JOHN LONGHURST LIKEMAN

My grandfather was born at 84 Preston Road Brighton on 3rd February 1882. At the time of his birth his father, John Ade Likeman, was a grocer. Jack (for so was he generally known throughout his life) was called Longhurst after his grandmother Esther, who died as Esther Ubsdell in 1890, and John after his father and grandfather. He died on 7th January 1963 at Ashburton, in Devon.

In 1885, the year that General Gordon met his death at Khartoum, the Likeman family moved to Tonbridge, and in 1898, the year of the Battle of Omdurman, they moved to Reading. We do not know why these moves were made; in fact we know nothing about Jack’s childhood, except that it was said that he always wanted to be a soldier. At a time when the British Empire was at its zenith, this is perhaps not so remarkable.

In 1899, when a new war with the Boers in South Africa was threatening, Jack’s mother Louisa Likeman died. Within a month Jack, who was still only 17, ran away from Reading to Aldershot, and on the 28th September he enlisted in the 2nd Battalion the Royal Scots Fusiliers. He gave his age as 18 and 2 months and his place ofbirth as Inverness. Neither of these details was true.  He was 5ft 6ins tall, and his Army number was 6339.

The 2nd Battalion the Royal Scots Fusiliers formed part of the Army Corps sent to South Africa in October/November 1899, and took part in the great disasters of Sir Redvers Buller, at Colenso andSpion Kop, in December 1899 and January 1900. Later they were one of the units in the force that relieved Ladysmith.

But the new recruit was not included in the contingent which went overseas, but had to wait until he was trained, and until reinforcements were sent out to the Battalion. It must have been frustrating to have been kept back at the depot in Aldershot while the major battles of the war were being fought. In the event Jack did leave for South Africa until October 1900, by which time Mafeking had been relieved and Pretoria captured. But at least he escaped wounds, and the enteric fever which killed more British soldiers than the Boers.

When Jack finally reached South Africa, the battalion was at Johannesburg. The war had now entered a new phase, that of guerilla warfare, in which the British under Lord Kitchener used mounted infantry to try and prevent raids by Boer Commandos on isolated British positions. A large number of yeomanry units were raised in England, and regular units broken up to form others in South Africa.

We do not know where Jack learnt to ride, but he must have done so because he soon became a member of the Royal Scots Detachment of the 22nd Mounted Infantry Regiment. There do not appear to be any extant war diaries for the 22nd, and the RSF no longer exists: it has been absorbed into a combined Royal Highland Fusilier Regiment. Sadly the regimental museum in Glasgow was burned down in 1985, and most of the records were lost. It seems be impossible to obtain any further details of this period.

The medal rolls of the 22nd MI show that Jack received the Queen’s South Africa Medal with the bars “Cape Colony”, and “South Africa 1901 & 1902”. He did not qualify for the King’s South Africa Medal, for which the requirement was to have been in South Africa for 18 months prior to 1st June 1902. This meant having arrived by 1st December 1900, and it appears that Jack must have missed this by only a few days. Clearly he felt he had been unfairly deprived of this decoration, and promptly awarded it to himself.  Pictures of Jack at the beginning of World War 1 show him wearing this medal ribbon, together with those of the Queen’s Medal and the African General Service Medal, which he received in 1906. But post-WW1 pictures (when he was serving in the Regular Army) show only the latter two medal ribbons. But by that time he had won a chestful of other decorations, and the absence of the King’s Medal probably seemed less important.

The Boer War, with all the horrors of concentration camps and guerilla warfare dragged on until 1 June 1902, a few months before Edward VII’s coronation in August.  Jack had already become a Sergeant, but he soon had enough of the peace-time Army in which his prospects of advancement were very limited. The battalion was recalled to England, and returned to Aldershot. Rather than go with it, Jackpurchased his discharge at Middleburg in the Transvaal, where two of the RSF companies had been stationed. It cost him £18, which was one year’s pay for a private soldier. It was January 1903.

Jack started work immediately with the Transvaal Repatriation Department in the Transport Branch at Pretoria as an Assistant Quartermaster, and remained in the job until a year later when the establishment was reduced. South Africa was beginning to become home to a large impoverished white element with no visible means of support, and it was time to move on.

In 1904 he moved to British East Africa, where he joined the British East African Police as No 3540. In May 1905 he was appointed to the rank of Inspector. Jack had become an officer.

This was the East Africa of Isak Dinesen’s “Out of Africa” and Elspeth Huxley’s “Flame Trees of Thika”. It was a true colony, settled by whites whose home it became. In 1903 the Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain offered Kenya’s Mau Plateau as a Jewish National Home for the Zionist Movement. It was in many people’s view a paradise on earth.  Life in East Africa in those days has also been vividly described by Major W. Robert Foran in two books; Foran was an Army officer who came to Kenya on leave from South Africa to shoot big game, and decided to stay and join the infant police force.

We do not know anything about George’s parents, but prior to the time of his marriage to Ann Tubbs, but there were already Likemans living in the four villages which lie just over the South Downs from Brighton in East Sussex, where the “Jack and Jill” windmills stand to this day. The villages were Ditchling, Westmeston, Keymer, and Clayton. The name Likeman appears with this spelling in the earliest records, although occasionally Lightman is substituted, especially with the poorly educated or illiterate. The origin of the name is obscure; it is not included in any dictionary of English surnames. Lightman, except as an mis-spelling of Likeman, is not found until the late 19th century, when it appeared as the anglicised version of a Baltic surname, brought by a family of refugees from Latvija. This family is now prominent in England, but they are also uniquely named, and unrelated. A similar surname ‘Lakeman’ is found in the West of England, but it is also distinct and there is no apparent connection with Likeman.

Theories for the etymology of Likeman have included ’Lych’ as in lych-gate (leich in Germanic languages) which means ‘ corpse’. But the earliest members of the family were simple farm labourers, not undertakers. Another suggestion is “Luke’s man”, but the spelling of Likeman is consistent, and Lukeman as a surname is very rare. [i] A Danish origin is also a possibility, remembering that when King Alfred expelled the Danes from England, they left some of their genes and many place names behind them. There is a will in the London Commissary Court calendar for 1793 for a Nicholas Lickman, carpenter on the MS Sea Nymph, but the will gives no clue to his origin or any family.

George Likeman probably came from a large family, and had at least one brother that we know of, John Likeman of Clayton. On 25 January 1757, the year after the birth of Mozart, John was married by licence at St Nicholas Church Brighton, to a spinster of the parish, Elizabeth Bourne, daughter of Matthew Bourne, Elizabeth Bourne was a Quaker, and John may also have been one. Elizabeth Bourne was a Quaker, and John may also have been one.  At that time marriage in the parish church was the only legally recognised marriage, so everyone was married in their parish church whatever their religious persuasion. St Nicholas is the oldest church in Brighton. This wedding is the earliest recorded use of the name Likeman, and the spelling is the same, (although in the parish register John signs himself as “Likman”).  We know that he was George Likeman’s brother from information in the will of his eldest daughter Elizabeth, who was born late in 1757.

For reasons as yet unexplained, the famous author H.G. Wells introduced a character called ‘Bishop Likeman’ into his novel The Soul of a Bishop, published in 1917.  One might assume that he knew, or knew of, one of our illustrious ancestors. But as there has never yet been a bishop in the family, he must have taken a fancy to the name alone. At least he spelt it correctly !

Mombasa Harbour about the time that Jack arrived there in 1904

The railway from Mombasa to Kisumu on Lake Victoria had been completed in 1901 (see the film “The Ghost and the Darkness” for a graphic and reasonably factual account). A contemporary photograph of the railway station at Nairobi, which I saw in the museum in Nairobi, shows lines of rickshaws waiting for alighting passengers, just as today there are lines of taxis. Kisumu was a particularly unhealthy place with sleeping sickness and endemic plague, and a high expatriate suicide rate. White women were not allowed to live there. Its importance lay in its port, the gateway to Uganda by steamer. Unfortunately the last section of the railway passed through a tract of land that belonged to a tribe called the Nandi.

Another contemporary character of importance was Richard Meinertzhagen, who served in the 3rd Kings African Rifles from 1902 till 1906. Meinertzhagen later achieved fame as an Intelligence officer on the staff of General Allenby in the Palestine Campaign against the Turks, and as spokesman for the Zionists at the Versailles Conference. He came to East Africa on secondment from the Indian Army, and played a key role in the war against the Nandi in which Jack Likeman was to take part.

The Nandi began to raid the railway where it passed through their territory, and looted anything metal that could be removed from the track, telegraph wires and stations. The track had to be regularly patrolled, and trains escorted. The situation deteriorated steadily, leading to murders and harassment of all kinds. Towards the end of 1905, after the failure of four campaigns against the tribesman, a large punitive expedition was assembled, with a total strength of over 3200, including a strong police detachment. A great advantage was achieved by a personal confrontation between Meinertzhagen and the Laibon, or chief of the Nandi, in which the chief was killed. This later caused a political storm, but at the time received general acclaim; I have written the full story elsewhere. From the official records of the day, I obtained a copy of the mobilization order for the Nandi Field Force, which shows that Inspector Likeman was assigned to command police on the line between the 500 and 525 mileposts, and was based at Lumbwa Station. During my brief visit to East Africa in 1995, I did not have time to make the rail journey to Kisumu to see if Lumbwa still exists, but it is marked on a map I have from 1922.

Jack Likeman received the African General Service Medal for this campaign, with the very rare bar “NANDI 1905-06”. For the first occasion he had been in the right place at the right time.

Jack continued to serve in the Police until September 1908. In a letter dated January 1952 he wrote as follows.

“Tanganyika was German until the 1914/18 war…Bagamoyo was the HQ of the slave trade on the coast opposite to Zanzibar. This trade was supported by the Bosch and there were slave markets at Bagamoyo and Kilwa which we closed down when we occupied it. Most of the slave dhows sailed from Bagamoyo for the Persian Gulf, and it was these dhows that we used to intercept when we could. Dar-es-Salaam was the Bosch post and capital of German East Africa, and all their ships used to call there – like Mombasa for British territory – the Deutsch Ost Afrika line ran in competition with our own Castle Line and British India Line. Zanzibar was of course the property of the Sultan and was a British Protectorate. The High Court and law for the whole of British East Africa (now Kenya) came under the jurisdiction of the Appeal Court at Zanzibar, but Zanzibar had a separate police force under the Sultan, officered by British, who were exchangeable with British East Africa Police officers. Magistrates were interchangeable in either territory, and the High Court judges lived in Zanzibar and went on circuit to Mombasa and Nairobi. Also a 10 mile wide strip of coast right along from the southern extremity of German East Africa to the northern edge of British East Africa, belonged to the Sultan of Zanzibar, and both the Germans and us paid him a certain sum annually to lease it. Further the Sultan’s flag had to be flown on certain specified public buildings (I can’t remember exactly which now).  All questions which required the authority of the Sultan in the 10-mile strip, we had to submit to the Governor-General of Zanzibar who told the Sultan what to do about it. But you see it was to Zanzibar and not to the Governor of British East Africa that some questions were submitted and the necessary authority obtained. As I was several years at Mombasa I used to be quite clever at playing one off against the other”.

Presumably the years at Mombasa were those after Nandi. I have a circular letter sent to Jack in Mombasa in December 1906 (which gives his number as 3540) informing him of the details of Mess Dress for officers of the EAP !   My father told me of stories he had been told as a child by his father, of chasing slavers in a dhow fitted with an engine, of scimitar fights, and even of emergency childbirth. But the letter goes on.

 “As for writing about this and the rest of my experiences out there, even if I could remember accurately the details…I hate writing more than anything.” 

As a result of this attitude, this letter is the only original account I have from Jack Likeman’s pen, although some of his hand-written reports from WW I may be found in the Public Record Office.

We do not know why Jack terminated his service with the EAP. Perhaps it was during leave in England that he was introduced by his brother Bill to Gladys Wood, who was then attending college at Reading. Her family were Baptists, and they lived at 67 Sisters Avenue, Clapham. Her father, William Merryman Wood, was a tailor’s clerk.  On 3rd October 1908 Gladys married Jack at the Northern Road Baptist Church at Battersea. She was 21, he was 26. Bill was one of the witnesses. We do not know if Jack’s father was present. No wedding photograph has survived. On the marriage certificate Jack is described as “Of Independent Means” and living in Balham, presumably in digs.

In October, the handsome couple left England and set sail for Australia.  They sailed from Marseilles on the Orotava, and arrived in Fremantle on 17th December 1908. We have no details, but there is a contemporary account of Fremantle and Perth in Western Australia (where Australia won the Americas Cup in 1982) in “A Fortunate Life”, the autobiography of A.B. Facey, who also arrived there in 1908.  These were hard times in Western Australia, and we do not know what prior contacts the young Jack Likeman had, if any. According to a pencilled note among his papers, he set out to make his fortune breeding horses. Jack and Gladys are listed on the electoral roll for Harvey WA in 1910, living on a property called Glentanna. Harvey is 140 km south of Perth, near Bunbury. Jack's occupation is stated as 'farmer'. Sadly, he failed to prosper because of drought (so it was said), and in May 1910 he and Gladys returned to England on the Orvieto. Perhaps one day the details may be filled in.

There may have been another reason for the timing of the return to England; Gladys was pregnant. So my father John William, who came to be known as “Little Jack” was conceived in Australia. He might have been born here too, if the weather had been better, but in the event he was born in London, at 171 Peckham Rye. His father is described on the birth certificate as a ‘House Proprietor’.

Probably the same year (again the dates are uncertain) Jack returned to Africa, this time to Portuguese East Africa. We have letters addressed to him at Porto Amelia, which is on the coast to the north of Mozambique, in July 1911 and May 1912. The latter was redirected to 68 Shelgate Road, Wandsworth; we can only speculate whether this was the time of his final return to England, or whether he went back to Africa for another tour of duty.  The name of the company for whom he had been working was East Nyassa Consolidated Ltd.  According to Jack’s letter from which I have already quoted, he was recruiting for the gold mines in Johannesburg. We presume that Gladys remained in England; such arrangements were not uncommon in those times.

There follows a period of silence for 2 years. Jack’s pencilled notes say that he returned to England in 1914 just prior to the outbreak of war, but this may not be true: Jack, like me, was an Aquarian, and may have edited the truth when it suited him. 

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