Miscellaneous Information

My Life by Lionel Graves. (Page 24)

We used to go down to Haifa by bus, swimming at Athlit Castle, an old Crusader castle, not a main one but a supply one for unloading and storing food, arms, horses and goods, etc. On one journey I offered a young pregnant Jewess my seat as she was standing, but she just glared at me and refused it, it was a wonder she didn't spit at me.

Once a sergeant in the 6^th Airborne in a red beret asked if he could join us going down town, we refused him unless he swapped his red beret for an ordinary one, which he did, the Jews hated the Red Devils or 6^th Airborne even more than we normal troops. We were supposed to carry arms at all times, sometimes rifles and sometimes pistols, but occasionally when we didn't want the hassle of signing or booking out a weapon from the armoury we just stuffed paper into the pistol holsters.

I went to the pictures once in the Arab quarters by myself, to see “The Four Feathers”, this time I did have a rifle and ammunition. When the scene came on with the captured British officers were being dragged through the desert behind camels in the Sudan, the audience (except for the dozen or so British squaddies there) rose to a man and the shouting and cheering was really deafening. I gripped my rifle tightly but could have done nothing in any case. Later on when it had all died down another kerfuffle started in the front few rows of seats, down on the left I can remember. This time I thought it might be a bomb scare, but after some Arabic swearing and gesticulating things settled down. We won in the end, in the film I mean, but cinema going always seemed tamer after that.

The Jews had been bombing cinemas, army camps, troop transports and the railway lines. The Stern gang the extremist terrorist group hanged two Intelligence Corps sergeants in an orange grove as a reprisal, one was from Kidderminster. They also bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem killing about 30 innocent people.

Our guarding the camp was a joke really, they could have taken us out any time they had wanted, but luckily the Education Corps was not one of their main targets. When illegal immigration ships were in harbour, before being turned round and send to prison camps in Cyprus, squads of thirty or more young Jews would come marching past our camp down hill towards the docks. After demobilisation I met a chap, Tony (?) who had been in the Palestine Police motor boat section, supposedly stopping arms running and illegal immigrants landing in the dead of night. He claimed that the skipper of his boat got sums of £100 or more from both Jews and Arabs to turn a blind eye to their activities when they had something going on, this he split with his crew. Tony's only complaint was that he couldn't bring it out with him! After doing a stint of selling Hoovers, not to Elon and Prue Gregory though, he joined the Canadian Mounted Police. My faith in law and order was shattered. I wish I could remember the Latin tag for, “Who guards the guards?” - Quis custodiat, custodius, or something!

At the Education College we made leather goods, I cobbled together a handbag which Dad used as a bag to carry cartridges when shooting for years. String belts, macrame work and various other items were also produced. A small camp incident, someone put his boot on and found a scorpion in it and he got stung, but as it was only a baby one he was lucky, real stings were very painful. One day a petrol tanker blew up in the harbour, accidentally for a change and the fire burned for three days with a huge plume of smoke.

Foot Note – From Juvenal's satires

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”

“Who will guard the guards?”

Juvenal, A Roman satirist

AD c.60 – AD c.130

He also wrote -

Probitas laudatur et alget.

Honesty is praised and left to shiver.

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