THE HISTORY EXAM

Near the end of my teaching career, I was invigilating a history exam. Whilst it was in progress, I looked at the exam paper. One of the questions required the candidates to comment about a photograph of a member of the British Royal Family in the tropical dress uniform of an admiral surrounded by a group of smartly dressed notables. They had, the candidates were informed, been lowering the flag on British colonial rule somewhere in Africa. It was time I retired. In my early career, I had played a very small part in the aftermath of the event.

Sometime in December 1962 I was watching at Benghazi’s international airport as an East Africa Airways aircraft in transit from Nairobi to London aborted its start-up procedure. One of its engines was broken and we could not fix it in Benghazi. The aircraft would have to be flown back to base using three of its four engines. The passengers were disembarked and parked in the airport lounge.  They were stranded in Benghazi until we could find another aircraft to take them onwards. That was not a simple matter.  

My staff removed the baggage from the aircraft, found transport to take the passengers to town and accommodation for them in the aged remnant of Italy’s colonial architecture, the Berenice Hotel. There was also the matter of emigration and customs to sort out. Whilst all this was exercising my mind the cabin crew told me that the ex-Governor General of Tanganyika and his wife were amongst the passengers. It was the time when the British Empire was on its last legs. Tanganyika had just become a republic and he had become redundant as the Head of State.

By this time, the passengers were showing signs of discontent. I decided to follow them to the Berenice Hotel and do what I could to make their lives easier. I identified a distinguished looking gentleman as the Governor General and offered to take him and his lady wife to town in my car. I was a little concerned that they had two young daughters. Governor Generals, in my limited experience of such personages, were unlikely be encumbered by progeny. We arrived at the hotel before the other passengers and I arranged for the distinguished gentleman and his family to have the VIP suite.  It would allow them to unwind from the rigours of high office in tranquillity, or so I reasoned. There was much to do, and I forgot about the matter until the next morning.

There was, in those days, a certain type of English woman who could dominate a hotel lobby or any other public space for that matter. It was such a woman that I found in the early morning addressing the hotel receptionists in the manner of a Governor General’s wife. She was complaining that she and her husband had not slept well as their very small room was immediately over the night club. No doubt the orchestra’s limited repertoire would have tested their patience. 

I had identified the wrong person to have the VIP suite. The gentleman I had selected for the privilege had just sold his farm in Kenya and was on his way to England to start a new career. The exchange that followed between me and the ex-Governor General’s lady would not have found a place in a history exam.