Overview

These memoirs are based on the diaries and handwritten memoirs of Dr Norman Jewell. They offer an intriguing view of the life of a young doctor in the Seychelles in 1910. After four idyllic years in this tropical Eden, Norman waved goodbye to his pregnant wife and two baby sons and set sail for Mombasa, to join the World War One campaign in East Africa.He was posted, as a Captain in the British Army, to Kisumu on Lake Victoria and then to the 3 East African Field Ambulance. This took him all over British East Africa and into German East Africa via circuitous routes and battlefield skirmishes following the famous undefeated German commander, General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck.Faced with the risk of injury and death from warfare he also battled hunger, recurrent dysentery and bouts of malaria through to 1917 when a particularly bad attack of malaria forced him to return to the Seychelles, via Bombay, to convalesce. There he met his new daughter who was born in 1915 after he had left for war.Upon his return to East Africa after six weeks he was posted back to the Field Ambulance and served in the continuing pursuit of von Lettow-Vorbeck in the southern part of former German East Africa (now Tanzania). He was awarded the Military Cross for working on one occasion for 62 hours, without a break, on 100 wounded men.Post war, after surviving Bloody Sunday in Dublin in 1920, he rejoined the Colonial Medical Service in the new Kenya Colony and his stories of the development of medicine, managing smallpox epidemics and the pandemic flu, his social surroundings in Mombasa and Nairobi and the people he met provide a fascinating professional and personal picture of life at the time in British East Africa. Always a keen photographer he describes his friendship with Cherry Kearton, who was a photographer of international repute, from the days of the campaign and then in peacetime in Kenya. This book is based on his diaries and richly illustrated with his photographs before, during and after the war and will be of interest to historians of the period in Africa. Transcripts of his archived war diaries are reproduced and a section which provides more background to his wife Sydney and the family provides an account of extraordinary lives in a fascinating historical period.

Full Product Details

9780993138201

Table of Contents

Reviews

'On Call in Africa' comprises an account of Dr Norman Jewell's military and medical career in the Seychelles (1910-14) and Kenya (1914-32) during the height of the British Empire. Put together by his grandchildren as both a tribute and historical record, this memoir has been assembled from Jewell's own diaries and autobiographical notes and has been supplemented with some extremely interesting additional archival evidence. The result is a dedicated family project that provides a fascinating source that will be of great use to historians, as well as the general reader, interested in the complex interrelationships of colonialism, medicine and war. Works such as this one help to preserve the experiences of those actively involved in the British Empire. They shed light on the social and cultural world into the operation of medicine in colonial outposts and provide vital details about the often forgotten East African military campaigns that dominated the region. This is a wonderful source, providing a rare personal account of what it meant to be a doctor in the early twentieth century in British East Africa. Anna Greenwood (previously Crozier), BA (Hons), MPhil (Cantab.), PhD. (Lon.)

Author Information

Norman Parsons Jewell was born in Larne, County Antrim, Ireland on 27th September 1885.His father, Thomas Jewell, died the following year and the author was raised by his grandparents, in Dublin, where he attended school and later qualified in medicine at Trinity College Dublin (TCD). It was there that he met Sydney Elizabeth Auchinleck, one of the first women to graduate from TCD, whom he later married when she joined him in the Seychelles.In 1910, soon after qualifying as a doctor, he joined the Colonial Medical Services and was posted to Praslin Island in the Seychelles as Surgeon and Justice of the Peace. Upon the outbreak of World War One, he volunteered to join the war effort in East Africa where, after a spell in Kisumu, he was posted to 3 East Africa Field Ambulance. He was awarded the Military Cross for gallantry during the campaign.Post war he obtained his Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons (Ireland) and Diploma in Public Health and rejoined the Colonial Medical Service. He published a book Handbook for Tropical Fevers with his colleague Dr William Kauntze and published regularly in British Medical journals on his clinical casework. He remained in Kenya until 1932 before returning to England to settle in Pinner, Middlesex with his family. He was awarded the OBE for his services in East Africa. Back in Britain he worked as a surgeon in Harrow on the Hill Hospital and consulted in Harley Street until his retirement. NP Jewell died in 1973 before his memoirs could be published.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available