Gerald Haigh's Blog

In memory of Norman Shilson.

2010-10-29T03:03:00.000-07:00

When I arrived in Singapore, at GHQ Far East Land Forces, early in 1956 I was taken to Tyersall Camp and directed to report to the Regimental Office, facing on to the main barrack square. There were perhaps half a dozen people in there, ruled over by the Chief Clerk, who was a sergeant. He had it in mind to keep me as one of his team, but he lost out to an officer, Captain Collins, who was OC (Officer Commanding) Operating Squadron – the business end of GHQ Signal Regiment. Op Squadron worked the Signal Centre across at Tanglin Garrison, a mile or so away from Regimental HQ at Tyersall. The OC heard that a Clerk had arrived and he came across in his Ford Consul to capture me and take me back.
The Signal Centre was a busy place, handling Army communications across the whole of the Far East. There were Wireless Operators, Telephone Operators, Teleprinter Operators, technicians of various sorts, and, of course the mysterious Cypher Operators, specially trained to use code machines. They were sworn to secrecy, and all were automatically promoted to be full two-stripe corporals, with a good chance of making sergeant. This was presumably because it made them less likely to be irresponsible and talk about their work in pubs, in front of suspicious people with Russian accents and snow on their boots.
I worked in a little office – the Squadron Office. When Captain Collins took me in, he handed me over to Corporal Ron Toft, who ran the office. Ron and I shared the office with the SSM – the Squadron Sergeant-Major. (What would be a “Company” in the most of the Army is a “Squadron” in the Signals.) Captain Collins was in an inner sanctum on his own.
In just the twenty or so months I was there I saw various corporals, SSMs and Officers come and go. Some were terrific people, others were miserable bastards. My all time favourite, though, was Squadron Sergeant-Major Norman S. Shilson. A gem of a man who had joined up as a boy soldier at fourteen, rising to Warrant Officer Class 2, Norman Shilson was funny, kind, firm and wise in a way that went way beyond the stereotype of the senior non-commissioned officer. I never heard him shout, for example, and he had an engaging way of standing up from his desk, picking up his silver topped walking stick and smoothing his moustache with the back of his hand. As he straightend up he was visibly putting on the persona of the traditional Sergeant-Major before he walked out to catch some unfortunate Signalman going by with un-gleaming boots.
(“Sergeant-Major” is, in military terms, not a rank but an appointment. Norman Shilson’s rank was WO2 --Warrant Officer Class 2 -- next to the top for those who weren’t commissioned officers. His appointment was to be Squadron Sergeant Major (SSM) of Operating Squadron, responsible for discipline and general good order.)
Sergeant-Major Shilson was a keen letter writer, and had pen friends all over the world, people of all walks of life. Every day there was mail for him, and he was always delighted.
“Mail for the Sarn’t-Major? Good-oh!”
He had a collection of quaint sayings, some with words and phrases borrowed from India and the Middle
East. Most are now forgotten, but I do remember, though, what he always said at the end of the day when it was time for us all to leave and lock up.
“Come on then,” he would say, “Pick up your monkeys and parrots, and fall in facing the boats.”
It’s a magnificent phrase and I use it often, in his memory, and to the bemusement of anyone who hears it. It’s redolent with the experience of troopships, India, soldiers returning home with smuggled pets, and the long years of Empire.
(Richard Holmes, in “Sahib”, his wonderful account of the British soldier in India, tells us that monkeys and parrots were popular pets, and that “Men spent long hot days trying to teach birds ‘a soldier’s vocabulary’…”)
Rest in Peace Norman Shilson, for we really won’t see people like you again.

Bugs 2. Flaming vengeance.

2010-06-11T04:24:00.000-07:00

Bugs 2
The big insect problem for us in Singapore though, wasn’t ants, or beetles, or even the cockroaches, which sometimes hid in our clothes. We didn’t even really have mosquitoes to any significant degree – the Army had carried out a highly effective anti-malaria programme draining stagnant water and liberally using DDT (later to be banned worldwide for its effects on bird life) So although we had mosquito nets, they weren’t really necessary and few used them.
No, the big problem was man’s eternal companion the common bed bug. These terrible minibeasts were in their element – a warm climate, sweaty beds and lots and lots of human flesh. You knew you’d got them when you felt one crawl up your back in the middle of the night. It would perhaps continue across your pillow, and if you squashed it with your thumb you would produce a little splash of your own blood – which made you indignant at the idea of being invaded. We were plagued by them. You’d go for ages without noticing them and then, suddenly, one morning you’d wake up covered in little specks of blood where the little devils had been feasting on you in the night.
The Army knew there was a problem. In fact they tried to solve it by withdrawing our coir-stuffed mattresses, giving us posh Dunlopillo ones instead, presumably believing that the bugs wouldn’t nest in them.
They were missing the point, though. Bugs don’t necessarily need mattresses to live in. They will nest anywhere within reach of humans – in hollow walls, under peeling wallpaper. But when we really noticed them was when they set up home in the angles of our metal bed frames which they did from time to time. They could appear quite suddenly. You’d see a chap wake up in the night and move his mattress on to the table in the middle of the barrack room, having been driven off his bed by the arrival of the little red invaders.
The quartermaster gave us insect powder – presumably the then ubiquitous DDT. The best solution, though, was to burn your bed – not the mattress, but the iron bit.
This was quite a ritual, usually carried out at the weekend. You went to the NAAFI and bought a can or two of lighter fuel. Then you took your mattress off your bed and carried the iron bed frame on to the grass. Next you poured fuel over the iron frame and set it alight. The bugs perished in a satisfying series of cracks and pops. A riskier but more satisfying alternative was to squirt a stream of lighter fuel from the nozzle on the can and then light it, so you had a sort of mini flame thrower to work with. The only trouble was, if it lit back into the container itself you were likely to share the crackly fate of the bugs.
The other big insects we occasionally encountered were the cicadas – burly members of the grasshopper family, who sawed away producing music all night in the grass. Any film about the tropics has them in the background. The only time I saw one at close quarters though, was one night when I was on guard. I was lying on a bed in the guardroom, when I turned my head and there, about two inches away, looking me straight in the eye, was this giant thing a bit like one of those crayfish they put on the top of the paella in Spanish restaurants.
They’re harmless, of course, but that didn’t stop me from taking off and flying across the guardroom. I swear I actually levitated and travelled twenty feet still in a lying position.
All of this was in my mind when we returned to Singapore in 2000. Of course, I didn’t expect that we’d have to burn our bed on the lawns of the Shangri La Hotel. (“Two cans of lighter fuel, waiter, as soon as you like.”) But I did think we’d be plagued by night time flyers as we walked around.
In fact I don’t recall seeing many insects at all. All I can think is that the whole island has been so comprehensively zapped with chemicals that there’s nothing left. It was Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” brought to life.

2010-05-04T02:24:00.000-07:00

Bugs 1.

Why Bugs 1? Because there’ll be Bugs 2 in due course. Lots of bugs in the tropics remember.

In Singapore, the heat and humidity bred insects like – well, like flies I suppose. Not that flies themselves were the main problem. In that we were lucky, compared with our comrades who served in places like Aden and Egypt, where the flies were organised into brigades, with officers and NCOs, and were practically running the country.
That, though, left several species of flying annoyances. Because we were short on entomological knowledge we called them one of two things. They were either “weirdies” or “flying kitbags.”
Weirdies were, well, weird. And some of them could nip you. Flying kitbags were huge flying beetles – so big they seemed to be defying the laws of physics, managing to keep aloft with what looked like impossible wingloadings. They were peaceful things, content to lumber around under the eaves of the huts where, presumably they had nests. Maybe they weren’t harmless at all. Maybe they had time expired National Servicemen cocooned in their nests, hoping for death like those missing crewmen in “Alien”
There were ants, too. Big, and fierce and red, like Russian soldiers. They made it impossible to sit on the grass outside the barrack rooms at Tyersall. In fact it wasn’t advisable even to stand still for any length of time. You got the feeling they could strip a horse and rider to skeletal form in short order, like the African jobs I once read about in a horror story.
They were clever devils, too. I once saw them do something that I’ve kept it to myself, because I didn’t think anyone would believe me. So do I tell you now? I only hope that among the half dozen or so people who get to read this there’ll be someone with enough ant-based knowledge to confirm that I really could have seen it.
I was in the shower. The dividing walls between the shower stalls were of brick faced with plaster, and they were about six feet high, finishing well short of the ceiling. One afternoon, I was showering blissfully, enjoying the feeling of the day’s sweat rolling away, when I became aware of movement on the wall beside me. Stepping hurriedly out, I got my glasses from the washbasin shelf where I’d left them and went back to look.
There, on the dividing wall of the shower I’d just left was a working party -- I can think of no better description – of ants. They were half way up the wall, and they were carrying the dead carcass of a very large cockroach.
Imagine the excitement in antland! Think of the joy as they made their way home with the biggest lump of food anyone had captured all week.
Still, they were calm enough when I spotted them, and they continued to work their way up the wall.
The problems they were solving were considerable. The cockroach was hundreds of times bigger and heavier than any one of them. The wall was vertical, and so somehow they had not only to drag its weight, but they also had to keep from dropping it.
What interested me, though, was what they were going to do when they got to the top – the wall didn’t go all the way up remember, so they were faced with transferring their burden from the vertical face of the wall to the horizontal surface on top. How would they do it? I stayed and watched.
Eventually, they reached the top of the wall, where they stopped. They were carrying the insect on its back, and lengthways --- fore and aft so to speak, with its head leading. You can now imagine, can’t you, how they were fixed. The problem was how to get enough leverage to tip the dead cockroach over from the vertical to the horizontal. They tried, several times, and each time they failed. They got the cockroach so that it was ready to be tipped, but they just couldn’t get enough force to bear on it to complete the job. They could get it tilted a bit, but the final topple evaded them.
What’s amazing, of course, is that the ants somehow knew what the limits were – that if they tried too hard they risked losing control and letting the cockroach drop.
So what did they do? First they tried something incredible but rather stupid. They took the cockroach back down the wall a few inches and turned it through 180 degrees and then brought it back up to try again. But what they hadn’t realised, being common squaddies and not members of the SAS, was that with the cockroach facing the opposite way, the problem was exactly the same. It was still on its back, still lengthways.
“What to do now, Lads?” That was clearly the issue in ant city now. They were not about to give up, however. What they did was what you’ve already guessed and what they should have done to start with, which was take the cockroach down the wall again and turn it not through 180 degrees but through 90 degrees so that now they were taking it up the wall sideways. As a result when they presented it to the top of the wall again, the task was easier – probably less leverage needed, and it was possible to get more ants engaged in the tipping. So, over went the cockroach, and off went the working party along the top of the wall, with renewed vigour. I swear I heard faint singing, fading away into the distance like the Red Army Choir at the end of one of their marching songs.

A month or two ago I asked a world authority on ants about this. He confirmed I hadn’t been dreaming, but pointed out that I’d made a sexist assumption and that the ants I saw were undoubtedly female.

Reading a dodgy lesson in the Garrison Church.

2010-04-04T01:17:00.000-07:00

My churchgoing was done at the main GHQ Garrison Church -- St George’s, Tanglin.
St George’s was the centre of my world in Singapore. Before I joined the army I’d gone to church at home and done the churchy things that young people did then -- sung in the choir, taught Sunday School and served on the Youth Club Committee. So St George’s was a blessed (in every sense) continuation of civilian life, at least for a few hours distributed through the week.
Except, of course, that it wasn’t really a civilian place. The Army is the Army. The Chaplain, a nice enough chap, was an officer, with an officer’s rank badges, so there was always some distance in the relationship. It would have been unthinkable to call him by his Christian name, for example.
Then, although I sang in the choir seated democratically (at least in the eyes of the Lord) beside a full colonel, you could never get away from the fact that as garrison church of a major headquarters St George’s could be a pretty formal place. On Sunday mornings, generals and brigadiers sat on the front row with their ladies.
I was always aware of this when read the lesson, which I did quite frequently at short notice when someone didn’t turn up. After all, I was in the choir within easy reach, and the Chaplain knew that I was good at sight reading the Bible
Mind you, it was a bit intimidating to stand at the lectern, fixed by the stony gaze of the top brass of both sexes.
“I say!” I always imagined them thinking, “This chap’s an ordinary soldier – a private for God’s sake! With an oiky Yorkshire accent! And bloody acne! And he’s reading the sacred word of God! It’s probably illegal! And we’re having to listen. Must have a quiet word with the Chaplain General!”
It was in those circumstances that I drew, one Sunday, the shortest of all possible straws.
You see there’s this passage in the Bible – in the Second Book of Kings actually -- that goes like this,
“And thou shalt smite the house of Ahab thy master, that I may
avenge the blood of my servants the prophets, and the blood of all
the servants of the Lord, at the hand of Jezebel. “
So far so good. No tricks there. But then it continues –
“For the whole house of Ahab shall perish: and I will cut off from Ahab him that pisseth against the wall, and him that is shut up and left in Israel.”
Now as usual, I didn’t have time to read the lesson through ahead of time. Normally that didn’t worry me, for I was quite adept at reading the immediate words on autopilot while my eye looked ahead to see what was coming.
And so suddenly, there it was, three four lines further on down the page, the dreaded word “pisseth”.
I couldn’t believe it. I slowed down a bit and glanced ahead again. Maybe I was mistaken. Perhaps it actually said “passeth” or “putteth” or something. Surely it was just my coarse mind, seeing what it wanted to see?
But no, as my voice droned automatically on, the word came reeling in, nearer and nearer, and, yes, it really did say, “pisseth”. Not only that, but it became apparent that the whole phrase was “pisseth against the wall!”
What the…! Here I was, faced with the General Officer Commanding, Far East Land Forces, the Brigadier who was Chief Signal Officer, two full colonels, and a motley crew of primped and dewy cheeked lieutenants acting as ADCs and various kinds of acolyte. And that’s not to mention the fragrant be-hatted ladies. And here was I, a bleeding Signalman about to describe an act usually carried out by drunken soldiers on a Saturday night. “Pisseth against the wall,” indeed!
My mind raced. Maybe I could change it? But into what? What were my chances of dredging up a meaningful word, in the space of five seconds, which was all that was left, while half of my brain was busy with the current line? In the end, I just went for it. “If it’s in the Bible it must be OK” I though.
So, I read it boldly, with lots of emphasis. After all, if you glance at the passage you’ll see that it calls for something of a kick on the key phrase. It’s also true – and I suggest you try this, taking care about where you are at the time – that the phrase, “Pisseth against the wall,” is quite difficult to say. It’s a bit of a tongue twister, and invites a slow, deliberate and emphatic approach. So although I didn’t actually bang my fist on the word “pisseth”, I have to say I came pretty close.
I said the sentence, and paused. As its echoes died away, I looked in a challenging way over the lectern at the row of top brass. They stared glassily back. Not one of them moved a muscle, except for the General, whose ears waggled a bit, much as my dad’s used to do when he was making me laugh in my cot. The General’s motivation was different, though.
I guess that underneath the impassiveness they were having one of two reactions. They were thinking, either, like me, “It’s in the Bible after all,” Or they had decided
“The bastard! He’s made that up! He’s done it for a bet. Bloody ignorant squaddy. He’s probably drunk. I’ll get the Chaplain to arrest him at the end of the service.”
As I sat in my pew through the sermon, I did genuinely wonder, fleetingly, whether the Chaplain would arrest me. Army Chaplains after all, are commissioned officers. People like me called them “Sir”, and saluted. They weren’t usually your friendly vicar types in those days.
I don’t think I entertained the thought for long. After a bit of consideration, I decided that everyone would be just too embarrassed to do anything other than just forget about it.
In that, I was wrong. The Chaplain came up to me in the choir vestry afterwards and smilingly pointed out that the Church of England – which thinks of everything – has standard substitutions for the Bible’s naughty bits, which make them suitable to be read aloud in the prim and proper surroundings of an English church. He acknowledged that it was his fault for not telling me this and giving me the alternative word. What it was I cannot now remember – “standeth” perhaps, or something equally bland and utterly meaningless.

Goodbye England

2010-03-28T01:17:00.000-07:00

Posted to GHQ Signal Regiment, Far East Land Forces, I sailed for Singapore on board the Troopship Empire Orwell, one of several troopers in use at the time, most of them with “River” names – the Empire Fowey was another.
I don’t know how many of us there were on board, but it was an awful lot – probably upward of fifteen hundred. Officers travelled first class, in shared cabins, but as ordinary soldiers we were on what were known as the “Troopdecks”. These were big below-deck spaces – holds, really – filled with rows and rows of folding bunks. The arrangement of the bunks was very space efficient. They were in sixes – three high and two side by side. Another six started a few inches from your head, and yet another a few inches beyond your feet. Across a very narrow gangway was another row, and beyond that another and so on, into what looked like infinity. The whole ship just a big floating block of humanity. The most irksome thing about the arrangement – apart from the obvious claustrophobia of it all – was the lack of space to put your stuff. You had a locker, but it could be a long way from your bunk, and so it had to be locked and carefully watched – and you really couldn’t bring very much to your bunk. A book – and my specs -- had to stay in bed with me when I went to sleep because there was nowhere else to put them.
During the day, soldiers were drilled and lectured at, lest they get lazy and mutinous. The fear was, presumably, that we’d take over the ship and sail off over the horizon to an island paradise peopled by dusky beauties. Now there’s a thought.
So most of us were kept busy drilling and doing PE. A few, though – the lucky ones -- were given actual jobs to do, helping the crew, away from Army discipline. That, thank heaven, after a few days, was me.
I was doubly lucky, because not only did I have a cosy job in the bakery, helping the baker who already had a good enough assistant of his own, but I was also on the night shift. So at night, when I was working, I was in the depths of the ship, out of the way of the crowded troopdecks. Then in the daytime I could quite legally sleep on the empty troopdeck -- after, I should add, a huge breakfast in the galley. (Big breakfasts were a strong feature of my early months in the Army.)
The baker was a genial Londoner. He always had a fag in his mouth, with about an inch of ash on it, ready to drop into the bread mix. His assistant was Northern Irish and very kind to his incompetent slaves. We really had hardly anything to do except sit and gossip. They both had stories to tell about the great liners, including the Queen Elizabeth – that’s the first one, not the QE2—which they insisted was a death trap, its hull patched endless times by the simple expedient of pouring concrete into the gap between the double skin.
“Full o’ concrete!” they’d say. “Won’t catch me sailing on her.”
At some point during the night I’d go up on deck with a big cardboard box full of rubbish – potato peelings, tins – and drop it over the stern. I don’t think you’re allowed to do that now. It’s too environmentally unfriendly. The environment hadn’t been discovered then, so everything went over the side. It’s said that during the war the U boats followed trails of garbage to find merchant ships, until the crews got wise to what was happening.
After I’d dropped the box I’d stay there and gaze down at the wake and imagine myself just slipping over the rail and jumping, and swimming steadily until I reached whatever land was nearest – Malta, or North Africa perhaps. No-one would see me go. Everyone would assume me dead, until at some safe time in the far future I would turn up on the doorstep at home, with long hair and a beard. “Hi Mum, I’m home!”
All that went through my head as I gazed back along the ship’s wake. Now, my wife and I like to go on cruises, and I often re-enact that scene. I stand alone, in the night on the stern with the wake stretching away into the dark, and the memories come back.

Hosetops and puttees

2010-03-02T02:50:00.000-08:00

It’s not possible to talk about Singapore without mentioning the climate. It doesn’t take long to describe it – it’s very hot and very humid, with occasional brief torrential downpours that make the pavements steam with vapour when the sun comes out again.
For a Northern European, the steamy heat is scarcely bearable. In colonial days it was recognised that, for career diplomats or businessmen, a long posting to Singapore would shorten your life. The right to a “long leave” (six months for example) back home every few years was built into many contracts – in fact the then Governor, Sir Shenton Thomas, was on long leave in England during much of the crucial period when Singapore’s defences should have been built up during 1940.
A climate like that demands careful thought about what you’re going to wear. Which is why, through many years, Europeans, with long experience of Empire and service in the tropics, have ignored the dress developed over centuries by local people and deliberately and consistently worn entirely inappropriate clothing.
Standard military dress consisted of olive green shorts and tunic, worn with a webbing belt and a beret. (We were issued with a floppy hat in olive green. Troops up country in Malaya often wore them, but we never did)
After dark, to protect from insects, we wore long trousers in the same starched olive green material, and the sleeves of the tunic could be – but rarely were -- rolled down and buttoned at the wrist. Under the tunic (and under civilian shirts) we always wore a vest to soak up the sweat.
In the daytime, in offices and working areas away from the public most of us, apart from officers, went naked above the waist. This was called “Bare buff order.” (Officers didn’t do such things. Even today, whether or not a man goes naked above the waist in public in hot weather is a social class issue.)
Footwear varied. With ordinary working gear we could wear black shoes rather than boots, but only if we bought them ourselves. With shoes went long khaki socks with garter flashes in the Regimental colours. The alternative was to wear issue Army boots with regulation grey socks, which we wore rolled down to the boot tops only when we were in bare buff. That basic gear – bare buff, shorts, boots and rolled down socks – was standard for everyone who did any sort of manual work out of sight of the civilian world outside.
For parade occasions when we were on view to the public – at Church Parade for example -- we wore, with our shorts and tunics, our best Army boots with those diabolical twins, hosetops and puttees.
The best way to explain these is to describe the process of putting them on.
First, there was a pair of standard Army woollen socks – thick grey jobs that came up above the ankle. Then came the hosetops. These were Regimental blue kneelength thick woollen stockings with no feet in them. You pulled them up so they folded over just below the knee, and finished at the top of the boots and socks. They were held up with elastic garters embellished with Regimental garter flashes.
The boots themselves were next – standard issue leather ankle boots with metal studs and hard toecaps, all polished to a mirror finish.
Finally, you wound on your puttees.
Over the years the Army has worn its puttees (the word obviously came from India) in various ways. Our puttees were lengths of coarse khaki material perhaps a yard long and four inches wide, ending in a thinner, ribbon like section that was used for fastening. The Signals method was to wind them round the ankle so as to overlap the top of the boot, not extending up the calf, as was the practice in earlier years, but simply covering the untidy looking junction between the bottom of the hosetops, and the top of the socks and boots. If all of that sounds crazily difficult, what made it really impossible was the existence of lots of little rules about exactly how you wore all this stuff – the depth to which the hosetop turned over below the knee, the tiny but exact degree of overlap of each succeeding wind of the puttee, the precise finishing point of the fully wound puttee, the way you dealt with the end of the ribbon that held the puttee on. Get it right and it looked tight and neat. Wrong, and at the first forward step the top of your boot escaped from under the puttee, and the puttee itself started to unwind. Nothing made you feel more inadequate – and this happened to me more than once – than the realisation that one of your puttees was adrift and trailing behind as you marched.
In thirty two degrees of heat, and humidity that made mildew grow before your eyes, it was madness to make us encase our feet and lower legs in thick wool and leather. And just to make sure we didn’t miss the craziness of it, we were given antiseptic foot powder and treated to lectures on how to prevent our feet from rotting away. The saving grace was that as soon as we got back to camp we took everything off, showered and went around the barrack room area in a pair of flip flops and a towel.

Gentlemen and others

2010-02-24T12:48:00.000-08:00

Gentlemen and others
I arrived at Tyersall as a Signalman – a private soldier, bottom of the heap (or salt of the earth, whatever your point of view). I left proudly bearing the same rank.
There’s a particular, maybe perverse pride for me in having done the whole of my National Service as one of the Her Majesty’s privates (as it were). I didn’t even make “Lance-jack” – the one stripe lance-corporal that was just one step up the ladder and was, actually, well within reach of any competent soldier within two years. That I couldn’t manage even that says a lot about my soldierly qualities.
So I stayed at the foot of the ladder, and compensated by being an inverted snob about it in the years immediately afterwards. In the post-National Service days, when people were still talking about their service, I often mixed with people who had been officers, and I never failed to let them know that I hadn’t lived a life of luxury in the officers’ mess. (Usually, interestingly enough, it was their wives and girl friends who were most impressed by this, because suddenly they had living proof that their husbands hadn’t been nearly as badly done by in the forces as they claimed.)
This preoccupation simply reflects life in the services, where your rank is what really matters. (Arguably, the same applies in civilian life, though not as much as it once did.) In the services, you wear your badges of rank, and when you meet someone else in uniform you know instantly whether they can give you orders or whether it’s the other way round. It all has to do, of course, with quick decision making under pressure, in battle.
To describe all of the ranks would probably be boring. There’s one dividing line, though – more of a gulf really – in the rank structure that you need to understand. It’s there in the each of the Services -- Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines -- and it’s that between commissioned officers and “other ranks.” It’s important in this story, because some National Servicemen were the one thing, and some (most, in fact) were the other. I harboured dreams of being one, but inevitably ended up as the other.
Of course, had I been offered the Queen’s commission when I went in, I’d have accepted it like a shot. I fancied the better uniform, the swagger stick, the nice peaked cap, being called “Sir” and the chance of being saluted in the street. In fact when I first went in I asked about it. After all, with three A Levels I was better qualified on paper than most recruits – than most officers in fact. But the officer interviewing me took one look, shook his head and said, “Maybe after three months you could apply.”
I guess he knew that it wouldn’t take me three months to realise that I was more likely to become Pope than receive the Queen’s commission.
It was all, you see, a matter of class. Up to then I’d had quite a sheltered upbringing as an only child in a mining family. I’d been to grammar school and passed a few exams, and been readily accepted by the middle class families of my friends -- suburban accountants, middle managers. To me, they were genuine posh people, the real thing. They lived in semi-detached houses with bay windows and had fitted carpets.
They were, I thought, the ones at the top. I simply hadn’t met the people further up the ladder, from whom most of the officer corps was drawn. Their children didn’t go to the schools we went to, and they certainly weren’t to be found doing the Veleta in a Church hall to a Dansette record player, which was our idea of a good night out. Those were the people who automatically assumed that they would become officers. Even the way they put it spoke volumes. They didn’t say, “I became an officer,” they said, “I took a commission.” It wasn’t an achievement you see, it was a right.

Monkeys and Parrots 8. Chasing memories.

2010-01-21T04:25:00.000-08:00

I did my National Service in Singapore. Over forty years later, I went back there. On my first morning I got up early, left my wife sleeping off jetlag and walked the short distance from the Shangri La Hotel into the top of Orchard Road. I was restless, and anxious to renew my acquaintance with the City.
For the moment it wasn’t too hot. The early mornings are the best time of the day in Singapore. Before the real heat arrives, the air’s like wine. It’s invariably still, too, and once upon a time there’d have been smoke rising from kampong (village) fires on the outskirts of the City, and spreading out sideways as it met the overnight temperature inversion a few feet up. No kampongs now though. Just acres of high buildings, villas, cultivated tropical gardens, roads, dual carriageways.
I turned from Orchard Road into Tanglin Road. I knew the way perfectly. The buildings were different – more so than I could have imagined. There was no Manchester United shop in Tanglin Road forty-three years before for one thing -- but the road layout underneath it all was as familiar as that of my home town, even though the roundabout I remembered at the start of Tanglin Road had been replaced by traffic lights.
I passed the gates of the Botanical Gardens – the gates were the same -- and a little further on headed off the Tanglin road to the right into Tyersall Avenue. There I started up the camcorder, the archetypal tourist. Now the heat was coming. Soon it would be very hot and very sweaty. In that respect, too, the place hadn’t changed since I’d been there all that time before.
“My old army camp was up this road,” I said, self consciously, into the camcorder mike. “I’m pretty sure it won’t be the same. Maybe it’ll be used for something else, or it might even be derelict.”
Tyersall Avenue’s quite a narrow road, much like an English lane with hedges, except that beyond the hedges instead of cows and fields, there’s dense tropical undergrowth – rain forest really.
In the Fifties, Tyersall Camp was perhaps half a mile up the Avenue, on the left after a series of bends, well out of sight of where I was standing when I first spoke into the microphone.
Tyersall wasn’t the most comfortable of Army camps. The huts were all wooden, and despite the slatted shutters, deep verandahs and ceiling fans, they were unbearable in the heat of the Singapore day. On balance, though, we were happy to be a mile or so away from the main Tanglin Barracks, where most of the GHQ staff were based, dominated by all the palaver and bull of a major HQ.
I kept walking, with the camcorder running. “I feel quite strange,” I said into the mike. “And I just don’t know what to expect.”
In truth I didn’t expect much, but I walked on, craning to look to my left where, in 1956, the camp would have been visible over the hedge. Now, in 2000, there was only jungle. Then, there would have been coming into view rows of huts arranged inside a perimeter road maybe half a mile in circumference that we called “Camp Circle”. In the middle of the Circle, and of the huts was the parade ground and the offices of the Colonel – Lieutenant-Colonel R.B.S. Eraut – and the fearsome Regimental Sergeant Major, WO1 P.E.A. Hall (and no, we daren’t call him ‘Pea’ even privately among ourselves.)
It couldn’t all have gone could it?
Yes, it could.
I walked the full length of the stretch of Tyersall Avenue where the camp entrance used to be – that wide turning into the camp, with a lifting barrier, and the guardroom. But there was absolutely nothing to be seen. The hedge by the road was continuous. The rainforest was intact right up to the hedge. A ditch bordered the road for the whole of its distance, offering no sign that it had ever been other than unbroken.
It was a surreal, science fiction moment. I didn’t expect to see Tyersall Camp intact. But I genuinely thought there’d be something to see – though more sensible members of my family always stumped me when they asked, “What, exactly?”
I suppose I thought there’d be, well, some open space with overgrown concrete bases and so on. Something to wander about in, no matter how derelict.
What there was, though, was what I least expected – which was absolutely nothing. Not so much as the slightest sign or mark on the landscape that there had ever been an army camp there, home to a thousand soldiers, a park full of vehicles, a parade ground, some offices, a little chapel. All was entirely vanished under the jungle.
I stood there gobsmacked for quite a while. Then I walked to and fro wondering if I’d got the right place – which, of course, I had. I was searching in that futile way that you do – like when you’ve lost your keys and you keep looking again and again in the same place, even though you know they aren’t there.
I knew Singapore had changed enormously. I knew I’d find big differences. This, though, was more than a big difference. This was going back to your old school and finding a reservoir or a cow pasture.
I felt strangely bereft, as if a bit of my past had been rubbed out.

Monkeys and Parrots 7. Let loose with a rifle.

2010-01-05T05:13:00.000-08:00

Because I enjoyed drill, I became an unusual recruit. At what you might call static soldiery – keeping my kit, clothing and boots immaculate – I was inept. Everything – polish on the brasses, shine on the boots – was at the margin of acceptability, and until I got to the Far East, where there were lowly paid local people to look after me, I was something of what the Americans used to call “a sad sack.” At mobile soldiery, however – foot drill, rifle drill, marching – I was fine. I’d been a keen cyclist, and in the school cross-country running team. Most of the other lads had left school at fifteen and so had spent three years devoted to beer, cigarettes and the pursuit of girls. So I had no problem at all with the physical demands of soldiering.
We also, of course, were taught the basics of actually using our weapons -- how to handle and fire our rifles. And, yes, we really did have “Naming of Parts”, complete with “...the piling swivel, Which in your case you have not got.” (Henry Reed's World War II poem, “Naming of Parts”.)Every soldier then had a standard issue .303 rifle – really the one that had fought the First World War, with just some largely cosmetic changes. We learned to fire it, and were tested in our marksmanship on the rifle range. I have no memory of how good or bad I was, but I assume that I passed whatever standard was applied. I do remember, though, how cold it was on that range up on the Yorkshire Moors. I also fired the Sten gun – a clever little sub-machine gun of skeletal construction that was reputed to cost only a few bob to make.
The rifle was unsophisticated, reliable, lethal and accurate up to half a mile. It only fired single shots, though, and the magazine held a single clip of a handful of rounds (was it seven? Something like that) You fired, then you manipulated the bolt to get another round from the magazine into the breech so you could fire again. It didn’t take long to do that, but it wasn’t a machine gun. At that time, you see, it was thought that you couldn’t give ordinary soldiers automatic weapons as standard issue, because they would poop them off willy nilly, wasting ammunition and endangering everyone around. Now, though, presumably reflecting the advance of technology and improved training, standard infantry weapons are effectively sub-machine guns – and by all accounts they’re not as reliable as our venerable rifles were.
So there we were. After four weeks we could shoot, march, keep ourselves and our kit clean and smart and obey orders. We were real soldiers, fit to be let loose on leave in the Queen’s uniform.

Monkeys and Parrots 6 Stand by your beds.

2009-12-28T02:21:00.000-08:00

This little bit of my memoir "Monkeys and Parrots", is about kit inspections at Catterick Camp. I actually still occasionally use the phrase "Stand by Your Beds" when I walk into a room, thus confirming the impression of geriatric lunacy that many people have of me.

“Stand by your beds!” The entry of an inspecting officer or NCO into the barrack room was always heralded by that cry, from one of the NCOs in attendance, followed a flurry of leaping to attention, and a deal of activity at the door as people of increasing importance came in – a corporal, a sergeant, perhaps a sergeant major -- and then stood back waiting for whoever was the senior to make an appearance. In basic training, routine inspections were carried out by your troop officer, usually a second lieutenant, although the company commander, a major, would make regular visits, and occasionally we’d see the CO of the Regiment, a lieutenant colonel. He’d peer at your name card.
“Haigh, eh! Where are you from?”
“Barnsley, Sir.”
“I see. Well, your kit seems OK. Keep it up, play fair with us and we’ll play fair with you. Any questions?”
“Please can I go home, Sir?” (Just joking. The real answer was --)
“No thank you Sir.”
“Good, good, carry on.”
If you were unlucky, the RSM, following along behind the Colonel, would look more closely at your kit.
“I can still see the joins in these bootlaces! You’re an idle soldier!”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Do them again and show them to your corporal this afternoon.”
“Yes, Sir, thank you Sir.”
“Don’t thank me. Just think yourself lucky you’re not parading at the orderly room to show them to me.
“Yes, Sir, thank you Sir. I mean just Yes Sir, without the thank you, Sir.”
“Are you taking the piss, Signalman.”
“No, Sir. Sorry Sir.”
“I’m watching you. Remember that!”
“Sir! Yes Sir!”
Your own troop officer, a National Service second lieutenant, would be following behind. If he was the right kind of young officer, who’d got to know you, he would, after hearing an exchange like that, give you a crafty wink and a grin. (In his own training, it has to be said, he’d certainly had worse experiences. But because he’d been to public school he was used to it. )
The remarkable thing about all of it was that it was entirely ritualised. It could have been scripted, and it was often delivered with an undertone of genuine humour.
So familiar did the order, “Stand by your beds!” become to all ex-servicemen (and women) that it passed into the language. People used it when they walked into workplaces, raising a rueful smile of reminiscence. Even now, you hear it from time to time. Now it’s a joke. Then, it could loosen strong men’s bowels.

2009-12-21T01:05:00.000-08:00

Monkeys and Parrots 5.
How to display your bootlaces.

Quite a lot of my "Monkeys and Parrots" memoir -- most of it in fact, as it currently stands -- is about my National Service with the Royal Corps of Signals. There's a longish section on the basic training we had at Catterick Camp in North Yorkshire, in the freezing Winter of 55 -- 56. There are a few paragraphs about the rigours of kit inspection, and this little snippet describes how we had to display our spare bootlaces.

Spare bootlaces. The dividing line between spare bootlaces and insanity is finer than you think. That’s because this is how, in 1955, with the Cold War at its height, the Royal Corps of Signals, at the very core of the Free World’s communications systems, displayed its spare bootlaces for inspection.
First, you took your bootlace -- which was of leather and maybe two or three millimetres square in section – and coiled it tightly so that it became a flat disc a little larger than an old penny. Then, using a piece of black cotton, you tied it so that it would stay coiled.
That was just the start, the easy bit. The object now was to treat the coiled bootlace in such a way that the coils themselves – and, if possible, the cotton thread -- became invisible, and you were left holding a shining black disc. This you achieved first by ironing the bootlace disc on both sides with a hot iron, and then by polishing it with boot polish. The process was repeated until you had an object of beauty the real nature of which could not have been guessed by anyone outside of the madhouse which was the armed forces in the Nineteen Fifties.
From your two spare bootlaces you crafted two of these jewel-like objects, and displayed them proudly, in their allocated correct positions, on your kit layout.
The really, really, sad thing about this was that you could get really absorbed in the task -- relishing the challenge of producing the best spare bootlace display in the Regiment.
All of this kind of thing has been described many times, and I only mention it here so as to confirm its truth, in support of all those National Service veterans who are assumed to be rambling and senile when they tell their tales. Don’t trouble your head wondering at the sense of it all, because there never was any. However incredible the stories you hear of bullshit in the barrack rooms, don’t doubt, only believe.

Monkeys and Parrots 4

2009-12-10T01:46:00.000-08:00

I'm posting excerpts -- and they are excerpts, just tasters -- from my unpublished account of the years when I in my teens and early twenties, at a time when the world was a different place. This one is called --

A small reunion.
In 2007 a handful – maybe a dozen – elderly people gathered at a pleasant Yorkshire hotel on a beautiful Summer day. I’d helped to bring them together, and they are all my friends, although we meet but rarely. What we have in common is that we were all in the same form at school. In those days, secondary schools like ours – a local authority grammar school – didn’t have the kind of flexible timetables that allow different kinds of grouping through the day. You stayed with your form all day, for almost everything. As a result you became a very close knit band. Just how close is best shown by the fact that in about 1990 we had a proper reunion which was attended by all but two of the original class of thirty.
There weren’t that many of us there in 2007 – maybe a dozen, and about the same number the following year when we met again at the house of one of our number. Both gatherings were sparked off by the knowledge that during 2006 two of our number had died, the beginning, we accepted, of a steady attrition that will gradually accelerate now towards its natural end.
The 2007 reunion, full of memories of the ones who had died, was quite beautiful, really, like a scene from a tranquil, life-affirming English film. It was so wonderful to see these old friends, very much in their prime, smiling, relaxed, entirely comfortable with each other. It was, I should have explained, a mixed school that we went to, and so we were a mixed group of elderly folk. Now, though, we were free of the adolescent hormonal tides and tensions that flowed through us in those far-off school days. Well, almost at any rate. I, for one, and I guess this applied to everyone, was conscious all the time that many of us knew toe-curlingly embarrassing things about each other, all not so much suppressed as deliberately dismissed as irrelevant. Only occasionally, perhaps, did someone wonder why the person across the table smiled in a certain way, or suddenly went mentally into another place.
And do you know, the other thing about being free of the hormone thing is that we saw each other so much more clearly. We were free of adolescent self-obsessed posturing and inhibitions, and frankly I think we’ve mostly turned out to be nicer people than we were in those far off days. Nothing to prove now, I suppose.
Something else struck me, too. It was that some people were instantly recognizable, little changed in over fifty years. Others were the exact opposite – you could stare for ever and not see any sign of the younger version. What does that signify? Well, nothing really, except that people are different from each other.
What did we talk about? Why, school of course. What else? Our memories were the usual ones – this or that teacher, what happened to old so-and-so. There were revelations – things you didn’t know about people, including the stories that everybody except you knew at the time. We all had slightly different takes on our teachers, because we weren’t all equally good at everything. So there were those who really liked our Latin teacher, to me a fearsome lady who gave me nightmares.
On the whole, though, the memories were good ones.

Monkeys and Parrots 3

2009-12-03T01:29:00.000-08:00

The centre of my existence for quite a long time at school was a small room in one of the classroom blocks. I had an interest in model aeroplanes at the time, and I and a group of like-minded nerds asked the head if we could have an aeromodelling club at school. He agreed, and actually gave us our little room. We proposed to use it, so we said, for building models, and we were allowed to go there at lunchtimes.
In fact, we did no model building there at all. We brought half-built models in from home and left them around. We even put on a special exhibition of our work one day, which gained us considerable, and much needed brownie points, even though not one stick of what we exhibited had originated in school. No, the modelry was where we spent all our time nattering and laughing, indulging, as teenagers always have done, in what one of my friends always called “erotic parlance”. The room was always known as “The Modelry” and was effectively our common room, a sort of disreputable alternative to the prefects’ room, of which, needless, to say, I was never a member. The de facto leader of our band of brigands was a very big boy always known as “Boris” (His name was actually David, but not many people knew it -- teachers always used surnames in those days anyway) At fourteen Boris was six feet four inches tall and weighed fourteen stone - a good lad to be friends with. He was an expert builder of model planes, a good cyclist, and competent pianist and was very, very funny. He was also, in his spare time, a flight sergeant in the Air Training Corps. His descriptions, with sound effects and facial grimaces, of the conduct and habits of the young louts he took to annual camp had us in stitches.
Tragically, and short-sightedly, the school establishment didn’t rate him at all, because, well, he didn’t fit the mould. Even his leadership of the model club, with the exhibition which he organised, was looked on with patronising amusement. Of his Air Cadet activities the school knew nothing, yet he'd gathered lots of serious qualifications as a Cadet. He was one of the few to become a cadet senior NCO, so it was clear the Corps respected him and gave him responsibility. Yet he was a thorn in the flesh of his teachers and left school before taking any exams. Why did they let that happen? Eventually, he went into the Royal Air Force where he became an Air Electronics Officer, flying with the “V” Force of advanced jet bombers, Victor, Valiant and Vulcan, that carried our nuclear deterrent. He'd simply got his education elsewhere, in a different way.
So the years passed, and in no time we were sixteen, ready to go into the sixth form. Our form members knew each other very well by then, and we were, by modern standards, young men and women. The implications of that, however, will have to wait till next time.

The story of Boris will be recognisable to many. The student who's rebellious at school but has a different sort of life outside -- in sport, maybe, or a band, or a cheerleader group. Fortunately Boris's outside life led directly and seamlessly to a worthwhile technical career. These days, I suppose -- I hope -- that a school would know about Boris's ATC life, would celebrate it, and add it to his portfolio in some way.

Monkeys and Parrots 2

2009-11-30T12:28:00.000-08:00

I'm posting excerpts from a longer set of my ramblings, called "Monkeys and Parrots", about what it was like to be growing up in the Fifties. This bit is about my teachers at Ecclesfield Grammar School. I think it provides food for thought about the sort of qualities that make a good teacher.

Monkeys and Parrots 2
The teachers were academics, mostly Oxbridge graduates. That’s not to be sneezed at. It meant they were sharp, usually very funny, and, most importantly, it meant they knew what they were talking about when they taught their subjects.
The downside is that they often were not, by any modern standard, good or effective teachers. I doubt very much if any of them had a teaching qualification. In those days, if you had a degree, you could be a teacher, without further training. So, not unnaturally, their preferred pedagogic method was based on their own experience at school which was to tell us a few things, then make sure we all had “a good set of notes”. These were either dictated or written on the blackboard to be copied. (You had to write fast, or the board was rubbed and re-written before you caught up.) The notes, well and accurately regurgitated, were what got us through the still quite new GCE O level and A Level exams. This meant that as a learner you were effectively on your own. If you were someone who needed actual teaching, or coaching, or individual help, forget it.
But what our teachers really had going for them was that they had a precious and hard-won hinterland of experience and wisdom and a monumental sense of proportion. They came to us, you see, from the War. Chemistry teacher Sam Hemingfield had flown Halifax bombers, mission after mission, in the strategic bombing campaign that claimed the lives of 50,000 airmen. History specialist Paul Slater, later to be a Coventry comprehensive head, was in the Royal Navy and endured the kamikazes off Okinawa in 1945. Geography teacher Harry Birkby flew a Dakota, towing gliders to the Normandy landings, then Arnhem, then the Rhine crossing. And our maths teacher, Rudi Wessely, was a Czechoslovakian Jew who’d escaped to Britain on a Kindertransport train in ’39. All of his family died in the camps. And they're just the ones I knew about.
These were people who had seen life and knew what it was capable of. They relished what they now had, and they weren’t going to let anything get them down. They revelled, whatever their subjects, in the precious things that they had so nearly had ripped away – the countryside, poetry, music, drama, good company and fun. We didn’t appreciate that at the time, of course, but on reflection I realise that the War created a whole generation of role models for young people – men and women who had broader horizons and a driving sense of the importance of gratefully and zestfully living the life you’re given.

Monkeys and Parrots.

2009-11-28T09:49:00.000-08:00

I started this blog thinking I'd have interesting things to say about education --after all I've been a teacher, a head and a writer on education for many years. I actually posted a couple of things. Then I thought, "Hang on. There are too many education bloggers already. Do something different."
So I took down my educational ramblings. Instead, what I'm going to do is post here, as time goes on, is some excerpts from a book I've been trying to put together about what it was like to be a teenager in the Fifties -- about school, and National Service, and my first job. The whole thing runs to about 45,000 words, and it's called "Monkeys and Parrots", for reasons that are explained in it somewhere. But I'm not going to post the whole lot at once. Let's settle for 500 words at time. Here's a bit about when I passed my eleven plus.

"You have qualified".
My year group started at grammar school in 1948. I was the only one from my junior school to go there that year, the only one to pass the eleven-plus.
I remember taking the eleven-plus. I don’t think we called it that. To us it was always t’ Scholarship. If you were bright, or lucky, or both you could “Pass t’ Scholarship.” Presumably because there was a time, not long before, when that’s exactly what it was – a financial award to help poorer kinds into a fee-paying school. The school we were trying for wasn’t fee paying, though. It was a straightforward West Riding Grammar School, well down the pecking order of selective schools.
We didn’t take t’ Scholarship exam in our own quite small church primary. We had to travel to a much bigger junior school in the next village, where we had a rotten school dinner (I remember awful mince) and sat in rows, in silence, in a strange place, doing a full-blown exam. No wonder so many fell by the wayside.
Then we waited for the Word. Pass or Fail. Your whole future on the turn of an arithmetic problem (“A train leaves Crewe at nine-thirty am. It takes two and a half hours……”) My letter was late arriving, which makes me think I was perhaps on some sort of reserve list. I knew I hadn’t done well at maths, but I was certain I’d done an excellent English paper, and I’d probably been OK on the intelligence test, so maybe that tipped the balance. None of my classmates got the call. In some cases it was a surprise. The headmaster’s brother, for example (yes, he had an eleven-year old brother) who sat by me in class, didn’t pass, although he later made up for it with technical qualifications and did very well. Another star pupil, a girl, failed but went to a fee paying Catholic girls’ school instead.
I still have the letter. It’s very ordinary looking, and is called “Form S (E) 24”. The heading is “County Council of the West Riding of Yorkshire Education Department”. Then there’s my name, written in, and another heading, “County Examination for Selection for Secondary Schools, 1948.’
Then it tells me (not my parents, but me – a nice touch, that) “You have qualified for admission to Ecclesfield Grammar School.” (The school’s name is handwritten) and continues with the instruction to report there on 6 September next, and that I can get a travelling allowance. In fact I got a nice bus pass, with a red cardboard cover.
I was just elated. It wasn’t so much anticipation of the delights of the grammar school as sheer relief at not going to the grim, school-of-hard-knocks sec mod that catered for the sons and daughters of all the local miners. That was where the kids had been known to put a teacher upside down in a dustbin. Or so they said. I didn’t want any part of that. Oh dear, no.
So my mother took me to Cole’s in Sheffield to get my uniform – blazer, flannel trousers, beret.......
OK. That's enough rambling. If you like it I'll post a a bit more soon

Meanwhile, Ric, commenting on the above, suggests that I might bring in some contemporary references where appropriate. That seems a good idea, so I'll try to do that.
What this first excerpt does, I suppose, is help to show just how useless the eleven plus was (and sadly still is, because it does cling on a bit here and there) at predicting future success. My guess is that it's really no better than sticking a pin into a list of children's names. Worst of all, though,
as Bob Harrison's comment below suggests, was its effect on children and families. I could go on about this, but I really can't add anything to what was already a well worn debate when I first came across it forty or more years ago.