About Ian Cutler
I was born in 1948 to William Walter Cutler, a British army officer in the Royal Artillery and son of a farm labourer (see below right) from Winterborne Stickland near Blanford Forum in Dorset. My father returned to farming himself after 21 years in the army, including 8 years in India and Burma. He had joined the Communist party in India (and later CND) which did not sit well with the army. Like many young men at the time, he lied about his age to join the army early and escape from the tedium and hardship of life at home.
My mother (Elise Engelhart) arrived in the UK on the Kindertransport. She met and married my father in Camden Town, London, when she was working as a nursery nurse and my father was still in the army. Elise's passport issued by the Nazis, includes the name Sara that was added to all passports of Jewish women to indicate they were Jewish.
Elise's parents, Wilhelm Engelhart from Kolbuszowa in Poland and Ella (née Weiss) from Budapaest, met and married in Vienna and remained at their home in Fleischmarkt 20, Wien 1, to settle up their jewellery business when the Germans occupied Vienna. They sent their daughter and son, Freddy, on ahead by kindertransport but they never escaped and were sent by the Nazis to Maly Trostenets concentration camp near Minsk. They were shot in a mass grave a week later (1942) in the Blagovshchina Forest.
I left school aged 15 with no qualifications and no regrets. Hating the narrow provincialism and boring facts and figures about Britain in particular, I wanted to see the world that I suspected offered much more than I had seen so far.
Aged 18, I spent the last 2 years of the 'sixties' in Kasama, Zambia. The real culture shock was returning to Britain after two years of total immersion in African food, music, people, and the land itself. Imagine getting off the plane at Heathrow early one very cold and grey British winter day, boarding a bus with a single suitcase, and looking out of the bus window at streams of shivering workers walking or cycling to local factories, their canvas lunch bags across their shoulders, thinking: 'What the hell am I doing here'.
It would be a further four or five years before I’d saved up enough money to go back to Africa, but only weeks later I was arrested for an act of terrorism: blowing-up a section of the Chinese built TAZARA railway line from Dar es Salaam to Lusaka; a case of mistaken identity as I was the only white guy in the wrong place at the wrong time; the white Rhodesian mercenaries who were responsible had long since fled. After a couple of weeks of house arrest (fortunately in the house of the local mayor’s daughter where I’d been staying) I managed to sneak back to the capital on a night bus, get myself on a plane and home again. This time arriving back relieved that I’d not been tortured or worse, and for the first time appreciating that Britain did indeed have something going for it—the security and anonymity that accompanies tedium.
But banality has a way of giving way again to a lust for difference and adventure and I moved from Somerset to London where I worked for a year as a road sweeper—a very satisfying experience but during the days of bad haircuts! Sweeping the streets around a large Victorian mental asylum, and being fascinated by the richness of human life coming and going from within its walls, led to training as a mental health nurse and later as a general nurse also, following which I took a job as a primary care nurse in the Honduran rain forest.
A heady experience that included witnessing (fatal) Wild West type shoot outs in local bars, a stay in the Bay Islands, Morgan the Pirate’s hang out, eating freshly caught crab in a hammock on the beach, and bathing in rock pools at night surrounded by fire flies. But the unfortunate coincidence of the Falklands war and the inevitable wave of anti-British sentiment in Latin America forced me back to the UK. After further forays around Europe and the Middle East, I did eventually succumb to a fairly conventual life, retiring in 2011 as Director of Adult Social Services for a South Wales local authority.
I had been living in Cardiff since 1985 with my wife Angela and our two sons (born in 1991 & 1992). I continued travelling but not to the usual tourist destinations. The research for Angela’s first book 'Auschwitz', a travelogue come critique on holocaust tourism, included journeys to Warsaw, Kolbuszowa, Kraków and Auschwitz in Poland; Budapest; Berlin; and then Minsk in search of the forest where my grandparents were killed. In connection with the Jewish Diaspora resulting from the Holocaust, we also visited family and friends in New York, Chicago and Toronto, but since 1986 have also been visiting Spain almost annually, most frequently around Segovia in central Spain which we regard as our second home.
Angela has written a book that includes the details of my personal family history. But the book is primarily an autobiographical discourse on why people are drawn to visit the sites of holocaust atrocities and questions our need to look: what is there to uncover, other than the difficulty of peering into such a place and into a subject that has been obsessively documented, yet can never really be understood? The backbone of 'Auschwitz' is a series of emails between Angela and Franco-American writer Raymond Federman. At the age of 14, Federman was hastily thrust into the small upstairs closet of their Paris apartment by his mother just before she, his father and two sisters were taken to Auschwitz, where they were killed. Visit Angela's page on this website for more information about her writing.
In spite of my cultural heritage, I identify no more with being Jewish than I do with being British, or Welsh for that matter. Like the Ancient Cynics who first captured my philosophical imagination, I regard myself as a Cosmopolite (in the proper Cynic definition of the term). Religious beliefs, national borders, cultural customs and practices, civil law, etc., vary from state to state, change over time, and therefore have no legitimacy for those who would prefer to regard themselves as Citizens of the World: those who feel free to adopt whatever laws and customs have meaning for them according to their own natural instincts.
POLITICAL DIGRESSION: Regardless of my Jewish background, I see no legitimacy for the Israeli Government's atrocities against Palestinians. Surely the Israelis have enough intelligence to know how to live at peace with their Arab neighbours, and with their wisdom, together with the financial power of the Arab world, make the region a place of safety and prosperity (and not necessarily in monetary terms). Such is the stupidity of those who seek to promote their own interests and ideologies at the expense of the world they share with others. Why would the Palestinians not be entitled to and desire the same autonomy as the Israelis? Britain (via Brexit) and North America's current moves to close their borders and disappear up their own backsides; reinventing their cultures to exclude its natural diversity, and shoring up their power base with narrow definitions that no longer reflect the reality or best interests of their citizens, demonstrate that true cosmopolitanism is a fantasy.
As for the rest of my life, meeting Angela and becoming infected by her own obsession with writing, was just the latest in a series of unplanned accidents that led to me becoming an author in my late 50s. My cynical attitude to life anad my attraction to the weird and unconventional, led to a series of biographical works on those who sought out life on the margins of human existence; starting with the ancient Greek cynics and chronicling the lives of their modern legatees. During my research for my third book on fifteen tramp writers, I made contact with someone who had met Kathleen Phelan (the final chapter of 'Golden Age of Vagabondage') on a boat from Spain to Morocco in 1971 and tramped with her for 3 weeks through that country. Never one to let a chance encounter go to waste, I ended up putting Golden Age on ice to write 'Jim Christy: A Vagabond Life'—“Why pass up the chance of writing about a living vagabond when the subjects of my work to date were all dead.”
See older blog version of my autobiography HERE