Notes From a Small Military - I Commanded and Fought with 2 Para at the Battle of Goose Green. I was Head of Counter Terrorism for the M.O.D. This is my True Story. Major-General Chip Chapman
was made up a bunch of bastards – but an increasingly professional bunch of bastards.
We had Hussars and Lancers (including ‘vulgar fractions’ with regiments such as the 16/5th Lancers), and KINGS and QUEENS. A notice board in Gibraltar once told me to be warned as ‘4 QUEENS were exercising’ which seemed a more appropriate sign for a gay bar in the Vauxhall district of London, more particularly the famous Royal Vauxhall Tavern (or RVT), rather than as a military unit going about its tactical business.
Lest you think that there is anything untoward and prejudiced in my picture of the RVT, let me say that I lived in Vauxhall for three years. I walked to work, and on my way to the Ministry of Defence my route took me past the RVT, and then via either the Queen Ann Pub (reputedly the oldest strip joint in London), or the Headquarters of MI6 (or to give its official name, the Secret Intelligence Service). In my career, I only ever visited one of these three locations. It should be obvious which of these three it was, but let me say that both the RVT and the Queen Ann have security on a par with trying to get in to Sir Terry Farrell’s architecturally interesting Embankment Headquarters of the SIS. For the sake of both the Bond franchise and reasons of national security, I assume that MI6 have a refined business continuity plan, for the SIS Headquarters was blown to pieces in Skyfall.
It was a male and testosterone-dominated army, very different from the very professional inclusive army of today. There would have been no noted contradiction between the Soldier News front-page headline of 12 December 1980 that proclaimed ‘GIRLS TO GET GUNS’ following the announcement in the House of Commons by Francis Pym, the Secretary of State for Defence, with that newspaper’s ‘Soldier Bird’ colour photo portrait of a Miss Lyn McCarthy. Soldier Bird really was the title of the pin-up page. Although, as this was Christmas, the 1981 calendar included an added untitled double-spread bonus of another lady without pyjamas a few pages later. Miss McCarthy was currently appearing in Wot! No Pyjamas? at the Whitehall Theatre. I can confirm that she was not wearing any pyjamas. I do not believe you will see this theatrical tour de force from the artistic stable of the noted Soho impresario, Paul Raymond, revived any time soon. Nor did we know much about the role of women in the army. One exam howler on this subject included the statement: ‘Women were used extensively during the Second World War; some were even shipped over to France.’
I came from a family with little military background. There were no famous generals or soldiers in our lineage. If I had featured in the TV series Who Do You Think You Are? the bland answer of generations of Cornish agricultural labourers would not have been too far from the truth – and that was the successful side of the family.
Like most British families, we had suffered from death in the First World War: a great-uncle had been killed at the Battle of Loos as a young private in the 8th (Service) Battalion of the Devons, but that was about the limit of the family military prowess. Great-Uncle Albert Stone was one of the 1,105,5531 British military casualties in the 20th century, when a military death occurred at an average of one every 48 minutes.
The Second World War passed us by, bar the death of my grandmother who was killed in a Luftwaffe raid on Plymouth during the night of 22/23 April 1941 as she harboured in a communal air raid shelter that took a direct hit: the worst single civilian tragedy of the war in Plymouth. She was also a part of an increasing trend in the 20th century and beyond – that the brutality of war now reached civilians in a way that it had not in previous centuries. More civilians would die with each war (particularly in non-state conflicts such as civil wars) and the consequences of war would touch far more people, and in a wider arc, as the century unfolded. My father was an orphan at the age of five.
The catalyst for my application to join the army had been no more profound than watching the BBC current affairs programme Panorama about Sandhurst. I thought all the assault courses and running around looked like quite good fun: I could do that. Going to Sandhurst might at least solidify my future apolitical leanings. At university, one flirted with everything. I even flirted with anarchy: I attended an anarchist meeting. The assembled anarchists waited outside a locked room. They could not gain entry. The hall porter came along and inquired as to who was in charge.
‘No one, we’re anarchists,’ came the reply.
‘Well, someone has to say they are in charge and sign the book,’ the hall porter grumpily replied.
Suitably miffed, and in contravention of the universal principles of anarchy, an individual fulfilled the leadership burden and duly signed. For the next two hours, our nascent anarchists discussed how to arrange the chairs in a non-hierarchical fashion. My flirtation with anarchy was over. Not that this was serious. Student politics were absurd. At a student University General Meeting, the International Socialists proposed a motion to send a coach to attend an annual protest march against Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland. I put an amendment to their motion to quash it. Thankfully for us all, the entire apathy of the student body meant that all came to naught, for the meeting was not quorate.
My Sandhurst training course was entitled Post-University Course Number 9, shortened to POSUC 9. This was accommodated in and run out of Victory College. Every officer cadet in the college was a university graduate and all were deemed to be already semi-competent, due to their service at a University Officer Training Corps (Liverpool OTC in my case). We were only to complete 17 weeks training at Sandhurst before we graduated. Our former OTC service meant that we were seemingly competent in the art of being able to dress ourselves and to strip and assemble a self-loading rifle (SLR). On completing the course I won a prize of sorts, being presented with the ‘Show Clean’ book by Colour Sergeant Scott of the Welsh Guards. If there was any dirt or crease out of line, this was recorded in the book every morning. It was this book that was paraded at 2200 hours, the misdemeanour was read out and it was checked whether the error had been corrected. My copy of the book was inscribed that it had been given to me for my inability to ‘appear neat, clean and tidy in any form of dress whatsoever’. A ‘show clean’ would be determined at the morning ritual of being inspected and being found wanting. In particular I could not bull (army parlance for polish vigorously) shoes to the correct standard of shininess. I still cannot. I still have those shoes, and they are still not very clean. Fluff was particularly offensive. Our mission at Sandhurst was not to destroy the enemy or hold a particular piece of ground: it was to rid the world of its offensive fluff.
We bounced off the walls with multiple ‘changing parades’. There was a different form of dress for different lessons at different parts of the day. The horror of being incorrectly dressed, or not having pristine clothing, worried more than the most junior. On 6 February 2011 – during my time as Senior British Military Advisor, HQ United States Central Command, Tampa – I was watching an evening screening at an American cinema of The King’s Speech in which Colin Firth gives his fine Oscar-winning representation of George VI. The audience seemed a curious assortment. The cinema was full of only two types of people – women and gay couples. I was the only heterosexual male member of the audience. I now know this to be because it was the same evening as Super Bowl XLV. This event, won in 2011 by the Green Bay Packers, attracts the largest television viewing figure of the American calendar. I can safely tell you which demographic is not watching the Super Bowl, if that would be of help to future advertising agencies.
The King’s Speech led to a number of requests to the British team working in Florida, via the British Consulate in Miami, for information on what the medal ribbons worn by George VI represented. Ever willing to do our bit for British foreign policy, the team duly complied. One of our young naval officers knew an academic at the Britannia Royal Naval College at Dartmouth who was an expert on the subject. In fact, the naval uniform of King George VI was kept on display in a glass cabinet at the college. This was a saving grace on the occasion that Field Marshal the Viscount Montgomery of Alamein KG (Knight of the Garter – the senior chivalric order of the UK) came to take a pass-off parade at Britannia. One detail was missing. His uniform was without the star of the Knight of the Garter. The professional head of the Armed Forces – the Chief of the Imperial General Staff – was incorrectly dressed. Or he would have been if his aides had not broken in to the cabinet containing the naval uniform of George VI,