Alan Simpson

Alan wrote this himself.

Alan Geoffrey "One Wine" Simpson 1930 - 2011  A native of the leafy lanes of Hertfordshire, Alan Simpson traversed jungles and deserts on his way to his final home and resting place. He first came to Mojácar in 1968, when Bill Napier and old mayor Jacinto were beginning to put it on the map. A child in World War Two, he was machine-gunned in his village school playground by a cruising aircraft (The only casualty was a boy who ran into the road and was brushed by a passing car) and rendered homeless by a V2 rocket before he had finished his Sunday lunch, thereafter being probed for broken glass on top of a piano in a snowstorm. That is why the title of his on-going autobiography was "Naked in the Snow". {It was serialised in Talismán magazine and later printed as a book of "the-story-so-far". Each chapter was written to be a stand-alone, anectdotal tale, but together they form a fascinating and humourous account of a true adventurer.} An infantry commander in the Korean War, he was commended for his part in extricating  casualties and the dead from a minefield in No-Man's-Land. After the war he aided Malaya's path to independence, seeking out terrorists deep in the Malayan jungle. Travelling with headhunters for companions he explored distant headwaters in Sarawak by dugout canoe, sleeping at night beneath bundles of human heads.  He later sought out remote parts of tribal Africa and the Sahel before moving to West Africa, where he commanded part of a 650-strong  security force protecting the diamond fields, which later funded Sierra Leone's twenty year civil war; the setting for the film "Blood Diamonds". Still in West Africa, he became a chief of police in the diamond mining areas, and was later a miner of diamonds, gold and tin. His memoirs mention the Zanzibar bloodbath instigated by "General" John Okello, and the attempted overthrow of the Moroccan monarchy by General "Name of a Nightmare" Mohamed Oufkhir, both of which situations caused him some inconvenience. Alan Simpson was an occasional magazine contributor, and a talented photographer. An "honorary" Mojaquero since his first visit, Alan became the real thing when he settled into Mojácar Village in 1990. His partner, the artist and potter Janet Le Bretton, predeceased him in 2001.