British Voices (6 page)

I heard there a pre-War musketry story of the time when proficiency pay had been introduced by the Secretary of State for War, Mr Haldane. ‘An old soldier required a magpie (2 points) to qualify. He took careful aim, fired, and the butts signalled an inner (3 points). He stood up and in a loud voice exclaimed “Mr Aldane loses”.'

A similar event took place on the last day of our classification when an ancient soldier only required one point for first class shot and his proficiency pay. He fired, and there was the ugly sound of a ricochet gradually fading away in the distance. He looked down the range as if to watch the flight of the bullet and then burst out: ‘There goes my sixpence opping all the way to b----- y'

Our machine gun platoon had been exercising on the Mountains of Mourne and then joined us to fire their rifle course. Two privates were standing together cleaning their rifles when one of them pointed to the famous mountains and said:

‘We ain't go no 'ills like that in Essex, buoy.'
‘Bleeding good job tew.'

These pleasant interludes soon ended and we went back to Carrickfergus with its stinking foreshore on the Belfast Loch. The general excitement, however, had died down; probably the Shinners had gone to their civil war in the South, so we were able to do some badly needed training.

In September we left the ‘Snowdrops' and moved to Borden in Hampshire, a few miles south of Farnham. We were all glad to be at home again in a good station. To use an Essex expression: ‘I did not like myself in Ireland.' I do not think anybody else did either.

Details

This chapter is an extract from his memoirs held in the Imperial War Museum. He enlisted as a private in the 20th Battalion Royal Fusiliers, and saw action on the Western Front during World War one. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant into the 2nd Battalion Suffolk Regiment in 1916, and fought with them at the Battle of the Somme. Vinden served with the 2nd Battalion Suffolks in Ireland from 1920 to 1922, mainly at the Curragh Internment Camp. He was then in Gibraltar in 1926 and in Shanghai from 1927 to 1928. He attended Staff College from 1929 to 1930, and held an appointment at the Smalls Arms School in Wiltshire from 1930 to 1937. He served as a General Staff Officer, Grade 2, in Malaya Command, mainly in military intelligence duties, from 1937 to 1940. Vinden served at the same grade with the 1st Division in France in 1940. During the Second World War, he served mainly in the War Office, where he was responsible for improving officer selection and in the creation of the War Office Selection Boards. After the Second World War, he served as the Director of the Government of India Personnel Research Bureau. From 1951 to 1964, he also worked with UNESCO and the OECD.

Ireland 1920 to 1923

W
E HAD JUST
completed a year in Colchester, when orders came on Christmas Day 1920, to proceed on 1st January to Ireland.At that time, Ireland was part of the United Kingdom to which it had been joined in 1801. Demands for Home Rule for Ireland had been under periodical discussion since 1870 under Gladstone's Government and a Home Rule Act granting independence was on the statue book in 1914 when the First World War broke out.The matter was shelved, but dissidents in Ireland organised themselves into a sabotage force which murdered officers and soldiers in cold blood. One Sunday, around 7am, seven officers living in hotels in Dublin with their families were murdered in the presence of their wives and children.The rebels, known as Sinn Féin, had received smuggled arms from Germany during the war and at Easter 1916 had attempted to seize the city of Dublin. Fighting was fierce for some few days but the rising was defeated. Subsequently, rebel activity increased and when we arrived there were about two divisions of our troops in the country.

My regiment was divided on arrival, two companies going to Sligo HQ and two companies going to Boyle in County Roscommon. Boyle was a town of about 3,000 inhabitants with a barracks (as in many Irish towns) in which we were quartered. We were surprised with the mildness of the climate with the temperatures in January of 60 degrees Fahrenheit. There were some 30 or so shops, including a tobacconist who sold smuggled navy tobacco at a very cheap price. There was a weekly market, which began unpunctually, and there was no sign of open hostility, rather the reverse.

Our task was to assist the Royal Irish Constabulary and we had six lorries for troop transport. The help we gave to the police took the form of sweeps of an area chosen by the RIC and two companies would be lorried out to the select spot and circle an area of some square miles. On a signal all would gradually close in with police officers questioning all the inhabitants and making some arrests of able-bodied males about whom they probably had information. Some would be arrested and taken to one of the prisons. We also provided a guard for the country home of Field-Marshal Lord French nearby. He was then the Viceroy of Ireland. Our time there was void of excitement and we were confined to barracks except when on duty. We were not to stay there for long. The prisons had become over full and the government decided on internment without trial. Internment Camps had to be provided and we were sent to the Curragh to establish a camp to hold 2,000 internees. I thought that this was a happy choice, as our senior officers who had been ‘inside' in Germany should know the ropes of guard duties and the wiles of prisoners trying to escape. On arrival, we found an extensive hutted camp established during the war and round it we had, with the help of the Royal Engineers, to surround the camp with two ten-feet wire fences with watch towers at each corner.

Aid to the civil power is one of the most unpleasant tasks which can fall to soldiers and our colonel, Arthur Peebles, was most alert to the pitfalls for the military. If anything went wrong, it would be blamed on the soldiers and officers as it is now in Ulster. Colonel Peebles wanted to avoid being in command of the regiment and at the same time be in charge of the internment camp. He induced GHQ to appoint a camp commandant for the internment camp, while the regiment only provided the guards required for it. He appointed me to be staff captain to the commandant and this brought me in a very welcome extra five shillings a day.

The internment camp was soon filled to capacity and amongst the internees were Desmond Fitzgerald, who became the Eire Minister for Foreign Affairs when Southern Ireland became independent, and Sean Lemass, who later became Prime Minister. I liked Fitzgerald and spent many an hour in evenings walking round the cage with him. He poured out the woes of Ireland going back to the days of Cromwell and the Battle of Boyne in 1690 when William III defeated the local chieftain. All I could do in response was to apologise for their action. However, we did talk of other things.

Colonel Peebles was correct in his forecast of troubles. The internees raised all sorts of trivial grievances and one subject which I recollect was a complaint about their parcels being opened and cakes cut. The reason was that the camp staff had found knives, files, letters and money in them. They dug a tunnel, which we did not detect and about 30 escaped one night. We foiled one effort in which an internee hid himself up to the neck in a swill cart and was found by the gate sentry who opened the cover. Other used to try and hide in the latrines or in the exercise cage, so that they would not be in their huts at nightfall and could attempt to cut a passage through the barbed wire fence. We were free of trouble for some time, but we later had a series of disappearances of one internee at a time. I gave much thought to discovering the method. One afternoon, I went down to the guard room at the main gate to see the officer on duty for an idle chat. I was looking out of the window of the guard room still half-thinking about the escapes and saw a working party of Royal Engineers marching out. There were about twenty soldiers under a sergeant. Working parties were almost permanently in the camp patching roofs of the huts which leaked or other maintenance jobs. I went out to the gate as the party was passing through and ordered the sergeant to march them into an empty hut on the opposite side of the road. I followed and was then at a loss to know why on earth I had given such an order. However, inspiration made me tell the sergeant to ground tools and when this was done, I said: ‘I am going to search you.' This I did, making each man turn out all his pockets. From the pockets of the sergeant and four men I found letters from internees addressed locally telling the recipient to give the bearer five pounds for which he would bring into the cage a uniform in which the internee would dress and march out with a working party. They were tried by court martial and sentenced to five years imprisonment.

Thinking over our time on the Curragh, I have realised how frightfully ‘green' we were. We never even thought of putting agents in the cage through whom we could have hoped to get some information. However, we did play one trick. On several occasions, the patrol which went round the inside of the cage after lights out had found an internee hiding in the exercise cage, either in a latrine or against a pole carrying an electric light, which had been rather sketchily encased in a sheet of corrugated iron. I took six of my brother officers into the cage one night about 10pm, we went into the exercise cage and after some minutes I fired my revolver into the ground and one of the officers then ‘groaning' as if in agony. We immediately called stretcher bearers as in the trenches in France. These arrived – they were Suffolk soldiers – and an officer got onto the stretcher and we threw a blanket to cover him completely and he was carried out through the main gate of the camp. Of course, the internees heard the shots and were all looking out of the windows and the padre, also an internee, demanded his right to give last unction. The internees were quite convinced that one of their number had been killed or wounded. We had a list of the internees, but the hut leaders were supposed to keep lists of those sleeping in their huts. They were lax about keeping their lists up to date and as people sometimes moved from one hut to another, they were unable to discover who had been killed or wounded. We foxed them and had no more cases of hiding before lights out.

The ‘disturbances' were far less disruptive of life than they have been during the current strife. In the 1920s the Sinn Féiners had no bombs and they did not have the support of Russia and Libya as they have today: and I have no recollection of fundraising in the USA. By 1922, the Royal Irish Constabulary and the Army obtained the upper hand, but the British Government under Lloyd-George became tired of the whole affair and decided to send for de Valera, the then leader of Sinn Féin. A call from GHQ while we were at dinner one night told me to release Desmond Fitzgerald and take him immediately by car to his house in Merrion Square in Dublin. As we had not been allowed to move without armed escort, I asked a brother officer to accompany me and we set off, each with loaded revolvers in our pockets. We arrived in Merrion Square about 10 pm to find a welcoming party gathered to greet Fitzgerald. Many of the Sinn Féin leaders were there, including Michael Collins, on whose head up to that moment there had been a price of £20,000. We were invited in and a good time was had by all. The agreement to divide Ireland was reached quickly and orders were issued for the release of all internees. As all money was taken off the internees when they arrived in camp and replaced by camp tokens, we had to return the money. Some internees were so anxious to get away that they went without their money and to trace some of them I got into touch with Fitzgerald in the effort to find addresses to which the money owed could be sent. In a series of meetings with him, he was very frank in expounding the difficulties of the takeover and also of the differences in the Sinn Féin Party. These difficulties came to a head in the civil war, which occurred soon after partition and in them, their hero, Michael Collins, was killed. One matter of interest which he asked me to put to Dublin Castle – the seat of the now disappearing British Government in Ireland – was a suggestion that Southern Ireland should take over the six Irish regiments of the British Army which were recruited in Ireland with drums and colours complete.

The Curragh Internment Camp closed, but, strangely enough, it was resuscitated by the government of Southern Ireland and used for internment in their civil war. A news item in the
Daily Telegraph
in 1973 announced that the Curragh internment camp was still in use.

Trouble then flared up in Ulster and we were sent to Belfast where we were billeted in the Usher Hall – officers on the orchestra platform and the other ranks in the auditorium. The centre of trouble was the Falls Road area as it is today, and besides bullets, there was a good deal of bottle throwing between the two religious groups. Our task was to patrol this area with a platoon at a time. We had no casualties, but assisted the Royal Ulster Constabulary, as that part of the Royal Irish Constabulary was termed, in searching houses for wanted persons. King George V opened the Northern Ireland Parliament, and hostile action ceased for a time. We were moved to Ballykinlar – a war-time hutted camp. I had received an anonymous letter while we were in Belfast headed by a skull and cross bones and with the words ‘There is not room for you and me in this world and one of us is going to leave it'. Colonel Peebles decided it was best if I got out of the country and sent me on a three-months' course at the Machine Gun School, then located in Seaford, where I attempted to learn to play golf, less successfully, I regret to say, than I learned about machine guns. After the course finished, I returned to Ballykinlar where we were very isolated. In spite of our isolation we kept the troops interested, by lots of games and athletics and also by amateur theatricals. It was my first essay in this field and we produced Conan Doyles'
Speckled Band
.It went down well with the regiment and we then performed it in the Hippodrome in Belfast for the benefit of the British Legion.