AWOKE TO FIND SNAKE IN BED

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 72, 17 December 1938, Page 13

AWOKE TO FIND SNAKE IN BED

Authoress’s Experience In

Africa

FOUR MONTHS’ VISIT TO

NEW ZEALAND . Best known by her pen-name of Dorothy Una Ratcliffe. Mrs. McGrigor Phillips, authoress and traveller, and a member of the Royal Geographical and Royal Astronomical Societies, arrived at Wellington yesterday by the Rangitane from London. She was accompanied by her husband. Mrs. Phillips has trekked across the African veldt. photographed lion and elephant in their natural habitations and awakened in camp in the tropical jungle to find a deadly serpent in bed beside her. She has navigated her own yacht across the stormy waters of the North Atlantic. She said that it was her intention to spend four months in New Zealand, much of it camping in the back country.

-It will be lovely to be able to sleep in ,the open air, without danger from wild beasts or reptiles/ she said. "You are lucky in New Zealand to have nothing that bites or stings. It is not nice to wake up with a horrible, cold, poisonous mamba in bed beside you.” Asked if that had happened to her, she nodded assent. “But don’t say too much about that,” she said. "I don’t want people to think of such creepy, horrible things.” Through African Deserts. She said that she had travelled extensively in Kenya, Uganda, Belgian Congo, through the deserts of North xkfrica, and all up the River Nile. She had trekked with a caravan through South Africa, a six months’ journey that few people had emulated. Her home, a lovelj' old English country house of mixed 15th, 16th and 17th century architecture, was in Westmoreland. She was a lover of the Border country, with its sheep farms like those of New Zealand, and she was aniious to see much of the farming districts of the Dominion. She was president of the Yorkshire Dialect Society and was anxious to meet members in New Zealand, of whom she believed there were many.

During her stay in New Zealand she was going to write her impressions for the four great English newspapers serving the Border country and the North of England—the “Manchester Guardian,” “Yorkshire Post,” “.Scotsman,” and “Glasgow Herald.” For all these papers she wrote regularly. It was not, however, her intention to write a book upon her visit to New Zealand. Keen Yachts woman. Having heard of New Zealand’s sounds and liordland, and being a keen yachting enthusiast, she was anxious to have the opportunity of sailing on the coast. Ou the Clyde she kept her own 40-ton auxiliary cruiser. Sea Swallow, in which she had cruised extensively to Brittany, the Hebrides, Finland, Spain, and the Azores, where she took her yacht on its maiden voyage. She herself held a mate’s certificate, and did all her own navigation. Her works included “Equatorial Dawn,” an account of her African journeys, “Swallow of the Sea,” about her North Sea and Baltic cruises, “South African Summer,” and "Lapwings and Laverocks,” "Fairings,” “Dale Folk,” and "Dale Dramas,” tales and verses of the English North Country. Her husband, she said, was formerly an officer in the Inniskilling Dragoons, and went right through the Gallipoli campaign from the landing to the evacuation. She believed lie was the only officer to have Mrs. Phillips is tall, dark, and vivacious, and speaks without any trace of the broad accents of the North of England. Her writings are remarkable for their sincerity, verve, humour, and observation.