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This is of great personal interest but I feel this story will hook just about anyone who likes a good story. This is a narrative written by my father describing his life from his birth in 1917 until he wed my mother. An adventure to say the least.
Jump to any particular year in the story by clicking below, or just scroll on down and begin reading.
| 1917 | 1918 | 1919 | 1920 | 1921 | 1922 | 1923 |
| 1924 | 1925 | 1927 | 1928 | 1929 | 1930 | 1931 |
| 1932 | 1933 | 1934 | 1935 | 1936 | 1937 | 1938 |
A PERIPATETIC CHILD By Peter B. T. Wood
I was born in the city of Rugby, England where my mother had fled from London to escape the air-raids. This was not the best town to choose because I was born in the middle of a zeppelin bombing raid; the date was December 29, the time1:30 a.m. and my birth weight 9lbs. 8 ozs. My father who had been born in New Zealand, was still in London and we rejoined him there two weeks later. Shortly after that I was baptized by the Bishop of London in St. Paul’s Cathedral as a favor to my grandfather who had served for many years as senior warden of the church of St. Mary le Bow, of " Bow Bells " fame, and was an old friend of the bishop’s.
My mother, my nurse and I sailed aboard the P.& O. liner Khyber to join my father in Calcutta where he had been sent by his employer as a consulting engineer on a project to build a bridge over the Ganges. According to my mother the ship, which was only about 12,000 tons burden, ran into a major storm in the Indian Ocean and was hit by a huge wave just as my nurse, with me in her arms, was descending the main staircase. She had a nasty fall, but was not seriously hurt, and I was flung from her arms. It has been suggested that may account for some of my actions later in life.
In the summer, to escape the extreme heat and humidity of Calcutta, mother took me up to the Margaret Hope tea gardens in the foothills of the Himalayas. In those days this was quite an adventurous journey involving a long train trip to some town in northern India whose name I do not remember where we switched to a special train that ran a ratcheted center rail round a spiral route on which passengers in the front car could almost shake hands with those in the last car. This train took us to Darjeeling, the end of the line, where we disembarked and made the final leg of the journey, through dense forests on elephant back to the tea gardens ( plantation to you ).
The whole family returned to England and moved into a rented house in Carshalton, a suburb about 14 miles outside London, and I was enrolled in a Montessori school.
I fell victim to an epidemic of whooping cough which was sweeping England and was sent to an isolation camp for small children. According to hearsay, I almost died but, obviously finally recovered.
Early Dad’s employer sent him to Australia to supervise the construction of a new hospital and, at the end of November, mother and I went out to join him. We were originally supposed to sail via the U.S. and then through the Panama Canal but a coal strike in the U.S. (almost all steamships of that time burned coal ) disrupted world shipping. The Suez Canal was already operating at capacity and Panama traffic had to be rerouted round the Cape of Good Hope. We steamed to Cape Town aboard the Blue Star Line’s S.S. Anchises only to find that all coaling berths in Cape Town were booked up for the next three weeks. Rather than wait that long we proceeded on to Durban where, after a one week delay, we were able to take enough coal to get us to Sydney. I had my sixth birthday on board a few days after leaving Durban and , being the only child on the ship, received a deluge of gifts such as I was never to enjoy again!
In the spring we all took a vacation at a friend’s ranch outside the country town of Bowral, on the far side of the Blue Mountains. Our host raised horses and my first experience of those animals was being hoisted aboard a large ( 17 hands ) stallion to survey the view. I subsequently was lent a very good pony for the rest of our stay and , by the time we were ready to return to Sydney, had become a reasonably proficient rider. That June I started, as a boarder at Mowbray House School where I got into a number of fights after being taunted as a "Pommie". However peace was gradually restored and at the end of the school year I was awarded the "Dux" prize as the academic leader of the school. The prize itself was a beautifully illustrated copy of Kipling’s "Just So Stories" which I kept ever since and have read to my children and grandchildren. Unfortunately it seems to have been mislaid sometime last year, much to my dismay.
My father and mother were experiencing difficulties with their marriage at this time and felt that some time alone, without my distracting presence, might help. They decided to send me to stay with my grandparents in Christchurch, New Zealand; so my father drove me up to Newcastle in Queensland and turned me over to his sister’s husband. Uncle Jack was the owner of 800,000 acres of sheep land in Queensland, he was a director of then one of the largest wool companies in the world, he swung a lot of clout. Together he and I boarded one of their freighters and sailed to the port of Dunedin in the southern part of the South Island of New Zealand. At Dunedin he put me on a train for the 200 mile ride to Christchurch where I was met by my grandparents, They took me to a large red timbered house with a big front lawn and semi-circular drive in front and , behind the house a tennis court and behind that a vegetable and fruit garden with beans, peas, potatoes, raspberry canes and apple trees. At the sides of the house were flower gardens where my grandmother raised her prize dahlias. It was a lovely and comfortable house but my youthful exuberance proved a little too much for two people in their late fifties and I was packed off to boarding school at Medbury School in Christchurch. I enjoyed the school, just as I thoroughly enjoyed my entire stay in New Zealand, a wonderful, incredible scenic country full of wonderful people. I still remember, vividly, weekends spent at Sumner Beach, a marvelous summer vacation at the family sheep station ( 56,000 acres ) in Kaikora, Another great summer spent visiting the family of a school friend on a farm outside Wellington in the North Island. .Only two events marred my stay, a case of measles and driving a nail through the palm of my left hand while trying to make a hole in "conker", horse chestnut to you. This last resulted in a bad case of blood poisoning which nearly killed me.
However all good things must come to an end: after a little over two years the time had come for me to return to Sydney. My grandparents took me , by train, to Littleton, the port for Christchurch, and put me on board the Wahine the overnight ferry to Wellington. There I made my way across the docks to a New Zealand Steamship Co. liner whose name I cannot remember, for the five day journey to Sydney where I was met by parents. Bear in mind that from the time I left Littleton until I arrived in Sydney I was on my own, it was quite an adventure for a nine year old. This was to be the year in which my father made an effort to spend some time with me. He had recently been appointed general manager of the Willys Knight - Overland Motor Co. for Australia. The company assembled the cars from parts shipped from the U.S.; both makes are long since defunct but the Willys Knight was a very good car which had a sleeve valve system that was so quiet that it was nicknamed " the silent Knight" and it competed directly with Buick. The Overland was a less fancy car and competed with Chevrolet. Dad was an avid and excellent driver and used his skills to promote the cars. Time trials were races in which one had to complete a long road course, generally about 500 miles, over a set route in preset stages which you had to reach at scheduled times, points being lost for arriving too late or too early. He won the Australian championship in 1927 and I was in the car with him when he did it, We drove in a circular route from Sydney up to the Genolan Caves, reputed to be the deepest in the world, and then back to Sydney by a different route. The roads were really quite primitive in those days, particularly once you got outside the metropolitan areas, and on the return leg, coming down the mountains, we hit a huge hole in the road that had been hidden by a sharp curve. I should say that the car was a Willys tourer, what we would call a convertible today, whose canvas top was supported by X shaped wooden struts and when we hit that hole and bounced out, I bounced too and my head went straight up through those struts so that I was left dangling in mid-air. I had a sore neck for several weeks. Dad was also the first man in Australia to drive a car over 100 miles an hour; the Vauxhall Co. had sent over a racing car from England and Dad challenged them to a race. He took an Overland from the factory and souped it up, them beat the Vauxhall doing better than 100 mph in the process. On another occasion we took a family to a place called Galston Gorge which was a huge defile at the bottom of the Blue Mountain foothills. One reached it by going down a narrow, rough road with seven hairpin bends. We were in the Willys, which was actually too long a car for those turns, and at one point the left rear wheel of the car started spinning on the very edge of one of the bends. Dad stopped the car, turned off the engine, grasped the steering wheel in both hands and turned it back and forth, using it as lever to inch the car safely back onto the road! I was enrolled as a boarder at the junior school, for boys under 13 at Scot’s College, one of the most prestigious in the country. All the new boys had to go through a hazing which involved having ones face covered with black shoe polish, shampoo poured on ones hair and then having sand rubbed into it; this was followed by being forced to get up on an inverted tub and sing a song. That shoe polish stung like blazes and was the devil to get off and it took days to get all the sand out of ones hair. I made something of a name for myself as an athlete at the school by winning the junior sprint event at track in record time and becoming the youngest member of the cricket team. In one game against our chief rival, King’s School of Paramatta, I hit a "four" to the boundary, about the equivalent of a triple in baseball, and the catcher turned to me and said "little tikes like you aren’t supposed to hit like that!". Actually, Sydney was a wonderful city for a small boy to grow up in; I practically lived in the water at the magnificent sea beaches of Bondi, Coogee and Manly or the harbor beach at Rose Bay. This last was a great place to swim because the water was calm and there was a 100 foot long pier one could dive off. It did have its hazards including an occasional plague of large, blood-red jellyfish which would cover the beach after a storm and could administer a nasty sting to the unwary, and on one occasion I stepped right on top of an octopus! There was also Taronga Park, one the finest zoos in the world. It was situated on an island in the middle of the harbor and was reached by one of the multitudinous ferries which plied the harbor. There was no Harbor Bridge in those days, although they had just started construction.
Splitsville. The marriage had been rapidly deteriorating over the past 12 months and a separation was agreed upon. Mother decided to return to England taking me with her. Uncle Jack stepped in with his good offices and got us a large cabin on the S.S.Port Brisbane of the Port Line, a subsidiary of Cunard. She was a 9,000 ton refrigerated freighter and only carried 12 passengers. That was the beginning of one the most interesting and exciting periods of my life. We started our journey by taking the train from Sydney, New South Wales to Melbourne, Victoria where the Port Brisbane was berthed. The distance is something over 500 miles but the trip was prolonged by the necessity for changing trains, at 5;00 am, at the NSW-Victoria border because, in those days NSW had standard gauge rails while Victoria had 48" rails. When we got to Melbourne we had no time to see anything of the city but had to go straight to the docks where the Port Brisbane was getting ready to sail. We ere escorted to our cabin and unpacked and, a little later, went down to dinner and met our fellow passengers of whom I only remember two, a widow returning to London with her son Charles who was about 14 and who was to become my almost constant companion during the voyage. For us the most notable member of the crew was the First Officer, who would develop quite a shine for mother as the voyage progressed, there were several young merchant seaman cadets on board for training; their ages varied from 15 to 17 and they treated me with patience and good humor. We steamed out of Melbourne, and after rounding Wilsons Promontory, the south eastern tip of Australia, entered the Great Australian Bight, one of the roughest seas in the world, where we encountered a howling gale coming straight from the Antarctic with nothing in between. It was bitterly cold with high cross seas throwing the ship into a corkscrew motion and, for the first and last time in life, I felt some pangs of sea-sickness. Our first port of call was Adelaide, the capital of South Australia where we were to spend two days loading cargo. One of the sights of Adelaide was a snake farm some five miles out side the city: the cadets formed a party to visit it and took me along with them. It was a miniature zoo but confined to every variety of snake in Australasia - black diamond and coral, both very poisonous, boas, pythons and many, many others. The cadets hung a small python round my neck and took a picture, but it got lost somewhere in my travels. Next stop Albany to load crates of apples which were taken by a perpetual hoist to the top of a long chute which fed them into the ship’s hold. Berthed just behind us was a small White Star liner, the Cedric; it was a Friday and both ships were loading as fast as possible so as to get out of harbor before the weekend, the Cedric sailed first and promptly encountered an abandoned wire hawser which wound itself tight around her propeller. We found out, later, that she had to get divers to go down and free the shaft and was delayed for three days and we blessed our luck that she had sailed first or it might have been us. From Albany on to Freemantle, the port of Perth, capital of West Australia and a very lovely city. Freemantle is the last port of call for ships bound for Europe and the British Isles with the result that many homesick and destitute men try to stow away on ships that are homeward bound. This happened to us too. We were guided out of the harbor by a pilot and we signaled for the pilot boat to come and pick up our pilot by a long blast of our steam siren there was a terrible shriek of pain from a poor stowaway who had hidden under the steam valve and been badly scalded. We had to wait, hove to, for several hours for a police boat to come and pick him up, and when they arrived they searched the ship from stem to stern and captured six more. While this was going on Charlie and I begged some bacon from the cook and fished over the side. We were lucky enough to hit a large school of mackerel and, between us, pulled some thirty or more fish in less than an hour; they were served up for dinner that night. Leaving Freemantle we sailed for three weeks without sighting land until we passed Aden and entered the Red Sea. It was mid-summer and the temperature on deck was over 100 degrees. Down in the stoke hold where the "black gang" labored to stoke the ships boilers it was close to 150 degrees and, half way up the Red Sea, the stokers threw down their shovels and refused to work without a long spell on deck to cool off. The Captain, anxious not to loose time asked for volunteers from the passengers to join the cadets in stoking the ship while the black gang got their rest. I was one of the volunteers and helped stoke the ship for three one hour shifts; by the end of the third shift I had learned to throw a shovelful of coal some four feet into a small furnace opening, that was as close as one could safely get to the furnaces. Eventually the matter of what was, under the laws of the sea, a mutiny was settled, although I don’t know the terms. We had stopped at Suez solely for the purpose of taking on a fresh supply of coal, a very dirty job. We did not dock but moored out in the harbor and two large barges full of coal came alongside, gangplanks were lowered and a steady stream of men, each carrying a sack of coal, came up the gangplanks and emptied their sacks into the bunkers. We had been told to lock our cabin doors and portholes to keep out both thieves and the coal, and then we all went ashore until the coaling was over. When we returned and entered our cabin it was to find that, despite locked doors and closed portholes, everything was covered in a thick film of coal dust and, this was before the days of air-conditioning, under the Egyptian sun the cabin had become an oven; We had to open the door and the porthole and spend several hours on deck while the steward cleaned the cabin and put on fresh linen and the cabin cooled down to a bearable temperature. Early the next morning we started through the Suez Canal which is a long narrow cut punctuated by three lakes. Theses lakes are the only places where one ship can pass another coming from the opposite direction or over take one going in the same direction. Immediately in front of us, as we started through the canal, was a small Greek freighter and directly behind us was the Orient Line’s large passenger liner the Oronsay; we passed the Greek in the first lake but Oronsay had no time to do so. The Greek entered the narrow canal just behind us and, a few minutes later, her rudder jammed and she slewed around until she was broadside to the canal, totally blocking it, then her boilers exploded! It was quite a sight to see and we thanked our lucky stars that we had passed her, the Oronsay was stuck behind her for several days while the canal was cleared. We steamed on to Port Said where a group of the ship’s officers, including the First Officer , who seemed to be developing a bit of a crush on mother, escorted the passengers into the city, which had a rather seamy reputation, a good time was had by all and my principal memory is of consuming large quantities of a gooey but delicious candy called "Turkish Delight’. Next day we set off through the Meditteranean , then through the Straights of Gibraltar. I have been through the Straights three times but never seen the Rock because it has always been at night. Then on to Dunkirk whose port is entered by a long winding river. The evening after we docked Rigden and two other officers took the Riches, mother and me to the local Casino for dinner. Everyone else ordered famous French dishes but I was a bit dubious and ordered a simple herb omelet; the others were all served fairly quickly but nothing was put in front of me. I waited and waited and, at last, a waiter appeared bearing a large silver platter on which was a huge omelet. It must have been a foot long, six inches wide and three inches high. It was very light and fluffy and was the most delicious omelet that I have ever eaten. From Dunkirk we steamed up the North Sea to Hull in northern England where we disembarked. The ship was proceeding from Hull to Copenhagen and then on to London. Rigden offered to take me for a free ride to see Copenhagen but mother was anxious to get to London as soon as possible and, to my intense disappointment, refused permission. Instead we boarded the Flying Scot and arrived in London a few hours later. Strangely I can remember nothing about who met us at the station or any family reunion. Mother and Irene Rich had become close friends on the ship and we were invited to stay with her until we got our bearings. She was quite a wealthy woman and had a large luxurious apartment on Kensington Palace Gardens where we spent the next eight weeks. Charles had gone off to spend the summer with his cousins and I was mostly left to my own devices. I was given a lot of independence and, having acquired a small model yacht spent much of my time sailing it in the Round Pond which was only five minutes walk from the apartment. Other than that I practically lived in the museums which surrounded the area including the Science Museum, the Natural History, the Victoria and Albert and the War Museum. At the end of this time we joined my grandfather, Sir James Slade, and grandmother who were living at the Ivanhoe Hotel on Bloomsbury Street. The Ivanhoe was quite a select hotel in those days with a large lounge, a smoking room furnished with big leather covered armchairs and a very good restaurant where we ate breakfast and dinner almost every day so that I was on friendly terms with our two regular waiters and could cadge a few favors. Life at the Ivanhoe was rather dull except for the presence of the British Museum only two blocks away. I spent a great many hours there and got to know its layout by heart, except for the library which was not open to my age group. I also spent a lot of time walking to Hyde Park, to grandpa’s office in the city, to Piccadilly and over to Green Park or up to Whitehall. One of my fondest memories is of being taken to the Drury Lane Theatre one evening to see a performance of The White Horse Inn a new operetta. There was a big revolving stage that could handle four scenes at once, there were some very good tunes which I can still remember and it was a wonderful evening. We spent Christmas at the Ivanhoe and, once again I was introduced to the "one present for Christmas and your birthday" which I thought was most unfair.
The depression hit England early, business was off and expenses had to be cut so early in the new year mother and I moved in with my Uncle Gerald, Aunt Phyllis and their four daughters Diana, Ruth, Pauline and Stella. Uncle Gerald was just beginning to make his mark as one of the up and coming barristers of the time and the house was in the middle class suburb of South Norwood. It was a large house, still lit by gaslight, with a long narrow garden that backed right onto the Southern Railway’s main line and every time one of the coastal expresses thundered by the whole house shook, but one soon got used to it and ceased to notice it. I got along quite well with the younger girls but, for some reason or another Diana and I were always at loggerheads. This, in turn, caused problems between mother and Aunt Phyllis so, to relieve the tensions I was sent off to a small private boarding school for boys in Norwood. The school had about 25 boys varying in age from 11 to 13 from mostly lower middle class families. We were a tough bunch with most differences being settled by wrestling matches with the rest of the school standing round and rooting for one contestant or the other. No holds were barred except that eye gouging, biting and head butting were frowned upon; the winner was generally the one who succeeded in getting the first head-lock. The school itself was a large house with a big back yard surrounded by a seven foot high brick wall. On the far side of one wall there was a packed earth playground about 200 feet long and 50 feet wide where spent most of our spare time playing a version of soccer with a tennis ball. This taught us ball control to the extent that during the regular soccer season we were able to take on and defeat much larger schools. On Guy Fawkes’ day, the traditional English day for bonfires and fireworks we uses to engage in fireworks battles with town boys, they occupying the playground and we the back garden. We had a distinct advantage because the townies had to lob the torpedoes and fire bombs blind over the wall we were able to climb a row of tall Lombardy poplars at the bottom of the garden and, with good visibility launch our own missiles form them. The school had three classes, broken down by age, and three masters who moved from class to class teaching their own subjects. One of these masters was a quite remarkable man, a Mr. Simpson nickname " Simmy", who had spent many years in South America as a University professor, succumbed to alcoholism and then come home to England and recovered from it. He was a first class teacher and was to play a very important part in my life.
Early in the year mother took a position as receptionist and housekeeper for a bachelor dentist in his early forties. He owned a fair sized house in Sutton, a suburb some fifteen miles outside London. There was a central entrance with a waiting room on the left, the dentist’s office on the right, a big kitchen and pantry behind the waiting room and, behind the dentist’s office a comfortable living-room, with a piano, that looked out onto a large garden. The garden consisted of a trellised patio, then flower beds, then a lawn in the center of which was a thirty foot tall cedar tree and behind the lawn a vegetable and fruit garden in which we grew beans, peas, potatoes, carrots apples and pears. The second floor contained a bathroom and three bedrooms, two of which were given to mother and me. Merideth was quite a pleasant person but I do not think he was a very good dentist because, shortly after our arrival I developed a bad tooth; the doctor gave me laughing gas and attempted to remove the tooth with dental pliers but was unable to budge it. I was brought back to consciousness and had to wait while a second dentist was sent for and then put under again so that between the two of them the tooth was finally removed. In extenuation it must be said that this was before X-rays were in general use in dentistry, the tooth was very large, an inch and a quarter long, and the roots had curved around and joined each other under the jaw bone. Nevertheless, it was a most painful experience. In the spring mother brought up the subject of continuing my education. She was most anxious that I should go to Bedford School, a quite prestigious English "public school" which is really what we would call a private school, where both my father and Uncle Gerald had gone. I knew nothing about the place but figured that it had to be better than Norwood or some London town school, they did not have much of a reputation at that time, so I said it was fine with me. It turned out there was a catch, the depression was already setting in in England and money was tight, so my grandfather had told mother that he would pay the boarding fees if I could get one of the few full tuition scholarships that were available by passing the required exam, Mother was sure that I would need tutoring and did not know where to turn, I told her what a great teacher Simmy was and suggested that she might talk to him. Accordingly Simmy was invited to come to the house to discuss what arrangements might be made. He came out, said I was the only intelligent pupil in the whole school and that he would be delighted to take on the task of getting through the exam with honors, he also said that he would not take any sort of fee, it would be a labor of love. He kept his word and started me on a series of advanced courses outside the regular school hours, keeping my nose hard to the grindstone. One result was resentment from most of the other boys and I had a difficult time, punctuated by several fights, for the rest of my time at the school. One exception to the general attitude was Paddy, an Irish boy with whom I had struck a fast friendship. In fact, I was invited to spend a month of the coming summer vacation at his home and managed to wring a reluctant consent from mother. We took an express from London to Liverpool where we boarded the night ferry for Belfast. Paddy’s father met us there and drove us about forty miles to their home which was a mile or two outside a small town called Dungannon. He was the vicar of a parish consisting of three churches forming a rough triangle with five mile legs. Services were conducted at churches A and B on one Sunday, B and C on the next and C and A on the third so that his parishioners saw their vicar on two of every three Sundays. The vicar was a very busy, man constantly on the road visiting parishioners or attending meetings of various committees so that, except for mandatory attendance at church on Sundays, Paddy and I were left pretty much to our own devices. Within the bounds of the parish there was a private lake about two miles long and half a mile wide; it belonged to a Lord Something or other but, by ancient custom, the vicar and his family had boating and fishing rights on the lake. Paddy and I availed ourselves to the fullest of the privilege and spent three or four afternoons and evenings each week in the family rowboat trolling spinners for pike which turned out to be few and far between, I dont think that we caught more than half a dozen between us in the whole month, but in the last half hour or so we descended to fishing with worms and generally managed to bring back several of the local versions of bluegills, sunfish or crappies which were consumed by the family for dinner and helped stretch a rather poor budget since I gathered that the vicars stipend was rather meagre, however I surmise that he may have had some private income because they were able to afford a maid and, anyway, they were a very happy and pleasant family. One of the high points of our vacation was a joint expedition with Paddy’s family, myself and his uncle, aunt and their daughter to the beach in a small town, Westberry I think it was, just across the border in the Irish Free State. Paddy’s uncle was a farmer and, among other things he raised ducks. After the drive and a swim in the Irish Sea, which, despite a warm sunny day, was too cold to allow one to stay in for very long, we all sat down to a marvelous picnic lunch of cold roast duck, there must have been three or four of them, cold boiled eggs and sundry Irish dishes which I did not recognize but enjoyed. After we kids went for a long walk along the beach while the adults took a siesta, then we all drove home ending a really happy day. The first three weeks of that vacation were almost idyllic but then, halfway through the fourth week I came down with diphtheria. This was a life threatening disease which was not uncommon in rural areas in those days before the preventive vaccine had been invented. Fortunately the disease was diagnosed quickly and I was rushed to an isolation hospital in Dungannon. There was something of an epidemic of diphtheria at the time and also of scarlet fever and the hospital was overcrowded with children with the strange result that I wound up in a ward with a dozen other children of both sexes! Fortunately for me a serum against diphtheria had recently been discovered, I received several injections and made a complete recovery in less than two weeks. By now my four week vacation had been involuntarily extended to almost six and I was hustled straight out of the hospital and on to the boat bound back to Sutton. In the fall, I think that it was sometime in November, I traveled down to Bedford to take the entrance exam, which all boys who wanted to enter the school at the high school level had to pass and which also served as the basis for awarding scholarships. When I got back to Norwood I told an anxiously questioning Simmy that I did not think that I had disgraced him but that the exam had been quite stiff and I was somewhat doubtful about having done well enough to win any scholarship. A couple of weeks later I received a visit at school from my Aunt Clarice, my father’s elder sister who had married Uncle Jack and now lived on his 800,000 acre sheep ranch in Queensland, Australia. She was making an annual visit to London and I think had agreed to come and see me and report back to my father as to how I was doing. Anyway, it was a very pleasant visit and she took me out to lunch at a good restaurant. I told her about Bedford but said that I was not too sanguine about my chances; she wished me luck and added that she would pass the news on to my father. She also asked me to try and keep in touch with him by writing more often.
I think that it was in February that we received the announcement that I had won a full tuition scholarship to Bedford and would be accepted for entrance in September. Much rejoicing and Simmy was invited to join us at a celebration dinner where I assured him that my success was all due to his coaching and prodding. The announcement also contained a letter informing me that I would be a member of St. Cuthbert’s house and would live at Glanyraffon, it’s boarding house. This information was accompanied by a long list of the clothes that I would have to bring to school to meet the boarding and Bedford uniform requirements including such items as two pairs of dark gray slacks, a navy blue blazer, four white shirts with detachable eton collars, socks , underwear, rugby shirt and shorts, white flannel cricket shirt, two pairs of black shoes, a pair of sneakers and football boots. It was a long and expensive list and certain of the items such as the blazer and gray trousers had to be purchased at the approved supplier in Bedford. My grandfather was informed that the news was both good and bad, I had won the scholarship but the cost of the required clothing was going to be high. He rose to the occasion like a trouper, congratulating both mother and me and saying that he anticipated the uniform requirements and was prepared to pay the tab. The last paragraph of the letter stated that because of the distance between boarding houses and the school buildings and playing fields, and the fact that there was a minimum of two trips a day each way, it was recommended that new boys bring a bicycle to school. This caused some consternation as bicycles were expensive in those days, a new one would cost as much as $400 in today’s money. After much discussion it was agreed that a new one was out of the question but resources might be stretched to getting a used one. There followed many days of perusing want ads and making disappointing inspection trips, but at last I located a very nice Hercules with a three speed gear that had been owned for two years by a gentleman who had reached his seventies and decided to give up cycling. The bike was in very good condition and the price was four pounds; you have to consider that the current rate of exchange was roughly five dollars to the pound, so that we are talking about twenty 1931 dollars or about $300 in 1996 currency. I had that through all my three years at Bedford and for about two years after I left school; it took a lot of abuse but was a very sturdy machine. I started at Bedford that September and was immediately introduced to the "fag" system. Each prefect was allowed to pick a new boy as his servant whose job it was to carry the prefect’s books to school, make toast or crumpets for before supper, polish his shoes, clean up his football boots and run any required errands. A prefect was one of six seniors appointed by the house master to keep order among the other boys of the house, he could impose grounding or, in severe cases administer up to six strokes on the back side with a slipper, he was required to pay his fag a stipend of five shillings a term, somewhere around $20 today, and, by custom, was expected to stand his fag lunch at a good restaurant at half-term. If you got a bad fag master life could be quite unpleasant but I was fortunate enough to be chosen by a prefect named Dalgliesh, a pleasant easy going sort who made no extraordinary demands. That first term at Bedford was one of getting used to new rules, new teachers, new customs and generally getting oriented. There were some major adjustments and I was tired and ready for a vacation when Christmas rolled around.
This was a year in which nothing of any consequence happened at home and my interests were all centered on school, so I will try and give you some idea of what life at Bedford School was like. Bedford School was founded in 1142 a.d. as a grammar school for local boys, it is supposed to be the fourth oldest school in England. It is now run by the Harpur Trust, set up by a wealthy merchant somewhere in the fifteenth century, which now has more money than it knows what to do with and also operates two newer schools, the Bedford School for Girls and Bedford Modern School, a vocational school for local boys. The town itself is pleasant, rather sleepy one, sitting on the banks of the River Ouse; it has a population of about fifty thousand. The school consists of two distinct parts which are operated quite separately, they are the junior school running through what we would call the eighth grade and known as " the incubator" or "the inky, and the high school. We are not concerned with the inky. The school body is divided into seven ‘forms’, Third Form for freshmen, Fourth Form and Remove for sophomores and dumber sophomores, Fifth Form modern and Fifth Form classical for juniors and Sixth Form modern and Sixth Form classical for seniors. Students were assigned to classes based on a track system and , at the junior level could choose between a modern track concentrating on math and the sciences or a classical track oriented towards languages and ancient history. The average class size, in my day was about 25 in Third, Fourth and Remove , dropping to about 15 in the Fifth and Sixth Forms. The school year was divided into three thirteen week terms with two weeks vacation at Christmas, three weeks at Easter and eight weeks of summer vacation. Classes ran from 8:30 to 12:30 in the mornings, from 4:00 to 6:00 in the winter and spring terms and from 2:00 to 4:00 in the summer term; all class periods were one hour long with the master for each subject ( there were no female teachers ) coming to the classroom, not the boys moving about, except for special periods for "shop" and . gymnastics, each of which got two periods a week in contrast to the basic subjects , math English, history, French or German and science. "Shop" consisted of three courses, one each term, in metal-working ( the school had it’s own forge in which all the wrought iron gates and fences for the grounds were made ) wood-working, and electrics were taught. This may seem strange for a private school but I can tell you that there were many times, after I had become a home-owner, that I was extremely grateful for those courses. The difference in the timing of afternoon courses was to make the best use of daylight for athletics which were a very important part of the school curriculum. Every boy, unless exempted by a medical certificate, had to take part in one compulsory sport two days of each week and two voluntary sports on four days, Sunday being exempt. The compulsory sports were rugby in the winter, track and field in the spring and cricket in the summer. The voluntary sports were fives ( handball to you ), boxing, wrestling, fencing, rowing and swimming according to season. There were also several voluntary activities such as a drama, photography and debating clubs. The school had its own chapel, built as a memorial to boys of the school who had died in World War I, at which a service was held at 11:00 every Sunday morning. Attendance was required for all boarders but not for "day" boys who lived in the town and made up about 60% of the total school enrolment.Sunday was also the day at which the boys at Glanyraffon were required to do a two mile run in the afternoon come rain shine or frost and snow, a custom unique to our house and one which was cordially detested by all of us. One other feature was compulsory participation in the school’s ROTC which was run by retired army personnel consisting of a sergeant-major and two sergeants. Each summer there was a week-long camp on the army grounds at Aldershot. This was a very large affair attended by most of the schools in southern England that had ROTC units. Each unit shared quarters with a regular army unit; I don’t remember that we ever learnt much but it was an interesting experience, except for one year when it rained every day and the camp became a quagmire full of totally bored and frustrated boys and men.
I had, by now, become acclimatized to Bedford and formed some friendships, two special ones being Jack Webb, an Australian and a fellow member of Glanyraffon, and Peter Sherry a "day boy" who lived in the town with his parents. Sherry ( the use of christian names at school was unheard of ) and I were both ardent cyclists and biked all around the area including trips to a village that had been the home of John Bunyan and was also where the hangars that housed the two giant dirigibles R100 and R101, to the town of Kettering some 15 miles away for the express purpose of evading the school ban and going to a movie and, on the one-day half term holiday a thirty mile ride to Whipsnade and the first large outdoor, natural habitat zoo in England. Webb was more of a walker and we used to go on some good hikes in the surrounding countryside. He came up to Sutton to spend two weeks with us during the summer vacation and we would take day long hikes across the Banstead Downs, stopping at some local pub for a lunch which consisted of as much bread and cheese as one could eat and a pint of beer, all of could be had for sixpence, in those days about equal to 15 cents. It was on returning form one of those hikes that we reached the crest of the Banstead hills and , some ten miles away, got a wonderful view of the great Crystal Palace blazing fiercely. We stood and watched the fire, which totally destroyed the historic building, for almost an hour. One problem that plagued me during my whole time at Bedford was that I was something of a runt; while all the boys around me were growing every year I stayed at about five feet six and 135 pounds through the entire three years. I was a little tall for my age when I got there and a definite runt when I left. This was not too much of a problem in sports except that I was considered too light to make any school team in rugby, which was my favorite sport. I did, however, manage to make the house team for the inter-house matches and became something of a star after the second game in which I scored after a 75 yard run and then scored again after a 20 yard run; they were the only two tries (touchdowns to you) we made but we did win the game as we held the other side scoreless. In those days there was only one graduating exam, it was set by the Oxford and Cambridge examining board, was called the Matriculation Exam ( the Matric for short) and had to be taken by all students at accredited high schools. At Bedford they liked to give everyone plenty of practice so we took the exam three times, first as sophomores, then as juniors and finally as seniors. I took the exam that May and passed with five honors in seven subjects which was the required level for graduation. The rest of the year passed fairly uneventfully.
This was to be my last year at Bedford. I had become a bit bored with the routine of school, the depression in Europe was at its worst and J.B. was feeling the pinch. It was agreed at a family meeting that, providing I again passed the Matric successfully, I would leave at the end of the school year in June and go to work at my grandfather’s firm, thereby providing some much needed financial relief for my mother. Scholastically I did quite well that year, winning the fifth form Fuller Mathematics prize and the Philpott’s English Literature prize. Nobody, including me, took the Philpott’s very seriously because winning it brought the onus of being regarded as a "brain’. The exam that year took the form of a series of essay questions based on two books, the first a book of essays by various authors, which I rather enjoyed, and the second a book called "The Thousand Days" which was a history of Garibaldi’s rebellion in Italy. The day before the exam I suddenly realized that I had not even looked at the Garibaldi so I spent that evening and most of the night (under the covers with a flashlight) reading it. I was dumbfounded , a month or so later, to be informed that I had won the prize, a leather bound and very readable copy of "Napoleon and his Marshals" by A.G. Macdonnel; I kept it for many years until it finally fell apart. I also succeeded in passing the Matric again with seven honors in seven subjects, including a score of 98 out of 100 in the math exam, the high score, up to that time, ever recorded at Bedford. I remember the spring and summer of that term as being one with much time devoted to canoeing and punting on the river and to cricket. The subject if cricket has a story attached to it. I had never shone in that sport being a mediocre batsman and a batting practice bowler (pitcher) on the senior house team. Then in the third house match of the season, with our starting bowlers unable to take a single wicket from the opposition, I was suddenly handed the ball by our captain and instructed to bowl the next inning. My first ball took the wicket of the opposing captain, my second ball took the wicket of his replacement, the third ball was blocked but the fourth felled the next batter up. I had missed a "hat-trick" (three wickets in three balls and roughly the equivalent of a no-hitter) by just one ball. I was one of the two starting bowlers for the rest of the season. My stay at Bedford ended that summer and I had no regrets at the time because I was anxious to get to work. Looking back now I am really sorry that I did not stay on for my senior year, I think I would have enjoyed it, particularly as I was finally starting to grow again. When I left Bedford, after a month’s vacation, I reported for work at my grandfather’s firm ( we would call it a "professional association", but in England it was known as a "firm"). Here I want to make a digression to talk about my grandfather and his firm because it is an interesting piece of family history and because both, in their own way were unique. My grandfather, Sir James Benjamin Slade, was born in the north of England, I think in Lancashire, and as a youth acquired some local fame as a professional track star before leaving to seek fame and fortune in London. He was a very kind man, intelligent, hard working, and possessed the gift of getting along with almost everyone. He joined the real estate firm of Protheroe and Morris as a junior clerk and worked his way up to become the senior and managing partner. Along the way he also became the mayor of Leytonstone, a major London suburb, and then a member of parliament. He also became Senior Warden of the Church of St. Mary le Bow ( the home of Bow Bells) and president of the Royal Horticultural Society. He was quite a man and as much my friend as he was my grandfather, taking me with him on several business trips and treating to my first experience of wine with a bottle of 1928 Ponet Canet over dinner one evening on a trip to Devonshire.I remember with much affection. His firm, Protheroe and Morris, was quite unique, there was nothing like it in England or even the Continent and it had no rivals. It had started in the early nineteenth century as an ordinary real estate firm and then carved out a specialized niche dealing in nursery properties, the ones that raise plants, not babies. In England many people own their houses but not the land those houses sit on because the land is so expensive that very few could afford to buy it. Instead most of the land is let out on long term leases of 99 years up to ,in some cases of commercial property in the cities, 999 years. When the land is sold it is frequently put up to auction. P & M handled many such auctions of nursery property and from there drifted into auctions of the nursery’s stock of plants on a seasonal basis. The next step was to open an auction house in London to which many nurseries all across the country could send their stock. Auction sales of plants were held first on a monthly and then on a weekly basis and P& M became a sort of Sothebys of the plant industry. This, in turn, led to requests from abroad and soon the action was enlarged to include shipments of azaleas, roses, tulips and daffodils from Holland and lily bulbs from Japan. All these imports came in large "lots", the bulbs in cases, and here the English nurseries were the customers. In the early thirties my grandfather made a special trip to France to conduct an auction of the Rothschild orchid collection which netted close to a million dollars, a very healthy sum in those days. I worked at checking in the cases of bulbs as they arrived, opening sample cases so that they could be inspected by the bidders and clerking the sales. At one time I could tell you the type of bulb, tulip, daffodil or lily and in some cases I could even name the particular variety, but I had no idea what the flower looked like. I still remember some of the botanical names of the plants because they had such a lovely sound to them, names like chionadoxa lucillae, scilla charibidis, gentiana sino ornata or my favotite- cupressus lawsoniana psifera filifera aurea. This mouthful was the name of a little dwarf conifer with golden foliage which grew to a maximum height of about two feet! One event from this period which lingers fondly in my memory is a telephone call from Mr Cobby, our assistant house master at Glanyraffon, inviting me to join him for dinner during a visit to London which he had planned for the following week. I was happy to accept and we had a wonderful dinner at the Holburn Restaurant during which we discussed my plans for the future, I really did not have any, and wound up the evening with a liqueur and my first cigar. Cobby and I kept up a sporadic correspondence through the years until I left England.
This was the year when I suddenly started growing again, and very rapidly. From first to last I grew about four inches that year and another two in the following year. Clothes were a continuing problem as I could nor afford to replace them as fast as I grew out of them, the result was that I spent most of the year looking like a gangly, bare-legged skeleton! In January I enrolled in The College of the Estate Agents and Surveyors Institute which entailed two evenings a week of night classes for two years, leading to an examination for membership in the Institute. I understand that either during World War II or shortly thereafter the college was folded into and has become a part of the University of London. The college had a rugby team of which I became an enthusiastic member, playing at fullback. This position is different from that of a fullback in American football as its principal requirements are not being able to run straight into a defensive line but rather the ability to make a good tackle and to punt a good distance. I developed something of a reputation in the latter category as, at my best, I could punt a rugby ball some sixty yards. The strange thing was that I was a complete bust at place-kicking (kick-off and conversions) which I never could master. In April I developed stomach pains and was diagnosed as having appendicitis and was told that I would have to have an operation. Much dismayed at the thought of not being able to play tennis all summer ( I had recently joined the Cheam Tennis Club) I asked the doctor if the operation could wait until fall. He said yes but within the week called me back for a second examination, following which he insisted that the operation should be performed the very next week. In doing so he probably saved my life because when they opened me up they found that peritonitis was just setting in. Shortly after the operation I took the first solo vacation in my life and went to the seaside town of Bournemouth, not far from Southampton. I had a wonderful ten days doing nothing but lazing on the beach, swimming and walking in the surrounding hills; I had to walk because I had no car. This was the year in which I got to know Jack Moll who had been Head of the School at Bedford in my freshman year. Jack was the fourth of five brothers and the fourth to go to Bedford, the fifth one was due to enter the school that fall. Jack had been captain of the school’s rugby team and went on to play for the English international team. The Molls were a delightful and hospitable family, the had a tennis court in their back yard and I was given an open invitation to come and play at any time. Jack died during the war in a tragic way, he had been in Africa on active service, came home on leave and was killed when a horse he was riding put its foot into a rabbit hole, fell and threw Jack, his neck was broken in the fall. One event that was to have a lasting effect on my life occurred early in the year when my other caught me smoking a cigarette. I do not know how, but for some reason she was far ahead of her time, and read me a long lecture on the hazards of cigarette smoking, She wound up by saying " I suppose you must smoke, but let it be a pipe and not cigarettes". She then bought me my first pipe and packet of tobacco. My grandfather, himself a confirmed pipe smoker, upon seeing me with a pipe in my mouth, proceeded to educate me upon the qualities of different types of tobacco and took me up to his tobacconist to help me select the right blend for a beginner, a gesture which I have appreciated for lo these many years.
Early that year I joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR), nicknamed "the wavy navy" because the stripes on the officer’s uniforms were wavy rather than the straight bands of the regular navy. However I joined as a humble seaman, not as an officer, and was assigned to the signals division. This was unfortunate because while I had no trouble with flag hoists and codes my eyesight failed me when it came to reading the rapid blinks of an Aldis signal lantern. Nevertheless I did manage to rise to the heights of signalman first class! The RNVR offered much to a young single male, we met once a week on the training ship, an old transformed merchant ship armed with two 4.7 inch guns plus several machine guns, for drills and classes. When weather permitted there were trips in the longboat to an island near the mouth of the Thames where we camped for the weekend. The longboat was a heavy brute to row, even with six oars a side, and almost as bad to sail as she had a sort of lateen rig which meant that the mainsail had to lowered and rehoisted every time one wanted to tack. We always tried to time our trips so that we could go with the tide in each direction and if the tide was adverse we could generally get a tow from some friendly tug. There was a shooting team which competed at the armed forces range at Bisley; I turned out to be quite good at this gaining a marksman’s badge and winning one of the competitions. Add to this a boxing team into which I was drafted, because of my having trained at Bedford, and on which I was defeated in the semi-finals of the national middle-weight tournament by the eventual winner of the finals. An annual two week stint of service with the navy was mandatory and that summer I got shipped down to Plymouth were I was assigned to a brand new cruiser, HMS Newcastle. She was one of a new class with nine six inch guns in three triple turrets, somewhat lightly armored since she was designed for speed in defending convoys and acting as a scout for the big battleships ships.. We spent most of that two weeks at dockside in Plymouth with the battleship Rodney (later to play apart in the destruction of the German battleship Bismark) tied up directly behind us and the aircraft carrier Courageous ahead of us. We did go out on one time trial cruise and recorded a speed of 42 knots, slightly above her designed speed of 40 knots. What I liked most, however, was that there was a rugby team of a higher caliber than that of the EA & S Institute. Again I was drafted and had a wonderful time. We played a full schedule of teams, mostly army or naval dockyard, from all around an area within 50 miles of London. We had no home field so we were always on the road but we still managed to win more than half our games and there was the added plus of the hospitality in the way of dinners and drinks we received as the visiting team after the game. There was a lot of beer, generally some sort of sing-along and always a good time.
This was a memorable year. It started with an event that would change the course of my life. My mother had an old friend, the Lady Alison Carleton (she was a peeress in her own right), who had a ward, a young woman named Judy, for whom she planned to hold a party on the evening of January 14. Invitations were sent out and my name was on the list. Mother was very keen for me to go because she wanted to oblige an old friend, but I was not enthusiastic since Lady Alison’s parties were generally rather dull. Fortunately I was scheduled to play in an out of town RNVR rugby game and had a valid excuse which I detailed in an RSVP note. Fate intervened in the shape of a major snowstorm on the 14th, resulting in hurried telephone calls rescheduling the party for January 21. This time I had no excuse and reluctantly presented myself at Lady Alison’s door that evening. The party was one at which one had to play a succession of party games, one of them consisted of having to decipher a series of anagrams of the names of world-wide cities written on cards pinned to the walls. I am quite good at anagrams, probably because of my fondness for crossword puzzles, and was making my way around the room fairly quickly when I saw a stunningly beautiful girl standing in front of the next card. I peered over her shoulder at the card and said "Try Manhattan". Somewhat startled she turned around, gave me a withering look, and said "What did you say?’. I hastily introduced myself and explained that I was referring to the game card. She thawed sufficiently for me to learn that her name was Helen Stapler, that she was an American, that she and her grandmother were at the beginning of a one year tour of Europe and had only recently arrived in London. She then said that she, too, would have been unable to attend had the party been held on the 14th. With this common bond established we spent the rest of the evening together and I put the time to good use by suggesting that she allow me to show her some of the sights of London that were not on the regular sight seeing list. Helen consented (by that time we were on a first name basis), and we made a date to visit Hampton Court Palace on the following Sunday. That date was followed by many, many more. In fact we were seeing each other almost every day. Helen’s grandmother became alarmed, and in mid-February, whisked her off to Paris. Helen and I countered this with frequent letters and Mrs. Stapler decided that the safest thing to do would be to return to New York. The arrangements were made and she and Helen returned to England just a few days before sailig back to the U.S A. I went down to Southampton to see them off and was able to spend one last day with Helen before she sailed. It was a very mournful day, but we both resolved that this was not going to be the end of things. There was no transatlantic airmail in 1937 but there were ships, Atlantic greyhounds, the Cunarders, Aquitania, Berengaria, Mauritania and Queen Mary, the French Ile de France and Normandie, the German Bremen and Europa and the U.S. America and West Point all of which did the round trip in fourteen days, five days for the crossing and two days in port each way, sothat there was a sailing nearly every day. Sailing schedules were published in the Sunday papers and Helen and I knew them by heart; our correspondence was hot and heavy. In April I became heavily involved in an RNVR training program to be one of the guards for the coronation procession of King George V which was coming up in May. That was quite an event; after hours of special drills and much cleaning, pressing and pipe-claying of uniforms we marched out to the Earl’s Court Exhibition Hall on the evening before, slept there on cold, hard concrete floors, and at four o’clock in the morning got up to a cold breakfast then marched five miles to Whitehall where we took up our guard position at the upper end, not far from Westminister Abbey, just before 6a.m. The procession itself was a thing of splendor consisting of contingents of troops from all over the British Empire- Anzacs from Australia and New Zealand, Mounties from Canada, Sepoys from India, Gurkas from Nepal and special units from the RAF and Royal Navy. Almost all the units were throwing their rifles about in fancy drill routines on the march and there were military bands of different kinds- brass, drum and fife, bugle corps, bagpipes etc. between about every three units. All this was topped by the new King and Queen at the end of the procession, in an open carriage, surrounded by an escort of the Royal Horse Guards. We, of course, had a front row view of the whole affair even if we did have to stand at the ‘present arms’ position for the last hour. We were dismissed at 2:30p.m. and we all dashed to get ready for the evening when we were to hold a dance on board HMS President with RNVR contingents from all over the globe as our guests. It was a wonderful evening. In June I took my vacation with two friends from the Institute. We got together and boarded a small coastwise freighter for a trip down the English Channel, round Land’s End up past the coast of Wales through the Irish Sea to Liverpool with stops to load and unload cargo at several small ports along he way. The ship stopped at Liverpool for three days and we disembarked and made our way some 40 miles to Blackpool (sort of an English equivalent to Atlantic City) where we rode the rides, including a giant roller coaster, and ogled the girls on the beach. Then back to Liverpool for the return journey. The most remarkable thing about the whole trip was that we had fantastic weather, the days were hot and sunny with no rain and we played innumerable games of cards or just lolled on the deck filling the time with idle talk. As enjoyable and relaxing a vacation as anyone could ask for. While all this was going on, by mutual agreement I had told my family, and Helen had told hers, that we wanted to become engaged. The reaction of both families was one of vociferous disapproval, we were too young, we had not known each other long enough etc.. Nevertheless we persisted with our correspondence and intentions and , somewhere on the fall of that year Helen’s Uncle Beverley came to London to give me the once over. We had a couple of meetings including attending an international rugby game, England against Scotland I think, and I believe that he also met with my grandfather before returning to New York. The result was that although there was still no approval, both families seem to have come to the conclusion that the other was respectable and the hostility subsided, at least for the time being. Helen and I continued our spate of letters and I learnt that she had found a job at a woman’s specialty store called "The Bermuda Shop".
In terms of world affairs this was a turbulent tear. A year of the Czechoslovakian crisis, the October mobilization of the Royal Navy, including the RNVR ( with me as part of it ) and Chamberlain’s return from Munich with his message of "peace in our time"; but I am writing of more personal matters and in that context this was a most important year. At the beginning of March Helen wrote to say that she would be sailing for London on the steamship American Farmer, a small ship which carried a mixture of passengers and cargo, at the end of the month. Early in April I went down to the docks at Tilbury to meet her and escort her to her hotel. The families had reluctant agreed to an engagement, provided that we understood that we would have to wait for at least a year before there could be any wedding. A ring was bought and duly presented and we tried to settle down to the waiting, but we were restless and the political future was already looking bleak. We decided to elope and laid our plans accordingly, making a reservation at a country inn in Worthing on the south coast not far from Brighton and buying tickets on the Southern Belle, an all pullman express train running once a day non-stop to Broghton and then on to Hove and Worthing. On June 17th we were married at St. Jude’s Church in Kennsington and took off on our honeymoon immediately after the ceremony. That was the end of childhood and the beginning of a long, loving, eventful and most rewarding life together.
THE END