Over the past four years, Saddleworth Voices have recorded almost 70 interviews to preserve fond memories and anecdotes of all things local.
With the support of Saddleworth Parish Council, Delph Community Association, Delph library, Saddleworth Museum, and the North West Sound Archive in Clitheroe, the team of volunteers has created an oral record of our times, with the added advantage of capturing accent and dialect.
Copies of the recordings are currently available in Delph library, Saddleworth Museum, and at the NWSA.
Here, Martin Plant looks at the life of Maurice Reid.
Maurice Reid was born in Liverpool in 1943 and brought up there. He graduated from the University of Wales where he met his wife Janet. They have been married for 50 years and lived in Delph for 35 years.
A few days after their marriage in 1965 they flew out to Uganda after Maurice accepted a contract to be a teacher of English at Ntare Boys’ School.
Winston Churchill called Uganda “The Pearl of Africa” because of its beauty. Maurice fell in love with the country and its varied scenery, which includes Lake Victoria and the Queen Elizabeth National Park, and wonderful wildlife.
On a trip to the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest to see gorillas their party tried to follow some of these superb animals and were chased away by a screaming and aggressive silverback gorilla. Maurice remembers: “I wasn’t a smoker but I had a cigarette after that!”
Maurice became a member of the British Trust for Ornithology and spent some free time ringing migrant birds. He was a keen outdoor enthusiast and led school trips including expeditions up Mount Muhavura, an extinct volcano over 13,000 feet high.
He said: “You began walking in a tropical rain forest then through thickets of bamboo where elephants liked to slide down the slopes on their bottoms and then ended up walking in an Alpine environment with giant lobelia and groundsel. The summit is also home to the rare scarlet tufted malachite sunbird.”
Ntare School was a selective boarding school for African boys. The boys were taught in English which had become the country’s unifying language to break down tribalism. Many students became important men, such as Paul Kagame who is the present President of Rwanda.
Sometimes students in other schools would riot or go on strike but this never happened at Ntare.
One of the students had walked from southern Sudan and appeared at the door with a spear in his hand and said: “I want to be educated!”
Later, some of those students with whom Maurice worked were killed during the repressive regimes of Milton Obote and Idi Amin. However, one of Maurice’s A Level students, Yoweri Museveni, formed an armed militia and became the present President of Uganda after driving out Idi Amin.
Uganda was a prosperous country by African standards though there was poverty and disease and, at times, violence. Maurice remembers when some local people had wanted to kill a lorry driver after he had killed their cow.
However, on another occasion, the European staff football team Maurice played for was training beside the local stadium when one of the teams in an African cup competition failed to turn up. Their team was asked to play and went on to win the competition!
Maurice felt “useful” in a newly independent country, working alongside other ex-Colonials who specialised in areas such as engineering, agriculture, law and medicine. He and Janet have twice revisited Uganda and people, “probably jokingly”, asked “When are you British coming back?”!
They returned to England in 1970. Maurice taught in a grammar school near Chesterfield for eight years “where kids like myself, from a humble background, could go to university” before he accepted the Head of English teaching post in Hulme Grammar in Oldham and “we found Delph. It was love at first sight anda wonderful place to bring up our two children, Angus and Juliet.”
Next time: Part 2 – Maurice’s solo cycling trips including coast to coast across The USA and from London to Istanbul.
