It’s You He Doesn’t Know

“IT’S YOU HE DOESN’T KNOW”

Many who read this will have endured that indeterminate period when no Gurkha soldier below the rank of Lieutenant (QGO) understood a word one said, until the magical day when, suddenly, everyone understood. It certainly happened to me, and I remember perfectly clearly when and where my moment came. But this is not about me…

On my last trip to Delhi, in January 1995, Lieutenant Colonel ‘SS’ Singh, CO 3rd/1st Gorkha Rifles, then Public Duties Battalion, invited me, along with Tej Pal Singh who was hosting me in Delhi, to visit his Officers’ Mess, followed by dinner in his official quarter. This last was the bungalow in which had lived the architect who designed the Red Fort, while building took place around him. SS’s wife, Bunny, would be there together with Hari and Bholi Ahluwalia: truly, company and a setting one simply wouldn’t miss.

Arriving at the gate to the Fort, TP’s car and driver were stopped. Dismounting and speaking Hindi, TP tried to explain our intention to the Gorkha corporal IC Quarter Guard. Unsmiling, the NCO appeared to understand not a word, and nor did any member of the Guard standing by, watching a 300 pound Sikh becoming increasingly frustrated, and just holding on to his temper. I believe that all Indian Army Gorkhas have to learn Hindi, but I said, “Let me try.”

“Corporal, shayad ma samjaunu paryo”. With a snappy, “hajur!”, the NCO sprang to attention and saluted. “Dherai samay pahile, ma Che Gurkha Paltanma naukri garen. Ahile, tapainko Commanding Saheb hamiharulai bolaunu bhayo, Officers’ Messma kehi piunulai ani, tespachhi, usko qotama khana khanulai”. Another “hajur!”, and the now smiling guard commander said that he had been waiting for us; the jeep and driver next to the guardroom were to take us to the Mess and, later, to the CO’s house. A second salute, and off we went, an incandescent Tej Pal spluttering in the back. “What happened? This is our army, not yours!!” Amused to find the ‘system’ seemed to work across different armies, I explained it to TP.

“But he doesn’t know you!” said TP.

“Well, no – and yes, he does. He was expecting a former British Gurkha officer, and when someone turns up, speaks his language and tells him what he wants to hear, of course he understands. It’s quite simple, TP; it’s you he doesn’t know.”

Jack Keen

JAVA 1945/46

As we celebrate the 75th Anniversary of VJ Day, the following article by 24-year old Acting Major Gil Hickey MC* is a timely reminder of a little known and remarkable episode of British Military History. In 1945, some weeks after the official Japanese surrender, British troops were sent to Java to help maintain order. Both the strength and resentment of the independence movement under Dr Ahmed Soekarno (aka Sukarno) had been seriously underestimated and the troops were met with considerable hostility. Totally outnumbered by Indonesian rebels and with no British reinforcements available, Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia, issued the order to re-arm the Japanese prisoners of war to fight alongside British, Gurkha and Indian troops in their battle to save Dutch and other internees from being slaughtered by the Indonesians.

ANONE ARIMASKA – THE CANNON HAS FIRED

The sun shone brightly that October morning as C and D Companies disembarked from the Landing Ships Tank at Batavia, the rest of the Battalion having arrived the previous day.

3/5 RGR had left Malaya on consecutive days earlier that week, having boarded two Landing Ships Tank at high tide off a beach near Port Dickson. They had just completed their task of rounding up two Japanese battalions (Habu Butai and Kobiashi Butai) in the Kuala Pilah/Landing Geddes area, with the surrender parade taking place on the Bahao golf course. This was Phase 2 of Operation ‘Zipper’ which followed 37 Brigade’s unopposed landing three weeks previously near Sepang on the west coast.

The Brigade Commander, Brigadier N. Macdonald CBE DSO (Mac, of 4/5th fame) met the Battalion on its arrival and briefed the officers on the operational situation. The CO was Peter Sanders and his rifle company commanders were the following: Cameron (A), Gouldsbury (B), Hickey (C) and Buchanan (D).

The picture was not a rosy one. All reports from the interior showed that Dr Soekarno had lost control over the extremists who were terrorizing the countryside and roving about in bands lusting after blood and plunder. The Japanese were in the process of being disarmed. On the surface there was little to show that the Indonesian independence movement was Japanese inspired, but those better acquainted than the ordinary soldier with Japanese methods, saw clearly the product of a policy which aimed at leaving the United Nations a legacy of disturbance as the immediate aftermath of the war. The Dutch were in a state of impotence and unlikely to be able to provide a peace-keeping force from the Netherlands for another nine months.

As the briefing continued it became increasingly evident that 23 Div (The Fighting Cock) was virtually on its own and about to be spread thinly over a densely populated area covering 400 miles from west to east. Deployment, we were told, was to be as follows:

1 1 Bde (1 Seaforth, 1/6 Punjab and 1 Patiala) –

Batavia (West). 2 37 Bde (3/3 GR, 3/5 RGR and Bde HQ) –

Bandoeng (Centre). 3 3/10 GR, in coy detachments, was to join an ad hoc force being hurriedly formed to cover

Semarang, Megalang, and Ambarawa, to the north of the island. 4 49 Bde (4/5 Mahratta, 6/5 Mahratta and 5/6

Rajputana Rifles) – Surabaya (East). These then were the likely flash points.

The lull before the storm

The Battalion moved by train to Bandoeng, a major hill station about a hundred miles inland to the east. The men were favourably impressed by the country which in many parts was so like their own. The hillsides were terraced almost to their summits with vivid green rice fields. The stations were placarded with anti-Dutch posters and the people, though not openly hostile, were obviously resentful of the passage of the troops. We moved into the former Dutch barracks with a surrounding wall. The men were well content with their accommodation, although it was insufficient for the whole Battalion. Some of us, therefore, were sent out to protect the Dutch residential areas in company or platoon detachments.

In order to keep this narrative within reasonable bounds, I must now restrict my comments, in general to the activities of C Company. We were billeted in the Juliana Ziekenhuis (hospital) adjacent to the Pasteur Institute complex and a large quinine factory, our task being to patrol the area by day and by night with a view to preventing mayhem caused by rampokkers (raiders) armed with parangs, who would break into the up-market Dutch-owned houses, killing or wounding the occupants, destroying the furnishings and looting whatever they could carry away.

In the early hours of the morning a call would come from a frantic Dutchman saying “Please send the Gurkhas quickly, the rampokkers have come, my dogs have been killed and I am under the bed.” Inevitably the ‘quick reaction’ section would arrive after the birds had flown.

A change of tactics was clearly called for. Night patrols were replaced by a platoon’s worth of twoman ambushes deployed over a wide area, moving out stealthily after dark into previously reconnoitred positions in the shrubberies of selected homes. The results were spectacular. The rampokkers were picked off with stenguns at close range and the buzz soon got around. The warning notices on every gatepost along the boulevards, proclaiming Awas Anjing (beware of the dog) were replaced by their owners with Awas Goorka!

The storm clouds darken

3/10 GR were heavily engaged in fighting off the marauding hordes hell bent on overrunning the RAPWI camps (Released Allied Prisoners of War and Internees) in the Ambarawa area, already bulging with Dutch and Eurasian refugees, while the news from Surabaya was very bad indeed. 49 Brigade

(some 4,000 troops) were widely dispersed in a heavily built up area, many of them in isolated company and platoon posts. The whole town seemed to rise up in arms against them, a fanatical mob over 140,000 strong, 20,000 of them Japanese trained, whipped up to an uncontrollable frenzy and armed to the teeth. The bestial scenes that followed in the name of freedom rivalled the vilest moments of the French Revolution. The troops stood their ground bravely but the casualties were appalling, the Brigade Commander (Mallaby) being among the dead. The Rajputana Rifles suffered more killed and wounded in three weeks than during the whole of their time in Burma.

The storm clouds were rolling westwards towards Bandoeng. We were already too thin on the ground throughout Java, with no reserves. In response to an urgent appeal from the Theatre Commander, back came a signal from Mountbatten: “No reinforcements available. Re-arm the Japanese and take them under command”. It was an Alice in Wonderland situation. Bandoeng garrison was increased within a week by 1,500 armed Japanese, much to the relief of Brigadier Mac, already short of one battalion (3/10th).

I was allocated 100 Japanese, formed into an ad hoc company, with instructions to weld my composite force into a battle group in the face of the increasing threat. No fraternisation, was the order of the day! This was easy as far as the Burma veterans were concerned, but for the large number of young reinforcements it was a different matter – they were already impressed by the apparent efficiency and discipline of our new ‘allies’. Control was exercised through an interpreter, Captain Hiro Namazawa, a diminutive artillery officer with glasses. His looks belied him: when he cracked the whip his men jumped to it. His English was rudimentary, although his comprehension was good and he enforced my instructions to the letter.

Things were hotting up in the C Company area just then, the enemy having occupied the quinine factory in platoon strength, erecting road blocks along Kininaweg (Quinine Road) within the factory walls. I was ordered to clear them out. The Bn IO (Gus Ashby) joined me in the leading armoured car, a left hand drive MarmonHarrington from the Dutch stockpile, with Gurkha driver. CHM Hastabahadur Gurung manned the Vickers MMG mounted through a hole in the roof of the vehicle. We were followed closely by an escort of 20 Gurkhas in two Japanese trucks with Japanese drivers. We took a tremendous risk, but it paid off. The element of surprise prevailed as we burst through the barricades, the whole force penetrating the defences before the enemy were able to react. There followed a fierce exchange of fire and grenades were thrown from the top floors, resulting in two killed and three wounded on our side. Hastabahadur then stood up in full view of the enemy and emptied a belt of long-sustained fire at a group of 15 Indonesians preparing to counter-attack. He killed 12 and escaped unscathed. The remainder surrendered. It was all over within an hour and Hastabahadur was awarded the IDSM.

Bandoeng was now on “red alert” with both battalions fully committed. The town was divided by the main railway line which ran east-west, the southern half being described by the Dutch as the Native Quarter, consisting mainly of Indonesians and Chinese, the northern half (our side) being the European residential area which included two hotels and a number of department stores.

The Dutch East Indies

PORTUGUESE TIMOR

Despite our earlier efforts on behalf of the RAPWI to evacuate the Eurasians and Dutch still living in the southern sector, many of them had refused to leave their homes for the secure camps to the north. By now, of course, there were over a hundred of them held hostage and we were ordered to rescue them. The task overall was given to the 3/3rd, with my Coy Group under command. The CO (Arthur Greenway) gave me my objective the Zuider Zee, an area of semi high-rise flats to the east of the southern sector, where many of the hostages were known to be held. I marked my town plan accordingly, having consulted my Eurasian sleuth who knew the specific buildings. I was to operate independently, with two Japanese tanks in direct support together with two Japanese 150 mm howitzers, the gun position being a mile further back near “Chhattari Ghar”, an umbrellalike house well known to us all. In order to achieve surprise, D Day was to be December 25th!

I gave out my orders on Christmas Eve, the “O” Group including Capt Namazawa and two other Japanese officers, with specific instructions as to the artillery fire plan and the targets (known strongholds away from the flats). We would attack in two phases, Phase 1 being a frontal attack by the Japanese! H hr: 0530 hrs (dawn). Our axis of advance was to be Slachthuis Weg (Abattoir Road), with the FUP to the north of the railway embankment and the Start Line the railway line itself (now not in use). We moved forward (160 strong) in complete silence, the Japanese “discipline” being remarked upon later by my GOs. At H minus 5, Capt Namazawa, who was also the FFO, with his radio headset clamped firmly over his cloth cap, spluttering with excitement and forgetting that this British officer did not understand Japanese exclaimed, “Anone Arimaska! The Cannon has fired!” As the shells whined over our heads and crashed down accurately on the selected targets, the injunction not to fraternise with the Japanese was momentarily forgotten.

To keep matters simple, the success signal following Phase 1 was to be a live Japanese head sticking out of each of a line of windows in the nearest block of flats visible to me, whereupon C Coy would take over.

The two light tanks rumbled down the street to the left, machine-gunning indiscriminately anything that moved and silencing a strong bunker position 400 yards ahead with its six-pounder gun. Everything went according to plan, out popped the Japanese heads and C Coy went through (Phase 2). There followed some fierce close quarter fighting and heavy Indonesian casualties, our own losses being two killed and seven wounded (Gurkhas); two killed and five wounded (Japanese). 95 hostages were rescued, the remainder, sadly, being killed in the cross fire.

Epilogue

I left Bandoeng on a month’s leave in the UK in March 1946. When I returned to the Battalion to take over Second-in-Command, they had already moved down to Krandji and Klenda near Batavia. The worst was over, mopping up operations being the order of the day. It had been a tough year for 3/5 RGR, after the exhausting Burma campaign and we had suffered over 50 casualties including a BO and GO numbered among the dead. Nevertheless, morale remained high, thanks to the outstanding leadership of GPVS (Geoffrey Peter Vere Sanders).

BATTLEFIELD TOURS IN INDIA

When considering a battlefield tour in India one is spoiled for choice. Long before the arrival of the British other conquerors marched the length and breadth of the sub-continent. Ashoka the Great (304–232 BC), who ruled almost the whole of India from Afghanistan in the west to Bangladesh in the east and south as far as Tamil Nadu, captured modern Orissa (where Cuttack is) and is said to have killed 100,000 men in the process. It was Ashoka that promoted Buddhism across South East Asia and it is the lions of Ashoka that replaced the British crown on Indian army badges of rank post-independence. Babur, the first of the great Moghuls and a descendent of Timur (Tamerlane), was the governor of Ferghana, in modern Uzbekistan, until forced out when he formed a mercenary army and defeated the Lodi dynasty of Central India and the Rajput Confederacy of Rajputana. It was his defeat of the Rajputs at the Battle of Khanwa in 1537 that led to an influx of Rajputs into Nepal, fleeing forced conversion to Islam, who became the ancestors of many of the rulers of Nepali statelets, including Prithvi Narayan Shah (1723–1775), Rajah of Gorkha and the founder of modern Nepal. Afghans, Persians, Arabs, mercenary soldiers, adventurers, traders all saw India as an immensely rich country, as indeed it was, and the locations of many of their battles and those between kingdoms within India can, with a bit of imagination, still be visited today.

The great advantage of battlefield touring in India is that not very much changes. Roads have been built but many follow the ancient thoroughfares, and railways have generally been able to avoid much damage to the countryside. Temples, tombs and forts, once built, are not knocked down and while they might inevitably deteriorate, at the very least the ruins are still there. Crop planting does not vary greatly, and what is a rice paddy today was probably also a rice paddy two or three hundred years ago.

Arthur Wellesley, later the first Duke of Wellington, arrived in India as a colonel commanding a battalion in 1797, and left as a major general and military governor of Mysore in 1805. It was in India that he learned how to keep an army in the field in a fourth world country where difficult terrain, appalling weather and prevalent diseases all had to be dealt with. Wellesley fought in the Fourth Mysore and the Second Maratha Wars, and the battlefields are easily identified today. In 1799 Wellesley commanded the reserve brigade at the assault and capture of Seringapatam, when the ruler of Mysore, Tippu Sultan, was killed. The walls of the city are still intact and while the breach created by the British artillery has been repaired it is easily identifiable. The little temple where the British put the siege artillery still stands on the west bank of the River Cauvery although there has been a modern ashram built around it. Above the breach in the walls is a monument to the regiments that took part in the assault, and here is confusion, for the list of East India Company regiments inscribed on the monument includes ‘1st Bn 10th Gurkha Rifles’, but we know that the first

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington

The Battle of Assaye, 23 September 1803

recruitment of Gurkhas was in 1815, and the 10th Gurkha Rifles dates from 1902, so how can they have been at the capture of Seringapatam in 1799? The reason is that the 10th Gurkha Rifles were formed in 1902 by amalgamation of the 8th and 10th Madras and the Kubo Valley Military Police but retained the battle honours of its predecessors. 10th Madras Native Infantry fought at Seringapatam, but the memorial was not erected until 1907, by which time 10th Gurkhas had absorbed the battle honours of 10th Madras, hence 10th Gurkhas rather than 10th Madras. But! Curiouser and curiouser, 10th Gurkhas gave up the honours of its Madras forebearers in 1903 and so should not be mentioned on the memorial at all! When 10th Gurkhas petitioned for the return of those lost battle honours in 1988, and was granted them, there was some confusion around the brigade, but there was nothing illegal or dubious about it, and had the regiments been British rather than Madrassi and then Gurkha no one would have remarked upon it. The Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, formed in 1992, claims to be England’s senior infantry regiment of the line dating back 450 years, and indeed is second in seniority in the Army List only to the Royal Regiment of Scotland (formed 2004). The Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment is an amalgamation of 12 regiments, which have been absorbed over the years, and takes the honours of all those regiments. This is rather like entering a shepherds’ pie in the Bath and West Wilts show, on the grounds that part of it was once a sheep, but it is what the British Army does and is perfectly legitimate, even if somewhat far-fetched.

One of the advantages of following Wellesley’s wars in India is that his battles all took place well away from the tourist areas. The hotels are therefore basic, but clean, the plumbing makes funny noises in the night and the electricity frequently goes off, but the beer is cold and the food superb. In his old age Wellington said that his most difficult battle was that of Assaye, on 23 September 1803 – and also a 10th Gurkha battle honour thanks to 10th Madras. When I first went to

The memorial to Balbahadur at Kalunga

Assaye, in 2000, the headmaster of the school there told me that I was the first Englishman he had seen since independence! Perhaps one of the most stunning battle locations anywhere is the double fortresses of Gawilghur, assaulted and captured by Wellesley on 15 December 1803, in the last major action of the Second Maratha War. Located in Maharashtra miles from anywhere, the platform on which Colonel Stevenson’s elephant-drawn guns were placed is still there, the breach he created remained unrepaired until last year and the track up which Wellesley came to enter the main defences from the rear is unchanged. The locals claim that a tiger and her cubs lives within the main fort, but on many visits I have never seen her, nor any sign of her!

The battles of the Anglo Nepal war were mainly in the terai, but Kalunga, in October and November 1814, is near Dehra Dun in India. It was the first major battle of the war and readers will recall that this was where a Gurkha force of around 600 commanded by Balbahadur Thapa (a Chettri Thapa) was surrounded by a 5000 strong column under General Rollo Gillespie, who was killed on the first day. The Gurkhas were ensconced in an earthen fort on top of a high hill, and to this day there is no road up to it. After two unsuccessful attempts to assault, the British cut off the water and laid siege to the fort. The Gurkhas held out for a month, but eventually, refusing offers to surrender with the honours of war, with mounting casualties, out of ammunition and with stocks of food and water exhausted Balbahadur led the survivors on a last ditch charge through the British lines. Seventy made it, and got away to enlist in the Sikh army of

© National Army Museum

© National Army Museum

Ranjit Singh. Long before the British connection many Gurkhas joined the Sikh armies, hence the Nepali for a solider is ‘Lahuri’ because you went to Lahore to enlist. It was after this battle that the British did something that they had never done before, and to the best of my knowledge have never done since: they erected two memorials, side by side, one in memory of the British dead and the other ‘in memory of our gallant adversary’. The memorials are still there.

In Cuttack there is nothing that directly links to the forerunner of our regiment, although the thirteenth century Barabati Fort might have housed us at some stage. It was taken over by the British in 1803 and for some time used as a prison for recalcitrant local nobility, but might well also have been used as a barracks. Today only the main gate and part of the walls remain. Also in Cuttack is a rather scruffy museum to Subhas Chandra Bose, ‘Netaji’, the thoroughly unpleasant founder of the so-called Indian National Army formed from Indian prisoners in Japanese hands which aimed to assist the Japanese to drive the British out of India. No Gurkhas joined and many suffered appalling treatment for refusing to do so, including one battalion’s Gurkha Major (then Subadar Major) being beheaded. The INA of two small divisions was only put into action once when many deserted back to the British or refused to leave their assembly area.

The first action by battalions that were composed entirely by Gurkhas was at the siege of Bhurtpore, in Rajastan, from December 1825 to January 1826. The final and successful assault was at the north east corner, when the Nasiri Gurkha Battalion (later 1st Gurkha Rifles) assaulted the Jagina Gate and the main breach, while the Sirmoor Gurkha Battalion (later 2nd Gurkha Rifles) took the lesser breach. The walls of the town still stand and the battle sites, including the siege lines, can easily be followed. The same two battalions took part in the battles of Aliwal (28 January 1846) and Sobraon (10 February 1846) just south of the River Sutlej and not far from the present Pakistan border, during the First Sikh War, and while there has been some building since, the battlefields can be traversed, and there is an Anglo Sikh memorial to both Sikh wars.

Most of the Indian Mutiny sites remain, many cared for by the Archaeological Survey of India, an organisation rather more efficient than the Indian government. Although the sites are easily visited one has to be slightly careful as in recent years Indian nationalists have come to refer to it as ‘the first war of independence’ when of course it was nothing of the sort. The sight of British faces at mutiny sites can attract motor scooter born journalists, eager to create an incident. I always say we are studying Moghul architecture (of which there is much) and they then tend to go away.

Most studies of Gurkha involvement in the mutiny tends to concentrate on the Sirmoor Battalion (later the 2nd Gurkha Rifles), which took part in the attack and capture of Delhi Ridge, and held on there until the assault on Delhi itself. Hindu Rao’s house, the headquarters of the Sirmoor Battalion, is still there and is now a hospital but the original parts are easily identified, as is the well which then produced clear spring water allowing the Sirmoor Battalion to escape the depredations of cholera, although sadly now choked with rubbish. The telegraph tower where the survivors of the mutiny of the Delhi garrison gathered still stands. The major difference between 1857 and now is that then the slope from the walled city up to the ridge was bare except for scrub and a few stunted bushes, whereas now it is forested thus reducing the visibility in both directions. Lower down, the position of the guns commanded by Captain Kaye (ancestor of the late Major Johnny Kaye, 2 GR, with this author a member of the Brigade polo team) placed to bombard the Kashmir gate is now in a walled off garden but can be viewed by those adept at scaling walls.

The Sirmoor battalion took part in the assault on the Kabul gate, of which only a remnant is left, which was not supposed to be attacked until three other columns had entered the city and were approaching the Kabul gate from the interior. The column of which the Sirmoor battalion was part attacked too early and were repulsed, but the Kumaon Local Battalion of Gurkhas (later 3rd Gurkha Rifles) were successful in attacking the Kashmir Gate, which survives albeit that the outside ditch has been filled in. The first Victoria Cross awarded to a Gurkha regiment was won by Lieutenant John Tytler (1825–1880) of the 66th Bengal Native infantry at Charpura in Madya Pradesh on 10 February 1858. The original 66th had mutinied in 1857 and were disarmed, its number being given to the 1st Nasiri Battalion of Gurkhas, later 1st Gurkha Rifles. Charpura was a small village then and has not changed very much. It is relatively easy to work out how 500 Gurkhas on foot, led by Tytler on his horse, defeated a much larger rebel force. The Rangpur Light Infantry, then an Indian manned battalion but later 6th Gurkha Rifles, remained loyal and spent the mutiny garrisoning the North East Frontier. The final capture of Lucknow, in March 1858, was achieved by a force under Sir Colin Campbell (Lord Clyde) and included a brigade of 9,000 Gurkhas of the Nepal army commanded by Maharaja Jung Bahadur Rana in person. Both of the reliefs of Lucknow and the eventual recapture can be followed in great detail as most of the buildings occupied by the rebels are still there, as is the Residency and La Martiniere College in whose grounds is the grave of William Raikes Hodson, founder of Hodson’s Horse and killed at the assault on the Residency. It was the Indian Mutiny that brought Gurkhas to the attention of the British as more than just another martial race, and that is why it is important in our history as well as being the reason for the lale that RGR wears on its uniforms.

© National Army Museum

Sikh and British Officers of Hodson’s Horse, 1858

The opportunities for battlefield tourism in India are almost limitless, and much of the bureaucracy of getting there is now much reduced. A visa for India can be got on line, thus obviating the trek to the Strand and half a day standing in line. While Indian immigration at Indira Gandhi airport Delhi still rivals that at Moscow Domodedovo for confusion and time spent standing in queues, once in country the cost of living is cheap compared to that in UK (or in Moscow, come to that). Getting to and from battlefields is inevitably slow, thanks to appalling traffic and bad roads. The distance from Delhi to Meerut, where the mutiny broke out in May 1857, is less than fifty miles but it still takes half a day to get there. There is now a partially completed motorway running from Delhi to Agra, which does help somewhat, although I well recall the sight of a camel coming the wrong way up it. English is one of the official languages of India and even in remote areas where there is little English, Nepali is from the same root as Hindi and so one can make oneself understood without too much difficulty. One is quite safe from the Moghuls’ Revenge, Delhi Belly or whatever one wants to call it, provided one sticks to local food, which is delicious. Indian gin is excellent, as is the local beer, although Indian whisky is best avoided unless one is unconcerned by the likelihood of permanent blindness and insanity. I have been going to India regularly for many years and on every visit have always found something new, and while BA is no longer my favourite airline (that is Qatar), you can haggle at the BA check in desk at Delhi and get an upgrade to business class to UK remarkably cheaply. At present all my planned battlefield tours to India have been cancelled, due to Black Death II, but once the plague has passed that extraordinary and intriguing country will be open once more.

A PASSAGE FROM INDIA

Ifind it difficult to believe that it is well over a century ago since my mother, Kathleen, arrived with my father at his bungalow in Turkaulia to start their married life together. She was only nineteen then and he was considerably older and more experienced. Although she had already been in India for five years, she had spent most of her time in Kerala with her married sister, before travelling north after a wedding party, where she met and fell in love with my father, Ferrers.

Turkaulia is in Bihar, a State that borders Nepal in the North East of India and was therefore some distance from the coast and a far cry from the beaches of Kerala that she was used to. Most of the roads around the state were crude: dusty, dirty and full of potholes. They had had a long ride on horseback and my mother was looking forward to washing off the filth and grime of the journey.

Slipping out of her clothes and into her dressing gown she made her way to the bathhouse, situated to the side of the main bungalow, for a refreshing shower. Once inside, she disrobed and felt her way into the darkness of the interior in search of a faucet. There was no electricity installed at that time. Out of the gloom above her head came a deep disembodied voice.

“Would you like water now, Memsahib?”

A bucket attached to a shower hose pipe was then filled with water. I can’t remember whether she told me she had stayed or fled the scene before verifying these facts. However, by the time I was born and aware of my surroundings a few years later, there must have been some other kind of shower arrangement in place that was less traumatic.

NEPAL

Turkaulia

B I H A R

INDIA

BANGLADESH

Helen sitting on her father’s knee with the family

Helen watching the elephants

I was born in my Uncle George’s house in Muzaffarpur, about 60 miles from Turkaulia, on April 27 1922, three years after the shower incident and two years after the arrival of my elder brother, Geoffrey. It is, obviously, a long time ago and therefore difficult to remember details with any fluency. I have, however, been able to dig out some memories, namely our daily routines, a few colourful incidents and some moments of excitement. “All the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order”, as Eric Morecombe once said.

My daily schedule as a child was to rise about 7 am, have a quick wash and then join the rest of the family for a ride in the cool of the early morning. Showers (mostly non traumatic) were had on our return, before the family congregated for breakfast around a large circular table on the veranda. Porridge was the staple diet and as much as you could eat from the large basket of fresh fruit and vegetables. These were gathered from our garden and delivered by the mali (gardener) for the day’s meals. On one particular morning I came out to see a large krait (India’s most venomous snake) sun bathing on the roller blind above where my mother was sitting. Once spotted it was quickly dealt with by one of the household staff.

The rest of the morning was spent on my education. Initially, learning the English language because, up to the age of four, I knew more Hindi than English, and later the educational basics: reading and writing; times tables; the countries of the world and their capitals etc. We were home schooled by my mother who must have been pretty good at it because, even after all these years, I can still recite most of what I learnt. (For example: Northumberland, Durham, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Sussex, Essex, Kent etc). We then had a substantial lunch followed by the obligatory siesta (one hour minimum), during which time we were under strict instructions not to disturb the adults. General play under the watchful eye of our Christian ayah, Elizabeth, was next on the agenda and included sandcastle building in a large sandpit we had at the side of the house as a particular favourite. Tea, and then, as the heat dissipated, a long walk followed by supper and then a reasonably early bedtime. Mother or Daddy would read the next exciting chapter of King Solomon’s

Edmond, Helen on her polo pony, and Gil

Mines or some other novel by Rider Haggard. The last thing before bedtime prayers, a goodnight kiss and lights out was the routine search of dark corners and a final prodding of the thatched roof to dislodge any dangerous creepy crawlies that had been trying to find respite from the heat of the day.

The bungalow was a huge old planter’s residence situated in the middle of a large grass compound, and we could often be seen galloping over the meadows that ran alongside the bungalow in the company of my father’s chaprasis (trusted attendants), Issur Bahadur and Fattah Mohamad. My father, like the rest of the family, was very fond of animals. We had dogs, birds, ponies, otters, a mongoose and even a blue bull. I loved them all but top of the list was my ex-polo pony, Wendy. When riding out with the other children on their ponies, I towered over them.

We didn’t formally entertain much but my parents kept open house and visitors were continually dropping in on us to take potluck. Kobarry, our head man, was very efficient and always seemed to be able to organise extra meals when called upon. When we were allowed to stay up for a special dinner, Kobarry was the conductor. He would bring the meat dish round, indicating with the thumb carrying the plate, the portion allocated to you. If you made a bid for an alternative and, to your mind, a larger and

Gil and Helen (centre) flanked by their siblings

A family outing

juicier morsel, the thumb would clamp down on the chop so you couldn’t remove it from the plate. The biggest and best bits he guarded for my father and the honoured guest.

On my sixth birthday we had a party. Various cousins and friends who lived within a reasonable distance were invited to the event. Two of the children who came were the notorious Hickey boys, Gilbert and his brother Edmond. They were well known to be difficult to control and full of pranks and mischief. When I heard they were coming, I remember telling my brother that we must hide our best toys. Gil’s ayah once famously complained to his father when detailed to look after him: “yah hathiyon ka kam hai!” (It’s elephant’s work!)

My father was the Senior Circuit Officer for the Bettiah Raj, directly employed by the Rani family to perform a number of functions during the year. These functions ranged from moving around the villages in the area settling landlord and tenant issues and disputes, to ensuring the area’s wells were purified against typhoid and looking after the widow Rani’s four elephants.

Wagons were sent on ahead with the household staff to establish a camp made up of two large tents, and in front of them a large pit was dug for the communal fire. While my father worked, my brother and I would join with the local children, playing bicycle polo and hockey with whatever makeshift sticks we could get hold of and exploring the area with my mother. There were always strict rules we had to adhere to: never walk round in bare feet; always wear your topi (hat) in the sun; don’t touch any animal you don’t know etc. In many of the villages we passed through rabies was common, and a number of the local dogs were suffering from the disease. Once I remember my father putting me up on a wall as a rabid dog rushed past us looking agitated. He explained a dog with rabies moves straight ahead and if you stay out of his eye line you were safe. You didn’t want to get bitten as the antidote was most unpleasant. It entailed a

painful series of injections in the stomach, something that both Gil and his brother had to endure when their parents suspected they had been in close contact with a rabid dog.

‘Mad’ elephants were another challenge for my father. Periodically bull elephants would be in musth, when reproductive hormones increased and their behaviour became highly aggressive. I remember many times he had to motor in his Ford Model T to Motihari, the nearest local town, to pick up chains to fasten to the front legs of an elephant displaying signs of musth or, more terrifyingly, one that was rampaging through villages in the area. I always thought how brave my father was to tackle these situations.

These were just some of the challenges he had to deal with on his rounds. However, whenever possible, the day would end with the whole group gathered around the fire pit. My father would organise for a radio which could receive news from Britain. The sound of Big Ben ringing in the Indian night was greatly appreciated by everyone.

Many of our Christmases were spent in Triveni on the India/Nepal border, where families from all over Bihar came together. Big duck shoots were organised, gymkhanas, polo matches and children’s parties, where I recall seeing Charlie Chaplain films for the first time.

When I left India at the age of eight to pursue an education at a boarding school in England, I hadn’t imagined that I wouldn’t see India or my parents again for nine years. On my return in the late 1930s at the age of seventeen, a lot was different, not least because war was in the air. Since I had been away the old bungalow had been completely flattened in the 1934 earthquake and a new and more modern one built in its place. I spent the few months that I was there playing tennis, riding, going to parties and enjoying all my India had to offer. When I left Turkaulia for the last time on my return journey to England, it was Kobarry who chaperoned me on the three day journey from Muzaffarpur to Bombay to catch the liner home. In the late 1960s, when Gil was Military Attaché in Kathmandu, we had the opportunity to visit our childhood haunts again. Many from our Indian households were still alive and travelled a long way to meet us. We both found it a very moving experience but times had radically changed since we had been there last. The war had had its dramatic effect on the world, India had been carved up in 1947 when it gained independence, and many of those in our local communities that had been good friends with each other were now enemies. The sixties were also now in full swing and the young were travelling to India for an eastern spiritual awakening and further change was on its way.

My Indian experience was a Bihar one and although short, was intense and unique. It was the joy and happiness of the Indian people that I shall remember most and the profound effect those eight years had on the rest of my life.

A shared responsibility

GANDHI AND THE ADMIRAL’S DAUGHTER

When the SS Rajputana sailed from Bombay for England, in August 1931, among the passengers were Mahatma Gandhi’s delegation for the second Round Table Conference in London. Also onboard was a young Lieutenant, Norman BaillieStewart1 of the Seaforth Highlanders. He described later how the Indian entourage included “Miss Slade, the daughter of Admiral Slade and Gandhi’s ardent English disciple. She had gone completely native, dressing in Hindu clothes and ministering to the Mahatma’s most intimate needs, including bathing his feet. The spectacle of Miss Slade, scurrying up and down the deck with goats’ milk and dates for Gandhi, angered me.” Gandhi, at the time, was the Empire’s chief rebel.

The first Round Table Conference the year before was not attended by leaders of the Indian National Congress. Many of them were in jail after Gandhi initiated the Civil Disobedience movement. Consequently, the outcomes were minimal although the British government, faced with growing disobedience in India, realized the Indian National Congress needed to be part of deciding the future of constitutional government in India.

That Madeleine Slade was selected to accompany Gandhi on this historic trip is significant because she had been with him barely five years and she was the only non-Indian. Yet since arriving at the Sabarmati Ashram at Ahmedabad, Gujarat in November 1925, she had gone from being one of Gandhi’s many devoted disciples to being his most trusted and closest. She was 33 when she walked off the P & O liner in Bombay; tall, authoritative, unmarried and, in her own words, determined “to serve the cause of oppressed India through fearless truth and nonviolence.” Upon meeting Gandhi she wrote “I was conscious of nothing but a sense of light. I fell on my knees. Hands gently raised me up, and a voice said, “You shall be my daughter.” She soon Indianised herself, wore a khadi salwar and kameez, learnt to spin,

Gandhi and Mirabehn, 1938

1 Within two years of returning from his regiment in India he was to be charged with treason and imprisoned in the Tower of London.

speak Hindustani and lived in a one-room hut close to the Gandhis on one side and the Sabarmati river on the other. The ashram today is a museum and her former hut is named Mira Kutir in her honour. She accepted the name Gandhi gave her, Mira, after the medieval Rajput princess who renounced everything for God.

My relationship to Madeleine Slade is on my father’s side. His mother was a Carr-Saunders and so was Madeleine’s mother, who married a Slade. We share the same lineage to Madeleine’s grandfather James Carr-Saunders who is my great-great grandfather.

Madeleine had lived in India before. Her father was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the East Indies Station in 1908 and she spent two years in Bombay. It was not an experience which kindled her interest in the country or the cause she later served with such devotion. Nor would she ever have thought that one day she would retire to live in Austria on an Indian government pension to which the official document categorized her status as “Political Freedom Fighter”. For her service in the cause of Indian independence she was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, India’s second-highest civilian award for “exceptional and distinguished service”.

Yet, until 1920 when she met Romain Rolland, the French author and Nobel Laureate, she had no interest in Gandhi or in the cause for which he was becoming known. Educated from the age of eight by a governess, she spent much of her time on her grandfather’s estate near Dorking, Surrey. Her father, Admiral Sir Edmond Slade, and mother were frequently abroad on naval postings. One notable highlight of Slade’s career came in 1913 when he negotiated in Tehran the purchase of a 51% stake in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, today’s BP, on behalf of the British government. The significant timing was securing control of the oilfields following a decision to convert the Royal Navy from coal to oil barely a year before war broke out.

It was the Romain Rolland connection which changed Madeleine’s life. Until then, and since the age of 14, her one passion was Beethoven, “It was more than music to me; it was the communication of the spirit”. She was obsessive by nature and Beethoven possessed her. During the First World War she was so irritated by the over-patriotic boycott of German composers that she stubbornly set out as a concertagent to bring Beethoven’s music back to provincial and London audiences. After the war she made a pilgrimage to Beethoven’s grave in Vienna. When she heard of Romain Rolland’s book Vie de Beethoven she knew she must journey to Lac Leman, Switzerland to meet him.

After they had talked Beethoven, Rolland “mentioned a small book he had just written called Mahatma Gandhi. I looked blank. I hadn’t heard about Gandhi. ‘He is another Christ’, he said.”

As soon as she had read the book, she knew she had a ‘call’ to go to Gandhi and join his cause.

For the next year she set herself a vigorous training programme for life in an Indian ashram. She taught herself to spin raw cotton fibre into white cloth; became a vegetarian, gave up alcohol, disciplined herself to sit cross-legged, sleep on the floor and learnt Urdu.

In June 1925 she wrote to Gandhi asking whether she could join his commune, Sabarmati ashram, and enclosed samples of cotton she had spun. On 24 July he replied “You are welcome whenever you choose to come. Only please remember that the life at the Ashram is not rosy. It is strenuous. Bodily labour is given by every inmate. The climate of the country is also not a small consideration. I mention these things not to frighten you but merely to warn you.”

Madeleline made India her home for the next 34 years of which 23 years were devoted in personal service to Gandhi. She chose not to return to England for personal visits, even when her father died in 1928, and her mother three years later. Her only sibling, Rhona, married a District Officer in the Indian Civil Service.

Madeleine Slade (‘Mirabehn’) on the SS Rajputana with Gandhi

Her relationship with Gandhi was as unique as it was complex. They shared many similar attributes; tough in character, stubborn, and close to nature although seemingly diametrically opposed to their emphasis on spirituality, silence and solitude as essentials for the ideal life. They soon become close. Shortly after her arrival Gandhi left on a trip. She recalled later, “This was my first separation from Bapu after reaching the Ashram, and it caused me terrible pain.” In his letter to her at the time he wrote, “You have been constantly in my thoughts. This three days’ separation is good discipline.”

Many are the sources, contemporary and since, who infer there was more to the relationship than shared beliefs in a common cause. There is little doubt Madeleine was totally fixated with Gandhi to the point of obsession. She was at her happiest by his side and always longed to be near him. This reached an intensity he sought to lessen and wrote to her in March 1927, “The parting today was sad, because I saw that I pained you. You must not cling to me in this body. The spirit without the body is ever with you.”

Eventually it became too much for him, or both of them perhaps, and he found it necessary to send her to other states in India as she was becoming all-consuming in her worship of him. His justification was to give her more experience and to spread his message. Yet she still accompanied him frequently including his khadi tour of the Himalayas in 1929. Gandhi was, in many ways, a simple and direct man. His letters show that he was as afraid of and as puzzled by his own attachment to Mirabehn as she was about hers to him.

Mirabehn with Gandhi in England, 1931

She was the only European woman who ever came so close to him: tongues wagged all over England and India from the moment the closeness of their relationship became apparent. There was even a crude limerick doing the rounds in the 1930s which an elderly family relative recounted to me that went:

There once was a man called Gandhi Who woke in the night feeling randy. He called for his maid and said, “Send me Miss Slade Or a goat if she isn’t handy”

The attitude personified that of Lieutenant BaillieStewart on the SS Rajputana. Few people could have foreseen in the next decade the British leave and Gandhi dead less than a year after independence.

In the course of their time together, Gandhi wrote 650 letters to his Mira. All of them ending ‘Love Bapu’. There is nothing unique in that: he signed off many of his letters in a similar way. After Gandhi’s assassination, Madeleine published a selection of Bapu’s Letters to Mira (1924–1948)’, and what is interesting – and still not researched – are the parts she omitted as well as whole letters. Copies of the entire collection were given to me by a lady in Vienna who took it upon herself to look after Madeleine’s personal effects when she died there in 1982.

The letters Madeleine wrote to her parents, as well as ones she wrote to Gandhi, are not to be found. She recorded in her diary that she wrote to her parents once a week, a collection which could amount to some 250 letters covering her formative years with Gandhi. And assuming she wrote to him more frequently as he to her, that could be some 700 letters of her inner-most thoughts. Allegedly they were destroyed after his death by his family.

As Gandhi increasingly devoted all his time and energy to an intensive preparation for the coming national struggle, the constant presence of the daughter of a knighted admiral, and former Commander-in-Chief of the East Indies Station, became unsettling and embarrassing to the Raj. She acted on many occasions as Gandhi’s personal courier, carrying letters or verbal messages to the

Viceroy and other British officials. Her usefulness as a personal messenger stemmed less from political sophistication than from the Mahatma’s awareness that his admiral’s daughter was a godsend in communicating with the British establishment.

Which did not keep her out of jail. When the Civil Disobedience Movement resumed in 1932–33, the Government came down heavily with repressive measures. Gandhi was arrested and imprisoned, the Congress Working Party declared illegal and all its members put behind bars. Mirabehn took up the task of collecting information about the freedom struggle from all over the country and sending it to foreign countries in weekly reports. Her activities soon attracted the attention of the intelligence agency. She was duly arrested, tried and sentenced to three months in the Bombay female jail in Arthur Road. Upon discharge she was served notice by the British authorities to quit Bombay and never return again. She defied the order and was arrested a month later on the platform as the train entered the station. Her trial lasted a week and she was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment. Her health declined with frequent bouts of malaria.

After her release she returned to ministering to Gandhi’s needs. Yet increasingly she felt his work was being deliberately misrepresented in the West. She decided to go to England and counter the hostile British propaganda. News of her departure from India for London was widely publicized and she found herself competing for news-worthiness with the Prince of Wales himself. She lived and moved mostly among working class people in England, and through her lectures, presented to the British public the true picture of the happenings in India. She met with Lord Halifax, Foreign Secretary, General Smuts, Lord Clement Atlee and Sir Winston Churchill who told her “An Indian nation does not exist as a nation”, referring to the religious divisions and the way the country had always been divided into small states in the past.

From London she proceeded to America and in bare sandalled feet met Mrs Roosevelt at the White House. Her presence in America caused a stir. She returned to India in November 1934 having raised global awareness of the cause for Indian independence and about Gandhiji’s ideas.

Mirabehn actively participated in the Quit India movement in 1942. She was sent by Gandhi to Orissa to help in preparing the people to offer non-violent resistance to a possible Japanese invasion on the Eastern coast. Then in August that year, Gandhi, Mahadev Desai his faithful and longserving secretary, and Mirabehn were arrested and imprisoned in the Aga Khan Palace in Poona. Five days later Mahadev Desai passed away. Then in a final blow to Gandhi, his wife Kasturba passed away whilst still in confinement. He, along with Mirabehn, were released in May after nearly two years in prison.

Mirabehn was not with Gandhi the day he was assassinated on 30 January 1948. She had spent the month earlier with him in Birla House, Delhi, before returning to the second ashram she had established in the north since her release from captivity. It was at Pashulok just 26 miles from Dehradun. She declined all entreaties to attend his funeral or the immersion of his ashes at the confluence of the Ganga-Yamuna rivers at Allahabad. Instead, she recalled his words to her in a letter at the time of her mother’s death – “There is no meaning in having the last look. The spirit which you love is always with you.”

It was a mark of the esteem with which the leaders of India held Mirabehn that she was later given part of Gandhi’s ashes in a little copper urn. She immersed them in the Ganga at Rishikesh close to her ashram.

Her remaining years in India is another story, as is her time living in the hills near the birthplace of Beethoven where she retired in virtual solitude. Her manuscript on the life and works of Beethoven remains unpublished. She was looked after to the end by Datt, her devoted Indian bearer. It was Datt who carried her ashes to India and immersed them in the Ganga at Rishikesh at the same spot as Gandhi’s.

© Indian Spinal Injuries Centre

Captain Hari Ahluwalia (left) and Phu Dorjee on the summit of Mount Everest, 29 May 1965 and a commemorative stamp of the Indian Everest Expedition

HARI

© India Post

I first met Hari many years ago in Delhi, having been introduced at long range by Lt Colonel SS Singh – ‘SS’ to his friends – then commanding the Indian Army’s High Altitude Warfare School (HAWS) in Kashmir. Hari, too, became a friend and, thereafter, on any business trip I made to Delhi a meal together, with Bholi, his wife, and others was mandatory. A big man, in every sense of the word and now aged 83, Hari still works, writes, and serves as an inspiration to many, not only in India but across the world. In this piece, written in Delhi on my retirement trip in January 1995, you may see why he has long been, is, and always will be, a hero of mine.

Nearly 30 years ago, on 29 May 1965, Captain Hari Ahluwalia of the Indian Army stood on the summit of Everest, thus becoming the first Indian and 21st recorded person to do so. At 29 he was young for a summiteer of the world’s highest peak, conventional wisdom of the time having it that the prime age and maturity for this feat was plus or minus 35 years of age. As he remarks laconically, however, doing it early has given him time to do a great many other things since. I’ll say.

His first book, Higher than Everest, was published in 1973, five years after he left the Army. For 27 years he has worked at a Ministry in Delhi; he has written or produced in pictures 12 more books; with Bholi he has been on several expeditions, including one to Ladakh in India’s difficult north-west and, just last

year, they spent two and a half months exploring a major portion of the ancient Silk Road.

It took five years from concept to actuality to mount that one; the Chinese were reluctant to grant the necessary permits until Deng Pufan, son of a more famous Deng, weighed in with some help. And the logistics were awesome, beginning with the airlift of vehicles, stores and personnel to Tashkent before the expedition proper could begin. Subsequently, 20 scholars, drivers, mechanics, film crew, Hari and Bholi covered thousands of kilometres on a journey primarily conceived to rediscover ancient cultural links and to make the kind of direct, people to people contact that existed between traders, travellers and town folk along the famous route. This group of modern travellers visited places whose names ring with romance and ancient history: Samarkand, Bukhara, Kashgar, the Gobi and Taklamaken deserts, Duhuang and its newly discovered Buddhist caves, Xian and its terra cotta army, Chengdu and even Lhasa, before exiting via the road to Kathmandu and back to Delhi.

© Indian Spinal Injuries Centre Major Ahluwalia (centre) in his Army days

It is huge fun to be with Hari – and tiring. His mind is never still: he has opinions to offer if he has considered a subject; he has humour; he has projects and plans swirling in his head or actually in process, that leave lesser mortals floundering in the wake of his enormous energy. His latest project which will surely be the most enduring, is the building and running of the $40,000,000 Indian Spinal Injury Centre in New Delhi, the biggest in the country and one of the most modern in the world. To this non-profit making facility will be brought the seriously injured for diagnosis, emergency treatment, surgery and the whole complex gamut of rehabilitation: physical, psycho-social, occupational and sexual. Family rehabilitation will also take place, to prepare close relatives for the enormous change in circumstances occasioned by paraplegia, quadriplegia, or the lesser effects of spinal injuries, incapacity and the associated trauma. To everyone’s credit, the intention is that 30% or so of patients will be those simply unable to afford it, who would

The Indian Spinal Injuries Centre, New Delhi

© Indian Spinal Injuries Centre

otherwise be even more seriously disadvantaged. Of the $40 million needed, $25 million has so far been raised; the hospital has taken shape to the extent that the first outpatients will begin treatment and therapy in February; and the full 60 in-patient facilities will open in September. The Centre has plans to take its skills elsewhere in India, to provide training for other less well-equipped hospitals and teams, to cost the upgrading of those places and make recommendations to the Indian Government so that paraplegia and quadriplegia are less dreaded than they are today. Quite a project. To supervise all this as Managing Trustee, Hari is about to leave his job at the Ministry and will work without pay for the Trust which has been set up to administer the Centre. He will always have other interests – filling less than 16 hours a day is anathema to him – but the Centre will receive his main focus. And who better? For Hari himself has not walked in 29 years, nor will he ever do so. You see, in September 1965, four months after climbing Everest, he was shot and wounded in Kashmir and has been a paraplegic ever since. Now this astonishing man will devote the rest of his life to his fellow sufferers, using all his energy, all his clout and all his vision on their behalf. In my book, it’s Hari who stands higher than Everest!

Jack Keen

POODLE-FAKING ON THE TOP OF THE WORLD

When I joined the 2nd Battalion all the other officers had previously served in the Indian Army and there was often talk in the Mess of the opportunities for travel around India during annual leave. It was apparent that officers were encouraged to do enterprising things on leave and that did not include “poodle-faking” in Calcutta or other similar dens of iniquity. UK leave was only granted after seven years’ service, meanwhile there were endless opportunities to go exploring or climbing in beautiful and remote areas. There was much talk of the stunning Vale of Kashmir, often the start and finish points for trekking in the surrounding mountains. All this talk of the Shalimar Gardens and houseboats on the Dal Lake lay dormant in my mind until one day a casual word brought it all into sharp focus. So why not put together a group to travel to Srinagar, spend a few days on a houseboat, trek in the Kashmir Mountains and tie this all in with a trip to Ladakh, part of the State of Jammu Kashmir but really on the western end of Buddhism’s Tibetan Plateau. The people of Kashmir itself are about 75% Muslim although the state found itself part of Hindu India, and some of the mountain areas are still in dispute with Pakistan, one of the sad reminders of Partition. It would also enable us to interact with three very different religions at close quarters. It was a new area for me but I had a good contact in Delhi, with whom I had worked before and who put together a package for my unusual group of 10 ladies, including Cynthia, and only one other man to keep me company.

My neighbour Donna Sadkha and three more of her feisty journo friends had decided to join us and I wondered if I knew what I was getting myself into.

Mr Bulbul the flower seller in his shikara

David was a delightful chap and worked with Cynthia as the accountant of Silver Chain. We flew into Srinagar in the Vale of Kashmir which was absolutely beautiful, complete with distant mountains soon to be snow capped, we were taken directly to our two houseboats on Nageen Lake, which is smaller than Dal Lake but connected to it. Houseboats, it is believed, were introduced into Kashmir by the British who were not allowed to buy land, so came up with the novel idea of building luxurious houseboats, many of which rarely moved from their moorings on the banks of either of the two main lakes, to use as a holiday refuge from the hot weather in the plains. Our two houseboats were sheer delight, plenty of space, generous bedrooms with elegant beds and hangings, beautiful carpets everywhere and marvellous rooftop gardens all to ourselves. Wonderful local meals were prepared for us and a wide range of alcoholic drinks were available, even in this mainly Muslim state.

Small shikaras, paddled from the stern, leisurely made their way around the lake, some fishing, some collecting lotus leaves and others selling their many different wares to whomsoever showed the slightest interest and many who didn’t. They were charming and consummate salesmen. Many of the shikaras displayed a placard with the owner’s name and our two favourites were competing sellers, Mr Marvellous and Mr Bulbul, whose shikaras were absolutely laden with the most stunning collection of fresh flowers and fruit. “Buy my lovely red roses for your lady and she will love you for ever”, or “No, no. Buy my fresh pink pomegranates for your Lady and she will be kind to you tonight”. They were probably brothers and in it together. There could be no excuse for not buying Cynthia flowers everyday (perhaps with a few pomegranates thrown in), making up for all those missed events like the birth of our sons and all those other birthdays when I had been away on Ops or an Army Course or perhaps had just forgotten (perish the thought), so many black marks for which to atone if I am to go to Heaven. We actually had a large patch of lotus flowering in the lake right beside our new Muslim-run residence.

“Om Mane Padme Hum” is a much used Buddhist mantra, which I have heard many times in Nepal, meaning roughly, “the jewel in the heart of the lotus” which reveres the lotus for its ability to rise from the mud and produce a beautiful flower,

The Expedition’s Kashmiri pony-men Descending to the Srinagar-Leh Road

suggesting, perhaps, that man can do so too if he tries hard enough. I’ve always found Buddhism to be a gentle religion, though it is perhaps more a belief with a pathway for a ‘right life’ than a religion. This was surely a good omen for us, even in a country where the Muslim majority was not at peace with the ruling Hindu minority. Years later in Buddhist Myanmar, where the Buddhists are not at peace with the Muslims, on amazing Inle Lake in the Shan Hills, Cynthia and I saw the fibres in the lotus stalks being processed into thread finer and stronger than silk, but that is another story.

I’ve always been interested in the great Mughal builders and Srinagar is home to two of the most beautiful Persian style gardens built by them, both located on the shores of Dal Lake. Shalimar Bagh, the better known, was built in the early 1600s by Emperor Jahangir for his wife Nur Jahan (Light of the World, how lovely) and smaller Nishat Bagh (my favourite) was built by Asif Khan, father in law of Shah Jahan, the builder of the Taj Mahal. We visited both in a leisurely manner in three shikaras giving us ample time to absorb the beauty of the lake, the small island, centrally placed, with its crown of Chinar trees and the distant snow-clad mountains, all unimaginably peaceful, so unusual in India. I loved the haunting call of the Muezzin summoning the faithful to dawn prayers as it travelled as clear as a bell across the lake, but I also loved being able to turn over and go back to sleep, knowing the call was not for me, I had lived in Malaya for nine years where it had been part of my life. The call across Nageen Lake was only surpassed when Cynthia and I lived in a lodging house garret directly opposite the Blue Mosque in Istanbul and where the Muezzin was surely hiding under our bed.

Pahalgam was to be our trek start point and our Sirdar introduced me to our head pony-man and his team and a likely looking lot of cut throats they appeared to be, no smiling Pokhara porters or docile yaks as we used in the Khumbu, in Kashmir. The gear was loaded on the ponies, always leaving three spare for us to take turns in riding if we wished. The route led us beside a lovely small river with waterfalls, through sweet smelling pine woods and as we got the hang of things even the pony-men started to smile, while the cook’s team amazed us at every meal. So things were going well except that one of

Donna’s independent journo friends couldn’t tolerate our relatively slow pace and kept getting way ahead. She didn’t heed my warning that she might easily go the wrong way and be lost forever, so I hatched a plot with our sirdar who warned her that the surrounding mountains were full of badmash who would just love to capture and rob (and even worse) a white woman and with a graphic drawing of his finger across his throat indicated her inevitable end. Just one glance at the villainous looking pony-men made this unlikely story seem very believable and we had no more trouble with the lady.

We walked in these idyllic conditions for about a week with lots of ups and downs but no serious climbs, finding beautiful campsites by the river. We then started to climb more noticeably as we had to cross quite a high range, before descending to the Srinagar to Leh road to meet up with our bus to take us to isolated Ladakh, behind the Himalaya and on the Tibetan Plateau. The weather started to break up as we approached the pass through the range and it started to snow quite heavily. As we stood at the head of the pass looking at the track winding below, by some quirk of the wind, the snow was falling upwards, a new experience for us all. We made our way down to the road with some difficulty and there was our battered bus. We bade farewell to our pony-men who, suitably impressed with our bakshish smiled happily, revealing as wicked a collection of teeth as you are likely to see anywhere. Our sirdar joined us as our mentor for the second half of our journey.

The road to Leh, the capital of Ladakh, is controlled by the Indian Army as it passes near to the ”Line of Control” as this unsettled border with Pakistan is called. It crosses three significantly high passes as it twists and turns on itself gradually climbing onto the western end of the Tibetan plateau. For long stretches it is one way only and every vehicle has to wait, perhaps several hours, for the Down or the Up Convoy to pass before being allowed to start what may fairly be described as a perilous journey, I counted 22 successive hairpin bends in one sector. My friend David hadn’t warned me he suffered from vertigo, indeed perhaps until he came on this trip he didn’t know, but now he was really struggling. At one point we came round a horrible bend to find the road was being resurfaced by a gang of very dark workmen from Gujarat in the plains of India. They had fires going under several 44-gallon drums of tar that they were melting and spreading on the road before scattering stones. The combination of the acrid, dense black smoke and the flames, with the gang, silhouetted as they moved in and out of view, was surely like a scene from Dante’s Inferno. We had no choice but to wait until allowed to pass so we all got out to take a walk away from the smoke. I walked with David trying to convince him it was safe and that dozens of vehicles used the road on a daily basis, unfortunately I glanced over the edge and there below us was a bus like ours in the valley with its wheels in the air, David saw it too, just what I didn’t need at that moment. After a substantial delay we were allowed to pass and the workmen gave us a friendly wave and a flash of pearly white teeth. David said he was not coming back this way and I had to get him out.

We were not really very far East of Skardu (or Shangri La as it was sometimes called) in Baltistan where I had previously taken Cynthia and a group when we travelled up the Karakoram Highway in Pakistan, after a visit to the Regiment’s pre-Partition depot in Abbottabad, where Osama bin Laden was later found and killed, on through Gilgit and Hunza to the Chinese border. In Ladakh too the country is dry and rugged but with the occasional lovely green valley, often with water led from afar in ancient man-made waterways hewed out across steep rock faces, how did they do it? We stopped to visit dramatic Lamayura perched on an outcrop at some 3,500 m, one of the oldest Bon monasteries in Ladakh, formerly home to about 400 monks it now houses only 150, which is still a lot of monks, just think of all that chanting. As we stood in the main courtyard, scene of its famous masked dance festival, we could hear the women singing as they worked in the monastery fields below. The paintings in the principal rooms of this very holy place are astonishing and perched, as it is, on a bare mountain crag it must be one of the world’s most impressive sights. We soon arrived safely in Leh and I breathed a sigh of relief, although I now had to face up to the problem of how to get David out. By air was the only answer, so I thought I had better get on with it. Enquiries indicated there was a backlog of passengers trying to get a seat on one of the very few flights out of Leh as winter was approaching and the road over the high passes, especially the Zoji La, at 3,525 m the highest of the three, which we had just crossed, might soon be closed. I noticed a back gate to the Airport Terminal building guarded by a sentry, I explained to him I had been a soldier too and after a few more words some money passed hands with a promise of some more if, just if, he could find someone to produce a ticket to Srinagar. They say money talks and indeed I got a very relieved David a ticket (I guess my new soldier friend split the money with his accomplice) and he flew back to languish in houseboat luxury until our return about a week later. I felt quite bad about it, I’d never taken part in bribery before and I learnt that a Frenchman who had been bumped off his top place on the wait list had heard

Ladakhi Ladies selling vegetables in Leh – the true home of the Top Hat

‘Baldy’ the bus edging past the Up Convoy

a rumour and was looking for a Gurkha Officer to assault. I kept a low profile in Leh, well as far as you can when you are in charge of ten bolshie Australian ladies who thought it was all a great joke – but none of whom risked being beaten up by a justifiably angry Frenchman if found.

Ladakh is virtually treeless but the mighty Indus, which we had followed for much of our sometimes hair-raising journey in Pakistan, flows close to Leh through the valley and is a lifeline for the vital agricultural production. We travelled to the fabulous twelve storey Thikse Gompa, a Tibetan Buddhist monastery that is a smaller replica of the Potala Palace in Lhasa and then the equally impressive Shey Gompa, one could but marvel at the construction of these amazing buildings, with their wonderful paintings and endless statues of Buddha in this remote region. One lunch time we were walking to a local restaurant for a light meal of heavy-duty Tibetan momos when one of the girls said, “look at those people doing their washing in the drain”. “Ugh”, they all thought, but as we got closer the girls started to recognise their own undies and other items, some already laid out on nearby rocks to dry! I had a quiet giggle as more items were recognised giving me quite a different slant on some of my lady trekkers. My undies looked vey drab by comparison, but I didn’t care. Perhaps they fondly imagined their dhobi was being taken care of in some kind of Tibetan washing machine possibly stirred by a novice monk.

The weather forecast predicted further early snow; the three high passes are often snowed in cutting the Leh to Srinagar road for months, so we decided we would leave promptly the next day. As we were loading some of our gear one of the girls said why don’t they have treads on their tyres in Kashmir like we do. I took a look and she was right, they were all quite bald, I wished she hadn’t noticed until we had got back to Srinagar. As we were preparing to leave three young English backpackers came up and asked if we could give them a lift in our battered bus, now inevitably renamed Baldy, as they were so far down the wait-list they had no chance of a flight. Our insurance policy forbade us from picking up hitch hikers, but what could one say to three pretty young

girls, all with lovely smiles, stranded on the western end of the Tibetan Plateau with more winter snow approaching, surely nothing but “hop in”, so they did and I now had thirteen women to get home safely and only my trusty Sirdar and our fearless driver to assist me. Talk about a sucker for punishment!

We headed off and all was going well, in the vicinity of Kargil we again safely passed through an Indian Army Artillery Regiment deployed in gun positions on either side of the road. Tension between India and Pakistan was still running high with frequent skirmishes on the Siachen Glacier, at about 5,400 m the highest point of conflict in the world. The Up Convoy had just cleared the start of the long one way part of this heart stopping road, so we sailed through with our Baldy as the lead vehicle of the Down Convoy, morale was high as my ladies enjoyed the magnificent views and tried not to look down into the river alarmingly far below. We came round a corner to be confronted by an Army truck, remnant of the Up Convoy broken down on the inside of the road, leaving us, all holding our breath, to teeter past on the outside, which our driver was doing successfully as we bumped along the first couple of the trucks side canopy rails until our roof rack got caught in one of them and refused to budge.

We were stuck on the very edge of a hideous precipice, all too obvious to my thirteen ladies. I moved them quietly to the landward side of the bus and got out of the front door and asked the sirdar to step out with me while the driver remained at the wheel. I decided the only answer was to get them out one at a time before we tried to move the bus. Unfortunately the bus door was hinged on the forward edge so as each came out I had to hold her hand and facing inwards of course, we moved sideways away from the door so that the sirdar could push the door shut, then I could again hold the individual’s hand as she inched past the door, moving towards the front wheel and then, holding the underside of the wheel arch, on towards the sirdar’s waiting hand and off the crumbling edge onto the road proper. I asked them not to look down as they executed this tricky manoeuvre. Fortunately, I have a good head for heights and knew if we did this in a carefully controlled manner we could do it, although it took a while. All the girls managed wonderfully though it was an extremely dangerous situation with a 350 m or more drop into the river below, I was very proud of them and even my four journos had obeyed orders for a change, imagine the headlines if they had gone over the edge. While they all took a breather the sirdar gathered up some locals from the following vehicles and as our driver moved the bus slowly forward the men gently rocked it so the roof rack disengaged and rocked it again as our empty bus scraped past each of the remaining canopy rails, they had to be careful not to rock the bus too far! I didn’t think the girls would have enjoyed being in the bus during this dodgy exercise and if it had been rocked just a bit too far it would have been curtains for a lot of pretty faces. I thought the driver deserved a medal for the way he handled it throughout, but perhaps he had done it before and that was why Baldy was so was battered. I have to say I was glad David missed the fun.

With thanks all round and lots of smiles we set off confident we were on the home straight until we heard a loud noise and came round the corner to be confronted by landslide still cascading across the road with boulders bounding into the river and dust rising everywhere. As it started to settle a group of six road workers, armed only with shovels and crowbars appeared, obviously almost as startled as we were. Their foreman explained to the sirdar and others from our following vehicles that they were widening the road and the blasting was meant to have occurred after the Down Convoy had passed giving them time to clear the road before dark, obviously something had gone very wrong! They also lamented that the bulldozer hadn’t arrived yet, as we were a long way from anywhere in both directions, I didn’t ask from whence it was coming, the prospect of meeting a bulldozer on this road was somewhat daunting. I didn’t encourage the girls to think what might have happened if we had been just a few minutes earlier, maybe the previous incident with the truck had been a blessing in disguise or had the delay caused the problem? However, we were all on the wrong side of a landslide and turning the whole convoy round on this narrow road and scraping past the broken-down truck

Inside Lamayuru Monastery

again and then going back to Leh wasn’t an option. So we clearly had a problem and not many daylight hours in which to sort it, so we had better get on with it.

We formed the men in the convoy into teams to start rolling the bigger boulders over the edge and indeed some of the ladies peering over the edge enjoyed watching them bouncing down to the river, meanwhile others dealt with the smaller rocks and the workmen used their shovels and crowbars to good effect. Men from all the vehicles behind us helped willingly, if only because it was quite apparent that no vehicle could move until we did. Soon it was safe enough to get my team out of the bus and lead them across the remaining rubble onto the road with the suggestion that they might like to walk a little way just to stretch their legs and get their breath back and recover from the second terrifying experience in 20 minutes. Our driver earned a bar to his previous medal as he skilfully drove the empty bus, leaning at a crazy angle, across the part-cleared, man-induced landslide.

The rest of the journey was uneventful although I noticed one of my ladies looking distressed so I sat beside her. Anna, originally from Germany, had lived in Perth for many years and, like Cynthia, was a nurse. She told me she had a poor head for heights and was still shaking after the last event. I got her talking and we discovered that while I had grown up in the Blitz in London she had done the same in Berlin and we were soon comparing and laughing about our wartime experiences, fortunately she had escaped Berlin’s final trauma, soon she was fine, funny how these things happen. She was a delightful lady and later she often came round for coffee. We reached our two lovely houseboats on idyllic Nageen Lake a little before dark and celebrated our safe arrival in suitably alcoholic style. There was room on board for the three young English girls who had shaped up well during our exciting ride and who were appointed honorary Aussies and put on our account, with some stories to tell when they eventually got home. We decided not to tell David what fun he had missed but during the course of the evening he realised the journey had been something rather special.

Later, Cynthia and I sat in armchairs on the upper deck with an Indian brandy each, looking at the moon shining over the distant, now snowclad, peaks enjoying the silence. Knowing full well more snow might soon close the high passes I breathed a sigh of relief. I wondered what was it about the Himalaya and indeed mountains in general that mesmerised me so, starting way back in the Alps when I was at Sandhurst and much later Kinabalu and Merapi in Java. Why couldn’t Cynthia and I spend the rest of our days just living luxuriously on a Kashmiri houseboat, far away from our frenetic world, with the haunting call of the muezzin summoning the faithful to morning prayer across the dawn stillness of the lake, knowing we were exempt, and then jousting daily with Mr Marvellous and Mr Bulbul, their shikaras tied up alongside, as they offered us bargain prices for their fresh flowers and fruit, hopefully with a few pomegranates thrown in? Well, I guess I thought about it but I hardly need say it didn’t happen, but I did wonder if perhaps I should stop taking groups away on these dodgy trips – that didn’t happen either, at least not for several more years.

A Jungle River in North East India

THE BEST JOB IN INDIA

The best job in India, as only the cognoscenti know, is – not in government, the army, the railways, as box wallah or maharajah – but a career in tea. And the best place in tea – not in the Nilgiris, although pleasant enough, nor in hilly Darjeeling, nor the plains of the Dooars – but Assam with its plentiful shikar and unspoilt mahseer rivers.

My father, James (Jimmy) Beven, began his career in tea by responding to an advert in Engineer Magazine seeking an assistant engineer to look after the machinery used to manufacture tea. At the time he was still doing his National Service in the Royal Navy torpedo development centre at the Admiralty Research Laboratory at Teddington. He had applied half in jest never expecting a reply, but much to his surprise got the job, embarking by ship for India as a young man in the early 1950’s. relatively humble background. His father had been the maintenance engineer at Watts Naval Training School in North Elmham, Norfolk. My father had been a teenager during the War. Even then he enjoyed shikar, roaming the Norfolk fields with a muzzle loading gun, bagging rabbit and pheasant for the pot, and fishing for eels and pike in the River Wensum.

His first Assistant Engineer post was in Chandighat, Silchar, close to the border of what was then East Pakistan. Shortly after his arrival a piece of machinery in the tea factory broke; fixing it required the manufacture of a cast, something that usually necessitated repair in far-away Calcutta. My father was confident that he could fix it. An unbelieving manager told him there was a bottle of whiskey in it if he could; he did.

It was in Silchar, I think, that he also had to confront a rogue elephant that had killed a number of workers on the estate. My father bought or borrowed an

elephant gun and shot it; he cannot have been more than 22 years old. As a young child I can remember a hollowed-out elephant foot used as a dustbin next to the lathes in his workshop. There was also a large tusk, sections of which still serve as bookends.

Over the years Dad climbed the slow promotion ladder from Assistant Engineer to Assistant Manager to Manager of his own tea estate. He also moved estates, steadily heading to better hunting grounds in north east Assam. Beyond the estate was wild, hilly jungle country, then just delineated as North East Frontier Agency (NEFA).

Along the way he married our mother, Jean (nee Filshill), who was then Deputy Matron of the Burma Oil Refinery Hospital at Digboi. It was in this hospital that my brother and I were born. Shortly after my arrival in November 1962, the Chinese invaded India; along with many other British residents my mother and I were evacuated by air from Calcutta back to the UK; we spent a year living with friends in Norfolk. My father stayed to look after the tea plantation; so close did the Chinese come to it he remembered hearing the sound of artillery on the front lines. It was not the Indian Army’s finest hour but, just as suddenly as they had attacked, the Chinese withdrew although they still hold vast tracts of Ladakh that they claim as their own.

For most of my childhood, before I was sent to boarding school in Sussex, we lived in a large bungalow on a hill overlooking the Dehing river. On one side was the tea factory, whose claxon sounded at the start and end of the day’s work. Beyond it were the tea plantations shimmering in heat haze, their shade trees full of birds, the sound of cicadas deafening in the afternoons. Beyond the tea was jungle that climbed shallow hills into the mountains of Nagaland. At weekends, on bazaar days, Naga men and women, naked except for loin cloths, walked out of the jungle carrying dokos of vegetables and other jungle delicacies to sell.

The bungalow came with a large garden and a panoply of servants: a cook, ayahs, bearers, pani wallahs, sweepers, malis, a dhobi wallah and an ex-Indian Army Gurkha who was our chowkidar. My mother, because of her innate kindness and medical proficiency, was a much-loved major-domo of a large household. Unsurprisingly, our first language was the basic Hindi of the tea plantation workers, most of whom were transplanted tribals from Orissa State, who had been relocated by the British in the nineteenth century to pick tea.

I can still remember my father’s daily routine. He would drive off in his jeep before 7 am to visit the factory and tea plantations, reappearing before 9 for a substantial breakfast. In the cool weather this would sometimes be served on the lawn, with convoys of bearers bringing porridge, rumble tumble (scrambled egg) and toast on trays. He would then return to work, returning at midday for lunch. A large glass of nimbu pani always awaited him. There was then a siesta until 2 pm, after which he returned to work. At 5 pm he would return to my mother’s legendary afternoon teas: scones, cheese sticks, cucumber sandwiches, gypsy creams, a Victoria cake. He would then potter

The Editor (right) with his brother and friend (The WW2 Dodge Command Car behind)

in his workshop until it was time to dress for dinner (always); the latter a full-blown affair preceded by a pink gin and followed by at least three courses served at table in the dining room. There were often visitors to entertain as well as weekly visits to the Club, which served as a mess, nursery, sports club and cinema.

Shikar was plentiful; returning home for holidays as teenagers we joined the managers and assistant managers shooting green pigeon as they returned to roost in the evening. A line of guns would wait for these beautiful birds flying fast and low in small flocks across the tea bushes. Or there would be trips into the jungle after the higher-flying Imperial pigeon or a much-prized jungli murghi. On my thirteenth birthday I got a BSA .177 air rifle and we would venture out in my father’s converted WW2 Dodge Command Car whose front window could be raised up, allowing me to shoot doves gritting on the tarmac roads at dawn. These were later served up in soups or terrines in the evening. My father’s real passion was fishing, especially for mahseer, a fish that Rudyard Kipling described as “beside whom the Tarpon is a Herring and he who catches him can say he is a fisherman.” He built his own aluminium canoe and for many years had his own boatmen, who accompanied him on long trips into the jungle, leaving the house before dawn and returning late at night. Usually, these trips were up the Tirap river, which was on the boundary of NEFA and looked similar to the painting of the river at the start of this article.

My brother and I awaited his return: a good day meant the back of the Dodge would be awash with fish, mostly mahseer. Once he came back with an otter that had refused to relinquish a fish my father had already caught (it lived in our fishpond for a week before its plaintive cries led to its release). Our staff too would wait patiently in the cookhouse to divvy up the catch: mahseer was not good eating, at least to Western palates, but was a welcome addition to their curries. My father would have a tot

My fathers’ boatmen: Suktu and Himu (holding the mahseer) (The Editor from an early age showing his predilection for a career in a Rifle Regiment)

My mother counting all present on one our camping expeditions (Our ayah, Miriam, in attendance of my brother and I)

Men of tea (my father third from left, to his right is Superintendent J. P. F. Furst, ex Assam Regiment, who assisted 6 GR’s 175th anniversary expedition to Kohima and Imphal)

of rum on our veranda with the boatmen before they went home with their share of the catch.

Tea planters only got home leave every three years; leave in the intervening years had to be taken in country. This meant major camping expeditions on good fishing rivers with a sizeable proportion of our household staff relocating with us to live under canvas. My father would spend the days fishing; my mother would read and write letters: a canoe being dispatched daily downstream to drop off and pick up mail at the roadhead. My brother and I – an ayah in attendance on each of us – would spend the day playing on the sandbanks of the river. One year we went to the Manas National Park on the boundary of India and Bhutan; Dad fishing both sides of the border, the mahseer being unaware of national boundaries. Often in Assam we would share our jungle home with elephant catchers, the mahouts who would go out to catch and then tame wild elephants. We were welcome in their camps as Dad was generous with gifts of tea, an expensive luxury to them.

My father spent over thirty years as a tea planter in Assam, leaving in 1983 for a short tenure as a tea planter in the Kericho Highlands in Kenya before he retired to Norfolk. During the years in Assam he worked on tea estates at Chandighat, Ledo, Namdang, Bogapani and Margherita. As manager he was responsible for a labour force of over 1,000, their families, a factory and annual production which even then was over £1M annually, a small hospital, even an elephant (at Bogapani) whose daily duty was to push a railway waggon of tea chests up a siding from the factory to the main railway line. On pay days a bus full of workers, armed with bows and arrows, used to go to the district town to draw money from the bank to pay the estate staff.

My father did not have an unremarkable life; he was one of the very last British tea planters to have the privilege to live and work in India. He lived a lifestyle that was frankly unimaginable in the UK; his passion for shooting and fishing were well catered to. His knowledge of fishing for mahseer was immense. He had many friends in tea who he remained in touch with long after retiring. Within a few hours of news of his death reaching India there were over 100 comments on social media remembering him fondly.

When a manager of a tea estate dies it is a tradition that the gong in his old tea factory is rung to inform all the estate staff that one of their own has passed away. Through friends I asked if this could happen on the day of my father’s funeral. On that day I was duly informed by WhatsApp that the gong at Bogapani had been rung.

SEEKING A HAT FELT GURKHA

Author leading Attestation Parade at British Gurkhas Pokhara, 1989

Ask what is the symbol of the Brigade of Gurkhas and the answer will probably be the kukri. But a kukri can be easily acquired and is sometimes used by other troops. It is the Hat Felt Gurkha, issued, not bought, and unlike any other British army head dress, has been unique to us for more than a hundred years. It has a style and romance of its own. It was a long time into my service before I acquired mine and it has never been worn in public. It is unfinished business.

Commissioned into the 6th Gurkha Rifles, a week or so at Church Crookham and straight to Belize for the 1988 tour. Tropical kit issued, kukri acquired, but no Hat Felt Gurkha yet. A few days at Airport camp and an interview with Gurkha Major Chintabahadur Saheb. He cautioned this overawed young officer to remember that among Gurkhas there were still “the good, the bad and the ugly.” A night out in Belize City and a brush with the RMP: being dressed down for having sleeves rolled up. It was a mosquito thing. Then on to Holdfast Camp and D Company under Patrick Gouldsbury. Patrick was remote and our contact was largely confined to basketball which, for him, was very much a contact sport. There were some 7 RHA officers and a cavalry subaltern in the mess. The gunners were celebrating their re-naming as 7 PARA (all capitals!) and were being more “para” than the paras. Their drinking games were enforced by chloroquineeating “punishments”. There were no other 6 GR British Officers to play with – it was good for the Nepali. As company officer I spent my time on jungle patrol or exercise under the eyes of company 2 i/c Gumansing Saheb and in the benevolent care of platoon commander Naresh Saheb, my all-thingsGurkha guruji.

The only head dress was the beret with its bestin-the-army cap badge and the jungle hat with its Roman numeral VI patch. Not a Hat Felt Gurkha in sight.

Later, a move to Salamanca Camp to C Company with Paddy Grant who had succeeded Jeremy Brade. Along with Mark Benton, we formed the Officers’ Mess in that remote spot of the former empire. A fine

bulwark against the marauding Guatemalan host. Entertainment consisted of trying, unsuccessfully, to tune the satellite TV. We also tried, unsuccessfully, not to tread on the biblical carpet of little frogs that appeared on the paths when it rained. It rained a lot.

A week manning the Observation Post on Hunting Caye with a section of men. The mission, to record the ships going to the city of Puerto Barrios. Perhaps some intelligence analyst really did examine our log sheets to identify a build-up of Guatemalan materiel in readiness for territorial acquisition. Or perhaps the sheets just went into a cabinet. We had the services of a Royal Engineer lance corporal who drove our assault boat. ‘Moral courage’ lectures fresh in the mind, I upset the boatman by insisting on kit inspection parades and the wearing of correct dress rather than swimming shorts. There was a stand-off and then we came to an accommodation. He wore what he liked.

The only use for the boat was to take us on jollies to the nearby cayes and to provide a fishing platform. We lunched on conch stew and dined on grilled barracuda. One of the few ships we observed in fact arrived at the next-door island. It was an old coaster and we went over to find it had been re-purposed as a party boat for fifty El Salvadoreans. They had come overland via Honduras to the Caribbean for a few days’ respite from the horrors of civil war. They played volleyball, drank plenty of beer, smoked big cigars and possessed a huge cube of ice. The giant block had been swung off the ship by derrick and was kept like a religious artefact in its own tabernacle – a big tarp – in the shade of the palms. It didn’t seem to melt very much given the 80 degree heat and provided all the refrigeration and beercooling required for their stay.

Back to the jungle for more patrols. Another ‘moral courage’ issue with a pot-smoking Mayan soldier of the Belize Defence Force. We came to an accommodation. He smoked what he liked (but out of sight). There were no Hats Felt Gurkha but there was a deep kukri-wound constructing an A-frame basha. How quickly Gurkha riflemen harvest the most suitable basha-wood denuding the surrounding jungle of supplies. Perhaps I was just slow.

At the end of the tour it was time for the language course: back through Crookham and on to TDBG. Hong Kong stunned this Englishman abroad who was looking forward to meeting more Rifle Regiment subalterns on the course. But no, they were engineer and signals captains and a delightful Ulster-born warrant officer PTI. The only other TDBG mess inhabitant was an Argyll on attachment to the depot and we were honoured to be looked after by the mess chief, the WWII veteran muleteer known simply as “No.1”.

No Hats Felt Gurkha to be seen on the language course. We did play a lot of croquet in the late

afternoon shadows of Ti Mo Shan. The depot CO was quite the hoop-game devotee and required us language students to provide his opposition. We tried not to giggle.

A Nepal trek followed and a bizarre episode. It was two days east of Palpa Area Welfare Centre and we crossed the Kali river in a hollowed-out log canoe. Toiling up the valley-side my lance corporal guide and the porters became extremely agitated. Enquiries established that they were very worried about passing through the next village whose inhabitants were widely reputed to be most hostile. The hostility was manifest in the tradition of poisoning strangers on certain carefully calculated dates. My trek-mates insisted that we were indeed strangers and that, yes, calculations showed that a poisoning was due today. Their fear was genuine and contagious. I didn’t disbelieve them but the practicalities meant we had to pass through or fail to complete the trek and its welfare tasks. I cajoled them to press on with an agreement that there would be no talk, no eye contact, no acceptance of offerings, nothing touched and no deviation from the path. We went through at a near run, eyes front, dokos creaking and necks straining, mess tins jangling. We all made it back to Pokhara alive. It was quite un-nerving but a helpful cultural insight.

The Platoon Commander’s Battle Course came next and then perhaps it was time to re-join the regiment and acquire the hat. But orders sent me straight back to Nepal for the privilege of serving as Recruit Conducting Officer for the 1989 intake. It entailed a couple of months at Pokhara in a glorious sinecure as commander of the recruit cadre during final selection. Capable and experienced QGOs and NCOs really ran the show and the RCO did not have a formal role in the testing process. In scenes my grandparents would have recognised from their evenings at the Tollygunge Club in 1930s Calcutta, our evenings were spent drinking brandy and soda while playing whist on the mess patio and putting “chilli sherry” on our supper as the alpen-glow turned Machhapuchhare orange. The job did, however, require a crash course in Gurkha drill for the RCO commanding the attestation parade which included a march past. It was the culmination of the annual recruiting effort, and while the QGOs and Pokhara 2 i/c (our own Doug Maclean) were togged in No.6 dress and Hats Felt Gurkha, I was still in lightweights, regimental shirt and beret. No HFG but it was excellent for the Nepali.

Then back to HK, Cassino Lines and regimental service. OC 10 platoon, D Company, under David Bredin. Struggling, seemingly for weeks, to work out who was actually in my platoon, who was in camp and who was on Nepal leave. Of the battalion’s twelve rifle platoons, for a time, I was the only British Platoon Commander. But I was well supported by an admirable, old-school Platoon Sergeant, Kembahadur Pun (1601, a notable khud racer). I was given an orderly.

Operational tours of the border (and Wanchai), internal security training delivered by a travelling Northern Ireland training team fixated by the idea that unhappy locals might throw fridges on us from high-rise flats. White goods raining down seemed improbable. But then, I had never patrolled under the Divis flats and an Electrolux from the 20th floor would spoil your day.

Playing rioters for an IS exercise gave an unexpected insight to the men’s lives. In civvies, we confronted a line of shield-toting riflemen from another company and, to add realism, I told my men to start shouting slogans. Immediately the chants went up: “Dashain ma chuti hunnu parcha!” [At Dashera there should be leave!] and “NAAFI ma teruni hunnu parcha!” [There should be girls (allowed) in the NAAFI!] What it said about the common lot of the junior, but adult, Gurkha soldiers made me uncomfortable but such matters were beyond a saano saheb.

Separating fighting gangs in Vietnamese boatpeople camps; cataloguing the mess silver in a hot storeroom. Riding motorbikes, drinking too much Tiger and setting fire to my hands in Fanling’s “Better ‘ole”. An embarrassing “interview” with the

CO followed that episode. Adventure training on Ping Chau island and, of course, the inaugural young officers’ Nepali song contest. C/Sgt Santosh Gurung (Naresh’s brother) providing backing vocals accompanied by the regimental nautch band; Colonel Duncan playing Simon Cowell to GM Lalbahabur Saheb’s Louis Walsh in this proto-X-Factor event. The common experiences, surely, of the HK-based young Gurkha officer.

But still missing the hat. My orderly’s first task was to make my webbing more “jungle-y”, that completed, I instructed him to acquire me a Hat Felt Gurkha from the regimental stores. This was clearly not the right approach, because he was rebuffed. “Stores is for storin’” as any squaddie knows. I did not pursue it.

All it needed was the right ceremonial occasion, the hat would be required and would be mine. Sitting on a court martial at Fort Stanley to try a naughty Duke of Edinburgh’s Lance Corporal did not provide the occasion. But I did contrive to wear the wrong uniform (No.6 dress, not No.4) and, rather unsportingly I thought, the court’s president, an ancient major, complained to the CO. Another awkward “interview” and suitable punishment followed. We jailed the Lance Corporal.

HK life: training, the border, endless basketball and volleyball. A “vigorous” officers’ football match against 7 GR, an elbow in the face in a goal line melee. I don’t bear grudges. Running, the heat, a battalion deployment to Lantau by landing craft, helicopter drills. A nest of poisonous kraits at Pak Fu Shan on the border from where we could see Shenzen growing by the week. BMX bikes and catching IIs with a stick and kukri. Translating for the Special Investigation Branch after Dhaniram saheb’s death; an experimental battalion move by Mass Transit Railway in the small hours of the morning. A chilly night march and the CO issuing a rum ration to all ranks. But no hat felt Gurkha.

It was time to take matters in hand. A direct approach to the splendid QM, Alan Hobbs. No problem he said. And, just like that, it was done. After nearly two years, I took myself to the regimental stores and demanded my HFG. No storeman defies the QM and the prized head gear was passed across the counter. I don’t recall signing for it.

But still no occasion to wear it. And sadly there never was. Life went on at Cassino Lines, time passed and personnel matters led me to an attachment with a gore paltan. And, in a coincidental reversal of the traditional direction (Collet and Bredin, per et fils), I went off to 1st Bn the Devonshire and Dorset Regiment to be Operations Officer in the mechanised infantry role. I never really said farewell to 6 GR, just packed my HFG and other things into an MFO box, slipped away from Cassino Lines, boarded the Cathay 747 to Gatwick and went down the Infantry’s front drive, the A303, to Bulford.

I had a wonderful time with that excellent west country regiment. Many more adventures and the terrifying experience of planning and leading a mechanised brigade road move from Tidworth to Thetford. I hadn’t even done Junior Division Staff College. 400 vehicles, in packets, up the M3 and round the M25. The regiment boasted a disproportionate number of generals including John Wilsey, the soonto-be C-in-C Land Forces. He tried to persuade me to become a career officer with the D and Ds. I was tempted, but I couldn’t do it. I was 6 GR and my time was up; newly married and with a place to train as a BBC journalist.

But what of the unworn hat? At first I had little nostalgia, I was a BBC wallah newly commissioned into the 1st Bn TLME (The Liberal Metropolitan Elite). Quietly proud of my service but military credentials were not fashionable at Broadcasting House and there was no need for my regimental stuff. Mess kit, service dress, cross belt and cap all sold on but I kept my beret, stable belt and HFG.

One day, soon after re-badging to the BBC, I was taking a pint with my father and a family friend who was Sotheby’s top arms and militaria expert. He had a wonderful and historically important personal collection of weapons and accoutrements which had

James Herbert and a Rifleman from 10 Platoon, D Company, on anti-‘Aye Aye’ patrol on BMX bikes, Pak Fu Shan, HK / China border, 1989

captivated me as a boy. Space in our flat was limited and so on the spot I offered him my HFG for his collection. He was delighted and I was proud that he was delighted.

Over the years nostalgia grew. I started to attend regimental association functions and Cuttack Lunches and began more deeply to appreciate my good fortune at having been commissioned into the 6th QEO Gurkha Rifles. It was surely a short career, but I had been a part of that wonderful regiment. But my pride in wearing my regimental blazer was matched by my regret at never having worn my HFG and giving it away. Last year the custodian of my hat passed away. Fearing that his collection would be broken up and the hat lost forever, my letter of condolence to his widow also politely requested the hat’s return. Surprisingly quickly a large box arrived and, after 30 years, I was reunited with the elusive felt hat, dusty and a bit moth-eaten.

Now the challenge arises to find a suitable function at which to wear it properly for the first time. The Cenotaph Remembrance Parade would be a good start. And when that is done, I will have concluded my long-ago short service commission with 6 GR.

A TALE OF TWO 6TH GURKHA SEVENS

When I finally joined the First Battalion in January 1969 in Gallipoli Barracks, one of the things that I enjoyed most was the sport. The football was excellent and I learnt to play both basketball and volley ball plus we had both tennis and squash courts. Although the Gurkhas didn’t play Rugby, there was an Army team in Sek Kong then called 48 Brigade, but later called the Flying Kukris after the RAF helicopters moved up to Sek Kong. I particularly enjoyed our post amalgamation season of the winter of 1969-70 playing in Sek Kong alongside Brian O’Bree and, although we didn’t win any trophies, it was great fun and for me was my first introduction to playing Rugby alongside a Fijian, Sergeant Happy Nanova.

During 1970 Noel Thomas took over as our Education Officer and he came with quite a rugby reputation having played for one of the UK’s leading clubs, London Welsh, and had even had a trial for England! Late in the year Noel proposed that 6 GR should put a team into the Hong Kong Army Rugby 7-a-side competition. In discussion we were all pretty sceptical; Gurkha units didn’t play rugby and we knew very little about ‘Sevens’. Equally, there were only three or four of us who played rugby at all. Noel explained that sevens had been a feature of his London Welsh Club and that he would give us some training if we could find the players. So, with Noel, Brian, Nick McIver our Doctor and myself as a start, we co-opted Tim Whitehead, not a rugby player but a good athlete, plus Gopal, also not a rugby player, but a good football and basketball player and Peter Curley, our REME Fitter Corporal, who was also a good athlete. Noel had us training at lunchtimes; running up and down the football fields in tramlines to cover the field and always backing up the person with the ball; being prepared to run backwards as a team if necessary until we saw the opening and many other things that we had not considered before. Noel certainly taught us a lot and it was fun.

We had a real problem however, as although we had

Noel Thomas and Brian O’Bree with winning HQ Coy football team

seven players, the rules required us to have a reserve for the competition at Stanley Fort. This was solved by persuading Corporal Jasbahadur in B Company to join us for the day. He was big for a Gurkha and a keen weightlifter, but while very supportive, had no intention of playing and stayed in his regimental blazer on the touchline.

The day went really well. We won our first three matches and got through to the final, basically as a result of Noel’s training as we were better disciplined than our opponents and were able to follow the gameplan that Noel had coached us in. There was one lovely moment when Gopal had run over the try line holding the ball but was not sure what to do next. The coaching clearly had not covered this part of the game, but he quickly got the message to touch the ball down. Sadly, in the final when we met the first team of the Stanley Battalion, I think the Royal Welch Fusiliers, we were unable to complete the dream and finished as runners up as you can see from the shield in the photograph. We thought that we had done extremely well, even giving a good account of ourselves in the final and were very proud of our small shields. Sadly, we failed to take a photograph of the historic occasion.

For me, the real heroes of the day were Noel and the non-rugby players who had so gallantly volunteered for a sport that can be very physical; a clear indication of the wonderful camaraderie that we had in the Regiment at the time.

For the sequel, please fast forward 28 years with the Battalion in Church Crookham in UK. By this time, I was in the very privileged and interesting position of Commanding Officer. I was still playing a bit of football but had last played rugby at Staff College 10 years previously. We were part of 5 Airborne Brigade, who, as you would expect had a keenly fought inter unit sports competition. This involved a number of sports including basketball and volleyball, where, as you might expect 6 GR wiped the board. We held our own in football so were doing very well in the overall championship. One chink in our armour was that rugby was also part of the competition.

So, one day there was a knock on my office door and in walked one Ian Thomas, coincidentally Noel’s son, then a Captain in 6 GR and today a distinguished retired Brigadier. Ian explained that it had been agreed that as a Gurkha unit we were allowed to play 7-a-side Rugby rather than the full 15-a-side. However, for our next game, against 1 PARA, he explained that we were short of players and would I play? After unsuccessfully trying to squirm out of it I reluctantly agreed; it was after all only seven minutes each way. I asked to play my old position of scrum half about which I could remember a few things, despite the disadvantage that this put me in the thick of it. I never believed that there was rank on the sports field so I asked the rest of the team to use my first name rather than the more normal address of “colonel”. The game was tough going, but enjoyable until one of our team addressed me as colonel in the hearing of the opposition. There was a pregnant pause as the opposition’s eyes widened, realising that the Commanding Officer was playing against them … what an opportunity. After that I got hammered at every turn and tackle. The remaining minutes passed very slowly. Sadly, we lost the game, but with some honour. To be honest though, I really enjoyed the experience but it took a little time for my bruises to disappear. I decided that it was definitely time to hang up my rugby boots.

HKARFU Runner’s Up Plaque Duncan Briggs

35TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE 6 GR RUGBY 7s STREAK

Jon Titley

The Hong Kong Sevens’ first streak happened just before the finals in 1986: Jonathan Titley of the 6th Gurkha Rifles and a fellow officer stripped down to their desert boots and ran the length of the pitch, carrying the flag of Brunei’s Pirates Rugby Club. And so history was made, and the Sevens has seen streakers most years ever since.”

Extract from South China Morning Post magazine, 6 April 2016 I t was mid-afternoon on Sunday 6th April 1986 as 20,000 spectators were enjoying the ambience of the stadium, cold San Miguel, and the lull before the final of the Rugby Sevens.

In the stands were a group of 6 GR officers including Adrian Griffith, George Lys, Paddy Grant, Dougie Maclean, Charles Blackmore and Jon Titley, the latter being retired and the founder of the Brunei Pirates Rugby Club.

Undoubtedly it was the effects of San Miguel which sparked the idea that it would be a good “craic” to streak. It had not happened before in Hong Kong, even though streaking was in vogue following Erika Roe’s Twickenham debut four years before.

Blackmore: “Titters, how about a streak?”

Titley (beer in hand, Aussie slouch hat askew):

“Don’t be daft. I’m a retired officer.” Blackmore: “But if you are half the man my father said you are then you’d do it” (they had been fond drinking companions). Titley (not easily led): “Oh all right then.”

The Streakers: Blackmore (closest), Titley to his left side

Without further prompting, and with that flush of innocent bravado, down the stand we went and onto the grass on the side of the pitch. Dougie Maclean had been persuaded, or maybe he was volunteered as the junior subaltern present, to take our discarded clothes and run around the outside of the ground to RV on the far side.

Blissfully unaware of the crowd, and “streakers” apart from pith helmets on heads and desert boots on our feet, we set off diagonally across the pitch. The feeling of behaving like irresponsible children, something we were both good at, grew into laughter and glee as we heard the applause from the crowd grow stronger and stronger. By then we were at the 22 and all was going well.

Two uniformed Royal Hong Kong Police Constables were briefly glimpsed giving chase, until they suddenly were stopped in their tracks by a loud shout in Cantonese from a British RHKP Inspector. Jon later discovered that this friendly “Bomban” was a friend of his who had recognized him. “Mateship” at its best!

As we approached the half-way line, there, from the left side of the stadium, smartly marching onto the pitch, came the Pipes and Drums, 6th QEO Gurkha Rifles to play in the interlude before the Final.

Jon froze. He snatched at the flag, pulled it out of my hand, and wrapped it around himself like a sarong.

“I’m not going any further” he shouted above the din of the cheering crowd.

“It’s a taboo for a British officer to be seen naked by a Gurkha. I’m going back” he said looking to where we had come from.

“Titters”, I replied, now with my pith helmet on my lower abdomen, “You can’t go back, our clothes are over there.” I jutted my chin in the direction of the far end. helmet as though making a military appreciation of the ground and enemy forces.

“Oh bloody hell then, let’s do it!” and he whipped off the flag so again we could carry it high between us as we started to gather speed past the Pipes and Drums.

Immaculate as ever, Drum Major Tilbahadur, having recognized Titley Saheb even in sartorial undress, transferred his mace to his left hand and whipped up a smart salute as we dashed past. Jon acknowledged with an appropriate eyes left given at the double with pith helmet over his vitals.

By now it seemed the entire stadium were on their feet and cheering – apart from two in the crowd.

Brigadier Ray Pett (seated) to Lt Col John

Anderson (seated nearby): “John, do you recognize either of those chaps?” Anderson: “No, I can’t say I do and not from here anyway.” Pett: “Well they must belong to your Regiment as they have just been saluted by the Drum Major.”

We knew none of this until Brigade Headquarters rang the Adjutant, Nick Gordon Creed, early the next morning and asked if he had a Captain Blackmore in the battalion. Nick denied all knowledge on the grounds that, the Blackmore he knew was a Royal Green Jacket. He left out the bit about being on secondment.

Fortunately, Dougie Maclean was at the RV as the two streakers arrived breathless and thirsty. They quickly dressed and disappeared into the crowd. They were last heard of that day hitching a lift in the back of a 4-tonner with the Pipes and Drums singing “Jhyam Jhyam Pareli”, before being dropped off in the Wanchai to “continue the movement.”

A light-hearted moment of Regimental history had been made.

THE EMPEROR AND THE SARUS CRANES

Isaw the Sarus Cranes from the new eight-lane expressway that links Agra to Delhi. They were standing together in a dried paddy field next to the road. There were two birds: husband and wife both almost six feet tall, with morning suit grey plumage, white tails and their distinctive crimson faces and necks that looked as if they had pulled a highwayman’s mask over their heads.

Sarus Cranes pair for life and couples are almost always seen together. Despite a steep decline in their numbers they are protected by public sentiment and affection in rural India, rather like storks in Europe. Indian folklore abounds with stories of the birds’ faithfulness to each other. It is widely believed that if one bird dies the other will starve itself to death. In Gujarat, newlywed couples are taken to see the birds to inspire fidelity. Seeing the cranes was a reminder that the Taj was also a monument of a lifelong love affair: between the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan and his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal Begum. Like the Sarus Cranes, Mumtaz had accompanied her husband everywhere, even on his frequent military campaigns against the Mahrattas in the Deccan. She died giving birth to their fourteenth child on one such expedition.

The cranes breeding plumage was a sign of the onset of the monsoon. At Agra the Yumana River had been in full flow after the recent heavy rains. The Yumana, like the Sarus Crane, is also considered sacred by Hindus. I had admired the monument’s reflection in its flow: a fitting confluence of Muslim and Hindu beliefs.

Four hundred years ago, the Moghul Emperor Jahangir, a gifted amateur ornithologist, had studied the nesting habits of the Sarus Crane, making careful notes that he recorded in his memoirs. I’d like to think that his son, the future Emperor Shah Jahan, was sitting beside his father as he conducted his studies, noting the fidelity of the cranes and absorbing the natural history of undying conjugal love.

Minature depicting Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal Begum. Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum

Rick Beven

Painting of a Sarus Crane by Shaikh Zain Ud-Din. ©Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford