By Dan
Wooding
Engelbert
Humperdinck
On another occasion, I was sent to the home of Engelbert
Humperdinck’s father, Capt. Mervyn Dorsey, who had been an engineer in
the British Army serving in India, to interview him about his famous
son. The singer, originally Arnold George Dorsey, was born in Chennai
(Madras) in 1936, one of ten siblings, of his English father and Indian
mother who had eventually left India for Leicester, England, in 1947.
When I arrived at his Leicester home, the father told me
that he loved to arm-wrestle and added that if I would like him to talk
about his son – who took his stage name from the German composer
Engelbert Humperdinck -- I had to first arm-wrestle him.
Knowing this would secure the interview, I did so for about
20 minutes and, of course, I let him win each time. After his success
with his arm-wrestling, he proceeded to give me a terrific interview
about his son who now has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
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Dan Wooding and Ray Barnett at Karuma Falls,
Uganda, where thousands of bodies of the victims of Id Amin's terror
machines were dumped to be eaten by the waiting crocodiles below).
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The Stab-in-the Back pub
Fortunately for me, a good friend of mine, Ray Barnett, an
Irish-Canadian and founder of Friends in the West, had decided that he
also would do what it took to help me sort out my life. Some 26 years
ago, my life was a mess. I was drinking heavily and although I had
attained success as a journalist in Britain, my personal life was in
tatters. During a visit to London from his home in Vancouver, Canada,
Ray decided that he would visit me at the Stab-in-the-Back pub where I
hung out most nights, drinking and swapping stories with my
journalistic colleagues.
I had all but left my Christian faith and my wife Norma and
I had received several death threats because of some of the stories I
had written and the only way I could cope with the stress was to pour
more booze down my throat.
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| Uganda
Holocaust book cover |
Ray saw the state I was in and came straight to the point.
“Look at you Dan,” he said. “God has gifted you as a journalist, yet
all you do with that talent is write silly stories for the tabloids.”
I didn’t appreciate Ray’s comments, but he pressed on. “Dan,
I challenge you to give your life back to God, walk away from your
career in Fleet Street and come with me to Uganda to tell the story of
the courageous survivors of Idi Amin’s ‘holocaust’ in that country.”
Ray proceeded to tell me that some 300,000 Christians in Uganda had
been slaughtered by Amin and his thugs and he added, “Dan, you won’t
get paid and you’ll probably get shot at.”
I smiled and said, “Only a Christian could come up with a
deal as good as that.”
But his persistence paid off and within days, I had
recommitted my life to Christ, walked away from my job on one of the
country’s largest circulation newspapers, and was at Entebbe Airport in
Uganda, to help research a book we did together called “Uganda
Holocaust.”
I am very grateful that Ray Barnett did what he had to do to
rescue me from a situation that was destroying my life and my faith.
Maybe you, too, should do the same with someone you know that, like me,
had taken the wrong path in life. It may just transform their life,
like it did for me!
| Dan Wooding is an award
winning British journalist now living in Southern California with his
wife Norma. He is the founder and international director of ASSIST (Aid
to Special Saints in Strategic Times) and the ASSIST News Service
(ANS). He was, for ten years, a commentator, on the UPI Radio Network
in Washington, DC. Wooding is the author of some 42 books, the latest
of which is his autobiography, "From Tabloid to Truth", which is
published by Theatron Books. To order a copy, go to www.fromtabloidtotruth.com.
danjuma1@aol.com. |
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