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INTRODUCTION

JB, Dave Jones and Jimmy Edwards
The visitor was Jimmy Edwards, a comedian then at the height of his popularity in Britain. He  was spending the day touring Akrotiri and we were to record his visit. He started in the logical place, at the guardroom by the entrance to the base. Here he was fitted with  padded protection for his arm. He was told to run and a service police dog was sent after him. It fastened its teeth round the padding and, although it had clearly been trained to do so I though it was very brave of Jimmy to agree to do it.

Another day's tour of Akrotiri was with Walter Clapham of Lilliput Magazine, taking photographs as required to illustrate an article he was writing about life at the base. We also had a whole page of photographs published in Illustrated London News of a new primary school at Akrotiri. This was shot in colour, very unusual for us, although ILN published the pictures in sepia.

But all good things come to an end. The end of my four year engagement was approaching and I had no intention of staying any longer than I had to. Being the son of a soldier I had known before I joined up that service life was unlikely to be for me. I disliked the complete lack of privacy, the petty discipline and the feeling of being isolated from real life.

I sold my Rollieflex. Since I'd bought it new German cameras were once again being imported into the UK, so secondhand ones were no longer in high demand, and I'd no doubt have been charged duty on it which I could ill afford.

I flew out of Nicosia in a chartered Douglas DC6 of  Hunting Clan Air Transport at midnight on 9 June 1960, landing at Heathrow at about 9am on the 10th. Here a Customs officer, seeing all my photographic equipment, told me that anything I'd owned for more than a year was duty-free, but he charged me £10 (a week's wages then) on a lens.

I was supposed to go straight to RAF Innsworth, in Gloucestershire, to be demobbed. But it was Friday and I knew that by the time I got there it would be too late to do anything until Monday, so I went home. Since my parents had moved to Epping, in Essex, while I was in Cyprus, I had no idea where their house was, so I took a taxi from the station. The driver didn't tell me that it was only a couple of minutes walk away.

45 years later Alan Holloway and Alan Wise found me through this web site and we had a nostalgic reunion in a pub on 11 February 2005

JARIC (ME) 1958-1960 web site

Membership now open to all RAF Photographers