by Jim Gregson
I had been receiving elementary training as radar operator. With the huge but relatively crude machinery of the day, this involved staring at a green screen and trying to decide which of the many dots upon it were harmless and which represented approaching aircraft or missiles. I can only presume that I was as ineffective at this as I proved to be in most army activities, for in the postings at the conclusion of our basic training at Tonfanau, I had a welcome surprise.
I had been accorded the transfer I had asked for to the Royal Army Education Corps. I was to journey to the RAEC headquarters at Beaconsfield, Bucks, to be trained as a sergeant/instructor. Bombardier Pisspot could muster no more than a token resentment. ‘Must be because you’re such a fucking awful gunner,’ he said.
Basic training was now over. We looked surprisingly smart and marched surprisingly well on our passing-out parade. Hostilities between NCOs and this particular round of cannon fodder were now at an end. With my rail warrant in the pocket of my uniform and my departure scheduled for the next day, I made a daring reference to the real world which existed beyond the agonies of the camp at Tonfanau. I said that, in the absence of my beloved Blackburn Rovers from the FA Cup Final, I hoped that Manchester City would win the trophy.
Bombardier Philpot was outraged. ‘They can’t fucking win! They’ve got a fucking kraut in goal!’
‘Bert Trautman. He’s the best goalkeeper I’ve ever seen,’ I said with conviction.
Pisspot was outraged by this unaccustomed challenge to his authority. ‘And how the fucking hell would you know?’
I was then an amateur goalkeeper of some standing, so I declared my allegiance with confidence. ‘I’ve watched Trautman a lot over the last three years, when I wasn’t playing myself. He’s got the fastest reactions I’ve ever seen. He catches balls which ordinary mortals wouldn’t even touch. He’s the best.’
Bombardier Philpot looked at me aggressively. He didn’t like the mention of ordinary mortals: it sounded to him like a thoroughly civilian expression. ‘He can’t bloody be the best. He’s a fucking kraut.’ He nodded his satisfaction in this irrefutable logic. Then he stubbed his fag fiercely into the saucer in front of him, as if grinding the face of a mortal enemy.
A few hours later, Manchester City won the FA Cup by three goals to one. I had to leave the Welsh coast without any further contact with Bombardier Philpot. I would like to have declared this final small victory over him after the many sufferings he had brought to me, but I never saw him again. I pushed a note under the door of his empty room before I left: ‘Trautman 3, Pisspot 1’
It was not until several days later that I read in a newspaper that the fucking kraut had played the last twenty minutes of the match with a broken neck.
Four
I didn’t get off on the right foot at Beaconsfield. I began the first stage of my training as an NCO by saluting a man who wasn’t even an officer and being bawled out accordingly. I saw the flat hat near the guardhouse as I approached with my kitbag, sprang immediately erect, and flung my right forearm into the appropriate horizontal position alongside my forehead.
The impressively waxed moustache should have alerted me. This was a guards sergeant major. In his veteran years, he had been allotted the task of licking these callow young intellectuals into some sort of military order. In ten weeks, we were due to become sergeants. Not proper sergeants, of course, but we would have three stripes upon our arms.
If all went well at Beaconsfield, we would leave there as sergeant/instructors, known irreverently and universally in the army as ‘schoolies’. It would be a rank much derided among old sweats, but it would carry a sergeant’s stripes. We would be entitled to issue orders to all lower ranks and to pass through the jealously guarded portals of the sergeants’ mess. This lofty status must be armoured with some sort of enamel, however brittle the shine upon it might be.
Great events were taking place in 1956; significant international happenings which would define and limit the future status of Great Britain, and with it the functions of the British army. As the summer months crept by us in Buckinghamshire, we were largely unaware of these. Partly by accident and partly by design, the army existed in a world of its own, especially for recruits being put through the rigours of intensive training.
We did not see many newspapers. Television was still in its infancy and we saw it not at all. Radio was not often available to us. We concentrated upon our own immediate concerns and what we needed to do to fulfil the demands of our seniors. Our main concern was to pass out of Wilton Park as sergeant/instructors. The army liked it that way.
Nevertheless, there were serious happenings in the greater world outside the Centre for Army Education. We were a little over twenty miles from the mother of parliaments and Whitehall, where there was much frenzied Foreign Office activity. What was happening there would radically affect the military career of the man who was now drilling and learning as Private Gregson, though I was unaware at the time of their significance.
On June thirteenth 1956, British troops quit the Suez Canal Zone by prior agreement with Egypt. On June twenty-third, Colonel Nasser was elected unopposed as President of Egypt. Neither event made much impact in our trainee sergeants’ Nissen hut in Beaconsfield. We were, however, made aware of a bomb in a Cyprus restaurant which killed the American vice-consul on the sixteenth of June. It was a deplorable instance of Greek terrorism, but British troops would no doubt soon re-assert British control over Johnny foreigner. To the eighteen of us who were shining our boots and smartening up our drill on the barrack square in Buckinghamshire, these seemed irrelevant occurrences in a far-off land.
The news that Arthur Miller had married Marilyn Monroe on the twenty-ninth of June ran more readily around the camp. ‘Egghead weds hourglass’ was a much likelier and more lively subject for army delectation. A predictably coarse range of sexual possibilities was gleefully canvassed around the all-male establishment. I reflected that I seemed still no nearer to performing these amorous gymnastics with Joy.
I dwelt upon these thoughts after lights out, but I had no time to indulge them during the day. We putative sergeants were dispatched from Buckinghamshire to the wide acres of Salisbury Plain to take part in a vast and complicated military exercise, the purpose and machinery of which were never fully explained to us. We were to be fringe members of a major infantry force which never materialised. In the absence of the orders which should have been awaiting us, we were divided into groups of four and told to maintain maximum vigilance whilst awaiting further instructions. These never arrived.
Meanwhile, my four were mysteriously designated the ‘advanced party’ and told to await the arrival of our comrades. I was allotted the task of recording our fortunes in this conflict which remained so mysterious.
It was almost the longest day of the year, growing increasingly warm as the sun climbed higher. Roaming over War Office land to the sound of distant military gunfire, my quartet discovered a pleasant hollow beside a copse of young trees. We covered this den with foliage and made ourselves invisible from anything other than the closest quarters. Then we settled down to play cards.
For three hours, our leafy camouflage protected us. All around us and at varying distances, men strove to outwit each other in cunning military deployments. Each hour and on the hour, I recorded our concealment and our resolute survival in a hostile zone. The only instruction we had so far been given dictated that I should do this. Then, after three and a quarter hours, a hand appeared through the foliage above our heads, clenched itself into a fist, and remained still for several seconds. We looked at each other in wonderment, than back at the fist. It was not ‘clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful’. It was covered in tightly stretched khaki cotton. Things had moved on since Tennyson.
Nor did the hand brandish a magic sword. It matched the spirit of a more utilitarian age by dropping into our midst a battered cork cricket ball with paper wrapped around it. We detached the paper. It carried a simple but uncompromisin
g two-word message: ‘Hand Grenade’. I consulted my fellows, then wrote in my journal, ‘All four men in advanced party killed by hand grenade at 11.14 hours.’ We then resumed our game of solo whist.
This concluded our sole experience of the complex strategy of a modern military exercise.
Suez did not really impinge upon our thoughts until July twenty-sixth, when Nasser seized the Suez Canal. Our prime minister, Anthony Eden, responded with language which was well received in the army. He announced to Parliament and the nation that ‘a man with Colonel Nasser’s record’ could not be allowed to ‘have his thumb on our windpipe’ and that Britain and France would take military action if necessary.
This stirred interest at Wilton Park, especially among the regular soldiers who were training us apprentice schoolies. Everyone knew that military action brought the possibility of career advancement, if you were a regular. There were still many people around us who had reached senior rank through action in the 1939-45 war, and a sprinkling of latecomers who had arrived there after the bitter 1950-53 conflict in Korea. The view of the regulars was that the army should ‘kick the shit out of Nasser and those bloody Gypos’ whilst ensuring promotion for as many regulars as possible. We national servicemen offered tacit support. We offered as few opinions about what was happening in the Canal Zone as we could.
Because the army and survival in it dominated my thoughts, events on the international stage had an air of unreality for me. I was preoccupied with the shine on my boots, the glitter on my belt brasses, and the precision of my drill, as the army said that I should be. These were of course essentially petty concerns when compared with events in Egypt, but the whole system was designed to make the petty seem highly important for national servicemen.
Then, on July twenty-seventh, I was offered my first game of cricket in over a year. I had been a talented seam bowler at school and club level, but I had never passed beyond the ‘promising’ stage, because I had played hardly at all in my three years at university: Manchester was strictly ‘red brick’ and without the cricketing facilities and traditions of Oxford and Cambridge. And I had needed to work throughout the summer vacations to support my meagre grant.
Now I had been mysteriously selected without any prior soundings to represent our trainee unit against a visiting team of officers on the excellent army ground at Beaconsfield. ‘Show you what’s bloody what, the commissioned officers will,’ said our guards sergeant major. He knew nothing about cricket, but he was stoutly asserting a firm military principle.
The game was for me a welcome diversion from the mysteries and the rigours of army discipline. I didn’t feel at a disadvantage here, despite my rustiness. Coming off a run of twenty paces and with little fat on my rangy frame, I was pacey but erratic, as was to be expected. The fact that the match turned out to be other ranks against officers added an extra yard to my pace. Petty perhaps, but I was only twenty-one and pace bowlers aren’t supposed to be rational men. I would visit the frustrations left with me by the bombardiers, sergeants and lieutenants of Oswestry and Tonfanau upon the public school men who now stood tall and unflinching at the other end of this immaculate pitch.
I had a couple of near-wides in my first over which were haughtily ignored. But the first ball of my second over sent a major’s off stump cartwheeling. Our wicketkeeper, who was a friend of mine and knew how to support a man on a mission, raised his eyebrows to first slip, clapped his hands together, and moved a respectful pace further back as the new batsman took guard. Striving to respond with extra pace, I dropped the next one too short. The Harrow batsman, who was now an infantry captain, square cut it impressively for four with a crack like a rifle shot. He nodded his satisfaction at the stroke and replayed it in a mime a couple of times.
Then he eased his batting gloves a little, ignoring the panting bowler who stood within five yards of him. He said loftily and much too loudly to his partner, ‘Better leave this fellow to me, I think, Malcolm!’
I walked back thoughtfully to my distant mark. For almost the first time since I had entered the army four months earlier, I felt belligerent rather than merely frustrated. I concentrated on the right rhythm as I ran in. My next ball was a little too short, but very fast. It hit the wicketkeeper’s gloves with a satisfying thwack as the batsman completed an immaculate but belated back-foot defensive shot. The next one flashed past his nose as he twisted away from it.
I gave him a grin: we didn’t sledge, in those far-off days. He called to me in cut-glass tones, ‘Play the game, Private! Pitch ’em up and give a fellow a chance, eh? This isn’t a bloody test match, you know.’
As a stout northern lad of artisan stock, I was annoyed by the accent as much as the words. I nodded, but said nothing. The next one was only just short of a length, but it reared quickly and struck my opponent in the ribs as he tried to avoid it. Military pride demanded that he should remain upright, but he did not quite manage that. He sank slowly to his knees and rubbed the injured area, whilst I and my fielders gathered slowly around him. He was deprived of speech, which I considered a welcome amendment. The incident does not reflect well on me, but you should remember that I was expressing the pent-up frustration of four months of military training.
‘Sorry, sir, she slipped!’ I said as I stood over my victim. Since the batsman could muster no wind for speech, I was never able to check whether the officer recognised it as the response of a bowler who had whistled one through W.G. Grace’s beard. Army officers are not skilled in recognising quotations, but this was after all a Harrow man.
My next two balls were wasted outside off stump. But with the last one of the over, I produced the Yorker I had been striving for; it made an appealing mess of his wicket. This was great: we were allowed to attack the officer class and they couldn’t charge us with anything, because we were operating within the confines of a game. Cricket is too esoteric for some. For me on that far-off golden afternoon, it was delightfully straightforward.
It couldn’t last, of course. I was too much out of practice to maintain extreme pace for very long. I tired a little and was relieved and replaced with our spinner. But I finished the innings with a couple of wickets when I was eventually recalled for a second spell. The scorebook told me that I had taken four wickets for twenty-seven. I was petty enough to check the ranks of my victims. A major, two captains, and a full lieutenant; not a bad bag, for a resentful national serviceman.
My pleasure was scarcely diminished when I was caught on the boundary for a duck as we chased victory in the last over of the match – I’d never rated myself as a batsman. The captain of the opposition came and muttered to me about the possibility of my being selected to play for the Combined Services team when I had completed my training, but greater events intervened and I never heard any more of that.
Even our cricket efforts were put into perspective by simultaneous happenings in the north of England. When our match was completed, we found the pavilion buzzing with the news that, at a damp and sparsely filled Old Trafford, Jim Laker had completed the seemingly impossible and never to be repeated haul of nineteen of twenty Australian wickets in the test match.
Four days later, Britain, France and the USA held urgent talks on the Suez crisis. Even we trainee sergeants at Beaconsfield now became aware that the country was lurching towards war. National servicemen might actually be required to fight. The farce in which we were unwilling participants might become something much darker. We were young men, still at the age where death feels impossible. We were not afraid of conflict. What we really feared was our own incompetence.
We had shone boots and belt buckles and nailheads in the floor and been told interminably about the need for unthinking obedience, but we had received neither instruction nor practice in the arts of war. They were strictly reserved for officers. Even though we were at Wilton Park to be trained as sergeants, our nearest approach to battle was overnight guard duty. During the hours of summer darkness, we patrolled the perimeter of our camp, including the
fence that marked the border with the WRAC Camp next door to us.
We were strictly forbidden to peer through the fence for any glimpse of inflammatory female flesh. And because IRA raiders had recently broken into an armoury at an army camp in the Midlands, we carried not rifles but pick-handles on our patrols. The IRA assault had not been publicised, in the interests of security, but the armoury at Beaconsfield and its garrison of schoolies were thought vulnerable to attack. Its weapons were moved to a safer haven and we were allotted pick-handles to defend ourselves, the WRAC, and the realm.
It did not seem the best preparation for possible exchanges with Colonel Nasser and his army of zealous Egyptian patriots.
Guard duty meant ‘two on and four off’: you lay on bunks in the guardhouse and got whatever rest you could for four hours, then patrolled like vigilant tigers for the next two, trying to look formidable with pick-handles at the ready. We did not feel that we were equipped to outgun the ruthless and heavily armed Irish intruders we had been warned to expect, but we had more sense than to voice any such defeatist thoughts.
As our course at Beaconsfield proceeded and we crept towards the holy grail of sergeant/instructor status, there was some relaxation of the attitudes we had met throughout our previous basic training. We were treated a little less like cannon fodder and a little more like people with minds. But this was the army, so minds had to be shaped.
We had lectures from senior officers on British foreign policy and on the rich and glorious history of the British Empire. The process was one of sincere but unashamed indoctrination; the benefits Britain had brought to the world were still many and unquestioned in the British army of the nineteen fifties.
Soldiers exercising any kind of leadership must speak with one mind, we were told, or the troops would become confused, even demoralised. There is truth in this, of course. A successful army relies on cohesion. But our lecturers seemed blissfully unaware that the same sentiments had been zealously trumpeted in Germany and Italy in the late thirties.