A Shared Memoir of Love and Adventure

By Bill and Jeannette Thomson

The book is A Memoir About:
Adventure
Exhilarating journeys where travel and adventure intertwine. Awe-inspiring destinations, daring escapades, and transformative experiences that will leave you yearning for your own extraordinary odyssey.

Love
The quest for love transcends borders. Follow Bill's serendipitous journey across continents, revealing the remarkable tale of finding love on the other side of the globe.

Family
Delve into the vibrant tapestry of Bill's multicultural family. Witness the rich blend of traditions, languages, and identities, celebrating the power of diversity and unconditional love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798350928563

Book preview

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Bill was a ‘larger than life’ character, his incredible life,

love for travelling, passion for cricket, devotion to his family is an

inspiration to many. Reading his memoir is like walking through

a brilliant mind and you’re about to find out why…

A Shared Memoir of Love and Adventure

©2023 Bill & Jeannette Thomson

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN 979-8-35092-855-6

eBook ISBN 979-8-35092-856-3

Dedication

To my mum, family and friends for their relentless nature in inspiring and motivating me to finish Bill’s memoir.

Jeannette Thomson

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction

Born Into War

Postwar Period

Bill’s Cricketing Recollections

The Seattle Years

The East Coast

Asia

England again

Part 2

Memories of AGS

Memories from Brian Britton

Memories from Christine Brooks

Memories from Ron King

Bill in Business

Investing

Gold

Cricket

Bill the Father

Falling in Love Again

Barbara Suzuki Remembers Bill

How Friendships are Formed

Is there Life After Manila and ADB?

England

Northern Exploits

Malaga

Gibraltar

Granada

Barcelona

Azerbaijan

Germany

Covid-19

Portugal

Chichester

Brighton

Kent

France

Wales

Asian Delights

Boracay

Philippine Reunion after Covid

Thailand

Vietnam

Yokohama

Tokyo

Bill’s Milestone

South Africa

Memories from Habib Faris, Bill’s business associate

The Last Dance

Epilogue

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

This memoir is in memory of an extraordinary human being who lived his life with incredible optimism and positivity. My husband, William (Bill) Thomson, was a remarkable father to Craig, Alison and Alistair and was such an inspiration to us and to people he knew.

I want to express my profound gratitude to Bill’s friends, business associates and schoolmates who obliged in contributing to this memoir so that it could be completed. We couldn’t have made this happen without you. I would like to specially mention Brian Britton, Christine Brooks, Alison Thomson-Chaput de Saintonge, Habib Farris, Ron King, Philip Mappin, Barbara Suzuki, Alistair Thomson, Craig Thomson and Ken Waller. Rick Adkinson provided the Foreword.

In the process of writing Bill’s memoir, our daughter Alison married Daniel (Dan) and our grandson from Alison and Dan, Louis William Bramley Chaput de Saintonge, was born on May 3rd 2023.

Alistair is now married to Georgina (George.)

Bill, your memory and legacy will live on - this is a promise from us all.

Jeannette, Craig, Alison, Alistair

Fore

word

It is often said one might meet a handful of people in one’s lifetime that you can trust implicitly and who will remain a friend for life. I think you can count them on one hand;, I can personally count three. Bill was one of those three people.

I knew Bill for well over a quarter of a century and it has only recently occurred to me he spent a good deal of his time mentoring me personally, but he did it in such a way that, it is only now as I reflect that, he did it without me realising it.

I first met Bill before I started my company, which this year reached a twenty-five year milestone. He willingly took the role of Chairman when I asked him, unpaid because he knew we couldn’t afford him. He taught me much over the fifteen year period he chaired us, we still have not replaced him, and I am not sure we can.

His relentlessly positive and supportive attitude knew no bounds. He could be cantankerous, politically incorrect (though that did not bother me too much) and argumentative when challenged. He liked nothing better than a beer or a glass of Sauvignon Blanc in the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in his favourite city of Hong Kong, whilst tackling the latest of life’s challenges.

Our joint passion was cricket, as you will read, we often met up at Lord’s and managed a final tour in South Africa but before the Covid pandemic hit us. All the more memorable for a famously rare victory on the beautiful coast of Cape Town and Newlands.

Rick Adkinson, Private Capital Ltd, Hong Kong

I

ntroduction

Life has a way of weaving stories, hearts and souls into a tapestry of shared experiences. As I sit down to write the first words of what started out as an autobiography and has, since Bill’s passing, transformed into a biography, I can’t help but feel it is a bittersweet journey. It is both an honour and a heavy task to take on the completion of this book which Bill had initially started.

My name is Jeannette Thomson, (aka JT,) and I’ve lived most of my life intertwined with a man whose eccentricity, opinions, and remarkable journeys have left an indelible mark on those fortunate enough to have come across him – (or unfortunate enough should you dare to disagree with him)! This is not just my story; it is partly a journey through his eyes, through our years together, and the many chapters of his life which I have had to piece together through the contributions of his friends (and family).

Each contribution received is a treasure trove of memories, a window into shared experiences, quirks, and anecdotes. Reading through these tributes, I’m often reminded of the diverse roles which Bill played in the lives of others— – mentor, confidant, comrade, and source of inspiration. The process has required patience and empathy, as it has been a space for contributors to share their feelings, reflections, and unique perspectives. Through this journey, there were moments of sorrow and nostalgia but also a shared sense of purpose in immortalising Bill’s memory.

For those of you who knew us, we were together nearly 40 years –- it was matrimonial bliss, or something like that. Those years were like navigating a rollercoaster in a monsoon at times but it meant weathering life’’s storms and revelling in its joys together.

Bill was a man of strong convictions. He had a sparkle in his eye and a mischievous laugh. He had a get- up- and- go attitude and lived life to the full. He loved a good debate, political or otherwise. He was mad about cricket, travel and almost always ordered a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc in every drinking establishment. and for dinner, it would almost always be salmon. Nine times out of ten he would be the last man standing at the end of an evening.

He was lucky enough to have lived a life well travelled, which spanned continents and cultures. From the U.K. to America, Asia and Africa, he soaked in the diversity of the world with an insatiable curiosity.

Completing this book isn’t just a nod to his memory; it is a promise I made to myself when he passed away that has now been fulfilled. I feel in some ways it has been a final chuckle together. As I sifted through the completed chapters which he left on his laptop, I could practically hear his mischievous laughter. It is almost as if he has handed this project for me to finish.

He may not be here tapping away on his laptop, but he lives on in every story, in every memory shared by friends who crossed his path in different chapters of his life. Their contributions paint a vivid portrait of the man who lived with fervour, argued with gusto and did not take life too seriously.

So, dear reader, join me as we travel continents and eras, navigating through his thoughts, his travels (and misadventures), his quirks, and his passions, but through the memories of his friends and family. In these pages, his spirit lives on, and together, we’ll uncover the finale he wished for – completing this book.

B

orn Into War

Baby Bill, always having that cheeky smile

All stories are supposed to have a beginning, but where does a life story begin? Should it be at birth, or is there a prequel to the birth to give it some meaning? That’s a bit metaphysical so I will give both to provide some context, in case anyone is interested. I entered the world on 10th August 1939 at the Royal Northern Hospital on Holloway Road near Islington. The buildings of the Royal Northern are still around but they are now luxury apartments. The hospital was merged with University College Hospital London in the 1950s, sometime after the creation of the NHS (National Health Service) in the post war period.

My parents had only arrived back in England the previous month from Palestine, where my father was serving as an officer at RAF (Royal Air Force) Ramleh. Ramleh was a small, mostly Arab and Christian village at the time, but is now a large town in Israel called Ramla. My father had been in the Middle East for about three years after joining the RAF in late 1935. All families were being repatriated to the U.K. in the summer of 1939 anticipating the beginning of World War II, which duly commenced on 3rd September 1939 when Hitler invaded Poland and triggered a mutual defence agreement between the U.K. and Poland.

I was three weeks old and there is absolutely no proof that Hitler went to war on account of my arrival. I believe, though, my mother chose the Royal Northern because it had a good reputation and she was anticipating a difficult delivery with me. She had good reasons - her first child, a girl called Agnes, had been born in Ramleh a year earlier and had died after one day. The body was buried in the base cemetery, which is now looked after by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission for the dead fromWorld War I, the inter-war years and World War II. By the time war broke out we were apparently living near King’s Lynn in Norfolk, my father having been posted to RAF Manston, I believe. I, of course, have no memories of those days.

We didn’t stay there long. In 1941 we moved to Cannock in Staffordshire, where my father had been posted to RAF Hednesford, a training establishment; then, as now, Britain was critically short of the technical skills needed to run a modern, efficient war machine and the forces had to train their own. It is where I have my very first memory. I remember one night, as a two or three-year old, being taken to the air-raid shelter at the bottom of the garden and hearing the adults saying ‘They are bombing Birmingham tonight. I remember the words to this very day.

It would be about the same time I was taken to Glasgow to see my grandparents for the first time. I remember looking up and seeing barrage balloons high in the sky, dangling iron cables, and asking what they were for. I was told they were to prevent the enemy bombers coming over the area. Otherwise, it seemed quite peaceful but the dockyards were nearby so they could have been a target.

It was the spring of 1943 when we made our next move to Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire and my memories from that time are quite consistent and continuous. Dad was posted to RAF Halton with a major training establishment for young apprentices in technical areas. Because petrol was severely rationed and transport was very difficult we had to move to the new house by stealth. Our furnishings were in a cattle truck with presumably farmers being able to get fuel more easily - and we followed in our Morris 8 with the headlights shrouded so as not to attract the attention of the police or enemy planes!

The house was a large one on the A41, the main London to Oxford road, just outside Aylesbury, with a large garden and seemingly endless fields past the back fence where I spent much time over the following years as I was growing up. They seemed to a young lad to support an endless list of flora and fauna and certainly much more than today’s suburban youth ever experience. By 1943 the war was slowly turning in the Allies’ favour, and Aylesbury, being close to London and further south, was closer to the military buildup and preparations for the invasion of the Continent.

It seemed all men were in uniform except the very elderly who served in shops – not that there was much to buy since food was severely rationed and the quality was very poor. Even eggs were rationed, and I remember the first food aid packages coming from the U.S. which contained powdered eggs and appalling, sickly, Carnation canned milk. Meat was especially difficult and I can remember my mother triumphantly bringing home a wild rabbit that a farmer had sold her: wild rabbits not being rationed. Beyond these things I do not have many vivid memories of that summer, but 1944 was a completely different matter.

Several events stand out from 1944. The first was D-Day, 6th June, the day the Allied forces landed on the Continent and began the recapture of Western Europe from the Nazis. I remember that day - the sky was black with DC3s or Dakotas towing large gliders filled with troops who would land in France behind enemy lines and join up with those landing on the beaches in Normandy.

Of course, I had no idea about any of this but the sheer volume of aircraft made the adults aware that something big was underway. It would have been around the same time that my mother took me on a trip to Ilford to see her sister, who had given birth to a daughter, Brenda. We travelled by train and bus and it was just another trip until there was a noise and absolute panic amongst the adults. My mother grabbed me and hurried me back home, saying,’I’m not coming to London again till this war is over.’ A German V1 rocket had landed in the general vicinity. These rockets were designed by a German scientist, Wernher von Braun, who escaped to America after the war and who I met one time at NASA headquarters in Washington DC around 1967.

My aunt died soon after that trip from an infection and we looked after her daughter until the war was over and her father, Len Higgins, took her back. Mr Higgins and my mother did not get along so we lost touch with Brenda, to my mother’s regret. I started school in the summer of 1944 at Queens Park in Aylesbury. There was no preschool during the war, so the first few days’ adjustment was a shock for most kids. The war in Europe ended in May 1945 when Germany surrendered, Hitler having committed suicide in April in his bunker in Berlin as the Allies and the Russians closed in on him from the west and east respectively.

The end of the war in Europe was called VE (Victory in Europe) Day, but the war in Asia rumbled on and only ended in August with VJ (Victory in Japan) Day, after the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to Japan’s surrender. We were on holiday in Swanage in Dorset at the time. There were no hotels or B&Bs available. We had to sleep in a large tent in a field and have our meals cooked over a paraffin stove. The beach could be used, but there was no going into the water because there were still metal spikes in the sea to hinder an oncoming German invasion. These were all gone by the summer of 1946, when normal beach holidays were again possible.

But a few days after the dropping of the bombs in Japan I was at the cinema as a holiday treat and on the newsreel they showed the bombs and their blasts. There were great celebrations as the war ended, with marches as the troops returned home. The end of the war was truly the end of an era. Britain got a new government that year as Churchill was booted out of office, probably on the back of serving on the military vote. The men were fed up and just wanted to go home and have a normal service resume. The new Labour government was to transform Britain for the next 30 or more years, until another transformation began in 1979 with the election of Maggie Thatcher’s first government.

For myself, I believe the war years, even though I was just six years and five days old on VJ Day, probably profoundly affected my views and attitudes for the rest of my life. I only ever bought one German car in my life, for instance, and that was solely because it was such a slam-dunk way to make money, but perhaps that story can be told in a later chapter. There is little to comment about during the rest of my childhood in the 1940s, the primary school years. My brother Donald was born in 1946 and I remember us picking him up at Harley Street one morning and driving home, stopping off for coffee in Watford, a place of no distinguishing characteristics except it later became the home of Elton John.

Postwa

r Period

In 1950 I passed my 11 plus exam and was able to enter Aylesbury Grammar School. Grammar schools in those days were for the top 20 percent of pupils, they offered upward mobility in society into managerial careers and professions otherwise reserved for boys from expensive, fee-paying schools. I was given a bicycle for passing the examination; one that I did about 40,000 miles on over the subsequent 11 years before selling it for £1.50 (30 shillings in old money) to a lab technician in Trafford Park just before I emigrated to the United States.

The 1950s were better years. For a start I discovered cricket! I was vaguely aware of cricket when I was in primary school but it was something we played on the beach on holiday. The first news about cricket I remember was when the radio announced that Don Bradman, the greatest ever batsman at that point in history, was out for a duck on his last game in England at the Oval in 1948. Bradman, was Australian and when he was out, bowled by Eric Hollies (an English cricketer who is mainly remembered for taking the wicket of Don Bradman for a duck in Bradman’s final Test match innings) with a googly, he ended his career with a never equalled average of 99.96 runs per innings. A humble 4 in his last innings would have assured a lifetime average of 100.

My time at AGS was uneventful and was mainly about passing exams. The only real passion I developed was for cricket, and I managed to make the first XI. The most memorable innings was when I opened against Ealing Grammar School, who were in a different league to us. I carried my bat for 4 not out and was the highest scoring batsman.

We were all out for 27 with 7 byes as the top scorer. But I regularly visited Lord’s in those years and travelled to Oxford on my bicycle, where I saw many famous players such as Colin Cowdrey, who played for Kent when he was a student. My life was disrupted in 1956 when my father was posted to RAF Weeton outside Blackpool and I had to move up north in the middle of my sixth-form studies, leaving AGS and entering Kirkham Grammar School (KGS.)

KGS was frankly inferior to AGS and I had to work doubly hard to get good A Levels, which I managed. I was accepted into Imperial College London to study physics, but I knew in my heart I would struggle with the electronics side so I opted to study mathematics at Manchester instead. I duly entered Manchester University in October 1957. Manchester was probably the biggest culture shock I had faced until then. It was an alien world. The place was dirty, decrepit and polluted, with wartime bomb damage still around and the people overwhelmingly working-class. It could not have been more different from today’s student life. My budget was £5 a week to cover accommodation, food, transportation and entertainment (of which there was very little).

It was Tuesday 26th September 1961 when I made the big step. I was 22 years and one month and had just finished a year’s postgraduate research in fluid dynamics at Manchester University. I had received an offer to work at the Boeing Company in Seattle for the princely sum of $8,000 a year, about £2,800 at the then prevailing sterling exchange rate. That was a fortune for a lad who was living on a grant of £7 a week and almost four times the annual salary I had been offered to join the U.K. elite Scientific Civil Service.

I knew nothing about Seattle, very little about Boeing and nothing about the job. We did not have gap years in those days but I viewed this job as my gap year experience. I had no idea where it would lead, but thought I could always come back to the U.K. in a couple of years. I did, for a visit, but did not come back to live for 37 years.

So there I was,