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Moments in Millfield’s History: 1957 and the Hungarian Uprising

Barry Hobson, in his Brief History of Shapwick 1957-80, writes:
‘An additional arrival during the Spring Term of 1957 term was Arpad Botar, a 14 year old refugee from the Hungarian uprising against the Communist Government. He and his brother, Gabor, who went to Edgarley, were provided with clothes bought with money collected entirely by a whip-round of every single pupil in the school. Subsequently their father who had just escaped with his life was offered a post in Canada and the boys did not return for the September Term’.
Instrumental in all this was General Sir George Erskine, famous as Commander-in-Chief, British Forces in Kenya during the troubled 1950s, who is pictured here with his wife, plus Gabor and Arpad with their mother and step-father.
The school lost touch with the brothers not long after they emigrated to Canada, until just recently, when we were delighted to hear from Gabor, who gave us this account of his brief stay in England:
‘My memories of Millfield and Glastonbury and the Wapping refugee camp in London are the incomplete ones of a bewildered child who had just witnessed the death and destruction of the 1956 Hungarian uprising.
Nonetheless, those memories of England are almost all very pleasant: people were generous everywhere, Christmas in Glastonbury was very beautiful, our "den mother" at Millfield (assigned to about six of us boys in our dormitory) was a lovable and loving cheerful black lady, I rode a horse for the first time, etc.. The more difficult memories include learning to ride on a borrowed bicycle, then crashing it rather badly (injuring my knee as well) and feeling helpless as the young owner sobbed... My greatest hurdle was learning English...and trying to keep up with the French lessons as well!
An upshot of my few months at such an elite British school was that upon my arrival in Canada I was deemed to be more advanced in English than most of my fellow refugees. I was placed directly into the Canadian public (in the Canadian sense!) school system, and ultimately skipped a grade...(Of course, I did not yet know English well but applied myself diligently since I did not want to go back to the special school in the refugee quarters...) Another upshot of my embracing English with such gusto was that I was one of the founding members of a national association of teachers of English in Madagascar in 1970-72’.
Gabor, an eminent horticultural technologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton for many years, now lives in semi-retirement with his wife Szidonia on one of the University’s research stations, where he carries out vital work in preserving heritage apple cultivars, in an area of Canada dubbed the ‘Apple Capital of the Prairie Provinces’.