The voyage to Britain in 1961

Wendy, Rebecca, David and I left Adelaide for the UK in May of 1961, on MV Pretoria, a freighter that carried 12 passengers. The top photo shows the Pretoria berthed in Adelaide and loading cargo on the afternoon before we set off on a rather rough crossing to Fremantle.  After Fremantle, we had a near-perfect voyage across the Indian Ocean, where the kids were captivated by the frequent sight of flying fish. Occasionally one landed on the deck, and if it was alive we threw it back into the sea. We paused in Aden long enough to fill the oil tanks, then sailed on up the Red Sea, through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean.

The captain set a strict rule about meals: Wendy and I and Lynne and Bill Haskell, parents of a little girl about David's age, must dine with the other adult passengers, the captain and the ship's senior officers. We had to arrange to feed our small children before luncheon and dinner. David bellowed like a bull the first time he was fed by a plump woman steward instead of by Wendy. He was teething, and bit her, leaving deep tooth marks on her fat arm, but all was forgiven and they became best friends before the tooth marks faded.. David got used to the system; and so did we. We loved the luxury of having child care! We soon established the habit of feeding and bathing the kids ahead of time. To save time, we bathed them together. Sometimes Rebecca gave her dolls a tea party in our cabin while we dined in style at the captain's table.

  Lifeboat drill worried us: no one, especially our little kids, would have survived more than a few minutes in the ship's lifebelts! We went through the Suez Canal on a baking hot day. All of us, adults as well as small children, were fascinated by the close-up sight of parched desert sands and rich irrigated fertile fields beside the Canal. 

Our luxurious voyage from Adelaide to Liverpool lasted about 4 weeks, the first of our family's superb intercontinental sea journeys - luxury living on freighters that carry 12-20 passengers is by far the best, most comfortable way to travel across the world. (I'll describe our other voyages in future posts). A fast train took us to London, where we were met by my father, and by Bill Wheeler, the chest physician with whom I had been a fellow resident at Hillingdon Hospital, near Heathrow Airport in 1951-52. The inexhaustibly hospitable Bill and Hazel Wheeler accepted the unruly Last family as house guests - accepted Wendy, Rebecca and David, that is: I set off a few days after we arrived at Toogoolawah, the Wheeler's comfortable Surrey home, to visit departments of preventive and social medicine throughout the UK. I visited Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and Bristol, and several prominent and famous GPs, most memorably Will Pickles of Wensleydale in Yorkshire, author of Epidemiology in Country Practice. While I was "in orbit" Wendy moved into 30 Newington Green, the fascinating old home we had rented from Arnold and Verna Rosen; he was a biochemist at St Mary's Hospital Medical College. There is so much to say about that house and our year in London that I will save it for another day.