Fraud and integrity

During the Pandemic, Major General Nick Welch was found guilty of fraud by mis-using the army education allowance. This is intended to be used to provide continuity of education in boarding school to the children or military personnel when they have to move regularly for work. He was sentenced to prison and court-martialled. Such failures of behaviour befitting an officer were exceptionally rare. There was to much to lose. You colleagues are also your friends in the army. It is a way of life and it was just not the way things were done. To me, the idea of an officer being imprisoned is almost unthinkable. I can only think they would become an outcast. Perhaps the general genuinely made a mistake about the rules, or perhaps he thought they could be bent at his level, but ignorance in the army, as elsewhere is no excuse, particularly at a high level and whatever the case there is no question he was made an example of.

My father claimed this educational subsidy. I boarded at Royal Russel school in Croydon, near London from the age of 10 when my parents lived in Germany.  I moved schools due to bullying and had to board at a school when my parents were living walking distance away, in Andover.  I saw them at the weekends. I didn't mind the school.  I liked the day girls. The mistresses were strict and although I had a lot of catching up to do, and thus had to drop German, the work was fine.  I practiced piano.  To help me catch up, the RE teacher, who was also the headmistress took me on a private trip to a mosque I think somewhere in London.  She was nice to me, said red was my colour.  She also taught English and would crane her rather scrawny neck forward over the pulpit-like desk the teachers used and dictate adverbial clauses of manner and other mysteries to us, which I never understood.  We even had a real Mam'selle, like in books, from France. She was very French with a mysterious scar that ran down one cheek and mostly hidden by Mam'selle's dark bob.    

Although as fifteen years olds we still had to go down on our knees in the gym every day to pray in assembly, while the adults stood, on summer days serving tables were brought out on to the lawn and we had our lunch sitting on the grass.  It was a lovely tradition.  But I was bullied again at this school, ironically by the children of soldiers who had got in to board through the same allowance. I became a day pupil for the last term or two until I finished, but my father then had to pay the full fees.

Batmen, a bomb and a ghost town

Continuing on the theme of things anachronistic, at the time I last mentioned dad was commanding a garrison where two cleaning ladies "came with" the house.  It sounds odd to say it now, because most people just don't live like that, but some houses have staff  and so it was with this one.  

It was a beautiful, rambling farmhouse with roses around the walls. It had a pond, a lawns for which mum, in aspirational fashion, bought a croquet set, a lavender path, a south facing sunny terrace, an orchard, a hedged vegetable garden, an empty paddock and a field. 

Just two or three years before we'd been living in a small, ugly grey brick house with a garden the size of a handkerchief on an army patch in Middle Wallop, which was an army air base in Hampshire.  There was no shop but the NAAFI half a mile or so away and we were regularly chucked out the house to walk the dog around the windy sports field.  At that time on Sundays, shops weren't open.  Sunday was what it still was for probably millions of families: church, roast lunch, a family walk and a period drama on the telly at night.

We did go for fairly uninteresting walks on the lanes around the base. I decided cycling them was better and cycled the pretty Hampshire villages for miles around with their thatched roofs, admiring cottages now worth millions. The base had some World War 2 bunkers and really that was it.  I was thirteen and read a lot at that time.  I tore through Judy Blume, the morose, horrifying Flowers in the Attic series, the terrifying Amityville Horror, god knows where I found this rubbish.  I moved on to my dad's James Herriots.  I read all the Gerald Durrel next, the Roald Dahl short stories, Jeffery Archer, anything that was around really.  There was no logic to it.  There was no local library.  I just read what I found. Mum threw a fit when she discovered 'Fear of Flying'.  I felt wronged because someone at school must have given it to me and I'd never got around to reading it.   
  

After that, we had our own house for the first time for a year or two, a modest Georgian affair  with a pretty cherry tree, opposite a garage on London Road in Andover.  I was regularly sent over the road for chocolate in the evening.

It was after that that we moved to the farmhouse in Berkshire. It also had several barns and an old stables where we kept tools and a table tennis table. At that time I use to cycle about twelve miles to Farnborough Sixth Form college or get the train from Crowthorne. Mum used to drive me and we were always but always late. We would end up in a long queue of cars on what is still called Wellingtonia Avenue after the eponymous trees that grew there.  The road led up to a roundabout which caused the tailback.  This avenue contained houses so large, prestigious and set back they could barely be seen and they were all gated anyway. It was a stones throw from Wellington College, the prestigious private school. I would tumble, inelegantly out of the ancient Peugeot 504 estate, in which I later learned to drive barefoot until an off duty policeman crashed into me on the A30 dual carriageway outside Stockbridge.  I was attempting, a week after my test, to negotiate a U-turn in order to chase after mum who I had been trying to follow but had just seen going up the opposite carriageway in my 6'4 father's mini Mayfair.  It was scrapped soon after.  

Anyway, before all that, I routinely fell out of that car onto Wellingtonia Avenue and harum-scarum, scattered down the road puffing and panting the half mile to the station, bag banging and bumping, to catch my train while all the drivers stuck in traffic enjoyed this frequent, chaotic early morning spectacle from the tranquility of their very smart cars. 

The land around the farmhouse has been sold off. Some of the land nearby has also been used to build very smart modern houses. This house had I think two double guest rooms facing that sunny, terrace with the roses rambling up the red brick walls.  My room on the same side. The master bedroom was across the corridor.  One summer night when my parents were away, mystifyingly, a colony bats flew in from an open window in my room and swarmed, around the upstairs corridors.  Alone, I barricaded myself in my parents bedroom to find the house tranquil and empty of the creatures the following morning. It felt like a nightmare I had imagined.  

There was a little servants room at the far end of the hosue  which my brother used as a bedroom.  It was above the kitchen and had its own loo nearby. There was even a separate poky staircase down to the kitchen. There was only one bathroom for all of us.  One day I walked in on an ancient naked general in the bath while he was staying with us.  The ground floor comprised a large drawing room facing the terrace, a dining room next door, the kichen with flagstones and at the other end of the house, near the entrance with its solid old wooden door, my father's open plan study and a sort of family room or snug with a fireplace. 

One night dad was sitting at this desk which looked onto the circular drive between the house and the barns.  It was nearing midnight.  The phone rang and a voice told my father to leave the house within I think, a minute.  Threats from the IRA were in full swing at this time.  Military in uniform were being killed all the time by bombs under their cars or on trains or they were shot. We had to check our car every time we got in.  Dad used to wear a civilian sweater over his uniform if he left the base in a car.  We never had the curtains open at night in case we were shot.  The Brighton bombing of the Conservative Party Conference had killed five people only a few years before.  

The first I knew of it I was woken up and was made to hide under a table.  The military police were called.  Everything swung into action and it all felt far too grown up and serious. They swept the grounds.  It seemed to take forever. I asked dad why we hadn't left the house when told to.  It's a measure of how I had been brought up with unthinking obedience.  Because they could have been waiting outside to gun us down, he said. I was suddenly glad he was my dad, that he thought things through.  I spent a good part of the rest of the night being taught to play pool by dashing young officers when we were temporarily moved to their accommodation while, I suppose the house was checked. I was sixteen and once we were safe it all became rather exciting and delightful.  

Somehow I knew who had done it.  Some detectives visited us.  We had all been badly shaken.  I saw it as no joke at all and had no hesitation in naming the boy I suspected with whom I had been having a bit of a thing.  Although I think he got a criminal record for the attention seeking, he claimed the detectives had sided with him and spoken badly of me, presumably for giving him up.  I didn't know whether to believe him or not, but I spotted the attempt to rattle me and didn't care.  Had he been "one of us" he would have "done the right thing" and apologised. I may misremember when I think he said he wanted to but perhaps hadn't been allowed.

That's how I thought in those days. I didn't realise until later the effort that went into my parents', and mostly my father's, iron fast rules that children, dogs, and wives too, for that matter, obeyed. He trained us very much the way he ensured our dog didn't beg - rules with no exceptions.  We were not to have a say, and most of all never to answer back.  We didn't have our own ideas, because we had his.  We were brainwashed into believing dad was right, always right.  He was confident, intelligent, powerful, respected, charming and often fun.  He was a 6'4 adult with decades of life experience.  Why on earth would we do other than what he said or believed? That training was immensely powerful and that early indoctrination continued for decades.   

Still, our house was a stormy one.  There were a lot of arguments around that time between me and my parents.  I had a friend nearby who I saw nearly every day.  I ate regularly with her family.  The dad watched nature documents and was gently ribbed by his wife and daughters.  The mum went off to bed routinely at 9.30.  It was an oasis of calm, stability and routine in comparison to our tempestuous, highly social home. In contrast, she always came to our house with a demeanour of slightly nervous yet relaxed good humour: a sort of what drama was going to happen next? 

Nevertheless, it was an idyllic place to live. There was a heron that used to flap onto the little  island on the pond that is still there and steal all the fish. The farmhouse itself, per June 2025 photos on Google maps, sadly seems abandoned or perhaps under renovation, the entrances to the garden boarded up with plywood. I hope the heron stayed.

The cleaning ladies who lived locally would also help with the regular dinner parties in the evening. There was the more senior lady with a gentle, refined way and the junior, who was probably older, smaller, stocky, and straw haired, who assisted. I don't know if dad paid them or the army paid them, but they were part of the fixtures. They were there when we arrived and they stayed for dad's successor when we left. 

There often seemed to be cleaners.  In Germany around 1980 we had had a batwoman, Frau somebody or other, a quiet, efficient, slightly intimidating woman who came to help with cleaning, but I didn’t have much to do with her as she only spoke German. They managed because Dad spoke fluent German and mum could get by. I think we had one later to, in another house on the Rheindahlen base around 1990.  This was a huge NATO base with  a pool, pub, bars, shops, a travel agent, churches, a cinema and hundreds of homes.  It is now completely abandoned and can be seen as a ghost town, on Youtube.

Dad also had a batman, in at least one of his postings. These were effectively a sort of part time personal servant.  I can’t really say I’m sure what he did. Polished shoes perhaps? But I remember dad doing that himself and teaching us. Dad’s driver at the farmhouse became a sort of driver come batman, largely on his own initiative. He was a likeable, easygoing corporal of limited ambition who probably found jobs around the rambling old place for himself. He and dad got on extremely well. Certainly he preferred hanging round the house doing odd jobs, working in the vegetable garden with dad or having tea with mum and the cleaning ladies than doing whatever they made him do back at the barracks where he lived as a single man. Occasionally dad and Cpl T (would pick me up from sixth form but the corporal rarely or never came alone because that would not have been an appropriate use of resources. Dad was careful about that, though how it was OK for Corporal T to work in the garden I don't know. Maybe it was only once or maybe I misremember. Officer behaviour was extremely strict when it came to integrity.

Anachronism, inheritance, tradition?

In the military you could see social differences as against, for example, civilian life or between officers and other ranks (soldiers) in dress, in food, in the types of social events they chose, sometimes in first names, in modes of address and most of all in accent. 

Many would call this snobbery, but there was a reason to keeping things distinct. Soldiers and officers did not socialise in the same places or in the same ways. They had separate bars and messes for meals. They never socialised in each others houses. The reason I heard for this was - and perhaps still is - because if an officer had to give a order in time of war, it could not be questioned. Maintaining social distance was one way to increase the respect of men towards officers and therefore the likelihood of that order not being questioned under the impossible condition of war.  

Many officers joined the army with a regional accent and it became replaced, in their twenties I should think, with an "officer accent" which was RP English, often with a "posh" twang. Their children, like me, grew up with and inherited this. Soldiers kept their accent. Soldiers who became officers also tended to lose their accent, sometimes to a lesser extent, unless they were Scottish (or perhaps Welsh, but I never met these).

There were things that seemed anachronistic from outside military society but that of course is just another word for "tradition" if it is deliberately maintained by a specific group. It depends on perspective.  The power of perspective was belatedly brought home to me in my late twenties or early thirties by an Irishman in a story recounted here.

On instance of a tradition within the army was RSVP cards.  These were invitations to all kinds of parties and they were commonplace. You have probably received an RSVP card to a wedding. It's an elegantly written little card that says who is getting married, to whom, where, when , the dress code and you are invited to reply or "RSVP", from the French "répondez s'il vous plaît" saying whether you plan to attend. I feel I am labouring the obvious, only I know that to my children all of this would probably be impenetrable. My parents mantelpiece from the the 1970s through the 1990s were packed with these cards, inviting them not just to weddings but primarily just to drinks and dinner parties. They had them even into the 2000s and 2010s, though in diminishing numbers as they left army life and their local civilian friends who may also have used the RSVP card convention, pre-deceased them. The advent of email also probably contributed to the cards’ decline.

Traditions like these belonged, as far as I could tell, to the upper classes and the military but then we didn't know many middle class civilian people. My uncle I suppose, ten years younger than dad, was that. He had a successful career in  sales in the chocolate and drinks industry  and ended up with a veyr nice large house in a Derbyshire village and a second holiday home somewhere on the North Yorkshire coast. But they weren't the same as us and he ribbed dad about it constantly.  Dad bore it with an endless tolerant good humour.  I never once heard him gripe about his brother.  Dad was posh, and he was, comparatively.  There was something about him.  It wasn't that he had airs and graces because he didn't.  He liked opera so that counted against him. But he'd got that from his own family and developed it.  My uncle was a folk singer.  Dad had gone to grammar school whereas my uncle hadn't, so that made him posh too. He was posh just by virtue of Sandhurst, the officer training school.  All officers were posh, eventually.  It was just the way of things.

There were many things from that proper upper social echelons  that remained in the army but which were not part of the lives of most of the families from which those officers came. Officers then either were or became, middle class. Dad was a typical example. He came from a working class family. He was the son of a policeman and a shopkeeper who sent their first son at sixteen, to Welbeck, the now defunct pre-cursor of Sandhurst, the officer training school.

Officers were not generally members of the aristocracy unless they were in certain infantry regiments like the "Blues and Royals"  - the Royal Horse Guards (Blues) and 1st Dragoons (Royals) -  is one of the two regiments that make up the Household Cavalry of the British Army, along with the Lifeguards. "Household" here refers to the royal household.

So there were officers, whose equivalent in civilian life would be middle class, probably on a social par with doctors and lawyers. Teachers were no longer really in the same sphere. But it was a special kind of middle class, because unlike ordinary middle class which might mean restaurants, foreign holidays, maybe a cleaner, maybe private school, this was a middle class that borrowed or inherited, in a social sense, customs from the upper class because that is where, of course, officers had traditionally come. 

That’s why I think RSVP cards for instance remained longer in the military for ordinary social events when the rest of society now only used them for weddings. An effervescent social life was also a hallmark of the officer culture not only because it was borrowed from an upper class but because it was a necessity to quickly integrate into a ready-made society when everyone was being moved around the world every few years. 

Nobody in ordinary society went to black tie dinners any more, even in the 1970s and 80s, unless perhaps you were aristocracy and who knew what they did. Dressing for dinner, never mind black tie belonged to a time pre-war, pre First World War perhaps, when society was clearly split into working, middle and upper class. Only the upper class then dressed for dinner - and maybe still do. But in the army, at the mess, black tie or “mess” dinners for officers still existed and also probably still do.

The mess, in our case, was the regimental headquarters, a lovely historical hall in the country just outside the garrison.  It had a terrace and gardens where we had pre-dinner drinks.  Dependents didn't go to these things very often but I did go once or twice and remember, as a sixteen or seventeen year old teenager, meeting King Constantine of Greece. There was much protocol around these dinners, which were held in a enormous dining room.  No one could leave for the lavatory for instance I think was one and there were funny stories around breaking or getting round protocol.  Women wore long dresses, men wore the very equivalent of civilian black tie, called mess kit, a tight fitting scarlet and black affair with a waistcoat. 

The place was sold off and is now a luxury hotel and spa. 

Dependents

 The pieces I plan to post next (and so many of these never make it), which are seen through the lens of life as a military "dependent" came out of a draft about how parties used to be in the military, which in turn came out of a piece about the importance of welcome. I realised how much life has changed and how things that from some viewpoints were anachronistic then, would not even be recognised by or would horrify my children today and so I thought they might be worth recording.

Dependents
"Dependent" in this context is interesting.  It referred to wives and children.  There were very few female officers at the time I am writing of.  I never met one and certainly not a senior one.  The first woman I heard of that was an officer was a girl I did the very first military Potential Officer Course with when they, which is to say the Royal Corp of Transport, first accepted women.  She went on to become a captain some years later and probably had a successful military career.  "Dependent" smacks, today of uselesness, a woman who trailed round after her far more important husband being his support.  

In many ways that was exactly what happened although from inside, it was known that the men couldn't do it without them.  Almost literally.  I don't think I knew any single senior officers.  There were a couple of divorced ones but it was very unusual.  The one I knew was a quiet type. It was at house, socialising with his son, where I first heard Bach, which dad,  Mozart and Beethoven man, never got used to.  It was a distinctly more intellectual household than ours.  I mentioned Bach to dad who looked as though I'd said something slightly suspect and distasteful.  Had I understood dad's views on Communism at the time I might have thought the guy was a hop and skip away from Communist sympathies.

Absent wives tended to be painted as faintly scurrilous.  There was one chap who ran off with a younger model and we were all very sympathetic towards the original wife.  It wasn't done you see, to chuck over your wife. There was one woman, I think her husband left her too, I think, rather than the other way round.  She stayed it was us for a night after this.  The atmosphere in the house was sad and tense.  In the morning, her room reeked of cigarette smoke.  It also wasn't done to smoke in other people's guest rooms. Soon after she committed suicide. Men weren't supposed to harm women. It went with the culture.  That's probably why divorcing them when they traipsed round the world after you, as dependents, entertaining, having children, packing and moving and leaving their families and friends, wasn't done.

If a wife ran off and the man married again, it wasn't held against him.  He had done the right thing.  No one said so, but it was obvious:  being a military officer was awkward without a wife.  It was awkward at dinner parties, awkward at bridge, he couldn't entertain but had to be entertained.  It just didn't balance.