J. Gordon Mumford - Biography

(From his website

Biography (from his websitewww.gordonmumford.com/author1.htm, with permission) 

    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. Schools in the London area were evacuated to the country, so he left school.

     Too young to enlist in the armed forces, he 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.

Writing Background

After his retirement in 1990, Gordon began writing full time, and has since written several creative non-fiction books. His first two books, The Black Pit ... and Beyond and The Sampan Girl, are based on his wartime experiences in the Merchant Navy and are published by General Store Publishing House. He has also written books based on his African adventures.

The Wartime Books

      The Black Pit ... and Beyond covers Gordon's experiences on the Scottish Heather (torpedoed in the Battle of the Atlantic, 1942), on the Empire Harmony in the Mediterranean during the North African and Italian campaigns (1943/44), as well as on the Empire Path (sunk in the Battle of the Scheldt, 1944). This book convincingly describes a young man's experiences as he encounters the realities of the war at sea. Still trying to come to terms with the death of his father, his childhood experiences at the hands of the nuns, and his need to distance himself from his domineering mother, young Gordon copes with seasickness as well as the constant threat of torpedoes and mines. This is a human story of the war at sea, seen through the eyes of the then teenaged author who was a British Merchant Navy Radio Officer (aka Sparks). These are not stories of naval campaigns and how they were fought. Rather, they tell what it was like to be young and caught up in the war. The books depict life aboard merchant ships in wartime, from everyday routines to U-boat attacks, and show the emotional impact on a young man, as well as his reactions to conflict and strife

    The Sampan Girl is the sequel to The Black Pit ... and Beyond, and takes place in the Pacific war theatre. Gordon is the sole radio officer on a small tanker involved in the Malayan beachhead landings and the postwar clean-up operations in 1945-46. A series of adventures takes him ever closer to Hong Kong, where awaits him the best adventure of all. Having survived the trauma of war and childhood abuse, Gordon finally finds love and compassion in the arms of Anni, the sampan girl. They want to marry, but Anni is not free. When she was a child, her parents sold her into prostitution, and now she belongs to the madam. This is just one of the obstacles that they must overcome.

The above excerpt was taken from www.gordonmumford.com/author1.htm with permission from B & G. Mumford.

Sailing into War - The Writing Itch –

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 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 the atom bomb on Hiroshima 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, which operated 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. 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. 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.

 In 2000, after a long apprenticeship in learning the basics of writing and critiquing, The Black Pit was published by GSPH, an Ontario publisher, who published 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 now writing a Trilogy 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. The third book, In Fate's Footsteps, wlll be published in early 2007. All my books are available through www.zebrapublishinghouse.com on-line, as well as from www.amazon.com. They are in local libraries, as well as from Cole's (Richmond, BC).

Gordon Mumford

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