This website is about my mother, Sheila Unwin, and her adventures. Her first journey abroad was in 1940 when she joined the WRNS and sailed to Egypt, via the Cape. The record of this period is contained in my book Love & War in the WRNS: letters home 1940-46 (The History Press, 2015)
In 1947 she joined my father on the Groundnut Scheme in Tanganyika, which is where this website begins.
We then amble through a record of colonial Tanganyika, where my father was District Officer, then Commissioner, and finally Acting Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Often lonely and isolated she turned to photography, while continuing her letter-writing to her mother, providing a unique record of a vanished life.
Each photograph represents a page which, if you click on it, will take you to a description of the named place, what my parents/mother were doing there and lots of photographs.
After I was born in 1957, I joined her on some of her travels, but mostly she went alone.
On this site I have concentrated on the places which are mostly inaccessible today and which, if you were to go there, would bear no resemblance to this record – for instance Yemen and Baluchistan. India I omitted as her travels were very much in pursuit of research for her book on Arab chests and the photographs mostly of wooden boxes and brass hinges! And India has not changed that much in contrast to the other destinations.
In the 1960s and 1970s she was involved in the excavations, led by the archaeologist Neville Chittick, of Pate and Manda islands, close to Lamu, which was to become her adopted home. The photographs of Lamu as it was when she (and I) first visited in 1965/6 are a record of how it was before the rich and famous discovered it, with no electricity and no Coca Cola (hell for a nine-year-old).
Later we joined Neville on his dig on Mafia island in Tanzania before a short stint in Malawi (my father now in the UN). From there we travelled to Turkey (a new posting) via Dar es Salaam overland – an extraordinary journey through Lebanon and Syria, including to Palmyra and Krak des Chevaliers – now both largely destroyed by ISIS.
She kept journals and diaries of many of her travels and I have incorporated excerpts of her observations that relate to the photographs I have included.
Her wanderlust never left her and, after she came to live in England, she continued travelling widely – through the Yemen, via Moscow, Persia, and to Pakistan – and more specifically Baluchistan, where she visited, as part of an Italian research group, over several years to record the disappearing traditional arts and crafts.
Her last major journey was from Pakistan, via the Karakoram highway, to Kashgar and the Silk Road, funded by a legacy from Neville. A fitting way to end her travelling days.
She really was a remarkable woman – intrepid and fearless, much like her role model Freya Stark (although having recently read her biography, I’m not sure she was such a heroine! Nevertheless, their lives intertwined by both being in Cairo during the Second World War and their itineraries).
This site is a tribute to her – and a way of finally allowing me to clear out my boxes and boxes of slides and photographs by showcasing the very best (although age has not been kind to some of the pictures).
Note on text: stand-alone quotes from Mum’s letters and diaries will be in italics. Otherwise quotes will be part of sentences.
In 1976 I made my own journey – started younger than my intrepid mum – overland to India via the Hindu Kush to visit the Kalash in NW Pakistan. I found my diary and some terrible old photographs that I have augmented with better ones. You can read about my adventures here.
Acknowledgements:
Thanks to Ross for scanning and editing Sheila’s slides; and for helping me with the final editing of the site, installing the hyperlinks etc etc
Travels with my mother 