MY CATS & MYSELF

David A.P. Butcher

Click here to see the first recorded images of me as a baby (351 Kb, sound card required).

Shortly afterwards, I was born in Nairobi (Kenya, East Africa) at an early age (sometime in 1957),


and was caught on film with my Mum, our persian cat 'Fluffy', and my first set of wheels (the pram, not the Goggomobil). Just let me get behind the wheel, Mum!
I later attended St.Mary's School at Westlands in Nairobi (as did my father with the singer, Roger Whittaker) between 1963 and 1968 - first as a day-bug, and later as a boarder (when my parents moved away from Nairobi). This meant that, on the half-term breaks, I got to fly (with my younger brother, Robert) on Dakota DC3s and Fokker Friendships from school to home and back. For the main holiday breaks, we used to travel on the overnight train - over 12 hours on what must be one of the finest railway journeys anywhere, as the Beyer-Garratt 59 Class (the most powerful steam locomotives in the world), often in tandem, struggled to pull the trains up to one-mile in length across the East African Rift Valley. On a number of occassions, I got to travel in the cab of the '59 monsters (because my father was a Civil Engineer working for East African Railways & Harbours), fulfilling every schoolboy's dream of being a train driver at a very early age (and realising that stoking a boiler is not a very desirable job at all).


My passion for speed on four-wheels developed when, seven years after my first trip in a Goggomobil (on the way back from Nairobi Hospital), I finally got to sit alone behind a steering wheel and race around in a 197cc. Villiers go-kart in January 1964. Isn't this how all champion drivers started off?

   
My younger brother, Robert, also learnt to drive the go-kart, and my father, Peter, worked as a Civil Engineer for East African Railways and Harbours, so weekends saw us racing around disused areas of the railway marshalling yards and workshops in Nairobi.

When my father was posted to Mombasa, we sold the go-kart and bought a speed-boat, behind which we all learnt to slalom water-ski (in shark-infested waters, under instruction from various National Champions including Tony Dickinson).

From Mombasa, we were posted to Kampala, where we lived at 13 Prince Charles Drive, Kololo Hill, and our next-door neighbour was a middle-ranking officer (serving in the Ugandan Army) by the name of Idi Amin!


We found the best way to tour around game parks in Uganda long before the days of air-conditioning in our Hillman Minx.
We also used to go on regular trips into the Game Parks in a Morris van that my Grandfather had converted into a camper - this was in the days when it was not unusual to wake up at dawn with a herd of over 200 elephants, or 50 rhinocerous, wandering around outside the van.
In mid-1968, my parents decided to move to England, for a number of reasons - principally so that Robert and I could attend secondary school in UK, and to be nearer to my grandparents (who by now had retired and settled in Wimborne Minster, near Bournemouth on the south coast of England), so I lost touch with my first 'girlfriend', Marzia Mauro. I believe that she moved with her parents and younger sister, Patrizia, back to Italy at about the same time, and have subsequently heard that she now lives in Australia.

I then had to attend a primary school for a year - required simply so that I could sit the 11+ examination. This was a selection process between Comprehensive (generally more practical) and Grammar (more intellectual) secondary education streams. I must have passed, because I then attended Peter Symonds' Grammar School in Winchester (Hampshire) until I sat my Oxford-board GCE 'O' Level exams in July 1974 (9 passes, two fails - in Chemistry and History, both bunk).
At this time, 'Peter Pips' was restructured into a sixth-form College, so I was amongst the first batch to attend Peter Symonds' College from September 1974 until July 1976, when I took three Oxford-board GCE 'A' Levels (all passed - Mathematics, Physics and Geography).
During my spare time, I learnt to fix various appliances to raise money to pay for trips to various motor races; one of my best friends, Alan Wesson, had an ancient Renault 10, which he used to throw sideways around corners and roundabouts on the way to or from Brands Hatch or Silverstone race circuits.
I also learnt that an electronic flashgun stores a lot of charge, and gives a very nasty kick if you get your fingers across the terminals of the tube when the capacitors are charged up!

My father (Peter John Butcher) is a retired Civil Engineer, and my paternal grandfather (John Edward Butcher) was a Mechanical Engineer (he was the General Manager of General Motors in Kenya when he retired, but long before then, was one of the Research & Development team developing the automatic gearbox for a renowned sports car manufacturer in Coventry), and both used to compete (very successfully) in a number of motor races and rallies in East Africa - including the Jumamosa Rally (which has since been watered down into the Kenya Safari Rally), when they beat Stirling Moss (he was driving a works-prepared Mercedes 190, they were driving a self-prepared Morris Minor). They also raced in the Goggomobil and a Fiat 2300 - and these 'rally' cars had to double as the family daily shopping buggies!
Hence I was under a lot of pressure to study Engineering, and soon had to choose between Acoustical Engineering at Southampton University and Mechanical Engineering at City University (in Central London). Although I was most interested in the former course, it was somewhat of an unknown career choice, so I went for the 'safe' option, and dreaming of following in my grandfathers' footsteps by getting a job at the Jaguar Vehicle Research Centre, left home for the 'smoke' in September 1976.

Unfortunately, all the stories that I had heard about the fun (drinking, deborchery and more drinking) aspect of life at 'Uni' seemed to pass me by completely! I worked, worked, and worked flat out to meet the deadlines for countless assignments, and had to commute 12 miles each way from my digs in Muswell Hill (North London) by bicycle every day. When I failed the exams at the end of the first year, I then spent the entire summer holiday swatting even harder, and managed to scrape through the re-sits at the end of August 1977. My course tutor then pointed out that the end-of-second year papers did not have a re-sit option, and suggested that I took a year off, to reconsider my career choice. I didn't have to think about this for very long!

BBC Television soon offered me a job as a Technical Assistant, and after the introductory three-month residential training course at the BBC Engineering Training Centre at Wood Norton (near Evesham, Worcestershire), I was assigned to 'Network Department' at Television Centre, Shepherds Bush (West London) in May 1978, where I completed the on-the-job section of the training (interspersed with further residential stints at Wood Norton) until I qualified as a Broadcast Engineer (EESI Chapter II) in July 1981. The Network Department carried out a varied number of roles, and my job ranged from vision and sound mixing the continuity links (the bits leading into and out of the programmes) or live feeds from sports events (such as the tennis at Wimbledon - if I made a mistake then, only a few hundred million people worldwide would see it), to lining up the incoming feeds from any events all over the world, or calibrating studio cameras (we had two small 4-camera studios, one for the daily weather forecasts, the other for programmes such as 'Ask Aspel' or 'The Money Programme').

Hard as it may seem, I began to want a more demanding job (or one that would pay the bills - I also worked as a minicab driver on my frequent days off - a condition largely imposed by the landlady, who threatened to evict us at the end of every month), and when I found that my fiancee (Karen Sonnenberg) also had a part-time activity (which involved another bloke called, appropriately Nigel - do you remember the chart hit in the early '80s by XTC, it must have been written about him), I decided to run away from the problems - so when British Forces Broadcasting Service offered me a job in September 1983 which involved working overseas, I jumped at the chance. I was originally scheduled to go to Mönchengladbach in Germany, but Typhoon Ellen took out the mast and transmitter in Hong Kong, so after a one-day training course at Pye/Philips in Cambridge, I flew off to get the Radio station at Sek Kong (in the New Territories) back on air.
What was meant to be a brief visit developed into a 21 month stay, during which time I adopted two lovely kittens ('Yat' and 'Yee'), but they seemed to grow up very quickly, especially when I realise how few pictures I took of them when they were tiny!


This was 'Yat', caught whilst imagining there was something to stalk on the sofa in Hong Kong in 1983.


And you thought cats were afraid of water ! Every time I got the hose pipe out to water the plants, or wash the car, 'Yee' would try to catch the water. When he was completely soaked, he would try to block up the end of the hose with his paws. Taken in Hong Kong in 1984.

Incidentally, I named the cats 'Yat' and 'Yee', being the Cantonese numbers for One and Two.

I was eventually posted from Hong Kong to Germany in July 1985 (but not before I had visited Brunei to set up a radio outside broadcast from their annual Military Tattoo, and enjoyed several short holiday trips to the Philippines, Thailand, Sri Lanka and China).
Once back in the TV world at JHQ Rheindahlen (near Mönchengladbach in West Germany), I spent the next three years rushing around Germany, as part of a two/three man crew filming, and then editing the material together, for a weekly magazine programme on whatever the British Forces were up to - I was even lucky (?) enough to spend a fortnight in Northern Ireland, and another two weeks in the Falkland Islands, for our Christmas Special programmes in 1986 and 1987.


And here we are 'in action'. This picture of John Dunlop (camera) and myself (sound) was taken in 1987 in sub-zero temperatures, somewhere in Northern Germany, and submitted for a caption competition in a Forces newspaper. No, I don't know what the winning caption was!


This is more like fun. Here I am pretending to round an imaginary buoy on a gravel pit at Maaseik, Belgium in 1987.


"I can't hold this smile for much longer, it's licking its lips - press the shutter button now, or I'll set Hissing Sid on you." Taken in Mombasa, Kenya whilst on holiday in 1986.

I adopted my third cat, who I called 'Sam' (big surprise, Cantonese for Three, but because he was German, maybe should have been called 'Drei'), in September 1985. He followed the same fate as 'Yat' and 'Yee', when he was taken out by a car in 1987, hence I decided to name any future cats after cars.

When BFBS decided to send me to the Falkland Islands for an extended tour (i.e. at least 12 months), I resigned and moved to Bavaria in November 1988, where I worked initially as a 'Bildtechniker' (Vision Engineer) for peanuts (sorry, ARRI TV) in Munich. Shortly afterwards, the ailing 'Eureka TV' was bought up by the Kirch Empire, who renamed it PRO.7 TV (there was already the first network, ARD1, the second network, ZDF, RTL4, TV5, and although the next in sequence would have been PRO.6, pronounced PRO SECHS, this could have been misconstrued). Eureka TV had tried to stay on-air using a selection of freelance Engineers, but Pro.7 were looking for a full-time Senior Engineer and offered me the job, so I started there on April 1^st 1989.

A year of being on-call (single-handedly holding a TV station on-air 24-hours every day, with equipment rescued off the Ark), combined with the attitude of the Bayern civil servants soon became too much, so I decided to move back to the 'real world', and accepted a job as a 'Field Service Engineer' with Quantel in Bonn, starting on April 1^st 1990. I had always worked for a broadcaster, so did not plan to stay long with a manufacturer, but soon realised that there are worse employers than Quantel out there. Just as I was beginning to get itchy feet, I was unexpectedly promoted to 'Service Manager' in July 1992, and a similar pattern followed in September 1996 with a move to 'Product Support Manager', so the departure planned in the second half of 1990 has not happened yet!


We adopted two cats in August 1990, "Mini" and "Morris" - "Mercedes" and "Benz" sounded silly (but not as daft as a friend of my parents, who named their Dachshund "Taxi" - imagine calling his name out loud in public). So much cat, so little space on the chair.


"Switch on the PC, and warm this monitor up for me". When the heating is off, alternative sources of warmth and attention will be sought.


"OK, I've caught it, you cook it for me". After a failed attempt to bring this bird through the catflap, Morris staggered in from the terrace, and tripped over the small step on the way into the living room before making it to the bathroom.


Over the Christmas break in 1999, we heard a faint cry outside; when we opened the living room door, a lump of bone and matted fur fell into the house, and over the next month he decided to adopt us (and wasn't eaten or attacked by Morris and Mini either), so we nursed him to good health. We were too scared to total up the vet bills that came flooding in, but he occasionally answers to the name of "Austin", and we seem to have an addition to our family in 2000.


Only one year on, Austin sits on his favourite mound of grass, full of confidence and Lord of all that he surveys.


Time to catch up with some sleep on the sofa.

Unfortunately, Austin's kidneys were severely damaged during the time that he was living rough, and he lost his fight when they failed and the vet had to put him to sleep peacefully on 10^th November 2001. He will be sadly missed, not just by myself, but by the entire neighbourhood - his extremely friendly and trusting nature won him many friends (and a lot of extra food and fuss!)


In winter, the warm marble shelf above the radiator is an ideal place from where to watch the world go by ....


.... until it becomes too much like hard work.
Sadly, Morris also suffered from kidney failure and had to be put to sleep by the vet in February 2004, when he was almost 14 years old.


The black devil, Mini, was written off by the local vet in August 1995 and given only weeks to live, because of several large tumourous growths on his tongue. A TV pet programme shown that same week in UK featured a cat with a similar problem, caused by an allergy to a chemical in dishwasher powder. Since then we have washed his dishes by hand, and the tumours have virtually disappeared. TELEVISION CAN SAVE LIVES!


My car tonneau cover made a great hammock for Mini - when no-one is looking.


Despite being black, Mini loves sitting in direct sunshine! Perhaps this is why his fur seemed to fade to more of a rusty colour?


Mini likes to join in the Christmas festivities - including playing with the decorations !!


This was the last picture of Mini, taken just a few hours before he had to be put to sleep by the vet on 11^th October 2007 - he had a good innings with 17.5 years of being pampered, before his heart became too weak.


The house was so empty without Mini, so we revisited the animal shelter where we collected Morris and Mini from in August 1990 (Tierheim Troisdorf), and two cats instantly chose us .... both are about 2 years old, and were named Frodo and Sam (from the "Lord Of The Rings").


This one is Frodo - he is much braver and more dominant than ....


.... Sam. They are not related, but seem to get on very well and compliment each other.


No, I'm not sleeping - caught without a tripod, the landscape must be utilised to achieve a steady video shot of the coastal cliffs on a camping holiday in Scotland, July 1995.


Is this a mad professor at work? No, just David modifying a clutch lever arm retaining nut for the Cobra 289 replica (I bet you are sorry that you asked now).


Now all I have to do is turn the clock back to 1923, and I am a DM millionaire!!


Here I am (with my ex-wife) at a ball in 1988 (we haven't aged a bit since this photo was taken!)
We decided at the end of 2003 to go our separate ways, and we were finally divorced on 20^th December 2006.

Oh, and don't forget to have a look at my summary of all the various cars that I have owned, or currently own - under Cars, Past & Present.

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