CHAPTER ELEVEN

On the Ground

I had four days to get gold rank-tapes on my Mess Kit – as there was to be a formal dinner night on the third day of the course – and get up to Andover, look for accommodation, and move Esmé and the girls in. I found a small thatched-roofed cottage about a mile from the College and had it quite readily accepted as a Hiring. So far so good. The next task was to get Caroline into a local school – her fourth at the age of six and a half.

The RAF currently operated two Staff Colleges. The other was at Bracknell, in Berkshire. Andover was the original and longer established one but, because Bracknell took no foreign students, and could accordingly delve more deeply into security classified material, it was held by many young officers to be the more desirable of the two to attend. This view took no account of the variety and interest that the 50% mix of foreign students at Andover contributed to all aspects of college life. And it ignored the fact that most of the classified material disclosed was either ephemeral or was quickly in the newspapers, or both.

Military Staff Colleges everywhere attempt to open and broaden minds by a variety of well-tried means. Usually these include: encouraging students to study a wide range of topics in reasonable depth, discuss them, and stand up and speak about them before an audience (usually of hyper-critical fellow students); arranging visits for them to Service establishments, industry, and government departments; and giving them problems to solve, both military and political, requiring well-argued written solutions. And, to show both foreign and domestic students at Andover what Britain had to be proud of, there was a series of visits to places and things of historical, industrial and constitutional significance.

Asking questions of visiting lecturers was encouraged, and there was a feeling that if one failed to ask questions one would be marked down as a dull student. Sitting directly behind me for the first term – we all had chairs allocated to us in the lecture theatre – was a chap who was very much into amateur dramatics, a natural thespian behind the footlights. When he stood up to ask a question, however, my chair shook as he gripped the backrest in a paroxysm of fear. There then followed a pause before he managed to stutter out his query. We were all nervous in the first weeks but we were forced out of that and into confidence on our feet as time passed – even the thespian.

Most times the question and answer session provided a lively supplement to a lecture. But sometimes answers could leave one less than impressed by the speaker. For example, when I asked the then head of the Army Air Corps why the Army felt that it needed to acquire and operate helicopters as opposed to relying on the RAF, as specialists in the air, to operate them in an army support role, his response was: ‘We need to have them because you chaps couldn’t cope with living roughly in the field as our chaps happily do when required.’ Perhaps he thought I was being deliberately provocative and was answering me in the same coin. However, I felt that the question deserved a serious answer and was about to point out that we could rough it with the best of them and, in support of that I was going to tell him that I had recently been on an outfit that had camped very successfully for several months in primitive conditions on a (mostly) dried up paddy field. However, I sat down without doing so, having noticed the Commandant fixing me with one of his beady do-not-attempt-to-follow-that-up looks.

Syllabus days were set aside for working on and writing up the solutions to the more complex problems that were set for us, but occasionally it was necessary to wrap the proverbial wet towel around one’s head and continue into the late evening. Because by now I had gone ahead with my really badly timed decision to embark on studying for a law degree, and London had accepted me, I was committed to finding the extra eleven hours that I had convinced myself would be available ‘in my spare time’. I had to work late in the evenings a little more than most. But, in reality, eleven hours was not so difficult to squeeze out of a Staff College week. If I’d had any idea then how very much more time I would need to devote to the final stretches of study for the degree I would have thrown the venture away immediately. As it was, while I didn’t have as much time as some to patronise the local golf courses, I missed nothing of the social life of the College and had time to get to know several of the delightful country pubs that abounded in the area – more often than not dragged away from my books to one of them by a particular mate on the course, Paddy Hine.

Among our tasks in the final third of the year was a requirement to write an article to be considered in competition with articles by the other forty odd Andover (and hundred Bracknell) students for inclusion in the yearbook published jointly by the two colleges. I decided to write about Indonesia, in part because of my passing experience of Confrontation and all the briefings we had had on Indonesia as a result, and in part because there was a very comprehensive cross-indexed book, newspaper and magazine archive at Andover, created by a very dedicated librarian over the years, that contained some very pertinent stuff on this topic. At the time the conventional wisdom was that Indonesia was on the verge of a communist take-over. A bit of research into the Indonesian psyche convinced me that, while this was possible, it was very unlikely to be successful, and I wrote my article to support this view. It was a real relief to get the thing finished and handed in, and I was happy to forget about it when I had done so. Then, a month after the deadline for submission, and well into the run-down period towards the end of the course, there was indeed an attempt by the PKI, the Indonesian communist party, to take power. It failed dismally. My thesis had been validated – and at the same time made as stale as last week’s newspapers. However, greatly to my dismay I was summoned to the Deputy Commandant’s office, told that my article had been selected for publication, and directed to write a postscript to emphasise both the strength of the previously prevailing view and my advance prediction of the opposite. This was a bit of hasty extra work that I had not expected, and which I would have been greatly delighted to avoid if only my effort had been allowed to sink into obscurity there and then.

Just before the course ended I was sent to HQ Transport Command to be interviewed by the then C-in-C, Air Marshal Sir Kenneth (‘Bing’) Cross, as a possible Personal Staff Officer. There were two others besides myself up for the interview, both from Bracknell, and I rather hoped that Bing might prefer one of them as he had a reputation for being rather crusty. As it turned out he wanted none of us, preferring someone from within his HQ staff, and was probably seeing us simply to keep the Air Secretary happy. The downside was that the postings waiting for the two from the Staff Colleges that the latter expected Bing to reject were to staff appointments in Aden! In fact, all three of us went there. Esmé and the girls stayed put at Andover, unable to join me until the availability of accommodation in Aden ticked the magic box in the Ministry of Defence¹ and a movement order was generated.

I enjoyed Staff College and found it a lot more usefully mind-stretching than I had found university to be. But then, I had started off reluctantly reading for a degree in a subject that held little interest for me and from which I could see no future enjoyment flowing. Changing horses, even well beyond mid-stream, had been one of my better decisions.

Aden was a bit of a shock. That miserable bit of rock, sand, ugly architecture, complex of small townships and warring factions, was in a very sad state when I got there in January 1966. Terrorist attacks were a daily – and nightly – occurrence. Before Christmas Eve 1964, when malignity and mayhem had been set running by a grenade thrown into a children’s party killing the teenage daughter of the Principal Medical Officer, Middle East Command, life for the Service community had apparently not been at all bad. All that had changed dramatically. The children’s party atrocity had been rapidly followed by the murder of Adeni Special Branch Officers. And things had not got better. A nightly curfew had been imposed on Service personnel and their families, and gatherings of more than six people in Service homes were forbidden. Aden had become a very small place indeed for them all.

Accommodation in the Headquarters Mess at Steamer Point was bursting at the seams in January 1966 and, in spite of the risk, some officers were being accommodated in the only two decent hotels in that part of Aden, the Crescent and the Rock. These were situated in the formerly flourishing commercial area of Steamer Point, Tawahi, a duty-free shopping centre known to generations of ship borne passengers transiting the Indian Ocean, and more latterly to the passengers of cruise liners.² I spent my first three months in the Rock along with a bunch of ten other officers, all of us suffering on a daily basis from what I presume to have been the effects of unclean kitchens. On the bright side, during that period the Rock’s catering brought me down two stone to a comfortable eleven and a half.

At the end of the three months I was allocated a Hiring in one of the many blocks built by local entrepreneurs specifically to cater for Service families along, and next to, a mile-long stretch of main road known to its occupants as the Mallah Straight. This was a ground floor flat in a far from salubrious building opposite the gates of the Aden Supply Depot (over whose high walls passing Arabs surreptitiously flung hand grenades almost as a daily routine). Apart from the noise of exploding grenades, and the nightly disturbance from mortar shells aimed at the Depot, and falling a few yards away from the wire-covered glassless windows of our bedrooms, my one abiding memory of that flat was the day, three months after we had settled in, when the lavatory in the one bathroom gushed with all the enthusiasm of an over-active geyser every time the occupants of the flats above flushed theirs. As the mid-day temperature was hitting 35ºC at the time the resultant horror was hard to take.

The mess was cleared the following day by a gang of locals whose Muslim susceptibilities must have been sorely tested by the task. But more important to Esmé, the girls and me, the flat was declared unfit to be a Hiring and we were rehoused a few weeks later in the top floor flat of a six-storey building. This had a splendidly large balcony with a view across the harbour. It was a real joy to have breakfast on the balcony in the relative cool of the morning looking at the panorama of minor maritime activities, or to sit on it in the evening gazing up at the stars and the very visible satellites passing above us in the clear cloudless sky. The other side of the building faced Shamsan, the 1,800-foot high mountain rising abruptly out of and dominating most of Aden. Our neighbours on that side suffered occasionally from machine-gun fire mounted from among the closely packed makeshift dwellings clustering along Shamsan’s lower slopes about half a mile away – and survived by learning to stay below the level of their window sills after dark.

My appointment in Aden was to the Secretariat of the C-in-C, Middle East Command, a small busy office whose function, in short, was to oil the wheels of joint-Service co-operation within the Command. The head of the Secretariat was an officer of commander RN, lieutenant colonel, or wing commander rank and there were three single-Service secretaries at my level. Oiling the wheels brought us all sorts of tasks, often matters on which the other staffs felt they had too little time to waste, but nevertheless which impacted on all of them. And sometimes we had to follow up things that the C-in-C had stumbled upon during one of his disarmingly informal visits across the Command. One of my regular responsibilities was to attend the one-star Joint Administrative Committee’s meetings, record the minutes, and produce a draft of them for the Chairman to amend as he later saw fit.

Another of my responsibilities was to produce a draft signal each week on the operations that had being going on across the Command during the previous seven days. This would then be discussed, massaged, and amended at a meeting of the C-in-C’s Committee and sent off to reach London in time for the weekly meeting of the Chiefs of Staff.

Assembling the material for the draft signal required me to run rapidly around the Command HQ in advance of the meeting and knock together what I had been given into a reasonable précis. I always got an abundance of items from the Army staff as the soldiers were having a bloody time both with dissidents up-country and with the terrorists within Aden itself; the Navy had a very small presence in Aden and were unconcerned by the fact that they rarely had anything to give me; and, although the RAF’s Aden-based Hunters, Shackletons and tactical transport elements were constantly and riskily engaged in giving support to the Army, most of what they were doing was repetitive and had become rather stale as far as newsworthiness was concerned. My RAF seniors inevitably, and justifiably, felt a little sore about how infrequently their Service was mentioned and when, one morning, Group Captain Operations passed me an item about four Hunters carrying out a firepower demonstration on the doorstep of a dissident tribal leader, he urged me to see that it was not omitted. Firepower demonstrations – the term, as used in the Middle East, meant the practice of first warning recalcitrant elements to remove themselves from their property and then pounding it from the air – were a time-honoured RAF tactic that had been used, for example, effectively and bloodlessly to keep order in Iraq for most of the years between the first and second world wars. Knowing how much the C-in-C, Admiral Sir Michael Le Fanu, appreciated a joke I was quite relaxed when my typist suggested that we might replace ‘firepower’ with the words that at the time were much used by the ‘hippy’ crowd, ‘flower-power’. I felt sure that they would disappear during the editing session within the C-in-C’s Committee. Unfortunately, although the AOC, Air Vice-Marshal Andrew Humphrey, vigorously argued that they were obviously a typist’s error and should be corrected, Sir Michael refused saying that the joke would brighten up the Chief of the Defence Staff’s day.

Sir Michael was C-in-C throughout my time in Aden. Known within the Navy both as the ‘Chinese Admiral’, Lee Fan U, and as ‘Ginger’ because of his hitherto brightly coloured mop, he was a delightful, gifted and mischievously humorous man for whom it was a pleasure to work. When, hard on the heels of the dispatch of the ‘flower-power’ signal it was suggested to me, doubtless jokingly, that I should consider myself fortunate that my own Service was not writing my annual report, I was doubly pleased that I was working for him. Jokingly or not, the fact that I was reported upon upward via the Head of Secretariat, at that time a lieutenant colonel, to the Chief of Staff, then Brigadier Roly Gibbs (later Chief of the General Staff), and thence to the Admiral, was comforting.

I had hoped when I first arrived in Aden that I could get myself airborne with one or other of the Hunter squadrons based at RAF Khormaksar, Nos 8 and 43 and (later) 208. I knew many of the pilots on them as most had either passed through Chivenor when I had been there or had been on a squadron with me. Peter Taylor from my time on 19 Squadron was one of the Hunter flight commanders at Khormaksar throughout my tour, and he took me up once in a T7. However, I simply couldn’t escape from the Secretariat long enough during the working day to get to the airfield, fly, and get back in time to deal with the matters piling up at the end of it. And, on two of the three rare occasions when I did have the time, security alerts had stopped all movements between the HQ complex at Steamer Point and Khormaksar. There was nothing for it but to be happy to be a full time staff officer.