Over the years the trustees have been entrusted with various documents relating to Kindwitwi and Father Robin Lamburn. This year Sarah collected some of Father Robin’s diaries, his visitor books and other papers, from our former trustee, Nick Bowley. Bishop Trevor Huddleston and Leader Sterling, Tanzanian Minister for Health, visited what was then called ‘The Rufiji Mission’ on several occasions and we have also found the names of many of our donors in the visitor books. Those of you who met Father Robin will remember him as a man of many stories and anecdotes. His diary entries are generally quite different, comprising of short sentences documenting whether the post had arrived and what time he said matins!
However, one of the earlier diaries had more information of interest. In November 1939, a couple of months after war had been declared, Father Robin left London to return to Africa. He carried his gas mask, ration book and identity card and boarded a ship which was part of a big convoy. He noted planes overhead and a destroyer on the port bow and ‘a tanker within 200 miles of us is being chased by a U- boat’. He also recorded that ‘there were ‘parlour games’ which were very jolly’.
After the long voyage, Father Robin disembarked in South Africa and then appears to have spent a few weeks travelling overland from Cape Town, through what was then Rhodesia, took a sailing boat across the Zambezi river, then a further boat across Lake Malawi before making his way to Tunduru in South Tanzania by car and on foot!
We are in the process of cataloguing all these documents and in due course hope to find a permanent, accessible, home for this historic archive.