This article first appeared in History Scotland magazine which has graciously allowed us to reproduce it here.
From early on and throughout Northern Ireland’s Troubles, the IRA’s propaganda machine portrayed Scottish troops deployed there as sectarian. This was always an over-simplification. Religion had no part in army recruitment in Scotland and the parachute regiment, arguably the most violent unit to serve in the Troubles, were never represented as the product of a sectarian society. What was true was that in 1969 the army still had a strong nucleus of officers and NCOs with recent experience of tougher and more brutal operations during Britain’s long retreat from empire in colonies like Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus and Aden. Scottish soldiers had without any doubt been part of this.
The End of Empire?
The Second World War increasingly as it went on posed questions about Britain’s imperial role. After the United States entered the war, President Franklin Roosevelt never concealed his own anti-imperialism and opinion polls showed support for his view. In Britain itself newspapers as different as The Times and Labour’s Daily Herald began to query whether Winston Churchill’s vision of empire could survive in a post-war world. In 1942 a Times editorial argued that the empire had to become a self-liquidating concern, but this was not what Churchill had in mind. After Labour took power in July 1945, the now ex-prime minister had to accept the loss of India but remained tenacious in his defence of British imperial interests in Africa, the Middle East and ‘East of Suez’. The new Labour government was in fact divided over its own response to a continuing British imperial role. A large military base in Egypt to control the Suez canal was still seen as vital to oil supplies, and Malaya, with its extensive rubber production, was also seen as important. Voices on Labour’s left, however, were not slow to raise the issue of the viability of a miliary presence among populations with the potential to turn hostile. The Movement for Colonial Freedom backed this view and had the support of Labour MPs like Fenner Brockway and Barbara Castle.
Even as the Second World War was ending, British troops were heavily committed in Palestine, where Britain was running down the clock on its status as a League of Nations mandatory power. Communal tensions between Jews and Muslims had to be controlled and often draconian cordon and search powers were used against Zionist militias and terrorist cells who wanted to see the creation of a Jewish state. Three battalions from Scottish regiments served there and one officer in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, who had seen combat in Italy, was awarded a regular commission while in Palestine. He was Colin Mitchell, who wrote in his memoirs that this ‘offered a life of travel, adventure, and excitement in the old colonial empire’.
As Britain’s withdrawal from Palestine drew close, the colonial authorities in Malaya declared an emergency, which lasted until 1960. During this time, 400,000 Chinese people were forcibly re-settled to curtail the area within which communist guerrillas could operate, and 34,000 people were held for varying periods of detention without trial. Harsh methods and unlawful force were often used, and it is highly likely that in December 1948 a platoon from a Scots Guards battalion shot dead 24 captives after burning down their village, Batang Kali.
The Scottish author and journalist Neal Ascherson was there as a national service lieutenant in a royal marine commando unit. ‘All wars are horrible’, he wrote in 1998. ‘I saw houses burned and tried not to hear the sounds of torture and I stood watching the hopeless tears of women’. Later still, in 2017, at the height of a controversial court martial of a royal marine sergeant for murder in Afghanistan, he described how he had on a jungle patrol shot dead two mortally wounded Chinese insurgents.
The first battalion of the Cameronians was one of a number of Scottish units sent to Malaya. On one single tour of duty, it claimed 125 kills. In 1952, visiting MPs were shocked to hear of its inter-company competitions over kills claimed. John Baynes, an officer serving with them, had no problem justifying the practice when he later wrote a history of the regiment. By then he had been made the first battalion’s commanding officer and had received a knighthood.
Kenya: Britain’s Gulag
Soon after this, the Cameronians arrived in Kenya, where a rebellion against colonial settler rule had broken out within a large landless element of the Kikuyu people. It was led by the Mau Mau, an oath-bound and ruthless secret society. They had little support from the rest of the multi-tribal African population, but relentless force was used against them, including beatings, torture, forced population movement and summary executions.
Caroline Elkins has claimed in her book Britain’s Gulag: the Brutal End of Empire in Kenya that over 20,000 Kikuyu were killed, 150,000 held in detention camps, often in very harsh conditions, and over 1,000 died by hanging after trials in the English language few of them understood. This was over the eight years of what the British termed the Kenyan ‘emergency’ (1952-60), during which local security units and British units suffered minimal casualties compared to the Kikuyu people’s death toll.
In early August 1952, the first battalion of the Black Watch arrived in Kenya. They were soon deployed in sweeps in pursuit of the Mau Mau through the colony’s thick forests and across its so called ‘White Highlands’. In Red Hackle, the regimental journal, these were cheerfully compared to grouse drives in Scotland’s moorland, and there were references to the battalion’s ‘game book’, in which kills were recorded. Questions about ‘security’ operations in Kenya began to be asked by MPs, notably Barbara Castle. Few doubts however were voiced in the Scottish press. The major story for it was the death in a Mau Mau ambush in December 1953 of a Black Watch officer, Major Archibald John Arthur Wavell, 2nd earl Wavell, only son of the Second World War field marshal, Archibald Wavell.
One Scot who did voice his anxiety about operations was Major General Sir George Erskine, who took over command of British and local forces in June 1953. He accepted the need for Mau Mau to be defeated, but we now know that he despised the racism of Britain’s settler community in Kenya. One of his first orders to each soldier under his command was ‘to stamp out at once any conduct which he would be ashamed to see used against his own people’. There can be little doubt as to the need for such an order.
Cyprus
During the emergency in Kenya, Greek Cypriot opposition to British colonial rule of the island, or at least an element within it, began to identify with EOKA, a terrorist movement ready to wage war in pursuit of Enosis, or union with Greece. Britain’s garrison in Cyprus had to be rapidly reinforced. At various times between 1955 and 1959, over 20,000 British troops, many of them on national service, served in a low-key war which, while never as brutal as the emergency in Kenya, cost nearly 400 lives. 79 of these were soldiers, and Lance Corporal Milne of the Royal Scots was the army’s first fatality, killed during a grenade attack on his land rover in October 1955.
The Royal Scots, the Gordon Highlanders and the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders all did duty in Cyprus, as did Scots in other units. Their tasks alternated between riot control, cordon and search operations in towns and villages, and strenuous patrols across the Troodos mountains. EOKA’s attacks extended to off-duty soldiers and their families. In October 1957 they shot dead the wife of a sergeant while she was shopping in Famagusta.
The unit of the Royal Artillery in which the victim’s husband served was promptly deployed along with the Royal Ulster Rifles to search houses and make arrests. They were in the words of a Timesreporter ‘in the grip of cold rage. No pretence was made that kid-glove methods were used’. A Daily Telegraphreporter wrote of his shock ‘when I saw rows of bloody and bandaged Greek Cypriots lying on floors in Famagusta hospital’. Scottish units were not involved in this operation, but allegations had already been made against the Argylls over their treatment of the population in and near the village of Kathikas, where one of their battalion had been killed in an ambush.
Little came of these allegations and the island’s governor, Sir Hugh Foot, a man of liberal sympathies, came to the Argylls’ defence. They were and remained a formidably tough regiment, and their journal Thin Red Line used sour and racially contemptuous language in its coverage of operations in Cyprus. In its September 1958 edition, a B company officer noted that the local police had created a detention area for newly arrested suspects close to where he and his men were based. ‘The thought of having them with us is not attractive’, he added, ‘the smell, you know’. In another feature he praised a long-serving soldier known as ‘auld yin’ who ‘would make a first class Gestapo interrogator’.
The Rearguard: East of Suez
Cyprus was an important base for the Eden government’s ill-conceived and abortive operation to re-take the Suez canal zone in October 1956. British forces had evacuated the huge Suez base only in March of that year and a post war generation of its soldiers, Scots among them, had served there, latterly under increasingly dangerous attacks from local nationalist guerrillas.
After Suez and the Cyprus emergency, the long march home from empire continued into the 1960s. In 1964, Charles Ritchie, a young officer in the Royal Scots, was posted to what is now the Republic of Yemen. Its rugged and forbidding Radfan mountains, 60 miles north of Aden, were home to rebellious tribal people who were seen as a threat to Britain’s interests in the area. Ritchie was assigned to a sizeable British force operating against them with RAF support.
30 years later, he talked to a Scottish Sunday newspaper about his time there and the measures taken against the local population:
Their punishment was to be driven from their homes and villages, to have their crops burned, their houses levelled, their livestock scattered, their grain stores destroyed. It was now less than ethnic cleansing. I was young, just twenty-three and I am ashamed to say that a lot of what we did was quite exciting.
Barely six years later, Charles Ritchie was on duty with his battalion on the troubled streets of West Belfast.
Operations in the Radfan created some borrowed time for Britain to maintain a presence in the port of Aden. ‘Acquired’ in 1839 and used initially as a coaling station for ships en route from the Red Sea to India, it later became a large military base. Described, because of its climate, as a ‘concrete furnace’, and built on an extinct volcano which gave the name ‘Crater’ to its most populous area, its people by the late 1950s were receptive to the secular Arab nationalism espoused by President Nasser’s Egypt. They did not take kindly to the decision by the Conservative government which lost power in 1964 to put it into a federation with the highly traditionalist sheikdoms of its hinterland.
As nationalist unrest in Aden grew, attacks on British installations and military personnel began. The Labour government elected in 1964, initially divided over the case for ending Britain’s role ‘east of Suez’, decided that the federation was as unsustainable as a continued military presence. It settled on the policy of withdrawal in late 1968. Until then British forces were to remain.
Among units deployed to Aden was the first battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders under its new commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Colin Mitchell. He was not one to let attacks on his men go unpunished. Before his battalion arrived at the end of July 1967, a nationalist element within the local police mutinied, ambushing and killing 22 British soldiers in the Crater district. Among them were three members of the Argyll advance party.
Mitchell’s instinct was that the Crater should be reoccupied promptly and order restored after the police mutiny. This was what he did on 3 July 1967, when he led his battalion in, to the sound of its pipes and drums, arresting and detaining as many local men as they could. It has been debated ever since whether Mitchell disobeyed his orders or ‘reinterpreted’ them, and he was certainly contemptuous of Major General Philip Tower, who had command of British forces in the Middle East. What cannot be denied is that Mitchell and his men secured the Crater for the brief remainder of Britain’s presence in Aden. Once there, they stayed, setting up numerous secure observation posts from which patrols could emerge at any time. They also used what Mitchell called the ‘portcullis’ tactic of closing off areas, blocking all escape routes from them and searching local men, arresting suspects and shooting anyone who ran away. These were not methods that could have been contemplated in Belfast three years later.
The imposition of ‘Argyll Law’ in the Crater was never comparable to the French army’s operations under General Jacques Massu in Algiers in late 1956 and 1957. Yet it was still an uncompromising and often brutal business. There is plenty of testimony to that from other British units who were in Aden at the time, and Mitchell, who enjoyed meeting the media, spoke with pride of his battalion being ‘a mean lot’ who would give short shrift to any resistance from what he described as ‘third-rate fly blown chaps’. His thoughts were echoed in crudely racist commentary on events in Aden in Thin Red Line. In its pages, Aden’s people were often referred to as ‘Golliewogs’ or sometimes just ‘Gollies’. Their favoured tactic was said to be ‘running away’ and their personality was summed up as ‘lazy and unintelligent – who would throw a grenade when you can get fifty pounds for it?’ Their place of business, it was said, was ‘the market, a convenient roof top, or street corner. If they are not available, try the mosque. Armed with this information, any would-be Gollie-hunters should now have no trouble finding their men’.
Rumours and allegations about the Argylls’ tour of duty in Aden have refused to go away and they resurfaced in 2004 in a BBC documentary series Empire Warriors. Viewers heard a succession of claims of torture, beatings and killings carried out by the Argylls, and one aging survivor of Lieutenant Colonel Mitchells’ battalion remained quite open about his views, saying ‘we didn’t like the Arabs. To us Jocks, they were just smelly, dirty people. So, we treated them like smelly, dirty people’.
‘Mad Mitch’ – National Hero?
At the time, much of the Scottish press idolised ‘Mad Mitch’, as they nicknamed the Argyll’s commanding officer. To the Daily Record he was the ‘iron man of the Crater’ who preferred ‘dead terrorists to dead Argylls’. When the battalion left Aden as part of the final withdrawal at the end of November 1967, a large number of decorations for bravery were awarded, but the commanding officer received only a mention in dispatches, not the distinguished service order which an officer of his rank might have expected. The Scottish Daily Express led the way in denouncing this as an insult to Scotland, with the Labour supporting Daily Record agreeing coming out in full agreement.
What brought anger to boiling point were two developments. In July 1968, a ministry of defence white paper announced that the Argylls were to be disbanded. There were all-party protests from Scottish MPs but Tam Dalyell, the Labour member for West Lothian, had the temerity to query the idea that the regiment’s case for its retention should be linked to Aden where, he argued, it had been violent and ill-disciplined.
The fury brought down upon him tells us much about Scotland’s image of itself 50 years ago, and of its relationship to Britain’s imperial role. The hate mail to Tam Dalyell still repays reading. ‘You are not fit to lick the boots of a private in the Argylls who done the job the English could not do in Aden’ one correspondent told him. Another declared that ‘Mitchell could shite better things than you’. Others resorted to crude sectarian abuse because of his marriage to the Catholic daughter of the judge, Lord Wheatley.
Others who wrote to him reacted with rage to a London government disregarding Scottish opinion. ‘Give us our rights. Leave our kilted army alone, Scotland forever’, one woman said. The Scottish National Party, on the verge of a major electoral breakthrough, did not officially support the campaign on behalf of the Argylls, but some of its leading members did, like Dr Robert McIntyre, victor of the famous April 1945 Motherwell by election, and Arthur Donaldson, the party’s chairman for an extended period after 1945, despite his clearly pro-fascist sympathies during the war years.
Tam Dalyell had his supporters, but opposition to the regiment’s disbandment took on huge momentum. It was claimed that a million signatures were gathered for a petition against disbandment that was presented to parliament on 13 December 1968. ‘One million Scots can’t be wrong’ was the Scottish Daily Express headline that day, and car and window stickers supporting the petition appeared all over Scotland. After reducing the regiment to a single company, the ministry of defence went into reverse, restoring it to full battalion strength in response to the onset of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Another Country
This was done in 1972, and by then Colin Mitchell had left the army and been elected as the Conservative member for West Aberdeenshire in 1970. He left parliament after just four years and showed himself to be an essentially decent man with the tireless work he did around the world for the Halo Trust. Its often very dangerous work was to locate and clear mines and unexploded ordnance from former war zones in some of the world’s poorest countries.
‘The past’, the novelist L.P. Hartley famously stated, ‘is another country’, and Scotland certainly was five decades ago when the Argylls returned home from Britain’s last ‘east of Suez’ rearguard action. As a thoughtful Times article put it in October 1971:
…indignation on behalf of the Argylls became curiously entwinned with Scottish nationalism which always had an uncomfortably ambivalent attitude about the famous regiments of Scotland, and on the other side with Scottish Unionist pride in the nation.
In 2006, the old Scottish regimental system came to an end with the formation of the new five battalion Royal Regiment of Scotland. Fifteen years later, Boris Johnson’s Conservative government announced a reorganisation of the army into four divisions with Scottish battalions to serve in what would be called the Union division. Scottish nationalists attacked this decision, but the Nationalnewspaper responded with the launch of a six-part series on the history of Scotland’s regiments.
There may seem to be a paradox here, but the writer of the series felt able to justify the decision. ‘I am well aware’ he said in his opening article ‘that many people in Scotland would like this nation’s military history and traditions to be forgotten about but I think that is very short-sighted. Scottish regiments and our soldiers are very much part of Scottish history and their importance in our past cannot be denied’.
Yet in today’s Scotland, the regimental culture exemplified by the Argylls is all but gone. Unease over our military traditions and guilt over Scotland’s active part in Britain’s imperial past are not confined to those who support independence. Perhaps the great Hamish Henderson saw this coming when, in Freedom come all ye, his anthem for a new Scotland, he wrote these lines:
Nae mair will the bonnie callants,
Mairch tae war, when our braggarts crousely craw,
Nor wee weans frae pit-head and clachan
Mourn the ships sailing doon the Broomielaw.
Broken families in lands we’ve harriet
Will curse Scotland the Brave, nae mair, nae mair.
Ian S. Wood taught history at Edinburgh Napier University and for the Open University in Scotland. Among his recent books are ‘Times of Troubles: Britain’s War in Northern Ireland’, which he co-wrote with Dr Andrew Sanders, and ‘Crimes of Loyalty: A History of the UDA’. Both were published by Edinburgh University Press.
Further Reading:
The Thin Red Line: War, Empire and Visions of Scotland (Edinburgh, 2004) S. Allan and A. Carswell
An Army of Tribes: British Army Cohesion, Deviancy and Murder in Northern Ireland (Liverpool, 2018), E. BurkeMad Mitch’s Tribal Law: Aden and the End of Empire (Edinburgh, 2014), A. Edwards
