Happy Medium

Image: © Simon Carey Taken: 15 Feb 2008

Moored at 9 Riverbank with a view of Norfolk Bridge and the Ropetackle development in the background. Tom Wildy kindly sent these details on 1 January 2023: Happy Medium was originally an ASR. After the war my father was a Houseman at Greenbank Hospital, Plymouth. No houses were to be had (because of the Blitz), so Happy Medium was purchased. My father had recently returned from his National Service as MO to the King's West African Rifles, my mother and her sister, both with young kids, shared a tiny house in Ipswich - my uncle was in Germany, and my father in Nigeria, then Malaya. Happy Medium was moored on an Admiralty buoy off Mashford's Yard on the Cornish side of the Tamar. My father was more interested in bacteria than medicine, so he got a place in the Labs at St Thomas' Hospital where he'd been trained. This involved a move, so Happy Medium was sailed to Shoreham (a tricky business as the original powerful engines had been replaced with two Ford V8s, giving her a top speed of about 13 knots. Quite a hairy journey, with water in the fuel, engines stopping, a near-wreck at the Needles, and a tow from a destroyer. Needless to say my sister and I were aboard with our grandparents - they were experienced sailors! Eventually we arrived at Shoreham, and some of my earliest memories were of playing on the bank. This would be perhaps 1949 or 1950. In about 1951 my dad got an exchange fellowship with Melbourne University, where the Head of Department was one of the early scientists working on viruses (he became Professor of Virology at Birmingham, and later Professor of Pathology at Cambridge).

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