British Voices

by William Sheehan

  To drink beer or stout at mess was unheard of, though one could of course drink water, as was smoking a pipe, even in the ante-room. I think most of us drank whiskey and soda, and a few brandy and soda. In those days this was not expensive. Spirits were always served to each officer, already mixed with soda, in a small glass mug, which was allowed on the table. No wine bottle, however, was ever allowed to rest on the table, and was put on the floor at the person’s foot.

  Needless to say, no ladies’ name was ever mentioned in mess or ante-room, and military ‘shop’, though allowed in the ante-room, was not encouraged at the mess table. I am, now, sometimes asked by young officers, what we talked about night after night in Mess. It is difficult to remember, but my recollection is that we covered a wide field. I suppose, in those days, a third of us were university men, and certainly we, of the self called ‘Captain’s Union’, who often sat together, had a wide range of interests.

  Phil Christison was something of a naturalist, and was later to write a book on Indian birds. Angus Collier had always a hankering for ancient history.

  Family history was already becoming a leisure hobby of mine. Again, thanks to the war, we had all travelled widely, and between us had covered the Western Front, Gallipoli, Salonika, East Africa and the Arctic. Again, most of us had common interests, as regards what ‘Punch’ used to term as ‘huntin’, shootin’, and fishin’’.

  But, of course, the real bond linking us all was that we were intensely proud of our regiment, and its great record, and almost equally proud of the whole Highland Brigade.

  To encourage the standard of piping in the regiment, we usually had the day’s Orderly piper playing round the Mess table every night, except, of course, Sundays, when these was no Mess dinner, and a cold supper was served. Once a young Hebridean piper was playing in the Mess for the first time. When the time came for him to stand and play his strathspay and reel, he walked to the nearest corner of the room, firmly turned his back on us all at table, and played his tunes facing the wall. On being asked afterwards why he had done this, he replied: ‘I was chust that nervous, I couldn’t face all the chentlemen.’

  In the late spring HM King George V, our Colonel in Chief of the Camerons, visited Aldershot, and stayed in the Royal Pavilion, Aldershot then being a military station where no less than two Divisions had their Headquarters and the bulk of their 24 Infantry Battalions were actually stationed. He held a Review on Laffans Plain, and I had the honour of marching past my company, as the massed pipes played the Pibroch O’Dhomnuill Dubh .

  In May 1920, we received sudden orders to move to County Cork in Southern Ireland; then the storm centre of what was known in Ireland as ‘the troubles’. We travelled by sea from Southampton in the HMT Czaritea , the same ship that had taken me a year before to Archangel, and the stewards in the saloon assured me we ate exactly the same menus as in 1919. At that time, soon after the Great War and with some rationing still in force, the food seemed to us, of the 8th MG Battalion, as excellent; now, a year later and used to an excellent peacetime officer’s mess in Aldershot, we rated the menus as rather indifferent. Life is always so much a mere matter of comparisons.

  On arrival in Ireland our Battalion headquarters moved into a camp called Belmont Hutments, at Queenstown, now called Cobh, and we found outlying detachments in such places as Ballincollig, Middleton, Killeagh and Youghal. All around us those who were now called our enemies, the Sinn Féiners, all wore plain clothes, had their arms hidden, and spoke good English.

  It was very difficult for some weeks to teach the Jocks that we were now in what was largely a hostile country, and that maybe 75 per cent of all local inhabitants, both men and women, viewed us with enmity, active or passive; though these sentiments were largely hidden.

  We had to learn our job the hard way. Very soon after our arrival an unsuspecting road patrol, with their rifles stupidly clipped on to the side of their bicycles, were surrounded in a village street by a number of young men supposedly playing a game of hurley on the village green, a game akin to our own Highland Shinty. They apparently made friendly remarks and gestures, and gradually closed in on the cyclists. A few seconds later they had knocked the Jocks off their bicycles with their hurley sticks, and held up the men with revolvers. They removed the rifles’ ammunition and bicycles of the soldiers, and they released them to return, under the NCO in charge, to our camp, very ashamed.

  During the next few weeks, while moving about the Irish roads between our various detachments, small parties of our Battalion were ambushed and some men were killed and wounded, and one officer, a young subaltern, Ian Begg, by seizing the wheel from a wounded driver beside him, and though badly wounded himself, managed to drive his vehicle right through an ambush at high speed, for this he was later given an MBE.

  Then occurred an even worse rebuff to our pride. Another young officer, with a small working party, was ordered to demolish an army hut in Queenstown. He very unwisely ordered his men to pile their arms, and then put them to work with picks and shovels some 30 yards or so away from their firearms.The job took him several days and, worst of all, he followed exactly the same practise each day.

  On the third or fourth day, while the party were at their work, a volley of shots suddenly rang out. The sentry over the arms fell a casualty, several Sinn Féiners then jumped out of the windows of the ground floor of some houses close by, and covered the surprised workers with rifles, shot guns and revolvers, and meanwhile a motor van drove up close to the piked arms, and a Sinn Féiner or two bundled them up into the motor and drove off.

  The whole Battalion felt very angry and ashamed that day. We, a famous regiment, had lost ten or twelve rifles to the rebels with but one casualty, the sentry; and without our having fired a shot. However, we were now learning our lesson, that we must be ever vigilant of all local Irish, and all were our enemy unless we knew them to be otherwise.

  Thereafter we lost no more arms, and soon we began in our turn to capture hidden arms and to inflict casualities on our hidden plain clothes enemy. It was, however, most frustrating and unpleasant work for us all, and certainly we soldiers felt that we were not being given a free enough hand by Parliament to deal with the situation with which we were faced.

  Soon after the fiasco in Queenstown when our working party lost all their rifles, the soldiers discovered that two girls, daughters of a loyalist, who had attended a troop’s dance had had all their hair shaved off by local Sinn Féiners for so doing, as a reprisal for their behaviour. This was reported to the civil authorities, but no action was taken, and indeed practically the whole civil and police authority had already broken down.

  In Youghal, a middle-aged married policeman of the Royal Irish Constabulary was shot in the back as he came out of Catholic Mass in the town. I happened to be near at the time, and though as the shot rang out the streets were full of people, they all hurriedly left. The man was just left to die on the street. I and one or two with me were left to carry him, a dying man, into a local chemist’s shop.

  Our NCOs and men, and indeed some of our young officers, felt that we should be allowed to take much sterner action with the rebels. Many cases had arisen of obvious Sinn Féiners having been arrested and tried, but if they had managed to hide or dispose of their arms and automatics, they were as often as not acquitted and released. On the other hand if the troops fired on and wounded a civilian, or killed him, whatever were the circumstances, a dozen civilian witnesses were always ready to come forward and state that the man concerned was invariably one of the most loyal inhabitants in all County Cork, and as often as not the unfortunate officer or NCO in charge of the army party concerned would then receive an official reprimand, while the local Irish press fulminated over the action of the brutal and licentious Cameron Highlanders.

  Matters came more and more to a head, and the troops became more and more restive, and chafed at the restraints they were invariably subjected to. Finally, one night, a report came to the CO, while we officers were
all dining in Mess, that the Camerons were loose in the town of Queenstown breaking the windows of all the shops. By this time I was Assistant Adjutant and, as such, I was sent out in a great hurry to investigate.

  It was true enough, I soon ran into a party of some 50 NCOs and men, under the RSM himself. They were armed only with tools’ wooden handles, and they were systematically and deliberately breaking every shop window as they passed by.They were all quite sober, but the Jocks had felt that they were not being allowed to deal properly with their enemies, and they sensed, and rightly, that many of the inhabitants of Queenstown were reporting their every movement to the local Sinn Féin bands, and they had therefore decided they would retaliate. I sternly ordered them to return to camp at once, and back they came with me now at their head, but still, I fear, rather pleased with themselves and they rather reminded me of a pack of naughty dogs caught out in forbidden rabbit hunting.

  Well, there was, of course, the ‘father and mother’ of a row over the incident. The Divisional General, Sir Peter Strickland, ‘Old Hungry Face’ as the soldiers called him, I believe, had the whole Battalion paraded, and what the Army calls ‘told us off to no uncertain tune’. In his eyes we were indisciplined and insubordinate, and I believe our CO, Sorel Cameron, was nearly removed from commanding us.

  However, the Jocks had let off steam, and in point of fact their indisciplined action really did a lot of good, for the military authorities were forced to realise that the troops were not prepared to stand, any more, a policy of never being supported, whatever politicians in London might be advocating.

  After that unfortunate incident we officers took care whenever what was called an ‘Incident’, as skirmishes were then called, or when policemen were murdered, which involved Cameron Highlanders, we at once worked the troops off their legs for the next 48 hours, searching and patrolling for the culprits for miles into the countryside, until all our soldiers wanted to do was a chance to sleep; and by this time tempers had cooled.

  Of all duties we were called upon to do, I think, the searching of houses was the most distasteful and unpleasant. To start with most of them were literally swarming with fleas, which we then invariably picked up, and as soon as I got back to camp I used to bathe and change my clothes. In one house, which I was searching I myself found in the floor, under a loose floor board, a cavity in which a revolver was probably hidden.The rebel and his pistol was not at home, but in the hiding place was a real hymn of hate poem. I have still a copy of it and it ran for many verses. The first verse began:

  God curse the British Empire.

  May he wither the flag that flies

  May he shatter the strength that still remains

  Of that father of sin and lies

  May he strengthen the hands of its enemies

  May he hasten its dying gasp

  May Satan rise from the depths of Hell

  That ulcer of earth to grasp.

  And so on in the same strain for six more verses.

  About this time, we, as a Battalion, started in Queenstown an unjust collective measure, which from our point of view, however, soon bore good results. One day, without any warning, we rounding up and brought compulsorily into Camp at Belmont, which was surrounded with barbed wire, all the males whom we found anywhere in the streets of the town. They amounted to several hundred men. We made no exceptions whatever, and so those collected, much to their fury, were well known loyalists as well as suspected Sinn Féiners and included several retired officers of the British Army.

  Once safely shepherded inside our camp and our sentries, we paraded them all together, and took the names and addresses of every man, using local Royal Irish Constabulary policemen, as necessary, to help identification when we thought any individual might be giving a false name. We then and there detailed them haphazardly, in small groups of five and six, as being ‘on duty’ for every night of the next month or two.

  We explained to them through a megaphone, as the present loudspeakers had not been invented then or at any rate were not yet in use, as to what being on duty entailed. It meant, we explained, that if a hostile incident occurred within the town boundaries of Queenstown, whereby any member of the Camerons, or the police, were killed or wounded, we would at once arrest and hold and incarcerate in a cage of wire in our camp, all those half dozen civilians that we had detailed for duty for that 24 hours.

  Now this meant that those concerned had either to leave their homes and ‘go on the run’, as it was then called, in a hurry, or else wait in their homes till we collected them and then incarcerated them. By this arrangement, we calculated, that it was now probable that in the five or six men concerned, in any 24 hours, at least one of them would probably have some influence with the local town Sinn Féin leaders, and he would do his best to dissuade his friends from carrying out an incident against us during the period we had arbitrarily detailed his for duty and possible arrest. I may say this plan worked, so far as the town of Queenstown was concerned, surprisingly well.

  Nevertheless, as the months passed by, more and more of the unfortunate policemen of the Royal Irish Constabulary were killed in action, or more often shot down and murdered.The survivors naturally became very nervous, and the morale of the force quite disappeared. Soon they would no longer identify suspicious rebels we produced before them, as they knew that to do so meant revenge, and generally death later for them, as, living as they were in little isolated police stations in the various towns and villages, there was no way in which we could arrange to protect them adequately.

  We therefore used to arrange to parade our prisoners in the courtyard of our guard room, and we secreted a local RIC constable where he could see the prisoners through a small peep hole, but the prisoners did not know they were being so watched.

  It was by this method that we were able to get identified the local ‘Robin Hood’, a man named Henry O’Mahony who had, on capture, given us a false name. He was a colourful character, and the local Sinn Féin leader in our area. We had him imprisoned in a fort on Spike Island, a small island in the Cork Harbour, but he soon escaped by means of a disused passage into the fort’s moat. I think we had a sneaking admiration for him, for though very ruthless, there rebels were certainly brave, and, according to their beliefs, patriotic men.

  One way in which we tried to obtain information of rebel activities was by using our Gaelic speakers. Some of the rebels knew Irish Gaelic, and those that did used it for reasons of secrecy. We accordingly sent our west coast Highlanders into public houses to listen, but the Irish Gaelic was so different to the Highland Gaelic that I do not think anything was achieved.

  We knew that every telephone conversation was invariably tapped, as most of the post office workers were Sinn Féin sympathisers, but over this we were sometimes able to turn the situation to our advantage, as we deliberately reported in conversations by telephone, small troop movements well in advance, which we hoped thereby would be ambushed on route, and we, in our turn laid ambushed for the expected ambushers.

  As the months went by matters seemed to get worse and worse in Ireland, and there was little relaxation for either officers or men. We officers were able to play golf on the local links, but it was an order that we had to play in two foursomes one behind the other, and all eight of us armed with revolvers in our pockets. At first some officers used to go out hunting with the local foxhounds, but soon this was at an end.

  During the Troubles lost ammunition usually meant ammunition stolen by the rebels, and accordingly to lose ammunition was a serious offence. Before I went into the orderly room, one of the Jocks in my company lost five rounds of rifle ammunition, and in consequence our Brigadier, Higginson, not only had him punished, but also ordered my leave, as the OC Company, to be stopped! Later all leave for officers, was stopped for a time; I think it was after a lot of officers had been murdered one night in Dublin. This hit me hard as my father arranged to go with me to Shetland to fish, and fishing and accommodation was all booked.

/>   As Assistant Adjutant, one of my duties was to help the Adjutant, Donald Cameron, to keep the Secret Files and documents. One of these files was called ‘Prominent Sinn Féiners’, and in it were photos and dossiers and descriptions of such men as de Valera, Michael Collins and the like; men whom at the time we were trying to capture. This was regarded as a very secret file, and, as such, when not in use had to be kept in the orderly room safe.

  One day in September 1920, Donald went off to the mess for luncheon before me, and took with him the safe key, the file was not locked up, as I had been studying it, and as I did not like to leave it in the orderly room untended I decided to take it with me to the mess.

  In the middle of lunch, a signal message was suddenly delivered to the CO, or more likely the Adjutant on his behalf, with the welcome news that leave had been reopened. I had already lost several days of my fishing, and I did not waste time. I changed into plain clothes and caught the night train to Dublin that afternoon.

  I frankly found it a frightening journey. I travelled with my .45 Colt automatic in one pocket, and another .32 automatic in the other. Not long before some British officers had been pulled out of a train, in cold blood and shot. Every time the train stopped I felt nervous and alone. Every time a ticket collector came to the compartment, while I showed him my ticket with one hand, I kept the other in my pocket on the butt of one or other pistol. Nothing happened at all, and soon I was safely on the boat travelling from Dublin to Holyhead, but I decided I was not cut out for lone intelligence work, I was too frightened.

  From Holyhead, I travelled by train north to Perth and then to Aberdeen. Here I caught the Lerwick steamer, and there I changed into a very small steamer called the Earl of Zetland which went to the Northern Isles. It deposited me at Balta Sound on the Isle of Unst, the most northerly island of all, in the early hours of one morning. I had been travelling for about three days and nights.