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The Metamorphosis of Thomas Fish
An aged man was pottering
Along a winding lane
With short slow steps
And many stops
With groans and grumbles grizzling.
A little boy was loitering
Towards him down the lane
With short brisk steps
But many stops
To poke and pry aplundering.
They met at a corner meandering
Along the winding lane.
The boy was scared,
The old man stared,
And I could see him puzzling.
Said white beard to the foundling
‘I know you, what’s your name?’
‘Sir, an you wish,
It’s Thomas Fish.’
‘That’s mine,’ said the old man grumbling.
On his return from Russia, Hudson married. His wife, Gladys Lee, had come from Allendale in Northumberland: her family had farmed there for several centuries, as designated in the local church register moving up the social scale from ‘farmer’ (a farmer employed nobody) to ‘yeoman’ (a yeoman employed somebody) to ‘gentleman’ when coal was found under their land. Work; less work; no work! She had been his nurse on his arrival in the London Hospital after being wounded in Italy. They had been engaged but had broken it off, hence one of his reasons for the foray into Russia. In any event, they came together again and ‘lived happily ever after’. He was deeply in love with her for the rest of his life. He was, however, plunged into a quandary – what was he to do with the rest of his life? He had no money of his own apart from his meagre Army pay as a captain (marriage allowances were not paid until the recipient reached the age of 30) and his wife had a very small allowance. His decision to stay in the Army was reached in the main because he saw no possibility of earning his living in any other way. He was no military enthusiast at that stage of his life.
After a period as second-in-command of a company he was made adjutant to the regimental depot in Derby. With no money to spare the young couple had to live very frugally – they could rarely afford to go to ‘the pictures’ for instance. They managed to buy a car, which had to be unloaded before it went up a hill. There was no driving test in those days and Hudson had several hilarious confrontations, including hitting a bread van in Piccadilly and the bread being scattered all over the road.
His life was full of contrasts. Perhaps the most ludicrous was when he was sent on a rifle course at the School of Musketry at Hythe. Having commanded a battalion for two years in war in the most challenging circumstances, the Army sent him to learn about the Lee Enfield rifle, extraction and so on. It is not surprising that, however well intentioned the instructor, Hudson found it difficult to take the course seriously.
The young couple were living in Derby in a most dreary semidetached red brick house in a long and grimy street on a tram route. They lived on Army rations: ‘Tough frozen meat, stodgy, badly baked bread, margarine and rat-trap cheese.’ To add to their miseries their first child died in childbirth – in fact unnecessarily because the local doctor had failed to make a proper examination before the arrival of the baby. The two subsequent sons born in 1922 and 1925 were Caesarean births. The deep joy of their arrival is reflected in two of Hudson’s poems.
Mother Love
No-one
Has got such a wonderful, wonderful, baby
As we
Though why it should be
You must not ask me
It took us all three
The baby and Daddy and me
To make such a wonderful baby
No-one
Has got such a wonderful, wonderful, baby
No-one
Has got such a wonderful, wonderful, baby
You see
The best things are free
A flower or a tree
The limitless sea
And now you, his Daddy, and me
Have got our wonderful baby.
No-one
Has got such a wonderful, wonderful, baby
Mummy
Patter, patter tiny feet
Sturdy legs and toes so neat.
‘I will catch you, if I can,
My beloved little man.’
Running, laughing, full of glee,
Shouting loudly, ‘Can’t catch me.’
When he’s caught she’ll hold him tight,
Kiss him breathless with delight.
When he tumbles, ‘It’s just fun,
My beloved little one,
Keep that quivering lip held tight,
Fight back tears with all your might.’
His adored sister Dolly had married Phillip Jelf who was in the Colonial Service in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). In January 1923 Jelf was a District Commissioner at Luwingu, 100 miles away on dirt roads from the nearest doctor. He was woken up at 3 a.m. by a lion which had jumped through his window, was lying on top of him and was trying to eat him! He struggled clear and, as he put it:
I crashed about the room, dodging round furniture and eventually through the dressing-room archway where I collapsed on the floor, face down, while the lion lay on top of me chewing my right shoulder. Then I heard a shot fired and the lion left me. I had just enough strength left to get up, open the door and stagger to the store room where I locked myself in.
A companion staying in the bungalow had summoned armed assistance from the local jail. Shots had been fired, one of which lodged in Jelf’s body. After a pain-wracked journey he returned to England. He never fully recovered from the attack.
Life in the Regular Army in the 1920s was not exhilarating, to say the least. After Derby, Hudson was sent to Northern Ireland. He always seemed to get something wrong. He forgot the annual regimental inspection and turned up in his workaday Army uniform to the huge annoyance of the inspecting officer. He lost his temper with a general who with his staff was standing over a soldier as he attempted to shoot on the range. The soldier was managing only to hit a few stones in front of him when the general made some unpleasant remark.
Hudson said to the general: ‘I don’t know how you expect this wretched man to shoot properly in front of a whole crowd of brass hats. He is just petrified.’ Not surprisingly, Hudson’s stock as a peacetime soldier waned considerably as time went on. He failed the Staff College exam twice, the first time through illness, but at last he succeeded and received a vacancy at Camberley. Hudson was nothing if not self-critical. He summed up his two years as a student at the Staff College:
For the first time I found myself in close contact with a number of officers of my own age and standing, and this in itself was invaluable experience. Almost against my will, I became so afraid of appearing to curry favour with my instructors that as time went on I went to the other extreme, and became abnormally stubborn and argumentative. I had, in any case, a fixed idea that the last war had been shamefully mismanaged, nor did it seem to me that the teaching then given at the Staff College would be likely to make any future war less mercilessly blood-thirsty. Had they taken me seriously, my attitude must have been irritating to both my instructors and my fellow students. By the end of my two years as a student, the Staff had pretty accurately summed me up as inclined to be awkward and pig-headed, but not really aggressively-minded. Officially, this was put in more formal phraseology in my final report, but I was given quite a good recommendation as regards further employment in the Army. . . .
The staff and students of my time included four future field marshals and a number of high-ranking generals. Of the future field marshals, my first commandant, General Ironside, I had known in Russia; another, General Wilson, I saw very little of, as he was not directly concerned with my year. Of the other two, Montgomery was on the staff as an instructor and Alexander was a fellow student, though senior in rank to Monty. With the aid of a quick promotion in the Irish Guards he was then a full Colonel.
An outstanding memory of Monty was of his sitting firmly on the fireguard in the mess, the centre of a number of the students, affirming that the weakness in modern generals lay in their inability to make a personal impact on their men, owing to the size of modern armies. ‘When I am a General,’ he said, ‘I shall adopt some distinctive mark, possibly some unusual form of dress, by which I shall be known to every private in my army.’ [Author’s note – hence Monty’s Tank Corps beret, with two badges.]
Hudson went on to describe Alexander, Montgomery’s future rival and boss:
Even Alexander, the most apparently unself-advertising of men, had personal idiosyncrasies which drew attention. His boyish delight in physical agility, his neatness with pen and pencil, his German upturned uniform caps, his tunics of unusual material, his trick of using his eyebrows to denote either amused surprise or friendliness or frosty disapproval, all these differentiated him from his fellow men in any company.
Monty arrived at a conclusion through hard thought and severely logical reasoning; Alexander, with a swift realisation of basic principles, accepted or refused the opinions of others whom he consulted with an open mind.
After the first year at the Staff College, Hudson was warned that he risked being dropped from the course. He was told that he was either lacking in interest or being consistently lazy.
In fact my only consistency was rebellion against the methods preached by my instructors. They seemed to me to differ little, if at all, from those which failed, as I saw it, in the last war. It was always the same dawn attack with lines of infantrymen following behind the bombardment, and a sprinkling of tanks to resuscitate the advance when the infantry had been, as it was euphemistically put, held up by fire.
As Hudson saw it, if the Army was to fight in Europe, a predominantly armoured organisation was required, supported by a trained parachute force to land behind the enemy defences. On the other hand the need in India and other outposts of Empire was for infantry trained to act in aid of the civil power. In his view, training at the Staff College fell hopelessly between these two stools and he consistently said so. He was lucky to survive.
Like many young men of his ilk, during the General Strike he joined enthusiastically in trying to sustain some kind of order. His task was to help in the distribution of the Government magazine, the British Gazette.
One day, outside the office on the Embankment in London, he saw ‘an old bearded sandwich-man parading the pavement with boldly-printed notices adjuring the public “To hang Locker Lampson from the nearest lamppost”’ (Lampson, an MP, was one of the leading figures in the anti-General Strike movement).
Late one evening, on returning to the offices, I was astonished to recognise the old man sitting on the floor in the passage outside the secretary’s door. I demanded to know what he was doing. He said he had come for his pay! At this moment the door onto the passage opened and, looking rather embarrassed, Locker Lampson’s secretary hailed him in. This was a form of publicity that was new to me, and an eye-opener into the wiles of publicity managers.
After the Staff College, Hudson returned to Northern Ireland with his regiment for six months before being sent to Singapore for his first staff appointment as staff officer to the local forces on the island, the equivalent to the Territorials in England. This led to a most unfortunate, not to say tragic, development for his family. The conventional wisdom was that the elder son, John, aged 8, was too old to go to the climate of Singapore. If he did so, it was said, his health would be irrevocably damaged. The author, as the younger son, aged only 4½, was deemed able to accompany his parents without danger. The upshot was that John was left behind while the author went with his parents. It was an impossible situation for John who felt very bitter about it, not understanding or accepting the reasoning. It was a most difficult choice for Hudson and his wife and they always bitterly regretted it. Nowadays no such distinction is made, quite rightly and, in any case, the aeroplane has made it much easier to keep families together.
During the otherwise halcyon days of the British Raj this division of families, often with all the children being left behind while their parents went to India or elsewhere, must have had a devastating psychological effect on tens of thousands of Britons.
On his return from Singapore in 1932, Hudson joined a new regiment, the King’s Own Scottish Borderers (KOSB). He had been told that there was a complete blockage of promotion in the Sherwood Foresters and that he would be most unlikely ever to command a battalion as by the time he was top of the list he would be too old. On the other hand he would command the KOSB shortly. His first appointment in his new regiment was as second-in-command to a battalion at Fort George near Inverness.
He was there for six months. He had a somewhat frosty reception as his new commanding officer probably resented him for, as he saw it, making use of his regiment for personal advantage. This attitude did not last long, in spite of Hudson, as always, upsetting some of his colonel’s practice manoeuvres by making idiosyncratic decisions when acting as ‘enemy’. Furthermore, as a result of the existing Army practice of ‘brevet’ rank, Hudson found himself senior to his commanding officer when acting as garrison commander. They both had to request leave from each other.
Hudson’s next appointment was in 1933 as Chief Instructor at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst where he spent four happy years with his family in the comparative luxury of a large Army quarter. A distant relative through his mother, Lord MacKenzie (a Law Lord), came to his financial rescue and the family had many most enjoyable fishing holidays at a house on Loch Maree near Poolewe in north-west Scotland. The comparative turbulence of the past seemed to be subsiding.
Hudson rejoined the KOSB, again as second-in-command, at Catterick in Yorkshire. From there they were sent to Portsmouth where Montgomery was their boss as their brigadier. The German military attaché was visiting the regiment and Monty, to Hudson’s great astonishment, told him that the British people would never fight for the rights of a remote and unknown people such as the Czechs and that there was no danger of a second world war over such an issue. Next day they happened to go for a walk alone together along the front.
Perhaps foolishly I remarked what a dangerous statement he had made the night before. Very angry, he inquired what right I had to criticise. Hoping to appease him by the implied compliment I said that a rising soldier, such as he was, would be sure to have his own dossier in the German intelligence records and that any remark of that sort coming from him would undoubtedly be reported. The Germans had gone into the First War to some extent because they thought the British would not join in, and we did not want history to repeat itself. Nevertheless our walk was brought to an abrupt conclusion and I knew I had offended him deeply.
There then occurred one of the most abrupt changes of fortune in a life which, it must be said, was rarely without surprises. Hudson had just been told that he was to command a battalion of the KOSB, then in India, when he was informed that he was promoted to the rank of brigadier to command the 2nd Infantry Brigade of the 1st Infantry Division then at Aldershot. This formation was clearly destined to go to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force in the event of war with Germany. Hudson’s promotion to such an elite position over the heads of all the existing commanding officers in the British Army was astonishing. In many minds it was linked to the Secretary of State for War, Hore Belisha, whom he had met when directing a tattoo in Leeds and who had clearly been impressed. Furthermore, Hore Belisha had just promoted General Lord Gort to be Chief of the Imperial General Staff over the heads of several more senior generals including General Dill, then Commander-in-Chief in Aldershot. Gort also had a Victoria Cross and the natural conclusion was that Hudson’s promotion before he had even commanded a battalion in peacetime was due to the same influence.
The situation was extremely embarrassing. Montgomery told Hudson’s commanding officer that in his opinion the appointment was a shocking one since he had far too little experience to justify taking over a brigade in the Expeditionary Force. Hudson seriously considered refusing the appointment, ‘But after some thought I came to the conclusion that I should have a go at it. Having come to this decision I went off with my family for a fortnight’s skiing holiday.’ Not surprisingly, the press got hold of the story and cuttings from The Times, the Star, the Natal Mercury and the Malay Mail can be seen in Appendix C.
Hudson’s propensity for offending officers senior to him was never more in evidence than in the following two years. The commander of the division of which his brigade was a part was General Alexander and the Commander-in-Chief was General Dill. His first encounter with this latter august figure was when he was half-an-hour late for an official dinner and, on arrival, found everyone waiting for him and his wife (who had mistaken the time of the invitation). Then, on a training exercise, Dill arrived to find the vehicles of Hudson’s brigade parked in rows on a road. This was in fact in the operation instructions in order to avoid damage to farmland. Refusing to listen to any explanation Dill left the scene, clearly in a fury. Misunderstandings of that nature seemed to continue throughout Hudson’s stay in Aldershot. Without ever actually breaking the ground rules set for an exercise, he would never follow the expected course of action, making his own decisions and frequently confusing umpires and generals alike by arriving with his Brigade at an unexpected place and time. His original meeting with his divisional commander, Alexander, was a frosty affair, probably because of suspicions Alexander might have had of how he had obtained his position, but this situation improved and Alexander was able to save Hudson when Dill wrote an adverse annual report on Hudson’s capabilities.
The outbreak of war with Germany was fast approaching and Hudson was amazed that, in the last manoeuvre in which he took part before war started, he should have had a German officer assigned to him.
Such was his keenness that he actually joined my HQ at two o’clock in the morning. We were engaged in a river crossing, and I was just going down to a portion of my front where a successful crossing had been made and where the engineers were building a bridge. I took him along in my jeep. It was just getting light when the bridge was completed. The infantry had crossed some time before in boats and as I could get no news of where they had got to I motored over the bridge to find out. Some of our men directed me down a track through a wood saying they thought their battalion headquarters had gone that way. As we rounded a corner, I saw General Dill standing quietly on the side of the track with two or three staff officers and at almost the same moment I saw the ‘enemy’. We were within about 30 yards of them. The ‘enemy’ wore soft hats and we were in steel helmets. They had only to open fire and an umpire would have put us out of action. Presumably they thought that being in a vehicle we were something to do with a General and they did nothing. The driver had seen them, too, and quickly getting into reverse, he backed down the track and out of sight. By a lucky chance I and my German had escaped an ignominious capture under the eyes of the C-in-C who at a subsequent conference remarked that he did not wish to discourage commanders from being well forward in the battle, but there were reasonable limits!
The German was very surprised that he was allowed to examine any weapons we had and see what he liked. He hinted on many occasions that we must have some secret weapons which we were hiding from him. I told him that I wished we had, but he obviously did not believe me. He openly derided our antitank rifle, which he said would certainly not pierce German armour but did not mention that, at that time, the Germans had little armour to pierce.
On returning later to Aldershot, I drove him in my private car to the hotel in which he was being housed. Leaving my car near the door, I took him in and gave him a drink. When I came out a policeman met me and pointed out that I had parked the car on the wrong side of the road. I do not think anything he saw in England astonished my German more that the fact that a civilian policeman had the temerity to challenge the right of a senior British officer to park his car where he liked. His opinion of the British Army up to that moment fairly high, dropped to zero.
War was now upon us and with a heavy heart I at last realised that it was inevitable. To cling on to the hope of a last moment reprieve was just wishful thinking. I said goodbye to my German, in the full knowledge that the next time we met, if we did, it would be our mutual duty to shoot each other!