“Elephant Bill"

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30058, 16 February 1963, Page 3

“Elephant Bill"

xne FMtpnnta « Elephant ML By Susan WUliaaas. Wffihnltake.SMjp The many admirers of “Elephant Bill” (Colonel Jim Williams) will welcome this account of their 26 years of married life together by his widow. The narrative, simply as an autobiography carries its own interest, for Mrs Williams’s adventures in the Burmese jungles as well as her description of the painful trek into India before the Japanese invaders of Burma are vividly told. But she is at pains to make a personal tribute to the work and character of her husband, and the book provides a fitting epjtaph to his career.

Susan Williams’s introduction to Burma would probably have sent a more selfish and -headstrong young woman home again at the first opportunity. On the invitation of her - unde, Steven Hopwood, Chief Conservator of the Burma Forest Service, she agreed to go out there to keep- house for him, not without misgivings, for “Unde Pop” was all too dearly a mixture of martinet and club bore, given, in the latter capacity to interminable and oft-repeated sporting reminiscences. He expected the girl to accompany him on the most exhausting tours, and to exist on the meagre tinned rations which were his own chief sustenance. Yet she found herself

fascinated by the country, and when she had her first meeting with Jim Williams in the heart of the jungle while accompanying Unde Pop on one of his tours, life took on for her a new and richer significance. The two young people fell in love at first sight and were married soon afterwards.

She soon came to share his love of elephants, and adds her own anecdotes of these sagacious beasts to those told in her husband’s books. New Zealand grandmothers will no doubt appreciate the account of the patient babysitter, who instructed by her oozi to keep guard over an adventurous youngster, within a chalk-circle, gently gathered him up in her trunk and returned him to his playpen every time he strayed over its circumscribed limits! Another example of the intelligence and docility of these great beasts is in the story of one which submitted to having an abscess lanced with no reaction save a roar of pain. The constant fight against malaria and- other tropical ills; the onslaught of swarms of noisome insects; toe jealousy of a Burmese servant who, it was suspected was planning to poison her; the pathetic episode of Tugli, toe mentally simple gardener; the proneness to rabies of favourite dogs—all these and many other incidents enliven a book which ranks with, the best of Far Eastern reminiscences.