An Autobiography

William Robert Atkin, 1901 to 1984

An Edwardian Upbringing

Winchester, 1914

Oxford, 1919

Anglo South American Bank, Barcelona, 1923

Valparaiso, Chile, 1925

Antofagasta, Chile - 1929

Spain Again – Madrid, 1931

J&P Coats, 1934 - Glasgow and Rio de Janeiro

Salvador - 1936

Curitiba - May 1937

Tuberculosis

Rio - 1938

Tuberculosis Again

Curvelo Cotton Mills- 1943

Rio Flour Mills – Belo Horizonte, 1947

Sao Francisco Valley

Teofilo Otini

Curitiba, 1952

Rio de Janeiro, 1956

Manaus

Rio, 1960

Retirement

An Edwardian Upbringing

A big family in Edwardian days was a very close-knit unit fortified against intruders. I was born into the middle of one. Three sisters and one brother had preceded me; three more sisters were to come. In my case the barricades remained at one level or another all my life. Until I left England at the age of 23, my family was my life; I did not want it otherwise, though I remember envying boys who were not homesick when they arrived at school.

When I was born we lived in Bayswater, at No. 8 Porchester Square. I remember nothing of the house, only the family doctor, Dr. Cook, who gave me chloroform when I was four so that he could puncture an abscess in my ear.

The next increase in the family came two and a half years later and by then the house must have become too small. We moved to a large house in South Kensington, No. 16 Southwell Gardens. This was an important change for all of us, made possible by my father’s growing success at the commercial bar. My memories of the house are of the nurseries and of my old Nanny (probably not old at all). I remember less than I should about Nanny except that I loved her very much. I have more vivid memories of nursery food, which, it seems to me, consisted largely of milk puddings of three or four nasty varieties, none of which I have been able to touch since. My mother, at this time, did a lot of entertaining, for which the house was admirable suited. My father was working very hard, often until past midnight. As a result the nursery was our real home. We saw little of our parents; our mother came to say goodnight to us and those who were old enough went to Church with them on Sundays. We also had dessert with them after Sunday lunch. Surprisingly though, my mother inspired in me, and no doubt in the rest of us, an almost idolatrous love that continued for many years and in a saner form as long as she lived.

My real memories, and very clear ones, are of our holidays at Aberdovey. At first we took one or other of the hideous Victorian seaside boarding houses that exist unchanged today. They were probably uncomfortable, but just being in Aberdovey was paradise for us. It was a small place then, not yet discovered by holidaymakers from Birmingham. It possessed a fine golf course for my father, and later for his children too, magnificent sands, and above all, a ferryman, Edda Ball, who took us in his small boat across the Dovey estuary to picnic among the sand-hills of Borth, and sometimes up the estuary to Glandyfi. These expeditions were pure joy; I am certain we enjoyed them more then children enjoy their equivalent jaunts today. I think, too, that the pleasure I got from the train journey to Aberdovey is unequalled nowadays. The drive to Euston in a growler - my father’s horse and carriage were not used for this - the special saloon coach, the nervous suspense, shared by my mother, when my father got off the train at Shrewsbury and only got back on again when the coach had been shunted on to the Cambrian line. The lunch basket, all these excitements culminating in the first sight of the Dovey with its wide expense of sea or sand, according to the state of the tide. The journey back to London was a comparatively dismal affair. The misery was only relieved by the thrill of our drive home from Euston, listening to shouts of “whip behind” that meant some urchin was getting a free ride on the back of the cab, and watching the men run alongside who would arrive with us and unload the luggage and carry it upstairs.

I must have been happy in those early days. I was an ill-favoured child - there has been no great change in this respect over the years - with indifferent health. At some stage these facts, often rubbed in by more boisterous elders, made me self-conscious and shy, the early stages of an inferiority complex that would have become serious if I had not had the affection of my father and mother to fall back on. Much as I loved my brother and sisters, I now believe that the only treatment for a child who is overshadowed by other members of the family is to develop his self-confidence in surroundings outside the influence of brothers and sisters. I myself became in time, very large and strong. The shyness remained for many years and I suspect psychologists would interpret my passion for games in adolescence and even later as an attempt to build up confidence in myself.

I went to school very early, when I was four years old, to some school where, in company with my sister Daisy, eighteen months older, I was taught to read and write and to do sums.

They even tried to teach us French. There is a family story about this. “That” they said to Daisy, pointing to the picture of a house, “is la maison”. “It's not”, I am reported to have protested, not wanting to have my sister hoodwinked, “it's a house”. Very soon I went to a day school called “Wagners”, which I believe still exists, but I only stayed for the mornings. I remember nothing about Wagners School except my dismay when I was told that next term I would have to go in the afternoons as well. Somehow I must have been taught to read and write and do sums because when I went, at the age of seven, to a mixed boarding school at Bexhill, I did not have to learn these important subjects again.

Sandown School was owned and run by a spinster cousin of my mother's and a friend of hers of whom I can remember nothing except that her christian name was Maria. The school catered for children of both sexes from around 1 to 10 years old, specializing in children of parents who lived abroad. I went there because of what was thought to be a weak chest. I remember walking on the downs and occasional visits to the pebbly beach. Above all, though this does not speak well for my behaviour, I recall the strange code of punishments my cousin and her friend had put in force. On the charitable supposition that children were only naughty when unwell, minor offences were treated with a strong dose of senna pods, a disgusting infusion. Major crimes were treated with strong and highly deleterious draughts of liquorice powder, which I would be good for weeks to avoid and which have given me a permanent distaste for anything that has even a mild liquorice flavour.

When I was nine, I was sent to the New Beacon Preparatory School, on the outskirts of Sevenoaks. My brother had been there but had already left to go to Winchester. If anything could have made me enjoy my four years at the Beacon, it was the fact that my maternal grandfather had built a large house within easy walking distance of the school and had agreed that I could spend my Sundays there. It was a very large house surrounded by enough land to provide a big garden, kitchen gardens and orchard, and even enough pasture to feed a small herd of cows. By modern standards, the house was not beautiful. It was, however, extremely comfortable, heated by hot air which fascinated me as it blew up through gratings in the floors. This system may even have been efficient; the big coal fires would have burnt in any case, as they always did in those days.

My grandfather, William Hemmant, a retired nabob from Queensland, was, I believe, universally loved. He had a fine white square beard, was always kind and forgiving to me however many dreadful tales he was told by my spinster aunts. In the winter afternoons and whenever the weather was bad, I sat in a corner of his library and read, bit by bit, the entire works of Mr. Conan Doyle. When it was time to go back to school, I helped myself to two of his Turkish cigarettes to smoke on my way. My grandfather's sight was failing to an extent that made it necessary for him to have somebody to read to him. A series of gentlewomen in reduced circumstances took on this task; each one lasting until my aunts made her life unbearable. One of them, I think, used to drink - and no wonder! I remember that even at my callow age, I felt sorry for those unfortunate women.

The most fascinating part of the estate was a smallish pond full of water-life of every kind. I could catch carp from it with a rod and line, but found it more rewarding to use a net. This produced fish of many kinds, tadpoles, newts and water beetles. The tadpoles often went back with me to school; it was exciting to see whether they would turn into frogs or newts. There were many other pleasures to be enjoyed, which, for a time, I was allowed to share with any friend I liked to bring from school. I do not remember whether it was our letting the pigs out of their sties, flooding the stables, racing in barrels down the sloping lawns, or climbing about the roof that finally decided my grandfather - surely at the instigation of one of my aunts - to ask that in future I come alone.

Food is always important to a small boy. The Sunday luncheon I was allowed to share with the grown-ups was typical of the period. My grandfather carved a joint at one end of the table and the senior aunt served something else from the other. On the sideboard, among other delicacies, was always a cold pigeon pie with delicious, indigestible pastry, a good two inches thick. I always helped myself to this after I had done with my helping of roast meat. Dessert almost always included a highly intoxicating trifle. This was prepared by my Aunt Ada, a convinced teetotaller, who also made home-brewed ginger beer that must have had an extremely high alcoholic content and was much appreciated by everyone. I understand that, on the lines of Parkinson's Theory, the human stomach adapts itself to the amount of food it is asked to take care of. This must have been so because the meals we ate at holiday time at Aberdovey were as gargantuan as my grandfather's Sunday lunches. I remember, particularly, the breakfast table and side-board at Aberdovey, porridge, eggs, bacon, fried fish, fried mashed potatoes, kidneys, and always a large cold ham, sometimes a cold pheasant too. Most of this found its way into my Parkinsonian stomach.

I am afraid that almost all I can remember about the school was the headmaster's insistence on a “good tone”, so successfully that I left, at the age of thirteen, completely ignorant of the most elementary facts of sex, and his equally strong belief in the evils of sparing the rod. We must have been quite well taught, for it was considered worthwhile my trying for a scholarship at Winchester, at that time the most difficult of targets for a preparatory schoolboy. I did not get my scholarship but passed into Winchester at a fairly high level. And, of course, I had the excitement of going there for the exam and being shown round by my brother Dick.

Winchester, 1914

My years at the Beacon were the last I was to spend before the First War transformed England and all who lived in it. War with Germany was declared on August 4th 1914, when I was just 13 years old. In September I went to Winchester. I had been put down for “K” house, “Beloe's” as it, like most other houses, was called after its house master, where my brother Dick had gone four years earlier. He left two terms later to go to Woolwich and then to Flanders, where he was killed. I was lucky to go to Winchester and I am sure I enjoyed it more than I should any other school. The truth is, though, that for my first three years I was not very happy. I was not unduly bullied, but I made few friends - only one that I could think of then, or now, as a close friend. Perhaps, school life being what it was, the fact that I did not begin to grow strong and therefore take more than a feeble part in the compulsory games until I was seventeen, kept me out of the circles I should have liked to join. Public school life has been described to saturation point and differs very little from school to school. There were some peculiarities about Winchester; the chief one, a large private vocabulary; another, a special game of football, for which complicated equipment in the form of strong netting along each side of the field was necessary. Netting had replaced the original canvas, which had given the game its official name. The game was played in the autumn term and was followed by soccer the next term. I did, of course, have some experiences that have remained in my memory. One of the most vivid is being taken ill with diphtheria and being removed to the school hospital or “sanatorium”. I had this disease rather badly and the school doctor (where did schools find this odd race of medical men?) did not know enough about it to save me from a serious heart disturbance when the more obvious symptoms had disappeared. The result was a long period on my back that continued when I had been allowed to go home. The Matron was a formidable woman, who fortunately took a liking to me - as a patient - and even presented me with a grey Persian kitten. I took this home where it was warmly welcomed. Being an invalid sometimes has its advantages!

The thread woven through our lives at school during those war years was a permanent unsatisfied appetite - not quite the same as hunger. Food became short as the war went on. One of the most irritating aspects of house meals before the shortage became acute was that at lunch, the second helping never went all the way round, the result being a mad gobbling of the first course, in the hope of getting in on the second. But soon there were no second helpings. There was a variety of strange products obtainable in “school shop” as substitutes for jam: “honey sugar”, made from heaven knows what, was plentiful but not much liked; South African gooseberry jam, on the other hand, was delicious. (Can you still buy it now?) This general feeling of hunger led to strange practices. One boy was found spreading marmalade he had been sent from home on slices of blotting paper. I myself, when a prefect and entitled to cook up any delicacy we liked, sent the boot boy, an elderly man not fit for the army, to buy whatever he could in the town shops. He returned with delight, his and ours, with a sack of potatoes that we ate plain boiled and that lasted a satisfactorily long time. We were entitled to those potatoes for not only had the school golf course been ploughed up for growing them, but we were sometimes made to weed fields of potatoes and corn newly made on the outskirts of the city.

One day in August 1917, when we were at Aberdovey, I found on my plate a letter from someone in the army in France. It was addressed to R. Atkin Esq. and so came to me, as my father was a judge and therefore, a Knight. The letter was from Dick's Commanding Officer saying he had been killed in action. Dick was always the apple of his parents' eyes and neither or them was the same again. It was my first glimpse of almost unbearable grief and I have never forgotten it. Dick had earned more than the normal affection due to the elder son. He seemed to have all the qualities youth could ask for, he was intelligent, musical, good at games and liked by all who knew him. His father and mother idolized him and he was the only hero I have ever worshipped. To add to my poor mother's despair, a telegram arrived a few days later, telling her that her youngest and favourite brother had also been killed.

In my last year at school I won “Senior Steeplechase”, a cross-country run of about six miles. I was a dark horse, and the member of my house who ran a book on the event made a lot of money. I was also chosen for the Soccer First XI. I was Senior Prefect of my house and a School Prefect, rather like being a State Governor and Federal Senator.

During this year, I went up to Oxford to sit for “Responsions”. My father took the decision that I should go there, as soon as the war ended. Until then, I had intended to go to Woolwich or Sandhurst and was in “Army Class” trying to improve my mathematics. I was allowed to relinquish Greek, which I had never enjoyed, but not Latin. Oxford University, however, insisted on all candidates passing exams in both Latin and Greek, so my Greek had to be polished up. For a whole Easter term I got up every morning at five, put on all the coats and sweaters I could find, and went down to my unheated “toys”, a Winchester version of a study, and buried myself in Greek grammar and the plays of Euripides. Successfully, I am glad to say, for I passed Responsions. So I left Winchester with few real regrets and prepared to go up to Magdalene, my father's old college.