Jean drove me back to Blantyre this morning to visit the David Livingstone Centre. David Livingstone was born on Blantyre in 1813. His family worked in a weaving mill and lived in a tenement building called Shuttle Row. He worked hard to get an education, graduated as a doctor and became a missionary in Africa.
The mill where he worked has gone but Shuttle Row has been preserved as his memorial. The building once housed 24 families, each of whom lived and died in one room. The room where Livingstone was born has been restored to what it would have been like in those days. It's about 6m x 4m with a fire on one wall, a single cupboard, two hole-in-the-wall beds and a chest of drawers. The top drawer was the porridge drawer. Once a week, a large pot of porridge was cooked and poured into the drawer. Each morning slices would be cut off and eaten cold for breakfast. In the bottom drawer, the youngest child would sleep. There was no running water and the toilets were out in the yard.
It would have been a hard existence but they were much better off than a lot of others. One of my ancestors lived there at the same time as Livingstone so I was really interested in seeing the museum again.
On his last trip to Africa, David Livingstone encountered a slaving party. He had run out of paper and ink so he had to improvise to write down details of this terrible trade. He made ink from local berries and wrote on an old newspaper, right across the black printed words. Of course, it was unreadable until very recently when modern technology made it possible to make the printed words almost invisible, while enhancing the words written in the improvised ink.
It's probably not PC to applaud the work of a Victorian missionary, but David Livingstone was probably not as damaging as many others. He was first and foremost a doctor and he is fondly remembered in Africa, especially in Malawi where the capital city is named after his birthplace.
The mill where he worked has gone but Shuttle Row has been preserved as his memorial. The building once housed 24 families, each of whom lived and died in one room. The room where Livingstone was born has been restored to what it would have been like in those days. It's about 6m x 4m with a fire on one wall, a single cupboard, two hole-in-the-wall beds and a chest of drawers. The top drawer was the porridge drawer. Once a week, a large pot of porridge was cooked and poured into the drawer. Each morning slices would be cut off and eaten cold for breakfast. In the bottom drawer, the youngest child would sleep. There was no running water and the toilets were out in the yard.
It would have been a hard existence but they were much better off than a lot of others. One of my ancestors lived there at the same time as Livingstone so I was really interested in seeing the museum again.
On his last trip to Africa, David Livingstone encountered a slaving party. He had run out of paper and ink so he had to improvise to write down details of this terrible trade. He made ink from local berries and wrote on an old newspaper, right across the black printed words. Of course, it was unreadable until very recently when modern technology made it possible to make the printed words almost invisible, while enhancing the words written in the improvised ink.
It's probably not PC to applaud the work of a Victorian missionary, but David Livingstone was probably not as damaging as many others. He was first and foremost a doctor and he is fondly remembered in Africa, especially in Malawi where the capital city is named after his birthplace.
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