Autobiography of a Naturalist and Environmentalist

Autobiography Of

A NATURALIST

AND

ENVIRONMENTALIST

S. K. Eltringham & R. B. Eltringham

AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

Phone: 1-800-839-8640

© 2012 by S. K. Eltringham & R. B. Eltringham. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 03/21/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4678-9470-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4678-9471-5 (ebook)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Introduction

Foreword

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

EPILOGUE

Introduction

This book is an autobiography based on Keith’s memoirs which he wrote shortly before he died in 2006 not for publication but for his descendents who might be interested in how he spent his life. He didn’t think there would be wide interest but this was far from true and in fact he wrote a most interesting story of his life especially in Africa where he lived with his family for several years

Keith was born in 1929 in rural Canada on the prairies of Alberta. He was always passionate about animals and wanted nothing else than a life involving animals and this was something that he achieved. He went to school in Bristol and was educated at Southampton University and Cambridge where he taught for several years. He had a wide knowledge of the animal world and was very knowledgeable about every animal that he met. He acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of the animal world and he wanted nothing more than to learn all he could about animals and to this end as a youngster he established a so called zoo in the garden. Our mother was not too happy when he introduced ants to what he called Ant Island which was an upturned dust bin lid.

After National Service in the Royal Air Force served in Germany he took a BA and PhD in zoology at Southampton University.

In 1957 he was engaged at the Wildfowl Trust with Peter Scott at Slimbridge, Glos as a Pilot Biologist. He became a pioneer of aerial surveys of animal populations laying the foundations for many long term worldwide research studies of conservation importance.

In 1958 he married Sue and they had two daughters, Jane and Louise. From 1962 to 1967 he lectured in zoology at King’s College, London.

A turning point in Keith’s life was his arrival in Uganda in 1967 as Director of the Nuffield Institute of Tropical Animal Ecology, the first wildlife station in Africa. He also featured in zoology at Makerere University, Kampala. In 1976 he became Director Of the Uganda Institute of Ecology and Chief Research Officer of Uganda National Parks. He used his aviation skills to great effect in aerial surveys of large mammals, especially elephants. With his students and visiting colleagues he directed research studies of animals, birds and plants whilst his own interests leaned towards large African mammals, especially elephants and hippos and this was reflected in the books that he wrote such as Life in Mud and Sand in 1971, Elephants in 1982, Resources and Economic Development in 1984 and Hippos in 1999.

By 1972 the Idi Amin regime made life difficult and Keith and his family returned to England and from 1973 until his retirement in 1996 Keith was a lecturer in Applied Biology and Zoology at Cambridge University. He was active in wildlife research, conservation and aerial surveys. These led him to Spain and Peru, as well as repeated visits to Uganda and other parts of Africa for research, conservation work, consultancies and advising universities. His report to the World Conservation Union on the decline in hippo numbers led to protective action being taken in 1995. During the period 1985-89 he was a visiting Lecturer in zoology at Dar es Salaam University, Tanzania. He was a member of many conservation organizations. He particularly enjoyed the Elsa Conservation Trust, arising from Joy Adamson’s work with lions, with his visits to Elsamere in Kenya

Keith was a valued colleague of those with whom he worked, always helpful and reliable. He was good company and was a member of the Bredon dining society and was its President in 1995-1996.

He had a great sense of humour from an early age. Throughout his life the absurd could set him off in uncontrolled laughter. I remember an occasion in church when the rector slipped down the chancel steps as he was leading the choir to their seats. Nothing was said but it was not long before I became aware of Keith struggling to suppress his giggles.

Keith was Secretary of the Emeritus Fellows’ Society in 2000-2001. He taught on the Wolfson Course and Programme for several years.

All these activities ended in 2005, when many months of ill-health led to his death on 19th. January 2006, aged 76.

R. B. Eltringham

S. K. Eltringham Memoirs

June 2002

Foreword

This account of my life is intended for my descendants and other family members of the future with an interest in their ancestry. It is, emphatically, not written for publication. I have always been curious about my own forebears and would love to know how they spent their time and, assuming that my descendants will feel the same about me, I have put together some of my experiences in everyday life. I have enjoyed doing this as apart from giving me something to do in my retirement, it has brought back many happy memories. I have relied mainly on memory for I have not kept a regular diary although I have, since 1973, jotted down daily events when I have been away from home and the entries have helped to jog my memory. I apologize for the poor quality of a few of the photographs, some of which have been downloaded from the Web. There are no photographs from the war period as it was impossible to obtain film in those days. I have not tried to trace my own ancestry here. In any case, I haven’t much direct information for I knew only one of my grandparents as the others died before I was born. A useful source is The Milne Saga written in 1993 by Lucy Milne of Medicine Hat, Alberta. She goes into relationships within the Milne and Eltringham families in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. The lineage of our branch of the Eltringham family was traced back to the 1640s in a report prepared by Debrett’s Peerage Ltd at the request of John Headley, with whom I share a great-grandfather. Most of the men seem to have been coal miners. The Eltringhams probably originated from the hamlet of Eltringham in Northumberland and everyone of that name that I have met has been a Tynesider or descended from one. My father was born near Consett in County Durham. I haven’t much information on my maternal ancestors. I know little more than that my great-grandfather was a police constable, first at Thornbury and then, I believe as a sergeant, at Newport, both in Gloucestershire. My grandmother, Rose Hannah Guy, came from the Stroud region in Gloucestershire. My other grandmother, Margaret Stewart, was a Scot.

S. K. Eltringham

Cambridge, June 2002

Prologue

Keith was always passionate about animals from an early age and wanted nothing more than to spend his life involved with animals in some capacity, preferably one where he could travel the world studying animals and perhaps extending knowledge of the animal kingdom particularly of the largest animals such as elephants and hippos. To this end he wanted to learn as much as he could about the natural world. When asked what he wanted to do when he grew up he would say from an early age that he wanted to be a naturalist. He also had a deep concern for the environment and the welfare of animals without being sentimental when he saw the need for control measures or culling where it was for the benefit of wildlife. His feelings in this respect are thoughtfully spelled out in his book Wildlife Resources and Economic Development written in 1982 and well worth reading.

Keith always took the opportunity to develop his skills if he felt it would be a useful accomplishment, and this was why he joined the Southampton Gliding Club whilst an undergraduate. This ultimately led to his becoming a pilot which was of tremendous help when later he was involved in animal counts and doing animal surveys.

Chapter 1

Early Days

I was born in Canada on 21st June 1929, in a little town called Edgerton in eastern Alberta near the border with Saskatchewan. My mother had moved into a small nursing home in town for the birth and I was delivered by the locally famous midwife, Mrs. Ethel Bullymore, weighing in at a massive 11 pounds. There were five babies born around the same time and I have a photograph, copied below, of us all together in a large bed. Mrs. Bullymore trained as a nurse in England but emigrated to Canada in 1910 and practiced in Edmonton for a number of years before moving to Edgerton, where she delivered around a thousand babies during her time there. It was her proud boast that she never lost a mother or baby and it is fitting that the Ethel Bullymore Memorial Playground was opened in Edgerton in her memory.

First photograph. I am on the far left.

My father, George Alexander Eltringham, was a cereal farmer who had emigrated to Canada just before the first world war when his small store was forced to close. He was born in 1888 in Shotley Bridge, Consett, a steel town in County Durham, and had gone into business with his half-brother James, who, if family history is to be believed, drank most of the profits but a more likely reason for the failure of the business was competition from a Co-operative store, which had opened nearby. He told me once that he was thinking of emigrating to New Zealand but chose Canada instead at the prompting of his cousin, Polly Milne, nee Eltringham, who had emigrated earlier and had finished up in Alberta.

In those days immigration was actively encouraged and anyone setting up as a farmer could buy a quarter, i.e. a quarter of a square mile, 160 acres, for $10, provided that 10 acres were ploughed up and a house of sorts erected within the first year. This was called homesteading. My father knew nothing of farming beforehand but obviously learnt quickly for he was soon able to double the size of his farm by purchasing a further quarter. This was after an initial mistake in selecting the site of the farm, which he must have chosen from the map because of its proximity to town and the presence of abundant water. What he had overlooked soon became apparent after his arrival—that the site was situated on a ridge of sand running across the grasslands and useless for growing crops—but he was able to buy another farm some 8 miles south of town in a district called McCafferty, where we lived.

Life on the Canadian prairies was very different in those days from what it is today. Most people lived in one-storey, wooden cabins with two or three rooms heated by a central, wood-burning stove. There was no electricity, gas or running water. Sanitation was in the form of an outdoor long-drop. The climate, then as now, is harsh with long cold winters, when the temperature can drop as low as minus forty. Summers are short but hot. On the plus side, the countryside is attractive. Many people think of the prairies as being completely flat, and some are, but that is not the case around Edgerton, which is situated in the parkland prairies. These consist of rolling plains dotted with sloughs and groves of aspen. Sloughs are pond or wallows, which usually dry up, at least partially, by the end of summer to be topped up again in the spring with melting snow. They are important breeding sites for wildfowl and the whole region of central Canada is called the Duck Factory by the shooting fraternity in the United States, to which the ducks migrate in the Fall.

My father lived as a bachelor for 15 years or so before he met my mother, who had also emigrated to Canada but for somewhat different reasons. She was born in 1895 as Christine Lilian Rose Brown in Lower Cam near Dursley, Gloucestershire. Unusually for a Victorian family, she was an only child. She left school at 14 to work in the cloth mills in Cam, living at home until her mother died in 1925. She had been very close to her mother and she once told me that their relationship was more like that of sisters than parent and child. My mother was somewhat upset when my grandfather married again within six months. Although in later life, she became very fond of her stepmother, she felt that such a rapid remarriage showed insufficient respect for her mother and I suppose she found it difficult to adjust to her changed circumstances so that the idea of leaving home became attractive.

She chose Canada because she too had relatives there. Her maternal uncle, Fred Guy, had settled in Edgerton and produced three cousins of my mother’s. He had been close to his sister, my grandmother, and the families corresponded regularly. Consequently, when my mother was looking for somewhere to go she wrote to her uncle, who invited her to stay until she found a job, which she soon did with Henry Spencer, the local MP, as a domestic servant. The Spencer household appears to have functioned as a marriage mart for the turnover in domestics was rapid as a consequence of the surplus males in the community exploiting this source of potential brides. In the event my parents were married at Christ Church, Edmonton, in 1926 from the home of her cousin Grace Parker (nee Guy). Their honeymoon was spent in Banff Springs Hotel in the Canadian Rockies. They arrived after dark and as my mother had never previously seen any land higher than the Cotswolds, she had the shock of her life on drawing the curtains in the morning to be faced with mountains thousands of feet in height.

My mother had apparently led a sheltered life as far as housekeeping was concerned, as her mother had insisted on doing all the cooking and cleaning herself, and she had to admit to my father that she could hardly boil a kettle. He seemed not to mind, possibly because his bachelor standards were not high. She must have learnt fast for I remember her as an excellent cook and housekeeper. Families had to be self-contained in those days for there were no shops around the corner and it took a couple of hours by horse-drawn vehicle to reach Edgerton, where there were some stores.

Before he was married my father often used to stay overnight with his cousin Polly after he had hauled a load of grain to the elevators in town. There was a livery barn in Edgerton where horses could be stabled overnight and a hotel of sorts for those with nowhere else to stay. With the coming of the motor car a trip into town and back could be accomplished in the day but this was not always possible in winter, when horse-drawn sledges were used. My mother tried her hand at driving but never mastered the art. As long as the car wheels stayed in the ruts in the road she was all right but once on a level surface, she was as likely to finish up in the ditch as on the road.

The McCafferty farm, like most in the district, grew mainly wheat and other cereals but we kept a cow for the milk supply. In order to keep the milk flowing it was necessary to mate her from time to time and my mother used to make pets of the calves. One such was Jerry, a bull calf, which my father proposed slaughtering to help feed the extra farm-hands that he had to take on at harvest time. My mother pleaded for his life but my father quite reasonably pointed out that he couldn’t accommodate a full-grown bull and that sooner or later, he would have to get rid of it. In the event Jerry went into the pot and, to add insult to injury, my mother was obliged to cook him.

The farm as it was in 1971 (left) and as it is today (right).

The growing season in Alberta is short with only a few months between sowing the seeds and harvesting the crop. Nowadays the farmer uses a combine harvester and has no need of extra staff to do all the stooking and loading of the sheaths. In winter he is as likely to be found in California or Florida as on the farm. This was not the case in the thirties for there were plenty of winter chores for, apart from anything else, the horses had to be looked after throughout the year. In any case, travel was not so easy for there were no commercial airlines and long-distance journeys had to be made by train.

I was christened on the farm as Stewart Keith, by a traveling priest of the Church of Canada, which is part of the Anglican communion, with a pudding basin serving as a font according to my mother. Presumably there were no resident clergy in Edgerton at the time although there was a small church, St Mary’s, which was opened in 1927. Stewart was the name of one of my uncles, who died at the age of 21 long before I was born, but I have always been known as Keith as my mother wanted me to be called that but she thought that the names tripped off the tongue more easily in their present order. My elder brother, Robert Brian, was also named after an uncle and, like me, is called by his second name. He was born on the farm on September 7th 1927 and my parents took him on a visit to England the following year to show him off to the relations. This involved several days on the train to the east coast and a week’s voyage across the Atlantic. My mother was always a rotten sailor and after her first experience of seasickness, she would distinguish herself by being sick while the ship was still tied up to the dock. Consequently we children were left in the tender care of our father, who was immune to seasickness, but he had not mastered the technique of removing our shirts before washing us, so that after a week, it is said that we sported distinct tide marks around the neck.

The year of my birth, 1929, is famous for the Wall Street Crash and the beginning of the great depression which blighted the 1930s. The effects were felt on the prairies and one by one the banks foreclosed on the farmers, who were force to sell up and seek their livelihoods elsewhere. Our situation was complicated by the deteriorating health of my father, who, although he did not realize it, was showing the first stages of tuberculosis. The situation was reached when the cost of the seed corn exceeded the value of the subsequent crop and farming became economically impossible. Clearly a change was needed and my parents decided to sell up and return to England. Although the household goods and farm equipment were auctioned, it proved impossible to sell the farm, which remained in our possession until after World War II.

On arriving in England my parents bought a new semi-detached house on the outskirts of Bristol, about 20 miles from Cam, where my grandfather still lived. The postal district was Westbury-on-Trym, which is an old village that has been swallowed up by the spread of Bristol. Our house, 8 Farington Road, was some two miles away from Westbury and we were really part of Henleaze. The garden had recently been a field and many species of meadow flowers were to be found. It was quite long but narrow and was divided by a cultivated blackberry hedge into flower beds with a lawn and a vegetable patch. The latter served us well during the war, when food was rationed.

Our Bristol house soon after our arrival.

Within a year or two my father’s health worsened and he had to spend some time in a sanatorium in Wiltshire where the regime of nourishing food and fresh air was the accepted treatment for consumption. Part of the cure consisted of sucking ice cubes and after some time bothering the local pub for supplies, he invested in a refrigerator, one of the first in the district. In the event he recovered although his decision to give up smoking probably played an important role in the cure. Unfortunately, his heart was affected, preventing him from working, and we had to live on his investments, which left us, if not in genteel poverty, at least with the need to be careful with pennies.

Chapter 2

Bristol before the war

I was sent to school at Horfield Church Junior School, which was situated on the edge of Horfield Common about fifteen minutes walk from home. The school was a sturdy, stone-built edifice that was still standing and in use as a youth club when I last visited Bristol. The school itself has moved about half a mile to a new concrete and glass building that stands on what were the fields of Manor Farm when I was a child. The whole farm is now built over and the farm house is no more but it provided a rural playground for me and other children. There was a stream and several ponds in the meadows where one could catch frogs and newts as well as sticklebacks and minnows. Trees that could be climbed were plentiful.

Class at Horfield Church Junior School, Bristol.

I am in the back row, fourth from left.

There were two other small farms nearby; one of which was a dairy farm that supplied us with milk. Their days were numbered, however, for the whole area was scheduled for housing, of which our house was a part, but the onset of World War II halted the development as no building was allowed in wartime, and the fields remained accessible to us well into my teens. Some houses were half-built when hostilities started and remained so until after the war. Although strictly off-limits, they provided us with a magical playground.

In the opposite direction, towards the village of Westbury-on-Trym, there was a medium-sized wood with a stream running through it. It later became a small nature reserve but it was always open to the public and I spent many happy hours there, first in imagined adventures as Robin Hood and the like, but later, when I took a serious interest in nature, in identifying the many flowers and birds. I still have vivid memories of the smell of wild garlic and of the songs of birds.

Our local wildlife probably instilled in me my life-long love of animals and my stock reply to the question of what-are-you-going-to-be-when-you-grow-up was a naturalist (later modified to a vet). My biggest treat was the annual visit to Bristol Zoo, which included a ride on the elephant, and it was there that I received my early education in animal taxonomy for I was an assiduous reader of the labels on the cages. The place of origin of the exhibits was usually given and I was always thrilled by Equatorial Africa, which conjured up romantic visions of a faraway wilderness inaccessible to me, little realizing that I would spend a considerable part of my life there.

I was stimulated to establish a zoo of my own in a corner of the garden complete with fence and wooden turnstile. It was stocked with my collections from the ponds supplemented by various invertebrate life culled from the garden and such pets as mice, guinea-pigs and rabbits. For a time I exhibited a tortoise until it failed one year to wake up from its winter’s sleep. Later on a very reluctant cat allowed himself to join the stock temporarily. One of the exhibits of which I was particularly proud was Ant Island, which consisted of a large earth-filled flower pot stuck in an upturned dustbin lid filled with water. What I overlooked was the need to include a queen in the batch of captured ants so that a regular restocking was required. In those pre-pesticide days, the number and variety of insects and spiders available allowed me to display an impressive number of species in the Invertebrate House. I took the venture very seriously and wrote a guidebook. I even devised a keeper’s uniform from sundry pieces of cardboard and established an entrance fee, which was never paid by any of my visitors.

Apart from my zoo, my interest in animals extended to the breeding of tame mice of many colors. I used to treat the matter professionally and kept stud books of the various blood lines. I can’t remember how many I finished up with but the accumulation of cages soon outgrew the indoor accommodation and I took over the whole of the outside lavatory with cages perilously piled on top of one another. Occasionally, a mouse escaped but it was usually soon recaptured. One remained at liberty for several months and even reared a litter in the wild but she never left the lavatory and eventually was recovered. Another came to a sad end when it fell into the bowl and was not discovered until the origin of the unpleasant smell dawned on me one day. The enterprise paid for itself for I was able to sell the young mice for about sixpence each at a pet shop in town.

Other pets included rabbits and guinea pigs, which also bred although not on the scale of the mice. The tortoise, mentioned above, was acquired from my grandmother’s sister in Cheltenham and it survived for several years despite once being close to decapitation by the lawn mower while feeding in long grass. A last-minute hiss saved its life. The rabbits, Spot and Trixie, were the first pets I had although I had to share them with my brother. They lived in a hutch but were put out to graze underneath an old table, their escape being prevented by a roll of wire netting around the table legs. They did not do much except eat and my main memory of them is of their panicked reaction to my sudden appearance round a corner dragging a branch of a tree, for some now forgotten reason. They appeared to leap from side to side of their enclosure without once touching the ground.

The cat was a present on my birthday, my fourteenth I believe. It was a sandy colored neutered torn called Timmy after a Soviet hero, Marshall Timoshenko, who raised the siege of Stalingrad in the days when Uncle Joe Stalin was our ally. Timmy arrived as a very young kitten but soon developed cat ‘flu and would have died but for the devoted care lavished on him by my mother. He made a good recovery but was left with a permanent inability to purr properly. When he tried to purr, the resulting snorts resembled a decrepit engine operating on one cylinder. Later on he developed fits, which led to him being put down in 1953.

I also became involved with silkworms, which I kept going for several years and through many generations. They lived in cardboard shoe boxes and were fed on lettuce rather than the preferred mulberry leaves. I was told that lettuce-fed silkworms do not produce proper silk so I never tried to unravel the chrysalis and all my pupae were allowed to emerge as moths. There was a mulberry tree in Horfield Rectory and I am sure that I could have had some of the leaves but I was too shy to ask.

My pet cat Timmy

One cannot leave pets without mentioning the budgerigar called Mickey. He was an unnatural blue color and lived in a brass cage from which he was released from time to time for a fly around the room. He often finished up on the floor in an exhausted state, presumably from being out of condition. He arrived as a Christmas present but we were lucky to get it as apparently he escaped on Christmas Eve and nearly flew up the chimney. The cat tried to catch him once by leaping at the cage but only succeeded in dislodging the water container, which gave him such a fright that he treated the cage with great respect afterwards. My mother was convinced that she could teach the bird to speak and spent many fruitless hours patiently repeating the same phrases over and over again. He never learned to talk.

My school days before the war were generally happy but for the annual autumnal torture when my mother insisted that we had to change to woolen vests and underpants for the winter. The itchy discomfort lasted for only a short period until the skin got used to wool but the misery of those few days still remains in my memory. I vowed never to inflict such an ordeal on my own children.

I don’t remember much detail of pre-war life but some memories stand out. One was my puzzlement when my pugilistically inclined companions were discussing the fights of the famed Joe Louis for I could not understand how boxers could be cut if they weren’t fighting with knives. One incident that I remember vividly was when I myself was genuinely cut as a result of being driven by my brother into a glass cloche. I was a horse and Brian was driving me with string reins attached to my arms. A tug on the right turned me in that direction, smack into a pane of glass. I was only six so my mother and a neighbor were able to carry me to a local doctor who inserted four stitches. I have the scar to this day but my immediate concern was the embarrassment caused by being confined for several days to a pushchair at such an advanced age.

I was further injured some time later when a friend trod on my finger with his hobnailed boots (I was not lying on the floor—he was standing on a fence). This entailed a further visit to the doctor, who decided that my crushed digit would recover on its own. An accident which did not require medical attention but which was very painful, occurred when I ran full tilt into the end of some railings and was completed winded. Apart form these accidents, some scraped knees and the usual childish illnesses, I was generally very healthy. In those pre-antibiotic days one expected to catch most infectious diseases but mine were usually milder than most because the germs had been cycled through my brother, who always caught things first.

Some memories remain of events in the outside world. I recall the abdication crisis when I thought there was going to be a civil war and I was very anxious that my father should fight on the King’s side. Happily it didn’t come to that and we were honored by a visit to Bristol of the new King and Queen, whom we watched from the playground of our school as they passed down the road. I also remember well the death of Pope Pius XI in the spring of 1939. We were told that mourners were kissing his feet as he lay in state, which caused one of our neighbors to remark that she wouldn’t kiss the feet of her living husband let alone those of a dead pope. Another memory is of a Zeppelin airship that passed over our house. It was probably the ill-fated Hindenburg, which Hitler was exploiting as a measure of German superior technology.

School Photograph of me

probably taken in 1936

The main happening in the big wide world, of course, was the rise of Adolph Hitler, which we watched with foreboding. I was of the opinion that he was just a puppet and that the real villains were his henchmen, such as Goebbels, Himmler and Goering. The newspapers were full of comforting news of the meeting of our prime minister with the Nazis at Munich and we all thought we were safe. Nevertheless, there were preparations for war and one night we were treated to a demonstration of anti-aircraft action on Horfield Common. An aeroplane was overhead and was to be picked out by searchlights and fired upon by an anti-aircraft gun. Unfortunately the searchlights failed to find the aircraft until it assisted them by turning on its navigation lights and I was disappointed to find that the gun was being loaded and unloaded with dummy shells so that the only reaction to the order Fire was a click and not a loud explosion.

The school had a paved playground, which presumably was not deemed big enough by the authorities for the school was later transferred to a Greenfield site. The playground was in fact quite big but as it was also the only way for entering the church, it may have been considered insecure for children. The church was high, with vestments and incense, and I don’t think that my mother, with her nonconformist upbringing, altogether approved. It was also an old church and I loved its dark nooks and fragrant smells. The school occasionally arranged special services and I made a brief appearance as a choir boy. I also made it to the school choir despite an inability to sing in tune. We did not have a school uniform although there was a school tie, which we were not obliged to wear. We had distinctive red caps, which were once the objects of ridicule to the local kids when my brother and I were on holiday with our grandparents in Cam. Then, as now, it did not pay to stand out from the herd.

Brian and me with tricycle and pedal car, Bristol.

One of my friends was the son of the verger, who lived next to the church. His garden had a bank of rhubarb and we used to steal the stems and suck them. I can recommend them as an excellent thirst quencher. Another memory is of a prize-giving in the church hall when I was due to receive one of my rare prizes. It had been mislaid and I was obliged to sit self-consciously on the Rector’s knee onstage while it was found. The church hall was by the side of the school playing field, where we had our annual sports day and where we played unofficial games of cricket in the evenings. We spent most of the long summer evenings playing outdoors and wandering in the woods around Henleaze Lake.

In those days children were much less watched over than they are today but I am not sure that the present generation are at any greater risk than we were. I remember wandering off with my brother and his friends on my tricycle one day and finishing up on a busy road in the centre of the city. My mother was not too pleased when she heard about it but it was my brother who got the blame for leading me astray.

I had many adventures on my tricycle including hurtling downhill towards a T-junction and finding that my primitive braking system made only a marginal difference to my speed. Fortunately there was nothing coming and I managed a skidding left-hand turn without capsizing. I was less fortunate on another occasion and my adventures on the tricycle ended when I failed to negotiate a turn and hit the curb. I went flying over the handlebars, bending the front wheel beyond repair. An older boy, observing the accident, offered to straighten it out with a brick but I turned down the offer.

My other means of transport in the early days was a pedal car but I had no untoward experiences with it. After the demise of my tricycle, I graduated to a bicycle, which was given to me by my grandfather. My father taught me to ride it and I managed to stay on it thereafter except for one occasion when I discovered that attempting to turn right by grasping the right handle bar grip with the left hand results in one being deposited on the road. This happened when I was at secondary school and old enough to know better. I was more embarrassed than hurt but the driver of an oncoming bus looked as if he was about to have a heart attack. That bicycle survived for many years and I was still using it at University but when I left, it was not worth taking away so I gave it to a fellow student who, on reflection, decided that it was beyond restoration and consigned it to a hole in the ground where the foundations of a new engineering block were being constructed.

Although not strictly a form of transport, roller-skating featured amongst my pastimes. The skates were noisy, quite unlike the modern roller-blades, and were strapped on to one’s ordinary shoes. The tarmac roads were usually too rough for the small wheels and the best surface was the concrete flag stones of the footpaths. I got quite adept at jumping over suspect-looking surfaces although I had my fair share of spills.

Annual visits to the Pantomime were a feature of childhood. We watched them in the Bristol Hippodrome, a large theatre in the centre of town. The productions were lavish and were characterized by gorgeous backdrops, some of which changed before your eyes in the so-called transformation scenes. To a small boy, they seemed little short of miraculous.

The equivalent treat in the summer was a trip to the Bertram Mills Circus, which was always held on Horfield Common. There was a whole range of acts including acrobats and animal shows. I particularly liked the lions and tigers and enjoyed looking round the menagerie tents afterwards. Little attention was paid to animal welfare in those days and I can see now that many of the animals were being kept in unsuitable conditions.

My grandparents used to visit us for lunch from time to time, usually on a Sunday and always unannounced for few people had telephones in those days. They lived in Upper Cam, near Dursley in Gloucestershire, some 22 miles north of Bristol and close to my mother’s birthplace It was always a pleasure to see their little car arrive for it meant being excused from Sunday School, if nothing else.

Often there was something else for we might go for a ride in the car and finish up at an Italian ice cream shop in town. My grandfather always ordered tubs without lids on the principle that more room was thereby left for the ice cream. Alternatively, we might visit the docks at Avonmouth and board the ships for a look around. Surprisingly, no one on the ships or at the dock gates seemed to worry about the invasion. Nowadays, I suspect, there would be far more stringent security. Avonmouth was then a busy port with many passenger ships as well as freighters operating from it. Prominent among them were the refrigerated Fyffe’s banana ships plying between England and the West Indies.

Holidays

Holidays in Upper Cam

Holidays before the war consisted of a fortnight each summer at Weston-super-Mare on the Bristol Channel, some twenty miles south-west of Bristol, and a week at Whitsuntide at my grandparents’ home in Upper Cam. My grandfather then lived in an old cottage by a dip in the road called Teetotal Valley, presumably because it was once occupied by an abstainer. The building rambled rather and comprised three homes under one roof. The ground floor of ours consisted of a scullery, which was the general living room and two front rooms, one with a front door that was never opened. There was a steep flight of stairs between two walls leading to a landing bedroom and two other bedrooms each opening into the other. There was no bathroom and the only lavatory was outside but it did at least flush. Close by was a two-storey timber building which was used as an annex as it had a bath and kitchen area. Upstairs was a bit of a junk room, as far as I remember, with a door that opened onto space so it was always kept locked.

Water was obtained from a well with a hand pump just outside the back door. There were several outbuildings, one used as a garage, which were great fun to explore. The barn contained old agricultural machinery which would be highly desirable these days as museum specimens although I imagine they have long since crumbled into dust as they were riddled with woodworm. When I last visited Cam I was saddened to find that the complex was no more and that the old house had been replaced by a cul de sac of modern houses which would not be out of place in the suburbs of a town.

There was an orchard next to the house, also owned by my grandfather. About an acre in extent, it had a stream (the River Cam) running along the bottom of the field and a smaller tributary, known locally as the delken, flowing down the side. A branch railway ran parallel with the river. Known as the Dursley Donkey, the locomotive travelled between Dursley and Coaley Junction several times a day, transporting machinery from the Lister works to the mainline. There was also the occasional passenger train on which we were once treated to a ride. There was only one station, Lower Cam, en route. Sadly, the railway is no more being one of the victims of the Beeching axe.

The Haven, Upper Cam. Grandparents on left, Mother on right. Aggie Hill, Granny’s sister, on left with her husband and son, Percy, at the back. Brian and I and the Hill children are in the centre.

My grandfather moved house in 1937 or thereabouts, when he built a bungalow, called The Haven, in the top of the orchard. Unlike the Teetotal Valley cottage it had all mod cons and was much more convenient but it lacked the charm of the old house. Although a bungalow, it had a bedroom in the roof space, where my brother and I slept. It was accessed by means of a step-ladder that one pulled out from a cupboard underneath a ceiling trap door.

The river was badly polluted with industrial waste from the Lister engineering works in Dursley and by the Cam cloth mills downstream. Water pollution was not an issue in those days and rivers were used as convenient sewers. My grandmother treated it as such and always tipped any kitchen scraps that the hens wouldn’t eat into the brook. The delken, on the other hand, was unpolluted with crystal clear water supporting frogs and many aquatic insects. My greatest pleasure was to play in the field, watching the neighboring cattle, chasing the hens and making ponds by damming the stream. Once I lost a shoe to the brook when leaping about in ecstasy on first arrival. There were always odd jobs for my grandfather to do and I was anxious to help or at least to observe. He was one of the few people I have met who knew how to use a scythe properly and he regularly scythed the grass in the orchard. He taught me a few lines of doggerel to be recited in rhythm with the strokes of the whetstone when sharpening the scythe. It went:

Oh whet, oh whet, the scythe won’t cut

The mower is too lazy

A pint of beer would make him drunk

A quart would make him crazy.

This seems a sad reflection on the drinking capacity of Gloucestershire mowers.

Even when we were more of a hindrance than a help, I believe Granddad did more than just endure our presence for I think he was secretly proud of his grandsons. My mother said that he was far more tolerant of us than he ever was of her.

My mother too was anxious to show off her sons to her childhood friends and we were occasionally dragged away to spruce up and go visiting our many honorary aunts. There was one I was not too reluctant to visit as she always produced chocolate for us in quantities we never had at home. Other outings included shopping trips to Dursley, where we were sometimes treated to a visit to the ice-cream parlor, and walks up Cam Peak, which resembles a miniature volcano in shape.

My grandfather owned a car, an Austin Ten, and no holiday in Cam went by without our visiting his two sisters, great-aunts Rose and Lilian, in Gloucester, and his brother Frank, who lived in an isolated cottage near Longhope, on the edge of the Forest of Dean. One had to park the car and walk across two fields and an orchard to reach Uncle Frank’s house. There were no services and water had to be fetched from a well across a field. The smell of paraffin, which was used for lighting and cooking, was the dominant feature of the house.

Uncle Frank was very jolly and, unlike my grandfather, who was short and thin, he was one of the fattest men I have known. He was a fund of funny stories and although born and bred in Gloucestershire, he had acquired a Lancashire accent, and a Lancashire wife, from a long period of employment in that county. He served in the first World War although he was too old to be conscripted and had to lie about his age to be accepted. He joined the Royal Flying Corps as an observer and was nearly drowned when his aircraft ditched in the Channel. He caught a severe chill as a consequence and was laid up in bed for several days, which was just as well as his pilot, a younger and fitter man, went straight back into battle and was killed on his next sortie.

Uncle Frank, sitting on left with Aunt Rachel behind him. Father in deckchair on right in front of standing Grandparents. Brian and I are in the front. Taken on holiday at Weston-super-Mare.

Uncle Frank had no teeth but that did not stop him from coping with the toughest meat. Nevertheless, when he joined up he was told that he would have to be fitted with false teeth despite his assurance that he did not intend to bite the enemy. Officialdom prevailed and he was issued with a set, which he never wore although while on duty he carried them around in his pocket handkerchief. He was an innovator and was active in the early days of the Labour Party. His hobby was fiddling with various gadgets including cat whisker radios and he was always the first in the district to try out anything new, such as motor-bikes. His only failing, in my opinion, was his habit of giving us vast quantities of plums from the orchard. Once we had so many that my mother seemed to spend days turning them into jam. Plum jam has been low on my list of delicacies ever since.

Aunts Rose and Lily were quite different from each other. Aunt Rose was austere and down to earth while Aunt Lily had some pretensions to gentility. She had certainly married a wealthier man and lived in a large detached house in the leafier suburbs of Gloucester whereas Aunt Rose occupied a terraced house by the railway. Aunt Lily was the more nomadic and apart from moving several times in Gloucester finished up in Somerset near Weston-super-Mare. Her peripatetic lifestyle was inherited by her daughter, Gwen, who never stayed more than a few years in any house, including one opposite to my mother’s in the 1950s. Aunt Lil’s husband, Li Baker, was a successful business man who came originally from Stone in Gloucestershire. He was very religious in an evangelical way, and always opened a mission chapel near his new home if one did not already exist. I never found out what the Li was short for but suspect it was a biblical name.

Albert Reed, Aunt Rose’s husband, was a craftsman who worked in wood. He came from Falmouth. He had a workshop in the garden and he used to show us how to carve chair legs from blocks of wood. He once made me a model sailing boat with a pine hull, an oak deck and ash mast, which I kept for over thirty years but it got lost when I left it behind on moving to Africa the late 1960S.

Uncle Frank had no children but the two great-aunts had two each. Aunt Lil had a pair of daughters, Flossie and Gwen, but Flossie died in the early l940s. Neither of them married although Gwen lived to her seventies and had several boy friends. Aunt Rose’s daughter, Edith, also never married although her brother did and had two sons, whom I once met when they were late teenagers. My mother was an only child so with such a low fecundity, these four Victorian siblings were not typical of their age in leaving only four grandchildren between them.

My parents, grandparents and brother in garden at Bristol

My grandfather had been a baker’s roundsman in his youth but he had given up the job before I knew him and had become a small-holder. He used to buy piglets and weaned calves and rear them to slaughter size. He did not have enough land for this and was obliged to rent fields. He invested his savings in property and, I believe, made some profitable deals. By the time I knew him, he had given up his stock rearing and his only paid employment was a part-time post as a county court bailiff. His job was to deliver court summonses and eviction orders on transgressing citizens, which he did by car. He was always happy for us to accompany him on his rounds and I got to know the geography of mid-Gloucestershire very well.

Granddad enjoyed his official status for he had always wanted to be a policeman, like his father, but unfortunately he was too short. To his great delight, however, he was accepted as a special constable during the Second World War, when he was in his seventies. He was 44 when the first World War began but as the war progressed, older men became caught up in the conscription net. He was rejected for military service because of a slight limp resulting from a broken leg when young. I think he exaggerated the limp for the benefit of the medical examiners for nobody was keen to be slaughtered on the Western Front.

My step-grandmother was a cousin of my grandfather’s so was a blood relation, if somewhat distant. I used to think of her as being very young and active and she did indeed often play vigorous ball games with us on the nearby Cam Green. She would never divulge her age but she was over eighty when she died in 1966 so she must have been in her youthful fifties when we first knew her. Her only ailment was what she called the screws, which I assume was rheumatism as they seemed to coincide with rainy weather. After my grandfather’s death in 1952, she went to live with her widowed sister, Aggie, in Cheltenham, where I often used to visit her when in later life I worked at Slimbridge. She lived to have four great-granddaughters and I was pleased to be able to introduce her to our first-born, who I think was the only great-grandchild she actually met. She was a kind, gentle person and I was very fond of her.

Holidays in Weston-super-Mare

Holidays in Weston were very different from those at Cam. They took place in August every year and took up half of our month’s school holidays. As we had no car, we always travelled with a neighbour, a chauffeur, whom I suspect was moonlighting with his employer’s car. We stayed in lodgings, which were somewhere between a bed & breakfast and a self-catering establishment in that the guest was responsible for buying the provisions but the landlady cooked and served the food. This involved my mother making a morning round of the shops every few days accompanied by her impatient children, eager to get to the beach. We usually stayed at the same place for several years at a time. One was next to a church on the sea front and run by a Mrs. Weymouth, who suffered from attacks of vertigo, during which she could operate only by walking about with her eyes shut. Surprisingly, she never harmed herself.

Weston is situated sufficiently far down from, the mouth of the Severn Estuary to count as fully marine. The coastline of northern Somerset is sandy, grading down the shore into thick mud, vast areas of which become visible when the tide is out and the tide goes out a very long way for the tidal range in the estuary is the second highest in the world. When the tide is in, the beaches are among the best in the country. The town itself is attractive with winter gardens, a floral clock and a wide promenade running the length of the resort. In those days few people went abroad and holidays in Britain were the rule. Consequently seaside towns catered for all tastes and Weston was quite up-market in many ways.

Paddling in front of the Grand Pier at Weston

A typical day of our holiday involved establishing a camp of deck-chairs with my mother as guardian while we boys wandered off to make sand castles with our buckets and spades or go bathing, which involved wading out to sea while the cold water mark crept agonizingly up one’s body. Sometimes we would sail toy boats in an enclosed pond built below high tide mark so that it was flushed out twice a day. My ambition, never realized, was to own one of the large model motor boats that some other children had. My last hopes were dashed when I learnt that Father Christmas didn’t really exist and I realized that it was highly unlikely that my parents, as substitutes, would buy me the coveted model steamer displayed in one of the more expensive toy shops. Alternative attractions included Punch and Judy shows and donkey rides, which were strictly rationed because of their cost. We also possessed a huge box kite which in a stiff breeze could rise to impressive heights.

My father sometimes accompanied us and sometimes wandered off on his own leaving my mother to guard our belongings. In warm weather she rather enjoyed sitting down doing nothing but observe the passers-by but when it was cloudy with a stiff breeze blowing, she would wonder in what sense being nearly frozen to death qualified as being on holiday.

When not playing on the sands, we would take the bus to Anchor Head, which was at the eastern end of town with a rocky shore backed by hotels. Its main attraction was the rock pools, where one could catch crabs and even net small fish. There were also typical shore animals such as barnacles and limpets, which I was surprised to discover were alive. I think that my interest in marine biology stemmed from those days. The steepness of the beach meant that there was always some accessible sea even when the tide was low. A special treat was to take a ride in a motor boat, which could operate under all tidal conditions. Usually it was just a short trip across the bay but once we went as far as Steep Holme, a hump-backed island, now a nature reserve, between Weston and Cardiff. During the war, when fuel was unavailable, the boat trips were made under sail. An afternoon at Anchor Head was never complete without taking tea on the rocks. This involved carrying a tray from a nearby cafe but by the time it arrived, the tea was at best lukewarm and often spilt.

Walking along the Promenade at Weston

Nearby is a pier, known as the Old Pier to distinguish it from the newer Grand Pier, near the centre of town. The Old Pier serves a practical function as it links the mainland to a small island at which the Campbell paddle steamers used to dock. These ships plied between Bristol, Weston and Cardiff calling at Clevedon on the way. Some went as far as Ilfracombe in Devon from where one could take trips to Lundy Island. My mother would never venture on one if there was the slightest hint of white horses (breaking waves) out at sea. There is also a lifeboat station at the end of the Old Pier, which was open to visitors when there were no emergencies. The Grand Pier, on the other hand, was given over to pleasure with stalls along its length serving ice creams, toffee apples and candy floss amongst other delicacies. There was a funfair at the end with a switchback railway, water dodgems, magic mirrors and a theatre. Dotted around were numerous slot machines with working models or flickering cards showing what the butler saw. Others had little cranes which never picked up any prizes or, if they did, dropped them before reaching the delivery chute. At the far