CAA Vancouver Members
J. Gordon Mumford
Author of Memoirs and Creative Non-fiction Books
About the Author
Born in England in 1925, Gordon Mumford is a Canadian citizen, and lives in the Lower Mainland of B.C.
Too young to enlist in the regular armed forces, Gordon attended Holloway Marine College in 1941 at age sixteen, and graduated with a Marine Radio Certificate in the spring of 1942. When his father died unexpectedly that August, Gordon, just seventeen, became the sole support of his family. He joined the British Merchant Navy as a Radio Officer, and served in the Atlantic, Europe, Mediterranean, and Pacific war theatres. He left the seagoing life in 1947, and immigrated to East Africa (1949-58).
As an assistant engineer in field survey, he worked on point-to-point HF radio networks in the Northern Frontier District, a remote area of Kenya. In 1951, he transferred to a major four-year project that involved the survey and construction of a VHF radio telecommunications repeater route that stretched from Kampala, through Nairobi, to Dar es Salaam.
Gordon writes of his experiences on safari before, during, and after the Mau Mau Emergency in Kenya's Central Province.
Gordon immigrated to Canada in 1958 after his first marriage ended in divorce. He upgraded his academic qualifications, studying first at the University of Western Ontario (where he met Barbara), and then the University of Toronto (OCE). He taught electronics in Toronto, but the lure of Africa was too strong.
For twenty years (1961-81) he and Barbara and family travelled between Canada and Africa, where Gordon was employed as a telecommunications lecturer under various international aid contracts. They eventually returned to Canada, and Gordon joined the Pacific Regional Office of Communications Canada in 1981, first as a Radio Inspector and later as the Federal Emergency Planning Liaison Officer. He retired in 1990.
© J. Gordon Mumford
www.canauthorsvancouver.org/mumford/bio.html
Updated: April 2, 2008