Emigration from England to South Africa

Chapter 11: Emigration from England to South Africa When we landed at Harwich this time there was no trouble with Customs. Out of the dock area our first need was to fill up with petrol and when we did so Nigel was very intrigued and said to me quietly so as not to hurt anyone’s feelings ‘Daddy, They all speak English here!’ Of course, as they were often during the day in Utrecht in the care of a Dutch nanny (after her marriage, Kitty had been replaced by ‘Babs’), they heard a lot of Dutch spoken and understood quite a bit. When Babs took them to the Wilhelminapark (where it was forbidden to walk on the grass!), she would take them to see the ducks and they knew them as ‘eendtjes’ and a passing horse would be referred to as ‘een paard’. Only two days after we returned to England Stuart was being a little fractious when being taken for a walk in his push-chair, or stroller as it seems to be now called, and we attempted to distract his attention from whatever was worrying him by pointing out a passing horse and cart by saying ‘Kijk, Stuart, een paard!’ he replied crossly ‘It isn’t a paard, it’s a horse!’ Life in England was obviously not going to easy because we did not have a home, we only had the car for a few days until I would have to hand it over to Dr Johnson, my replacement for the job in Holland, and all I had to build a practice around was my appointment at the Middlesex which thanks to the introduction of the National Health Service was paid now, but not enough to keep a wife and family of three children. Lilian’s parents lived in a small house in Mottingham and managed to be able to give us the use of one bedroom. I cannot remember what happened to Anthony but we found a Children’s Home on the South Coast at Littlehampton where we could board Nigel and Stuart temporarily. I was able to get five half-day sessions at the Middlesex, but of course they were the worst five sessions, all the better ones had been filled by my anaesthetic colleagues on the staff, including now Peter Dinnick and Brian Sellick, and I was landed with the sessions none of the others wanted, including a session with a newly appointed neurosurgeon, a Dr Diana Beck, the first woman surgeon to be appointed to the staff of the Middlesex. Diana Beck was a very nice person but she had the prevailing disadvantage of all neurosurgeons at that time, her operations were often very protracted and a morning session might not end until well into the evening. I had to try and fit any private cases I could get into the hours when not engaged at the Middlesex on hospital routines. I could not with confidence accept any private work on the afternoons following my ‘morning’ session with Diana Beck. I had to try to get a car and found that unlike in Holland where such things were well regulated, in England there was a waiting list and the people at the top of the list were those who had had the foresight to order a new car even during the war before cars were being produced for the civilian needs. The waiting time on the list was about two years, but luckily the British Medical Association had come to an arrangement with car manufacturers that medical practitioners without a car should be given preference, so under this scheme I managed to acquire a new Humber Hawk within about two weeks of returning to England. It turned out to be one of the worst cars I have ever owned. The door handle of the driver’s door had a habit of coming off loose in my hand and the self starter would not work once the engine was hot, and if it stalled in traffic I had to get out, lift the bonnet and press a mysterious knob called the solenoid. This performance in a crowded and busy London street is annoying to the motorist stuck behind as well as wearing on the performer’s nerves. I looked all over the car carefully, 170 certain I would find somewhere chalked on the chassis a little notice ‘Unfit for Export’ but I failed to locate it. Still it went, most of the time, and I could not have carried on without it. I had to pay £900 for it and sign an undertaking that I would not sell the car in less than a year from the purchase date. This was to try and stop the racket which ‘Smart-Alecs’ had devised of putting their name down for every car on the market and as a soon as a new one became available, selling the current car for as much as twice the purchase price of a new car, such was the shortage of cars on the ordinary market. There was a proviso that if one had to sell the car for any valid reason before the year was up one could sell it, but only back to the original agent who in his turn agreed to refund the entire new purchase price. Rather than commute by car from Mottingham morning and night to the west End, a matter of about 15 miles through heavy traffic each way, I used to leave the car from Monday to Friday, or even until Saturday mid-day if I had any private work on Saturday morning, in the car park of the Middlesex Hospital and do the journey by rail. I knew the line very well as Mottingham is only one station further on than Lee where I had lived as a student and commuted for nearly five years. The practice went better than I had expected, quite a few of the dentists with whom I had worked before and during the war were pleased to see me back and gave me support. I did not have the help to which I had been accustomed from Patterson, so I had quite a lot of extra manual heavy labour, but I was only 37 years old and fit. One day I was walking along Mortimer Street when I met a young doctor who had been a student at the Middlesex and I knew he had come originally from South Africa, He asked me what I was doing these days and I told him that if it had not been for the intransigence of the South African Medical Council with their blessed Specialist Register I would have been in Johannesburg on the staff of the General Hospital there. He asked for details and then said me would write to his father who was still in practice in South Africa and see what could be done about it. I didn’t really expect anything would come of it but some time in early December I received a letter from the Medical Superintendent of the Johannesburg General, saying that in consultation with the University of the Witwatersrand, they had decided to offer me the job again, but I must come as soon as possib1e. I found that all the accommodation in the Cabin Class of the Union Castle Line which ran regular services every fortnight between Southampton and Cape Town was booked out for many months but that in the first week of January 1949 there was a vacant Family Cabin in the First Class, and I decided to take that. Then followed a hectic time saying farewell to my mother, my father and Dora my stepmother, all my in-laws and friends. I sold the car back to the agents, who had big glossy showrooms in Piccadilly, for the £900 I had given for it and saw it in their shop windows a few days later polished up and a ‘bargain’ at £1250. I gave in my notice to the Middlesex Hospital and severed my connection with that institution a where I had been continuously as a student, resident, Assistant Anaesthetist and finally for the last 10 years as an Honorary Anaesthetist (though for the last three 171 months Honorary in name but not in fact), in all for more than 20 years. I went there as a student in September 1928 and left in January 1949. I asked the Dutch removal firm, by the name of De Boer, to send our furniture to Johannesburg, but asked then to hold it in storage until I could give them on address. The only people I knew in South Africa were George and Vera Ridge. George was the friend of my mother’s family to whom Olive had sent me on his farm in Leicestershire in the hope of eradicating that stupid idea of becoming a farmer, way back in 1926, twenty-three years before. They had immigrated to South Africa where George had a small holding about 20 miles south of Johannesburg on the road to Vereeniging, where the Peace Treaty had been signed at the end of the Boer War. The smallholding was too small to be viable as a farm and George had got a job with the Robinson Deep gold mine, and commuted daily. I managed to contact them (the postal service must have been much better then than it is now, in spite of the introduction of airmail as a regular thing) and they said we could stay with them until we managed to find more permanent accommodation.

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