The Life and Travels of a Soldier, Engineer and Arbitrator in Africa and Beyond

305 Pages·2010·1.35 MB·English

MANY PARTS

MANY PARTS
The Life and Travels of a Soldier,
Engineer and Arbitrator in Africa
and Beyond

Desmond FitzGerald

The Radcliffe Press
⋅
LONDON NEW YORK
Published in 2007 by The Radcliffe Press
6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU

In the United States and in Canada
distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St Martin’s Press
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
Copyright © Desmond FitzGerald, 2007
The right of the estate of the late Desmond FitzGerald to be identified as the
licensor of this work has been asserted by the licensor in accordance with the
Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any
part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission
of the publisher.
ISBN: 978 1 84511 306 3
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress Catalog card: available

Typeset in Sabon by Oxford Publishing Services, Oxford
Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Preface viii
Introduction ix
Lineage xi
Part I: Tale of Four Families 1
1. My immediate family 3
2. England and India 20
3. My school years in England, 1925–35 29
4. Further education: the RMA, SME and Cambridge 66
Part II: Away to the War 79
5. Phoney War 81
6. Dunkirk, Leeds and Skegness 91
7. Round Africa convoy 100
8. Middle East posting 114
9. Tripoli, Tunis and preparing for Italy 126
10. Italy and training for Europe and Overlord, 1943 135
Part III: Peacetime Soldiering 157
11. Military service in East Africa, 1945–48 159
12. Back in the UK 175
Part IV: Kenya: my second career, 1955–99 193
13. Down to earth 195
14. Family life and DF&A, 1965–76 218
15. Nomad roaming from place to place, 1976–81 240
16. Life on Ol Olua Ridge and Kamundu, 1979–89 258
17. The last lap: 1990–2000 267
Index 271
v
Acknowledgements
The end of the Second World War and then 40 or more
years of silence on the part of most participants. Who
wants to provoke that glazed look that labels you the bore
of the century if you dare reminisce? History books, of course,
there are in plenty; but you don’t have to read them, and for that
matter, who does? Then gradually one senses a thaw. Don’t ask
why, but young people begin to listen, actually to invite one to
open up. They don’t actually ask the dreaded question: ‘What did
you do?’, but if you tell them a good story they start asking for
more. One’s family, of course, are the most curious. I remember
wondering about my father, who married my mother when he was
40. Did life really start for him in 1915? What was he up to during
all that lost time? No good, no doubt.
So it is with our daughter Katie, although she has already heard
most of what follows during her 30 odd years. Our grandchildren
are not old enough yet to be curious; Charlie wants eventually to
own my ceremonial sword, and so he shall, one day. My story is
meant mostly for their mother and for them when they are old
enough to read it – and perhaps their children. What about a
wider audience? This was where the idea of a memoir became
exciting. I had the luck to befriend a young Irish colleague in the
company for which I work, named Sue Lawless. She liked my tales
(anecdotes you could call them, though I dislike the word), and
kept on encouraging me to put them on tape. I might have done so
at that, if I had had her beside me when I recorded; but she went
and got married and left for Uganda, and I could not relate
anything just into thin air. It was not that Sue was interested in the
war as such; in fact the idea of war repels her. What excited her
were the tales of human interest. She loved the sad story of Lucy
the hen – she even wanted me to tell it at her wedding. It was her
particular enthusiasm that made me think that even the story of
vi
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
my childhood might attract a wider audience; but others, particu-
larly my wife Barbara, have encouraged me to prune that part very
thoroughly. I am leaving that to an editor.
Sue Lawless, then, is responsible, if not for the memoir, for the
enlarged form it has taken. Barbara, along with Sarah Cape,
Bridget Evans and Joanna Hechle (who have been typing it) is
reading it. They have all kept their opinions of it very much to
themselves. Bridget, when in a moment of despair I threatened to
bin the whole thing, said she thought that would be a pity –
otherwise, silence. Barbara is my critic. She would like to have
typed it, but with all her activities, including coping with my
business correspondence, there would never be time. I would not
be writing it at all if it were not for her. She is the one to whom I
owe it all. I owe a deep debt of gratitude, of course, to the ladies
who have actually taken on the onerous task of interpreting my
awful writing and typing it. I am especially grateful to my two
sponsors, my ex-brother-in-law W. R. (Bill) Horne who put up
most of the funding and my ex-wife Buff (Elizabeth) FitzGerald
who also contributed. I must also acknowledge the involuntary
help I have had from other amateur authors. I’ve collected a little
library of books of this kind, and have rather shamelessly
plundered the best of them for ideas on style and construction.
I am particularly grateful to Hugh Holmes, John Millard (who
has read and commented on the war section) and Michael StJohn,
whose books I treasure and hope to emulate. The late Roger
StJohn’s family reminiscences have also been an enormous help.
My son-in-law, Philip McLellan, told Ian Parker about my book
and he expressed interest. When he had read the first draft Bridget
passed to him he told me he would like to edit it. He noted that
the book stopped in 1955, 45 years ago. ‘Why?’ I said I was
thinking of stopping it in 1964, the year of my second marriage.
‘That is not much of a compliment to Barbara.’ ‘Well what can
possibly interest anyone in an account of domestic ups-and-downs,
let alone bliss?’ ‘What about your grandchildren, and your great
grandchildren?’ That’s it then, the whole story as edited by Ian.
So, here’s to Sue and Sarah and Bridget and Jo, and to Hugh and
John and Michael and Roger and Ian; and most of all to Barbara,
my wife, for being my critic and having to put up with me for so
long and for enabling me to survive happily to tell the tale.
vii
Preface
Henry Ford I opined: ‘History is bunk’. Tony Blair seems
to hold the same view. ‘Call me Tony’ he bleats. Why
not ‘Blair’ for God’s sake? What’s wrong with a
distinguished Highland Scottish clan name? I am Desmond John
Otho FitzGerald. At my prep school I was ‘FitzGerald’. My friend,
John Gaskell, had an elder brother there, and was therefore
known as ‘Gaskell Minor’. Nobody addressed us as ‘Desmond’
and ‘John’. Similarly, at Wellington. I believe they got this right.
Now I am mostly ‘Desmond’, even in the office. This marks me as
a person, that’s all. FitzGerald links me to a family 1000 years old,
and to 1000 years of history. It is nothing to boast about, but
something surely to live up to? That is why I have written a few
paragraphs about my Geraldine and Goodbody forebears.
viii
Introduction
Apologies all round. Clinton apologizes for slavery. Aus-
tralians say sorry to the Aborigines. Her Majesty of the
United Kingdom, it is true, bucks the trend over Amritsar
and the Emperor of Japan dissatisfies the British survivors of
Japanese prisoner-of-war camps; but we lesser lights are expected
to follow the fashion and don sackcloth and ashes.
The FitzGeralds, including the Glin clan, have nearly a millen-
nium of misbehaviour to account for. A FitzGerald was one of
Strongbow’s lieutenants in the 1169 invasion of Ireland – out-
rageous aggression – followed by the illegal seizure of great tracts
of land in southwest Ireland. They even had pretensions to (petty)
kingship. The FitzGeralds, it is true, didn’t have to pretend not to
be English – they were not; but to claim to be Irish, that was
another matter. They were, are, Normans, with roots in Italy and
the Mediterranean islands – ‘not one of us’ in the recent words of
a truly Irish lady. Some of the FitzGeralds, the Kildares for
example, sucked up to the English/Hanoverian monarchs and
became earls and dukes. Thank God we Glins do not have to
plead guilty to that; but what about our adoption of the Protestant
religious rite, just to hang on to what was left of the lands we had
pinched? Tut tut!
Nearer to the present, we Glins fell into the bad habit of joining
up and fighting British wars. There were FitzGerald officers in
George III’s household brigade; and more recently still my own
father fought in the second Anglo–Boer war. He could have been
forgiven for this if he had realized he was fighting the oppressors
of the South African Bantu, but he did not. He thought he was
fighting for Queen and Country. How confused he was! He then
compounded his errors by joining the colonialists in East Africa
and became part of a mercenary African army, the King’s African
ix