40s and 50s Memories
toppled, or become seriously ill, and we lived
prepared for an instruction from the British
High Commission for immediate evacuation
- mercifully that never happened. One big
interruption in the long sequence of courses
was when I had to administer a conference
for institutes of administration from all over
anglophone Africa, called at the suggestion
of a Professor Richardson, a former District
Officer in the Sudan and Nigeria who had
qualified as a barrister and who was currently
Vice-Chancellor of Ahmadu Bello University
in the latter country. Towards the end of the
conference he asked me what I would be doing
next, and I said I would try to capitalise on my
experience there in management training. As
we were leaving Kenya in mid-1969 the whole
country was devastated to learn of the murder
of Tom Mboya, which was widely presumed to
be a contract killing on behalf of some of those
in power.
Very soon I made a first move to broaden my
experience in training, joining the management
training staff of Mindeco, the governmentowned copper
mining company of the by-now
independent government of Zambia, a very
interesting but harsh environment but as it did
not suit the family we moved to England after a
year. It was symbolic of the difficulties I was now
to confront that when I flew back to England the
zebra-striped Bristol Britannia chartered by a
'Sikh hockey club' in Nairobi that I had joined as
a 'temporary member' for the occasion circled
Gatwick for an hour while the promoters tried
in vain to get landing permission, before being
turned away to land at Ostend. There we were
shepherded onto a rattle-trap DC4 converted
into a car ferry which staggered across the
Channel to deposit us at Southend at 1 am,
whence I made my way, via a back-street hotel
at Paddington, on to the first train to rejoin the
family at Taunton. Beth had had to precede
me by a month, and valiantly coped with all
the difficulties of finding a house and settling
the children in school, at Pyrland and Weirfield
respectively.
Feeling the need for a formal course of my own, I
settled on the Diploma in Industrial Management
at the new Bath University of Technology, taking
the Training speciality, and although making heavy weather of this, I did get through and
in the long run it stood me in good stead. Jobseeking in
England got me nowhere, until I had
a call to let me know that 'Dr Richardson from
Australia' wanted to recruit me for a training
programme in Papua New Guinea which was
approaching independence, coupled with the
inducement of a permanent senior lecturership
in Canberra on completion of a three-year tour
in PNG. This I happily accepted and on the 4th
of May 1972 I was on a Boeing 707 headed for
Sydney. A week or so of briefing in Canberra
and I was on my way to PNG. This was a country
supposedly on the verge of independence and
I was being rushed there to help while there
was still time. As it turned out, disagreements
between the politicians of the twenty districts
were in fact so deeply ingrained that there was
still no agreement on constitutional matters by
the time I left the country three years later. The
Administrative College, as it was called, was
a few miles outside Port Moresby and close
to the well-established university. I was to
work with Australian staff running courses for
senior officers on broadly similar lines to those
I had been running in Kenya. There was some
resentment at first that I and a couple of others
from the UK were trespassing on an Australian
preserve, and a feeling common to many
academics in Australia that PNG was unique
and could learn nothing from Africa. However
those sentiments faded over time. It was
customary that courses such as I was running
should include a last fortnight in Sydney to
observe Australian practice in local government.
So I was not popular when, with a large grant
from the Commonwealth Foundation, I took my
last course on a study tour of Malaysia. This
proved a great success and the participants
found a visit to another developing country,
albeit at a more advanced stage than their own,
much more profitable than just going down to
Australia.
The family had stayed in Taunton while I
pioneered the Australian and PNG scene but
after a year they joined me. The big plus for us,
in the hot and humid climate, was the beach
and the offshore islands, and every weekend
found us snorkelling on the brilliant tropical
reefs and stocking our own small aquarium
tank with a brilliant array of small tropical
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