Administrator
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Peter Deakin wrote this tribute to Tom in Ariel:
For many years the spare and scrubbed – if sartorially challenged – person of Tom Heaton was the first point of reference for newcomers, particularly expatriate editors at the BBC’s East Africa unit in Nairobi. Aside from his professional skills, Tom had a unique gift for engaging others in his own enthusiasms. You might resist for a while, but sooner or later most were won over, and found they had made a friend (and assiduous correspondent) for life.
Born in Germany in 1928, Thomas Peter Starke was the son of a dentist and botanist who entered the service of the Shah of Iran. In the language of his nursery years – he always regarded Persian as his mother tongue – Tom came to know of a world very different from his own comfortable existence. Ever after, he said, he was troubled by the ‘obscenity’ of extremes of wealth and poverty.
Following his father’s death and mother’s remarriage to a British expatriate, Tom Heaton arrived in Britain at the age of 16. After graduating in Persian and Arabic, and a brief spell at BBC monitoring in Caversham, he joined the colonial service as an education officer, and was posted to Aden. He later described with relish how he had to sleep with a revolver under his pillow for fear of an attempt on his life.
In 1968, Tom went to work as a teacher in Kabarnet, northern Kenya. It was a happy time for him and his new wife Jackie.
Tom rejoined the monitoring service in 1970. By 1976 he was back in Kenya as assistant head of EAU, taking up his duties with characteristic energy. He brought to his work in particular a genuine absorption in regional affairs and a detailed local knowledge which he was ever eager to impart to his colleagues.
After taking early retirement, he set off in 1982 on the first stage of a journey that would take him from Pangani on the Tanzanian coast to the shores of Lake Rudolf in northern Kenya.
The story of his adventures was eventually published by Macmillan in 1989. In Teleki’s Footsteps, humane, candid, humorous and packed with incident, deserves to be better known.
His journey done, Tom returned to the BBC in Nairobi as, so he put it, a ‘dudu’ (insect), making himself useful as Arabic monitor, editor, trainer and of course adviser to all. He built a house in the nearby town of Ngong, with enough land for the purposes of his latest enthusiasm – Rhodesian ridgeback dogs. These formidable animals he exercised amid the beautiful Ngong Hills, accompanied, as often as not, by the latest visiting editor from Caversham.
Tom finally left BBC monitoring in 2002, and went to work for the UN in Nairobi. At the time of his death he was contemplating taking a translating job in Entebbe, where he had bought a house. What he never seems to have thought of doing is giving up work altogether.
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