Travelling through my Early Life #WWWblogs

Spending most of this year not travelling but staying at home has made me think about how I travelled during the first 20 years of my life.  At the time I was born in Scotland in 1950 the plough on my Grandparents farm was pulled by two horses. Here is my Gran with Dick and Donald.

For the rest of the 1950s I lived in a terraced house in Mitcham in Surrey, which is now considered to be south London. I don't think anyone in our road had a car but we had milk delivered by the Co-op electric milk float and bread by this horse and cart. Coal was delivered in sacks carried along an alley to the back of the house and from time to time the rag and bone man or the knife grinder would call round. The street lamps still ran by gas, switched on each evening. To go to central London, my father would catch a bus to his office, while my mother and I would sometimes take a trolleybus to Croydon or take the bus to Tooting for the underground into London.

We moved away from Surrey in 1961 and so I didn't ride on another trolley bus till 1968 when I arrived in Reading, Berkshire to discover they still had trolley buses.  Meanwhile in Glasgow on holiday I was able to ride on trams for many years.

Like most people I travelled on school buses and eventually my father learnt to drive and bought a car.  A succession of Fords ended with me buying his old Ford Corsair.

Prior to that, in 1966 we had sailed to Singapore, where we lived for 3 years, on the P & O Cathay, a 14000 ton ship for 300 passengers. There was a small pool, films were shown and entertainment such as quizzes and music were offered. Going through the Suez Canal was an interesting experience but this stopped in 1967 due to the Arab Israeli war.  

After 3 years we returned via Australia and South Africa on P & O Himalaya, a much larger ship taking 1416 passengers. It was full of young Australians going to Europe for a year and elderly British people returning after visiting their families who had emigrated to Australia.

While I lived in Singapore we took a mini cruise to Hong Kong in April 1967. We sailed there on an Italian ship the Achille Lauro which served amazing Italian food but had rather too many cockroaches in the cabins.

The Achille Lauro was to become famous for disasters. On October 7, 1985, four men representing the Palestine Liberation Front took control of the cruise liner off Egypt as she was sailing from Alexandria to Port Said The hijackers held the passengers and crew hostage and directed the vessel to sail to Syria,  demanding the release of 50 Palestinians from Israeli prisons. After being refused permission to dock at Tartus, the hijackers murdered wheelchair-bound American passenger Leon Klinghoffer and threw his body overboard. The ship headed back towards Port Said, and after two days of negotiations, the hijackers agreed to abandon the liner in exchange for safe conduct and were flown towards Tunisia aboard an Egyptian plane.

 On November 30, 1994, the Achille Lauro caught fire off the coast of Somalia while enroute to South Africa. Abandoned, the she finally sank on December 2.

I didn't sail on another ship until 2012!