Down Among the Weeds Read online

  Down Among the Weeds

  Down Among

  the Weeds

  Harry Beaves

  Copyright © 2018 Harry Beaves

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  Matador

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  Tel: 0116 279 2299

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador

  Twitter: @matadorbooks

  ISBN 978 1788034 753

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  For John and Philip and the generations to come.

  ‘The objects of life are to do adventurous things, to make (or at all events enjoy) beautiful things, to understand wonderful things.’

  Romney Green – furniture-maker, writer, social reformer.

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1In the Beginning

  2The Gunner

  3The Officer Cadet

  4The Officer

  5Semper in Excremento Sed Altus Variat

  6Preparing for Ireland

  7First Steps

  8Life in the Bus Station

  9Motorman

  10Riots

  11David Storrey and Bob Hope

  12Fred Basset Patrols

  13The Arms Find

  14The Net Begins to Close

  15Tommy Gorman

  16Crash and Bang

  17Getting on Top

  18Running Down

  19Louis Hammond

  20Northern Ireland Evaluation and Epilogue

  21Back in Germany

  22Life in Wales

  23Burning the Candle

  24Getting Qualified

  25Oman

  26Down Among the Weeds

  27Malta

  28Marriage

  29The Sublime and the Ridiculous

  30Back to the Weeds

  31The Family in Germany

  32Norway

  33Health Problems

  34The End of the Army

  35The Submarine Starts to Rise

  36Heather

  37The Anxiety Increases

  38CBT and Mindfulness

  39And Finally…

  Appendix 1 The John West Pedigree

  Appendix 2 The Hammond Family Story

  Appendix 3 The Beaves Family Tree

  Appendix 4 The Elkins Family Tree

  Appendix 5 The Williams Family Tree

  Appendix 6 The Wilkes Family Tree

  Acknowledgements

  I am indebted to many people for this book, but it was Stephen Craske who first sowed the seeds. We were quietly chatting one evening about my problems with anxiety and my suspicion that the roots lay in my Northern Ireland service so I showed him the scrap book I kept of that period. As a psychiatrist he saw the connection and suggested I wrote about it. At the time I thought it might be a throwaway line, but it struck a chord as it was something I had secretly wanted to do. A few days later a package arrived containing a copy of his own autobiography. I read it with fascination. It showed me what was possible and lit the fuse for this project.

  Neither this book nor Stephen’s book would have been possible without the assistance of his son Oliver Craske. Oliver has been a huge help in providing both moral support and practical advice and assistance without which this work would have remained a dream.

  Hundreds of characters have influenced my life, but for more than thirty years I was in the Army so I owe it to the Great British soldier who makes this story and in particular it is the men of 28 Battery and of 148 Battery whose courage, determination and irrepressible good humour have made it a privilege to serve.

  Much of my story concerns health and I am indebted to Graham Kidd for all his help in putting me back on my feet.

  Self-publishing is a daunting process and the staff of ‘Troubador’ have guided me through superbly.

  Finally, none of this would have been possible without the help, support and encouragement of Barbara, my wife of forty years. To her an explanation: when in Chapter 27 and others I refer to the ‘Big Brown Bird’ I do, of course, mean ‘tall’.

  Photographs and illustrations are by the author and family unless otherwise stated.

  Introduction

  I am now well into the last quarter of my life and have reached the stage when many people take stock of what they have done and what they might have achieved. I probably haven’t achieved very much, but I believe that I have been extremely lucky to have led a very full and happy life. There are a number of reasons why I have chosen to tell my story.

  As a boy I was fortunate to grow up among a large extended family, my grandparents all coming from the usual Victorian-sized families. My mother’s relatives lived around Devizes in Wiltshire and my father’s around Andover in Hampshire. They were country folk who over the years had rarely moved far from their native villages, so my sisters and I grew up knowing most of them and regularly heard tales about their characters and their deeds. Today, families are much smaller, the world seems a much bigger place and I have been struck by how little my own sons know about their immediate ancestors.

  When I thought about this, I realised that there were important parts of my parents’ lives that I knew little about and although, as a boy, I had known my grandparents, I knew almost nothing at all about them. I particularly regretted not learning more about my father’s and grandfather’s service in the World Wars. Neither achieved great distinction, but both were very much in the thick of it and were seriously affected afterwards, but, for whatever reason, I never asked them about it nor did they choose to tell.

  In recent years I have developed a strong interest in genealogy and, using the internet, have been able to trace our family tree in some detail. But a family tree is often very sterile as most of the members are flat with no more than the bare details of birth, marriage and death. What were these ancestors really like and how did they live their lives? I can get some sort of a picture from other records that show that my great-great-great-grandfather (on my father’s side) and eight of his nine siblings separately fled rural poverty as silk weavers in Andover for the urban squalor of Spitalfields. Two of them died there of illnesses caused by poor living conditions. In 1842 four others took their young families on a three-month sea journey to New Zealand where they were among the country’s earliest settlers enduring amazing hardships and dangers. Their descendants include an important Missionary to the Maoris (Thomas Godfrey Hammond), an ‘All Black’, of course (Ian Hammond) and the inventor of the ‘Elastrator’ device for castrating (!) sheep and cattle (Arthur Oswald Hammond). A fifth chose to settle in Australia.

  Similarly, it was fascinating to discover that Edward Wilkes, my maternal grandmother’s seventeen-year-old brother, on the instructions of his mother, kept a diary of his journey to Australia, telling in matter-of-fact terms of the rugged conditions for passengers on a sailing vessel when he emigrated in 1883. After 104 days at sea and with the journey complete, he thought the diary of
little consequence, but he sent it home to his mother as she had instructed. She kept this treasured memory of her eldest child with her for fifty years until she died. It is now a valued document in the Wiltshire County Archives.

  My first reason for writing this autobiography is to fill a gap for the generations of my family to come, not to suggest that I achieved any great things, but in the hope that my story and the way I tell it will paint a picture for them of the sort of person that I am.

  In doing so I have become very aware of the vast changes that have taken place during my life time, memories of which roughly span the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, a period which has taken us from the austerity of the post-war years to the cyberspace age. From a time when children played in woods and trees until dusk to a time when they stay indoors and focus on electronic games, in fear of unknown dangers that might lurk outside. In some ways my early life is a reflection of the social history of that time.

  Almost all of my working life was spent serving in the Army. The Artillery Regiment, of which I was part, was taken out of its comfortable role in Germany, where it was part of the NATO force opposing the Communist Bloc, re-trained and sent to Belfast perform a largely infantry task. For four months in 1972 I served on operational duties in one of the most difficult and hostile areas of Northern Ireland, at a time when IRA activity is generally reckoned to have been at its most intense. On a number of occasions our unit was involved in events that made the front page of the national press.

  It is typical of the willingness and adaptability of the British soldier that we did so well. We were a very ordinary group of men who, I believe, achieved extraordinary things with little formal recognition and I feel very privileged to have played a part. Throughout that time I kept a diary in a large Stationery Office note book. Over the months it grew to a second volume and to it I added all manner of press cuttings, photographs and other ephemera that related to events at that time. The diary stops on the day we returned to Germany, but stories have continued to emerge and my diaries have become overflowing scrapbooks as I have added to them as the years have gone by. I have always strongly believed that story of 28 Field Battery in Ireland in 1972 deserved to be told and that is my second reason for writing this book.

  In 1972 little was known of post-traumatic stress and the strains put on soldiers by active service. Like the rest of my comrades, when we left Ireland I put that time behind me and concentrated on my military service and the rest of my life. I would talk freely about those days and enjoy a good yarn when I bumped into folk who had been in Ireland with me, but those yarns were almost always about the amusing events and never about the more harrowing things that we experienced. They were kept in the depths of my memory and only forced their way to the surface on occasions like Remembrance Day. I was never fully aware of the mental scars that I was carrying or of the lasting subconscious effect that they had on me. Those memories remained firmly battened down for forty years until after I had left the Army. Without the protective framework of military life I eventually succumbed to severe bouts of anxiety and depression which had their roots in events in 1972. Thankfully, I believe that I have now largely overcome this, so my third reason for writing this book is cathartic. Re-visiting events of that time and re-telling previously-avoided details of the story is proof to me that I have finally exorcised those demons.

  It is well known that the Army is much more than just a job. It is a way of life, often boring, frustrating, difficult, dangerous and unpleasant, but by far the largest part of it is fun, great fun, lived to the full by energetic, well-motivated people. The strong sense of comradeship and humour and the bonds that they create help overcome adversity and are something that I have tried to convey in this book.

  I can only express this in my own way. For forty years I was obliged to write accurate and objective military English, so, freed of those constraints, it has been a joy not just to use adverbs and adjectives again, but to revel in superlatives and the occasional piece of hyperbole!

  I once had a CO who wrote of me in an annual report, ‘He is more at home in the rugby club than at the cocktail party.’ That CO might have described this book as, ‘The product of a mind uncluttered by an excess of education’. I wouldn’t disagree, but this is my story and I tell it in my own words.

  I hope you enjoy it.

  Harry Beaves

  2017

  Chapter 1

  In the Beginning

  My first brush with the law was on 27th October 1947, probably minutes after my birth, when the midwife took me from my mother, Mrs Nora Beaves, and handed me to my father, Police Constable Harry Beaves of the Wiltshire Constabulary. At the time my father was the policeman for Shalbourne, a pretty little village on the edge of Savernake Forest, near Marlborough in Wiltshire. I was born ‘at home’ in the police station which, at that time, was the end house in a row of semi-detached properties called ‘Kew Gardens’. On my birth certificate, under ‘Place of Birth’ it says ‘No 1, Kew Gardens’ which has often raised eyebrows when the document is produced for official scrutiny and seems to have marked me for life as a person to whom the unusual frequently happens.

  My father, Howard Harry Beaves, was born in 1916, the son of Harry Albert Beaves, the village barber in Ludgershall, Wiltshire, and Norah Annie Elkins. His only sister was named Beryl. The memories of the two World Wars were very prominent in my parents’ and grandparents’ families. My grandfather Harry Albert Beaves fought in the First World War initially with the Machine Gun Corps before becoming one of the earliest members of the Tank Corps. He was seriously wounded when his tank was blown up and walked with a stick for ever after. I remember as a very small boy him telling me that as his tank rumbled forward the bullets would come through one side, pass by his ear and go out through the other side. His experiences of tank warfare must have been horrific. Years after Granddad’s death, my father took the family to visit the Tank Museum at Bovington where the very first exhibit that we saw was the sort of tank that Granddad went to war in. I gazed in wonder at the real bullet holes in one side of the tank and matching exit holes in the other – just like the old man had said!

  My paternal G-G-Grandfather’s Family in about 1885. Seated. Polly Ann Tibble, Sgt James Tibble (my G-G-Grandfather), Susan (Blunden) Tibble (my G-G-Grandmother), Charles Tibble. Standing. Ellen Ada Tibble, Mark Elkins (my G-Grandfather), Hanna Maria (Tibble) Elkins (my G-Grandmother)

  My paternal G-Grandfather’s Family in about 1913. Seated. Nellie Florence Elkins, Mark Elkins (my G-Grandfather), Hanna Maria (Tibble) Elkins (my G-Grandmother), Wilfred Thomas Elkins. Standing. Pte Howard William Elkins DCM, Lucy Ann Elkins, Alexander Elkins, Norah Annie Elkins (my Grandmother).

  The Central Garage, Ludgershall in about 1915 owned by Mark Elkins (my G-Grandfather) with his son Wilf in front of the Ford truck.

  I suspect my father had a difficult relationship with his father, but he was particularly close to his maternal grandfather, Mark Elkins. Mark Elkins was very much loved and admired and a pillar of the local community. He served with distinction in the Wiltshire Constabulary and reached the rank of Inspector. He married Hannah Maria Tibble, daughter of Sergeant James Tibble who served in the Wiltshire Regiment before becoming one of the earliest members of the Wiltshire Constabulary in about 1855.

  Granfer Elkins retired to Ludgershall where he established the ‘Central Garage’ at a time when there were few motor vehicles in that area. He became a local councillor, was the choirmaster at Ludgershall Church and chairman of Ludgershall Sports Club. He had six children. His son Howard must have been a remarkable man as he served as a Private in the Hampshire Regiment in Mesopotamia during the Great War, winning a Distinguished Conduct Medal and being mentioned in Dispatches. He was killed in action aged only twenty-one and is commemorated on the Basra Memorial.

  St James’ Church, Ludgershall about 1907. Rear. Choirmaster Mark Elkins (my G-Grandfather), Standing Left Wilfred Elkins, Standing Right Alexander Elkins.

>   My father was christened Howard after his uncle, but hated the name and preferred to be called Harry. He spent many happy hours as a boy, with his grandfather, learning how to find his way round car engines and when he left school at fourteen he began work as a car mechanic at Anna Valley Motors in Andover. When he was old enough he was persuaded to join the Wiltshire Constabulary and serve alongside his favourite uncle, Inspector Walter ‘Dapper’ Hawkins, who had married my grandmother’s sister, Lucy Elkins.

  My grandparents Harry Albert Beaves, in the uniform of the Tank Corps, and my grandmother Norah Annie (Elkins) Beaves with my father Howard Harry Beaves.

  At the outbreak of the Second World War he was in a protected occupation as a police constable, stationed in Trowbridge, but despite this he enlisted in the Wiltshire Regiment and fought in Burma. His experiences were very harrowing. On one occasion he was the point scout of a thirty-man patrol using the river beds as access through the jungle. The patrol was ambushed leaving only four survivors who were cut off behind Japanese lines. They had little idea where they were as their leaders had been killed, so it took several weeks, surviving on leaves and berries, before they finally found their way back to safety. For this, he was ‘Mentioned in Despatches’. It was several weeks before he had recovered sufficiently to return to the front, by which time his battalion had moved to a different part of the theatre so he was asked if he would rather join another unit.

  My parents Howard Harry Beaves, in the uniform of the Wiltshire Regiment, and Kathleen Nora (Williams) Beaves with my sister Stella Jean Beryl Beaves.

  Grasping the opportunity with both hands he replied., ‘Yes, sir. I would like to transfer to the Ordnance Corps.’ His logic, if he could wangle it, was that it would be infinitely preferable to be safely stacking blankets miles back than fighting the Japanese up front in the jungle. The infantry were sorry to lose such a proven asset but his request was granted and in due course he reported with relief to his new unit, part of the Indian Army Ordnance Corps.