Technology—Family— Geography
By Mac Noden
Malcolm A. Noden, the (Retired) Senior Lecturer in Management, Economics, Marketing and Tourism at the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University, is a well known expert in the applied economics of hospitality and tourism policy, promotion and development. During his thirty-two year tenure at the Cornell Hotel School, Mac taught several courses including Resort and Condominium Management, Airline Management, Franchising, and two tourism policy and development seminars. Mac is a Managing Director of Cayuga Hospitality Advisors, the former leader of the tourism division of the practice, and the Managing Editor of the Cayuga Hospitality Review, the quarterly e-journal of the consultancy.
The English family trees from which I come have the Nodens on the paternal side and the Landings on the distaff. My Grandma Landing had, along with my mother who was the oldest, eight sons who survived to adulthood, seven of whom became pilots in the British Royal Air Force in WW II. The eighth and youngest son, Robert (“Bob”), who was by all accounts something of a rebel, decided as a young adult that he was not going to risk his neck in what he conceived to be a dangerous war, and so, after marrying his sweetheart, a young Irish Roman Catholic lass named Tillie (nee Coughlin), discovered that he could get a waiver from the universal military draft if he took up what was then described by the UK government as “critical occupations” one of which was farming.
Accordingly, Bob and Tillie bought a farm outside the city of Preston, in Lancashire, and went to live there, and during the war years happily raised chickens, goats and cows along with a family of three children, in birth order, Sheila, Keith and Clive. In the summer of 1943, during the worst of the German air raids on Britain, my mother sent me to spend the summer with Bob and Tillie with the idea that the farm would be a safer place for me, and one in which I might get to know my cousins who were, by virtue of their mother’s religion and their father’s apparent lack of patriotism, completely shunned by their respective families. The Landings who were staunch Protestants—and the Coughlins who were committed Roman Catholics, viewed the union as a “mixed marriage” and one of which they unyieldingly disapproved. Moreover, Bob’s failure to “join up” was seen as little short of treason.
The one exception to this familial disapprobation was my mother, who refused to engage in the family shunning at the expense of losing a brother.
I knew none of this at the time and, for a small boy who grew up in the urban centers of England, that summer on the Landings’ farm was a great adventure for me. I have clear memories of wandering around in the barn yard with Keith and Clive, and helping to feed chickens, knocking apples and pears from their trees, learning how to milk a cow, and knowing with great certainty that the big grey Belgian geese (particularly the giant gander who was at least six feet tall), would, if given the opportunity, eat me alive. It was a magical place and an unforgettable summer, and one in which for the first time I met and lived with Uncle Bob, Aunt Tillie and their three kids—my cousins.
When the summer ended, and I went home again to my mother and back to school, I never again saw or heard from any of these relatives.
In the aftermath of the war, in the spring of 1947 when Britain was an awful and chaotic place in which to live, Bob decided that he had reached the end of his willingness to live in and with what he thought of as a failed society, and a mostly destroyed nation. He sold the farm and all his equipment and furniture, bought a well used 3-ton Bedford diesel truck from army surplus and proceeded to leave England. With Tillie and the three kids in the front seat, his strong box under his legs, and an old Webley .38 caliber revolver in his belt, he drove from northern England, across the channel on the ferry to France, and then all the way through eastern Europe, around the Mediterranean, into Egypt and North Africa, and fetched up in the city of Livingstone, then in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia.
There they settled in, and eventually Bob became the city engineer and lived there until the independence movement drove out most of the white population. In the early 1960s, following their retirement, Bob and Tillie bought a 48-foot motor-sailer, and while living aboard it pottered about for several years in the Mediterranean. When he died in 1966 Tillie buried Bob in Gibraltar, and there, following her death some years later, the family buried her beside him.
After many years of searching vainly for the cousins, I had about given up all hope of ever learning of their whereabouts, and simply assumed that they had disappeared into the great maw of Africa and would not be found by any of my efforts. And then, in one of those moments for which rational cause cannot be found, one day while using my computer I decided to simply type in the names of the cousins using the Facebook utility. Neither Sheila nor Keith Landing brought any results, but when the name Clive Landing was entered, lo and behold there he was. I quickly sent along a “friending” request to him and waited impatiently for him to respond. Several weeks later, after repeated messages assuring him that I was not a Nigerian scam artist, but truly his cousin, he finally responded, and told me that he had been away on business, and only rarely looked at his Facebook page. Since that time, I have learned much about the cousins, their lives, children and grandchildren.
Clive lives with his wife in Christiana, a town in the north central part of the Republic of South Africa. He is employed as a sales director by a major manufacturer of tires for heavy construction equipment, and travels widely throughout southern Africa. Keith, who is retired, lives with his wife in a small town approximately 100 kilometers north of Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. The picture below shows (l to r) Keith, Sheila and Clive on the lawn of Keith’s house located on the shores of a man made lake.
Sheila lived for many years with her husband, David Siddle (1928-2006) on a 1200 acre cattle ranch on the banks of the Kafue River, in Zambia, close to the border with the Congo. In 1983, someone brought them an orphan chimpanzee with the hope that they might try to save it from bush meat hunters in the area.
The rest is history, and I quote below from their web site, http://www.chimfunshi.org.za/ about the refuge.
“The Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage in central Zambia is a non-profit refuge that cares for a wide variety of sick, wounded or unwanted animals -- but the primary residents are over 100 orphaned chimpanzees. Chimfunshi was founded in 1983 when a game ranger brought a badly wounded infant chimpanzee to the cattle ranch of David and Sheila Siddle, a British couple who had lived in along the Zambian copperbelt since the 1950s. The Siddles nursed that chimp – nicknamed "Pal" – back to health, thereby establishing a tradition of care and respect that forms the legacy of the sanctuary. Once word of Pal’s recovery spread, the Siddles found themselves inundated with orphaned chimpanzees. Although many are confiscated from poachers who attempt to smuggle the infants into Zambia for sale as pets, an equally large number are rescued from dilapidated zoos and circuses from all over Africa, Asia, Europe and South America.
The Siddles bestow love and care upon the traumatized apes and gradually introduce them to the extended family at Chimfunshi. Five social groups inhabit the free-range enclosures that span 1100 acres at the orphanage, including two 500-acre enclosures, the largest area ever set aside for captive primates.
The Siddles’ work has won them a steady stream of honors and awards, including the United Nations Environment Programme’s Global 500 Award (2000), the Audi / Terra Nova nomination (2001), a special commendation from the Nedbank / mail & Guardian Green Trust Awards (2000), and the Jane Goodall Award (1995). In 2001, the Siddles were granted MBEs by Queen Elizabeth II in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace. In 2002, Sheila Siddle published her autobiography, “In My Family Tree: A Life With Chimpanzees” (Grove/Atlantic) to widespread acclaim.”
Sheila’s home on the ranch has no outside electrical power source, no telephone, and of course no TV. Power for the well pumps, refrigeration and household appliances is supplied by diesel generator, and the office complex approximately two miles away does have a somewhat balky satellite receiver which occasionally gives them access to the internet. In early February, when Sheila was visiting one of her daughters who lives in Johannesburg, South Africa, we were able to join in on a teleconference via the use of Skype, and spent a joyous 45 minutes catching up on almost seven decades of spouses, children, grandchildren and occupations. During this conversation we learned that the entire family had journeyed to Zambia to visit Sheila at Chimfunshi in the fall of 2009 for a family reunion that brought together all 50 plus souls to all of whom we are related. Pictured below, (l to r) Sheila and her daughters and grand daughters in descending birth order.
And, since this is Africa after all, the other picture is of one of the natural “ladies” of the area wildlife.
It is difficult to fully articulate the joy of these long distance reunions, and the opportunity to be included in their intra-family communication, via the extended family e-mail circuit, is a great blessing and one which we are enjoying immensely. Moreover we are very proud of Sheila’s accomplishments at Chimfunshi, all of which have been so widely recognized and supported by many people from around the world.
Mac has offered to obtain a few autographed copies of Sheila’s book, “In My Family Tree: A Life With Chimpanzees” should anyone be so interested.
