Travelling Man With A Weather Eye Open (24 February 1978)

To my appeal of a fortnight ago for information about what the weather was like on St Paul’s Day, January 25, I received one convincing reply.

As a result, I am happy to tell you it was a bright, sunny day and warm for the time of year.  Happy because, according to the old saying, fine weather on St. Paul’s Day presages good weather for farmers over the ensuing 12 months.  And this, of course, means good over-all weather for all of us.  We shall see.

I had the information in a letter from Mr. James Slimmon, of Dodkin, Beanhill.  He is a most interesting man, as you will realise when I tell you right away that he speaks 12 foreign languages and in his 75 years has actually lived in more than 50 countries, which I should think makes him the most travelled man in these parts, and possibly in the whole kingdom.

He wrote that he remembered the weather because that morning was so benign that he washed his lounge curtains and dried them out of doors in half-an-hour, then made an entry in his diary to that effect.

The handwriting and the English, plus further scraps of information in the letter, prompted me to seek out Mr. Slimmon almost at once.  I found him in one of those little black box bungalows that back almost on to Saxon Street.  Not that he regards his dwelling in those terms.

In fact, he has lived alone in it (except for a cat) for the past two years and the only criticism he makes is that the hot water tank in the airing cupboard is too well lagged, in that it does not let out enough heat to air the items kept there.  All the rest is fine by him.  Especially now that a tree-filled bank has been raised between his back garden and Saxon Street.

He told me that he spent his first 17 years in China.  His father went there from Canada in the 1880’s as a missionary.  The Boxer Rising of 1900 caused him to return to Canada, but the rising was quickly quelled and he was soon back in China, this time as “Reuter’s man in Peking”.

James was born in 1903 and so from his earliest days he was bi-lingual, prattling away in English and Pekingese alike, without difficulty.  I guess this must have bred the aptitude for languages that was to stand him in such good stead later.

In due course, he was sent to the only British public school in China and that small blue enamelled badge he wears on his lapel is nothing less than his old school badge.  There can be very few others still being worn.

“It was in China that I learned the accuracy of the saying about `Red sky at night’ and that other saying about `Rain before seven, fine before eleven.’  Since then I’ve lived in more than 50 countries all round the world and have found such jingles more dependable than meteorologists’ forecasts,” he told me.

Then he went on whimsically: “take this area, for instance.  We cannot tell from the forecasts whether we are North Midlands, South Midlands, East Midlands or West Midlands.  Sometimes we actually experience the weather predicted for one of those quarters and at other times we have the weather predicted for others.  We seem to be about the middle – a place with weather of its own.”

After leaving school, he went to Canada.  Then, in 1924, at the age of 21, he began working in the travel business and continued to work in variations of it more or less for the rest of his working life.

He does not seem to have stayed more than three years at a time in any country.  Sometimes it was only two or three months.  He lived in almost every country around the shores of the “Med,” and also in Iceland, the USA, Eritrea, Switzerland, Java and Malaya, among other places.  Sometimes working for one company, at other times working for a group of companies, opening up facilities for travel and business or acting as translator and commercial foreign correspondent.

“To really know a country, you have to live and work there among its people,” he says.

His aptitude for foreign languages, beginning with Pekingese, has helped him to achieve this – “Aptitude and a lot of hard study,” he says.

He learned to read, write and speak a dozen foreign languages.  Besides the more common French, German, Italian and Spanish, he learnt tongues like Greek, Arabic, Serbian and even Croatian.

In the last war he was officially recruited into the Royal Navy, but only to find himself mainly on land among Arabs of various countries and for some time even working as far from the sea as Baghdad.

“Arabic is an interesting language,” he says.  “I taught myself in every country along the north coast of Africa right to the Middle East and down to Aden and the Persian Gulf.

“They might not be able to understand each other very well, but they all know the Koran Arabic and if you have that, you are already halfway there with any of them.”

He also told me that Chinese is intensely interesting.  I gathered that it is almost devoid of grammatical rules.  There is no feminine, no masculine, the only tense is the present one, and so on.  There are other Chinese languages along these lines besides Pekingese, but Pekingese has now been made the official language for all China.

Asked how he set about learning a new language, he said one of the best ways was to start not with letters, but with the symbols for numbers (1, 2, 3 etc), learn how they were spoken (“It usually takes only about a couple of hours”) and carry on from there.

About ten years ago he came from Spain and based himself in London.  When he decided to retire he intended going to New Zealand to live, but the arrangement suddenly fell through and he found himself “desperate” for accommodation, which was how, two years ago, he came to settle in Milton Keynes.

He quickly interested himself in the activities of Beanhill (“There isn’t a hill anywhere near”) and joined a group of would-be allotment holders.  “We went to the Woughton Parish Council, who referred us to the Milton Keynes Borough Council, who referred us to the Development Corporation, who referred us back to the parish council,” he recalls with a grin.  But in the end they got their allotments.  So this spring will often find him there in the daytime and the evenings will find him as I found him, sitting in an armchair, with the cat on his knee, reading a spot of Greek, with classical music in the background.

His wife died some years ago.  He has a son in South Bucks and two daughters living in other parts of the world.  “I made no fortune in my travels – just enough to keep me going,” he says.  Another case of “a rolling stone?”