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Friday, May 3, 2024

Moving in with Jomo

 

Moving in with Jomo

 

Jomo Kenyatta was born in Ngenda around 1895. After moving to Nairobi, he became involved in the political and cultural life. He became general secretary of the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA) in 1928. In March 1929 he travelled to Britain on behalf of the KCA with Isher Dass, an Indian lawyer living in Nairobi. He had hoped to meet the imperial authorities but only briefly met senior officials at the Colonial Office. However, he established contacts with other anti-colonial activists in London and the Communist Party like George Padmore and Shapurji Saklatvala.

In 1936 Dinah and her friend Elsie were inspecting a flat at 15 Cranleigh buildings, Camden Town. Around this time, she met the Kikuyu student Jomo Kenyatta who was working with George Padmore and C.L.R. James to campaign against Italian rule in Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia). Stock and Kenyatta first met at an anti-imperial meeting, where Johnstone was introduced as a student in need of help with a book. Dinah offered to edit his anthropological study of his people, the Kikuyu.

By 1937, Kenyatta had moved into Dinah’s flat in Cranleigh buildings where they entertained various anti-colonial activists, especially George Padmore who lived in the same building. The well-travelled English woman helped propel Kenyatta into the limelight. They collaborated on articles together using her connections at the publications the Manchester Guardian and the New Statesman.[1] She was able to equal him intellectually and help him improve his command of English. In 1939 they fled London together as war broke out, moving to Storringham, Sussex.

After the war, Stock kept in touch with Jomo and continued to fight to end imperialism.

Dhaka Times: In her graduate years, Amy Geraldine Stock, also known by the sobriquet “Dinah,” was a regular participant in the meetings of the Oxford Majlis, an anti-colonial student forum. She spoke there occasionally as an only European student and supported the Indian independence movement. She had expertise in English literature, especially in classics, but she wanted to contribute to the cause of India’s liberation struggle against colonial rule and to teach in “one of the emerging countries.” 

Years later when she was teaching as a part-time lecturer in a London training college, an advertisement in The Times Educational Supplement persuaded her to apply for a teaching position in erstwhile East Pakistan. And in the winter of 1946-47, the 45-year old anti-imperialist—bored with London’s “dark skies, bitter winds, [and] streets choked with piled-up snow”—would soon find herself on SS Franconia, a ship bound for Bombay to join as the head of the Department of English at Dacca University, where she would be teaching from 1947 to 1951.

 

In 1936 Dinah and her friend Elsie were inspecting a flat at 15 Cranleigh buildings, Camden Town. Around this time, she met the Kikuyu student Jomo Kenyatta who was working with George Padmore and C.L.R. James to campaign against Italian rule in Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia). Stock and Kenyatta first met at an anti-imperial meeting, where Johnstone was introduced as a student in need of help with a book. Dinah offered to edit his anthropological study of his people, the Kikuyu.

By 1937, Kenyatta had moved into Dinah’s flat in Cranleigh buildings where they entertained various anti-colonial activists, especially George Padmore who lived in the same building. The well-travelled English woman helped propel Kenyatta into the limelight. They collaborated on articles together using her connections at the publications the Manchester Guardian and the New Statesman.[1] She was able to equal him intellectually and help him improve his command of English. In 1939 they fled London together as war broke out, moving to Storringham, Sussex.

After the war, Stock kept in touch with Jomo, and continued to fight to end imperialism.

 

She decided on teaching “literature in one of the emerging countries”. At that time she was 45 and teaching as a part-time lecturer in English in a London training college and she finally accepted to teach in East Pakistan.

Soon we find Amy Geraldine Stock, or Miss AG Stock as she was popularly known, on board the SS Franconia bound for Bombay and arriving in Dhaka. As head of the English department she taught there at the university from 1947 to 1951.

After Dhaka she taught in India, for five years at Punjab University, at the University of Rajasthan, Jaipur from 1961to 1965, at Calcutta University, and at Makerere University in Uganda.

 

During his visit to England in 1931, Gandhi had a meeting with Jomo Kenyatta, the future leader of Kenya. Jeremy Murray-Brown, Kenyatta's biographer, writes about the meeting: "Kenyatta met the Indian leader in November 1931, and Gandhi then inscribed Kenyatta's diary with the words: 'Truth and nonviolence can deliver any nation from bondage'."

 Dinah Stock – A Sort of Retirement in Seavington Dinah Stock was born in 1902 in Oxford. In 1924 she became Chairman of the Oxford University Labour Club, and in 1927 she was appointed Secretary of The Centre Against Imperialism under the pacifist Fenner Brockway (later a founder of CND). She became a friend of Jomo Kenyatta who was to become Kenya’s first president some twenty-five          years later. She held several teaching jobs, in the UK, India, Pakistan, and Uganda.

 In 1964 she was on leave from teaching in Jaipur and holidayed in Somerset with her life-long friend Helen Neatby. Helen was head teacher of the Sidcot Quaker School at Winscombe. Visiting Wells and Glastonbury, Dinah decided that Somerset was the place to settle down – she was then 62. Helen undertook to find a place for Dinah to retire to. 

At the back of Dinah’s mind was concern for what she was going to live on when she could no longer teach. She did not qualify for a state pension. She was always overgenerous with loans (many never repaid) and school fees for the many waifs and strays she encountered in the countries she worked.  In the summer of 1966 Helen Neatby found a cottage for sale by Helen Oates, in Seavington St Mary. 

 “Lilac Cottage is on Scott’s Hill in Seavington St Mary. It stands in a row of houses which has been identified on a drawing of the village made some two hundred years ago. The cottage was an amalgamation of two cottages of the one-room-up-one-down type. From the front door of one, a passage led to the dining area and on to the kitchen beyond. The main room led off the dining area and occupied the whole ground floor of the second cottage. A stair led directly – there was no door – to the upper floor, which had been reorganised into three small bedrooms and a modern bathroom. The fire was in the front of the main room but, though big enough, was not very effective. Neighbours recall that it was a cold house. There was no garden at the back of the house; the garden was across the lane. It had originally belonged to the neighbouring cottage…” 

By November of 1966 Dinah had taken up a teaching post in Uganda. At the beginning of 1967 she summed herself up in her diary: “physically pretty fit, in my right mind as far as I know, quite uncertain where I shall be at the end of it.” She started to think about the possibility of living another thirty years and not having the foggiest idea how to find the means of life. “But what the hell! Either there’ll be something to eat and somewhere to sleep or there won’t. The best provision is to practise enjoying life quietly and retain the power to enjoy it on small resources.” 

She had £5,000 in the bank in London; half of it would go on the cottage, and £500 more on furnishing it. Helen Oates sent her photos of the cottage and Dinah agreed to buy. She signed the deed of conveyance in January 1967. In March Helen wrote to Dinah, sending useful information about the cottage and Ilminster and also introduced several Seavington people, including the vicar. 

Dinah moved into Lilac Cottage in May 1967 (she was now 65) and was busy tidying up and going into Taunton to arrange electricity and furniture, being horrified at the prices. She arranged a couple of days B&B at Seavington House; “the bed was brass and had an enormous mattress”.

Cycling from Ilminster she got lost, divided between the fun of exploring and anxiety about getting lost for too long. Dinah gave talks to village groups and took part in village plays. She also had play readings at Lilac Cottage and other meetings at the rectory.

For someone who often seemed diffident, Dinah was able to bring poems vividly to life. She had a fine speaking voice from school days, and was able to retain this even though her hearing was failing her. She was described later by Mrs Rachael Amos as the first “character” the village had known.  Dinah knew she had to continue earning a living, and she kept her hand in by running WEA courses and coaching National Extension students. More substantial was a part time appointment at Homerton College, Cambridge. In 1972 east Bengal was emerging from the struggle to separate itself from West Pakistan and become the independent state of Bangladesh. Dinah was asked to help in the reconstruction of the English department at Dacca University. She set off at the beginning of June 1972 to spend another two years in Bangladesh.

A friend remembers her with her rucksack (and not much more) to hold her personal belongings and a battered suitcase of books, tied with string. The appointment ended in September 1974. She made her way back via India and Kenya (visiting Kenyatta). Back at Lilac cottage she had a string of visitors and was back teaching part time at Cambridge. She struggled to write her memoirs. Early in 1976 she learnt that she had been put on the Civil List for £500 a year. The pension was later increased. She undertook trips to Poland and Canada. 

At the end of July 1977 the performance of two plays by Rachael Amos was a great success, and Dinah was involved. One plot concerned the supposed re-opening of the school and the interviewing of candidates to be the new head. They had to give a demonstration lesson, involving the audience. The singing teacher (who won the job) got them singing, and the PE specialist (an elderly widow with one lung) put the audience, many of them old and arthritic, through brisk exercises.

Dinah (who couldn’t speak Somerset) asserted that she was going to make them learn the Oxford Accent and got them to chorus “I-t’s a-a vair-airy fi-ine da-a-y”. The following February she went to see friends in Oxford and couldn’t get back because Somerset was snowed up. Seavington had snowdrifts up to fifteen feet high and was cut off. Telephones, but not electricity supplies, failed.

The local farmer distributed enough milk; it was unpasteurised, and people said what wonderful milk it was. Two men walked four miles to a bakery and returned loaded with bread.  Dinah had a vague idea of getting to India in 1979 or 1980. Sometime in 1979 she suffered an unexpected collapse and was taken to Yeovil hospital. In January 1980 she flew to Calcutta, touring and meeting up with old friends and acquaintances.

In April she thought “It’s time I went home”. Her Ilminster doctor suggested that her earlier illness had been a mild stroke. By November she was writing that she was feeling indolent and complaining of poor sight, poor hearing, and a weakness of the head. By the third week of November 1980, she had sold Lilac Cottage for between eleven and twelve thousand pounds, more than she expected; this would keep her for three or four years at a residential home in Wiltshire. She died on 23 July 1988 in a private nursing home in Chippenham.  Dinah’s diaries were used by Basil Clarke to write a biography. She never completed her memoirs.

One of her entries perhaps indicates why she was ambivalent about the task: “My actual achievements are not worth recording. Schoolgirl – Oxford Student – lecturer in adult education and then in training colleges – professor in more than one overseas university: this Curriculum Vitae presents a phased story of moderate success, not strikingly unusual. The real story, the one worth living in, is a haphazard succession of encounters and small adventures, enjoyable to remember and often most enjoyable when they had least to do with ‘success’ in a usual sense”. 

Reference: Basil Clarke, 1999 - Taking What Comes – A biography of A.G. Stock (Dinah), Panjab University, Chandigarh, India. 

Contributed to the website by Ken Cooper 7 Greenway Dowlish Ford ILMINSTER TA19 0PJ Tel: 07966 205519

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Very interesting story. Dina seems to have brushed shoulders with some noteworthy characters.

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