Travels with My Uncle

This was written by Colette in 2001 as an eulogy for Richard’s memorial service. Colette was unable to travel from Australia to attend the service, and so her eulogy was read out on her behalf by Michael. It was very well received, and many comments were made about how it captured many aspects of Richard’s personality and presence. Colette mentions visiting relatives in Zululand, and these were Jenkinsons, the descendants of Edward Hinton and Elizabeth Anne Vaughan.

One of Uncle Richard’s favorite sayings was,

“I was nearly born a Zulu!”

Essentially, it was just one of his many openers employed to make people think, laterally or literally. It also shows his fascination with connection and possibility.

I was fortunate to accompany him on a trip to KwaZulu Natal in South Africa in 1996 and share his passion for travel. We followed a similar itinerary to a trip made some 30 years earlier by himself and Granny starting in Durban, taking in Eshowe and Ndundulu, up to Mbabane in Swaziland, and returning to Durban via Tugela Ferry and Pietermaritzburg. We made visits to relatives, friends and acquaintances as well as particular places of interest.

Among one of the highlights of the trip was a visit made with The Very Rev John Salt, the Bishop of KwaZulu Natal, to Umfolozi Game Reserve. He and Uncle Richard talked for hours into the night like schoolboys after lights out, speaking of common interests and taking the opportunity just to chat.

We spent the best part of another day driving in central Natal (Uncle Richard’s driving abilities were probably better suited to Africa and its vast open spaces… Granny’s deteriorating vision in her later years probably saved her a great deal of worry!). We were searching for a church, very close to Nqutu, that was not marked on any map we had. We found it (of course) in the middle of nowhere in particular, surrounded by miles and miles of bush and dirt road with no obvious guiding features and all this done on a ‘hazy recollection of a visit many years earlier.

It is worth noting that these excursions were made using routes considered no longer safe to travel. Guided by a belief in the legitimacy of his purpose, he seemed immune to threat and held ‘that as long as you were not looking for trouble it wouldn’t look for you’.

He was a great believer in ‘letting events happen’ at the same time as orchestrating with considered planning. I would say that he had a talent for staging the unrehearsed.

Our stop at Tugela Ferry was after a whole day of driving. The only thing in Tugela Ferry was a very large local hospital and a tenuous link with a trainee doctor. We literally pitched up just as it was getting dark, with absolutely nowhere else to go, with no forewarning… and were put up for the night in one of the doctors’ quarters. It turned out to be another highlight.

Many of his trips were repeated years apart (he made two overland crossings between the UK and India) and the diaries he meticulously kept must have made some fascinating comparisons. On our trip together he recorded our various expenses in a small notebook and when one day I was asked to fill in the latest purchases I was astonished to find that it was the same book used for the same purpose 30 years before, and my own handwriting was now just pages from that of Granny’s – and another of Uncle Richard’s connections was made.

Throughout his life he recorded things that he did, people that he met and events he was part of. But he was not a passive observer, and by recording he built a tremendous wealth of friends and acquaintances throughout the world. I am sure that he devoted a good deal of his energy to maintaining links with people and clearly inherited his mother’s ability to remember a vast array of names and faces and remarkably what they were doing when last he heard!

In a world that places a great emphasis on change and progression there seems little time to reflect and mark what has passed.

I doubt that there was a single day in Uncle Richard’s diary that lacked a recorded event of personal history. As such, his life was a succession of anniversaries, which he always marked or celebrated.

Colette Knowlden 2001