In our March issue this year, we carried a feature about a Chesterfield couple, Adrian and Caroline Close, who climbed the highest mountain in Africa, Killimanjaro – and it sparked a reaction from 90-year-old reader Brian Dick, who remembers climbing it in 1954 on his 20th birthday with some national service colleagues. Here Brian reminisces about his national service days.
IT was true to say that national service didn’t get in the way education-wise as I’d left a London grammar school at the age of 14 – the austere headmaster gave my dad quite a roasting, apparently – and was in an office job in Islington when I was invited to a national service interview – bend over, cough, etc – and learnt that it was either two years in the army or three in the RAF. Luckily, I think, I chose the boys in blue as in the army I could have ended up in the Korean War, this being 1952.
So, Cardington in Bedfordshire first stop and then square bashing in West Kirby, near Liverpool, at the No.5 School of Recruit Training. We had to fill in a form asking did one want to serve at home or overseas. I said ‘at home’ so, of course, I ended up going overseas!
Next was trade training as a teleprinter operator at Compton Bassett in Wiltshire. Every Wednesday was a sports afternoon and I enjoyed the runs. Training came to an end and think I had a fair turn of speed on the keyboard; and I was posted to Moreton Hall in Lincolnshire where we were housed in nissan huts, and the first of many years of shift work (up until I retired in 1999, actually!). I even had to work on Coronation Day in 1953!
My overseas adventures started with a flight to Fayid in Egypt, via Malta. Assembly there was at El Hamra – sand as far as the eye could see – before being moved to Abyad, just a bit further south alongside the Great Bitter Lake, which is near the Suez Canal. We were living in tents before moving in to huts, complete with ‘mossie nets’ and bed bugs! The loos were a line of buckets – each sectioned off – and every day the yell went up that the ‘sh*t run’ was on its way; a tanker with, sitting on top a ‘local’, waiting for the sometimes brimming bucket to be handed up from down below to be emptied into the tank. Obviously, some of it ran down the sides and one got a real whiff!
On guard duty on my own during the night I can, even now, hear the sounds of donkeys braying in one of the villages beyond the wire.
We had to go over to the far corner every so often and switch the searchlight on to sweep the area, though with the cranking noise it made, any raider would have been known what was coming! I dread to think how I’d have reacted had I been challenged at all!
After around four months, I said goodbye to all that sand and was posted to Eastleigh, a few miles from Nairobi at the height of the Mau Mau troubles. Here we lived in two-storey, stone-built blocks. There was a swimming pool which received frequent off-duty visits and from arriving pearly white I soon gained a good tan. It reminds me that the water in the pool was the same colour quite often; but one was okay keeping one’s head above water!
“Looking up at the racks with 1,000lb and 500lb bombs hanging there.”
Guard duty here was not as bad as Abyad – we had to patrol the Lincolns, which superceded the Lancasters – looking up at the racks with 1,000lb and 500lb bombs hanging there. Had a trip in one once, and also in a twin-seat Harvard.
We were sent to Kenya as a new signals centre was being built at Eastleigh, a vast hall with four rows of benches long enough to take at least 20 positions each. Up country, a vast building housed a transmitting station at Ruiru and a much smaller receiving station at Kahawa. Whilst in Kenya, I was in hospital for a circumcision, though I certainly hadn’t been frequenting Maria’s, the brothel not far up the road from the main gate! We also had a cookhouse strike in protest at the poor food on offer, but it folded after several days.
There were a few ‘sweeps’ to gather in Mau Mau fighters. On the biggest sweep, a chap called Pepper was unloading his rifle – in the NAAFI! – and didn’t realise there was one up the spout and shot Blondie Bourton in the stomach, a wound from which he died. Never did find our what happened to LAC Pepper, but it couldn’t have been good!
Had a few car journeys ‘up country’ in the Rift Valley – one of the lads had a car – to Lake Elementitia, now called Nakuru Lake, but the hundreds of flamingos there are often shown on nature TV programmes.
As for cars, three of us bought an Opel from someone – think I financed it more than the other two as I had more in my Post Office book – but it all went pear-shaped when one day driving back from town, the steering jammed going downhill and round a bend to cross a river. Luckily we rammed the stone parapet rather than end up in the river; but as the driver only had a UK licence, so we had to hurriedly call a chap from camp – no idea how we did that as there were no mobiles in those days! – who said he’d been driving. The car was a write-off, though, and I lost a few quid!
Eventually, my national service was over, so I flew back to Blighty in a Hermes, landing at Blackbushe in Hampshire in the early hours – the country smell was very welcome!
After that, I worked for Cable & Wireless at the time of overseas telegrams in the late Fifties; and in 1960 I joined the new national news agency, The Press Association, in Fleet Street until redundancy in 1987. I had a few jobs before retirement in 1999, including at the BBC and News International, both copytaking duties, which was quite interesting.
I also drove blood bags to London hospitals – blue light at times – for the Brentwood Blood Bank. I also set out cones for roadworks, mainly on roads like the A127 or M11, as I knew someone who ran a traffic management company.
While living in Essex, two friends were ex-teachers from Chesterfield who moved back up north on retirement, and one day, on a visit to the town, my wife and I picked up a property paper and got the idea about moving north as walking in Essex was not that good – whereas, of course, we could have the Peak District on our doorstep. So we moved to Chesterfield in September 1999 and have loved it!