Part 89
After leaving school in 1954 and travelling 2,500 miles by train from outside Durban on the East Coast to the West Coast of Southern Africa, I arrived in Walvis Bay in Namibia.
Walvis Bay has had a curious history. It was first visited by the Portuguese explorer Bartholomew Dias in 1487 on his expedition to find a sea route to the East Indies via the Cape of Good Hope. He never staked a claim to the territory. It was only in the eighteenth century that the Dutch established Walvis Bay as a stopover between Cape Town and the Netherlands.
In the nineteenth century, Britain occupied Walvis Bay and the nearby Penguin Islands (a chain of man-made platforms for collecting nitrate-rich bird guano) and allowed the now-British Cape Colony (taken from the Dutch) to annex Walvis Bay in1884. Although the port and town were entirely surrounded by South West Africa, a German territory, Walvis Bay remained part of the Cape.
Walvis Bay was overrun by the Germans in World War I but recaptured by the South African Forces in 1915. Thereafter, South Africa was awarded control of South West Africa by the League of Nations, forerunner of the United Nations, with Walvis Bay being administered through the South West African authorities. South West Africa gained independence as Namibia in 1990. Walvis Bay finally was fully incorporated into Namibia in1995.
That was my home for the next year – as I have mentioned in previous blogs – but I gave some thought to it the other day and recalled how it shaped my future after leaving school.
My dad owned a pilchard fishing trawler. After having crewed on it for two seasons, he became a “shore skipper,” sending the trawler out with its sea captain, Henry Bouwer, giving my dad plenty of time to explore other activities.
When I arrived from school, I did not have the faintest idea of what I wanted to do. There had been an outside chance of my going to Cambridge University, but the headmaster at my school, Michaelhouse, hated my guts and refused to write a letter recommending me.
When my dad asked if I wanted to follow in his footsteps in the fishing industry, I replied, “No, thanks.” He laughed and said, “Thank God for that.” At no point did he ever suggest that I follow any particular career – other than to say, “OK, while you’re making up your mind, I’m opening a fish and chip shop. I want you to run it.”
I did so, as previously written, and spent the next few months concentrating on running the shop and playing rugby for the town. I did later take a job with the local timber merchants, but by now I was firmly fixed on the idea of leaving home and returning to the UK. My dad shrugged and said, “If you can find a way to pay for your passage, good luck. Don’t expect me to pay for you.”
This made me all-the-more determined to make it. I had heard that visiting cargo ships often had some of their sailors beaten up by the incredibly tough Walvis Bay fishermen and were taken to hospital to recover. The ships would either leave short-handed or on occasion they would find someone willing to work his passage to Europe to fill in for the missing crewman.
I made enquires through the port captain and he confirmed that it did happen, but I should be ready to leave at a day’s notice. About three weeks later, I got a phone call to say that a Swiss cargo ship, the Anunciada, had lost three crewmen to the flying fists of the fishermen, some of whom had played rugby with me.
I had already left the timber yard and so told my parents that I was on my way. My mom was clearly saddened but told me it was the right thing to do. My dad shrugged, peeled off ten pounds (still South African currency until the 1960s, linked in value to the British pound) from a roll of banknotes and wished me good luck. I never knew whether my dad wanted me to succeed or fail, but I happily accepted the challenge of getting over to Britain with virtually nothing except my dad’s “’tenner.”
The only lifeline offered to me was that my mom promised that they would write to my English granny (Annie Ronald) to let her know I was on my way over to Britain.
I boarded the Anunciada the following day, ignoring jibes from friends that the Swiss don’t have a navy. In fact, they do have a number of cargo ships registered at Basel (in landlocked Switzerland with its “home” port of Rotterdam in Holland).
I was surprised to be given the task of helmsman, which I supposed was a pretty skilled job. As written previously, I was closely supervised by the officer on watch and managed to perform my duties quite well, apart from being seasick every half hour or so and asking the officer to take the wheel while I threw up over the side of the ship.
I get the feeling that most young men and women form some idea of what they want to do when they leave school. I honestly had no idea at all. Had I managed to get into a university, I would probably have chosen architecture. I did also have a moment staring at the magnificent and massive sand dunes of the Namib desert on the doorstep of the town. I dreamed of becoming a writer one day but had no idea of where and how to start. After fooling around with a vague theme of a novel, I had dismissed it as being too difficult.
The voyage for the 40,000-ton Anunciada took three weeks to Rotterdam, from where I would have to find my way to Britain. I had plenty of time in which to think about what I wanted to do when I reached the UK. All I could come up with was a resolve to join a top rugby club and see how far I could get in the sport, having just missed playing for South West Africa against the 1955 British Lions. As it was still an amateur sport in those days, I would still have to find a job and I decided I would take on anything that allowed me to train for and play rugby.
Steering 40,000 tons of metal through a big storm in the Bay of Biscay, turning the ship to face every incoming seventh wave (which for some reason is always larger than the other six), took some doing but I managed it quite well. A warning that if the ship were broadside to the seventh wave it could capsize probably motivated me to keep on my toes. All thoughts of a future career were erased as I faced a truly dangerous and frightening situation.
Another nerve-wracking but less frightening event was the morning we entered the English Channel. The officer explained that there were up to twenty ships in sight at any one time but all on divergent courses in almost any direction. I was told to be prepared to alter course in seconds after receiving the command.
I think perhaps I grew up somewhat during those weeks of steering and puking days from south to north but still had not arrived at a career path.
Arriving at Rotterdam, I had just enough money to buy a ticket on a ferry to Harwich on the English side of the Channel, as well as a train ticket to London. Once there, I decided to call my granny whom I had always called Gaga – no relation to the current Lady!
She was very excited to hear from me and insisted that I catch a train or bus to Weybridge and come to stay at the hotel where she lived. Just as well, I could not have afforded anywhere to stay in London for more than two nights at the most. So, I continued on to Weybridge, the town where I was born before we had left for South Africa when I was 9.
Could I ever have stayed in Walvis Bay? Today it has grown from a small port with a population of about 20,000 to a city of over 62,000. Its shipping container facility which started in the 1980s can now handle 750,000 containers a year, thanks to a new 40-acre platform built on land reclaimed from the sea. Would I have been satisfied to have grown with Walvis Bay, perhaps becoming a big fish in a small pool? I doubt it. Thankfully, I drifted into the arts, which proved to be a perfect antidote for someone who could have ended up scratching a precarious living as an amateur sportsman.
I have been enormously fortunate in my later life to not only publish a trilogy of novels, as well as being poised to produce a movie from one of my screenplays. Even more exciting in many ways has been my involvement for the past five years with the computing system that will take the world of computing to a completely new level. ExoTech is not just “the answer to a maiden’s prayer” but a concept that will allow every computer user on the planet to operate her or his computer with simplicity, certainty and success.
Truly amazing!
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.