Africa in 1951-2

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Tonbridge to the Americas in 1946

Africa in 1951-2

Africa 1959

Liverpool and Germany in the 60's

Africa 1951

I had to make a sudden journey to South Africa to examine a small plastics factory that was in financial trouble and my company wanted to buy and eventually did. The only flight I could get was on board a new Comet that South African Airways had just taken delivery of and were flying out on an unscheduled flight by a South African crew. Apart from the crew and one stewardess, there were only two passengers besides myself and a poor devil with a terrible skin complaint, who had been over in the U.K. for treatment. Some seats had been taken out and he was lying on a mattress and was accompanied by a nurse and a relation. The trip was uneventful and very informal; we even played gin rummy with the captain for a spell.

We landed at Khartoum about midnight and I remember as we got out of the plane to stretch our legs, how the heat came up from the tarmac and hit us under the jaw. We took off again after refuelling and settled down for the night run to Entebbe. The poor patient had been baked lying on his mattress whilst we were in Khartoum and was suffering agony. The nurse therefore started dabbing his skin with cotton wool soaked in ether to cool it off. The cabin soon reeked of ether and the smell stopped us dozing off. Across the aisle one of the other two passengers was similarly affected like myself and decided to have a cigarette, taking one out of his case and a lighter out of his pocket. I threw myself across the aisle and knocked the lighter out of his hand before he could spark it. Ether, like many other organic solvents, forms explosive mixtures with air over wide ranges of concentration. If the mixture was inside the explosive limits and he had sparked the lighter, our Comet would have blown to smithereens in the air and nobody would have known why.

KENYA 1952

On the evening of our first day in Nairobi, my wife and I decided to visit the Nairobi Game Park in a car we had hired. I had been to Africa before but it was her first visit and after reading that the night before lions from the Game Park had raided the city's abbatoir, she was naturally a little nervous. We paid our entrance fee, examined a variety of dung heaps to enable us to determine what game had passed along a track before us and drove on, suitably impressed with the displayed warnings not to leave one's car, which was surmounted by crossed elephant thigh bones and skulls. After driving for about two miles and not seeing any game at all, we came to a rise, which led down a steep slope and up steeply to the same height the other side. The view from the first rise was superb, so I fished out the cine-camera, From the window of the car my view was impeded by a single stalked flower only about three feet away. I wanted a clear field, so I opened the door to lean round the flower, so to speak. My wife went off the deep-end, but I still took the shot as I wanted to, closed the car door and put the camera back in its case as we were still bickering about my crass foolhardiness. I started the engine and looked ahead and we both started roaring with laughter. Down the hill from the further rise was flying a bicycle with a black boy riding it, gripping the handle bars with his toes.

It was only about three weeks later when driving through the bush my wife shouted, "Stop - Pyjama Lily.' She is an ardent botanist and this was a very beautiful and rare plant, even I admit that. She found the camera for me and told me to get a shot of it, fifteen foot away and in an embrasure of bushes. I protested that there might be lions in them there bushes, to which she replied, "??. the ?? lions. Get that lily." How women can change!!!