Allan Anderson's Blogs

Sunday 22 March 2020 Today is Mothering Sunday in the UK, and I am sitting at home in self-isolation because of this awful war the world is waging against an invisible enemy. It gives me time for reflection. My mother, Gwen Anderson, born Gwen Starbuck (1916-2006) in Sheffield, England, was a Salvation Army officer for almost 70 years, which is as long as I have lived. She gave birth to me four years after the Second World War, in what was then the Salvation Army Mothers’ Hospital in Hackney, London, which makes me a Baby Boomer! I want to concentrate on the qualities that my mother showed in this blog. Firstly, she was courageously resilient. She was born to Salvation Army officer parents during the First World War, and was an officer in the Salvation Army during the Second World War, particularly serving in the London Underground bomb shelters at a time when people lived in great fear of the ‘Blitz’ bombing of London. Many live in fear of the coronavirus today as it sweeps thr...

My Dad was born in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe on 25 November 1917, into a family of Congregational missionaries who had worked in southern Africa since 1800 with the London Missionary Society. His mother was Sheila Blyth from Beaufort West in the Western Cape and his father, William Anderson, was the fourth generation and had moved from South Africa to the west of Zimbabwe in 1915 to work for the LMS in Matabeleland. Dad was a fifth generation missionary and I was to be the sixth. He was second oldest of four brothers and four sisters (one who died aged seven). He grew up in a large rambling mission house that his father built in a remote part of the country near the Shangani River, a tributary of the mighty Zambezi. The seven children grew up speaking Sindebele and learning to love African people and their way of life. Dad was head-boy of his school, Milton High in Bulawayo, and joined the railways working as a bookkeeper clerk in 1937 until the outbreak of war in 1939. While at s...