Indian Independence









On 15 August 1947 India celebrated independence from British rule.

The picture left shows Mahatma Gandhi, a key architect in the process, with India’s first prime minister Pandit Nehru. Within 5 months Gandhi was assassinated.

On the same day Muhammad Ali Jinnah (right) became the first governor-general of the newly created independent Muslim state named Pakistan. He died a year later.

Anticipating violence in Bombay, a strict edict was issued to all personnel to remain in the camp during Independence Day and until further notice.

So three of us whose natural disposition was non-conformist got into our civvies and took a taxi into the city. The crowds that we met were at least as large as those recently seen in Cairo, shouting, waiving flags, gesticulating not in protest but in jubilation.

As representatives of the nation that had taken so long to relinquish power we feared what might happen to us. We were surprised to be hoisted onto shoulders and carried high along the main street, people shaking our hands and saying thank you oh yes, thank you for giving us our freedom.

We smiled and waved royally.

The RAF Mutiny

The war in Japan ended in August 1945. With tens of thousands of British troops stationed in the Far East there was a logistic problem of getting them back home. Most had been there for three years or more, many of them battle-scarred and still suffering appalling deprivation.

The British government had dragged their heels in organising the evacuation and did little to improve the conditions of the troops meanwhile. This was just one of the many problems facing the prime minster Clement Attlee. 

In January 1946 nearly 1000 RAF personnel based near Karachi went on strike mainly in protest at the delay in demobilisation, causing a domino reaction that allegedly spread to over 50,000 men in 60 RAF stations throughout Asia, the biggest act of defiance in British military history, so it is said. Indian personnel in the RAF were also involved, their grievance being over the conditions of service.

A Court Martial that ensued seems to have fizzled out due to legal wrangling.

By the summer of 1947 it was claimed that an extra 100,000 men had been released from service and returned to the UK. Most of these were channeled through BRD Worli near Bombay, the RAF station designated to deal with the repatriation of troops.

It was at BRD Worli that I spent the best part of two years from the Autumn of 1946.

 


Physical hazards

As we were dependent on hand-held Davy lamps for light there was always the lurking danger of an explosion. It was reassuring when the safety officer came on his rounds to test the methane level.

Another constant anxiety was the danger of falling rock. Once Trevor called to me to come over to him on the other side of the dram. When I delayed he shouted, ‘Come here, Dai Bach, NOW”. So I did. Tons of rock then fell from the ceiling onto the spot where I’d stood seconds before. A miner’s sixth sense they call it.

Sometimes deaths were caused by foolhardiness, such as when I stumbled in pitch dark (my lamp had gone out) upon the body of a man who had tried to ‘hitch a lift‘ between two drams as they were being hauled by a pony to the pit bottom. He’d slipped and broken his neck.

My scariest moment was when at the start of the shift we were going down the shaft in the cage at 30 mph when the lift stuck and the cable above started to unwind on the top. We managed to dislodge the cage by rocking it. It then dropped a few feet under gravity before the cable took up the slack, mercifully without breaking.

The outcome could have been very different.

An Airman’s lot

It cannot be said that my introduction to His Majesty’s service was a happy experience.

At the beginning I found the atmosphere soulless and depressing. One reason for this was that I missed the comradeship of the mining community I’d left a few weeks before. RAF life was by comparison impersonal. You were just a number not a person.

I was a poor recruit. One early morning during initial training I spent a good 20 minutes polishing my boots to a mirror finish. On the way to parade a few specs of sand had sprinkled onto them, quickly to be spotted by the loudmouthed corporal as he inspected his men. “What sort of fucking polish do you call that, Aircraftman?”, he bellowed. “Excuse me, Corporal, but ..“, I began.“ “EXCUSE ME?”, he roared. “I’ll bloody well give you EXCUSE ME. You’re on a charge for insubordination.” I almost wept. Fortunately I didn’t. However I got my own back: my punishment was to spend time in the office, so I simply filled out a pass form giving myself a weekend leave that I wasn’t entitled to.

Life got much better when I had the good fortune to be sent to India, a country which made a huge and lasting impression. 

 

In the summer of 1946 I developed chronic miner’s elbow resulting in my discharge from the mines. Within weeks I was passed A1 for the armed forces and shortly afterwards joined the RAF.

Working in a South Wales mine

If going from school to college was a culture shock, moving from the esoteric environment of a Cambridge college to this was like landing on another planet.

After a brief but intensive training at Oakdale Colliery in South Wales I worked at Llanbradach pit in the Rhymney valley and lived in a corrugated Nissen hut with other Bevin Boys in the village of Ystrad Mynach a 20 minute train journey away.

I was attached as a ‘butty’ to a miner called Trevor, a large muscular man in his thirties beside whom I felt totally insignificant and inadequate. The shaft bottom was about half a mile down and the coal face we worked more than that distance along a labyrinth of tunnels through which you had to bend double to avoid colliding with the roof. The height of the coal face itself was 3ft or less.
 

Llanbradach Colliery

The mine had been declared unsafe before the war, and was closed for a time, but then reopened when coal became in high demand 
for the war effort. There were no mechanical diggers, pneumatic drills or conveyor belts, and no pithead showers either.

On hands and knees or lying on his side Trevor worked at the coal seam with a pick. My job was to heave massive lumps of the coal by hand into a dram (truck). He was paid by the ton of coal produced (piecework) in his seam. I received just over £2.50 a week whatever the output. He got paid for looking after me, too! 

We breathed in coal dust constantly, filling fingernails  mouths, nostrils and lungs — small wonder that so many miners came to an early end from pneumoconiosis.  

My early attempts to do this job were greeted with derision by a group of miners who had gathered to watch. I looked up to see their faces wreathed in silent mirth. So I got better at it. Once they started to call me Dai Bach I knew I was OK.

When on dayshift in the winter we arrived at the pit in the dark and it was dark when we emerged in the late afternoon. It was a joy to see the light on a Sunday.

The political background

I was well out of my depth politically. The miners were mostly highly articulate and knowledgeable about party policies and political history — left wing, of course, and strongly antagonistic to the Prime Minister Winston Churchill who as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1926 had brought in the army to quell the miners’ strike.

Working with the mining community and to some degree socialising with them made a lasting impression that has influenced my thinking ever since.

 

A coal seam

Llanbradach colliery

national service (2) 1946-1948

From Southampton to Bombay If extracting coal from a 3ft high seam in a mine was the worst physical experience of my life, travelling in a troopship came a close second. Thousands of us, each carrying a heavy kit bag, poured into a troopship converted from a passenger liner — was it The Pride of India? I joined the crocodile of men wending their way along a maze of gangways down and down until we reached a large area deep in the bowels of the ship. This was our sleeping quarters for the next 3 weeks. The whole space was filled with hammocks, three tiers high, slung from steel posts and packed so closely that there was barely room for one person at a time to pass along. At night time in the rough waters of the Bay of Biscay the hammocks swayed around banging against each other, and by daylight the floor was slippery with vomit. However the unpleasantness at this stage of the journey was mild compared with the suffocating heat as we passed through the Suez Canal with a temperature at 1000 F at that level. We heard that two of our number died from heat exhaustion during the journey. The lucky ones were those whose sexual advances had persuaded one of the many WAAFs (airwomen) on board to share the nights with them under a tarpaulin in one of the lifeboats slung from the side — strictly against regulations of course but they seemed to get away with it. In the mornings they looked much happier than we were even if a little tired! It was an indescribable relief when early one morning we saw land and the imposing sight of The Gateway of Bombay. From there it was a short journey to the RAF Station in Worli. BRD Worli (British Repatriation Depot) By the time I arrived the station was a major administrative centre for repatriating personnel from the Far East following the end of the war against Japan (see left). My initial training had been as a clerk and typist so I was a bit surprised not to say apprehensive when I was told to act as an orderly to the doctors in the medical unit. In that unfamiliar capacity I sat with a doctor in his surgery taking notes and filling up forms as he examined his patients. I fear I may have mistaken some of the technical names for his diagnoses and prescriptions but luckily no disasters were reported. Among the patients were those claiming early discharge from the forces on mental grounds. Some were genuine, others not, such as the perfectly sane chap who spent hours reading books upside down in a desperate attempt that they would send him home more quickly. The discipline was relaxed and friendly, reputedly more so than in the Army — no parades and hardly a salute to be seen. The dormitories were spacious and fan-cooled, and tea wallahs and dhobi wallahs sat in the corridor to meet our basic needs at very low cost. We slept on string beds which were surprisingly cool and comfortable. And you could wander in and out of camp more or less as you pleased. The monsoon season was a pain, though, sheets of rain pouring down incessantly. People of like interests soon got together. There was a group of would-be thespians who put on an ambitious play, Dangerous Corner by J B Priestley I think it was. I was roped in as stage manager. The Commanding Officer seemed to like it. By the summer of 1948 the work was finished. An clapped out Dakota was pulled out of a hanger to fly the remaining staff to Karachi. It speeded along the runway but failed to rise more than a couple of feet above the ground. A second ancient Dakota took off but within half-an-hour one of the two engines spluttered to a halt. The pilot said that logically we should return to Bombay as our destination Karachi was two hours away. However, he said, I have a date in Karachi this evening, so . . There was a frightful moment when the remaining engine hesitated but all was well even if the ride and the landing were distinctly bumpy. Within days I sailed back from Karachi to Southampton. Living conditions on board were better than on the outward journey. Back in England it was a matter of serving out the few weeks left of my national service. By then I had been promoted from Leading Aircraftman to Acting Corporal. I could never fathom why, unless it was because I was put in charge of a typing pool! Happy release and then back to Cambridge. Intro.htmlshapeimage_5_link_0