My life story
(for those who might be interested)
by Richard Ashton
Northern Ireland
My father was John Forbes Ashton, born 2nd October 1898, the only son of Henry Gordon Gooch Ashton (a master mariner who was working in the British navy's Hydrographic department, mapping the southern English coast. Father had a younger sister, Queenie, who died while father was very young. My grandmother also died while father was young, and some years later my grandfather remarried.
My mother was Hermione Mostyn Herbert-Smith, middle (of three) daughters of Charles Herbert Smith, a Yorkshire solicitor's son, who hyphenated his name when he was called to the bar (became a barrister) because of the potential confusion in identifying himself under the frequently used name of Smith. Later he "took silk" - became a Queen's Counsel - and then a judge.
No, we weren't in Ireland during the last couple of decades; the 1st batallion of my father's regiment was based at Hollywood Barracks there between 1934 and 1936. Father had been attending a course at the British army's Staff College at Aldershot in southern England, and on completion took my mother with him to Belfast, she being "great with child" as the scripture says!
- The Border Regiment
http://www2.prestel.co.uk/stewart/ccborder.htm
http://www.regiments.org/milhist/uk/inf/034Bordr.htm
The Museum of the Border Regiment
http://www.visitcumbria.com/car/carbmus.htm
http://www.museums.simonides.org/gb/borderregmus.html
Father and mother crossed on the Irish Mail (ferry) steamer from Liverpool, and in due course of time, I arrived on 15th January of 1935, at about 1.30 in the afternoon, just too late for lunch!
In a typically British way, I was brought up as Church of England, although I was totally unaware until adulthood that there were other churches apart from the Roman Catholics, which of course "weren't really nice" because the English establishment were all (nominally) part of the denomination officially founded by King Henry VIII.
Aden
Father commanded (he was officially the Adjutant of) the Aden Protectorate Levies from 1936 to 1941. His British chain of command went via the Station Commander of the RAF base at Khormaksar who was in theory the Commanding Officer of the Levies. The R.A.F. had a handful of very ancient fighter aircraft, though it is uncertain what they were supposed to defend, and from whom!
In some ways the chain of command was like that of my uncle Orme with the Arab Legion's 3rd Brigade at Ramullah - Orme being responsible to Glubb Pasha, both being British, except that Glubb was responsible to King Abdulla bin Hussein. I understand that father was also directly responsible to Sheikh Othman (with whom he communicated regularly) for the Levies.
We actually lived just outside of the village of Sheikh Othman (named after its "owner"), some ten or so miles out from Aden on the road towards Lahedj. Aden has its intriguing "Crater Town" which is constructed in an extinct volcano crater!
The community of Sheikh Othman was bustling, built around a natural oasis, with fresh water running in a fertile irrigated spot totally surrounded by desert. Mother's chief servant Ali used to head off to the market (Sukh) at Sheikh Othman at about six every morning. Probably the time father went to work. Afternoons were unbearably hot so nobody did anything... father's work resumed about 5pm for several hours, if there was no entertaining - and entertaining was always alcohol free except for Europeans. Frequent guests were the local sheikh I believe, and other local businessmen.
The roof of the house was great for summer sleeping (inside mosquito nets, of course). From memory the ceiling height of the rooms inside the house were about ten feet, with electric and mechanical fans. We had no "punkah wallahs" in our employ!
The sheikh was a subordinate ruler to the Sultan (perhaps Emir) of Lahej, who owned a rest house at Dhala in the mountains a long way to the north, which we visited several times during our stay.
As dad was therefore the senior officer of the Levies, he and mother were kept very busy with "official functions" as well as his military duties, and hence a substantial amount of my upbringing had to be performed with the help of an Arab Ayah (a woman servant hired for the job) assisted by Ali, the senior Arab member of the house staff. Alas I don't remember very much of that period.
I recently came across a web page written by a British pharmacist (chemist) who had served his military period of "National Service" at Aden in the 1950's, with a life-style similar in many respects to that of my family in the late 30's/early 40's. This page can be found at http://www.pharmj.com/Editorial/19991218/articles/aden.html
This brought back memories long dormant... for example the two-story plus roof walled house with massive front gates, and palm trees around the front, and huge back yard (also walled), all standing in isolation in the desert. This was provided by Sheikh Othman to Ashton Sahib and Memsahib because father ran what was effectively Sheikh Othman's private army.
Searching the internet for "Aden Protectorate Levies", I discovered this link which refers to a slightly different period. There is also a link which shows a large number of British 'minor' overseas military presences here.
Outbreak of War
Italy, who had colonised what is now known as Somalia, then called 'Somaliland', entered the war on the opposite side to the British, and apart from a couple of high level air raids across the straits from Djibouti - raids which didn't acchieve anything very much - on the whole we were unaware of the war. I do vaguely remember being taken up on to the flat roof of our house and seeing 'the pretty lights' of bombs falling and exploding at night time in the desert.
Then, I believe at the end of 1940, father was recalled to active service in Europe. We travelled by the good ship "Almanzora" - a Royal Mail Line "Packet", the Master of which was a Captain Bridges according to a 'crossing the line' certificate I used to have.
The image we have here comes from a cigarette card, found at one of a number of cigarette card websites. Here you can see the rear of the card. I don't have a real card, unfortunately. The cigarette cards were a great source of history on many topics, and I can remember my parents always had new ones as they both smoked John Player's and WD & HO Wills cigarettes.
I have been told that 'Almanzora' was later torpedoed and sunk in the Atlantic while serving as a troopship - with the loss of all hands. We travelled by way of the Cape of Good Hope rather than the Suez Canal, and we all disembarked at Cape Town, dad staying with us perhaps a couple of weeks while we got set up with a rented house in the suburbia that had grown up south of the city under the shadow of Table Mountain. Mother and I were refused passage the rest of the way back to Britain because of the war.
If you are interested in the history of the Royal Mail Line (the name of the actual shipping company that carried the bulk of English postal traffic to and from abroad), here is an interesting link.
South Africa
While in the Cape, I attended a private school set up by an expatriate British school teacher (Cicely McDougal) for expatriate Brits, specifically with an English type curiculum (for easy transition back to the English system when the war was over). This operated from a large specially constructed building on the land they owned high in the Table Mountain foothills, and was appropriately called "Albion School".
A couple of years later on, living in Grahamstown in eastern Cape Province, mother was able to place me in another school which also followed the British private school system, the well established St. Andrews' Preparatory School, whose headmaster at that time was Major Mullins.
'Prep' - as it was known - boasts a website nowadays, and you may take a link to it from here.
I remember little, except a few oddball things. The main assembly room had folding partition doors which divided it into three quite large classrooms, and the daily roll-call there was done not by the name being called out and 'present' being responded but the name being called by the pupils in rotation, in the order in which you had joined the school. If someone was there but failed to respond the next person would put their oar in, with their name prefixed by 'name asleep', for example the boy after me had the name of Langley, and the one after him was Strachan (funny how you remember irrelevant things), so if Langley and I were not paying attention, Strachan would pipe up from where he was sitting... 'Ashton asleep, Langley asleep, Strachan'!
This school was one of the earliest in South Africa to leave the traditional (English) boy OR girl pupil arrangement and it became first of all a co-educational, and later a multi-racial private school, along with a number of others, many years before that country was accepted back into communication with the rest of the world, and certainly before the mid 1980s when I wrote to them out of curiosity from Australia. For those people who see South Africa as a nasty place full of racial hatred, let that fact show them that not all South Africans supported the policiy of 'Apartheid'. Nor indeed had it always been so.
The youngest two years at 'Prep' had their classes out the back in a new, possibly prefabricated block, divided into two rooms. My form mistress was 'Miss Lollie', presumably a nickname. I remember she used to supervise our rugby afternoons, a game which at the time I found tedious and because until I was 17, I was a good foot (303mm) or more shorter than all of my contemporaries, having a similarly slender physique, I dislked it because I continually got hurt by very much larger boys, as children were always grouped by age rather than physique in those days.
Cricket I found fun, though it was the single-ended variety we played, and because of the intense heat in that country, we would start in the late afternoon and go on until the evening started to draw in. I particularly remember one day not having eaten a banana that was part of my packed lunch. I had slipped it in my left hand white cricket shorts pocket, and out we went to play, the side I was on fielding first. By the time we got to going-home time I was distraught, the banana on that hot day having totally disintegrated in my pocket, and I remember refusing to go home because mother would find out about the banana. Thinking about it nearly sixty years later, I find it hard to understand my reasoning that I should have to 'tell' her - the fact would have been so obvious to nose and eye. I did go home, and I have no recollection of mother being angry, so I must assume that she wasn't.
Then there was the time that mother and I went somewhere by train, I forget where. Maybe it was to Port Alfred (known as 'The Kowie'), a holiday resort at the end of the railway line from Alicedale through Grahamstown. Or maybe it was to East London, as I also remember that name. On our return, days later, I swelled up like a balloon, and was barely able to see out of my eyes, apart from feeling dreadful. Apparently the medicos in Grahamstown were very worried about me, because the sleuthing they did to find out what had happened was quite interesting. My poisoning, as it was proved to be, was traced to my having eaten the only serving the train's dining car provided of a particular fish dish - which was, of course, canned, as deep refrigeration was more or less unheard of in those days. The South African Railways (Suid Afrikaanse Spoorvee), now called Spoornet, took full responsibility, and I was off school for a while, with daily injections that hurt like blazes, but which eventually brought me down to size again.
Mother's health deteriorated and I was placed in the care of a school chum's family for the rest of the term, and a few months before the end of the war I moved north to join her in the Hogsback Mountains, at a guesthouse called the Hogsback Hydro which was being run by a gorgeous lady (as seen by an impressionable nine-year old), a Mrs. Wilson, whose father whose name was McFarlane (the owner), was away fighting the war.
Thinking about it fifty-five years later, I suspect that mother had a problem with her lungs back then, and so the higher ground of the Hogsback - associated with the Winterberg Range - would perhaps have provided a more suitable climate. In the last years of her life she suffered badly from bronchial complaints.
I remember horseback riding down a deep gully, crossing a fast-flowing creek, and up the other side to the table land above us, on which was the razor-back ridge of the actual 'hogsback', from memory three of them describing an arc of a circle centred many miles away on the other side.
I remember my first contact with that infamous 'country' communications system, the party-line phone, in which you didn't pick up the phone handset to answer unless your code, perhaps two long rings and a short ring, was what you heard. I also remember a fundraising evening to culminate a Bombers Against Tokyo (BAT) month where we were frantically selling flags or something to help the allied war effort in the Pacific. Aged perhaps nine I did very well and acchieved the results needed for becoming a 'WingBAT'. And there were community charades - or similar activities - on most saturday nights, and there was an almost horrific moment when I fell out of a boat-shaped swing in the playground out the front, and got trapped under it.
This was the land of no mod cons... water was pumped from the fast-flowing stream previously mentioned into tanks which in the summer time had to be used carefully. A place where there wasn't electricity, either, except that generated by an enormous single-cylinder diesel engine which had a huge starting handle that fitted next to the flywheel, and which two burly workers would crank up while a third one held open a valve that relieved compression in the cylinder head. At the moment that it got up to the right speed, this valve would snap shut and after a brief virtual 'stall', away the engine would go with a slow phutt-phutt-phutt once every revolution. This engine in turn drove a 120-volt DC generator which when the voltage was high enough would then charge an enormous array of car type batteries which actually powered the resort.
The Hogsback was reached by a railways bus north from Alice (not to be confused with Alicedale) which ran to Cathcart, climbing the first twenty miles up to the Hogsback winding up through a pass after leaving the plain where Alice and its railway line was. At the midpoint on the bus route, a tee-junction on the road from Cathcart to Seymour, the bus would wait to meet one coming the other way, and the two would turn round with the passengers and their belongings being trans-shipped for the rest of their journey.
As a child I remember feeling that it would make more sense for the drivers to change vehicles, and leave the passengers and freight stuff undisturbed!
Dad of course only spent a couple of weeks with us before going on to the war in Europe. He served for the rest of the war in a typically British way, not being conspicuously obvious but just getting on with his job, which I believe was largely the training of soldiers for the various "fronts" to which they were sent. He was, by this time, a Lieutenant Colonel, and by the end of the war had advanced to Colonel.
In South Africa I discovered that like in Arabia, there were more people with a darker skin than I had, but I can honestly say that at no time did I encounter any suggestion of prejudice against skin colouring, because Apartheid was not legislated until about 1948 - after we left. Mother supplemented her monthly 'allotment' (it is strange how words mean different things when converted into miltary language) from dad's pay by coaching undergraduates from Capetown University - and later Grahamstown University (she was a classics scholar from Girton College in England's Cambridge University herself, one of the earliest female graduates from there), and I can remember her telling me that the only students she ever had problems with were whites.
You may ask "What were those problems?" Well, payment of coaching fees, not just on time but at all, and potentially nastier, being an attractive 40-year old female, there were some quite serious amorous attempts made, also by white skinned young men half her age. Conversely, the darker skinned students she taught had impeccable manners, were honest, and diligent.
Mother's contribution to what was called the "War Effort" was interesting. Judged by late 20th century/early 21st Century standards, it would raise eyebrows, but at that time it was completely innocent and safe, and many military families did it.
Convoys would pass through Cape Town regularly, and she had standing invitations with a number of shipping companies to host sailors for an evening, giving them a relaxing home environment spell for a few hours away from their wartime duties. That was all there was to it - nothing clandestine - and she struck up several friendships that would have lasted had those who called not been torpedoed in the Atlantic later. I remember meeting the Chief Engineer of a particular merchant ship several times.
Being fluent in the French language, she joined Cape Town's Free French Society and would speak French with itinerant French military and sailors, and participated in a number of fund-raising evenings in amateur dramatics, which she was very good at.
We returned to Britain in 1945 on the Cunard-White Star company liner R. M. S. Mauretania, which was still fitted out as a troop ship. We kids occupied the soldiers' quarters, row after row of bunks, three high and maybe thirty long, and several wide, under the 'command' of a young army officer who had difficulty in keeping us in order. The mothers shared the few cabins left, which as a troop ship had been quarters for officers.
The Mauretania had two short fat funnels as opposed the the tall skinny four funnels of ships of the Titanic era - which included the original "Mauretania" - which was replaced by her owners in 1938 with the launching of this "updated" ship. One can read about this at the link here.
The thumbnail image above came from that site, and was produced from a photograph there. Please visit this link and read about this beautiful ship which mother and I had the privilege to travel from Cape Town to Southampton on, fares paid by the British Government as we were service families from abroad whose original journey had been prevented by hostilities.
My Schooling in the U.K.
Mother and I returned to the U.K. just in time to be able to attend the Victory Parade through the streets of London. This link will take you to the next page.To Be Continued...