Appreciation: Ronald Hunston

Published on Thursday 4 February 2010 20:10

Soldier, engineer, printer, missionary, photographer

Born: 22 September, 1919, in Sheffield.

Died: 31 January, 2010, in Melrose, aged 90.

MY FATHER, Ronald Hunston, who died on January 31 after a short illness,

had a full and varied life that began shortly after the 1914-18 "war to end all wars". His teenage years and training as a printer were ended abruptly by the next global conflict in 1939, when he enlisted in the doomed British Expeditionary Force.

Images of the nine-day Dunkirk evacuation straddling May and June 1940 haunted him until his final years. They included indelible memories of trying unsuccessfully to clamber on to a crowded fishing boat shortly before a German Stuka dive-bomber sank it.

He returned safely and uninjured to Britain, claiming to have salvaged only his rifle and beloved chess set en route. During the Second World War his technical and logistical gifts were harnessed and he joined the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, rising to the rank of warrant officer first class and then appointed regimental sergeant major.

This took him to the north African theatre, where he supervised the vast three-base workshop containing equipment including units of the Eighth Army's tanks and artillery which would be pivotal in defeating Rommell's Afrika Corps.

It was during the western desert campaign, masterminded by Field Marshall Montgomery, that the gangly pipe-smoking Yorkshireman met Kathleen Shedden, a Queen Alexandra's nurse.

The Glasgow-born daughter of First World War Church of Scotland chaplain John Shedden and his wife, Isabel, later to be a pioneering woman Congregational minister, nursed him after he sustained a shrapnel wound on the eve of the decisive and epic 13-day El Alamein tank battle towards the end of 1942.

He was also mentioned in dispatches after recovering damaged tanks from the battlegrounds.

A whirlwind romance, which including courting in a Staghound armoured car, culminated in a uniformed wedding ceremony in Egypt's Tel El Kabir before the couple returned to far less glamorous, but safer, Yorkshire after the war. Soon afterwards they moved to Lanark, where he worked as a newspaper caseroom printer.

In 1951 he was recruited by the Church of Scotland Mission Field, and Africa beckoned him again, with responsibility for establishing and managing a book printing operation in the centre of Accra, Gold Coast, later to become independent Ghana.

The place had a cosmopolitan dimension, and he lived in a large stucco colonial house on a inter-denominational "church" compound. My parents made the then controversial choice of sending one of their children to a convent school run by nuns, as the Lutheran German alternative was considered too rigid.

Unwitting genuflecting at the dinner table caused some raised eyebrows among Presbyterian colleagues.

Returning to Scotland in 1957, my parents maintained their church links as superintendent and matron at the then new Wellhall Eventide (old folks') home in Hamilton.

His publishing expertise and a consuming interest in photography resulted in a transfer to the Church of Scotland's growing social services operation, where, as a protg of director Lewis Cameron, my father was a driving force in the pioneering publicity department as photographer, publicist and documentary film maker.

Several of the early 1960s cine productions feature in the National Library of Scotland's film archive. His remit included travelling the length and breadth of Scotland in all weathers in a venerable grey Austin Seven van crammed with literature, slide projectors and movie projection equipment.

Gaining funding was crucial for an organisation running a network of children's homes, eventide homes, units for unmarried mothers, centres for alcoholics and "bad lads'" facilities, and an awareness of the value of multi-media exposure was fairly radical then.

During the late 1960s Ronald and Kathleen returned to run Queensbay Lodge Eventide Home in Joppa, Edinburgh, the vast rambling former dormitory for Jenners' store staff, until they retired to Broughton in the Borders in the mid-1980s.

He maintained his interest in photography, capturing the rolling wide-skied scale of his beloved Cardona valley while providing repairs for broken family technical equipment.

A family friend from the late 1950s and early '60s summed him up as "an incredible engineer, Mr Fix It or Make It", adding: "We were always in awe of his skills and creativity," which extended to hand-crafting radio-controlled MTB torpedo and fishing boats.

Latterly, my father's failing health forced a move from his farm cottage in Glenholm, near Broughton, by Biggar, to St Ronan's Care Home in Innerleithen, near Peebles.

On reaching 90 last September as an exiled Yorkshireman "doing missionary work among the Scots", and with an inevitable interest in cricket, he commented: "Not a bad innings and not a bad life."

Kathleen died, aged 67, in 1988. Ronald Hunston is survived by three sons and a daughter, ten grandchildren and two great-granddaughters.

He is to be buried today in the ancient Broughton Old Parish Church graveyard alongside Kathleen.