大象传媒

I was called up straight from school - no chance of a career or university studies - and sent into the Royal Signals where I trained as a wireless operator and was commissioned.
I had a brigade signal section on the south coast preparing the camps for the troops which would mass there prior to D-Day. We put the sound systems in the camps and into the docks in Southampton. It was staggering going round the docks in the days before the invasion: the whole port crammed with landing barges. Then, the day after the ships and men had left, such a feeling of emptiness.
Later, I was sent to India. I had expected to go to Burma but I was posted as a GSO III in the Chief Signal Officer`s branch of the Allied Land Forces, SEAC. I was only twenty and already made up to captain - and there I was, responsible for posting signals officers into the jungles of Burma, just going to a filing cabinet, taking out a man`s card and sending him off, perhaps never to return: a very sobering thought.
After a while I was hospitalised with an elbow abscess and went to convalesce in Darjeeling; I was downgraded medically so could not go back to my old job. However, I was chosen to be the ADC of GOC Bengal District and went to Calcutta. I worked in the plush surroundings of Flagstaff House supporting Major-General Douglas Stewart. It was a fantastic experience for a twenty-one year old son of a Methodist minister; there were certainly things I had to learn fast, such as how to pour a brandy and soda! I met all sorts of distinguished and interesting people, including the parliamentary commission which was looking into the future independence of India. Calcutta was the staging post for Singapore and places beyond and we accommodated all those passing through. I sat at the table with Woodrow Wyatt, Edwina Mountbatten, the CIGS, General Sir Alan Brook - I had to search the bookshops of Calcutta to find a book about Indian birds as the CIGS was a keen ornithologist.
From one point of view it was an unsatisfying posting: I wanted to get on with doing things and to have more responsibility. Later on in my civilian life people would ask me where I had done my management training, expecting me to name a university, but, of course, I had learned everything in the army. Dinner with the Chinese Ambassador and mixing with Maharajahs at the Calcutta races certainly helped!
It was also a somewhat lonely posting for me; I hadn`t been brought up to go out on the town, so to speak, so I saw less of the off-duty social life than I might. I did spend quite a lot of time writing to my fianc茅e!
Eventually there was a change of general - who was a Catholic widower and who wanted to marry the chief of the Red Cross in India, so a Methodist minister`s son had to organise a Catholic nuptial mass in Calcutta! At the same time my injured arm was playing up - I said that I would have to be demobbed because I couldn`t raise that arm to salute properly! I was sent home in 1946. I`m so tall that no demob suit
could be found for me; for formal events I had to continue to wear my officer`s uniform for several months although I was a civilian.

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