In memory of Norman Shilson.

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.