In 1972, my mother was forced to leave Nairobi and return to England after I got into a spot of bother at school and was expelled. I was arrested and taken from my dormitory at Wycombe Abbey school at the end of a half term weekend in November, and later charged with being the mastermind behind an international drug smuggling ring. All at the tender age of 15! Needless to say the courts demanded that she return to the UK or I would be taken into care…
After two terms in a comprehensive in Branscombe, where we stayed at her cousin Hazel’s house Wobble, we moved to a cottage in Stadhampton, just outside Oxford. I went to Oxford High School and poor Sheila, who was whisked away from her much-loathed but well-paid job in Nairobi with FAO, had to go out to work as a lowly secretary – which she also loathed. She just wanted to be travelling!
She nevertheless made the best of things as she always had done, rekindled old friendships, made new friends and used Oxford as a base for her travels, many of which are on these pages – others to India, Morocco, Portugal, Jordan, undertaken from Devon are not. I either deemed them too ‘normal’ or too chest-oriented (India – about seven notebooks and my energy failed)!
After I left school, she bought Wobble off Hazel, who had moved to a much larger house in Branscombe, and she settled there very happily, gardening and travelling. She was wonderful host and received many visitors from her travels, colonial days and from closer to home. She made a mean Swahili fish curry. Tom/Dad who lived nearby was one of her frequent visitors.
Eventually she decided the hilly garden was too much for her – only after several falls – so she bought a smaller house in the village, Glebe Cottage, and again settled happily there, surrounded by her chests, carpets, coffee pots and a glorious garden.
Glebe Cottage memories
It was at Glebe Cottage that she completed her magnum opus, The Arab Chest, the culmination of all those years of research as reflected in this website. We managed a couple of reprints and international sales to the Gulf and East Africa, before it sadly came to the end if its life. In great synchronicity in 2025 I was contacted by Mohamed Matar’s (her Zanzibari chest partner) grandson who requested I send him a copy – I had one spare and so I did. He was thrilled. Both his grandparents were dead, and Matar’s museum dispersed -see here for description of it. Sheila’s diaries record meeting his father as a baby in Dubai, so he was very tickled. One of my tasks is to transcribe the entries of her visits to the Matars in Dubai.
Her final move to sheltered housing in Sidmouth was only a few days before her stroke, which incapacitated her and from which she never recovered. She died on 22 October 2009.
Unfailingly elegant towards the end of her life, she loved to dress in galabeyas, like this gold one at her book launch of The Arab Chest, or Baluchi dress as at her 70th and our 50th birthdays
Travels with my mother 