National Service 1955
Second Part
The story continues in Cyprus
As we flew east over the Mediterranean towards Cyprus the dawn broke. It must have been light for an hour or more before we started descending towards Nicosia airport. Having landed at 6.00 am local time we taxied back to the arrivals building and passed a row of parked aircraft. One of them was nothing more than a burnt out wreck and we wondered out loud about this. It was the work of the EOKA, we were told, they had started a terrorist campaign about a year ago and bombed a number of targets. ( At the time we did not realise it was a Skyways Hermese, like the one we were on, which had been destroyed about ten days earlier )
The airport seemed to be staffed mainly by service people and having collected our luggage we changed some money. We got a thousand Cyprus mils to the English pound and there were 5 mil and 3 mil coins equivalent to our pennies and halfpennies. Our instructions were to wait outside the main building for transport. In the army way of things we waited...... and waited....and waited.. As the day grew hotter we moved to some shade and then started discarding items of clothing that had been highly desirable the day before. By nine o'clock it was as hot as an English summer day and by nine o'clock the driver had finished his first run, taken a late breakfast, and arrived for us. We climbed into the three tonner and felt that we too had really arrived.
Not really, the driver told us, he was only taking us to the nearby Wayne's Keep transit camp. From there it would need a special run being laid onto take us half across the island to our final destination at Episcopi. "Where's that ?" we asked and he explained it was a new base being constructed on the southern coast and still some way from being completed.
At the transit camp we were allocated to a tent and told there was no onward transport that day. We hung about the tent as quite a wind got up and it was nothing like as warm as it had been. ( In fact this was the pattern of the weather at that time of year, quite variable. ) Next morning we went to the admin office to inquire further and the NCO in charge had two stripes. As I was first in line I addressed him as corporal and got a right rocket for my pains. Couldn't I see his badges showed he was from an Artillery regiment and didn't I know that his two stripes meant he was a Bombardier ! ( none of us did but it didn't seem a good idea to admit it.) He took our names and said he would be in touch. When a runner came to the tent that afternoon we were hopeful, but his message was that the other three were on guard that night ! They blamed this on me - the bombardier was taking his revenge.
When they came back in the morning they were even less happy. Not so much that they had done a guard duty but they had for the first time been issued with ammunition and gone out with loaded weapons. That was bad enough but they had patrolled the perimeter of the camp wondering if any one outside was going to take a pot shot in at them. They all found this quite sobering. They went to bed and couldn't care less about the onward journey so it was not till the following day we were on our way.
The journey took some hours. There was not much traffic and the roads had a reasonably good center section with rough edges that you had to pull onto when you met on coming traffic. The driver was in no hurry so we rolled back the canvas sides to the truck and admired the view.We passed people riding donkeys but the sight that did take us aback was someone ploughing. A one furrow plough with a long wooden pole to the front , a donkey harnessed one side, and what looked like a bullock the other. The scene was straight out of the Bible as far as we were concerned. After we got to Limassol the road followed the coast and we caught views of the sea in places. There was a square towered castle to the left which one of our travelling companions told us was Kolossi castle where Richard the Lionheart spent his honeymoon with Queen Berengaria. To the right was an army compound of married quarters which was called Berengaria Village and people travelled in from there to Episcopi. We eventually came over the brow of a hill and on the headland in front were brick and concrete built buildings - where we would be working, our informants said, and row upon row of tents on the hillside opposite where we would live.
We had come to join the 3 GHQ Signals Regiment which had recently moved to Cyprus from Suez. The transport dropped us off and we reported to the Adjutants Office. It seems we had been expected for several days, they were desperately short of Cipher mechs who had been on call a hundred hours a week since the last one had returned home. The Adjutant himself came out to check on us. When we explained that the Army had got us from our homes out to Cyprus in less than three days but despite our best efforts we had spent nearly four days in the transit camp he threw a wobbly. The telephone line to Nicosia was red hot, whether it was the corporal, sorry, bombardier on the receiving end we couldn't tell but someone got a real earful.
Since most of the barrack blocks had not been started, and would not be finished for nearly a year, we were each allocated to a tent and started the routine of settling in. We had arrived just two weeks before Easter and also a few days before the annual Regimental inspection. This culminated in a full dress parade at 7.30 am before the day got hot. Everything passed off well and we then started our Easter leave.
Living in a tent turned out not to be as spartan as it might sound. Each was maybe fifteen foot square and housed six people. Center poles held the roof up and the walls were fastened to an external wood or metal frame. There was a solid floor of paving slabs, mains electricity and a paraffin heater for the winter. The lines of tents were ranged down the side of a hill and each had a view of the blue Mediterranean in the middle distance. In the summer we rolled back the canvas front to keep the place cool so the first thing you saw when you woke in the morning was the sea. The oft repeated taunt of the drill instructors on those parade grounds in far away Catterick Garison kept ringing in my ears. " Where do you lot think you are some bleeding holiday camp ? " There wasn't another camp in the world like this. It really was the holiday camp that no drill sergeant believed existed!
The first thing we needed were our civillian clothes as they could be worn any time we were not on duty. We could even go for meals in the mess in them but the dress code at that particular time of year required a Jacket. I still have the letter I wrote home asking for my college blazer to be sent out. It arrived in a couple of weeks but by then the weather was getting warmer and the dress code had gone to shirt sleeve order except after dark.
The nearest beach was actually about a half hour walk from our tents. The Army had numbered the beaches. As you looked out to sea to the left there was what we called the RAF beach, since it was in front of their lines. This was number three beach and was not easy to get down to as rock slides had demolished the path a couple of times. In front of us was number four beach now called tunnel beach because you can drive to it through a tunnel and was the main beach as far as we were concerned. Out to the right was Happy Valley, a short bus ride along the coast road and then down past football pitches and sports fields.
Most of the time we worked a twenty-four hour shift system so we had enough free time to go for a swim every day if we wanted too. The pattern changed a couple of times but in the main it was based on the assumption that not much happens on a Sunday. Sometimes nobody actually went in to work but there were a couple of people on stand by. The remaining six days we worked a morning and then through the night. Next we had the whole day off to sleep if we wanted to and then the third day we worked the afternoon. To say that we worked through the night was not strictly true. Usually sometime after two o'clock in the morning the traffic tapered off and the circuits were closed down one by one. The mechanics, in ciphers where no one could see them, curled up in corners for a kip.
If any urgent message came in it was quicker and cheaper to send it by dispatch rider into Limassol and let Cable and Wireless deal with it rather than open up again. Our circuits involved VHF links to separate transmitters and receivers in the far reaches of the camp area with large aerial arrays attached to each. The story was told that whoever had laid out the first aerial array may well have got the adjacent roads and buildings correct but had not mastered the black art required to point the aerials in the correct direction of an unseen location some way round the globe. Whether it was spherical trigonometry that needed to be invoked I'm not sure but those in the know told us that as a result the aerial performance was somewhat below par. ( I later met a sapper who said he had been distantly involved and that the story was basically true.)
There was a NAFFI where everyday items could be purchased but there was also a tent at the back of the lines that had been converted into a shop. This held more sophisticated items and here I bought a camera. At this point in time we were getting nearly three pounds a week ( UK and Cypriot pounds being judged to be the same value ) and we actually got £C 2.250 on pay day. The army fed and clothed us so most of this could be saved and I think I paid twelve or fourteen pounds for what was quite an expensive camera. It was German , I think the make was Baldix, and it took two and a quarter inch square negatives. The shop was run by the Shahabdins who were Punjabis. They are very proud of the family record of having travelled the world with the army and been trusted contractors to them for what is now getting on for two hundred years.
They had been with the regiment in Egypt and some had come on ahead and recruited local labour as cleaners, cookhouse workers, etc. ready for the move. Obviously they were pro British and one of them had been assassinated in Egypt because of this ( shot as he came out of a cinema ) so they were happy to leave. Any way they were trusted to run an honest shop for us and when I talked to them in later times they obviously did not remember one particular sale but they did remember this range of cameras. Just as it had been an expensive purchase for me so it had been for them. Having put them in stock they had "sweated on the line" as the expression goes in case no one could afford to buy them.
I still have a number of the pictures I took. Because they take much longer to download than text they are available separately. There are links at the end of the text.
How much we saw of the Island depended very much on the view the army took of "the troubles" and how much of a threat the EOKA were perceived to be. At times we were allowed to roam the Island at will and at others confined to camp. Various in between stages allowed us out in armed parties of different sizes. Regulations decreed that Sergants and above could take a service revolver, Corporals could have a sten gun and other ranks had to lug a heavy rifle with them. Army lore had it that Sten guns were unreliable and even with the safety catch on could fire if dropped. Two of us, in our uniforms exploring Limassol, took the magazines off and put them in our pockets because we felt safer. However some redcaps (military police) saw us and we got a good telling off for doing this.
Firing practice with Sten guns was infrequent but when organised was taken as a chance to use up out of date ammunition so misfires were not unknown. This happened on one occasion when I was present. There were strict rules about what was to be done. The person with the stuck gun stood fast when the order to leave was given and an NCO then supervised the clearing of the problem round. Obviously he must never walk in front of the gun in case it went off and he also had to work from the magazine side since the spent cartridges were forcibly ejected on the opposite side. This time it was difficult to clear and the NCO ignored the rules and went to the wrong side. Eventually the gun went off and he was struck by the cartridge and had quite a gash on his face. We were all sworn to secrecy as he would have been in deep trouble if the cause of the wound had become known.
Since they had a big influence on our lives a word about the EOKA. The capital letters are the initial ones of a Greek phrase which translates as Association of Greek Cypriot fighters. It was not a spontaneous Cypriot uprising, in fact far from it. At that time the Greek rulers were promoting a political ideal of reviving "The glory that once was Greece" . To this end they wanted back what it had been robbed of which included, amongst other things, the Elgin Marbles and Cyprus. It all harped back to before 30 BC after which Cyprus became part of the Roman empire. A huge propaganda campaign was mounted by Greece urging the Cypriots to accept enosis the Greek word meaning union with Greece. Colonel Grivas, a Cypriot who lived in Greece, came to lead the terrorists who started letting off bombs in April 1955 and then went on to killing people. They killed British civilians, service personnel and a few Turks. However a large number of those killed were Greek Cypriots, terrorizing them into supporting the movement.
After initial attempts to maintain law and order the British felt they would be well out of it. They secured the future of the Air Force at Akrotiri and the two Army bases at Dehkelia and Episcopi. In 1960 the Cypriots got, not enosis, but independence and the whole island became the Republic of Cyprus. In those days the population of the Island was perhaps half a million and about a fifth of them were of Turkish rather than Greek origin so the British and Turkish view was that enosis was never an option. However, having got rid of the British, the subsequent troubles and the invasion in 1974 all arose from the Greek attempts to displace the Turkish minority.
Links to pictures associated with the above text.