David Waddington Memoirs by David Waddington Read Free Book Online Page A

minority of the population) had fought the Japanese throughout the War from their jungle hide-outs and soon therewas a communist-led movement, the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) determined to seize power from the British by force. By 1950 there were about 40,000 British and Commonwealth troops in the country, and we had come to join them. The British Army had enough on its hands with war in Korea so there was a fair chance of anyone being called up in 1951 seeing some action. I felt extremely lucky: I had already seen parts of the world which I had never in my wildest dreams thought I would be able to visit. No one then thought that world travel would soon be commonplace, and I felt truly privileged to be visiting countries which I thought few others would ever have a chance of seeing.
    The time came for the train to leave Singapore and we set off into the darkness with armed guards on the platform at the end of each carriage, peering into the surrounding jungle and longing for a burst of fire as the prelude to a pitched battle and the winning of much glory. But on this occasion, as on so many others, the opportunity for glory never came: and at two in the morning we arrived at Ipoh. Transport was there to take us to the 12th Royal Lancers RHQ. There I was taken to a room in a straw-roofed hut and as I arrived a young subaltern sat up in one of the two beds and said: ‘I am David Duckworth and you’re the fellow who stuck a compass in my sister’s bottom at Sunnybank School, Burnley!’ I had forgotten the incident but at the time it had led to fearsome punishment, and it ought to have stuck in my mind as the point of the compass had stuck in Rachel’s posterior. She was a nice girl and at the time I felt she should have taken my attentions as a compliment.
    I did not stay in Ipoh long – but long enough to learn something of the eccentricities of the Commanding Officer, Lt Col Horsburgh-Porter. On mess nights, subalterns were required to perform feats of bravery like jumping off the first floor terrace and grasping the trunk of a nearby tree to slow their descent to the ground. In calmer moments we were set the almost impossible taskof dislodging lizards from the ceiling of the mess with the end of a long brush and catching them in free fall. The regiment had arrived in Singapore in August 1951 and consisted of twenty-five officers and 470 other ranks, 35 per cent of whom were National Servicemen conscripted for two years. It was deployed in three principal locations – Ipoh, Taiping and Raub, with a detached troop at Kuantan and another up in the Cameron Highlands.
    After a week or two I set off to join ‘B’ Squadron at Raub and there served happily under the squadron leader, John Clark Kennedy. The officers were housed in the government Rest House, and a fellow subaltern was John Lang, later Dean of Lichfield. Then I went to Kuantan for a few weeks. It was off Kuantan that the Prince of Wales and the Repulse had been sunk on 10 December 1941 and it was on the padang at Kuantan that in February 1952 we paraded for the funeral of King George VI. The Sultan’s palace was at Pekan and we were summoned there one night to hear his complaint that his polo ponies had been blown up by a landmine on the road to Ipoh.
    Back in Raub one of my jobs was taking consignments of gold from the local mine to Kuala Lumpur. The officer in command travelled in a Daimler armoured car with a driver and gunner and we were accompanied by an armoured personnel carrier with a driver and about half a dozen men. Once, on arriving in KL, we drove into the car park adjoining the NAAFI and, with a breezy ‘carry on sergeant’, I nipped across the road to the railway station to have a drink. When I returned I found the whole troop under arrest. They had abandoned the vehicles without a guard and had themselves gone for a drink. I felt entirely responsible and on returning to HQ made this absolutely plain to the commanding officer. Not