PARTITION - additional recordings I Andrew Whitehead I ______________________________________/ CD-16 Father Gerry Dunne - transcript of a conversation at St Joseph’s College, Mill Hill, 19 April 2002. Father Dunne is a Mill Hill missionary who served in Uganda, Borneo, Qatar and elsewhere. He’s from the north-east and knew George Shanks and his family, though did not see George after he was sent to serve in Kashmir. He’s 83. (in grounds of College, close to grave of Monsignor Shanks) ‘we’re looking at the grave of Mon. Shanks ... I had an aunt and he was a nun and she sd I know somebody from Mill Hill, and that was George Shanks, that was the year before he was ordained ... 32, 33 ... HE DIED IN 1962 AGED 53 ... that’s right, yeah, he would be around 24 ... and so I met him then ... but later on when I was in another place, he was in Durham, he was then studying French .. .and he must have started teaching when he went to Kashmir, and the fellow before him must have given up as Prefect, and he took over as Prefect, he was Prefect from ‘52 ... when this thing happened in Baramulla, he was in the school and he was there with another priest from London, Father Mallett... I knew the family, I knew [Shanks’s] father, his father worked in what was then ... the Central Station in Newcastle for the old London North Eastern Railway ... and then I met George again in Durham in the 30s, he was a very quiet kind of fellow, he wasn’t boisterous, but very sharp and very witty ... when he was a student here too in those days ... then it was really monastic [Shanks and friend] used to take Gilbert and Sullivan to bits and make a play of them ... [George] played the piano’ ‘I knew the family very well, and I lived in the same place for at least a year ... and then later on I kept in touch with Veronica, his oldest sister ... George was also a good swimmer because he was brought up in Cullercoats ? and that has a nice harbour with a sea wall... and you’ve got to be fairly Spartan to swim in the North Sea, even in summer, and George did that regularly’ why such as George would be attracted to missionary work [not specific] ‘I didn’t have much to do with him after he’d gone to Kashmir, it was before that, but I know from different people who’ve been there how they lived, things were pretty Spartan in those days. He was in school and then others were in the mission ... he was a man who did what he had to do, he wasn’t a zealot in the sense that he got himself into a lather but he worked hard, he had a good head on him and he worked hard ... ’ [re Baramulla] ‘at the time you heard funny stories, there were horrific stories, there great worries of course would be whether the sisters would be attacked, and when they managed to get them behind them I imagine there was a sense of relief, but I do remember them saying that these Pathans saw the church and the sacristy, they had no idea, they just went in and rifled anything, and there was one description of one of those big fellows with a vestment draped round his shoulders, and they must have had