David Waddington Memoirs (5 page)

The Suez Canal was not a pretty sight, the banks being lined by masturbating Egyptians – a very exhausting form of political protest which I have never seen repeated. An enterprising subaltern dressed up as an Arabian potentate entered the ship’s dining room. He was announced gravely as the Ding of Dong, and proceeded to the Captain’s table. There the Captain politely gave up his chair
to him and stood blushing like a bride while The Ding (otherwise 2nd Lt Piers Dennis) ate his turkey.

Next stop was Aden where we had another day’s shore leave. I took a fancy to a dinner service, bought it and arranged for it to be sent to my parents as a present. It was not a good move and led to my father complaining bitterly that he had to pay a large sum as demurrage because of the consignment languishing for some weeks on Liverpool Docks. When I arrived home a year and a half later I found the dinner service unused, at the back of a bedroom cupboard, and a few years after that it was given back to me as a wedding present.

On Christmas Day 1951 we arrived at Colombo and I met my first snake charmer sitting on his haunches outside the Galle Face Hotel. On New Year’s Day 1952 we sailed into Singapore harbour through a veil of rain but, before docking, ran in to a bit of trouble. OC Troops had ordered all baggage to be brought up on deck and put on the port side, but this led to the ship leaning over in that direction and being unable to get alongside in an orderly fashion. An exasperated captain then countermanded the order and after half the baggage had been moved to starboard we tied up and went ashore. A few hours later, after being issued with a side-arm, I was on a train bound for Ipoh in Penang.

We were in Malaya to take part in a fight against a communist insurgency which had begun not long after Britain, the colonial power, had arrived back on the Malayan peninsular at the end of the War. A plan had been laid for Malaya to be retaken by ground forces in 1945, but the collapse of Japan after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atom bombs meant that the British did not re-enter Malaya as conquerors but as representatives of a recently defeated colonial power. Many Chinese (the Chinese
forming
a large minority of the population) had fought the Japanese throughout the War from their jungle hide-outs and soon there
was a communist-led movement, the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) determined to seize power from the British by force. By 1950 there were about 40,000 British and Commonwealth troops in the country, and we had come to join them. The British Army had enough on its hands with war in Korea so there was a fair chance of anyone being called up in 1951 seeing some action. I felt extremely lucky: I had already seen parts of the world which I had never in my wildest dreams thought I would be able to visit. No one then thought that world travel would soon be commonplace, and I felt truly privileged to be visiting countries which I thought few others would ever have a chance of seeing.

The time came for the train to leave Singapore and we set off into the darkness with armed guards on the platform at the end of each carriage, peering into the surrounding jungle and longing for a burst of fire as the prelude to a pitched battle and the winning of much glory. But on this occasion, as on so many others, the
opportunity
for glory never came: and at two in the morning we arrived at Ipoh. Transport was there to take us to the 12th Royal Lancers RHQ. There I was taken to a room in a straw-roofed hut and as I arrived a young subaltern sat up in one of the two beds and said: ‘I am David Duckworth and you’re the fellow who stuck a compass in my sister’s bottom at Sunnybank School, Burnley!’ I had
forgotten
the incident but at the time it had led to fearsome punishment, and it ought to have stuck in my mind as the point of the compass had stuck in Rachel’s posterior. She was a nice girl and at the time I felt she should have taken my attentions as a compliment.

I did not stay in Ipoh long – but long enough to learn
something
of the eccentricities of the Commanding Officer, Lt Col Horsburgh-Porter. On mess nights, subalterns were required to perform feats of bravery like jumping off the first floor terrace and grasping the trunk of a nearby tree to slow their descent to the ground. In calmer moments we were set the almost impossible task
of dislodging lizards from the ceiling of the mess with the end of a long brush and catching them in free fall. The regiment had arrived in Singapore in August 1951 and consisted of twenty-five officers and 470 other ranks, 35 per cent of whom were National Servicemen conscripted for two years. It was deployed in three principal
locations
– Ipoh, Taiping and Raub, with a detached troop at Kuantan and another up in the Cameron Highlands.

After a week or two I set off to join ‘B’ Squadron at Raub and there served happily under the squadron leader, John Clark Kennedy. The officers were housed in the government Rest House, and a fellow subaltern was John Lang, later Dean of Lichfield. Then I went to Kuantan for a few weeks. It was off Kuantan that the
Prince of Wales
and the
Repulse
had been sunk on 10 December 1941 and it was on the padang at Kuantan that in February 1952 we paraded for the funeral of King George VI. The Sultan’s palace was at Pekan and we were summoned there one night to hear his complaint that his polo ponies had been blown up by a landmine on the road to Ipoh.

Back in Raub one of my jobs was taking consignments of gold from the local mine to Kuala Lumpur. The officer in command travelled in a Daimler armoured car with a driver and gunner and we were accompanied by an armoured personnel carrier with a driver and about half a dozen men. Once, on arriving in KL, we drove into the car park adjoining the NAAFI and, with a breezy ‘carry on sergeant’, I nipped across the road to the railway station to have a drink. When I returned I found the whole troop under arrest. They had abandoned the vehicles without a guard and had themselves gone for a drink. I felt entirely responsible and on returning to HQ made this absolutely plain to the commanding officer. Not for the first time, I found that the army mind did not work quite as mine. I was told in no uncertain terms that the day for my martyrdom had not arrived and that in the colonel’s view
I was in no way to blame for what had occurred. If a sergeant was told to carry on, that meant that or, rather, it meant the opposite of that. He had not to carry on. He had to stop carrying on and do his duty even if that meant denying himself a drink, etc., etc.

‘B’ Squadron then returned to Ipoh and the routine was dawn patrols along the roads surrounding the town. A few days later Julian Brougham was orderly officer and said he didn’t feel well. I said I’d relieve him if he didn’t improve and an hour or two later when I went to see him he was so obviously ill I called the doctor. The next day he died of polio. A short time later I was on guard duty and had to wake a fellow officer to tell him that his wife had also died from the same cause.

In October 1951 Sir Henry, the High Commissioner, had been murdered by communist bandits, and Sir Gerald Templar had been sent out to replace him. Already, vigorous policies launched before his arrival were beginning to bear fruit. Isolated villages were being shut down and the inhabitants moved lock, stock and barrel to newly built villages surrounded with barbed wire and watch towers. In this way the terrorists were prevented from preying on the villagers and demanding food and other supplies from them. But descending on a village at dawn and herding terrified men and sobbing women and children into lorries with only what they could carry was not a pleasant task.

The new High Commissioner soon began to make his mark. He set about seeing that the police were reorganised and retrained, took steps to see that intelligence was properly coordinated and that the information services were smartened up so that people knew what was going on and why. Gerald Templar was very popular with all who had dealings with him. He was particularly nice to junior officers, full of enquiries about their families, careers and
ambitions
. On one occasion I was responsible for providing an escort for him and, over a meal in a village hall, engaged him in conversation.
He was limping badly and I asked him at what stage in the War he had been wounded. ‘Wounded?’ he said. ‘I was getting a grand piano out of the mess at Naples ready for our move up to Rome when someone dropped it on my foot.’

One of my troopers was of hideous aspect with broken and blackened teeth. And I discovered why. We stopped at a roadside café for a drink and rather than wait for the man who brought the beer to produce a bottle opener, he struck the bottle forcibly against his bottom teeth and the beer foamed forth.

My next posting was to the Cameron Highlands to command an enlarged troop responsible for escorting food lorries up and down the hill. My troop sergeant, Sergeant Greetham, had won a Military Medal in North Africa during the War, and no one could have had finer support. The village or township of the Cameron Highlands was spread out around a golf course and two rather fine hotels, and at 5,000 feet the temperature was superb. From one end of the village a road wound its way down to the plain. At the other end there was a police post at a gap in the wire surrounding most of the
settlement
and the dirt road then meandered away across the plateau for thirty miles or so past various tea plantations managed by intrepid Europeans in almost permanent fear of their lives. Some had gone native and had Malay or Chinese girlfriends or wives. Most seemed to get their sustenance from gin or, in one case, cherry brandy.

One particularly demoralised planter invited us to stay for the night and he laid on a concert for our benefit. Some very beautiful girls danced for us – or rather they looked like very beautiful girls but at the end of the show turned out to be men. We were enjoying the entertainment when a volley of shots rang out and the place was plunged into darkness. The manager ordered one of the Malays to shin up a pole to see what was wrong with the lights, which were strung along the top of the wire surrounding the buildings. When he demurred the manager drew his pistol and the Malay went up
the pole at great speed. I led a few soldiers out of the gate in the wire and prowled around for a while in the pitch dark, but not surprisingly did not come across a single bandit.

The journeys up and down the hill were very monotonous but we got a little innocent enjoyment at the half way mark where there was a Sakai camp in which both men and women were almost entirely naked. Down at the bottom was Kuala Kubu Bharu (or KKB), and there we sweated in steamy heat for a few hours before setting off back up the hill in late afternoon. As we climbed it got colder and colder and it usually began to rain, so we were glad of a hot bath by the time we got home.

Back again in Ipoh we were sent off every now and then to lay ambushes in the jungle in the hope of bagging a communist courier carrying dispatches from one bandit unit to another. We were never successful. With the jungle so thick and visibility so slight I thought that I was far more likely to hit a running terrorist with a blast from a shotgun than with a bullet from a rifle so I used to take out my twelve-bore. One night in the pitch dark I set an ambush, taking each man to the spot where I wanted him to lie, and at first light found myself looking down the muzzle of a bren gun. Sometimes, Borneo head hunters acted as guides for us and, through an interpreter, I asked one why we were so unsuccessful in our efforts to bag terrorists. The man answered that the
terrorists
could smell us a mile away, and indeed we did smell, having covered ourselves with all sorts of unguents designed to protect us from mosquitoes, leeches and other beastly things which inhabit the jungle.

I was determined to have at least one success over the terrorists and devised a brilliant plan. A track ran off into the jungle a few miles from Ipoh and I decided that if I could get my armoured car and APC (armoured personnel carrier) down the track for a few miles we could strike out from a secure base and perhaps score a notable victory.
Disaster soon followed. The APC slithered off the track and
overturned
, the wireless would not work, nightfall was upon us and there was nothing for it but to sit tight until dawn. And then in the middle of the night some shots rang out. The only trouble was that it was impossible to see two feet in front of one’s nose and extremely
difficult
to know from which direction the shots had come. So we did precisely nothing. The next morning a party walked all the way to the main road and had to ring regimental HQ from a police station. We were then rescued in the most ignominious fashion – a number of surly soldiers having had to walk five miles with a very heavy winch in order to haul up the APC from where it had landed.

A few days later I went on another expedition and got completely lost. I reasoned that if we hit the railway line we had only to walk up it or down and we were bound to reach civilisation – so I asked my sergeant which direction was the railway line. Without any
hesitation
he pointed to the left. I asked the Corporal and he with equal confidence pointed to the right. I decided to go straight ahead and soon the line came in to view.

All good things come to an end. I sold my typewriter to pay my last mess bill and caught the train for Singapore. I made my way to the troop ship MV
Georgic
and offered my pistol to those on duty at an army post on the dock. They flatly refused to take it. I threatened to throw it in the dock and they said that if I did I would be court-martialled. I said I would take it on board ship with me and hand it in at Liverpool. I was told that that was prohibited. In desperation I hailed a taxi and asked the driver to take me to Changi, then British HQ on the island. Today a motorway runs from Changi Airport to the city centre. Then there was only a narrow country road and the journey seemed endless. But eventually I arrived at the Guard Room, handed in the pistol, got a signature for it and sped back to Singapore just in time to catch the ship.

Three weeks later we arrived in Liverpool. In the eighties I went as a minister to see a youth project at the mouth of the Mersey and there was not a ship to be seen, but in 1952 we were in a mass of shipping as we waited for the tide to turn. Eventually we entered the river and then began to come alongside, and on the quay I could see my parents and my sister Zoe. The next morning I
disembarked
and, after a quick word with the family, boarded a train bound for the Royal Armoured Corps headquarters, Bovington. I had 180 men under my charge, all due to leave the army, most with homes in the north of England and all fed up at not being allowed to go home at once. I sensed the danger and resolved to keep a very careful check on numbers. On leaving Crewe my 180 had shrunk to ninety-eight, Stafford left me with seventy. Before we arrived at Euston I gave my depleted band a strong lecture on the dire consequences which would follow if they did not board the train at Waterloo in three hours time, but at Waterloo my band of followers had dwindled to forty-three and when we got to Wool, the station for Bovington, there were only seventeen left.