August 2010

One extraordinary change at Gombe - I am sitting in the house on the beach where Grub grew up waiting to send a skyped message to the UK in commemoration of the 50th anniversary. When I arrived there was no faxing, no emailing - certainly no Skyping! Only telegrams if you wanted to communicate fast - and from here they took at least several days to a week. Letters took two to three weeks to get the UK, even by airmail. We used to communicate with aerogrammes - a sheet of blue paper with two gummed edges so you folded them into four and stuck the two loose edges. We used to call them "blues" and very many of the letters Dale Peterson published in "Africa in My Blood" were written this way.  

 Photos by Bill Wallauer