Joan Pawsey Shoucair - An English Woman in the 20th Century Vortex of Change....Part 1

by Glenn N. Holliman

A Chance Meeting and a Door Opens to History....

 

In 2012 my wife Barbara and I met Joan Shoucair on a Rhine River cruise.  We became good companions, and I began to learn of Joan's fascinating story.

Right, Joan in November 1944 on leave in Cyprus from the British Army.  Her parents probably would have been appalled if they had known their daughter was wearing trousers!  Said Joan, "How could I climb a mountain in a dress?"

When Joan came into this world 26 December 1921, the British King-Emperor George V, reigned over one-fourth of the globe's population. She and millions of other school children were taught that the sun never set on the Empire which circled the planet.

As a child in 1927, she and her mother, Elsie Newton Pawsey, traveled from England to Kampala, Uganda to join her father, Henry Herbert Pawsey, a businessman, soon to be colonial administrator.  In 1934, she went back to England for boarding school and returned in 1938 to employment with the Uganda Protectorate.

Left, Joan stands between her two parents at their home in Kampala around the year 1932.  Alas the family dog was eaten later by a leopard!

In early 1944, she flew from Uganda on a Imperial Airways flying boat to Cairo to serve with the British Special Operations Executive in Force 133.  After the war, she helped establish the U.N. Relief and Rehabilitation Agency.  Later, she married an Lebanese businessman with an artistic flair.  Albert Shoucair wrote poetry in French and English and his professional photographs grace several works of Egyptian archaeological treasures.   

Her mother is buried in Kampala, her husband in Egypt and her father in England.  Joan served in a World War, observed the rise of African nationalism, dodged death in an Arab uprising and the raging of Islamic fundamentalism.  She survives in the 21st Century having lived a long and complex life...in a world of constant change.

 I am indebted to Joan for many hours of sharing memories and photographs.  Below in her flat in Greater London in December 2013, she identifies pictures from her large collection of memorabilia of the Uganda Protectorate and Egypt from 1926 to 1989, the year she returned to England.

  Next posting, we begin our exploration of the adventurous life of Joan Shoucair!