Port Shepstone

World War Two commenced on September 1 1939. My parents and I moved to Port Shepstone in 1940. My mother had to forego her run of Golden Pheasants that I imagine she kept to remind her of her past. I missed my bumblebee that resided in the central rafter of the shed where my father housed his police Harley Davidson motorcycle and sidecar.

The transfer to Port Shepstone did not please my mother, not by any means. She was accustomed to a more developed environment and not a remote little village on the coast south of Durban in South Africa.

The town was established in 1867 on the banks of the Mzimkhulu River. A party of Norwegian, British and German immigrants settled in the town, playing a significant role in its development. It became a port when a source of marble was discovered near the river. On May 8, 1880, the first seagoing vessel entered the harbour. 

A railway link to Durban commenced in 1901, and the port fell into disuse. The river silted up, making it impossible to use while the lighthouse still remains at the mouth of the river.

When the railroad arrived in Port Shepstone, the train travel time to Durban was five hours to travel 75 miles. The railway attracted further immigration, and the Norwegians were soon outnumbered by both German and British settlers. 

I can remember my father frequently responding to African faction fighting and night time calls to investigate possible submarine signalling. It was not unusual for a swastika to be painted on the road between Port Shepstone and Margate 11 miles further South.

My mother dedicated herself to the Woman's Auxillary Service supporting the war effort. She organised functions to raise money for warm clothing and other comforts for the soldiers. It was not uncommon to have refugees and their children being cared for by her.

1940

 There is not much that I can remember before 1940. I turned five in December of that year. There are a couple of interesting incidents that I can recall. 

We lived on a road that rose quite steeply beyond our house. Vic, Molly's husband, had a fairly up to date car. That car could not climb to the top of the road where we lived. The only way was to go up in reverse.

My father had a 1935 Hudson Terraplane, a modest car for its time. A few notable incidents that I can remember were that the radiator's water would boil during a long uphill climb. The water would boil away, and the driver would need to seek a source of clean water before continuing the journey. 

That could be quite a challenge as garages were not that frequent. I can recall a night when my father had to hike off while halfway up a long hill in the country to find a passing stream.

The tyres and inner tubes were not of much quality, and punctures were frequent. There was only one spare wheel, and if a wheel had to be changed, there was always the bother of jacking up the car and changing it. A second puncture would require the driver to remove the wheel, sit on the roadside while seeking the damage to the inner tube and finally inflate the wheel by hand.

One night while climbing Van Reenen's pass in South Africa, we had more than one puncture. The road, then, was not tarred and very rugged, nor did it have barriers. Being at a high altitude, it was very misty, and my mother was terrified.

The pass was part of the main route through the Drakensberg mountains between Durban and Johannesburg. In 1856, Frans van Reenen planned the road through his farm as it crawled through the pass.

1900

 The period since my parents were born is remarkable. Starting from the year 1900, Queen Victoria died at 81 years old; Guglielmo Marconi sent a radio connection 299 km (186 miles) from the Isle of Wight to Cornwall. Britain's first permanent cinema opened in London, and the total population of the U.K. was 30.5m, while in 2021, it had increased to 66.8m. In South Africa, the population in 1904 was 5.2m and had risen to 51.7m in 2011. The black population in 1904 was 20% of the total, and in 2011, the percentage had increased to 80.4%

In 1901 railways of New Zealand and Australia were the first to run large numbers of successful steam locomotives, and they operated until the 1960s before being superseded by diesel. 

In 1903 the Ford Motor Company commenced assembly-line construction of the Ford Motor car. In July 1951, the U.S. Congress authorized the production of the first nuclear-powered submarine, Nautilus.

On 6 May 1954, Roger Bannister became the first athlete to run the mile in under four minutes. On 4 October 1957, the USSR launched the first artificial Earth satellite. The  Apollo 11 was the first crewed landing on the Moon on 20 July 1969. Now we have invaded Mars, and we are preparing to pollute that pristine planet.

While startling in themselves, I quote these facts; they reveal the immense historical change in my lifetime—considering the past historical presence of humans upon this planet, they are awesome, indeed.

As a young person born in 1935, I travelled extensively with my father in South Africa as he investigated crimes in the neighbouring countryside. There were miles of pristine and uninhabited grasslands. Those fields are now covered by houses, slum shacks and tarred roads. I'd roam the fields with a .22 rifle shooting at targets without the fear of injuring someone in the distance. 

My Mother

 Lucretia Matilda Smith, my mother, was born in Cowbridge, In the Vale of Glamorgan, Wales (United Kingdom), in about 1891. I know little of my mothers past.  

As far as I know, my mother married a British airman, Robert Marshall,  during WWI. She gave birth to a daughter, Molly Ena, in 1915. For reasons unknown to me, she left Britain for South Africa and joined a married sister living in Durban. 

She was always a loyal British national; she referred to Britain as 'home' until she died in 1962. I am not sure of when she left Britain. It must have taken some courage at the time. The sea was bristling with German submarines. The British luxury steamship Lusitania had just been torpedoed without warning off the south coast of Ireland on May 7, 1915, with many lives lost.

A dressmaker and milliner by trade, she met my father, Pieter, in Durban, and they were married in 1927. Molly (Ena) was 12 years old at the time of their marriage. Having very different backgrounds, they did well remaining together for 35 years of marriage.

Glyn was born in 1935 when Molly was 20 years old. Glyn's arrival was very late in a woman's life. His mother must have been about 44 years of age; older women face a higher risk of giving birth to babies with defects. A study suggests that fertility rates drop close to zero at age 44.

We lived peacefully in Durban, South Africa, until WWII in 1940, and that changed everything. Molly's husband joined the allied forces and departed for North Africa and Italy. He served on the hospital ship 'Amra' for a period, and he returned unscathed at the end of the war.

Pieter applied to join the forces simultaneously, but his application was refused because he was a detective and sent to Port Shepstone for the duration of the war.

My Father

Pieter, my father, was born near Elliot in the Eastern Cape in about 1898. His father, the son of a Catholic Irish immigrant and his mother from a Protestant Huguenot family that dates back to the original European settlers in the Cape Colony. 

At about 17 years old, he worked on a railway line being built past their farm. Later, Pieter was involved in the German East African campaign during WWI. He joined the 3rd South African Mounted Rifles (S.A.M.R) on 16 June 1917 and was deployed in German East Africa. The army led by General Smuts was composed mainly of South Africans. 

 

He returned to South Africa to recoup in 1918 after contracting malaria and, and upon his return, discovered that his father had followed him from the Eastern Cape to Durban, where he had died. In 1919 he was discharged from the army, and he joined the South African Police in April 1920. 

At the commencement of WWII, from 2 May 1941 until 29 September 1945, he was transferred to Port Shepstone. Upon returning to Durban from Port Shepstone, he served as a First Class Detective Sergeant. During this time, he investigated 443 reported murders. He also investigated a wide variety of other crimes. 

One of his last duties was to persuade African inhabitants of the Cato Manor slum in Durban to relocate to Kwa Mashu, where housing was being prepared. At the time, the South African government was forcing residents to move by demolishing their shacks; it led to a great deal of conflict culminating in nine police officers being brutally murdered. Pieter subsequently met with the leaders of the remaining families and persuaded them to leave peacefully. Pieter was likely to have been instrumental in conveying this understanding to them; he was an outstanding Zulu linguist.

The period have lived in is undoubtedly astonishing and unique.

 I hope to write about all that has unfolded in my life over time; I am aware that my life has been very different. As I mentioned when I started, I write daily to maintain a degree of mental acuity. I may as well start from the very beginning. Failing that, I do not have too much else to write.

The period that both Myrtle, my wife, and I have lived in is undoubtedly astonishing and unique. A startling fact when one of the earliest humans, known as Homo Habilis, or the handyman, lived about 2.4 million years ago in  Southern Africa. We are probably here only because of an unbroken and distinct reproductive chain that began back then. 

Our parents were born during the final years of the 19th Century and have had to endure two world wars. Myrtle's family had a relatively stable life apart from contending with the Boer War from 11 October 1899 to 31 May 1902.

Without a doubt, the emotional effects and expectations of life had an impact on us. During our formative years, education development was retarded while many experienced people were away serving in the forces.

I was born in 1935, South Africa. In 1939 WWII commenced and lasted until 1945. It involved most of the world's countries—many of the men within our family and circle of friends departed for Italy and North Africa.

Return of the God Hypothesis

 I was highly impressed by Peter Robinson in Uncommon Knowledge on YouTube when he interviewed Dr Stephen Meyer about his recent book Return of the God Hypothesis. Typically, Peter Robinson has a very 'matter of fact' attitude when discussing something during an interview, but this time he found it 'so striking'.

In the past, I followed various discussions Dr Meyer had on YouTube about his books. I'd feel so sorry for him because of the unwarranted rude and vicious comments he encountered from the scientific community. Stephen Meyer has a Doctorate in the History and Philosophy of Science. 

I was particularly interested in his observations concerning the explosion of animal life during the Cambrian Period. He considered it a circumstance of intelligent design.

Workers building a railroad through the Kicking Horse Valley in British Columbia became aware of fossilized remains of extinct marine animals. The area called the Burgess Shale became one of palaeontology's most notable sites. Fossils were preserved in remarkable detail and contained an unprecedented number of species from the Cambrian period, which began roughly five hundred and forty million years ago.

The discovery introduced an anomaly known as the Cambrian explosion. Darwin's theory insinuates that life evolves gradually, but the Cambrian rock seemed to explode with new kinds of life. Darwin himself puzzled over what this might mean. As Darwin suggested in "The Origin of Species," if life evolved gradually, what would account for this explosion?

A couple of years ago. I embarked on a set of lectures on Genetics that were available from the Open University. I did it for no other reason than my interest in cellular activity. Without writing another book on the subject, I strongly agree with Dr Stephen Meyer. There is little we observe or understand without some mode of divine intervention.