Tim Scarrott
Ship name / Flight number: BA812
Arrival date: 12 April 1972
Crossing the world and coming to Australia with the BBM was not something I expected to do!
I was born in Hanover, Germany, on 3 January 1953. My father was a pilot in the Royal Air Force, and we moved often. From Hanover we went to Lincolnshire in the east of England, where my younger sister was born in 1955, then west to the Isle of Man, to the RAF Jurby Head Base.
When I grew up, I wanted to be a pilot like my father. I had model aeroplanes and my mother tells me that I was happy when I was in my pram at the edge of a runway. We generally lived in the married quarters on airbases, so I was around airplanes all the time. Little did I know then, that my short-sightedness would thwart several of my ambitions.
When I was seven years old, my parents were posted to Kenya with the Royal Air Force. My younger sister was allowed to stay with them but I was sent to boarding school in Hampshire, in the south of England. The Royal Air Force paid for one airfare each year for me to visit my parents in Nairobi, so I would go there for the summer holidays. During the other school holidays, I stayed with Mum’s twin sister and cousins in Berkshire, England. I was homesick quite a bit of the time. Even though I was separated from my parents and sister some of the time, I had a happy childhood.
In 1963, Kenya gained its independence from the United Kingdom, so my parents returned to England, with my dad flying a little single-engine plane back over 21 days. Instead of going to live with them, I changed boarding schools. At the age of 13 years, I changed boarding schools after passing the Common Entrance exam and went to Monkton Combe public school in Bath. Boarding schools could be rough places with bullying and strict rules. They were also freezing – a glass of water would turn to ice overnight in the dormitories and we had cold baths in the morning!
However, I have some happy memories too. I loved sport, and played cricket, soccer, rugby, tennis and rowing with many good friends. I spent more time on the sports field than at a desk, so I wasn’t a great student. I did my O and A levels in English and French but I was more interested in practicing drills in the police cadets. I went to Volunteer Police Cadets on Wednesday nights and thoroughly enjoyed it. I decided that I wanted to join the London Metropolitan Police Force, but just as I couldn’t join the RAF due to my eyesight, the same applied with the police. I applied to join a couple of times, but had no luck.
As a result of my thwarted ambitions, I felt a bit confused about the future after I finished school. I took off on another hitch-hiking trip to Europe with a mate – something I had done in the summers of 1968, 1969 and 1970. That was fun, so when I got back, I hitch-hiked around England (again). After spending 11 years at boarding schools, I wasn’t used to living with my family. Being a teenager in the late 1960s, I got up to a bit of mischief and was becoming a bit of a pain in the neck to my parents! Then my dad, who had left the RAF, started talking about joining Qantas as a pilot, flying for the Royal Flying Doctor’s Service, and moving to Australia. We saw an advertisement in the local newspaper for a meeting about the BBM youth migration scheme and we both went along to the presentation in Wokingham. Within six months, I was on a plane to Australia. My Mum was a bit teary and upset, as I landed in Sydney the day after her birthday, and two years seemed a long time to be away. They said goodbye to me at Victoria Station in London. I was an excited 19 year old and ready for adventure!
After a 40 hour flight with stopovers in Rome, Persia (now Iran), India, Singapore and Darwin, I arrived in Sydney with eight other Little Brothers on 12 April 1972. We were met at the airport by a fellow POM, who drove us in a bus to the hostel at Burwood. I remember we were given eggs on toast for breakfast. We were told to leave our bags at the hostel and go out and not come back until 6pm. We were shooed out to entertain ourselves in an unfamiliar city. I remember finding a milk bar that served milkshakes in tall tin cups – I OD-ed on them and cheese sandwiches as in England, we only had milkshakes as a treat! They were comforting and reminded me happily of home.
The other Little Brothers in my group were all younger than me and had been learning a trade in England – the BBM found them apprenticeships. I’d had an assortment of casual jobs in England from working on a farm, labouring on a building site, to working in a hospital as a porter. The BBM was having trouble finding a job for me, so the director suggested that I go to the Commonwealth Employment Service (CES) to see if they had anything suitable. I saw a job at Graythwaite RSL ( Returned Services League) Convalescent Hospital in North Sydney as an orderly, which also provided accommodation so I could move out of the hostel. I worked the early shift from 5-11am and then a late shift from 5-11pm. During the middle of the day, I followed the lead of two friendly Queenslanders, who were also working at the hospital, and caught the train into Sydney and started working as a labourer on demolition sites so I could earn some extra cash.
This suited me for a while, but the bush beckoned. My Dad had started working for Hunting Aerial Surveys, which sometimes did mapping work for exploration companies based out of the UK. He suggested that I apply to work with geologists or drilling companies. I visited several offices in central Sydney and in no time Leighton and Associates, who were handling the recruitment for Chevron, offered me a job as a field assistant earning $10/day, which was much more than my combined wages as an orderly and labourer.
I was given a plane ticket to Broken Hill, a map, and a sleeping bag. When I landed at Broken Hill airport on dusk, I had to pick up a Land Rover and drive via Silverton, out to the South Australian border fence, meet a geologist by the name of ‘Paul’ at the pub, and then drive us to the drill site, which was about another 70-80 miles. It was the middle of winter in the middle of the outback and it was freezing. I had never driven on my own at night in the bush before and I had never seen kangaroos – there were heaps of them hopping across the road in front of my headlights. I was spellbound!
We camped out there for three months and saved lots of money, as there was nowhere to spend it, except on beer, which was only available every two weeks when the delivery truck arrived. We were exploring for uranium. The driller’s wife did the cooking, My fellow workers were a tough, motely bunch made up of Greeks, Poms, Slavs and Italians. For some reason, the Slavs were the target of most of the teasing and pranks and they had a pretty rough time. The Australians nicknamed me ‘Mary’ because I was new to the Aussie way and they thought I was a bit ‘soft’. It reminded me of boarding school! There was quite a bit of fighting, coupled with drinking, but I managed to avoid most of it.
While I was out there, I developed a painful infection in my armpit, which also gave me a fever. A Dutch bloke by the name of Flo, who kept to himself and camped on his own, could see that it was a carbuncle and offered to help. We had recently had our weekly groceries delivered, and he took a fresh loaf of bread, ripped out the middle of the loaf, squished it up, spat on it, and strapped it under my arm with some insulating tape. Then he gave me a Bex powder mixed with orange juice and whisky and told me to go to bed. The next morning, he ripped the tape off my arm and the boils erupted like Mt Vesuvius. The pain relief was instantaneous. The yeast in the bread had drawn out the infection. He washed my skin with warm, salty water and applied some basic first aid. I made a rapid recovery and Flo was my hero. He made it possible for me to keep my job, as I knew that there was no sick pay and that I’d be fired if I didn’t report for work. Later in life, I ended up working as a paramedic, and I wonder if Flo’s kindness and example influenced my decision.
During the three months I was out bush, I had to go and pick up the head of Chevron Exploration Corporation from the Broken Hill airport and drive him back to the camp. After chatting to him on a couple of round trips, he, Walter Koop, offered me a job as an assistant field surveyor in the new office in Melbourne! I could hardly believe my luck! I found a room in a boarding house in Toorak Road where I could walk to the Chevron office on St Kilda Road. However, I was in the field more than the office – I worked in western Queensland in Mt Isa. Cloncurry and Boulia; then on the Eyre Peninsula and the Nullarbor in South Australia, and back to Broken Hill and Menindee in New South Wales during 1972-73. Work was paying for me to travel! It was an education of a lifetime.
My Mum was a prolific letter writer and sent me an aerogram every week, c/o Post Restante at the GPO. I wrote back, but it was more like once a month than weekly. For my first Christmas in Australia in 1972, she sent me an advent calendar via the Chevron office, addressed to “Timpsey Scarrott”. That was her affectionate nickname for me, and it became a source of friendly laughter in the office, replacing ‘Mary’.
My first Christmas in Australia was in sharp contrast to the formal roast dinners in England. I had been working on the Nullarbor and on 20 December we stopped work and I hitch-hiked to Port Augusta. The only shop that was open there on Christmas day was a small deli, so I had a chiko roll for Christmas lunch. Then a transit van with ‘Johnnie Walker’ written on the side pulled up and I met Jeff and Marcus who were driving around Australia and we had some beers together at the hotel.
I knew they were from Melbourne, so I looked them up when I got back and ended up sharing a house with them and some uni students in Carlton. I have known them and their families now for 50 years. I bought a second-hand Yamaha motorbike – thanks to Walter Koop going guarantor for me. I loved motorbikes and wanted to ride across the Nullarbor and look up the Hundley’s, my mother’s family who had lived in Western Australia since the early 1900s. I did that in 1973 and ended up working for Lang-Hancock Mining in the Pilbara for a while. We lived in tents – there were no air-conditioned dongas in the 1970s!
During 1974, I rode my motorbike to Darwin to check it out and pick up some work. Fortunately, I left just before Christmas day. By the time Cyclone Tracy hit, I was hitch-hiking back to Melbourne (having written off my motorbike in a crash). I bought another motor-bike in Melbourne and put that in a crate so I could take it on a trip to South America. I planned to sail back to England, the long way ‘round. I bought a ticket on the Chandris Line and got off in Panama but decided to let my motorbike continue onto England and hitch-hike through South America for three months instead. It was very cheap and so much fun. I made it back to England in April 1975, about three years after I’d left with the BBM. I was missing my family and missing English things.
During the three years I’d been in Australia, I’d had 25 jobs but never signed a contract and was always paid in cash. I had managed to save about $6,000, which was enough to buy a block of land in Perth in 1975. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do back in England, and I knew that I had 12 months in which to re-enter Australia on my visa. I tried studying at university, but that didn’t last. I knew that I didn’t like office work, so I got a heavy goods vehicle license. I met an English girl over there, Felicity, and she was keen to come to Australia, so I decided that I’d come back. However, I wanted to see Burma, where my mother’s family had lived, so I flew to India and took an overland route through Burma, Malaysia Indonesia and Singapore. I knew the additional travel meant I was ‘cutting it a bit fine’ but I managed to land in Darwin two days before my re-entry visa expired.
I decided to set up home in Perth, as I had some friends there, including a truckie who used to write to me. I picked up dysentery in Asia and I only had one $20 traveller’s cheque left, so I took a job with Hammersley Iron at Mt. Tom Price Mine in the Pilbara region. When Felicity arrived in Australia, I came back to Perth and we rented in Cottesloe, by the beach. We stayed together for about four years then parted amicably. We are still good friends.
My parents came to visit me in Perth in 1981-82, the first of many trips over the next 20 years. My Dad loved sailing and owned a yacht at Fremantle Sailing Club. He was now flying commercial jets out of the UK. We travelled across Australia on the Indian-Pacific and all around Western Australia.
Unfortunately, my dad contracted motor-neuron disease and died in 1999. After this, my mum moved to Cornwall and lived most of the time with my younger sister. Sadly, she began to suffer with dementia from 2013, so I’d go there every year for about three months over the English summer and take her to a little house in Padstow to give my sister a break from being a carer. I was able to pick up a few odd jobs nearby. Luckily, mum died just before COVID hit in November 2019, because that would have made it impossible to visit her.
I met ‘my Kate’ at the Royal Perth Hospital in the early 1980s. I was working as an ambulance officer and she was working in the emergency department in admissions. There was a split door – like a stable door – at the entrance, and we would chat over the door. Kate and I started going out and were married in 1984. We both worked shift work, so when we had our sons – Ben and Christian – they would go to work with Kate when she had her morning shift, and I’d pick them up from the hospital at the end of my night shift and take them home in the side car of my motorbike. Kate had a son, Jason, from a previous relationship so we had three boys to raise.
Working as an ‘ambo’ was my most permanent job – I was on the road for 17 years. As our boys were growing up, we decided that we wanted to buy a larger block of land so they could have motorbikes. I left the ambulance service for three years and working in the Timor Sea on an oil rig to earn some more money.
My two careers – working on exploration sites and as a paramedic – came together in my next role. In 1995, I started a department for the ambulance service called Industrial Paramedical Services, providing advanced first aid training for staff working in isolated locations, and medical equipment and trained paramedics for onshore and offshore mining and construction sites. It was a more sophisticated version of the ‘bush medicine’ that Flo had administered to me outside Silverton in 1972!
After 12 years, in 2007, I left the ambulance service again and went to work for another drilling company. I spent three years with Seadrill, which operated off the coast of Nigeria and Ghana. In 2010, I took a job with Totale, a French oil company who were also located off the coast of west Africa, except this time I was a paramedic for the expat crew, providing back up to the doctor on board. I was also their Safety Training Officer, Helicopter Landing Officer and coordinated all the inductions and training and logistics for the rig and ‘onshore’ facility near Point Harcourt.
I’ve been very lucky to have had the opportunities I’ve had. I love working with people and I love outdoor jobs where you don’t know what’s going to happen next. I would have liked to live and work in London, but I know that I got more thanks as an ambulance officer than I’d ever get as a police officer in the Met. We did consider moving back to England in the early 1980s but I’m glad we stayed in Australia where there’s so much freedom and it’s cheaper to live and therefore easier to save a few bob.
For the past 40 years, I’ve been collecting medical gear that’s expired, which we can’t use in Australia, and sending it to refugee organisations and animal charities around the world. In 1987 I was a founding member of an organisation called the Save African Rhino Foundation and I’ve been going to Zimbabwe each year over the past ten years teaching anti-poaching teams some basic life support and first aid and taking medical supplies. I didn’t go in 2024 as I needed a lung operation, but I’ll go again in March 2025.
Coming to Australia with the BBM was the best decision I ever made, thanks to the encouragement of my dear Ma and Pa. I’ve been blessed with a lovely life; my wife, Kate; and my family – Jason, Ben and Christian (who recently married Penny). I’ve also had many four and two legged friends. I think I’ve had about 60 different jobs and my life has felt like one big adventure. I have to thank Kate and my boys for allowing me to do so many different things. Personally, I believe we Australians are the luckiest people in the world, and I love the place! Thank you, BBM!