Jeremy Black - There and Back

One night in November 1932, the church bells from villages on and around Dartmoor rang out in warning. A prisoner had broken out from the infamous Princetown gaol. The Black family, however, had other matters on their mind that night, even though their house, Mayfield, was situated in one of those villages at Horrabridge, near Yelverton. Their third child was being born, and if their precise thoughts at that moment can now be only a matter of conjecture, no shock or surprise was ever mentioned or even hinted at by my parents. And this despite the fact my birth was unplanned and would occur some seven years after that of their previous child, Colin, my elder brother, and ten years after my sister, Elizabeth.

My father had left his seagoing career only a couple of years before. He was born Alan Henry Black in 1887, into the middle of a family of eight, six of whom were boys. As he grew up and did well at Greenwich Hospital School, his father, who worked in a bank, was keen that his son should follow in his footsteps. Alan, however, had other ideas. During walks through Greenwich Park, he got into conversation with an old man who was recovering from an operation. The old mans tales were of adventures at sea, which excited and enthralled my father. On the last occasion of their meeting, the old man gave Alan a card, saying: If you want to go to sea, take this card to the offices of Clan Mackenzie. His parents lost patience with Alan, and were disinclined to listen to him or support his emerging desire to go to sea. Alan took the card along to the office, and Clan Mackenzie arranged for him to become an officer cadet. It was then Alan discovered that the old man had been the Chairman of the company. Thus, my father sailed for Hamburg, to load for his first voyage under sail, to Australia.

My father served in several ships, primarily under sail, until he transferred to the Eastern Telegraph Company, who ran a number of cable-laying ships. Whilst serving in one of these, the Amber based in Plymouth, he met my mother, Gwendoline, whose father owned a shipping line, based in Plymouth. They were engaged in 1913, before the outbreak of the First World War. When war came he sailed away, not to return until after the Armistice, five years later. Despite such a prolonged separation, he and Gwendoline were married in Plymouth in 1918. His war had taken him to many places, not least to provide communications off the beachheads at Galipoli.

The new family, with two small children, Roger and Elizabeth, sailed to Cape Town, where my father now served as Chief Officer in a ship out there. After a year, they returned to Plymouth, where sadly Roger died, aged five, of encephalitis. Colin was born six months later, and the family moved to Gibraltar, where my father remained with the Eastern Telegraph Company which became the mighty Cable and Wireless Corporation until 1930, when he left the sea in order to spend more time with his family. I was born two years later.

The family underwent some turmoil as he attempted to find his next job and lived temporarily at Mayfield, a house they owned but usually rented to tenants. Colin and Elizabeth attended the local school in nearby Yelverton. Alan, my father, purchased a company called A. A. Rodbard based in Whimple Street, located near St Andrews Church in the centre of Plymouth. The company was renamed A. H. Black Ltd and it supplied the hotels and public houses within a fifty-mile radius of the town in all directions with their every conceivable need: chairs, tables, glasses, cigarettes , measures, biscuits and chocolates, all delivered normally on a weekly basis. There were clear benefits for the entire family a weekly box of Black Magic chocolates and very often, at weekends, a trip to an appropriate establishment for a meal. This marketing exercise was always followed by an invigorating walk around the surrounding countryside .

A year later, in 1933, the Black family moved into The Linhay on Russell Avenue in a suburb of Plymouth. It was an unusual house built on steeply sloping ground. The front door was entered from the road by walking across a wooden bridge, and though the door led into the hall and the main living rooms, it was the floor below which opened on to the large garden at the back. The frontage was wide enough to allow my father to build a tennis court and, when the Second World War broke out, to dedicate a plot of land to the growing of most welcome fruit and vegetables.