About the Author

About The Author
Gordon now	Born in Chingford (Essex) in 1925, Gordon Mumford lived in a farmhouse in Epping Forest. He attended St. Mary’s Primary School and St. Egbert's College in Chingford. When WW II started in September 1939, he was fourteen years old. Schools in the London area were evacuated to the country, so he left school. He was too young to enlist in the armed forces. He had been an air cadet since he was twelve. The cadets were taken to North Weald airfield to help, but that stopped a few months later when the Germans began bombing airfields. He tried to get a job as an apprentice in the Merchant Navy. His mother refused to sign the papers because he was too young.	and then
When he was sixteen, however, he went to Holloway Radio College to train as a marine radio officer, and qualified for a Special Certificate in 1942. That August, shortly after the death of his father, Gordon joined the British Merchant Navy. During the war, he served in the major war theatres. His ships were the Soborg, Scottish Heather, Empire Harmony, Empire Path, and the MV Luling. The Soborg sailed to Iceland, to bunker ships for the Murmansk convoys. The Scottish Heather was an oiler, refueling the escort ships when she was torpedoed in the North Atlantic, and the crew took to the lifeboats. The Empire Harmony was a heavy duty lift ship, used to unload war materiel in the bombed-out docks in the Mediterranean and North Africa. The Empire Path took a cargo of munitions and other essential weapons for the Battle of the Scheldt, and was sunk by a mine. MV Luling, another tanker, took part in the beachhead landings in the Pacific, and then supplied the minesweepers in the clean-up operations at the end of the war. After the war, he had two voyages in 1946 on the Adolph S. Ochs, one to New Brunswick and the other to Argentina, before he left the sea.
Like many other young men returning home at the end of the Second World War, Gordon missed the sense of excitement and danger. Restless and unable to settle down, he joined the Colonial Service in 1949. In Kenya, he was employed as an Assistant Engineer in field radio communications for the East Africa Posts & Telecommunications Administration. Working in the remote deserts of the NFD (Northern Frontier District), he installed and maintained radio networks. In 1951 he transferred to a new VHF telecommunications project, and was involved in the field survey safaris and construction of the network. Living under canvas for months at a time, life on safari ranged from the heat of remote deserts, to the cold of East Africa’s highest mountains, and the rains and heat of the game plains. In 1958, Gordon migrated to Canada and studied at the University of Western Ontario, the University of Toronto (OCE), and Mohawk College (Hamilton, Ontario). He qualified as an electronics instructor, and returned to Africa. He taught on various international aid projects (including British aid, CIDA, and UNESCO) in Kenya, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Indonesia. During his time abroad, Gordon was actively involved in tennis, and served on many committees. These included the tennis committees in Kenya and Nigeria, KLTA (school tennis), amateur radio, radio control points for motor rallies, Aquarist Society, etc. When he and his family returned to Canada in 1980, they settled in British Columbia's Lower Mainland. In 1981, he joined the Pacific Region offices of Communications Canada in Vancouver where he worked in radio communications and served as the federal emergency planning liaison officer.


*Writing Background* Gordon Mumford's interest and experience in writing began in the early 1960s when he was an instructor/technical writer on aid projects in developing African countries. In addition to writing course manuals, he produced a newsletter for the Amateur Radio Society of Kenya. Since then, he has taken many writing courses and workshops, including a creative writing course at UBC, and has had articles published in newspapers and periodicals. . After his retirement in 1990, Gordon began writing full time, and has since written several creative non-fiction books. He has two books, The Black Pit ... and Beyond and The Sampan Girl, are based on his wartime experiences in the Merchant Navy, and are published by General Store Publishing House. He has also written three books based on his African Adventures. White Man's Drum and Drums of Rebellion are self-published, as is Dangerous Waters, a book of short stories about his seafaring adventures. A third book on Africa, Fate's Footsteps: For the Love of a Woman has been completed, while a fourth book, Tales of the NFD, is still in progress.
Canadian Authors Association	Gordon's non-fiction writing has won awards from the Seattle-based Pacific Northwest Writers' Conference (PNWC), whose Literary Contests attract some 600 entrants annually. Currently, he is a professional member of the Canadian Authors Association (national) and belongs to their Vancouver Branch. He is a member of the Federation of B.C. Writers, World Poetry, and the Burnaby Writers’ Society. Gordon also belongs to the Vancouver Naval Veterans Association (VNVA), the Burma Star Association, and the Radio Officers Association (ROA).	Federation of BC Writers
He and his wife Barbara now live in New Westminster, near Vancouver, B.C. They have two sons. David is a professional engineer engaged in research, and Gregory is an Egyptologist, with "digs" in the Delta and Sinai.


		Gordon's family lived in this cottage in Epping Forest for many years. The photograph was taken in 1933 from the top of a tall elm tree in the forest.

About The Author