MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency
Adventures as a Falklands travelling teacher
“Falling of a Horse in the Falkland Islands”, by Eddie Colgate, published by George Mann Publications, Easton, Winchester, Hampshire, SO 21 1ES,
telephone: 01962 779944. Soft back, 160 pages, with many colour and black and white pictures. ISBN 0954163427. Price £10.
A new book vividly describing life as a Falklands travelling teacher in the 1960s has been praised by the new Governor, Mr Howard Pearce, who described it as a delightful read which would be enjoyed by many people.
The author, Ted Colgate, a retired teacher living in West Sussex in England, called his book "Falling off a Horse in the Falkland Islands" because, he explained, he was clever at doing this in his many fraught journeys between the scattered farms where he taught around San Carlos and Port San Carlos.
The Falklands Government Representative, Sukey Cameron, said she loved reading it because "it was about her home and brought back very special memories of a wonderful childhood".
Ted Colgate captures in graphic personal prose his experiences living on farms with the families of the children he taught, creating close bonds with them, enjoying their instant hospitality and bountiful food, relishing and respecting their resourceful, pioneering life, in which self-reliance and neighbourliness are two characteristics threading together his many anecdotes.
Some of the most interesting tales involve his troublesome tousles with various strong-willed horses with minds of their own, getting bogged down in vehicles travelling over bog and field in all weathers, and the self-entertainment of happy communities indulging enthusiastically in sports meetings, sheep dog trials, steer-riding and weekend dances.
Forty years later he has turned what he calls his "three memorable years" into a very readable book, fresh with contemporary anecdote and description from his day- by- day diaries, his letters home, and correspondence from Falklands friends bridging the 40 years since, including the 1982 invasion and its aftermath.
It is a book recalling rural life which in its more rugged respects, its isolation and its rudimentary communications, has disappeared but one which, as his affectionate memoirs demonstrate, had much to commend it for its stable, close-knit family life. His book is very much a labour of love, determinedly re-written after the original script was blown up by an IRA bomb in a London post office in 1979.
Ted Colgate, now 66, taught for the rest of his career in the Sussex village of Hurstpierrepoint, retiring in 1998.
Harold Briley, (MP) London
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