by James Philip
Between 1927 and 1934 Julian Christopher was effectively on an extended leave of absence for five of the seven years; in the employ of Sir Harold Stanton. ‘A racing captain’, the darling of high society, a Royal Naval officer in rank alone; not that in this period he was the only footloose officer careless of his career or future prospects; Joan was beautiful, well-connected ‘on the London scene’, a marvellous adornment on the arm of the man the papers were already calling ‘England’s finest yachtsman’.
The couple’s first child, Elspeth was born on 9th October 1931. This author’s father, Peter was born on 18th July 1936. In between Joan had suffered at least two miscarriages. On both occasions her husband was away from London, racing yachts or partying with the Prince of Wales’s entourage.
When Christopher was posted to Singapore in the autumn of 1938 – after the abdication crisis the party was well and truly over for the numerous ‘bit players’ on the headline drama’s undercard[7] – Joan and the children had stayed in England. His womanising was no secret; although her drinking, which started around then, was less well known. The couple corresponded occasionally – mainly concerning reports as to their children’s well-being and education – but did not actually set eyes on each other again for nearly four years.
The Second World War rescued Julian Christopher’s career from the doldrums and provided him with a stage fit for his previously unexplored talents. Racing yachts had been fun; bedding accommodating women as he pleased had been good sport but the war was the making of the man.
He was a minor player at the ‘Battle’ of Mers-el-Kébir, part of Operation Catapult - the key element of the plan to put the French Fleet out of the war after the Fall of France - onboard the battleship HMS Resolution with Force H under the command of Admiral Sir James Somerville. He had commanded one of Somerville’s cruisers, the Polyphemus, at the Battle of Cape Spartivento, an inconclusive affair that enraged Winston Churchill from afar, and subsequently he had accompanied Somerville’s flagship HMS Renown to bombard Genoa in February 1941, a daringly aggressive mission which went no small way to restoring the reputation of the Mediterranean Fleet in the Prime Minister’s eyes.
Three months later he had brought his ship back to Alexandria with her sides riddled with shrapnel; the result of a dozen near misses as Stukas – Junkers Ju 87 dive bombers – had queued to swoop on her once she had shot her magazines ‘dry’ during the bloody evacuation of British and Empire troops from Crete.
Nick Davey[8] had re-joined his old ‘partner in crime’ on the Arethusa class light cruiser HMS Polyphemus in the early autumn of 1940. The ship had been re-commissioning in Belfast after being in dockyard hands for over eight months after being torpedoed in the first winter of the war.
The Polyphemus’s subsequent battle honours were to include Operation Pedestal – known to the Maltese as the ‘Santa Marija’ convoy – that lifted the siege of that brave island in August 1942, Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily and the bloody Salerno landings in 1943. Thereafter, the two men had gone U-boat hunting in the North Atlantic, with Christopher in command of an escort group with Davey as his faithful number two.
Julian Christopher and his wife had made a half-hearted effort to patch up their marriage after the war. Joan had come with him for the final part of his tour of duty when he was appointed Flag Officer 1st Cruiser Squadron at Malta; in retrospect a thing she regretted because it had meant being separated from her son and daughter in England for the best part of a year.
Afterwards, the marriage had effectively been over.
Her husband had got on with his career, gone back to his philandering – a thing he had never really forsaken, even in the time he was at Malta with Joan – and she had retreated into a lonely, alcohol-induced decline. She had contracted a cancer in 1956 and despite several operations she had died two years later.
The death of their mother completed the estrangement of both of Julian Christopher’s children. Elspeth had married and moved to Australia; and Peter had obediently been inducted into Dartmouth and graduated without particular distinction in 1956, immediately opting to go back to University against his father’s wishes before resuming his ‘real service’.
Until they met him again after the October War, neither Elspeth or Peter had actually spoken to their father – other than in the latter’s case formerly ‘on parade’ – since their mother’s funeral in 1958.
Strangely, both my aunt and my father recollect that when they encountered their father again after a break of – nearly five years in my aunt’s case and the best part of two for my father – he was paradoxically ‘as he was before’ and yet ‘somehow changed’.
Both Hugh Staveley-Pope and Nick Davey had remarked to friends in the late fifties and early sixties – pre-cataclysm – that their old friend was ‘a changed man’ after ‘Joan’s death’. It was as if the real world had finally caught up with him.
‘He used to have a rare temper on him,’ Davey said to one man, ‘but that was then, now he’s...older.’
On the occasion of Hugh Staveley-Pope’s re-marriage - his wife of twenty-three years having been tragically killed in a car accident in London in 1956 – to a woman nineteen years his junior Christopher had observed: ‘surely this thing should be the other way round? Shouldn’t I be the one chasing the flighty young things?’
Notwithstanding, in the late fifties Christopher had put his nose to the grindstone and started to play the ‘Navy game’ that any man who entertained ambitions of reaching the commanding heights of his profession had to play. Ironically, he very nearly achieved his ambition to be First Sea Lord, only to be pipped at the post by a younger, even more dazzling, and profoundly ‘steadier’ candidate.
It was no oversight that while his predecessor in Singapore, David Luce had been promoted full Admiral and appointed C-in-C of all British Forces in the Far East, that the powers that be in Whitehall had not trusted Julian Christopher to wield that much power; instead it had been adjudged that it was the RAF’s ‘turn’ to hold the post, and thus at the time of the October War the man in charge in the ‘Far East’ was, strictly speaking, Air Marshal Sir Hector Douglas McGregor, a New Zealand-born Battle of Britain veteran[9].
Not that Julian Christopher begrudged his younger friend David Luce his success; quite the contrary in fact. Many suspected that it was something of a relief for him to be able to finally step aside; to be free to contemplate an idle retirement ‘messing about’ in his twenty-five foot racing yacht – tied up for most of the post-1945 years in a tributary of the River Itchen in Hampshire – ‘Aysha’ in his declining years.[10]
Rumour had it that the then First Sea Lord, Sir Caspar John, with whom Julian Christopher had ‘sparred’ more than once during the fifties, had wanted Desmond Dreyer – seen as a safer pair of hands – to replace David Luce in Singapore. However, in the end it was decided that Dreyer, HMS Ajax’s Gunnery Officer at the Battle of the River Plate, a man Christopher’s junior by ten years, would have to await ‘his turn’.
The Royal Navy is an intensely ‘political’ service and the ‘gifts’ of high profile overseas commands were fraught with risks of provoking the next schism within the Admiralty. In a period when the Government was talking ‘very loudly’ about ‘cutting back the Navy’ there was an unspoken compact at the top of the service that ‘we all have to stick together on this one’.
Internecine strife was therefore, to be avoided at all costs if the Admirals were to present a ‘united front’ against Harold Macmillan’s ‘accountants’.
Julian Christopher’s appointment to command the British Far Eastern Fleet was his consolation prize for losing out on the ‘top job’ in the Royal Navy; and his promotion to full Admiral and a knighthood were scheduled to be confirmed in the Navy Gazette and the New Year’s Honours List respectively on 1st January 1963.[11]
In the First Sea Lord’s mind the appointment neatly squared a potentially troublesome circle. It at once placated the ‘Christopher suppor
ters’; enabled him to keep Desmond Dreyer, the soundest of officers by his side in London, and did not in any way impede – in due course - the eventual, smooth succession of David Luce into his ‘hot seat’.
The man everybody knew was slated to replace Sir Casper John as First Sea Lord in the late summer of 1963, David Luce – the former Naval Aide-de-Camp to Her Majesty the Queen, a man behind whom the whole Navy could happily coalesce - had dined with Christopher on his last night in London before flying out to Singapore.
‘Keep an eye on the boy,’ Christopher had reminded his old friend, only half in jest. Informally, his son’s commanding officers had invariably ‘done the great man the courtesy’ – as one later recalled to this author – of keeping his father ‘up to date with developments’ vis-a-vis Peter Christopher’s professional progress.
Fascinatingly, nobody thought this amiss or for a moment, attempted to ‘gild the lily’, or look to ‘curry favour’ with the famous admiral. People forget that notwithstanding Julian Christopher was never ‘the Fighting Admiral’ until after the October War, by the time he was sent out to Singapore he was a legend within the Navy. He had carried the mystique of his association with Royalty and his America’s Cup heroics into the Second War and had an uncanny knack for being where the fighting was the hottest for most of the time. More than once he had very nearly had ships shot from beneath his feet but never once turned away from danger and to the men who had served under him he was, to use a much misused expression, every inch ‘a living legend’. His film star good looks and his easy grace on the public stage, his long friendship with Lord Louis Mountbatten, even the slew of glamorous women who tended to hang off his arm wherever he went, all became grist to the mill. If the post-1945 Royal Navy had had superstars he and Mountbatten were ‘it’.
Nevertheless, it was well understood by all parties that any man who tried to garner his good graces by favouring, or by exaggerating the prowess of his son, would be in trouble. Julian Christopher only wanted for the son what he wanted and expected, from any other man subordinate to him in the Queen’s Navy; to be treated and judged fairly on his merits.
It was one of those odd quirks of history that in 1962 the one man in the Royal Navy with the personal brio, reputation and professional ‘stature’ best equipped to ‘take over’ in the Far East in the aftermath of the World crisis was actually in Singapore at the time of the Cuban Missiles War.
In typical, flamboyant style he had arranged matters so that he would formally take command in a ceremony on the deck of the Ark Royal at Hong Kong where much of the Far Eastern Fleet had gathered to take part in exercises with the US Seventh Fleet in early October 1962.
At the time China was flexing its military muscles in the Himalayas and the British and American governments hoped that a massive demonstration of naval strength in the Taiwan Strait would have a suitably sobering effect in the event, thought unlikely at the time, that Mao Tse-Tung had similar territorial ambitions regarding the ‘Nationalist’ island fiefdom of his vanquished enemy Chiang Kai-shek.
In the weeks and months before he travelled to the East to take up his last command Julian Christopher had sought out the best minds in England, Navy men and academics, historians and diplomats and done everything possible to be thoroughly conversant, not just with the pre-1940 East that he had known before the war, or the East as it was after victory over Japan, or even as it was during the Korean conflict in the fifties, but with how it was now.
Winds of change – every bit as violently volatile as those in Africa – were blowing through the Far East. Accordingly, he had corresponded with ambassadors, brushed up on his limited pre-Second World War ‘polite’ Mandarin and Cantonese conversational lexicons, and refreshed and practiced the ‘bits and pieces’ of the Malay dialects he had picked up in Singapore a quarter of century ago so assiduously that there were those in the Admiralty who discreetly spoke of ‘China Christopher’, alluding to another legendary soldier sent abroad in troubling times, ‘China’ Gordon of Khartoum fame.
Julian Christopher did not care a jot what anybody thought about him. In public at least, he and personal doubt were strangers. He was about to take command in a theatre in which Indonesia and the new Malay Republic – which Britain, Australia and New Zealand were bound by treaty to defend – might conceivably be at war sometime in 1963 or 1964, in which nobody knew how the simmering ‘Vietnam situation’ would develop, in which the two Koreas were still officially ‘at war’, in a region in which it was patently obvious that the Red menace of communist China was, like a great bear, slowly rousing from its long slumber and likely to be extremely hungry when it fully awakened!
Thus, in the immaculately choreographed very public ceremonial in Kowloon Bay on the deck of HMS Ark Royal – the largest operational carrier in the Royal Navy - he was speaking to the Asiatic soul as well as re-stating the reality of British power.
On that afternoon his flagship’s Sea Vixen interceptors and four RAF Canberra bombers flew past, their engines thundering across the great port while a long line of destroyers and frigates fired salutes.
As the sound of those guns reverberated around the hills of the New Territories beyond the city and the grey smoke from their discharge drifted to the east, few of those present could have imagined the dreadful twists and turns of fate that awaited them in an unthinkable, unknowable future.
Chapter 3 | Eight East
Sunday 28th October 1962
HMNB Sembawang, Singapore
The radio traffic between London and Singapore, the base of the British Far East Fleet, in the days immediately preceding and on the night-day[12] of the October War gives the lie to any suspicion that the British Government was complacent about the Cuban Missiles Crisis. Far from being inactive observers of events, the evidence ‘in the signals’[13] proves that all overseas forces were on a state of high alert. While at home over forty of the one hundred and fifty ‘operational’ Avro Vulcans, Handley Page Victors and Vickers Valiants of the V-Bomber Force were at QRA – Quick reaction Alert – status, fully bombed up and ready to scramble at as little as two to four minutes notice, and major units of the Home Fleet were hurriedly putting to sea; in the Far East Julian Christopher was specifically warned to prepare for the worst, albeit with the caveat that in his ‘preparations’ he was to ‘avoid further inflaming local regional tensions in his deployments’.
This of course, was easier said than done. While in the United Kingdom and the United States all eyes were on the Soviet Union; in the Far East and on other ‘foreign service stations’ the potential for ‘inflaming regional tensions’ was virtually unlimited.
For example, if there was war would Communist China seize the opportunity to attempt to gobble up the low hanging fruit of Hong Kong? Would the Korean peninsula again be set on fire? And what of the renewed insurgency that was threatening the oilfields of Borneo?
Moreover, between the great Imperial bastion of Singapore and Australasia the Indonesian Archipelago lay like an endless threatening reef, and in the event of a general war Julian Christopher’s mighty fleet was an awfully long way from home. Lest it should be forgotten, on shore and in the air the British presence in the East was, after years of retrenchment, reorganisation, cost-cutting and strategic u-turns, weaker than it had been at any time since 1945. A few modern bombers apart the RAF was equipped with aircraft considered obsolete in Europe, and the Army’s role had become one of garrisoning the last posts of Empire, and ‘fire-fighting’ in Borneo.
Underlying all other considerations in that age of de-colonisation – the Elephant in the room – was the question: what exactly was a large Royal Navy Fleet, second in size only to the Home Fleet and bigger than all bar a tiny handful of other World navies, doing in the Far East at all in October 1962?
The very presence of the British Far East Fleet was a gratuitous provocation to half the people in the region and an embarrassment to others. Not even the Malayan Government was actually ‘at ease’ with its ally�
��s armada patrolling its seas.
This was a problem because in those days although there was still an element of ‘flying the flag’ involved, and yes, remnants of crumbling national pride to be sustained; the primary strategic fig-leaf and the only operational justification for stationing over fifty warships, Royal Fleet Auxiliaries and coastal patrol boats in the Far East was the Anglo-Malayan Defence Agreement (AMDA) of October 1957[14], ostensibly designed to safeguard the territorial security and political stability of newly independent Malaya. AMDA was a bilateral defence treaty between the United Kingdom and the Federation of Malaya underwritten by Australia and New Zealand, motivated by the fear of an armed confrontation between Malaya and the emerging Indonesian nation.
Malayan independence had been granted at the tail end of a vicious and costly post-1945 colonial war fought between Commonwealth forces and the Communist Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA). Although the ‘Malayan Emergency’ had formerly come to an end in 1960 with the surrender of the rebels; nobody believed the peace with the MNLA was anything more than a temporary ‘ceasefire’, and in the early sixties a new guerrilla war – sponsored by Indonesia - was brewing in Borneo and in the still British crown colonies of Sarawak and Brunei. To complicate the picture Indonesian hostility to the Dutch in New Guinea had led to bloodshed and a near civil war the previous summer.