Rhodesian Hospitality
Accommodation in London was very difficult to find, but Edgar Whitehead's staff found him a small flat in St. James Court with a tiny entrance hall, sitting room and one bedroom.
Edgar's mornings were taken up administering the office. Business lunches were an almost daily occurrence, with some ceremonies calling for top hats and morning coats. Never one to worry about clothes, he nevertheless managed to get a suitable outfit to oblige.
He represented Rhodesia at the memorial service in St. Paul's Cathedral for President Roosevelt. Waiting for his car on the steps after the service, he bumped into none other than Umtali's Phillip Swinton who asked him, "How many more careers do you intend to take up? I've known you as a farmer, politician, soldier and now a diplomat. Where do you intend going from here?"
For weeks, even before VE Day, Edgar's major concern was the return of Rhodesia's liberated POW's. The majority were bomber crews shot down over Germany but there were also army personnel captured in the campaigns in Greece, Crete, North Africa and Italy. Rhodesia House never knew at what hour they would arrive in London. Most of those captured in the Mediterranean theater had never been in Britain before.
He left instructions with the caretaker of Rhodesia House that if any pitched up after closing time with no accommodation they were to be sent to his flat. He would put them up till they found some elsewhere. Sometimes he had one, sometimes more.
One evening four arrived, a Major, a Subaltern, a Sergeant Major and a young private from the Parachute Regiment captured a month before VE Day on the Italian front. The Sergeant Major had been captured in Greece and had been in the winter death march from Silesia.
Edgar slept on a camp bed in the hallway. He gave the two Officers his bedroom and the other two slept on sofas in the sitting room.
They invited Edgar to have an evening out with them which he firmly declined saying he had to be in the office by nine the next morning, but gave the Major a latch key so they could get in without waking him. Rank does not matter off-duty in the Rhodesian Army and they all went off happily together.
At one in the morning, he was gently awakened by the old hunter's trick of squeezing the lobe of the ear and a polite voice saying, "Excuse us waking you, Sir, but we don't like to drink your gin unless you have one too."
The historical novel Whitewashed Jacarandas and its sequel Full of Possibilities are both available on Amazon as paperbacks and eBooks.
These books are inspired by Diana's family's experiences in small town Southern Rhodesia after WWII.
Dr. Sunny Rubenstein and his Gentile wife, Mavourneen, along with various town characters lay bare the racial arrogance of the times, paternalistic idealism, Zionist fervor and anti-Semitism, the proper place of a wife, modernization versus hard-won ways of doing things, and treatment of endemic disease versus investment in public health. It's a roller coaster read.
References:
- Sir Edgar Whitehead's Unpublished Memoirs, Rhodes House, Bodleian Library, Oxford University, by permission.
- Photo Credit: Bridgeman Images.com