CAN YOU HELP?
INTRODUCTION

We boarded Her Majesty's Troopship 'Dilwara' in Southampton on a dark January day in 1958. Without ceremony 'Dilwara' slipped out of Southampton in the evening. We were in the canteen, playing cards, and hardly noticed. There were several of us from Brampton, including Dave Cribbins, Clive Kent and Martin Clark, amongst a mix of soldiers and airmen. Accomodation was basic; tiers of fold-up tubular steel bunks like so many shelves, in a hold-like space. The 'heads' were so far forward in the ship the walls sloped in 2 directions.

Thankfully there was no dramatic weather crossing the Bay of Biscay and 'Dilwara' soon turned left into the Mediterranean. There was little to do on board. I remember being on fire picket once, guarding a waterproof door in the bowels of the ship. And there was a lecture on the dangers of VD. For those so inclined physical exercise was on offer, but there was no compulsion. Otherwise the day passed in playing cards, lounging on the deck or hanging over the rails.

I still go on cruises with a movie camera clamped in my hand

'Dilwara' stopped at Gibraltar briefly, after dark, then plodded steadily eastwards. The weather remained fine and reasonably warm, although there was a steep swell at times which made the ship roll. Early on 21 January, about ten days out of Southampton, the coast of Cyprus emerged on the left and the ship anchored some distance off Limassol. This was familiar territory for me, having been in this same spot a few years ago, but it was an exciting, perhaps daunting, prospect for many of the other young servicemen about to disembark. In 1960 hardly anyone went abroad for a holiday, certainly not to Cyprus, even without the activities of EOKA.

We disembarked down a gangway on to landing craft, just as the family had done when coming here on holiday from Egypt. Episkopi, where we were to be stationed, was a few miles west of Limassol, perched on the top of cliffs. It was the headquarters of the Middle East Air Force as well as being home to a large number of 'brownjobs' or soldiers. It was also home to JARIC (ME), the Cyprus branch of JARIC (UK) at Brampton

Home for us was a tent, with a view you'd pay a premium for now.

Top left: Barry Porter outside tent
Top right: John Boon outside tent
Bottom: View from tent

And although this was January some of us went to the beach below the cliffs. It was deserted. Only new arrivals were quite that mad!

It was only a matter of a very few weeks before I was allocated a place in JARIC's Block 10, a 3 storey barrack block with a veranda overlooking the sea (and JARIC!).There were eight of us in a light airy room on the first floor, with windows on both the south and the north sides. South was the Mediterranean, north were the Troodos mountains, lightly snow-capped in winter.

My room-mates included John Hill, Alan Wise, Dick Barton, Pete Houston and John Eastwood.

There were two such rooms on each floor on either side of the central area of the block, plus a single room for a corporal to each pair of 8-man rooms. In the centre were the ablutions (toilets, washbasins, baths and showers), and a laundry room equipped with a single-tub Hoovermatic washing machine and an ironing board. This was for our personal laundry as all service uniform items and bedding were laundered for us. At the front of the building was an entrance hall and a communal sitting room. We were expected to keep all communal areas clean, and on rare occasions there would be an official inspection, when we had to make a special effort to get everything spotless. But otherwise we were left pretty alone by the authorities.

Bed bugs were an eternal problem which nobody ever really solved. Most of us would get bitten every night, and we would periodically strip our beds down to the iron frame and pop any bed bugs we found with a cigarette or lighter.

The work was the same as a Brampton, but that could not be said of the working conditions. JARIC (ME) was housed in a collection of Nissen huts, in its own high-fenced compound. In summer the huts were stifling, and the processing chemicals we used were specially formulated as it was impossible to keep them at normal temperatures. There were a couple of air-conditioned mobile units which were a welcome relief to those fortunate enough to work in them. Power for these was provided by truck-mounted diesel generators, which had to be started with a hand crank. This tended to kick back fiercely, especially on cold winter mornings, resulting in not a few wrist injuries.

The work routine was not onerous. We started at 7am and finished at 1pm, with a short break when a mobile canteen would enter the JARIC compound. There was a rota for a 'Duty Crew' of two airmen, who would go in to work in the afternoon to do any urgent work required. If there was nothing else to do they would mix up, by hand, the hundreds of gallons of photographic chemicals needed. This was not a pleasant task, especially the acrid fumes of the acetic acid.

The other regular duty was the guard. We took no part in station duties, but we did have to provide guards at night for the JARIC compound. This ran from 6pm to 6 am, with a 2 hours on, 4 hours off routine. During the 2 hours on, a pair of airmen, armed with rifles, patrolled the compound fence. It never seemed to occur to anyone in authority that whilst the compound was brightly lit, outside the fence, for the most part, it was pitch black. The 4 hours off were spent, hopefully, asleep. Grubby mattresses were provided, but many of us preferred to find our own little niche, on a shelf in a darkroom, for instance. The compound guardroom was manned at all times, day and night, by a Service Policeman, accompanied at night by the corporal in charge of the guard. Some of these corporals couldn't see the point of both them and the airmen staying awake all night. After making sure they knew where everyone was sleeping, these enlightened corporals simply took an occasional turn round the fence while everyone else slept.

In addition to these duties, there were 2 other minor breaks from routine work allocated to anyone who had nothing better to do. One was burning the secret waste, the other was Cyp-watching. When building repairs were required a local, usually a Turkish Cypriot in black baggy trousers, would enter the compound. The Cyp-watcher would have to remain in close proximity to the workman, who often spoke little or no English, until he had finished his work.

There were ways of staying out of the way of this sort of thing, a favourite being to stride confidently around the premises carrying something as simple as a ruler, thereby looking busy without actually doing anything.

One break in the routine, for me, was when I was sent to RAF Akrotiri to learn how to fit and remove the cameras used on Canberra reconnaissance  aircraft. These aircraft, a version of the Canberra bomber, sat very low on the ground and it was very tricky manoeuvring the bulky cameras in and out of the belly of the aircraft. There was also a camera fitted in the nose, accessed from the two-man cockpit, and you had to be careful not to touch the ejector seat release.

Episkopi sprawled over several dusty hillsides, covered in scrubby bushes and well-worn dusty paths. There were the usual Airmens' and Corporals' Clubs, Sergeants' and Officers' Messes, and a very welcome YMCA establishment.This served far better food that the official fare provided for the Airmen, including toast that was actually made to order and not hours old. The YMCA also had an excellent shop for books, magazines and newspapers. There was a story that one night the Duty Officer was also the Catering Officer. On his rounds he decided to visit the Airmens' Mess at about midnight, and found the duty cooks frying hundreds of eggs for the next morning's breakfast. He ordered them all to be destroyed and for eggs to be freshly fried at breakfast-time. This explained why the eggs we were normally served had the consistency of rubber.

I, like many other airmen, rarely ate in the Airmens' Mess, because the food was so bad. We spent most of our pay, £11 a fortnight for a Senior Aircraftsman, on food at the YMCA and on fry-ups provided by several enterprising Pakistanis working in small tents and from barrows. The only exception was when, on rare occasions, the RAF's tinned emergency stocks were turned over. There was little the cooks could do to ruin these, and they were very popular. It being hot most of the time, we also spent a lot on ice-cold soft drinks, mainly bought from small kiosks which were dotted around the landscape. These were run by Cypriots and sold mainly confectionery, drinks and grocery items like coffee. These fizzy drinks, Coke and Pepsi and  local fruit flavoured concoctions, became so boring that we would mix them in various ways to try to vary the taste.

There was a proper restaurant in the small shopping centre, called Aristos, but this was relatively expensive so we ate there very rarely. They did great milk shakes, though, blending real fruit into the milk to order. Oranges and grapes could be bought in the greengrocer's shop very cheaply, wrapped in old maps. There was an open-air cinema there, operated by the Army Kinema Corporation, while another housed in a large Nissen hut on the other side of the cantonment was provided for winter use. This was replaced in 1960 by a proper purpose-built cinema by the shopping centre, which was officially opened by, I think, a minor star called Patricia Bredin.

For much of the time that I was there it was not easy to leave the camp because of the terrorist activities, and if you did go you had to be in groups and armed. Everyone had to undergo training on the firing range in the use of the Sten Gun, which was the weapon issued to anyone going off camp.

So by far the most popular pastime was to go to the beach after work and at weekends. Episkopi had several beaches, identified by numbers in true military fashion. The exception was Happy Valley Beach. Happy Valley was the only beach not approached down a cliff face, and was at the sea end of a valley where the sports fields were situated. Number 4 Beach could also be accessed from here, by way of a narrow tunnel through the headland, which was controlled by traffic lights.

JARIC (ME) 1958-1960 web site