Ronald Hunston
Appreciation of Ronald Hunston, soldier, engineer, printer, missionary, photographer; born 22 September, 1919, in Sheffield; died 31 January, 2010, in Melrose, aged 90.
My father, Ronald Hunston, who died on January 31 after a short illness,
had a full and varied life that began shortly after the 1914-18 "war to end all wars", writes Hugh Hunston.
His teenage years and training as a printer were ended abruptly by the next global conflict in 1939, when he enlisted in the doomed British Expeditionary Force.
It was during the western desert campaign, masterminded by Field Marshall Montgomery, that the gangly pipe-smoking Yorkshireman met Kathleen Shedden, a Queen Alexandra’s nurse.
The Glasgow-born daughter of First World War Church of Scotland chaplain John Shedden and his wife, Isabel, later to be a pioneering woman Congregational minister, nursed him after he sustained a shrapnel wound on the eve of the decisive and epic 13-day El Alamein tank battle towards the end of 1942.
In 1951 he was recruited by the Church of Scotland Mission Field, and Africa beckoned him again, with responsibility for establishing and managing a book printing operation in the centre of Accra, Gold Coast, later to become independent Ghana.
Returning to Scotland in 1957, my parents maintained their church links as superintendent and matron at the then new Wellhall Eventide (old folks’) home in Hamilton.
His publishing expertise and a consuming interest in photography resulted in a transfer to the Church of Scotland’s growing social services operation, where, as a protégé of director Lewis Cameron, my father was a driving force in the pioneering publicity department as photographer, publicist and documentary film maker.
During the late 1960s Ronald and Kathleen returned to run Queensbay Lodge Eventide Home in Joppa, Edinburgh, the vast rambling former dormitory for Jenners’ store staff, until they retired to Broughton in the Borders in the mid-1980s.
• Full story at The Scotsman.
• Posted in Church of Scotland, Obituaries