David Waddington Memoirs

by David Waddington

  One particularly demoralised planter invited us to stay for the night and he laid on a concert for our benefit. Some very beautiful girls danced for us – or rather they looked like very beautiful girls but at the end of the show turned out to be men. We were enjoying the entertainment when a volley of shots rang out and the place was plunged into darkness. The manager ordered one of the Malays to shin up a pole to see what was wrong with the lights, which were strung along the top of the wire surrounding the buildings. When he demurred the manager drew his pistol and the Malay went up the pole at great speed. I led a few soldiers out of the gate in the wire and prowled around for a while in the pitch dark, but not surprisingly did not come across a single bandit.

  The journeys up and down the hill were very monotonous but we got a little innocent enjoyment at the half way mark where there was a Sakai camp in which both men and women were almost entirely naked. Down at the bottom was Kuala Kubu Bharu (or KKB), and there we sweated in steamy heat for a few hours before setting off back up the hill in late afternoon. As we climbed it got colder and colder and it usually began to rain, so we were glad of a hot bath by the time we got home.

  Back again in Ipoh we were sent off every now and then to lay ambushes in the jungle in the hope of bagging a communist courier carrying dispatches from one bandit unit to another. We were never successful. With the jungle so thick and visibility so slight I thought that I was far more likely to hit a running terrorist with a blast from a shotgun than with a bullet from a rifle so I used to take out my twelve-bore. One night in the pitch dark I set an ambush, taking each man to the spot where I wanted him to lie, and at first light found myself looking down the muzzle of a bren gun. Sometimes, Borneo head hunters acted as guides for us and, through an interpreter, I asked one why we were so unsuccessful in our efforts to bag terrorists. The man answered that the terrorists could smell us a mile away, and indeed we did smell, having covered ourselves with all sorts of unguents designed to protect us from mosquitoes, leeches and other beastly things which inhabit the jungle.

  I was determined to have at least one success over the terrorists and devised a brilliant plan. A track ran off into the jungle a few miles from Ipoh and I decided that if I could get my armoured car and APC (armoured personnel carrier) down the track for a few miles we could strike out from a secure base and perhaps score a notable victory. Disaster soon followed. The APC slithered off the track and overturned, the wireless would not work, nightfall was upon us and there was nothing for it but to sit tight until dawn. And then in the middle of the night some shots rang out. The only trouble was that it was impossible to see two feet in front of one’s nose and extremely difficult to know from which direction the shots had come. So we did precisely nothing. The next morning a party walked all the way to the main road and had to ring regimental HQ from a police station. We were then rescued in the most ignominious fashion – a number of surly soldiers having had to walk five miles with a very heavy winch in order to haul up the APC from where it had landed.

  A few days later I went on another expedition and got completely lost. I reasoned that if we hit the railway line we had only to walk up it or down and we were bound to reach civilisation – so I asked my sergeant which direction was the railway line. Without any hesitation he pointed to the left. I asked the Corporal and he with equal confidence pointed to the right. I decided to go straight ahead and soon the line came in to view.

  All good things come to an end. I sold my typewriter to pay my last mess bill and caught the train for Singapore. I made my way to the troop ship MV Georgic and offered my pistol to those on duty at an army post on the dock. They flatly refused to take it. I threatened to throw it in the dock and they said that if I did I would be court-martialled. I said I would take it on board ship with me and hand it in at Liverpool. I was told that that was prohibited. In desperation I hailed a taxi and asked the driver to take me to Changi, then British HQ on the island. Today a motorway runs from Changi Airport to the city centre. Then there was only a narrow country road and the journey seemed endless. But eventually I arrived at the Guard Room, handed in the pistol, got a signature for it and sped back to Singapore just in time to catch the ship.

  Three weeks later we arrived in Liverpool. In the eighties I went as a minister to see a youth project at the mouth of the Mersey and there was not a ship to be seen, but in 1952 we were in a mass of shipping as we waited for the tide to turn. Eventually we entered the river and then began to come alongside, and on the quay I could see my parents and my sister Zoe. The next morning I disembarked and, after a quick word with the family, boarded a train bound for the Royal Armoured Corps headquarters, Bovington. I had 180 men under my charge, all due to leave the army, most with homes in the north of England and all fed up at not being allowed to go home at once. I sensed the danger and resolved to keep a very careful check on numbers. On leaving Crewe my 180 had shrunk to ninety-eight, Stafford left me with seventy. Before we arrived at Euston I gave my depleted band a strong lecture on the dire consequences which would follow if they did not board the train at Waterloo in three hours time, but at Waterloo my band of followers had dwindled to forty-three and when we got to Wool, the station for Bovington, there were only seventeen left.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Starting at the Bar

  My national service now at an end, it was time to join the barristers’ chambers in Manchester where I was to be a pupil of James Warden Stansfield. Stansfield was the shyest man I have ever met. A table and chair were provided for me in his room and he threw a few sets of papers at me and asked me to read them. No further words were spoken till 1 p.m. when he asked me to accompany him to his club for lunch. He never said a word when we were walking there or during the course of lunch. After lunch we watched some people playing snooker as we drank coffee, again in silence. The afternoon was also spent in silence: and the following day I was told by the chambers’ clerk, Randall, that Mr Stansfield had decided that I might be happier in a room with another pupil. From that time onwards I saw little of Stansfield and I cannot remember doing any work for him or receiving any advice from him. Luckily, however, the head of chambers was a very different type of man. John Addleshaw was enormously popular, not surprisingly as he was prepared to go to endless trouble to help the young people in chambers, advising them on their court cases, helping them to draft pleadings and write opinions. I suppose he could not have been very busy himself or he would not have had the time to help as he did. Work was not plentiful at the Bar in Manchester at the beginning of the fifties before legal aid became a growth industry; and the 300 guineas I earned in my first year, although not a record, was thought pretty good going.

  The reason for my doing quite well was that I was the only barrister who lived in north-east Lancashire. Most Northern Circuiteers with chambers in Manchester lived in Cheshire. A few were scattered around Preston and Blackpool but there was no one near Burnley or Blackburn. My father’s old firm lived up to its reputation for caution. One day the senior partner rang and said he had an important brief for chambers. My spirits soared but only for a moment; because he quickly added that it was a weighty matter which he was proposing to give to Stansfield. But plenty of other local solicitors gave me massive support and I scooped the pool at Burnley and Blackburn Quarter Sessions.

  The Prosecuting Solicitor at Blackburn Quarter Sessions was a relative by marriage with a daughter called Ann. One day he rang up and said that I could have an extra brief provided I took his daughter to the Hunt Ball. I duly did so.

  John Addleshaw had recently acquired a new pupil called Colin Muscroft. He came from Huddersfield but for some mysterious reason had sought a pupillage on our side of the Pennines. We thought he was quite a guy because his father was the manager of the Huddersfield Transport Undertaking and had his name on the side of every Huddersfield bus. Muscroft was given a voluminous set of papers by a solicitor friend and was asked to advise in a dispute arising out of a contract for the sale of a large quan
tity of cloth. Muscroft nursed and cosseted these papers like a mother might a newborn child. Each morning he undid the red tape, glanced at one of the 100 or so exhibits, sighed deeply and retied the tape. At eleven o’clock when coffee was served for those not lucky enough to be in court he walked round chambers with his baby seeking advice on the multifarious problems thrown up by the case; and advice, most of it contradictory, was always forthcoming – advice in enormous quantities given from the depths of our ignorance. In the afternoon, after many lunchtime libations, Muscroft would set to work on the papers but soon felt obliged to have a nap after which it was time to catch the train back to Huddersfield. In this leisurely fashion many weeks passed, but then Randall the clerk began to relay disturbing news. The solicitors were asking when the opinion would be ready.

  On the scene at this stage came the great Neville Laski – a very senior member of the bar, a Silk and the recorder of Burnley. Muscroft was due to spend that night in Manchester attending Bar Mess, and over the second decanter of port he told Laski that he was rather over-burdened at that particular time by a complex set of papers involving a cotton contract. Laski said that he had spent much of his life at the Bar doing commercial cases and he would call round at chambers at nine the following morning to give his help. At nine prompt he arrived, picked up the papers, undid the red ribbon, affected to peruse the instructions to counsel and cried: ‘Fetch a stenographer.’ A shorthand typist appeared and Laski proceeded to dictate a long opinion. The only trouble was that when it was typed up and passed around chambers the unanimous view was that it was utter rubbish from start to finish. Poor Muscroft’s efforts had been in vain, the port had been drunk for nothing and the hangover contracted to no benefit. He dolefully replaced the ribbon round the papers, put them at the back of his desk and went off for a drink.

  Appearing before Laski at Burnley Quarter Sessions was a sobering experience. Mr Foulds, the prosecuting solicitor, sat at the table below Laski alongside the clerk and as each old lag appeared in the dock Laski asked Foulds to read from a scrap book the report in the Burnley Express of the man’s last appearance, including, of course, the comments made by the recorder in passing sentence:

  In sentencing Smith to five years imprisonment the recorder Mr Neville Laski QC said: ‘I am treating you with great leniency today but the time is drawing near when the public will have to be protected from your depredations, and if you ever darken these doors again you cannot expect the sort of extreme leniency you are receiving today. Condign punishment will be your lot.’

  Nursing my first brief at Burnley Sessions I heard this exchange: ‘John Smith you heard what I said when you last stood in that dock. You are a menace to society and you’ll go to preventive detention for eight years.’ ‘But, Mr Laski, I’ve got cancer and I’ll never live that long.’ Laski: ‘Well, do your best. Do your best.’

  Everybody in our chambers lived in terror of being dispatched to the Court of Appeal, the Divisional Court or the Court of Criminal Appeal at a moment’s notice having been handed what was known as a return from another set of chambers. This fate had actually befallen Kenneth Taylor in our chambers. He had been told at five in the evening that the following morning he was to appear in the Divisional Court against Henry Burton who was acknowledged to be the best advocate on the Northern Circuit. Ken nearly died of fright but survived the ordeal. Sadly, Henry Burton was killed a short time afterwards in the Harrow rail disaster.

  In 1954 I tried my hand at acting, playing the parts of Captain Hardy in Journey’s End and Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest. The stage, the Bar and the political platform had all become part of my life and all scared me stiff.

  It was in that same year that I joined a group of people bound for Luxembourg and Strasbourg to study the workings of the European Coal and Steel Community and the Council of Europe. One of the party was Mark Carlisle, who became a life-long friend. Another was Commander Courtenay who a few years later became an MP and then resigned after disclosing that the KGB had tried to blackmail him with photographs taken on a visit to Moscow. I am sure the visit to Strasbourg was most instructive but what sticks in my mind is the night when Mark Carlisle and I escaped from the ladies’ seminary (the ladies were not in residence) where we were staying. We visited various night clubs, ran out of money at the last one, and had to wash up till four in the morning because we could not pay the bill. The brave Commander Courtenay discovered that we had jumped ship, guessed correctly that we were out on the town, visited sundry night clubs in his efforts to find us and eventually rescued us from the place where we were so usefully employed.

  Shortly after this adventure I decided it would be no bad thing if I fought a hopeless seat in the coming general election. It would certainly put me in a stronger position to get a decent seat when later I felt I could afford to get into Parliament. I first had to get on the candidates’ list and that meant a visit to Central Office in London for interview by the then vice-chairman of the Party, John Hare – later Lord Blakenham. I was ushered into his presence and he smiled brightly, told me to sit down and asked me whether I had been in the army. I said, ‘Yes, the XII Lancers.’ ‘Oh!’ he said, ‘that’s good enough for me. Thank you for coming. Of course you can be a candidate.’ I felt rather cheated, having stuffed my head with information about the economy and three islands off the coast of China called Qemoy, Amoy and Matsu. It was as if I had taken my harp to a party and and no one had asked me to play.

  Anyhow, in no time at all I became the prospective parliamentary candidate for the Farnworth Division of Lancashire, the sitting member being a most excellent former Mayor of Rochdale, Ernest Thornton. I became candidate in no time at all because no one else wanted the job. Not for the first time I wondered why on earth I had this compulsion to make my life a misery. I was still cripplingly shy and appallingly nervous when it came to public speaking. But I was determined to fight an effective campaign and when the date of the general election was announced I took up residence in a pub in Walkden (pronounced Wogden) and began a full programme of daytime canvassing, factory visits and nightly public meetings. I owned a Ford Popular and on the first day I took it to a firm to have a loudspeaker fitted. When I returned I discovered that two holes had been drilled in the car roof and an enormous horn bolted on to it. I drove home at the weekend forgetting about this appendage. The horn hit the top of the garage, the back of the loudspeaker was driven through the Ford Popular’s roof and my saloon was instantly transformed into a sort of coupé.

  In the campaign Labour focused on the H-bomb, calling for disarmament under international control. Its other themes were rising prices (as a result of cuts in the food subsidies introduced in the War, sugar had gone up from 6d to 8d a pound and bacon from 2s/7d to 3s/6d), unemployment and the need to secure the future of the Lancashire cotton industry by control of imports from India. I talked of Britain’s success on the world stage (we had played a key role in the Geneva Conference on Vietnam) and the way we had managed to dismantle war-time controls and get rid of rationing. People were finding it difficult to remember that as recently as 1951 the weekly rations were: butter – 3ozs; cheese – 1¼ ozs; sugar – 10 ozs; tea – 2 ozs; bacon – 3 ozs; sweets – 6½ ozs; and eggs – sometimes one, sometimes two. As for meat, until shortly before the 1951 election, the shopper was allowed to spend only eight pence a week, two pence of that having to go on corned beef.

  My campaign began inauspiciously with a newspaper headline: ‘HITCH AT TORY NOMINATION’. My inefficient agent had taken me to the town hall to pay my deposit and on his advice I had proffered a cheque for £150, but this the town clerk had quite properly refused to accept. There then came a day when along with other Lancashire candidates I was summoned to the Midland Hotel in Manchester to hear a pep talk from Prime Minister Anthony Eden, but none of us was impressed by him. He was asked about education and said it wasn’t his subject, we questioned him about housing and were told to have a word with one of his aides … and so it we
nt on, with Eden revealing a complete lack of interest in, or knowledge of, anything but foreign affairs.

  At the end of the morning of polling day I returned to the central committee room to get a progress report and on the locked door was a notice in the agent’s handwriting ‘gone for lunch’, and the rest of the day I spent fearing that this and other examples of our inefficient organisation was going to lead to a humiliating result. In the event, however, the Labour majority came down with a bump and I came away from the count heartily glad the ordeal was over and reasonably content with the result.

  In 1957 it was rumoured that I was to be the candidate at a by-election in Rochdale. Luckily I resisted the temptation to put my name forward – the result was a disaster. John Parkinson took terrible punishment from mill owners furious at the damage being done by foreign competition and he never stood for Parliament again.

  At about the same time, however, I did miss a good chance. I was interviewed for Lancaster but lost to Humphry Berkeley, one of the oddest men ever to enter British politics. When an undergraduate he attended the Preparatory Schoolmasters Annual Conference masquerading as the headmaster of an obscure prep school, and in the various discussion sessions offered eccentric advice on how to run an educational establishment.

  I used to do a lot of work at Lancaster Assizes. The court sat in the castle and on the steps going down from the dock to the cells below were branding irons and other instruments of torture. One hot summer afternoon, when I was defending one of six defendants in a long trial and had little to do, my eyes strayed to the jury box and I saw to my amazement that thirteen people were sitting in it. I sprang to my feet and began, ‘My Lord.’ ‘Sit down, Mr Waddington,’ said Mr Justice Paull. I sank back into my place, but after a moment or two my conscience pricked and I rose again. ‘My Lord –’ I began again. ‘Mr Waddington, you are interrupting an important cross-examination. Will you please remain silent or I will report you to your Inn of Court.’ Again I sat down; but it did not take me long to conclude that drastic measures were required. I leapt to my feet and before the judge had time to interrupt, I yelled ‘My Lord, there are thirteen people sitting on this jury!’ The judge looked at me with a face of fury but then began to count; and sure enough I was right. A little old lady had come to the Castle to watch the proceedings, had tucked herself in behind a file of people making their way across the court, had sat down where everyone else seemed to be sitting and then, when she realised her error, had lain low in the hope that she could escape at the end of the afternoon undetected. Needless to say the judge did not thank me for my public spiritedness.