2. From Britain to Rhodesia
Early Years in England
Colonel Thomas Starbuck, who was born in Doncaster in 1890, died in London in November 1950 when I was only 14 months old. Grandpa was Director of the Red Shield Services in the National Headquarters at the time and only 60. Grandma, Mrs Colonel Lily Starbuck was a widow for the next 35 years, living in her own semi-detached bungalow at 8 Manor Avenue, Northolt, Middlesex, west London, where we were also based as a family during ‘homeland furlough’. Grandma was involved in the Salvation Army (TSA) South Harrow corps for the rest of her life. She had been an Army officer for 75 years, going into training in 1910 from Attercliffe Corps in Sheffield, where her parents had been local officers. Lieutenant Lily Piggott married Lieutenant Thomas William Charles Starbuck in the Mission Hall, Duke Street, Workington, Cumbria, on 27 August 1913. They were corps officers until the First World War, when they were sent as naval and military officers, first in England and then in France and Belgium, where they ran hostels for servicemen in Namur, Paris, and Dunkerque. For this work Tom Starbuck received an MBE.[1] My mother was born in Sheffield in the middle of the war and was looked after by her grandparents the Piggotts until the war ended. The Starbucks had another child, their son Kenneth Ashley, in 1922. In the years between the wars the Starbucks were appointed to various divisional headquarters, including Dundee in Scotland, Wrexham in Wales, and Birmingham in the 1930s, when they had a house in Sparkhill. During the Second World War, Colonel Tom Starbuck was Assistant Director of the Red Shield Services, responsible for canteens, hostels and mobile canteens for military personnel. For this work he received an OBE.[2] After his premature death in 1950, Colonel Lily Starbuck continued her work in the local corps, and made weekly visits to a blind home and the Harrow Hospital until she was over 85.[3] She died on Friday 11 October 1985 at the age of 95.
I was born at 9.20 pm (GMT) on Wednesday, 21 September 1949 in the Salvation Army Mothers’ Hospital in Hackney, London, opened in 1913 and closed in 1986 (the year my son Matthew was born). The hospital no longer exists but its historic frontage has been retained at 145-153 Lower Clapton Road.[4] My parents, who retired as Brigadiers Keith and Gwen Anderson were TSA officers, Captains at the time, stationed at the East Finchley corps (church) in north London. They lived at 17 Kitchener Road, East Finchley, N2. They had married in June 1948, after Dad had finished his training in London. Dad was born in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) on 25 November 1917, and he died in the old Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham on 19 May 2006, now a new housing estate. He had been baptised in the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Bulawayo. My mother, born Gwenyth Starbuck (her birth certificate mistakenly spells her ‘Gwynneth’), was born in Sheffield, Yorkshire on 14 April 1916. Because her father was stationed in France during the war, she remained in Sheffield with her maternal grandparents the Piggotts until the war ended in 1918. She died at the Ivyhouse Nursing Home, West Heath, Birmingham, seven months after Dad, on 10 Dec 2006. She went to schools in Dundee, Scotland; Wrexham, Wales; and Birmingham, where she attended a grammar school.[5]
After matriculating at a boarding school (Milton School in Bulawayo), where Keith Anderson had been captain of the rugby team and Head Boy in 1937, he worked for two years as a bookkeeper at the headquarters of the Rhodesia Railways in Bulawayo. He was the only one of the four Anderson brothers not to go to university. Keith travelled from Rhodesia to London to train as a TSA officer in 1946 after his discharge from the Southern Rhodesia Medical Corps whose headquarters was in Nairobi, Kenya during the war. He had been a medical orderly and Staff Sergeant, serving first in Kenya (1940-44) and then in Burma, attached to the Rhodesia African Rifles (1944-45). Whilst in Nairobi, he met and joined TSA. When he arrived in London in 1946, he was ‘billeted’ with Colonel and Mrs Tom and Lily Starbuck, whose only daughter Gwen was a TSA officer. From 1942, Gwen was private secretary to the Chief of Staff, Commissioner John J. Allan (an American, second in charge after the General), after whom I was named. Gwen Starbuck had a secretarial diploma and was a shorthand typist trained to be a TSA officer from 1938-39. She was commissioned as a Lieutenant in 1939. After her training, she was sent to work successively in the corps of Kingswood, Bristol (1940), Frome in Somerset (1940) and finally at Bath Odd Down (1941), before her transfer to the International Headquarters in 1942. During the bombing of London she also worked in the London Underground tube stations assisting with the air raid shelters. Keith had to do one of two years’ training first before he could have permission to ‘correspond’ with Gwen, who was now a Captain. This was given in June 1947, when they were engaged. TSA officers could only marry another officer, and Keith was promoted to Captain because Gwen couldn’t be demoted! They were married on 19 June 1948 in the Salvation Army Citadel, Brownhill Road, Catford, Lewisham, London, with Commissioner J.J. Allan conducting the ceremony. At the time Gwen was stationed in Bromley in Kent, and Keith was at High Barnet in north London. Their marriage certificate states that Keith was living at 3 Salisbury Road, High Barnet, whilst Gwen was at 84 Coniston Road, Bromley. The witnesses were their friends and co-officers, Eileen Stebbings (we knew her as ‘Auntie Tiny’) and James Holmes.[6] For the next five years they were stationed as corps officers (pastors) at various churches in the North London Division, including High Barnet (1948), East Finchley (1949), Stotfold (1950), North Watford (1952), and Bush Hill Park (1953), before being sent to Rhodesia. During this time their two children were born: Allan Heaton in 1949 and my sister Olive Carol on 29 Dec 1952, also in the Mothers’ Hospital.
My Parents and our Move to Rhodesia
Our family moved to Southern Rhodesia in December 1953, sailing on the Cape Town Castle, a ship in the Union Castle Line, from Southampton to Cape Town -- in those days the journey took two weeks. I was four, and my sister Carol turned one on the ship. My parents’ first appointment was at Howard Institute in the tribal area of Chiweshe as Training Officers at the Officers’ Training College. Chiweshe is in the Mazowe District of Mashonaland Central Province. I don’t remember much of those early days, except that we would go on a day out to a nearby riverbank for a picnic or travel to a swimming bath at Glendale, near the main road to Salisbury. The road to Glendale was not surfaced so it was a dusty and bumpy ride. I also learned to ride a bike at Howard, falling off once to break my arm for the first time. More was to follow! Howard was well known in the TSA as one of their premier institutions in Africa, and some of their future top leaders were stationed there.
Chiweshe was a traditional area of the Zezuru people, who spoke a dialect of Shona, spoken by around 75% of Zimbabweans. Mom immediately started learning ChiZezuru and was able to communicate in it within a short time, eventually being able to preach in the dialect (later standardised for the whole country as ‘Union Shona’). Dad had grown up fluent in SiNdebele, but this was spoken in Matabeleland in the south and west of the country; Howard was in the north. Howard not only had the Officers’ Training College, but also a hospital and a teachers’ college. The teachers’ college later became a High School with boarding facilities and the Training College moved to Salisbury (Harare) during the bush war. Of note also is that quite a few prominent Salvationists were stationed at Howard, including Australian and second woman General, Eva Burroughs, who we called ‘Auntie Eve’ during the Howard days. Another General, André Cox, was born while we were at Howard. His parents were officers at Howard working in the teachers’ college. Another officer there, Caughey Gauntlett, was to become Chief of Staff of TSA later at the International Headquarters in London – his two sons were at boarding school with me. The two first Africans appointed Territorial Commanders of Zimbabwe, Commissioners David Moyo and Gideon Moyo, were both trained at Howard, the latter was one of the cadets during our first time there. Both Moyos worked with Dad later in Matabeleland when he was Regional Commander (1965-70).
In May 1956, when I was six and Carol three, we moved to Sinoia (now Chinhoyi) in the north-west of the country, where Mom and Dad had been appointed Divisional Officers for Lomagundi District. They were promoted to Senior Captains in June 1957. We lived in a small house off one of the main roads and I remember the trees in front of the house that I used to climb frequently as a 6-9 years-old boy, becoming quite adept at jumping from branch to branch, until I fell and bruised my left kidney. At the back of the house was at least one jacaranda tree. These were very common in southern Africa, so that both Salisbury (Harare) and Pretoria were known for their avenues of jacaranda trees with their distinctive mauve flowers ablaze in the spring (September-October). The house we lived in only had two bedrooms, one for my parents and the other for Carol. My bedroom was on the front veranda, which (if I remember correctly) was enclosed by wire netting to keep out mosquitos. Some adjustments were made to cordon off the part of the veranda that became my room, but the new room had neither electricity nor a ceiling. I was an avid reader and my light was a candle near my bed. Reading by candlelight in that room may have been one of the reasons why my eyesight deteriorated, and I needed glasses constantly by the time I was 13. The other thing about this room was that during the summer we had frequent heavy thunderstorms, and I loved cuddling up in bed with the deafening roar of the rain on the iron roof. The room was also very hot in the summer. Up the road to the right of the house was my school, Sinoia Primary School, and in the other direction was the small shopping centre, and before you reached that, the public swimming baths (only for the European public in those days of segregation). I went to the swimming baths often and became a good swimmer. Apart from books, the only other entertainment was the wind-up gramophone that I had (some readers may not know what this is!). ‘Ee by gum’, ‘Mucking about the garden’, ‘Oh Maggie what have you been up to’ and ‘I‘m tickled to death I’m me’ were my mother’s 78 rpm recordings by a Yorkshire man that I listened to repeatedly (and can still sing!).[7]
My parents’ first six-month furlough in England was May-November 1959, after which they returned to their work in Sinoia. They moved again to Mazabuka in Zambia (then, Northern Rhodesia) in July 1960, where they were Divisional Commanders for the south-western part of the country. In May 1962 they returned to Howard Institute, where Keith became Officer in Charge of the Officers’ Training College, until another furlough in England from December 1964-June 1965. They were promoted to Majors in May 1963. Their last appointment in Zimbabwe was in my father’s birthplace, Bulawayo, where he was Regional Commander for Matabeleland from June 1965-February 1970. After another furlough their last promotion was to Brigadiers in January 1971, and they were appointed Officers Commanding Zambia, until March 1973. Then they moved to South Africa as Field Secretary, responsible for all the African TSA churches in the country, including those in the surrounding countries of Swaziland, Botswana, Lesotho, and Mozambique. I was only living 44 miles (58 km) away from them then and could visit them regularly, as I had just moved from the college in Vereeniging to the church headquarters in Pretoria. They lived in a flat in the headquarters in Doornfontein, central Johannesburg. My mother received her Long Service Order from the International Headquarters in May 1964, as she had been an officer for 25 years; and in 1974 she received the Long Service Order Star for 35 years in active service. Dad received his L.S.O. in May 1971.[8] Altogether, my parents were TSA officers for 67 and 60 years respectively.
When Colonel Mrs Lily Starbuck’s health deteriorated, my parents, now near to retirement, moved back to the UK for five years (1980-85) where my mother took care of her mother and my father had a temporary job as postmaster at the International Headquarters in London. He was also given two brief appointments to the remote Atlantic island of St Helena (1984-85). They retired and returned to South Africa in 1986 to live with us in a flat built onto our house in Garsfontein, Pretoria. Two years later they moved with us to the farm outside Soshanguve, where they helped us in the administration of the newly formed Tshwane Christian Ministries and Tshwane Theological College (1988-1990). Dad did the finance bookkeeping and Mom did the typing. In 1990 they relocated to a Salvation Army retirement cottage in Doonside, on the coast south of Durban. They were happy to be near lovely Indian Ocean beaches, and we were happy to visit them with our small children on holiday with free accommodation!
After our move to the UK in 1995, and a family reunion for their golden wedding anniversary in Doonside in 1998, it was obvious that their health was deteriorating. My mother was losing her short-term memory and Dad was recovering from a hernia operation after three months in hospital. After a phone call with Dad, they decided to move to Birmingham to be near us in the closing years of their lives. Their move was made in April 1999 and we rigged out a flat in an open retirement complex for them to rent, a few minutes drive from our house. My sister Carol had settled in Florida in the USA and they would not receive the medical and pension support there that they had in the UK. When they could no longer cope in the flat they moved to a residential retirement home. As they both worsened in physical and mental health, they were eventually housed in a nursing home. It was characteristic of Dad that although he was assessed as not needing to go to a nursing home he refused to be separated from Mom, and so they went together, at first in adjoining rooms. Mom had Alzheimer’s and Dad had Parkinson’s. They both were ‘promoted to glory’ in 2006—my father in May at the age of 88, and my mother in December at the age of 90. They are buried together in a grave at King’s Norton Cemetery, next to rolling countryside on the edge of Birmingham. Both funeral services were held in Birmingham Citadel Corps, which they had attended regularly when they were well enough. One of the highlights of both funerals was to have a Zimbabwean choir sing there. Zimbabwe remained their ‘home’ and was where they had spent much of their lives.
Schools and Furloughs
My parents’ constant moving from one appointment to another meant that my education was disrupted often. Our family home was in nine different places from my birth to leaving school. I went to seven different schools. My first school was a correspondence school when we were in Howard in Chiweshe, because the nearest boarding schools in Salisbury were too far away for a 4-6 year-old boy to be separated from his parents. My mother was my teacher for the first year and a half of my schooling. In May 1955 she had the following in her newsletter:
Allan has started lessons with the Correspondence School this year, and I have to do two hours with him each morning. He is doing quite well really, at least other people say he is, although his Mother expects perfection, and he gets into trouble when he does not achieve it.[9]
When we transferred to Sinoia (Chinhoyi) in 1956 there was a school near our home. I was 6 and went into Kindergarten 2 (Year 2 in the UK) halfway through the school year, which began in January. My mother’s tuition paid off and I was easily able to keep up with the other children in a ‘regular’ school. Mom wrote the following in June 1956 and again that November:
We are finding life at Sinoia very different from life at Howard. Sinoia is a nice little town with quite a large white population. It has only one main street of shops, but a very nice hospital and an open air swimming pool, which is only a few yards up the road from us, to the delight of our two youngsters, also a good school. Allan started at the school here last week, and is very happy and seems to be doing well. Out here they go to school from 8 a.m. to 12.30 a.m. each day. Allan will not have to go to Boarding School, at least for Junior School. It means of course, that I am somewhat handicapped from getting out into the Division with my husband, as he has to be out for long periods, and I cannot leave Allan who comes home mid-day.
Allan and Carol are both well, although they have both had Scarlet Fever recently. They spend a good deal of their time in the Open Air Swimming Baths just up the road from us. Allan can swim a little, and Carol can almost, and it is good for them, and they can’t get into much mischief while they are there. Allan is very happy at school. He is a prolific reader and reads book after book in a very short time far in advance of his 7 years. It is quite a job to keep up with his demand for books. His teacher told me that the Inspector dropped on Allan to read when he inspected their class, and he read perfectly for him, not knowing of course who he was. The Inspector then thought the whole class could read well, but the teacher told me she was glad the Inspector dropped on Allan as some of them are awful readers. It is a good job he did not look at his Arithmetic book or it would have been a different story!
I was at Sinoia Primary School for the next three years, until we went to the UK on ‘homeland furlough’ in 1959. I briefly attended a primary school in Northolt (west London), not far from Grandma Starbuck’s house, where we were staying. During the summer holidays we travelled a bit, most memorably to Broadstairs on the Kent coast, where we stayed in a Salvation Army holiday home. There my mother’s aunt Eff and uncle Baz joined us from Sheffield with their mentally disabled adult son, Mom’s cousin Geoff, who was under his parents’ constant care. I was put in the same bedroom as Geoff and was abused by him one night. It was an emotional nightmare that I was scared to report to my parents. I was traumatised and the next morning they asked me what was wrong. I am not sure what exactly I told them and the details are hazy now. I do remember that Dad was furious and Mom tried to calm him down. I never knew what happened to Geoff, but he died before his parents did years later.
Whilst in England I was given a cornet and taught how to play by TSA Bandleader Leonard Smith from the South Harrow corps. He came to give me lessons at Grandma’s house in Northolt. I had a short time of being able to play 2nd Cornet (the easiest music to follow!) in the Young People’s Band in Harrow, and this was my introduction to reading and participating in music. Bandleader Smith was also a postmaster, and during the 1960s he regularly sent me first day covers of UK stamps that are now in my stamp collection. I shall always be grateful to him for the personal interest he took in me throughout the rest of my childhood. During that time in England, I also received news that my best friend in Sinoia, Graham Sampson, was run over and killed by a lorry. He was 9 and his birthday was three days after mine. He and I had many happy times playing together, especially climbing trees, one of our favourite activities. We even ‘ran away’ together into the bush around Sinoia and had the police looking for us when we had not returned home. Once they found us and brought us back we were in serious trouble with our parents! After our furlough in England we returned to Sinoia for a few months, but in August 1960 we moved to Mazabuka (Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia), where I attended Codrington School in Standard 4 and 5 (Years 6 and 7 in the UK). As a new boy at this school, I was bullied -- not a good memory. My mother thought differently!
This is a very small town, only one main street with one European shop, as well as a butcher and baker. We have a very nice new house. Allan and Carol are able to go to school in Mazabuka, at a very good school where they are very happy.
We embarked on an adventure in December 1961 when we travelled down to Igoda Bay near East London in South Africa, a journey of 2,500 km (1,600 miles) from Mazabuka. In November my mother wrote to her friends as follows:
We are hoping to go down to the Cape Coast for our furlough, so will be spending Christmas at the sea. We have been saving up for a long time, and it will take us a very long time to get over it financially, but we feel we must make the effort for the children’s sake. They are fast growing up. Allan was 12 in September, and will be going to Lusaka as a boarder in January. We have just received his outfit list and what a formidable list – it will cost a fortune to rig him out! He will be far away from the Army but will go to the Baptist Church on Sundays. He has done quite well at school this year, coming top of his class. Carol is also doing quite well on the whole. …
We joined Dad's younger brother and sister-in-law Alec and Kath Anderson with their five boys at the beach for Christmas and joined a boys’ holiday camp for part of the time. We stayed in a cottage on the side of a lagoon. We did all that travelling in an old grey Ford Popular car, with Carol and I sitting in the back with luggage piled between us and moving every time Dad drove around a corner or hit a bump! The journey took four days and of course, the same time going back. I had just finished primary school, and in January 1962 I was sent to my first boarding school at Gilbert Rennie High School in Lusaka (after independence, Kabulonga High). I was only there for six months before my parents moved back to Howard Institute, when I moved to Prince Edward School, a boys’ school in Salisbury (Harare) in the second half of the year, my second and last boarding school. My mother wrote this in November 1962:
Allan and Carol have settled very well at their new schools, Allan at Prince Edward High School in Salisbury, and Carol at Routledge Boarding School. The thing which delights us that they can both go to Salisbury Citadel on Sundays, and are taking a great interest. Carol was enrolled as a Singing Company member last week, and Allan went with the Y.P. Band to Gwelo last weekend which was the long holiday weekend. There are 9 of the Howard youngsters at boarding schools in Salisbury, so they all come home together and have a great time when they are home.
My hostel was Selous House, and although they have changed the name (to Tokwe House) from the 19thCentury British explorer, hunter and colonialist after whom it was named, the front of the hostel still bears his name with the founding date of 1923, as I discovered in 2017. Two other boys whose parents were officers at Howard, Richard and David Gauntlett, were three and one year ahead of me and in the same hostel. I knew them well and Richard was a kind of mentor to me when he was an ‘A’ Level student. Their father was Commissioner Caughey Gauntlett, mentioned above. Richard moved to Labrador in Canada and David became a TSA officer.
Dad's older brother Ralph and his wife Helen and their five boys and one girl lived in Salisbury at this time. Although cousins Bill, Michael, Edward and Ronald were older than me, Helena was the same age as Carol and we were sometimes allowed to visit them at weekends. Dad’s eldest sister and her husband Sheila and Alf Morris, and their children David, Margaret and Pat lived on a Methodist mission, Goromonzi, about 50 miles east of Salisbury at that time, and we visited them during school holidays.
We hostel boys climbed trees a lot, and in November 1963 my mother described what happened in my second form year in the hostel:
So far as our own family is concerned, we have had rather a difficult time. Allan had an accident at Boarding School when a rope on which he was swinging, broke, and he broke both arms also had slight concussion. Carol also has had to have her tonsils out, and her tonsils were so septic that her throat was in a dreadful state after the operation, but she is pulling up again now. We then discovered that Allan had got Bilharzia (a tropical disease) so he had to have the blitz treatment for that. We are hoping to go to Beira in Mozambique, for two weeks in August, if we can save up by then, as we feel the children need the sea air to pull them up again. We shall camp in a tent, the cheapest way of having a holiday.
I remember well the ordeal of staying in the school clinic and being cared for in intimate details by a nurse for the six weeks until my two plaster casts were removed. Embarrassing for a 13-year-old! Plaster of Paris covered both lower arms and hands so I could do very little for myself. I also remember the ‘blitz treatment’ I had for bilharzia, when I was much sicker than I was with the disease itself! I have vague memories of our tent holiday in Beira, at the time a Portuguese colonial city with magnificent golden beaches. It was the nearest sea and sand destination for Rhodesians. I think our tent blew down a couple of times!
After I completed my General Certificate of Education (‘O’ Level) in November 1965, my parents had returned from furlough in England and were sent to Bulawayo as Regional Commanders for Matabeleland, Dad’s birthplace. I decided to become a day scholar again and did my Sixth Form (‘A’ Levels) at my Dad’s old school, Milton High School, 1966-67. I had attended four primary and three secondary schools during my thirteen years of school.
My best friend at Prince Edward was James Harvey-Brown, whose parents worked on a tea estate in the eastern highlands near the Chimanimani mountains on the Mozambique border. We were in the same hostel and the same form at school. I spent a holiday on the tea estate (remember the many wild guineafowl there), and another holiday with one of his relatives farming in the far north of the country, that we reached with a light aeroplane (I think it was a Cessna), quite an experience flying over the African savanna. I must have been considered a charity case, especially when my parents were still in England in 1965! I made contact with James again in England more recently and we met in Nottingham, where he was living at the time. He now lives in a rural part of Bulgaria and we still correspond occasionally.
Boarding school, however, does not always have good memories. Most of the boys in the hostel were sons of farmers who lived far from Salisbury. I was bullied, regularly given beatings by prefects and once receiving ‘six of the best’ from the Housemaster, a teacher called Bill Cock who we named ‘Toad of Toad Hall’ (from The Wind in the Willows). I had gone ‘AWOL’ from the hostel without permission and was caught on my return, so I was made an example of. I also was introduced to cigarette smoking at boarding school, which of course was banned and not allowed in the Salvation Army! We would find places where we were not easily detected. The prefects were allowed to beat us for bad behaviour, but they sometimes misused this to punish us for small things like not washing or drying their socks. In the first two years of boarding school, we had to be ‘skivvies’ or ‘fags’ (a form of slavery!) to prefects, and if we didn’t obey them to the finest details we could be beaten. I had the record for getting the most ‘dorks’ (strokes with a cane or another object) of all the boys in my dormitory. My backside had almost permanent red stripes on it! I was placed in detention on more than one occasion. We had to skivvie for two years. I skivvied for a school prefect in my second year, Preston Robertson, a big burly boy who played in the first school rugby team and was in the under-20 national water-polo team. He had a selection of various beating instruments arrayed in his room and would ask me to choose which one I wanted to be beaten with. These were the sixties in a British colony and thankfully, things are different now!
On the positive side, I was able to attend the Salisbury Citadel Corps where I became a bandsman and a corps cadet. I was enrolled as a ‘senior soldier’ when I turned 14, the minimum age. But I was not a good Salvationist during those years, as Bandsmen were not allowed to smoke! Fortunately, my smoking was sporadic and by the time I finished my teens I had given it up for the rest of my life. My parents never knew about this and I was never a counter-cultural rebel in my teens but was trying to fit into a dystopian society. I was also involved in sports: competitive swimming, cross-country running, and rugby. The rugby I continued until I went to college in South Africa. I was never very good at sports but enjoyed what I did, even though as boarders we were expected to participate in sports and attend all the big sporting events. I was captain of the Third XV rugby team at Milton, played hooker, and played a couple of games for the Second XV, even being selected for under-20s Matabeleland trials. While I was working in Bulawayo I joined a local rugby club and played hooker for the Bulawayo Athletic Club.
My mother wrote about our schooling in November 1965, as follows:
Allan is still a boarder in Salisbury, and is sitting his G.C.E. ‘O’ level exam. next week. He hopes to come to Bulawayo next year for 6th Form, to Milton High School, his Father’s old school, so we shall have him at home again. He is now a commissioned Bandsman and wearing band uniform. Carol is in Form I at the Evelyn High School in Bulawayo, and is quite happy in the little European Corps here. …
And in July 1966 she typed:
Allan and Carol are very happy in Bulawayo Corps. Allan passed his G.C.E. O level with flying colours, and is now in Lower 6th doing “A” level taking English, History, and Religious Knowledge at Milton, his father’s old school. The little Band is doing very well under B/M [Bandmaster] Ted Horwood and is now playing marches and selections. They have also started a Rhythm Group in which Allan plays the drums, and Carol is a soloist. Carol is now in uniform and has just signed her Corps Cadets Application Form (it just doesn’t seem possible that our baby is now a Corps Cadet). Easter weekend a carload of them went down to a Youth Camp near Johannesburg, had a wonderful time and all came back enthused and in love with the Army in South Africa.
Although I did well at ‘O’ Levels at Prince Edward with four distinctions in English Language, Physics-with-Chemistry, History and Maths, four credits (French, Geography, English Literature, Religious Knowledge) and one pass (Biology), my ‘A’ Levels at Milton were affected by my indecision about what to do after finishing. I started with English, History, and French; then, because I wanted to study medicine (a childhood dream), changed halfway through Lower Sixth Form to take Physics, Chemistry and Biology. I thought that was too difficult for me and changed again to English, History and (self-taught) Religious Education. Because I had so little time to complete these subjects, I ended up dropping RE and just passing English and History with university entrance (Matriculation Exemption), that enabled me later to go to the University of South Africa.
The schools I attended are no longer segregated and reserved for ‘white’ children, as they were in the 1950s and 1960s. As a child, I didn’t appreciate the injustices in the educational system in colonial Rhodesia; and indeed, throughout colonial Africa. The Salvation Army managed its own schools all over the country, and my dad in his capacity was also a school manager and inspector. All these ‘mission schools’ were for Africans only, apart from some Anglican and Catholic schools that were also only for white Rhodesians. I was impressed by how much has changed during my 2017 visit to my old boarding school in
At that time in Bulawayo (1966-70) I learned to play a ukelele and after that a guitar. I bought my first guitar in 1970, which I still have today with its original case. I gave up the drums in the ‘rhythm group’ for the guitar, and our little music group performed for General Frederick Coutts when he visited Bulawayo and held a rally in the City Hall in 1969. It was my 20th and his 70th birthday, as he was born exactly 50 years before I was! In the next section my ‘conversion’ to Pentecostalism will be explained. As I get older I am more appreciative than ever of my TSA roots and the enormous influence the ‘Sally Army’ and my parents have had on my life.
[1] Member of the Order of the British Empire (medal).
[2] Officer of the Order of the British Empire (medal).
[3] In her obituary.
[5] The dates of her movements with her parents are hazy, but these are the appointments she told me about, including her being part of the SA corps in Sparkhill, Birmingham.
[6] From a certified copy of the Marriage Certificate, 19 June 1948.
[7]Not all the same versions I listened to, but they are all online now: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ee+by+gum ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mvf32MGLWys ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvPX8aZ2GjE&list=RDhvPX8aZ2GjE&start_radio=1 ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3ZbntzeEqM
[8] Information and dates on my parents’ various appointments were from copies I have of their ‘Officer’s Career’ documents, obtained from the Salvation Army archives.
[9] All the quotations from my mother’s newsletters to her friends, published here: https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/394786203430875516/7580500204251070594
