Because of the length of this article it is in several parts.
Preface. To my astonishment three people of the few dozen from that remote place and distant time likely to be still alive have read this effort. Both have mildly taken me to task about “errors” so I thought I should make my position clear. This essay is a reminiscence not a work of historical scholarship, although I have invented nothing. What I say happened to me, happened. What I say I was told, I was told. Matters that were just “common knowledge” though may well not have been accurate. But if they are stories, they are not my stories. I do not know that Peachey crashed in the aircraft he had entered for the pre war London Johannesburg air race, but I do know he had a wardrobe full of spats. I think it is reasonably clear which stories are apocryphal but I have now made that clearer in places.
I now regret that I did not question more the colourful characters that clustered in Abercorn. How did John Carlin come to be there running The Lake Press – an unlikely venture in itself – and why did both his married and his unmarried sister follow him there? But I was young, and about others the young are incurious.
P S May 2006

Fifty years ago it was called Abercorn after the Lord of Abercorn and Fife, although as far as I know he had nothing to do with the place. Old Fife was 50 miles or so on the road to eastwards to Mbeya but there was nothing at Old Fife in my day. Abercorn is now called Mbala but I’ll stick to the names of half a century ago because that is the time I am writing about. Those were the last years of colonial rule. The Empire was ending perhaps not before time, but sadly it is difficult to claim that what has happened since has been for the better.
Abercorn was and Mbala is, at the end of every line. When you had moved on from every other place in Africa you would find yourself at Abercorn and there you might well stay since there was nowhere else to go. Abercorn was not on the way to anywhere. Abercorn was in the extreme north of Northern Rhodesia on the plateau 30 odd miles from the southern tip of Lake Tanganyika. The dirt road from the Copper Belt six hundred miles to the south, reached Abercorn and ended there. In the mid nineteen fifties a DC 3 Dakota flew in a couple of times a week either from Ndola or from Nairobi. Every three weeks the Liemba – scuttled at the end of the First World War and a sister ship of the vessel in the African Queen – put in at Mpulungu an hour’s drive away. You could have an indifferent meal there which at least made a change. If you drove down after dark you would see below you the lights of boats - perhaps a hundred, perhaps more - fishing for chembe, a sardine sized fish that when dried is a staple food throughout East and Central Africa. The lights came from paraffin pressure lamps, Tilley lamps, hung from the prow to attract the fish. It was a magical sight.
There were I would guess about a hundred whites living in Abercorn and the area nearby, mainly British, divided between the colonial administration, local settlers and the “locusts”. Abercorn was the headquarters of the International Red Locust Control Service that employed me. The nearest settlement was Kasama a hundred miles to the south and perhaps twice as large as Abercorn but populated only by the colonial administration. A track led to the Kalambo Falls where the river plunged off the edge of the plateau, a fall if I remember correctly of over 700 ft; one of the largest single drops in the world. An eerie place where it was said unfortunates used to be pushed over the edge. Maribou stork were always circling against the rock sides and that added to the feeling of unease. Another track led north-eastwards across the Ufipa Plateau and so to the Rukwa trough and the locust breeding grounds.
I find it difficult to credit that the time between the first settlers coming to Abercorn and my arrival was no longer than between then and now. I arrived at the beginning of August 1956 and left 5 years later. Livingston died not far away and his body was carried across the Rukwa and so to the coast. Harry Johnston came and described the Rukwa as a “terrestrial hell”, but it wasn’t as bad as that. Abercorn itself had an excellent climate; rarely above 30 deg C but cold enough in winter – the dry season - to justify a log fire.
There were then about 40 families in Abercorn – I mean white of course. There were 16 locust people – the Director, the Admin Officer, 2 accounts clerks, 2 pilots, an aircraft engineer, 4 scientists, 2 Senior Field Officers, and 3 mechanics - with about the same number stationed in the locust breeding areas. There were also about a dozen Public Servants; the District Commissioner - a New Zealander, his deputy - a South African, 2 District Officers, 3 Agricultural Officers, the Post Master, and several dealing with roads, bridges and buildings. The rest of the community consisted of the three that ran the local stores, John Carlin who improbably ran a printers- The Lake Press, Peter Parton an ex-locust mechanic who ran the garage, the proprietor on the Abercorn Arms, and about a dozen settlers, half of whom attempted to farm and the remainder who had just come to rest in Abercorn. There was a Catholic Mission some 12 miles from Abercorn and a London Missionary Society settlement with a leper hospital a similar distance away.
The North Road ended its run as Abercorn’s main street; unpaved of course. There was a plaque recording the “Good News”, a ship brought up from the coast in pieces and used to try to put down slave running across Lake Tanganyika. There was also an obelisk to mark the place where the Germans surrendered at the end of the Great War. There were three stores, Westy’s on the right, Booths North more or less opposite and Landry’s further on. There was also the Post Office and the office of the District Commissioner, known as the “Boma”. Further on again was the T V M I - the Tanganyika Victoria Memorial Institute - where there was a film show once a fortnight. Next came the Anglican Church. The graves – graves of those who had died mostly at no great age and often of black water fever, the final stage of repeated malaria- were some way off on a rise. From there the road ran downhill skirting Lake Chilla – a lake about a mile across - and then degenerated into a track leading to Tanganyika. Three streets of residences led off the main street, the middle one divided round the locust headquarters, an attractive building in a vaguely Dutch colonial – it was in fact Belgian – style. The last road was “nobs’ row” with the District Commissioner’s house and the houses of the more senior of the locust officers. These had a view across a nine-hole golf course to Lake Chilla. I forgot to include the “Abercorn Arms” (prop. Ted Davis). Ted had two notable talents. He could add-up the cost of a round in his head with great speed, almost always incorrectly and never to your advantage – “Oh, sorry old timer.” He could also while sitting on his bar stool reach behind and without looking draw a tot of whisky from one the inverted bottles lining the bar; years, no decades, of practice.
Northern Rhodesia was covered with woodland; a woodland of short, thin, ill shaped trees. I found that claustrophobic. I felt hemmed in. Abercorn was an island in a woodland sea that went on and on without change, without break and seemingly without end. I felt marooned.
I was born and grew up in working class East Bristol. I took a degree in Geography and became a teacher. I thought I should see something of the world since my experience of foreign parts was a limited to a fortnight cycling in France. So I applied for the job of Mapping Officer with the International Red Locust Control Service. I had no idea at all what living in a remote corner of Africa would be like, which was just as well since I didn’t enjoy the experience. I wrote two letters one accepting the job and the other turning it down. I asked my wife which I should post. She said, “Oh let’s go.” I pushed letter number one into the box as she cried, “No, take it back!” but by then it was too late and so we went.
We flew out in an Argonaut, a propeller driven four engined aircraft with a ceiling of about 12,000ft. We did not fly over but rather through the Alps. The view was breathtaking. We came down to refuel frequently. We must have landed at Rome and I recall touching down at Cairo and Khartoum, an airport I came to know and hate years later. There is a correlation between the poverty and insignificance of a country and the complexity of its security arrangements. I once counted the number of times I had to show my passport before taking my seat on the ‘plane leaving Khartoum; it came to thirteen! I sat transfixed watching the sun come up over the White Nile. Entebbe was the next stop and the flight ended at Nairobi. A night in the Norfolk then the Dokota to Abercorn. The pilot took us low over the Serengeti to “look at a spot of game”. He sounded as though he sported a set of handle-bar moustaches, if you see what I mean. It wouldn’t happen now.
We landed on Abercorn’s dirt runway where there was a modest group of locals, not there to meet us but for various reasons and some for no real reason at all. The ladies wore ill fitting floral cottons and the men in the main, shirt and shorts. I remember later the new South African wife of one of our pilots arriving in dark glasses and a tailored Safari suit as though coming from the set of Magombo; this apparition was viewed with to a mixture of amusement and contempt.
We stayed that first week with the chief Red Locust scientist, Leonard, Desmond, Edwin, Foster Vesey-Fitzgerald, “Vesey” very much for short. Having brought in Vesey I can’t leave him there.
Vesey was above medium height, upright, solid and vigorous, and a little florid in complexion. He dressed always in khaki shirt, shorts and boots that at first glance gave him a slightly military look. He wore small, round, metal rimmed spectacles and smoked a pipe almost constantly.
Vesey belonged to an aristocratic Anglo–Irish family. We ate our rice and tough meat off chipped crockery with the family crest. A good Public School education had left Vesey with no interest in food. He was a kind man but the least introspective I have every known or could imagine. In consequence snobbery and malice simply did not feature in his make up. Vesey was snoring loudly within 30 sec of getting into bed. He bounced out of bed in the morning and pottered happily all day. He had his photographs and his specimens to get stuffed, he had trained a crippled African Ananais as a taxidermist, and his notes to write. He was a naturalist and had he been born a century earlier he might well have been famous but as a scientist he was outdated. That was particular unfortunate because the Director D L Gunn was a noted scientist, Frankel and Gunn was the standard undergraduate entomology text book then, and Gunn viewed Vesey with contempt.
To return to Vesey, once out of sight you were out of mind and that is not just a figure of speech when applied to Vesey. When he saw you again he was always genuinely delighted though between I doubt you had ever crossed his mind even fleetingly. That went even for his wife. Octavia was as you might suppose the eighth child of a family similar to Vesey’s. Vesey loved Africa and the more remote the better; Octavia hated Africa and hated it the more, the more remote it was. She lived somewhere in the Home Counties and visited Vesey briefly from time to time, riding about the place side-saddle. There were two children, a tom-boy daughter and an older “artistic” introspective lad, who mirrored the contrast between the parents. It was not easy for either of them.
Vesey liked to be thought of as a “character” and would tell stories to bolster the image; to get the ladies to exclaim “Oh Desmond!” with an implied “you are a one!” I recall at one gathering Vesey saying, “Have I told you the story about Vesey and the blonde in the Nairobi Game Park?” to which I replied without thinking and to my shame, “Yes, at least six times.” It was a pity that Vesey stuck with these “amusing” stories because he had done some remarkable and very brave things. I think he did so partly because relating those events might have seemed like boasting and partly because they did not fit the “character” he liked to project.
Vesey told me once and once only about his escape from Malaya and then Singapore when the Japanese invaded. I forget the details of the retreat down the Malaya Peninsula though I recall Vesey saying that he fought with the local Communists. Vesey was one of the last to leave Singapore escaping in a native junk. They had not gone far when they saw a Jap plane heading directly towards them. A burst of machine gun fire would have finished them but the plane turned back presumably on orders to attack some more important target. A few days later they were spotted by a Japanese submarine. The submarine launched a torpedo but because the boat was so shallow the torpedo simply went under the boat. “I saw the torpedo coming directly towards us, then nothing. I ran to the other side and there it was running away! Ha ha ha” . They were then picked up by an American warship but soon the vessel got a call to join the fleet for a major battle – could it have been the Battle of the Coral Sea? – so Vesey and his mates were dumped on Sumatra which was of course in Japanese hands. They eventually acquired a local boat and set off westwards eventually reaching South Africa! Vesey told this not as heroic story but more as a school-boy adventure. Perhaps to him it was.
Another story he told me only once concerned an expedition whilst Vesey was an undergraduate at Wye College. Wye had a field station in the West Indies. There was a need to collect some thing – I forget what- from the middle reaches of the Amazon but the Brasilian – I affect the local spelling with an s - Government would not give permission to sail up the Amazon. Perhaps it was the memory of the smuggling out of rubber plants. So it was decided to sail a small boat from the Caribbean up the Orinoco to its source and then down the Negro to join the Amazon. The Negro and the Orinoco both have their source in a huge swamp, one exits northwards and the other to the south. It proved possible -just, to push the boat through the swamp. There is an account of the same thing in one of Evelyn Waugh’s books, “Black Mischief” I think. Perhaps Waugh had heard about Vesey’s expedition. Eventually, so Vesey claimed, they sold the boat to the Brasilian government!
I remember running Vesey to the airport on one occasion and his being called upon to deal with a snake in the waiting room. When dealing with snakes Vesey shed his breeze nonchalant manner; he was very careful. However having caught the thing he put its head in a paper bag, gripped it round the neck and hopped into the back of the car. I drove off feeling distinctly nervous, a nervousness that was not completely allayed by Vesey’s assurance that it was “only mildly venomous”.
There are a couple of stories that were repeated as stories always were in Abercorn, in which Vesey played a part. One featured a then Field Officer H Dick Brown who has never lived it down. He claimed to have seen “an elephant up a tree with a pair of binoculars” to which Vesey replied, “God bless my soul Dick, to see an elephant up a tree is one thing but with a pair of binoculars! God bless my soul!” Dick was an ass and indeed still is. He has the irritating habitat of asking a stream of questions but never listening to an answer. Many years later we, Dick and I, were in the Karoo and over a beer Dick said, “Tell me Phil. Sometimes in Australia you say you use 95% fenitrothion and sometimes you say it is 1230gm per litre. Which one do you use?” “Dick”, I said, “they are the same thing because fenitrothion has a specific gravity of 1.32 so 1230 gm per litre is 95%.” “Yes” said Dick “but I just want to know which one!” “But” I replied, “they are the same thing because etc etc.” “Yes yes “ said Dick “but just tell me which one!” Eventually I said with some emphasis, “Dick you ass, they are THE SAME THING!” “There’s no need to get offensive.” said Dick, “I only asked a simple question.”
Then there was the Belgian Field Officer who chimed in when they were discussing gardening saying proudly, “I to grow tomatoes in my own backside”. After an awkward pause Vesey said, “I think you mean backyard”. “Back yard- backside –is different?”
Vesey was always having rows with the Africans, the swaheli word is shauri and there is no good English equivalent. Shauri has the notion of a wrangle as well as of a dispute. The shauris in the nature of shauris would go on and on, but about what was seldom clear.
My good friend Alastair Carnegie when he first joined Red Locust asked Vesey whether he should take a mosquito net on an expedition to the shore of Lake Rukwa. “Take a net! In the middle of the dry season! Ha ha ha” replied Vesey. But come nightfall out came Vesey’s net and out came the mosquitoes. Vesey was totally unapologetic. “ My dear fellow, born and brought up in Africa! You should know never to travel anywhere without a mosquito net!” I was telling this story years later in Saudi Arabia to one of my staff Bob Steedman. He said, “That’s just like George Popov.” George was a protégé of Vesey’s. George hero-worshipped Vesey, he had to have boots like Vesey’s and binoculars like Vesey’s and dress like Vesey. Vesey by the way has a walking on part in Thesinger’s “Arabian Sands”. Bob went on, “ I asked George whether I should take a sweater on our expedition” into the escarpment backing the Tihamah. “A sweater?” said George, “In Saudi Arabia in summer? What an extraordinary idea!” but of course being in the hills the temperature dropped like a stone when the sun went down; George pulled on a thick sweater. George like Vesey proved totally unapologetic. However, George and his less than loveable eccentricities is another story. I think the explanation with both is that once having given advice, which they did without much thought, they accepted no responsibility; both changed their minds not just year by year or month by month, or even day by day, but hour by hour.
After leaving Red Locust Vesey became warden of the Momelo Lakes Game Park on the slopes of Mt Meru. I visited him there in 1970 or 71 and that was the last time I saw him. Vigorous, cheerful, active, puffing his pipe and seemingly unchanged. Vesey died about 1978 aged no more than 65 I would guess. Perhaps it was just as well. Africa was changing fast. In ten years, perhaps in five, there would have been no place for Vesey in Africa, and if there was no place for him in Africa there would have been no place for him anywhere.
The Red Locust Director was Dr Gunn, Donald Livingston Gunn, Bwana Bunduki, Bunduki being Swahili for gun, standing on the short side of medium, spare and very bald. He was then I suppose in his early ‘forties. Gunn was in many ways a good Director, honest, intelligent, able, literate and a good organiser. His great defect was belonging to an alien race; he was simply not a human being. I suspect that he thought of homo sapiens as a species somewhere between monkeys and mice. From careful observation he could discover how this curious lot behaved in different circumstances, knowledge that was important for him in doing his job. I remember Gunn asking my opinion about appointing Scheepers, one of the field people who Gunn had found useful and wished to reward, to the rank of Principal Research Scientist, the same rank as Vesey. Scheepers had neither the academic qualifications, nor the experience, nor the talent to justify this. I told Gunn that the scientists, Vesey especially, would be outraged. That consequence had never occurred to Gunn. I said that he could give Scheepers the money provided he invented some other title and no one would mind greatly. Gunn didn’t tell me not to be presumptuous as many a director would have, but agreed to think about what I had said. He called me in later and told me, “I’ve thought about what you said and I’ll take your advice.”
No one ever called Gunn by his Christian name although his wife Barbara did call him “Dodo”. Barbara looked as Alastair Carnegie, acutely noted, exactly like Tenniel’s drawing of the sheep knitting in the corner of the railway carriage in “Alice Through the Looking Glass”. Arnold Lea the South African locust scientist and one on nature’s true gentlemen, told me that once when Gunn was staying with the Lea’s, Arnold plucked up the courage to address him as “Donald”. Gunn was not so much offended as taken aback, flustered and non-plussed. Gunn always wrote to me as “My dear Symmons”. I remember him addressing one of our mechanics as “Stubbs”. “Mr Stubbs if you don’t mind” said Arthur. You need a strong Yorkshire accent to get the full flavour. Gunn did not mean to cause offence and I doubt he ever understand why offence had been taken. The Gunns used to throw a party though party is not the right word, for the locust staff once a year. These started at six thirty precisely and ended equally precisely at eight o’clock. The first guests left at eight and the last certainly no later than five minutes past.
One of the better Gunn stories I owe in the main to Alastair. The Rukwa is bounded on the west by an escarpment of at its highest all of 5000 ft. We had constructed a road up, or if you prefer down, the escarpment, and that in itself was no mean feat of engineering. The road crossed and recrossed the Muse River. Gunn with Barbara was at the locust camp at the base of the escarpment planning to set off for Abercorn. There had been heavy rain and the Muse was rising. We warned Gunn not to risk it but Gunn always knew best. He set off, came to the bank of the Muse, put the LandRover into low range and entered the river. The watu, the Swahili for men so usually used by us for the locals, in the back took one look at the swollen river and piled out. Gunn ploughed on. The LandRover started to float and was carried rapidly sideways.
It was the tree in the middle of the river that saved their lives. Without it the LandRover would have been carried into the rapids below the crossing and the two of them would have been swept to their death. The LandRover turned on its side and jammed itself against the tree; Gunn and Barbara scrambled out. About an hour later by which time the waters had gone down somewhat, Alastair came pottering down from Abercorn. He rounded a bend to come upon the sight of the Director and his wife perched on an overturned LandRover in the middle of the still rapidly running river. Alastair who always had his camera at the ready, took a shot through the windscreen. The photo, not a very good photo but quite recognisable, remains to this day as proof of the event. The point of the story though is the exchange that followed. Alastair is a third generation Rhodesian and so more English than the English. Even so nothing in his upbringing had taught him the etiquette to deploy when faced with Directors plus wives on upturned LandRovers in the middle of raging torrents; but he did his best. “Hello”, he called “been here long?” But the gem is Gunn’s reply, “Precisely fifty seven and a half minutes!”