I have tried several times to put together a small autobiography. But for some reason I always abandon the task before it is complete and then I lose my notes or the work I have already done before I start it again. So I decided to do it bit by bit adding little sets of memories and notes from time to time and keep adding them to the web site. I will also keep a copy on a memory stick. So if I can do this long enough I will have a complete and perhaps interesting record.
I was born May 2, 1941 and many years later found out more about the courtship and early days of my parents marriage. But I am going to write this as the mood takes me I will jump about in time and then later on, if I get that far, organize it into sections or chapters perhaps on different web pages so that when I have added photos it will not take too long to download each section.
First entry: December 8, 2007
My early memories
One of my first, if not my first, memory is of Christmas in England when I was three or four. It was at my Shawcross grandparent's house in Timperley Cheshire, England. I woke up to find a model airplane at the end of my bed, a gift from “Father Christmas”. I was staying at “the White House” on Thorley Lane with my mother (Ivy) I called her “Mummy”, my grandparents, Edith and Fred, “Gran and Granddad” and my father's sister Barbara, my Aunty Barbara. It was wartime and the airplane was a Spitfire, a single engine fighter that at the time of my birth was saving Britain from Nazi German invasion during the Battle of Britain. Barbara's husband, my Uncle Jim, was a RAF pilot. So, to find a Spitfire at the end of my bed in my little room over the stairs was such a vivid memory that I can still bring it back more than sixty years later!
Added December 9, 2007
Another Christmas memory from those early days, a year or two later, (I am writing this two weeks before Christmas 2007) was after my father had returned from the War. My mother and I had moved to Tenby in South Wales where my father was stationed prior to demobilization. They has rented a house on a hill outside of the town, rather drafty and cold as best I can recall and also home to at least one large rat, but a place where my parents could be together again after such a long time (and with such a short period of marriage before Kenneth (I called him Daddy) went away to serve in the Army mostly in India. My parents made Christmas a great event for me, although so little was available in the shops. They found a Christmas tree, and my father and a friend from the base hospital dyed cotton wool ( using iodine and other medical dyes) to decorate the tree, and we had little colored candles (real ones) to clip on the tree for the lights. I cannot imagine how great a fire hazard that was, but I guess with care and lighting them for just a short time it was OK. I do not remember what presents I got that year but I do remember that the colored cotton wool remained part of the Christmas tree decorations for many, many years even after silver tinsel and other decorations were available again. I guess it was just one happy memory that my parents did not want to lose.
Added December 17, 2007
So what other memories do I have of living in my grandfather's house before my father returned from the war? Here are five:
Added December 30, 2007
My Dad's first car was a Morris 8, the 8 was the horsepower! The registration number was HND 879. He was a junior partner to Dr. Jim Brown who had a medical practice in Timperley just across the road from the Hare and Hounds public house on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and Stockport Road and near the Timperley Cricket ground. Jim Brown had a Morris 10 as befitted the senior partner. Both cars were black and had doors that opened towards the front. Easier to get in and out of, but you better not open them while the car was moving! I was sent to Altrincham Preparatory School a private boys school my Dad had gone to which was supposed to prepare boys to go grammar school or win a scholarship to Manchester Grammar School or Davy Hulme both prestigious private schools. In the early days I used to car pool to school in either Dads car or Jim Browns car. But it was not too long before I was taking the bus from near our house a couple of miles to the main bus station in Altrincham and walking from there to school probably another mile and a half. The bus station was a busy place with maybe 20-40 buses coming and going and maybe a dozen buses at the station at any one time. I did not realize at first that there were two buses that made the circle that passed my home, one in each direction. One day early on in my bus riding I got on the wrong bus and was in tears when I realized I was going far from the usual route. Of course the conductor soon explained to me and a just stayed on until we got back to my stop. A few years later I was riding my bicycle to school and back each day. One of things I liked to do was to free wheel from school down into Altrincham, through the town and then as far as I could go towards home without pedaling. That was before the put the bridge over the railway line, that would have stopped me. It is amazing to me now that my parents allowed me at the age 7 onwards to ride through a busy town on a bicycle. Of course we never wore helmets (nobody did). I fell off my bike now and again but like all my friends I was very comfortable on a bike as we took them everywhere.
My first adventure on a bike was when I was still living in Flixton (so I would be 5 or 6). Some friends decided to cycle over the Manchester Ship Canal to see a ship. I went with them not thinking to tell my parents where I was going. Several hours later when we returned they were quite upset. I also remember going to my school in Flixton on a bike. Along the way was a big D shaped road pattern. Some older boys used to hang out and try to bully me as I passed them on my way home from school. I recall trying to figure out which side of the D they were on and go the other way. Of course sometimes they spotted me and ran across to intercept me. Another memory of that school was in the winter of 1947 when the outside toilets froze and we got the day off school! The snow was several inches deep, it came over the tops of my rubber Wellington boots. This was extreme weather for England!
Flixton was where my Dad got his first job after he was demobbed from the Army. He worked at the hospital and we lived in Flixton. When Linda was born in 1946, and was christened at the Flixton church. I remember noticing that the gravestones I was standing on outside the church had the name John Shawcross. Dad told me that the family moved from Flixton and that the John Shawcross in the grave was probably a relative of mine. More on that later (genealogy is something that usually interests the middle aged and old, not the young.)
Added January 6, 2008
One of the questions I am asked in the US is, “What brought you to the United States?” or “Why did you leave England”. It would take too long to explain so I joked, “It was a Boeing 707, or was it a VC10? Or, “I was trying to escape religious persecution”.
In fact, it was a decision that was arrived at slowly and even after we came to the US I was prepared to return to Britain if it did not work out well. I recall my father asking me in 1969, just before I left for the US, “ Do you think you will stay there, and I answered, “Yes, I think so”, although I was not so sure I would.
So why did we move from Britain that had given us a good home, a good education, where we both had good families, where our first two children had been born, and where, with steady work, we would achieve a reasonably good standard of living?
The years after WWII were generally speaking not easy years in England. Not that my parents or I were poor, or hungry or deprived. But the society was recovering from the war and those were hardworking years for my parents. In Timperley near Manchester the winters had dirty foggy air made worse by everyone burning coal. Fogs could last for days and some times you could not see the hand in front of your face. The newspapers were always full of the threat of nuclear war, of the retreat from Empire. Britain gave up one colony after another. It seemed like we were always on the losing side whether it was at Suez or in colonial skirmishes in Africa or at cricket with Australia. We never seemed to win. I was “a dreamer” as my mother called me. I used to look at the maps of the World with all the red and pink showing the British Empire and Commonwealth. As a teenager I used try to predict the long-term future. I used to read statistics in my Encyclopedia of industrial production and resources and the like and soon learned that the US led in many of those categories. I began to feel that England was small and restrictive. I was also aware the class structure and grew to dislike it. After I had made a few trips to Europe I was excited by the concept of the European Community and was extremely disheartened when General DeGaulle of France closed the door on British membership of the EC. I think that door closing was the single biggest factor that made me want to leave Britain. Also I grew to hate the long dark days of November, December and January. In Manchester we seemed to say goodbye to the sun in November for months of gloom and drizzle. Summer could be nice but some years it was a great disappointment. When we moved up to Tyneside the weather just got colder and the winters longer. Is it any surprise I became interested in somewhere where the sun shone more and where you could count on a warm summer?
In those years in the 50's and 60's emigration to Australia, New Zealand and Canada and even South Africa was a not unusual event. It was in all the newspapers and Australia had its £10 assisted passage to “qualified” emigrants. And there were plenty of jobs for people like me with a degree in Civil Engineering. While I was at Birmingham University I looked into emigration to Australia and considered emigration to Queensland. I would become a “10 pound Pom” as the Aussies would have called us. But I was in love, getting married and quite soon having children. Later on when we lived in Northumberland after I had worked in Britain a few years I applied for overseas work. Interviewing for jobs in Qatar, New York and with the British Ministry of Overseas Development for work in Africa. I got the MOD job and that is how we came to go to Tanzania.
If you look at the Shawcross family over the centuries they did not move much. As far as I can determine the family got its “Shacklecross” name in Taxal, Derbyshire area, stayed there a century or two, until my ancestors moved a few miles Northwest to Flixton, Lancashire and then, after a couple of centuries in Flixton, my Shawcross ancestors moved a few more miles South to Timperley Cheshire, where we stayed until my generation came along. Charles, Linda and I moved away perhaps because our education made it possible for us to do that, or perhaps because my mothers London origins gave us a different view on England and the World. It was most likely a combination of these factors with ease of transportation and ease of work portability thorough education a key factor.
I had a gradual weaning away from home. First the years a University, then the years working in different locations in England, then two years in Tanzania. This dislocated me from family and friends and made it less difficult to move away. There was no great hardship in England, although we were somewhat low on money in my early working days. I made about £1000 pounds a year in 1963 when I started work and about £1500 a year when we left in 1967. This was not poverty but it was not a lot of money either. My motives for moving to the US included a sense of wanting to see the World and also by the time I had children a feeling that they might have a better short and long term future in the US than in England.
In Dar es Salaam Tanzania a few things happened. First, I found myself working not only with Africans but also quite closely with people from a lot of different countries in the Middle East and the US, and in Europe from both sides of the “Iron Curtain”. Then the US changed its immigration policy and it became more difficult for Britons to move to the US and I heard the waiting list might be several years. Losing the chance to go to the US upset me as I had wanted to see the US and working there was the only economically viable way I could imagine.
In Tanzania I was responsible for the urban water supplies in one third of Tanzania. The other two thirds were managed by an Egyptian (Saleh Ahmed) and an American (Lloyd Belz) and the capital city Dar es Salaam was managed by a Swede (Lars Rasmusson). In my view, I was doing the best job of the four of us. I was earning twice what the Egyptian was earning, the Swede was making twice what I was making and the American was making twice what the Swede was making. This gave me the confidence to know that I could compete with people from anywhere and the knowledge that pay depended on who paid you not how hard you worked.
I used to look at Lloyd Belz's American Waterworks Association journals, I would read the job advertisements at the back and saw that there were lots of jobs for people with my qualifications at two or three times as much money as I was making in Tanzania.
So now let's put it together. I said to myself. “The US is a great country, the French won't let Britain into Europe, if I go back to England I will not well paid. Where you live and whom you work for has more to do with how much money you make than how hard you work. I can get a job in the US. The weather in Britain is lousy. I can do as good a job if not better than at least some Americans I know. The US has changed the rules that make it harder to get a visa. The future is not likely to get better relative to visas, the world population is growing the immigration barriers are likely to get tougher. So now would be a good time to apply for a visa and when it is approved, which may not be for several years, I can decide at that time whether to go to the US or not”.
Dar es Salaam was the capital city of Tanzania, so there was a US embassy not far from my office, so getting the paperwork to apply for a US immigrant visa was easy. Frances and I applied for a visa for the family in 1968. I had planned and quite expected to be in Tanzania for two “two year tours of duty”. But due to Tanzania breaking of diplomatic relations with Britain over Rhodesia Sanctions, the British Government decided not to continue the Tanzanian aid project that paid half my salary in Tanzania. So my first tour came to an end in the early months of 1969, at about the same time that I heard that my US Visa was approved. So there we were with one job coming to an end in Tanzania, a lump sum gratuity of a couple of thousand pounds and the ability to move my family. We decided that I would come to the US, look around and see what chances there were. Frances had just had Lucy and so she would stay in Britain until I had found a job in the US. But all the same, back in Britain in the early summer, with my US visa in one pocket I asked the Ministry of Overseas Development what other overseas posting they could offer me and if, they had come up with a non African one say Hong Kong (they offered Botswana), I might have accepted. Botswana was a step backwards so I came to the US.
Why we came to Boston, getting my first job in the US, the problem we had getting the entry visa for Frances and the children, buying our first car, living in Hull and then buying a house in Scituate will be part of the story. I will deal with that later.
Added October 19 2008.
Playing Chess
I began to play chess when I was about 11 or 12 at Sale Grammar School. That is rather late to become good at chess and I certainly was never particularly good. But I grew to love the game and and at various times it has been a great pastime for me.
At school I really only played for a couple of years during lunch breaks in Winter when the weather was too unpleasant to go outside. We did not have any chess lessons so I learned from other kids who knew no more chess than I did.
But I did read a bit about chess and it was enough of a thing in my life that France gave me a travelling chess set when I was about 18 as a birthday present. We still have the set, somewhat battered but recently repaired and painted by Frances!
The next time I played any chess was in 1973 when we went to Dacca Bangaldesh. There were some Russians staying in the Intercontinental Hotel (the Intercon) who played and I remember playing with them around the pool and one memorable event when they insisted that whoever won the game had to drink a shot of vodka). Also while in Dacca (now Dhaka) my boss with CDM, Jim Arbuthnot was a quite good chess player and he invited me to play with a group of expats from time to time.
When we came to the live in the Boston area in 1987 I went over to the Middlesex Chess Club and played with them but did not find them very welcoming so did not play there more than a couple of times. I also once on an assignment in Rangoon took my chess board and set and a chess book or two and then studied the game. In 1992, Connie Stolow started the Winchester Chess Club and since she did not play chess soon had me and Tom Richardson helping run it. From that time until the present I have been involved in the chess club and become reasonably proficient (but certainly not good) at the game. I played chess when Frances was working at Wellesley and spending a lot of time grading papers with David Plantamura who also had time to kill and Jim Herbert (who's wife Jean also had a teaching job that took a lot of her time at Tufts University).
In 2002, after I retired from the MWRA, on a walk by the Mystic late I met and I started playing a bit with Ken Dudley and Dan Sullivan. They played thousands of games by the Mystic Lake on sunny afternoons and I jointd them when I was not working (by now I was part time working for Metcalf and Eddy again). Later on I started playing at the Woburn and Reading Senior Centers.
So between one thing and another I play quite a lot of chess.
I wrote an article for the Winchester Star in October 2008 which is appended below that talks about a rare chess triumph and has quite a nice photograph. See photo below and article after that.
Chess, baseball, dreams and beating a Grandmaster
Chess! After 10,000 games, I have to admit that I don't have what it takes to be a very good player. I love the game. I read chess books; I study chess games and I spend more time looking at a chessboard than is good for my waistline. But I just don't see the good moves as often or as fast as the experts do.
Did you see that wonderful chess film, “Waiting for Bobby Fischer”? If so, you may recall the young chess prodigy (Josh Waitzkin) shouting out the moves, sight unseen, from another room while his Dad sits hunched over the chessboard. When I run up against a really good chess player, I am like the Dad in that movie.
Chess Grandmaster, Larry Christiansen once visited the Winchester Chess Club. Larry won the US National High School Championship at age 15 and was a Grandmaster at age 21. When he came to Winchester, Larry played a blindfold exhibition against Nick Troisi. Of course Larry won, but we were all awed by his ability to play great chess without looking at the board.
For 16 years I have helped run the Winchester Chess Club. My game has improved a little over the years, but I will never beat a really good player unless he or she happens to fall asleep and run out of time. But even chess prodigies have to learn the game. In the year or so before their steep learning curve crosses my flat line even I can win. Kids who will be good players can beat me by the age of ten; the best may beat me at the age of six.
Noah Pang recently described himself as “sort of a failed chess prodigy”. Noah started playing chess when he was five and had almost retired from chess, with an “expert” rating, when he was 12. I played him in a Massachusetts State tournament when he was six. Standing, his eyes were level with the pieces. Not that he needed to look at the board for long. Noah would make his move then wander off to watch a friend's game while I pondered my response. Then he would come back, glance at the position, move a piece and then wander off again. I got a draw in that game and I am still proud of it.
Jared Turkowitz and Jake Garbarino played at Winchester Chess Club from grade school through high school. The first time I played Jared I caught him with a particularly tricky opening sometimes known as the “chopped liver”. I got a win then, before he learned how to respond to that opening, but after that I only won a couple of games in the next ten years. Jake Garbarino always wanted to play five-minute games, I think that was because he knew he was going to win long before I knew I was going to lose, and so he got bored. Now Jake can take a knight or even a rook off his side of the board and still beat me.
Winchester Chess Club plays at the beautiful Griffin Museum on Friday evenings. On October the 10th I had reached the final round of a tournament having won all three games. Arnav Ghosh of Winchester, aged nine, also unbeaten was to be my opponent. Arnav is able do something I can only dream about. Like Larry Christiansen, Arnav can play chess blindfolded! So I needed to play my very best, most careful, chess.
Chess players seek any advantage they can get. A tournament player may arrive early just so he can use his own chess set. It's the chess version of having the home field advantage. I did not want lose to a nine year old so the gamesmanship started early. Arnav said, “let's play at this board”. Well I knew that was the seat where he won his game in the previous round. So I said, “Oh no that table is too crowded, let's play at this board”. Which just happened to be where I won my last game. .
Arnav had white and so the first move. After his second move I realized the position would allow me to try an opening I had been studying recently “the Latvian Gambit”. That was not the careful game I planned to play. Black's crazy second move gives away a pawn and seems to ruin your position, but it really is not as bad as it looks and only gives a small advantage to white. Playing a fast game against a young player, I hoped, if a mistake were made it would not be mine. So I played the crazy move. (The sequence is 1, e4, e5; 2 Nf3, f5).
By the sixth move we were playing a different game from any opening I had studied. By the fifteenth move Arnav was beginning to win. But then he made a small mistake, soon I was a piece up and trading piece for piece until eventually he had to lay down his king in resignation. Arnav, you will get plenty of trophies in the years to come, let me have this one small win.
In the photograph, young Arnav Ghosh is in the front row and I am at the back. Chris Kuang is on the left and Arvan Sahakian is on the right. Chris and Arvan pulled even with Arnav after the final game to make a three-way tie for second. Every one of them is, or will be, a better chess player than I am. But none of us is likely to ever beat a Chess Grandmaster.
But, at 9 or 69, we can all dream: about hitting a ball over the Green Monster for the Red Sox, or throwing a 120 mph fastball in the World Series or, even less likely, we can dream of beating a Grandmaster at Chess!
John Shawcross