Royal Corps of Signals

Dud's Army.
Chapter 10
Inventions

Billy Butlin, the holiday camp mogul, was a bugler in the first world war and a much-admired, enterprising spiv in the second. The construction of one of his early camps at Filey, for example, was actually completed for him by the Army who then built him two more, at Ayr and Pwlheli, handing them over to Billy at war’s end. In my mind, the Army and Billy go hand in hand. Auntie Rose, youngest and jolliest of my twelve aunties, was the only one of our family to have gone to Butlin’s and from the memory of the pictures she showed me I had cause to suppose, on first coming to our camp, that I was at Pwlheli. In essence, 280 SU resembled a Butlin’s camp and had Mr Butlin seen it I’m sure he would have approved the set-up, especially as the camp occupants were able to amuse themselves without the harrying of Redcoats or cues from loudspeakers on poles.

The place was satisfying to Jack and myself, most likely due to the lack of bull. There seemed to be an unwritten standing order forbidding it at Cape Gata. And, to further our delight, the Army could not officially intrude or impose on RAF camp management. With such a political shield our Royal Signals contingent and Albert of the Catering Corp remained largely insulated from the slings and arrows of the more outrageous militarists. By any standard we were on a good number. We were treated like honoured guests by a civilised host.

Within weeks of arriving at 280 SU we had the business of being there figured out. The camp, surrounded on three sides by bush, lay close to a rocky sea shore but otherwise miles from anywhere. We were enclosed by barbed wire and patrolled at night by armed RAF personnel. Personal excursions were limited to either the water’s edge for swimming or a hike to the airfield base at Akrotiri for pay. Fresh water arrived each day in a ghari. The nearest town, Limassol, glimpsed across the bay to the north east, was declared out of bounds by a situation we referred to as the General Emergency. We were on active service, the kind they mint medals for. We could be shot at but it would have to be a long one. We received a generous allowance of free time. And the sun shone.

In camp one lived in a quarter of a four-cornered tent, the other three sectors similarly occupied, two army and one RAF in my case. Jack’s tent, across the way, was all army. So one had a place to hang one’s hat, a home and nice neighbours. One had a job, which for us Radio Relay technicians was cushy, providing us as much time off duty as on, an unheard of arrangement back home. Food was good although the flies wanting a share of it were bad. The odd luxury items like cigarettes, beer and pop were cheaply for sale in the NAAFI managed by a stout Turkish gent of genial disposition. In the middle of the tent lines stood a concrete-floored, galvanised iron enclosure with dribbling taps poised above a tin trough we used for washing: selves and smalls. There was a camp laundry service for sheets and pyjamas. The typically foreshortened-doors-and-walls, see-your-neighbours’-boots type of row-toilets were at the north edge of camp smelling to high heaven and not a place in which to comfortably linger.

Up to this point the army had provided me small scope for my compulsive habit of inventiveness. True, in 4 TR I had contrived to lay an electric cable, terminated with a pair of split, brass, female receptacles, secured within a crack running the length of a forty-five degree wooden, ceiling-to-wall, support beam. The far end of the cable connected to a live junction box in the loft of our barrack hut. This facility, entirely invisible, allowed me to plug my electric razor into the innocuous crack in the wooden beam above and shave while laying in bed, a worthy and technologically advanced alternative to my open- razor performances at 1 TR. The Stalag 17 inspired trickery of it gave me much pleasure, especially when talking later in Cyprus with a new arrival from 4 TR, he assuring me my cracked-beam socket was, when he left there, still alive and kicking.

But better prospects now offered. With all of the free time at hand, and the famous wine-dark sea on our doorstep, I figured on building a boat of some kind. I was not without experience. At fourteen I had cobbled together a raft beside the coal-black waters of the River Taff. But as soon as I got it into the river it had floated away. I could not swim then so it carried on downstream from its launching at the Ynys Bridge to break up an hour later on Radyr Weir. Two years on I was quietly gathering material at my workplace for a second try, on the Avon at Bath this time, when a big storm came and blew down all of the eight metal drums I’d readied, painted with anti-rust and stored on the factory roof. When they came rumbling down over the corrugated iron panels and landed below it was with a noise like thunder, causing blokes on the shop floor to duck and the boss to run from his office. The drums were confiscated and I gave up on the idea after that, my resources proving too slender. Besides, not one of my friends was the least bit interested in coming in with me on it, not even Terry. It did give me pause that my enterprises were so singular but it did not stop me.

I decided on a two-man kayak although I had merely a vague sense of such a vessel’s design. I did remember from books that the Eskimo tied and waterproofed themselves in, flipping themselves upright if they overturned. I decided against this feature because of my horror of panicking and drowning upside-down. Not learning to swim until eighteen I was still wary of the water. It was for this same reason I could never dive into the blow-hole we discovered in a rocky shelf along the coast, and swim the twenty feet out from under its projection to come up in the open sea. Fred, a Signals lineman, demonstrated the technique but I could never muster the courage. Fred swam like a seal, and I like someone who’d rather be on land.

Materials and tools for this boat-building venture had to be scrounged from around the camp. The design, therefore, would be predicated by what came to hand. Looking for clues about kayaks in Nutall’s, I read it was made of “a skin cover over a light framework,“ as was a coracle, or a man, for that matter. Those touted lexicographers! But I had a picture in my head that would serve. And in disguised forms we had the necessary stuff: canvas, wood and paint. From wood I could make a light framework and for skins use abandoned tent fly-sheets. The paint would waterproof the canvas. We had a saw and a hammer. Nails one could pull out from here and there. Screws would have been better but there was no drill, drill-bits, or screws. There were no electric tools.

Canvas was easy to get hold of, and wood came from the piles of packing case sections laying about, many of which measured ten to twelve feet in length and five to six feet in height. They were made up like farm gates assembled from wooden strips rough-sawed three inches wide and three quarters of an inch thick. The wood itself was probably fir or spruce - certainly a softwood. Only the odd piece had too-big-of knots in it. The RAF’s intention for this lumber was to provide for the making of wooden tent-walls, although the programme was a please-yourself sort of arrangement the typically enlightened, non-Army type of common sense prevailing at 280 SU. While the RAF were making up their minds when to get started, the Army relieved them of one kayak’s worth of lumber.

I dismantled a couple of the larger sections, easing them apart gently to salvage all of the nails. The best looking pieces I cut lengthways into two, making thereby pairs of matched stringers. Once cut my stringers bent like bows. I planned to take advantage of their natural curves, so being cut from the same cloth, so to speak, ensured the curves of each pair ran complementary to each other. I nailed them to each of the horseshoe-shaped bulkheads, set apart amidships to provide for two cockpits and serve as backrests to the paddlers - Jack and me. The transom was, in shape, a miniature version of the bulkheads and to it all stringers running aft were then bent and nailed. I had no workbench or even a table, so I worked off a flat bit of ground in the dusty shade provided by our equipment hut.

With amidships and stern secured I was now faced with my stringers projecting from the forward bulkhead some eight feet. I tied a rope around them and applied a tightening all around like a tourniquet. With the ends just touching and striving for an upward and forward sweep of the stringers I could pencil on them the rough tapers needed to bring them together in a bit of a pointed edge. I either sawed or chiselled these tapers. When I had it right I nailed the ends together. This required some care because if a stringer end split I’d get what the English prime minister was getting around that time: a serious setback, although unlike his situation I could begin again.

Why the true lines of a ship are so satisfactory to observe is surely due to those same lines already existing somewhere in nature. The joy derived by man from this observance stems from recognising nature’s forms repeated in his creation. It is akin to seeing a rightness and is doubtless the same joy that makes a dog wag his tail. So with the hull built to outline form and happily beheld - with one or the other eye closed, one wants nothing more then than to get on with the finish of it and put it to the test.

With the help of Albert the Army cook I was delivered a tea chest, which taken apart provided five square panels of quarter inch plywood and a pile of one-inch, flat-headed nails. Pieces of the this ply were tacked into the sitting positions, bending easily to the curve of the boat below the waterline and adding transverse strength to the sections forward of the bulkheads. The sharp outer edges of the stringers were softened with the chisel before Jack and I wrapped the canvas around the frame and tacked it with our tea chest nails to the upper stringers. The bow was a challenge once the top panel was on as we had canvas ends sticking out like the head of a leek. After some serious swearing and judicious scissoring we rolled what was remaining together and nailed the roll in tight. Everything was painted oil green. What with the padding of the seats and making two pairs of paddles the whole job from concept to sea-ready was completed, in three weeks. It was surprisingly heavy but we carried it out of camp, along the path and down the cliff.

It floated grand and did not leak even a spoonful. But the kayak I’d made would not carry two persons. With Jack seated forward and me behind we were way too low in the water. I got out and Jack went off on his own, as consumed an Army paddler as any Army driver. He was flying. I’ve never seen him so pleased with anything. The kayak now rode beautifully and Jack was perfectly placed in the forward cockpit, just aft of centre. She was a beauty, that little ship, longer than you might at first think she needed to be, like a tall person, maybe. And Jack did not want to get out of her. He was going around the little bay we swam in like a marina porpoise. “She’s your’s Jack” I said, and that was that. I’d build another one. I already knew what modifications I planned to make. I couldn’t wait to get back up the cliff to camp to go sawing.

One odd thing I was finding out about myself was that not only did I love building things but I frequently loved the building more than I loved the use of what I‘d built. So far as the kayaks were concerned it came out about equal. And the particular joy derived from fashioning these kayaks was due to the improvisational aspects of the design and having only the very minimum of tools and materials to hand. The process was gratifyingly simplified. By a happy accident of personal fortune, and full thanks to the Army, I found myself following in Robinson Crusoe’s footsteps.

Chapter 11

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