Remembering Charles Arthur Andrew Hayes (1915-2000)

In 1939 shortly after England’s Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain announced, “England is at war with Germany,” Charles Hayes registered with the Recruiting Office,[1] but it was not until early in 1940 that he was selected for Officer Cadet Training in Wales. From Wales, he was sent to Inverness, Scotland and commissioned in the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders. In the mid 1941 he was drafted to India by way of Ghana, West Africa. “I was a platoon commander in the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders seconded to the Gold Coast Regiment, as part of the Royal West Africa Frontier Force. The Eight Battalion of the Gold Coast Regiment was made up of Nigerians, Gold Coast, Sierra Leon and Gambia Regiment. There were no black officers in our regiment until 1942.” [2]

“To prepare for operations in Burma, training was conducted in Ghana’s swampy, mosquito-ridden area. We had to teach the Africans,” how to move quietly in thick jungle and to learn the Hausa language with which to carry out our instructions” After Battalion training which included a 130 mile trek through swamps, jungles and rivers, Eight Battalion boarded ship at Lagos bound for The Cape and India.

“We landed in Bombay about September 1943, just as the monsoons were drawing to a close, entering that city through beautiful archways…Too soon we were whisked off to finish training in a nearby jungle area”[3]

After a month of road clearing Hayes’African soldiers cleared a 75 mile road as well as an airstrip along the Kaladan River. A month later we met the Japanese when, in an open engagement, we overran an enemy post. There after meeting stubborn resistance from small detachments, we began pushing down the valley to Paletwa and Kyaukyaw. In April the Japanese counterattacked and our West Africans were caught by surprise and Eight Battalion was thrown into confusion and forced back to the northwest of Kyuakyaw. [4]

“The West Africans do not like to have anything to do with death unless it is family. So I ended up digging graves for two soldiers killed. I wrapped their bodies in blankets, placed them into graves, and after a short prayer, covered them with earth and stones.

    The West Africans were courageous. We had to cross rivers at night in single file, rifle butts high above our heads with crocodiles all around us. We could feel the water vibrating. Suddenly the expected happened; the second man ahead of me yelled as he was dragged under the water. The soldier behind him just smashed his rifle over and over the croc’s head until the reptile let go. The soldier who had been attacked had bad gashes on his legs but recovered well.”[5]

Late in 1944 Captain Charles Hayes was wounded in the leg and evacuated to a casualty station where he contracted jaundice before being moved to Chiiagong for an operation in the Military Hospital. “They wanted to lop off my leg, but I absolutely refused. The hospital staff was surprised that I healed; I was not. While my leg was healing recovering, I walked from the hospital to the local Ashram, where I watched Mohandas Karamshan Mahatma Gandhi hold court.” [6]

When his leg had healed, Hayes returned to his unit and by this time the enemy was on the run and the war in the Arakan had almost ended. Promoted to Major, Hayes was offered a Brigade appointment as Deputy Assistant Adjutant General in Madras where he was given a special assignment with AFI (Auxiliary Forces India) to de-mobilise troops at Fort Madras.

    “I lived in the Duke of Wellington’s rooms there and was left in charge as the sole representative for the two West African Divisions with my own HQ, the West African Liaison section, dealing with the Government of India . My mission was ‘to clear out all West African troops and ship them home.’ Congress Party leader Jawaharial Nehru, Harrow and Cambridge educated lawyer and politician, had given orders that no African must remain in India.” [7]

After two months in hot and humid Madras, Major Hayes was posted to Simla ( now renamed Shimla).” Simla was a cool-weather hill station; a jigsaw puzzle of a town that seemed to  tumble down mountains of pine and cedar forests, but, for a century,it was one of the most important and powerful places; the summer capital of the British Raj with Tudor-style stone town hall, a gazebo-like band stand and the Victorian Theatre, all striking emblems of Britain.

     The Vice Regal Lodge, set on Observation Hill, was castle-like with a large ballroom able to hold hundreds. The whole township was magical, unlike my new archaic Indian State Forces HQ manned by two full generals, two full colonels , a second lieutenant and me, a major. It was a strange little unit hardly to be found out of MI5 –but that was where the plotting of the breakup of India was taking place.” [8]

In Simla  Major Hayes’ neighbour was Lord Louis Mountbatten who lived a hundred yards away in the Viceroy’s Palace,. When Lord Louis announced that India would be partitioned on 6 June 1947, Hayes was frustrated to the edge of insanity, as the staff officer tasked to liaison between the Marahaja (once so honoured and powerful)  and forced to plead with British Authorities.When the old India ceased to be, Britain did nothing to help these English educated anglophiles find a place to live after the transfer of power came on 15 August 1947. All the while, Charles Hayes was scrambling to learn enough of the Urdu language to answer impossible questions. Meanwhile, ‘the great solution’ was going terribly wrong as overnight there was a collapse of law and order and the streets of Simla experienced full carnage.

During this confusion, a letter from the War Office came for Major Hayes releasing him from active military duty and ‘expressing its thanks for the valuable service which he had rendered for his country at a time of grave national emergency.[9]

On his release in India from the army Hayes boarded a shipbound for England. After a four-day unexpected stop-over in Mombasa, on East Africa’s coast, the captain of the ship suggested  to Charles that he  might take a train trip through Kenya. So delighted to see many wild animals roaming freely, the beauty of the Kenya highlands and its magnificent snowy-topped Mount Kenya, Charles Hayes decided to ‘go no further.’

Travelling by train to the city of Nairobi,  Hayes accepted a post as D/O (District Officer) in the Machakos area of Kenya. Later, already fluent in the Swahili language, he started Andrew Crawford International in Nairobi, an advertising/recording company for Swahili and English radio. He also became well-known on a weekly television show, Talking Point and was stringer( journalist) for the British Broadcasting Company giving an every-evening 30-second The World Today’ news spot.

The Mau-mu threatened Kenya, Hayes was instrumental in starting the first Kiswahili newspaper, Taifa Leo( News Today) and, as Editing Director he developed, by 1959, the Nation Series Ltd, publishing English language daily and Sunday newspapers and, eventually, several magazines, including Kenya’s wildlife conservation magazine, Africana, for which, on his retirement from newspapers, he was awarded a folder of 24 golden discs each embossed with an African animal.

In the early 1960’s, His Highness, the Aga Khan, bought shares in the Nation Series Ltd company which now has the largest newspaper coverage in East Africa. In 2009, on March 18th (by coincidence, it would have been Charles Hayes’ 95th birthday) a book entitled Birth of a Nation, written by journalist Gerard Loughran, was published in England in celebration of the Nation Newspapers’ 50th year.

On his retirement in 1965, Hayes moved from the city of Nairobi to Lake Naivasha, in the Great Rift Valley, where he owned famous Crescent Island. On a main shore cliff-top, he built and operated the Naivasha Marina Club and restaurant, which, in time, attracted over 100 members and their fishing boats. A visiting American film company, delighted with the beauty of the lake and its surrounds, came to make their film, Living Free, starring Susan Hampshire and Nigel Davenport as Joy and George Adamson, the well-known couple who walked with, and cared for lions in the wild. Charles played the part of a tourist in the film and was invited to take several parts in other smaller films and documentaries. A year later, the film company returned to the Marina Club to make the Born Free Television Series. (the original Born Free film had been made many years previously).

By 1980, Hayes, tiring of Marina Club life, immigrated to Okanagan Falls, British Columbia, Canada, with his wife Margaret, and their young daughter, Caroline.  By 1981, Hayes had begun editing his own small-town weekly newspaper, The South Okanagan Review, which was published for 15 years.

Hayes wrote two books published in Kenya; Oserian,A century of Kenya’s History) and Stima, the history of electricity in east Africa. Since arriving in Canada he had several local books published by Rima Publications Ltd, The Casorso Story (1983), The Pat Hines Story and the Animal Orphanage( in Okanagan Falls) and The Remarkable Enigma of Hugh Leir (1999).

    A biography of Charles Hayes, entitled I’m Only The Editor, written by his wife Margaret Hayes after his death, captures the spirit of his adventures in England, India and East and West Africa; experiences of a remarkable gentleman, Charles Hayes.- Anne Balfour

            Notes on –186279- Major C.A. Hayes

    From the time the late Charles Andrew Hayes was a schoolboy essay-winner in England, he knew he would become a writer and news broadcaster. A lifetime of adventure led him, first as a young articled clerk in a London lawyer’s office, to World War 2 when he became an Infantry Officer in The Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders.  After Burma, in 1946 he was sent, to Simla, in the Himalayas where, a year later, he witnessed at the partition of Pakistan and India.

    Born with a ‘golden’ voice he was the perfect ‘stringer’ for BBC – the British Broadcasting Service for Foreign News. He sent out daily radio reports to the world and was an avid news writer for several English and South African newspapers.  He also used his voice, and his love of acting, to star in many of the Donavan Maule theatrical productions and films shot in Kenya.  — Margaret Ann Hayes.

1. Born in Croydon England, when his father was serving in France in WWI, Charles, a Rushkin School old boy, trained worked with a couple of Financial Law firms before falling in love with writing and journalism. Protestant Charles married Irish Catholic Josephine Venerable in Dec 1939.
2. Hayes, Margaret, I’m Only The Editor,Webb Publishing,2008, p.34.

3.“We arrived in Abeokuta, a horrible, snake-ridden area where an old Ashanti woman, the local witch doctor, came to cut a small 1-inch cross on the left cheek of all my African troops. It was to keep them safe in battle, she said (And indeed we did not have a lot of Casualties) I was told by the old woman, as she blew a fine white dust into my face, that I would never be in any danger from  a snake. See   I’m Only The Editor, p.37.

4. Ibid. p.40.
5. Ibid. p.41-42.

6.Ibid. p. 43.

7.” As Indian women loved the large West Africans with their rippling muscles, believing them to be black Gods, it was a frustrating heart wretching task to tear troops from the bosom of new Indian families.” Ibid p.44.

8. On August 14th, 1947, there was a special India Army Order sent out by His Excellency British Field Marshal Sir Claude John Eyre Auchinleck…which read [in part:] ‘With the transfer of power on the 15th August, 1947, there will no longer be a Viceroy or Viceroy’s House….Ibid p.56

It was part of Charles’ job to destroy the…mass of correspondence that had been sent between the Indian States Headquarters and all Indian Forces documentation….Ibid p.5

9.All British Forces were informed to return with their families to England.

10.Post Script: Margaret Ann Hayes, elegant, cultured and gracious, 1929 – 2013 died peacefully in Penticton. Predeceased by three husbands, ‘Magas’ had a charming worldliness. Down-to earth and quiet spoken she delighted welcoming to guests to her home overlooking scenic Green Lake, west of Okanagan Falls.  She was  83.