大象传媒

I spent the next three or four days sorting myself out, filling in forms, drawing from the quartermaster's store everything under the sun required for safari including a 'wangled' shotgun for free. I required this to shoot sand grouse and guinea fowl for the pot. My immediate boss in Command HQ in Nairobi was a charming old boy, the SOME or Senior Ordnance Mechanical Engineer. Probably trained as an engineer, Major Stringer must have come out as a Kenya planter many years previously, his knowledge of modern engineering appeared to be confined to farm machinery! He took me out to his house to meet his wife where they both gave me several hours of invaluable advice on how to exist in Africa. This advice, based upon many years of experience, I found later to be invaluable. In a very charming way they looked upon me as a personal responsibility.
The following day the Major took me round the KUR and H workshops, a very comprehensive organisation used for the maintenance of the railway rolling-stock and harbour equipment in Kenya and Uganda. Now however its principal occupation was building armoured cars by cladding Ford 3 ton lorries with mild steel plate and making mortars out of drain piping. They even went as far as constructing mortar bomb casings, presumably to be filled and primed somewhere safe away from everybody. All this had become necessary as supplies of war equipment were non existent from the UK and everything had to be an improvisation.
When we got back to his office there were five natives lined up along the wall by the entrance. Four of them seemed to be wearing only a blanket, two of them standing on one leg leaning on a long stick. "Ah" said the Major. "You will need a 'boy', you had better come and choose one from this lot which I arranged to be here as soon as we returned from the workshops". Needless to say I didn't do any choosing. He asked each of them a few questions in Swahili, got a few hesitant answers, nothing of which did I understand. Then, pointing to a rather fierce looking guy in quite clean shorts he said "You had better have this one".
His name was Muindi and claimed to be 35, but I suspect that he was younger. He came from the Wakamba tribe and agreed to be 鈥榤y boy' for the princely sum of 35 shillings per month. This included of course, coming to war! He only spoke Swahili besides his tribal language. The Wakambas pull all their teeth out at an early age replacing them with sharpened hardwood pegs, hence his fierce visage. He turned out to be an excellent fellow and stayed with me the whole time that I was with the East Africans.
I had arrived in Nairobi early on Wednesday morning. Equally early on Saturday Major Stringer, with all my gear in his truck and Muindi on top of everything set off to the northern edge of Kenya to deliver me to my mobile workshop in the 'desserty' bush at Garissa. It was not too far from the Somali border, then occupied by the Italians. It was a rough ride. That first day we made rear Div HQ at mile 161 at 5.00pm, an hour before sundown and darkness.
The Div HQ Mess itself was just four vertical poles with a well-made native bush roof. We slept outside on camp beds under the stars and a mosquito net and hoped that no prowling hyena would dare to intrude into the rather large circle of beds and bite off half a foot! It was here that I first met Major Hugh Collinson the DADOS, Deputy Assistant Director Ordnance Service, of 12 EA Division. He was a tea or coffee planter and over the years he and I became very good friends, we served together almost all the time that I was with the East Africans.
I remember many years later when I was with Conoco in Berkeley Square House, he telephoned me and said that he was in London and could we meet. I said "Of course" and invited him for a drink and/or lunch at the Berkeley Hotel, which was then I think, in Dover Street. "No" he said. "I would much prefer tea, why not meet me for tea at the Ritz"? So we had tea at the Ritz, which was the first time that I had ever been there. He was staying there! We were served by a white gloved waiter from what looked like a solid silver teapot.
We left Rear Div HQ early next morning to continue the safari thrust to the north, on the way we saw all kinds of game big and small. Great big vulture like guineas fowl as large as English Christmas turkeys, lion, giraffe running down the track in front of the truck and buck and antelope of every description. Luckily no elephant or buffalo as that could have been a bit dangerous.
We left bright and early soon after sunrise and finally reached destination mid afternoon in the heat of the day. It was the Nigerian Light Battery to which I was attached, commanded by a colourful Capt. Benjamin (Benji) Skeen. He liked his gin. When we arrived he was having his siesta on a camp bed under his tent affair beneath a thorn bush. I learned afterwards, that he had just finished a curry lunch preceded by more than enough gin. Ducking my head under the branch holding up the door flap I saluted smartly and said "Lieutenant Potter sir reporting to join the Battery". He got up on one elbow squinted into the light and said "Ah yes, I've had a signal about you. It says 'Lt. K. Potts is joining us and is an expert on guns'. You're welcome, we need you. Your other name must be Hiram". Although I explained that it was 'Potter' and not 'Potts' he wasn't having any. My nickname from then on in all the East African Officers Messes of which I became a member for the next four and a half years was "Hiram", after some famous Hiram K. Potts of whom, at that time, I don't think I had ever heard.
There were eight of us in all in the Mess each with his own little bush roofed wigwam affair. They were a very cheery crowd all with nicknames. They made me very welcome.
We spent the next two weeks at Garissa in this mass of level thorn bush that stretched for miles. It was all the same 10 to 12 feet high bush into which, if you left the track for only a short distance, there was a very good chance that it could take hours to find your way back to the track again. My small mobile workshop consisted of three lorries fitted out with a lathe, gas welding equipment and very limited stores plus a 15cwt truck. The troops were four white tradesmen from Nairobi all good at their trade but quite ignorant in all service matters and a bunch of Africans to look after us all - drivers, cooks, 'personal boys' etc..
The Nigerian Battery had white officers with Nigerian NCOs and ORs. All the Nigerians were from the Hausa tribe, every one of them well over 6 ft tall. They had three or four Troops of 3.7 howitzers ( Kipling's screw guns) and were head carried through the bush. As far as I remember, the only parts that were two man loads were the recuperator and each half of the unscrewed barrel. These bits were carried on the heads of two gunners on a "stretcher" like arrangement made out of poles. The Battery had no vehicles so every thing else had to be head carried as well.
During these two weeks I became almost fluent in Swahili - there was no alternative as my Africans spoke no English! The Gunners did their exercises and schemes. The Italians had several cracks at bombing the airstrip that we had next door that housed two or three of our Furies. Once they nearly got us instead. On the first occasion one of our Furies got a Sovoya bomber that crashed close by in the bush. In between all this, I managed to fit in a bit of shooting for the pot such as sand grouse and guinea fowl. The temperature most of the time remained above 100 F, from breakfast time until after the sun had gone down.
On our last night at Garissa the heavens opened and, although we were in 'deserty' scrub, within an hour the whole area was under 6 inches of water. I lit my hurricane lamp and saw all my belongings floating about the tent floor and water within half an inch of the bottom of my camp bed. It was at that moment that I was shaken to see a pretty large snake make rapid progress into the tent at one end and out through the other. Its head was out of the water together with several loops of its body, it looked like the Loch Ness monster. They later told me that it was probably a puff adder that is particularly deadly.
During the night the Battery moved out on a Scheme and the next morning we set off, in torrential rain, back towards Nairobi - our destination Mitiburi Camp. During the trip we encountered a herd of 22 giraffe that preceded us down the track at a gallop before getting off into the bush. We arrived an hour or two after dark and no one seemed to know anything about us. The next day the Battery arrived, their 'Scheme' having had to be called off because of the rain. It was about then that I realised that I had left at Garissa one of my prized possessions, the tin hat I wore with the BEF at Dunkirk. In spite of several signals, that was the last I saw of it.
We had found an empty concrete floored building in the camp that, with my lads, a bit of engineering know-how and improvisation, we turned into a reasonable anteroom and mess.
Having been in the bush for some time and as it was the end of Ramadan, Benji Skeen, the CO of the Nigerian Battery, decided to treat his Hausamen to a traditional and expected feast. He bought 5 'gombies' (bulls or bullocks) for the troops to slaughter. This was done by several of them grabbing the animal's horns and cutting their throats with pangas. A very bloody business. Subsequently the carcasses were skinned and roasted whole over large bonfires. Later that evening there was much feasting and tribal dancing late into the night.
Most of November was spent 'freewheeling' with several visits to Nairobi, some fishing for trout and one or two safaris after buffalo and other game. They were not too successful, my own 'best' was a very handsome waterbuck. Something I would not want to do today. In December we moved up to Gilgil camp where I became very involved with the South African Gunner Regiments who had not brought any workshop units up with them from Cape Town. We now had a large contingent of SA troops in Kenya.
After a memorable 1940 Christmas Day party at the house of a local planter also one of our Mess, a bout of tonsillitis put me in hospital for a few days. Then on 10 January 1941 I was a bit shattered by being soundly ticked off by my boss at HQ, Major Stringer, for being improperly dressed. When I enquired "Why". he smiled and held out his hand with 6 of his own rather worn 'pips'. "Here you are", he said "Put these on". I had been promoted Captain!
In the middle of January I took the workshop up through Nanuki and Isiolo and then on a 200 mile trek through a desert of larva boulders and rocks to Marsabit. At that time Marsabit was just an oasis in the middle of a desert. You suddenly came from an inferno of heat, dust and impassable rocky terrain into a few miles of tall green trees flowing streams, birds - and a local vicar! It was here that with my workshop I was officially attached to the 1st South African Division in the joint capacity of 'gun wallah and diplomat'. The South African equipment was all old first World War stuff, 4.5 howitzers, 18 and 60 pounders. Nearly all of them needing urgent workshop attention for which neither we nor they had spares. Particularly the 4.5 howitzers whose recuperators are all on the borderline of 'u/s'. No amount of signalling to Nairobi seem to produce any replacement spares, so we had to fiddle, fudge and improvise as best we could.
On the 19th January the first of the 4.5 Batteries went into action and did some very accurate shooting, so vindicating or justifying our 'fudging and improvisation'. On the same day Italian Savoyas strafed us and we managed to bring one down with rifle fire and one LMG. A newly arrived Hurricane, probably the only one in East Africa, brought down another. Although all a little bit "gung ho", the South Africans were all a very good crowd but so different from the Army types I had been used to. Discipline was there one assumed, but it wasn't too obvious.
By now everyone was getting very impatient to get on with it. If we were to take Abyssinia in 1941 we had to get to and take Addis Ababa by March otherwise the rains would make it impossible until a year later. By today's (1995) standards of equipment, techniques and communications, this may sound a bit exaggerated. However with our then pretty antiquated equipment and no roads in the rainy season, it was a 'no go' situation. Round about this time we were unfortunate to be in an area swarming with ticks. They were anything in size from pin heads to good sized garden peas. They tend to attach themselves to your person everywhere and can only be removed with the red hot end of a cigarette. Three or four consecutive attacks and you usually got tick fever that would last for several days.

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