from the flowers, and on the rocks we often saw enormous iguanas sunning themselves. They sometimes had their children with them. The trees were called Divi-Divi trees, which grew sideways in the direction of the prevailing wind. Most of the rest of the plant life were cacti, some quite enormous, looking like the sort of cacti one saw on the Nevada Desert.
The island had a checkered history. There was evidence of it having been inhabited by the Caribs as there were characteristic cave paintings. Later it was exploited for its gold and also its guano. In fact there is a record of two Porthmadag ships having been lost when bringing guano back from Aruba in the last century. Now its chief function is to provide an oil refinery for Venisualan Oil and a shipping terminal. I had a lovely two weeks, mainly lying on the beach, swimming and snorkelling.
When Larry Collier retired from general practice, he went to Jamaica to work in a health service scheme which had been set up by doctors from Cuba. He had been working there for a while and wanted to come back for a holiday and to sort out some of his commitments. He had married a childhood sweetheart who was American and he asked me if I would go and do a locum for him. At that time David and Helen Sloan were holding the fort for him but they wanted to come back. So I went out there via Miami to Kingston.
The practice was in Falmouth so when I arrived at Kingston, I had to take a small plane to Montigo Bay. The plane carried six passengers with their baggage on their knees. It was most uncomfortable and it didn't fly very high so I was able to get a good look at the island. It was covered in green mountains, quite like parts of Wales. We arrived at Montigo Bay and I telephoned David and waited for him to pick me up in the van which was their transport. We drove the forty miles from Falmouth to Montigo Bay, passing a few hotels and golf courses. We passed through some quite wild country. Falmouth is an old colonial port, predominantly in a Georgian style, in the middle of which there is a thriving market.
Larry had built a bungalow near the sea. It was designed to keep cool, having no ceilings but a wooden roof. It had electricity, lighting and a fridge and, of course, running water. At the bottom of the garden, was the beach with lots of palm trees and tropical shrubs also "Royal Flamboyant" trees in full bloom, and lots of banana plants.
We had a meal of parrot fish and potato salad. Parrot fish seemed to be the staple diet for many Jamaicans. If they had a boat, these were easily caught along the reef. The other staple food was of course, bananas.
I was woken next morning by the dawn chorus of dogs and squawking birds. I was taken around by David to the various places that I would need to know. Basically, they had set up clinics in all the villages in the district of Trellauny.
There was a hospital but that was under separate management. There was a bigger hospital with specialists at Montigo Bay, forty miles away. This district rose from the shore to lofty limestone mountains which where still known as the "Cockpit" because in these hills those slaves who escaped, lived and were harassed by the British soldiers so there was a constant state of war there. Eventually the Government of the day gave in and signed a treaty with the leaders of the slaves releasing them from slavery and allowing them to manage their own affairs. So, there is a scattering of villages in the area with names such as "Waitabit", "Decide", "Warsop", "Granville" and "Wakefield".
I had a rotor to visit all these villages at intervals but for two days a week I was at the Falmouth clinic. There was also an Infirmary in Falmouth left over from the old "poor law". It provided a refuge for all the terminally ill, mentally ill, criminals and alcoholics. An interesting cross section of human failings! The matron, with her small staff was a very dedicated humanitarian.
On my rounds, when I arrived at a clinic, there was always a long cue of people waiting in the road for the clinic to open. Each clinic was in the charge of a nurse or, in some cases, two nurses. I worked through the patients, getting the nurse to send in the most urgent cases first as I often did not manage to see them all. I worked until I was so exhausted that I couldn't carry on and then I left the rest to the nurses who were doing baby clinics and Immunisations and also did the midwifery.
Some of the nurses were trained in England or Scotland, Canada, or the USA. There is a school of nursing at Kingston and a medical school which has a good reputation. Unfortunately Jamaica does not benefit as it ought form these facilities since the graduates are usually eager to emigrate to the US or Canada.
I found there was a large number of dietary problems. Most people were very poor and relied for their nourishment on sugar and rum so that diabetes and hypertension affected most people over fifty. Children, as well as having a bad diet, always had worms. Every child seen was automatically given worming powders.
At the time I arrived, Prime Minister Manly had just been replaced by Seaga and all the Cuban doctors had been sent back to Cuba and the supply of pharmaceuticals was becoming scarce. One or two Indian doctors arrived when I was there which relieved the local shortage slightly.
The main street in Falmouth has some lovely old colonial buildings, some dating from 1799. Some, however, were very much the worse for wear. There is a picturesque market place in which I was relieved of my wallet on the first day. In the square is a fountain from where most of the local people fetch their water. Nearby was the Trellauny Beach Hotel, full of Americans. I often used their beach for sunbathing.
Sometimes I went to have beer and curried goat at Mrs.Campbell's Cafe on the Martha Bray Road. It was a lane with hedges and meadows and looked exactly like England. My next door neighbour had a breadfruit tree in her garden and she occasionally gave me one to cook. To prepare breadfruit, you have to cover it with palm leaves and set fire to them. When it is all black and the fire has died down you remove the burnt skin with a machete and inside it is just like roast chestnut.
Somebody knocked on the door one evening and introduced himself as Percy Gordon and said that Larry had suggested he make himself known to me. I found him to be a very helpful guide. He had been in the British RAF during the war and had an English pension and so was wealthy by local standards. He was a local councillor and a great supporter of Manly. He invited me to come and visit him at Deeside where he lived and he showed me around an area which had been a sugar plantation which had been divided up into smallholdings where families could build a house and keep themselves on their own produce.
He showed me round his own holding where he was growing bananas, plantains, yams, oranges, limes, etc. He also had a few goats. He owned an old bus which he hired out to people on outings. I once accompanied him on one such outing when he took the village children and some of their parents to the beach at Ocho Rio. Danny, a local boy who wasn't very bright, was employed by Larry as a handyman and gardener. He was always around and getting in the way and was not much use except that he used to bring the occasional fish for us. Also he was constantly trying to phone Larry's sister, apparently, when she was staying with Larry, he fell in love with her and she led him on.
Frances, Larry's wife, had two maids, one called Aunty who was middle aged and very stout and a bit of a tyrant but good humoured and efficient. There was also a younger woman called Ethelene who did the laundry. They each visited once a week. "Aunty" lived in a village that was several miles away and she had to be taken home at the end of the day. The journey was interesting because it involved driving down secretive jungle tracks.
I drove David and Helen to Kingston Airport to go home. When I was there, I took the opportunity to go and see Port Royal which was the major port for Jamaica in the old days. It was famous for its Client Captain Morgan. He was only one of the pirates that were looting left, right and centre in this part of the world. They became very rich and the port had a reputation for wickedness of all kinds. However, eventually, it seemed that God had enough and there was a big earthquake and most of Port Royal disappeared beneath the waves. All that was left were a fort and a few old buildings and fishermen's huts.
I also went to see Doctor Ashly, the Chief Medical Officer in Kingston. She was very nice and we had a long discussion about what was happening in Jamaica. She said that I needed to be registered before I could work and she sent me along to the registrar. She was quite different and seemed suspicious of my motives for coming to Jamaica; however, she added my name to the register and I paid the fee of one dollar.
I didn't much like what I saw of Kingston which was quit a big city. In the centre were many expensive hotels and shops but once you left the city centre, you were in the slums where houses were made mostly of boards and galvanized tin sheet and most of the children were half naked and gangs of young men were lounging around, looking menacing.
On my way back I went through a little town called "Spanish Town". This was the Capital city in the time when the island was a Spanish colony. It had some beautiful Spanish style buildings and gardens resplendent with enormous "Royal Palms". We also noticed an iron bridge, a replica of the one in Coalbrook Dale except that it was much smaller. I don't know when that was put up.
As I went up through the mountains, I saw huge bauxite quarries and all the surrounding land and vegetation was smothered in red dust and when I got down to the North coast I saw piers and cranes which were for loading the bauxite onto ships. It was all now derelict as the Bauxite market had collapsed.
Further up the coast, by contrast, was the town of Ocho Rios which was very pleasant with a beautiful bay. Unfortunately, it was marred by too many hotels and cafes for the American market. There were also some beautiful tropical gardens which we explored later when Gladys and the children were with us.
During the rest of my journey to Falmouth, I met My first tropical storm since India. The rain came down so heavily that the wipers did not function and I was forced to stop until the worst was over. Next day I officially started work, driving around in Larry's van (an eight seater). A few cases of suspected polio had just been reported so I was asked to distribute vaccine to all my clinics so that the nurses could start mass vaccination.
I was driven round in the hospital car which was a very hair raising experience until I got used to it. The driver drove like a maniac up winding narrow mountain roads where round every corner there were donkeys or children or women with great baskets on their heads. There was never an accident that I saw as the driver was very skilled indeed. I christened him after the current world racing car champion. The first day I went to Waitabit, Warsop, Albertstown, Ulsterspring and Clarkstown. Next day I did the rest of the deliveries.
Frances had a small untrained dog named Paddy who was constantly getting into fights with other dogs and I had to give him regular doses of ampicillin and valium. Another nuisance were the land crabs which were always digging holes in the garden. You could fill them up each day but next day they would have made some more and if you were coming home after dark, you had to be careful not to twist your ankle. These crabs were typically four or five inches across and their holes were the same with but about twice as deep.
Another local nuisance was the goats and the pigs. A lot of families kept a goat or pig which sometimes got loose and raided gardens. There was a notice up in the town square stating that goats and pigs were not allowed. I did notice that there were always far more goats than pigs so I assumed that literacy was commoner amongst the pigs than the goats. By contrast, the vegetation was very lush and beautiful and flowered all the year round.
The "Flamboyant" trees and "Royal Poinsettias" were particularly pretty and grew to enormous sizes. There was also an "Acci" tree whose fruit tasted like scrambled egg which was a great delicacy and was eaten with bacon or salt fish. However, it had one part which was poisonous and had to be carefully removed. The other common fruit tree was the Mango.
I soon settled into a routine, not working on weekends when I did a lot of swimming and snorkelling which I became good at. Swimming out to the coral reefs and then diving down, one saw the most beautiful fishes and corals in a fantastic range of colours, beyond the belief of anyone not seeing it themselves. Occasionally one would get a surprise. Once I saw a moray eel emerge from his hideout and on another occasion I found myself staring into a very ugly face and found later that it was a "Jewfish". It was important to avoid sea urchins because if you got one of their spines in your foot, it was very difficult to get out and extremely painful. Other wildlife included turkey vultures which hung around in the hospital grounds. They were very ugly and menacing looking creatures. One often saw Mongoose who were introduced into Jamaica to eliminate the snake population, however there were still some pythons up in the mountains but they were quite harmless.
Gladys and Lyn and Bob came and joined me for a short holiday. Bob did his usual run every morning and the locals got used to him and called out to him "Come on Whitey!". He was also popular at the local church. Frances had a friend also named Frances who she specially wanted us to meet. I rang her up and she asked me to go over for tea.
This Frances Tennison and her husband came from a family of plantation owners who had been in Jamaica for Generations. They lived in a beautiful old colonial house on a hill surrounded by a large "sugar plantation". They did not grow a lot of sugar cane and had diversified into coconut plantations and cattle rearing. Jamaican cattle were a cross between Herefords and Brahmas.
They were still living much as their ancestors had, with many servants. It so happened that when I was leaving, I noticed that I had a flat tyre so I got out the jack but Mrs. Tennison saw me and stopped me and clapped her hands loudly and a man came running to us, looked at the tyre and said "I do it Boss" in a manner that transported me back in time about two hundred years.
After Gladys joined me she invited us all to dinner. We were given a tour of the plantation which was known as "Good Hope". There were still the remains of the original buildings to be seen, an old church and a counting house, very Georgian in style with a stone viaduct over the Martha Bray River. Also a viaduct lead to a water mill where the sugar cane was crushed.
We then had a magnificent meal with servants waiting on us. The Tennisons had one daughter who was very keen on horse riding. Rather ironically we heard later that she had married a black boy.
The Martha Bray River which flowed down to the sea at Falmouth could be navigated by a bamboo raft which was a popular tourist attraction which we hoped to try. However there seemed to be some dispute between the brothers who ran the service and we never managed the trip.
We did a visit to Rose Hall which was a grand old Georgian mansion which had been taken over by the government as a tourist attraction. It had a very romantic history. Lurid tales abounded of the goings on of the various owners who always came to a bad end. It was furnished with genuine Chippendale furniture and Japanese silk wallpaper in one of the rooms.
Another person who called on me was Ray Fremmer, and American journalist who had bought up an old plantation. It was another museum piece which he had partly restored. The imposing Palladian entrance turn out, on examination, to be made of large cast iron rollers which had been made for crushing sugar cane. There were also the large cast iron vats (missionary pots) which had been for reducing the sugar. Also there was a narrow gage steam engine which had been used to transport the cane to the mill. Sadly the tracks no longer existed.
The slave quarters were still standing and were full of rubbish. We wondered around and found a place where slaves were buried and discovered the grave of a Scottish woman slave. After the official abolition of the slave trade, workers were still needed and the old slave traders called in at European ports and persuaded the down-trodden and starving urban poor to seek work in Jamaica where they became de facto slaves because there was no return passage offered.
The last thing we saw before Gladys and Lyn and Bob left for home was a visit to a lady who bred humming birds. She gave us each a small glass file containing syrup which we could hold up and the humming birds would come down and suck at it. Some had very beautiful plumage.
I found that it was possible to hire little sailing boats called "Sunfish" from the hotel. Having demonstrated my proficiency at sailing I was able to hire one when ever I liked. It was idyllic conditions for sailing, a constant breeze combined with hot sunshine and warm water. I used to get out as often as possible but one day I had a rather frightening experience when the squally season started. I was capsized suddenly by a fierce squall. Getting the boat upright again was usually quite easy but unfortunately, the centre board had not been secured properly and it started floating away and I had great difficulty keeping hold of the boat and retrieving the board at the same time. I managed to grab the board but then it was very hard to get it back into position with the sail flapping around wildly. It took what seemed a long time before I got everything under control again and I couldn't just swim home because I was a long way from shore. During the struggle I must have pulled some muscles in my shoulder and this gave me great pain for the next few days and occasionally in bouts months later.
My time in Jamaica was now up and Vicky, who was in Aruba at that time, had wanted me to be with her for the birth of her second child which was due shortly. I took a plane to Aruba.
They had bought a cottage in the local style called a "canuc" and was making it into quite a comfortable home with a nice veranda to sit out on with palm trees and banana plants and tropical flowers. Sam had put underground pipes in the garden to channel the waste water to where the roots were and made paths of crushed coral which made it look very smart.
I went with Vicky to the local hospital. The island was still part of Holland and the standards in Aruba were the same as in Holland and I was most impressed by the facilities. The obstetrician who was in charge of the case was a Colombian and he struck me as being very competent.
While waiting for the happy event, I took up snorkelling again. There was a wreck of a German boat about 500 metres offshore, that had been scuppered during the war and was covered in seaweed and so on, and was a great attraction for the fish. I saw the most amazing variety of fish and other creatures like squid. Sam had brought his "Mirror" dingy with him and we did a lot of sailing together. Sam nearly drowned one day when we capsized and he became tangled with the ropes underwater. He managed to free himself in the nick of time. It gave us both quite a scare.
One evening, Sam took us for a meal at the Bali Indonesian restaurant as a treat but half way through the meal Vicky started having labour pains and we had to leave the meal and rush her to the hospital. When we got there, the pains stopped. Next day, however, she produced a male child of seven pounds, four ounces who was christened Toby a few days later to the accompaniment of champagne and Iced cake provided by Lydia who had just arrived. I flew back to Jamaica to make arrangements for getting home.
Canadian relatives, Chuck and Gladys Bury, who live in Vancouver, did a tour of Europe and stayed with us for about a week. Gladys had some Welsh ancestry and they were keen to see Wales and were thrilled by the castles but were appalled by the low standards of cleanliness. We visited the local archivist and were able to establish that an ancestor of hers was the brother of Thomas Farnel Pritchard who was a famous 19th century architect and who helped design the bridge in the Ironbridge Gorge.
The following year we visited them. This involved a very long flight and we did rather wonder how comfortable this would be. But the Jumbo jets had just come into service. When we got to the boarding place there was a long cue of passengers which was moving very slowly so we decided to go and have a coffee until the others had boarded. We then joined the end of the cue and the lady taking the boarding cards apologised that the tourist class was full and would we mind travelling first class, courtesy of Air Canada, i.e. no extra charge. She told us to turn left as we entered through the curtains.
We were met by a nice girl who gave us glasses of champagne and then conducted us to our seats. She then collected our outer clothing and put it in a wardrobe and came back with slippers for us to wear. The other girl came and asked us if we would care for a preflight drink. After takeoff they announced that they would soon be serving lunch and they asked us to go upstairs into the lounge. When they announced lunch we went down and found tables had been placed in front of the seats and had been set with silverware and cut-glass boozware and a menu as long as your arm and a different wine with each course.
When we had finished the meal and were over Iceland, they suggested we go back to the lounge where they provided us we cushions and blankets to help us rest. Our first landing was at Calgary for a refuelling before crossing the Rockie Mountains. However, the crew failed to get one of the engines to start. The captain spoke over the intercom apologising for the delay and told us that they were arranging to have it started manually. We were very intrigued by this. Being a jet, there was no propeller to swing. We wonder if perhaps they had some large starting crank somewhere? however, they succeeded and we took off over the spectacular scenery of the Rockies. We hoped that the engine would continue more reliably than its starter.
We landed at Vancouver airport on time and Chuck and Gladys were there to meet us. They took us home and provided us with a turkey dinner. But, we had been so well fed on the flight and were so jet-lagged that it was very difficult to show proper appreciation of their efforts. The next few days was spent looking round their locality and the city of Vancouver.
A large modern city crowded with fine high-rise buildings and a large "Chinatown" where we had a delicious meal. We also visited the University of British Columbia and the Museum where we were able to learn of the art and life style of the West coast Indians. The totem poles were fascinating as were the long houses that they lived in during the winter. It would be occupied by several families living together which helped keep them all warm.
We met the other cousins. First we met Bob Redgrave (Auntie Ada's son) who lived in the city and he took us for a fishing expedition and told us that he would see that we each caught a salmon. He took us to a bay where the he kept his boat. Gladys was the first in line for the rod which he baited with mackerel and she caught her salmon within half an hour. It weighed over twelve pounds and after that we each caught one in rapid succession.
Later, we crossed to the Vancouver Island and met up with Morris and Kenneth Bury. With them, we saw a very large aquarium and a dolphinarium and also we visited a forest of Giant sequoia trees which are the tallest trees in the world and the area we visited is called the "Cathedral of Trees."
Victoria, the capital of British Colombia, is on Vancouver Island and we were taken to see it. In front is a large statue of Queen Victoria and several red, double decked London busses which were taking the American tourist on tours. We joined a tour of the building and our guide was a very competent Chinese girl who took us round, showing us the portraits of the royal family and of British statesmen, explaining the history and constitution of England to the Americans. It was a very fine building and a lot of silver and gold objects were displayed, originating from the Klondike gold rush in the previous century.
Chuck took us on a short trip down the east coast into Seattle to show us a bit of America and taste a real American hamburger and root beer. When we came to the boarder, which is marked by the "peace gate", we saw a lot of youngsters demonstrating with placards. They were both Canadian and American and on enquiry we were told that they were demonstrating against the first Polaris Submarine base which was being built just south of the border.
We had arranged to return by Canadian Pacific Railway and Chuck suggested that they take us across the Rockies as far as Calgary in their camper. We set out, pulling the camper behind the car. It was complete with four births, a shower, an electric heater, a cooking stove and not forgetting the kitchen sink.
We went up the Fraser Valley and stopped to admire the spectacular rapids. The route then took us to Kamloops, Revelstoke, Banff and then to Calgary where we boarded the train. The magnificent scenery was quite beyond description - quiet lakes like mirrors - rushing waterfalls and rapids and blue glaciers. We camped each night in camp sites and took about a week to get to Calgary.
We had a rather frightening experience one night where we put the camper in a camp site and then left it while visiting some friends who lived nearby. We noticed a "bear trap" and it contained some bacon and an old shirt and a notice saying that there was a bear in the vicinity that had been causing trouble. When it was trapped it would be transported a long way from here and if it gave trouble after that, it would be shot.
Before leaving the camp site we were listening the local radio which reported that at the camp that we had left the day before, the warden and his girlfriend had accidentally got between a mother bear and her cubs. The mother bear had charged at them and killed the man and the girl was badly injured.
We stayed with the friends rather later than we had intended as we were having a weiner roast (toasting hamburgers on sticks over a log fire) by the lakeside at their house. When we got back to the campsite, it was pitch black and we had to grope our way through the trees to find the camper. We then had to find the latrines, all the time wondering whether the bear was hearing us. There were one or two strange noises in the night and in the morning we saw deep claw marks in some of the trees around us.
In Banff, there is a famous hotel at the foot of a beautiful glacier and lake which is traditionally where newlyweds go for their honeymoons. There is also a mountain called Sulphur Mountain where one can bath in hot, sulphurous water. Very popular with people suffering with various ailments. Also there is a cable car to the top of the mountain from which there are wonderful vistas in every direction. There are numerous mountain goats.
Our next stop was Calgary and we made our way to the stockades where the cattle used to be driven for marketing and the annual rodeo. The rodeo had just ended and we were able to find the stockades by following our noses. Calgary is now a large modern town and centre of the Canadian oil fields. It has a fine University and we were intrigued by some tall Jackometti-style figures in the grounds.
Next day we took the train. It was a couchette carriage in which the seats could be lowered to provide a passable bed. There was a good restaurant and a observation car where one could sit to take in the views.
The first stop was at Medicine Hat which we reached after three days. After that we saw nothing but prairie, mile after mile of wheatfields. We went to sleep in the wheatfields and when we woke in the morning we were still in the wheatfields. It went on like this for about four days.
As we passed from one province to another, the barman was constrained by each new set of local bylaws as to whether you could drink or not. When we got into Ontario the scenery changed to wild woodlands and sparkling lakes which was very beautiful until we reached Sudbury where all the trees and vegetation were dead due to the smelting of the nickel which was mined there. When we reached Ottawa, we stayed with Pete and Row.
Gladys took off to try and find the house where she was born, flying to Halifax and Sidney arriving at Glace Bay in Novascotia. She took a bus ride and found the wooden house which her father had built just as it was except that a porch had been added to it. She took photos of it to show her father in England. He saw the pictures just before he died.
Recently, we did a trip to Novascotia with the Field Studies Council to see the wildlife and hoped to see moose and bear and Wales but unfortunately they did not oblige. However, we followed the Cabo Trail through some wild and spectacular country, staying in huts overnight. Halifax was a very nice town with an interesting museum. Also, we saw the bore in the Bay of Fundy.