MICHAEL ALEXANDER JOHN ANDERSON (1930 –
Michael Anderson is a familiar face in Leatherhead district where he has held prominent positions in the Bookham Residents Association and other local bodies. After a long career overseas working for Shell and also serving as a prospective Parliamentary candidate, he is President of the Bookham Arts Society, served on Mole Valley District Council for many years and was long involved in amateur dramatics in Fetcham where he lived when first moving to Surrey in the late 1960s.
Interview date: 24 March, 2017
Location: Great Bookham
Interviewer: Tony Matthews
Background and schooldays
What are your full name, date and place of birth?
Michael Alexander John Anderson. [I was born] 4 September 1930. I was born just outside Cambridge in a little village called Fen Ditton. My father was in the agricultural service. He was exempted – he was in an exempted profession anyway – but he probably would not have been physically qualified to be called up. My father was John Hainstock Anderson and my mother was Katherine Mary, as was Hooker Taylor who became Anderson when she married my father.
I spent a year at a choir school [St John’s College] although I was not a chorister. I then moved to a school called The Perse and I spent a year in the preparatory of The Perse. I then went to The Perse upper school. So I am on old Persean (emphasis on the old).
One of your schools was damaged during the war.
I used to cycle to school every morning and I used to cycle past the senior school on the way to the prep school. One cold winter morning I cycled past to find that the whole of the playground of the upper school was sheeted in ice and there had been incendiaries landed on the main school building. So there was quite a lot of significant damage done on that occasion. The headmaster at the time was a very driven individual. He stood in the playground with the school still blazing and firemen still at work and said: “School will open again at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.” And it did.
National Service
I did National Service because it was the era when one was required to do that anyway and I was called up in 1948. I did some basic training down at Shorncliffe near Folkestone with the Buffs – the East Kent Regiment – which still has a fond place in my memory. The Buffs, not the training at Shorncliffe. I was picked out then to go for officer training and so I didn’t spend very long in Folkestone. I then went up to Eaton Hall near Chester and it was decided that I should go into the Education Corps, I can’t really think why. So having spent six months up near Chester I moved down to Bodmin in Devon to complete my basic training.
When I was commissioned after my basic training I was posted to Egypt. I served for five months in Tel El Kebir. Tel El Kebir has a historical resonance in that there was a battle there in 1882 and it was the last battle in which the British army wore red coats. I actually did a project when I was there. Being a “schooly”, I wanted to do a project on the Battle of Tel El Kebir. I was interested anyway in military history and the local English language newspaper was in publication in the 1880s. So I thought I would go up to their offices in Cairo and see if I could look through the archives. I arrived, they welcomed me and said you are very welcome to look through the archives but we are not sure if we have got them. I said how come you’re not sure? Oh well, the Arab League drove a car loaded with explosives into our courtyard a week or so ago and just detonated it where it stood. We are not sure whether some of our archives survived.
What rank did you achieve?
I got to the dizzying height of [2nd] Lieutenant. [I achieved the rank of Lieutenant later when I served in the Territorial Army.]
What about your initials?
Yes, embarrassing in a way. Going back a step, I was christened by my grandfather who was a Congregational minister. I came from a long line of Congregational ministers which my father broke into and broke away from. My parents wanted me to be christened Michael but I was christened by my grandfather who decided that I was an Anderson and therefore I was a John. So my grandfather christened me John Michael Alexander…..but with the initials MAJ. when I was travelling, going out to my first post or whatever, all the communication messages said MAJ. Anderson. We couldn’t understand why we were met – I was married by then – by the managers of the plants or installations or branch or whatever. It was because they misunderstood that I wasn’t actually a Major.
Family
Anne and I are still together after quite a long time. [We married in]1954. We had known each for quite a while. Our families knew each other as well. They were both Cambridge-based families. I was then – as I am now – a Liberal and I got involved in university politics as a Liberal. I used to associate with the local Liberals, the local branch and the local committee, and that’s where Anne and I first really met up.
We have three children, Richard, Jane and David. Richard now lives in the south of France. He is the eldest of our three and he is permanently resident in the south of France and is probably in the process of taking out dual nationality which in the uncertainties of the EU is probably quite a good thing to do. Our daughter Jane, who is the second in line as it were, lives in Nottingham and she has lived there ever since she was married. She met her husband Blaise when they were at university in Southampton and they have been together ever since then. They in turn have three children so I have three granddaughters from that particular marriage. In all we have seven grandchildren. The three in Nottingham are three grown up young ladies now. The ones that are in France, Tim is 18 also and the younger girl there is 16, a very keen rower. She rows in competitive competitions in the south of France and internationally. Then we have our son David who is qualified as a lawyer and he is living permanently while he is working probably in Dubai where he is legal director for a firm called Carillion who we know in Surrey. They used to do the roads at one time. He is their legal director, Middle East.
Starting with Shell
When I left university, you get to the point where you have to have a job, something that brings in some money. I applied to Shell, to Unilever and to ICI. I got granted interviews by all three but my first interview was with Shell. From their point of view wisely or not, they offered me a job and I was very happy to accept. So I never really went to a definitive interview with either Unilever or ICI.
I suppose working for Shell in the sort of line I was in and working overseas you tend to become a bit of a jack-of-all-trades. I spent quite some time in the retail side of the business. I was the retail manager when I was in the Gold Coast which became Ghana. I was a district manager, and I also went to Singapore for a while. That’s another back story in that Anne and I were committed, pledged, wanted to marry but didn’t want to marry immediately on my joining Shell. I had a game plan which was that I would get myself to Africa in my first assignment and that I would then come back on my first local leave which from Africa I could afford to do, get married and Anne would come out with me.
The first interview I had for a job overseas was with the area co-ordinator for Singapore. I always remember. I went in and he said: “Sit down Anderson. Why do you want to go to Singapore?” I said: “Well quite frankly Sir, I don’t.” So in the way of the organisation I was posted to Singapore. So we decided we were going to get married before I went to Singapore and the knot was tied. Anne then came down to see me off on a Dutch liner at Southampton and I sailed off to Singapore, having I won’t say a whale of a time at sea but enjoying myself on a Dutch liner.
I got to Singapore and had a colleague with me. There were two jobs going in the Singapore region. One was in Singapore itself and the other was up country in Malaya. I would quite like to have had the up-country job but I got the desk job in Singapore. So when I arrived in the office having been allocated to my desk job my then manager said: “Oh hello Anderson, come in. You see that desk over there?” I said: “Yes of course I do.” “Be there at two o’clock will you.” That was my introduction.
I then sat in this desk not doing any travelling or anything for quite a long period of time. Then I eventually thought this is ridiculous. I’m married. I’d got married before I came out. We didn’t get married not to be together so I went to see the general manager – or rather I applied for permission to see the general manager. He said: “Come in. What can I do for you?” I said: “Well Sir, I would like my wife to be able to join me.” Which I didn’t think was an unreasonable request. To which he said: “Well I’ll have to ask London.” So he asked London and I was summoned back into the presence. He said: “Come in Anderson. We’re moving you to West Africa.”
The only book of reference I had at that time was an encyclopaedia [Harmsworth] of I think 1911. It said: “Singapore shares the reputation of West Africa for being known as the white man’s grave.” So my first two overseas assignments were both firmly in the jaws of white man’s grave territory.
Working years
You survived and retired in 1988.
Yes, I did 35 years with Shell and because if you were working particularly in the tropics you had concessionary time off your retirement age, I was able to retire in 1988 at my full retirement age. The other thing that I found very fulfilling actually is because Shell genuinely – I think that things may have changed subsequently – but then they were very keen that their staff got involved in their local communities and they actively encouraged the staff to get involved in the places they lived. At that time I was a prospective Parliamentary candidate but Shell that’s all right. We will give you paid leave of absence to fight an election. Which actually was quite forward looking as a general principle. So if there was a payoff, I’m very grateful to the company for which I worked for the opportunity it allowed me to have and for the opportunities I had when I was actually working.
I had one period just before I retired when I was involved in an outfit called Job Evaluation. We had a particular system in how we evaluated jobs. It enabled us to look at any job of any nature, any type, any level and rate them on a common rating so they would come up in a sort of batting order of significance. For three years I was roving ambassador for doing that just before I retired and I had to travel around the world. My job was going to wherever and training people to write the material in a form that was appropriate and necessary for us to go back later and evaluate the jobs. In three years that involved me going to a place for a month. In three years I went to Hong Kong, Bangkok, Singapore, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Zurich, Curacao in the West Indies and that was an amazing period of my life and work experience.
When we came back from overseas we based ourselves in Cambridge. We bought my parents’ house in Cambridge and I commuted backwards and forwards from Cambridge to London which was not a particularly good thing. I think of one chap I used to meet on the daily commute who had decided that he wasn’t going to move from Cambridge although he was working in London. This was in the late 1930s I think. He spent all of his working life shuttling backwards and forwards to London by train, retired, and sadly he did not survive more than six months. So you’ve got to pace yourself and you’ve got to do what makes sense and is reasonable.
Moving to Surrey
So we had bought my parents’ house in Cambridge which was a sensible thing for us to have done at that time but we had Shell friends whom we had met overseas and a lot of our friendships – sadly a lot of them no longer around as individuals – were forged overseas. What you had on the overseas circuit were shared experiences, shared frustrations and shared things that you had to see the better of. So many of our longer term friends were friends we had made a long time ago. When we eventually came back and we were living in Cambridge and I was commuting some of our friends from the earlier days who lived in Ashtead said why don’t you come down and see what would be on the market that you could afford in Surrey?
So we came down for a weekend and we trawled around. We found this house in Fetcham in a place called Cannon Way which had been flooded in the floods of 1968. We knew its history and knew it had solid flooring so we didn’t think any intrinsic damage had been done and it was in the price bracket that we could afford. So we bought a base in Fetcham. We then found that the River Mole, which is quite a tricky little river, had the potential for flooding levels quite often. We lived through three red flood alerts living in Fetcham and we said to ourselves…there’s one day I remember I went up to London and had a phone call. Red alert. I came back down to Leatherhead. Things seemed to be all right. I went back to London and then got summoned back again to Fetcham. You can’t cope with that indefinitely so eventually we decided we would move to higher ground. That was why we moved from Fetcham up to Bookham. We moved up to Bookham in 1975 to this house and we have been here ever since. So it’s now 40 plus years.
What changes have you seen in the area?
Bookham has changed. It is obviously so. Bookham likes to pride itself on its village ethos, its village atmosphere. But even in 1994 when Bookham entered in the Southeast in Bloom flowers competition it was in the small towns category. That was in 1994. With a population now of 11,500 knocking on 12,000, Bookham is quite a sizeable urban community whether we like it or not. That is probably why we spend a lot of our [time]…not consciously, but we try to nurture and develop the domestic feeling of it being a small, self-contained community.
It has grown tremendously. During the war I think the population in Bookham was about 3000. But we are surrounded – praise be that we are – by green belt and the demand for new housing still remains fairly high. Particularly areas like this which are convenient for Gatwick, convenient to Heathrow, convenient to London. So there’s a lot of pressure. One is very conscious of this and spends as much of one’s efforts as one can nurturing this as a very real, very special community in its own right.
What about Leatherhead?
Since moving down to Surrey I have established some of my roots in Leatherhead. I’m a particularly keen supporter of Leatherhead Football Club which I have been ever since the day we first moved down here. This is an interest that my younger son David also takes on board and when he is over here from Dubai we enjoy going down together to watch a game at the Grove. I think that Leatherhead is beginning now to find its feet yet again. When I was involved I had the feeling that Leatherhead as a whole didn’t really know what type of town it aspired to be. In those days you had the Swan Centre but in a way that was overshadowed by the fact that in Epsom much at the same time that the Swan Centre opened you had the opening of the Ashley Centre in Epsom. But no, Leatherhead is really a nice, pleasant, attractive market town. Historically it was where the ford was over the river, served as a crossing point and now today of course it is fixed very conveniently close to the motorway and midway between Gatwick and Heathrow.
Dorking?
One ought to see Dorking as part of…but from my own feeling again, although Mole Valley is a district government entity which embraces both the south and the north – the rural south and the urban north – it has not got the tied together relationship. I don’t know how strong the essence of “we come from Mole Valley” is as opposed to “we come from….in Mole Valley”. Certainly having been on the council for a while there’s a disjoint how people view the north and the south of the district.
Local activities and roles
I’ve been asked if I can say something about all the roles that I try – probably inadequately – to fulfil in the local community. I think partly my interest is because we are interested naturally in where we are living anyway. It is that I feel I have always had a community essence to what I do and how I try and do it. I think that if you have any contribution that one is able to make, hopefully people will step forward very quickly if it is clear that you are not able to make that contribution. I say that with some feeling because I don’t want to get in the same frame myself as people who cling on and cling on and cling on when really they have made their contribution, should be thanked for it and given the vase or whatever it is you get presented with. As I have said, I love the area we live in, I love the community we live in. If I can make any sort of positive input to it I will continue to try and do that.
I am still, as we speak in early 2017 involved in a few local organisations. There is the Bookham Residents Association where I am a member of the executive. Also particularly the Arts Society of Bookham of which I have the privilege of being president. I also am a member of the Bookham and District U3A and a keen supporter and participant in their Military History group.
One of my particular interests as a member of the Bookham Residents Association and of the committee is Norbury Park because Norbury Park is one of the very attractive countryside areas that we have on our doorstep in Bookham. It is an area that I don’t go up to and walk on as often as I should but which is a great treasure and great delight for people to enjoy the delights of the countryside.
But also bear in mind that the pressures continue to be strong. Pressures not only within the bounds of Bookham but just over the boundary. Issues like what is to happen at the Howard of Effingham School. I had some involvement with that in the past. The buildings really need to be refurbished and in large measure replaced but it cannot be done on site. So the only way to tackle that is actually to consider and conceive of moving the school to a different location. One thinks of places like Wisley which, bearing in mind the catchment area that the school covers, would be an equally valid and accessible place for users to get to.
Political life
You were a local councillor.
Yes I served for 13 years on Mole Valley District Council.
I suppose I have always had an interest in politics. I remember when I was at school I served as election agent for one of the candidates in the school mock election. In 1945 I was actually the agent for the Liberal candidate because politically I am a Liberal and that is something I have been all my political life. Indeed I did stand four times in Parliamentary elections, once for a by-election in Epsom and Ewell in 1978 where I did just save my deposit actually. It was the time of the Lib-Lab pact and the Liberals were not exactly the flavour of the month at that time particularly. I then stood in three subsequent general elections as a Parliamentary candidate. Firstly for the Epsom constituency which then embraced Bookham and Ashtead, and later for East Surrey. The record shows I didn’t actually any of those elections and indeed the first public election I won was the tenth one I contested which was when I stood for Mole Valley District Council in 1991.
I enjoyed my time as a local councillor very much. I thought that if there was anything that I could do at all to help members of the local community that was something trying to achieve. I quite enjoyed most of the cut and thrust of the district council although I did get very frustrated in that we tended to find that different groups do not really listen to what others were saying. I do remember on one occasion standing up in the council chamber and saying: “Look, wouldn’t it be helpful if occasionally at least we heard what people of a different view were saying and took it on board in deciding what might or might not be the best thing to do.”
One role which I did have for a while on the council, I was chairman of the town twinning group. I feel very strongly that we need to extend barriers across barriers but my aim and hope that we might be able to twin with somewhere in Poland I think was actually several boundaries too far. So we in fact finished up being twinned with a town in France, Triel-sur-Seine.
Life on stage
Another passion of my life has been amateur dramatics with the stress on the word “amateur”. I played a part when I was at school at the age of ten – I was Natasha in The Proposal by Chekhov. Nice part but I had problems keeping my ear-rings on. I then went on and graduated and became the King to Richard II but I then started taking more macho parts as my voice deepened. I used to act when I was at boarding school. I didn’t act at university at all but when I…….settled down and joined the Fetcham Players in Fetcham I did a lot of stage parts with them which I thoroughly enjoyed.
Apart from one occasional when we had had a farewell party at work and I arrived back home fairly well oiled [and] I had to appear on stage. Unfortunately it was the evening that the local paper representative came to see the play. I got a reasonable write up from him although he did say: “…Although at one part Michael Anderson very clearly lost the thread of what he was trying to say.” Which I think to have that appear in print is a bit hard. But it’s another side of my life, another part of my life.
It’s been a part of what I have done for most of my time but I haven’t been on the boards as I say since 1991. One occasion with Fetcham Players when there was a photographer from the local paper there was when I was playing the bent inspector in Joe Orton’s comedy, Loot. My picture appeared on the front page of the Leatherhead Advertiser seen by a lady whom I knew, happened to come across me and said: “Oh Mr Anderson. I saw your picture in the paper the other day, it was actually on the front page. Was it a good play?” It was quite difficult to know how to reply discreetly and carefully.
There is in many ways a similarity between being on the political stage and being on the theatrical stage. The main difference being that if you are a politico mostly you write your own speeches. When you are on the stage somebody else has written them for you. That in itself can be embarrassing if you have a mental crash-out in the middle of a scene which I think fortunately only happened to me once. I do remember playing in a play called Lord Arthur Saville. My fiancee in the play sadly had just lost her mother and she was really in a very emotional state very understandably. We were on stage together and she jumped from a cue line in Act One to a cue line in Act Two which was really quite a difficult situation to retrieve. I had to say: “My dear, did you not mean to say such and such….”
I think one of the highlights of it when I only played a relatively small role was in The King and I which I had the privilege of being involved in when we were in Nairobi. I was the British Ambassador which meant I got to dance with the leading lady which was great fun.
I had the pleasure of acting with the Nairobi City Players. It was a magical production in my eyes because all the young children in the King’s palace were in fact genuinely young Siamese children. We had the great pleasure of there [being] a Siamese dance in the play and the Siamese dancer was a professional royal Siamese dancer. That sort of magic can fulfil itself on stage as well as off stage. I remember that we were originally scheduled to run for ten days. We were a sell-out for ten days so we had to continue for a further week. Many of us were actually working in the office, packing up, coming down to the theatre and then going on stage, including doing a Saturday matinee on each of the two and half weeks we ran. I enjoyed it very much and it’s a part of my life and recollections that I absolutely treasure.
Being busy with politics, my work and other things I went though a period when I didn’t do very much on the amateur stage but I remember on one occasion I did say to a producer: “Look I would at least like to tread the boards, even if it only means walking on the stage for a minute or two. We were doing a play which required two excise men to walk across the stage, go up a flight of steps and knock on a door. I was the second excise man which meant I didn’t really have any words but as we got half way across the stage somebody yelled out from the back of the village hall in Fetcham: “There he goes. Canvassing again!”