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Shepperson Memorial

GEORGE SHEPPERSON – AN AFFECTIONATE APPRECIATION

David Stuart-Mogg

A relaxed George Shepperson, in retirement, at the door of his Orton Wistow bungalow.

A clear benefit of being an editor of this appreciation of George Shepperson’s
life is that necessarily one reads all the contributions submitted and, consequently, is
relieved from the fear that one’s own contribution may repeat material and aperçus
already submitted by others; a concern which I soon discovered would indeed have
proved to have been the case.
It therefore appeared a sensible plan to adopt a more personalised, perhaps
idiosyncratic, approach focussing principally on the regular weekly sessions which I
was privileged to share with George (other than when I was overseas) for a period of
over twenty-five years.
I employ the name George as his alliterative soubriquet, ‘Sam’, predates our
relationship resulting as it did from his wartime service in the army, notably in the
King’s African Rifles. Here he was apparently given to recite, repeatedly I am told, the
Lancashire dialect poem made famous by Stanley Holloway: “Sam, Sam pick oop tha
musket”. Upon demobilisation, the Sam soubriquet accompanied him throughout his
subsequent academic life.
In 1995 I was fortunate to secure, via a South Coast bookdealer, a box of
letters, photographs and ephemera relating to the 1915 Chilembwe Rising. It did not
take long to establish that much of what I had acquired offered new evidence of
substance which had been lost to sight for some eighty years and would have proved
invaluable to Shepperson and Price when they were researching their seminal work
Independent African. Upon enquiry, I was told that Tom Price had died some years
earlier and was wrongly assured that George Shepperson had retired to the U.S.A.
With more optimism than hope, I ‘phoned Edinburgh University for a forwarding
address. To my amazement, within a minute or so I was being given – this was before
the Data Protection Act – an address in Peterborough not five miles from where I was
sitting. Thus, serendipitously, as George would often observe, commenced what
proved a long, fruitful and mutually rewarding friendship and collaboration.
Once the subject of Chilembwe had been (if only temporarily!) exhausted, our
conversations thereafter ranged far and wide. I rapidly came to appreciate there was
likely little in the worlds of literature, linguistics, cinema, global politics and religion
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