SERGEANT PAPARAZZI O H M S

By
TERRY BUCHANAN

MANY National Servicemen feel they were part of a forgotten army, their history to be extracted by academics from dusty official records rather than from the vanishing voices of experience.

You Son and the Army, together with a letter, explained the reason for National Service and reassured parents that all would be well for their conscripted son.

Chronicles of this period emerge as bawdy, frivolous novels and farcical plays that only torment the facts by their fiction. Young men - teenaged young men - died during their National Service. Will this pulp fiction be their only epitaph?

My own National Service basic training was not much different from any other conscripted soldier. At the passing out parade the commanding officer told us that we were a shambles; that most of us would get foreign postings and some us would not return. I was glad my mum didn't hear that one.

We all marched dejectedly away from the parade ground, leaving a carpet of highly polished bayonets littered across its surface.

Just a couple of days before, I had had my service trade interview. The young subaltern, public-schooled and as much a 'sprog' as myself, peered at me, tortoise-like, from his ill-fitting uniform, a size 14 neck emerging from a size 17 collar.

'I have looked at your education and background and we can offer you instant promotion in the service trade of bomb disposal,' he declared.

Bloody hell, I thought, I don't think my mum would like me messing about with bombs.

'Is that compulsory or voluntary, sir?' I asked.

'Voluntary. The alternative is as a photographer.'

'Yes please, Sir. That's the one,' I replied.

Four of us were duly dispatched to a secret establishment in London for six weeks' training, which consisted of processing covert photographs and being sent on missions to take unobserved photographs of people wandering the streets of the capital. Oh no, I thought, out of the bomb disposal frying pan into the spy photographer fire!

Once trained, we were sent to a trade-training battalion to await posting, which, in my case, was as an Army Public Relations' photographer in Cyprus. This was at the end of the Suez Crisis and just as the EOKA campaign was in its stride.

Because the aeroplane had problems, it took 13 hours to fly from Southend to Nicosia - my first ever flight. As we landed, sparks and flames shot out of one of the engines, an indication, I thought, of the dangers that were yet to come - a sort of rite of passage for this East End lad who had never been further from home than Bournemouth.

A passenger aircraft about to land at Nicosia Airport flies over the Ledra Palace swimming pool, watched by Army officers of the Security Forces.

Close call

WITHIN a matter of weeks, my first test would come. Corporal Ken Burtt and I were in a shop in Old Nicosia. I was as green as grass but, fortunately for me, he was as sharp as a knife.

'Don't turn around,' he said. 'There's a lad just outside showing a pistol to some other boys.'

Of course, I turned and saw a group concentrating on an ivory-handled gun.

'When I say run,' said Ken, 'follow me and run like mad.'

And we did, like mad, pausing for breath in a photographer's studio shop's reception area. Fortunately for us, this was deserted, because around the walls were hung hundreds of pictures of young EOKA men holding submachine guns.

Nicosia's Police HQ, guarded and sandbagged against EOKA attacks.

We fled again to the Nicosia Police Station. As we reported our experience, pandemonium broke out. Two young military men had been shot in the back and killed while in the area where we had just been. It was an untimely first step into the savage ways of men who use violence when seeking to right what they see as wrong. That incident set the stage for the rest of my time in Cyprus.

(I am still in contact with Ken Burtt, but his time now is spent playing golf in Florida. He still ranks high in my estimation.)

'Eccentric' boss

ONE of my roles was to photograph funerals for the families of the deceased and for the Imperial War Graves Commission. Young men, many of them the same age as me, were being interred in a foreign soil. Some of them I had met, spoken to and even photographed as they had gone about their daily work.

Detachment Number One, Army Public Relations, Nicosia District, comprised a small group of photographers and journalists under the command of a dyed-in-the-wool veteran, Major Stubbs. His idea of rest and recuperation was to join his officer pals in scout car desert reconnaissance in the Oman desert. To us lads, he was a fascinating eccentric.

Major Stubbs studies the terrain for terrorist activity.

I once followed him up the steps of the Ledra Palace Hotel while his Luger pistol bounced up the steps behind him on the end of its lanyard. Another time. I gave him a good ticking off when he tore up some photographic prints that our printer, Pete Hawke, had spent all day producing in the corrugated iron oven of a darkroom under a blazing sun. He was stunned into silence, then apologised profusely.

Peter Hawke was a gymnast as well as being the Army PR expert photographic printer.

The Major got his own back, though, when, at five minutes' notice, I was ordered to go into the Troodos Mountains to join the search for Colonel Grivas, EOKA's leader.

The problem was, I had just put my cotton uniform into a bowl of water with half a packet of soapsuds. On my return 10 days later, a staff sergeant was waiting for me with fury on his face.

'What do you call that?' he demanded. My bowl of dhobi had grown into a beautiful and enormous fungus - impressive, but unhygienic.

Much of the Army activity was 'foot slogging'. Protective clothing was unheard of and soft hats were given to keep the sun away from the soldiers' heads.

Most patrols inevitably quizzed the male villagers when EOKA slogans were spotted, as they usually were.

The EOKA threat was 'the real thing'.

Prime Minister's visit

BECAUSE I dealt on a daily basis with the most senior of Army ranks, there was no trepidation when I encountered authority; usually, they called me by my first name. On one assignment, however, I was dispatched under a cloak of secrecy. A very friendly chap who was full of natural conversation met me.

'Will you get some good pictures?' he asked.

'Yes, sir,' I replied, not knowing if there were some protocol in how you address a Prime Minister.

(EDITOR'S NOTE: Buchanan had been assigned to photograph Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who had arrived suddenly for a one-day visit to Cyprus, where he wanted to meet the officers and of men of 1 Grenadier Guards, his former regiment. His helicopter landed on a football pitch and out stepped the Prime Minister and the Governor, Sir Hugh Foot, to be greeted by Lieutenant Colonel P C Britten, the Commanding Officer, with whose father Macmillan had served in World War I. Buchanan snapped away, using his Rolleiflex camera.)

Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was met by Brig J Read when he arrived at Vitalli to meet 1 Gren. Gds. in August 1958.

At the end of his visit to the Grenadiers, we stood alongside his helicopter waiting for him to leave. As I was preparing to take the final photograph, to my left - and in line with me - were a general, a brigadier, and a colonel.

Harold Macmillan leaves the Grenadier Guards with Sir Hugh Foot, the Governor of Cyprus.

Harold Macmillan cast his eye over the line, pondered, then strode directly towards me and shook my hand. The roar that went up from the surrounding troops was deafening; the look that came down from the adjacent officers was intimidating. The three officers had failed to recognise the immediate raising of morale that this simple gesture had made to the surrounding squaddies.

Memories galore

MY PERIOD as a National Service soldier gave me many experiences and stories to tell. Sometimes, I felt like a character in an Evelyn Waugh novel, especially on the day that his son, Auberon, managed to get himself accidentally wounded while climbing out of his scout car.

Private Aldridge of the Royal Berkshire Regiment operates his radio to report progress during a beach exercise in Cyprus.

During the Cyprus Emergency, the terrorist threat was an ever-present danger to the British. Male or female, civilian or military, all were potential targets. Nobody went out unarmed, not even for a day off duty on the beach.

But in the countryside, life went on much as usual as it had done from ancient times. This scene could have come from the Biblical account of the Nativity.

Broken promise

ONE terrible event, however, is burnt in my memory. I do not regret its scarring, but I do regret the promise I made, but was unable to keep.

One Saturday morning, I was called into our compound to photograph two Royal Military Policemen, who had arrived with gleaming motorcycles. These types of pictures were for 'local boy' stories, hundreds of which we produced with captions for circulation to soldiers' local newspapers back home.

We spent a great day together - with lots of jokes, fun and laughter and we produced a great set of happy photographs. The military policemen's last request to me was for a set of prints to be sent to their mothers.

I processed the films and printed the pictures on the Sunday. On the Monday I was sorting them ready to be sent off for distribution when another soldier appeared and told me to destroy them.

'Why?' 1 asked.

'They're dead,' he replied. 1 was shocked to the point of despair.

(EDITOR'S NOTE: The two RMPs were Lance-Corporals P F Turvey and W N Cameron of 51 Independent Brigade Provost Unit. They were shot dead in a carefully planned ambush in Famagusta on Sunday 4 May 1958,)

Lance-Corporals Cameron and Turvey were buried with full military honors in Wayne's Keep Military Cemetery.

I DID not destroy the photographs; 1 was determined to keep my promise to them for their mothers. I hid the pictures in my kit, but on my final departure from Cyprus, the duty officer at the airport confiscated them.

My promise was broken and I despised that man. The photographs' rightful place was with the families of those young men, as a reminder that their final full day of life was a joyful one filled with smiles and laughter, and that their final words to me were 'My mum'.

Where are they now those young boy-men?
They stood for life as it was then,
But died amidst their fellow men.
Targets for anger, they knew not why.
Their bodies rest 'neath deep blue sky,
Their happy spirits on warm breeze fly.
But where are they now those mothers' men?
Shall we ever see their like again?

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