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Writings of Albert Morris
Article 116 - Bully for those discipline-rich service days


WITHOUT looking at newsprint columns. I knew instinctively that the grand old moniker of A Morris (family motto, In Vino Veritas) had, yet again, been scandalously omitted from the honours’ list. There was only one thing to do and I did it.

"What’s this?" asked the man behind the counter at the place that deals with dignified protests. "It’s a pair of British Army shorts, long," I said, "a treasured souvenir of the days when I was a quartermaster sergeant in the Royal Army Mobile Stationery Corps (The Penpushers From Hell), which I had hoped to have included in some TV Militaria Antiques’ Road Show as an example of imperial outpost clothing, combining sartorial chic and battlefield pragmatism.

"I’m not bitter, just a little hurt," I said. "I do not use the words of Shakespeare’s Duke of Gloster, ‘... great promotions are daily given to ennoble those that scarce some two days since were worth a noble’, but I believe that the lists lack people of what is known as the old school, who stood alone in 1940 and took all that the sabre-scarred, spike-helmeted crews of German bombers could throw at them, endured incessant radio bombardments of the song, Bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover, and steadfastly faced the inconvenience of being called up and subject, not only to the anti-social activities of the enemy, but also to good order and military discipline."

"Just let me get that down," said the man, scribbling furiously. I added: "These people - myself included - should get gongs the size of the one beaten by that muscular chap on screens for film distributors, J Arthur Rank, for merely living in Britain during times of triumph and disaster and especially now that the nation, in my essentially biased view, is going to Hell at high speed in a hand-cart."

I WENT on: "If I can speak as a non-gong-holder, the state of our armed forces - what’s left of them - makes me uneasy. The Royal Navy, in which Noel Coward and John Mills served so notably on film during the Second World War, seems to be burning its boats and going soft, ordering off Commander David Axon from his frigate, HMS Somerset, at Gibraltar to return home and helm an office desk because of complaints by some ship’s company members about his alleged intimidatory style and verbal bullying. Six Royal Marine instructors are to be court- martialled for swearing at and bullying recruits at the Lympstone, Devon, Commando training centre, pushing them out of bed in the middle of the night and intimidating them in physical tests during the notoriously tough course, and Wing Commander Nigel Gorman of Number One Parachute School, RAF, has been recalled from a Special Forces mission in America amid similar claims.

"Now, I don’t want to compare my essentially peaceful Army life among the ramparts of paper-clips, carbon paper and indents for field service shoe-horns and battlefield-ready (officers only) toenail clippers, but these incidents make me worried about our modern complaints’ help-line forces."

I TOLD him: "What would a sensitive, junior officer have made of the scriptwritten words of Charles Laughton’s Captain Bligh aboard HMS Bounty, ‘A seaman’s a seaman, a captain’s a captain and a midshipman’s the lowest form of animal life in the British Navy.’ Would he have fallen into a faint or a fit? Nowadays, he might lodge an equal opportunities’ complaint, accuse the captain of humiliating behaviour or, like some Army recruits, phone their mums to seek a discharge because NCOs shouted and swore at them.

"Shiver my timbers, I, like most Army rookies, was shouted and sworn at by very rude NCOs and officers and subjected to humiliating name-calling, the least offensive being "b****y Morris" when among the last to complete assault courses. I quickly realised that swearing was the only language the Army understood, that shouting was endemic and, in naval barracks, heard officers and ratings swearing like pirates’ parrots. I was screamed at in kindergarten, bellowed at and belted at school, yelled at by sub-editors and barked at by outraged readers claiming I was up some wrong opinionative tree.

"Firm commands, often, alas, peppered with profanity, go with the tough, discipline-rich, armed forces’ terrain. Bullying and verbal and physical brutality should be stamped out, but so should politically correct over-sensitivity."

I rested my case, opened it and produced an Army bandolier of trench-quality toothpicks to be handed in as a protest when I will, doubtless, be unhonoured next year. "Fast track that info to the appropriate department," I said.

"You should get a medal for making such a sacrifice," said the man. I agreed, and, feeling as if I had been given a gong, I beat it.


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