Gordon Mumford

Born in Chingford (Essex) in 1925, Gordon Mumford lived in a farmhouse in Epping Forest. He attended St. Mary’s Primary School and St. Egbert's College in Chingford. When WW II started in 1939, he was 14. School children in the London area (including Gordon's two young brothers) were evacuated to the country. Gordon's school went to Derby, but his parents could not afford to send him there. Too young to enlist in the armed forces, Gordon studied to become a marine radio officer, qualifying for a Special Certificate in 1942. He joined the British Merchant Navy as a radio officer that September, and served in the major war theatres from 1942 to 1947.

Like many other young men returning home at the end of the Second World War, Gordon missed the sense of excitement and danger. Restless and unable to settle down, he joined the Colonial Service in 1949. In Kenya, he was employed as an Assistant Engineer in field radio communications for the East Africa Posts & Telecommunications Administration. Working in the remote deserts of the NFD (Northern Frontier District), he installed and maintained radio networks. In 1951 he transferred to the new VHF telecommunications project, and was involved in the field survey safaris and construction of the network. Living under canvas for months at a time, life on safari ranged from the heat of remote deserts, to the cold of East Africa’s highest mountains, and the rains and heat of the game plains.

In 1958, Gordon migrated to Canada where he  studied at the University of Western Ontario, the University of Toronto (OCE), and Mohawk College (Hamilton, Ontario), qualifying as a teacher. Returning to Africa, he taught on various aid projects in Kenya, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Indonesia for British aid, CIDA, and UNESCO projects. During his time abroad, Gordon was actively involved in tennis, and served on many committees. These included the tennis committees in Kenya and Nigeria, KLTA (school tennis), amateur radio, radio control points for motor rallies, Aquarist Society, etc.

When he and his family returned to Canada in 1980, they settled in British Columbia's Lower Mainland. In 1981, he joined the Pacific Region offices of Communications Canada in Vancouver where he worked in radio communications and also served as the federal emergency planning liaison officer.

Gordon had been a member of the Air Defence Cadet Corp. since he was twelve. When the war begain, the Ministry of Defense and the RAF arranged to have the cadets sent to military airfields. The nearest airfield to Gordon's home was North Weald. It was a fighter and fighter/bomber station in the green belt surrounding London, just north east of the city. The aircraft were Hurricane fights and Beaufighter bombers. They played a large part in the Battle of Britiain.

Every morning Gordon and his fellow cadets were sent there by bus. Day after day, all through the autumn of 1949 and into the winter, they spent every day on the airfield, climbing in and out of the aircraft. They also learned various jobs such as dismantling machine guns, and checking and cleaning them under the supervision of leading aircraftmen and armourers. They used a small handppulled tender to carry belts of machine gun bullets to the hurricane fighter aircraft. Gordon remembers sitting on the wings with Taffy, the armourer, and loading the belts into the breach blocks of the Browning machine guns.

Towards the spring of 1940, all air cadets were withdrawn from the air fields throughout Britain due to the increasing threat of attack by enemy aircraft. Instead, the cadets y had courses on aerodynamics and other subjects, as well as military drills and parades. Epping Forest was no longer peaceful, because with war came bombs to blast and crater and shatter its solitude. Bombers dropped their loads prematurely on the outer edge of London's antiaircraft defenses, and parachute mines floated down at the whim of the prevailing winds. Even the old farmhouse where he lived suffered. Bomb blasts blew in doors and wndows, and ripped tiles off the roof..

Gordon still remembers seeing the bombing of the airfield at North Wealt. He was on his bicycle about a mile or so from the firfields when he saw a squadron of German bombers flying in tight formation through a thick blanket of antiaircraft flak. Not one of the aircraft deviated from the formation, but bore on stadily. They dropped their bombs and then swung away in a wide arc to return to Germany. The sky was cloudless, and high-flying aircraft used their vapour trails to draw swastikas in the upper atmosphere. A massive attack force of five hundred bombers filled the sky, almost blacking out the sun.

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Sailing into War

For me, the Burma Star brings to mind the Chindits and jungle warfare, not the sea and Malaya. Thinking about Burma, I remember my brother-in-law, Wally Moss, who served in India and Burma with an artillery regiment for several years. Compared to Wally, I came late to the Burma campaign and somehow I felt that I did not merit the award. Others had been fighting there for many years, and the war in Europe was nearly over when I sailed for Malaya.

I had joined the Merchant Navy as a Radio Officer in September 1942, and my first ship was the Soborg, a small Danish collier taking coal to Iceland to bunker ships for the Murmansk convoys. On December 27, 1942,1 was on the Scottish Heather, a tanker torpedoed in the Black Pit, the killing ground of merchant ships between the Azores and Iceland. Transferred next to the Mediterranean, I saw service in Operation Torch, Malta, North Africa, and the Italian campaigns on the Empire Harmony. Then, I sailed for the European war front where my ship, the Empire Path, was blown in half on December 24, 1944 in the Scheldt estuary, Southern Holland after leaving Antwerp. We spent Christmas Day in an army transit camp in Ostend.

It was in early March 1945, that I sailed from the UK to Trincomalee on the MV Luling, a small, shallow-draft tanker. Assigned to a naval strike force, our mission was to supply advanced army and navy forces up rivers and wadis, where larger naval vessels could not cross the sandbars blocking the river mouths. Our first task was the Port Swettenham and Morib beachhead landings in Malaya.

Our two convoys from Vizagapatan and Bombay joined up in the Indian Ocean and sailed for the Malacca Straits. The dropping of two atom bombs ended all Japanese resistance, and we were halted off the Nicobar Islands for two to three weeks while surrender terms were negotiated. After that, the Luling was used in the cleanup operations in Southeast Asia, operating out of Singapore. We were based in Klong Toi up the Bangkok River, eight kilometres down river from the city. Minesweeping operations around Borneo followed, and supply runs to Java were the order of the day.

Eventually the Luling was returned to civilian life as a China Coast trader based in Hong Kong. It was there that I met Anni, the sampan girl in my book of the same name. The Luling traded from Hong Kong to Amoy on the Chinese mainland and eventually was handed over to the Chinese Nationalists in Shanghai in October 1946.

It was not until many years later that Percy Smith and I discovered that we both sailed on T-1 tankers that were assigned to the beachhead landings and cleanup operations. Both tankers were taken over by the Chinese nationalists under the Marshall Plan. We both ended up on the Otranto, a passenger ship that had been converted to a troopship.and sailed from Singapore to England in November 1946.

When the crew of the Luling was paid off in Shanghai, it ended my connections with the Far East and my dreams of marrying Anni. I returned to Britain, a bitter and angry young man. Back in Britain, I married Joan, and left the Merchant Navy for a job ashore in 1947, and then went to East Africa in 1949. This ill-fated arranged marriage ended in divorce ten years later in Nairobi, precipitating my departure from a land that I had come to love. It was the start of what I think of as my wandering years, eventually leading to Canada and the University of Western Ontario, where I met and married Barbara in 1959.

Two years later, the story took a sharp turn when I returned with Barbara to Africa. For the next twenty years, we were involved in overseas aid programs with CIDA, UNESCO and other agencies. In 1981, we returned to Canada along with our two sons to settle permanently in Vancouver.

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The Writing Itch

Throughout our time in Africa, I kept journals of our travels using an old Remington portable typewriter. Eventually, this was succeeded by an electric typewriter that later gave way to a computer, an invaluable asset to any author.

It was the issue of buying back pension rights for war service in 1990 that finally triggered the urge within me to write my memoirs. Service in the Merchant Navy came under the Canadian Civilian War Services act, and Canadian Merchant Navy veterans were fighting the government for full veteran status and benefits equivalent to those given to the armed forces. Only my eighteen months' service in the Mediterranean and the twenty months' service under South East Asia Command (SEAL) in 1945-46, qualified as service under the Act.

Voyages under six month’s duration were not eligible for buy-back purposes. This eliminated two short voyages -- shortened because one ship was torpedoed and the other blown in two by a mine. These two voyages did NOT qualify as "war service". Angry? Yes, I was very angry. The regulations had been written for fishing vessels off the coasts of Canada, not for war torn Europe and Malaya where my experiences lay. Needless to say, this was the impetus that spurred me on to write about the war at sea.

The urge to write is a complex thing that comes from deep within each writer, and is directly related to the personal experience of the writer. In my case it was the resentment that had built up inside me since childhood, where I was sexually abused in the religious schools of England. These memories coupled with the trauma of the war at sea, and the opposition of the postwar society to inter-racial marriages turned me against the generation in which I was born. I became a natural rebel.

My books are nonfiction, written in a novelistic style through the eyes of a teenaged youth. They are rites-of-passage books that teenagers and more mature adults alike can relate to. The books encompass all the emotions of life at sea encountered by youths and fully grown men. They tell what war on sea and land was really like. and brings realism to human history. The Black Pit... and Beyond covers 1942-44, while The Sampan Girl is about my two years in the Pacific (including Hong Kong, Borneo, and Surabaya)..

 After a long apprenticeship in learning the basics of writing and critiquing, The Black Pit was published in September 2000 by GSPH, an Ontario publisher. They also published the sequel, The Sampan Girl, the following year. Now I am involved in the ongoing marketing stage, as well as writing about East Africa, where I lived and worked for about thirty years. I am writing about Africa in the 1950s, a turbulent decade in East African history. White Man's Drum was published in 2004, followed by Drums of Rebellion in 2005. These two books describe the survey and construction of the VHF radio repeater route across a 1000 miles and three countries. The third book, ten short stories about the sea is called Dangerous Waters and was published in 2008. I am just completing the third African book, called Destiny: In Fate's Footsteps, while I am also planning a book about my experiences in Nigeria and a book of stories about the Northern Frontier deserts of Kenya..

By Gordon Mumford

To read more about my books and writing, please visit my website: www.gordonmumford.com.

To read a story about Java and Surabaya (1945/46),
and see some Japanese wartime relics in Java (1985/86)
Go To - Indonesian Interlude

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