John’s childhood was carefree, with the sea, moors and the countryside on his doorstep. A lot of time was spent at Dawlish Warren when it was unspoilt by all the caravans, and John said they used go out at 10 o’clock in the morning and not return until the afternoon. Parents had no worries in those days. During the summer, children from Dr Barnardos used to come to Dawlish on holidays and John and his friends used to play with them. Of course they did a lot of swimming and John can recall swimming on one occasion when the red flag was out but he ended up with a cracked elbow.

When John was 7 he joined the St. Marks C of E choir, and Sundays were taken up by Sunday School in the morning, then a Church service, and Sunday School in the afternoon followed by another service. John says St. Marks Church is no longer there and has been replaced by a housing estate called St. Marks Close.

John’s father retired from the Navy and, when John was 11, they moved into the Ring o’Bells pub in Teignmouth. John joined the St James’s Church choir, a swimming club and also the scouts. He enjoyed the choir and says they used to go on some good outings. He also loved sport, particularly Rugby, and joined the local sports club.

When John left school at the age of 15 he went to a technical school known as the Teignmouth Evening Institute where he took a number of commercial subjects. He followed in his older brother’s footsteps and went to work in the offices of a firm of boat builders, which made racing yachts, lifeboats, and motor cruisers. As his older brother had done, John sat his exams for the Royal Navy in November 1938 and joined the Navy in January 1939. He did his technical training at Chatham and went back to Plymouth to join his first ship HMS Newcastle in April 1939, which sailed around the coast of England.

In August of 1939 the ship returned for a re-fit in preparation for a commission in China. However on September 3rd war broke out and the ship sailed north to Scapa Flow and patrolled the Denmark Strait between Iceland and Greenland. Whilst in the Denmark Strait they sank a German ship but on another occasion they were trailing two war ships and lost them in a blizzard. The heavy seas damaged the ship and it had to return in 1940 for another re-fit. The ship stood by in Plymouth Sound ready for an invasion and at times carried out night bombardments of the French coast.John left the Newcastle later that year and went to Devonport Barracks at Plymouth. He was reunited with his elder brother who had arrived from China the day before. They contacted their father (who by this time had given up the pub and had gone back into the Navy) and they all went home for a celebration. John was shore based for a while and then in 1941 he joined a Fleet minesweeper, which he describes as a small 1,000 ton ship which held 100 men. They were straightaway part of the escort forces for the Russian convoys and found that not only had they to contend with aircraft and ‘U’ boats, but the weather as well. Their worst convoy was PQ17 when, on the 4th July 1942 after being attacked, the Admiralty ordered the convoy to scatter, and the covering force of cruisers and destroyers left to prepare to meet enemy warships. This proved disastrous, as they lost 24 out of the 31 merchant ships. On their final leg before reaching the White Sea and Archangel, they found themselves being bombed in the pack ice. Convoys were then suspended for some time and, in the meantime, they were running short of food and ended up by being supplied by the Russians with black bread and Yak meat. John was awarded a Russian medal many years later.

By coincidence, when John first came to Buntingford, he met the United Reformed Church Minister George Hewitt, who was a leading seaman on one of the Ack-Ack ships at that time. It’s a small world!

Later in the War, John spent some time in the Mediterranean and then came back to a shore base in the U.K. for a while and also spent some time at a shore base in Scotland. In 1944 he went to the far east with a naval landing party at Chittatagong and patrolled down the Burma coast. He was in Akyab on V.E.Day and had a week’s leave at Kandy in Ceylon (as it was then called). He then spent 6 months at a shore base in Calcutta and 6 months in Bombay. John came back to his parents’ house at Teignmouth in the middle of 1946. John had a commission to South Africa between 1948 and 1950 on HMS Nigeria, based at Simon’s Town. He met Joyce Pinnock at a dance in Cape Town and they married in Cape Town in 1950, living initially with Joyce’s mother who was a widow. John returned to the UK in September 1950 in HMS Nigeria, leaving Joyce who by this time was expecting their first child. Geraldine was born in 1951.

In 1951 John put his name forward as an urgent replacement for a chief of HMS Bermuda. He sent a telegram to Joyce and went out to Cape Town to re-join his family. He had to sign that he would finish the commission and he had no intention of carrying on for a further 10 years.

In 1953 he was offered a job on the staff of the South African Nautical College at Gordons Bay, which was a lovely spot about 30 miles from Cape Town. He accepted this and John, Joyce and Geraldine moved to Gordons Bay where they stayed for about three years. John says they had a lovely flat but the day after they moved in there was a big bush fire and they had to evacuate the flat and spend the night on the beach. John grabbed quite a lot of their possessions, as they were not insured, but luckily the flames stopped short of their flat. Joyce & John’s second daughter, Pamela, was born at Gordons Bay in 1954.

After three years, John was thinking of moving on and was asked if he was interested in going to Kariba when the Kariba Dam Scheme came into force. He was interested, even though it meant he would be away for a few months. John travelled by train from Cape Town to Salisbury and then north to Kariba by Land Rover. Parts of the road in those days were strip roads, and then 45 miles of dirt road, until they arrived at Kariba in the Zambezi valley.

Preliminary work had been going on but there were no facilities, and they camped in tents on Sugar Loaf Hill for a few months. The whole area had to be sprayed against mosquitos and tsetse flies. There was a retired Colonel who acted as Welfare Officer but he was described on one occasion by one chap in the camp as a Farewell Officer when he was sent by the Colonel to the area outside the tsetse fly barrier. During those ensuing months, a whole new township was created, including such facilities as shops, country club, swimming pool and cinema. In November John was asked if he was interested in working on the housing side of the Federal Power Board and, at the end of 1956, the Civic Contractors for the Dam came in. In February 1957 John’s family moved to Kariba and the two girls went to the school there.

The following picture is taken in 1956 showing John at the confluence of the Sanyati and Zambesi Rivers before the lake was formed Before the dam was built and when the waters started to impound into the lake (which is 175 miles long and 20 miles wide), operation Noah came into force, when game rangers and game wardens were employed to rehabilitate the wild life in the valley.

The weather at Kariba was hot most of the time, some 90 in the summer, and in winter you only needed a jersey on at night. There were quite a few snakes around but the only ones you needed to worry about were the puff adders, which would sometimes be found dozing on the paths. The majority of the snakes shy away from humans. However, one evening when Joyce was walking towards the house, she encountered a spitting cobra, which spat into the corner of her eye. They immediately washed the eye with milk, and Joyce was fine. On another occasion, John was coming out of a Church meeting behind four ladies. A large snake crossed the path in front of the leading lady and she fell back onto the other three. They then all fell back on top of John! He was a bit sore for a while after that!.

At certain times of the year there was the bother of flies and mosquitos, particularly early in the morning and late evening. If you drove outside the town you had to keep your car window closed. Once the lake formed, you could not swim in it because, apart from crocodiles, there was the danger of bilharzia a microscopic worm-like creature which could penetrate the skin yet leave no mark. It could cause illness and even death. John and Joyce’s daughters were affected by bilharzia and the drugs which are used to treat it are not very nice.

In Kariba, there was an inter-denominational Church which served the whole new community, which was useful considering that previously the nearest methodist church was 100 miles away. The Anglican minister had a parish equal to the size of Wales. John was secretary of the Church Council and he served 15 years as its Chairman. He also used to coach schoolchildren at swimming, and he umpired water polo matches. Joyce was the supervisor of the swimming pool for about eight years.

There were floods in 1958 which came through the gorge and it was touch and go whether a lot of the temporary dams would be washed away. The native Batonka tribes who had villages on the Zambezi river and around the lake said this was a sign of anger from the God Nyamami-Nyamami . One can sympathise with these people who, up till then, had lived very primitive lives and the only other people they had seen were hunters or police officers. They had strange customs and apparently the men used to knock out their front teeth as this was supposed to make them more attractive.

However, all was well and work on the dam went ahead and was completed in 1960 when it was opened by Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. A lunch was laid on and John was amongst those who met the Queen Mother. The road between the Airport and Kariba was tarred specially for the Royal visit and everyone commented that they wished the Queen had travelled all the way by road so that more road could have been tarred!

The Federal Power Board changed its name to the Central Power Corporation and, during this time John set up the stores organisation in Kariba. For the first three years he was the Hon. Treasurer of the Kariba Country Club. As there was no suitable local high school, the girls had to go to boarding school at Sinoia (now called Chinhoyi) some 165 miles away.

The family used to take regular holidays to Cape Town, driving 2000 miles to get there. On one occasion they went to Beira in Mozambique for a holiday and the flooding was so bad that people had to walk in front of their vehicles. With the present flooding in Mozambique, John wonders what has happened to all the hippos because he can remember the Limpopo river being absolutely full of them.

During the time of the Terrorist War, John joined the Field Police Reserve. He used to carry a pistol and Joyce carried a revolver at that time. Kariba being on the border with Zambia, John says they found themselves being shelled at times by Terrorists operating from there. He remembers on one occasion after a Sunday service in the church that the hill behind the church was hit a number of times.

In 1978 John and Joyce moved to Salisbury (now called Harare) and John joined the Police Specials . They were known as the wombles and they did shifts of 8 - 11 p.m. and 11 p.m. - 3 a.m. walking around Salisbury. John did a lot of travelling around in Zambia at various transmission sub-stations. In the last three years of their time at Harare, John says you could see how things were developing and you only have to open a newspaper today to see what is going on.

John retired as Chief Supplies Officer for the Central African Power Corporation and in 1983 John and Joyce moved to Perth in Australia where they stayed for about six months. However there were problems with John’s pension not coming through and, as a pensioner, he was not supposed to take a job, so money was tight. They decided to come to England and stayed in London until they were able to sort out their finances. Whilst looking round for somewhere to settle, they came to Buntingford at Christmas 1983 and saw the new houses at Downhall Ley being built. They moved in in April 1984.

John and Joyce became members of St Peter’s Church and John joined the P.C.C. in 1985. In 1989 he became a Governor of Layston School for a period of four years, which he thoroughly enjoyed. John and Joyce both helped at the Monday Coffee Mornings and they took over the running of this in 1991. John became Chairman of the Buntingford & District Christian Aid Committee for several years. He joined the British Legion in 1996 and became its Secretary. He is also now Verger at St Peter’s.

John and Joyce’s elder daughter, Geraldine, is married to an Australian. They have travelled around the world but have now settled in Melbourne. Pamela, their younger daughter, is married and lives in Adelaide. She has two sons. John’s younger brother, Les, sadly died within the last few weeks. He lived at Teignmouth. His elder brother, Gordon, lives at Dartmouth. He became a teacher after leaving the Navy.

John and Joyce are now happily settled in Buntingford. John says they could do with some extra help with the St Peter’s coffee mornings. These are very popular, both with visiting villagers and also the market stallholders. Currently 3 people help out each Monday, between 10.00 a.m. and 12.45 a.m. If anyone is able to volunteer, there is a rota system and they need only help once a month. John also enjoys the Churches Together Committee in Buntingford and he finds it so nice that people from different denominations can all work together so well.

John is obviously very concerned now about the events which are currently happening in Zimbabwe. The farmers, many of whom are British, should now be planting winter wheat but cannot because they are being terrorised, attacked and maimed, and their homes and farms destroyed. If the seizure of land is not stopped, the toll of human suffering will be immense. John has already written to our Government urging it to put pressure on the Zimbabwe Government. If anyone reading this feels that the British Government could do more to help, they should write to our local M.P., Mr Oliver Heald.

I was fascinated listening to John’s experiences in South Africa and I would like to thank him very much for talking to me.