Alfred (1903-1979) and Annie TATTERSFIELD – Northern Rhodesia

This section was written by John TATTERSFIELD, researcher of the TATTERSFIELD Family Tree, and updated Oct 2023.

My parents were JOSEPH ALFRED Tattersfield (descent JOSEPH (1747-95), JOSEPH, GEORGE, JOSEPH, CHARLES PICKERING, JOSEPH ALFRED) and Annie, the daughter of Joseph and Louisa Crabtree of Deighton Lane, Batley. They had the unusual record, for those days, of emigrating twice!

Father was one of six children whose father, and generations before him, had worked in the heavy woollen industry of West Yorkshire. Father followed in their footsteps.

The early family appear to have achieved some prosperity during the lifetime of JOSEPH (1747-95). He left a will, apparently the first Tattersfield to do so, and his assets on his death came to nearly £300.

The next generation, in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, became employers of both male and female workers, and were generally described as Blanket Manufacturers. Some of them were very affluent. One son, WILLIAM, left some £1,500 at his death, and a grandson left £16,000.

My great great grandfather GEORGE’s woollen business, called Tattersfield & Co, in or near Mirfield, went bankrupt during a depression in 1878, as reported in this Website under “TATTERSFIELDS in England”. His son, my great grandfather JOSEPH, took over, but was not able to sustain the business. JOSEPH’s second son, the young CHARLES PICKERING (CHARLIE)Tattersfield, my paternal grandfather, born in 1875, had to leave school, and started work at the age of 13. He was employed by G.H.Hurst & Company Limited, Woollen Manufacturers, a company belonging to cousins of his mother, Betsy Pickering. He started as an office boy, but rose through the ranks of his employer, to become a director in 1920.

CHARLIE married Ethel Chadwick of Leeds, in Emmanuel Church, Headingley, in September 1902. They were to have six children–JOSEPH ALFRED (my father) DOROTHY, GEORGE CHADWICK (GEORGE), HAROLD, CHARLES PERCIVAL (PERCY) and BARBARA. Father and two of his brothers, GEORGE and PERCY, entered the textile industry and father became a master dyer. DOROTHY married George W Cooke, a flock manufacturer in Birstal. HAROLD, who was a trainee pilot, was lost over the North Sea in a Wellington Bomber on 17th October 1941. PERCY had a distinguished career as Senior Chemist in Courtaulds, Manchester. BARBARA married Alec Parkin, who, after military service in post-war Germany, became headmaster of Birkenshaw Junior School.

In April 1924, CHARLIE was appointed President of the Batley Liberal Club.

On 29th July 1936, a piece of machinery at Alexandra Mills, where he worked, exploded, killing four people. After insisting that others be treated first, CHARLIE was found to have a cracked skull, caused by flying debris. He was in Batley and District Hospital for some weeks, and at a later stage developed thrombosis. Although he lived for four more years, my parents said it had changed his personality. He died in July 1940.

Father and mother married in May 1928.

Father was employed by G.H Hirst & Co, where his father worked. In 1930 the firm wished to open a branch in Canada. Father was sent as the dyer, and he and mother sailed on the Montcalm. His younger brother GEORGE CHADWICK (called GEORGE) was sent as the mill manager.

Not long after their arrival in Canada, the Great Depression caused the closure of the branch and put ALFRED and GEORGE out of work. Both scoured the country for new jobs. GEORGE was successful in finding one, and lived the rest of his life with his wife Denise (Snowdon) in Canada, for many years in Lachute, outside Montreal. He was manager of a large textile mill called Ayers Limited.

Father did not find another job, so he and Mother, together with my brother JOSEPH REX (called REX), who was born in 1932, returned to England in 1933, where father carried on as a dyer.

Initially my parents lived in Batley, where I and my sister Phyllis were born. They moved to Gomersal about 1940.

My father, born in May 1903, was just too young to serve in WW1 and just too old to be called up in WW11. He therefore served through the war in the Home Guard, becoming a lieutenant. He also ran a very successful youth club at West Lane Methodist chapel.

In the 1930s Mother’s only sister Phyllis Crabtree visited an aunt and cousins in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). There she met and married her cousin Edward Kendall-Smith (known as Ken), and never returned to live in England. This is mentioned more fully in Family Trees-Related Surnames-Barrett and Yeadon.

During the Second World War the Kendall-Smiths suggested that my parents should join them, after the war, in a tobacco farming venture in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). Though my Uncle Ken was a railway engine driver, he had been brought up on a farm near Bulawayo, but had never grown tobacco, as far as I am aware.

My parents thought it would be advantageous for us children, but decided they could not go if it meant leaving Mother’s parents, the Crabtrees, behind, with their only two daughters living together in Africa. A decision was made that they, now aged about 70, would come too.

It was nearly impossible, after the war, to get a passage out of Britain by sea or by air. After much persistence and two visits to London, Father obtained air passages for the family. A new airline called Mercury was ferrying two aircraft to Johannesburg to begin a scheduled service. The planes were not intended to carry passengers on their first outward journey, but my father secured seats on one. Accordingly my grandparents, parents, brother REX, younger sister PHYLLIS, and I took off from Black Bush airfield, London, in August 1947. The seven of us had a 26-seater Dakota (DC3) to ourselves!

As the aircraft was not yet flying to a schedule, we landed each day for lunch, and again for the night. The journey to Bulawayo lasted 10 days. Our co-pilot was arrested in Cairo where there was anti-British sentiment at the time. Luckily the pilot persuaded them to release him!

In Malakal, Sudan, we landed at the “airfield”, which was a strip of ground with shorter grass than the general surroundings, and with a small galvanised iron hut at one end. It contained only a drum of aviation fuel and a hand pump! As we walked to the hut a gang of workmen formed a ring and danced around us, wielding huge grass-cutting pangas round their heads. They were all stark naked! We, small family of seven staunch Yorkshire Methodists, kept together in a very tight huddle!

We completed our journey by train from Bulawayo to Choma in Northern Rhodesia, where Uncle Ken had by now bought two farms totalling some 5,500 acres of virgin woodland. Our family brought the total number of Europeans who had settled in Choma and the surrounding farming area to 205.

A week after arrival, father, the master dyer, found himself heading a gang of scores of labourers, trying to beat back, with cut branches, a massive bush fire which swept through the farm.

The house we were to live in was not ready, as the corrugated iron roofing sheets had been stolen while on the railway system. The Kendall-Smiths and our family shared a small cottage. Each family had only one room, and the two families ate together on an open veranda. At the same time the mosquitos ate us, and malaria was rife. The kitchen was across the yard, as was the PK (picanini kaya or small house), a long-drop standing out in a small hut on its own! The bath was a metal tub, which passed from one bedroom to the other.

By dint of much hard work the farms were developed. Trees had to be dug out by hand, complete with roots, to create fields for ploughing. The main cash crop was Virginia tobacco, which is very labour-intensive and required a workforce of some 100 people. In those early days life was very basic for everyone. Labourers did not wear shoes, had clothing full of holes and were given food by law as part of their earnings. They lived in traditional pole and thatch huts, which they built for themselves when they were employed.

The Virginia tobacco plants were grown in seed beds, then transplanted into the field and watered individually by hand. When grown, the leaves were stripped off, by hand, in stages from the bottom of the plant, different levels producing different grades of tobacco. The harvested leaves were tied in small bundles, and hung on horizontal sticks which were stacked in huge brick barns. Each filled barn was progressively heated over two weeks by air flues, leading from brick furnaces, which were fuelled by the abundant wood, cut from the newly opened-up fields. The barn temperatures were progressively raised to 160 degrees fahrenheit. The “curing” tobacco had to be inspected every two hours of the day and the night. The temperature was nigh intolerable, and the flues would give dreadful burns if touched, but such was the lot of a tobacco farmer.

The barns and furnaces were built by my uncle and father, with employed labourers, using bricks made on the farm from local clay, and fired in wood-burning kilns.

As well as 100 acres of tobacco, our farms were built up to produce maize, cattle, pigs, chickens, vegetables, beans, and a little cotton. Work was hard, Mother and Auntie Phyll worked full time, holidays were rare, and there were few of life’s luxuries. REX and I had to go away to boarding schools, as our nearby village Choma only had one school for junior girls. REX went to a school in Bulawayo, and was able to stay with our relations, Uncle Ken’s sister Doris and her family . I went to Lusaka Boys’ School, some 200 miles away, in old buildings by the railway station, which were then very “basic”. PHYLLIS was a day girl at the local school.

The small community had to provide its own social entertainments. Such time as was spare was spent visiting local farmers, playing tennis at the social club and hunting for our own and workers’ meat. Every week we screened a 16mm film in a large farm shed for the enjoyment of ourselves and our 100 workers and their families. Cowboy films were the favourite. The hero was readily identified and cheered on by the crowd of workers, who did not understand one word of English! Helpfully he either wore a white hat, or rode a white horse!

Our grandfather and grandmother Crabtree spent a lot of time in Bulawayo with Granny’s sister. They passed away in 1950 and 1953, not very long after immigrating, and were buried in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia.

After six years of developing the farm, father and my uncle decided to go their separate ways. The latter stayed on the farm for a few more years, and then retired to Cape Town. We visited the farm in 1966, to find the house totally derelict, with the roof sheets removed.

After tobacco farming, father embarked on a third career. He went into local government and became the Secretary/Manager of a village, some 100 miles further north, called Mazabuka. This was a post rather like a town clerk, but in a smaller community. The duties covered everything necessary to keep Mazabuka running, with its thousands of local and hundreds of European inhabitants.

After 11 years in that role he was obliged to retire by health problems, exacerbated by the difficult political climate which then prevailed and in which he had to work. Our parents retired to Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe), where they lived near to REX and his wife Sheila (nee Scott). These were happy and untroubled times, but Mother’s health declined and she died in 1971 and was buried in Salisbury (now Harare).

(In the Marandellas photo, from left to right, all Tattersfields unless otherwise shown:-Alfred, Phyllis Prior, Nance, Anne Prior, Rex, Sheila, Alan Prior, Judy, Rosie, George Prior, George).

In the same year my wife Judy and I returned from Zambia to live in England. A few years later father, who suffered from emphysema, came to live with us, his health being much better at low altitude. He passed away in Kent in 1979.

REX went to Gwebi Agricultural College outside Salisbury, and then took a degree in agriculture at The University of Natal. He returned to Rhodesia, and became a lecturer at Gwebi College. He then followed his particular interest as a plant breeder, firstly with Government, and later with a private company. He specialised in soy and groundnuts, and became internationally known in his field. He retired in 2003. In August 2009 The World Soybean Research Conference was held in Beijing. REX was not well enough to attend, but he was awarded the World Soybean Conference Prize “for his great contribution to global soybean research and soybean industry development” (see below). It was one of five awards, world wide, one going to each major continent.

REX and Sheila found the situation in Zimbabwe became intolerable, and in 2003 they left to live in Cape Town. Sheila passed away in 2011, and Rex in 2017, both in a care home in Rondebosch, outside Cape Town. They had no children.

PHYLLIS married George Prior, an executive in Shell Company. He had postings in Nyasaland (now Malawi), Northern and Southern Rhodesia. On his retirement they moved from Zimbabwe to Cape Town, where George had been born. George passed away in Cape Town in 1990. Later PHYLLIS’s daughter Anne, and son Alan both emigrated to Australia with their families, and PHYLLIS followed them about 2006, and lives in Brisbane. Through her working life Phyllis was a primary school teacher, and became head mistress of the primary school in Cape Town Cathedral.

I studied civil engineering at Leeds University, where Judy and I met in 1954. She travelIed out to Northern Rhodesia on her own, and we were married in Mazabuka in July 1959.

I practised as a Consulting Civil Engineer in Zimbabwe and Zambia until August 1971. Judy and I then returned to live in UK, with our children GEORGE, ROSIE and HENRY. Since 1974 we have lived in Kent. I retired in 1995, and I spend many of my retirement hours studying the Tattersfield family history, extending the family tree, and corresponding with interested members of the various family branches. After the children left home, Judy became a teacher of adults.

There are no TATTERSFIELDs now living in Africa, and the nearest relatives are cousins once removed, on mother’s side of the family, descended from the family we first visited in Bulawayo on our arrival in 1947.

Header Image: A flue-cured tobacco field in the southern African rainy season. The view is completely typical of the agricultural world into which Alfred and Annie Tattersfield arrived in Northern Rhodesia in 1947.   Chris Sheppard / Shutterstock.com