On Duty With the Queen: My Time as a Buckingham Palace Press Secretary by Dickie Arbiter Page B
Authors: Dickie Arbiter
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week of performance. I was crushed when the final curtain fell.
There was one major aspect to living in Southern Rhodesia that had never been explained to me. The country was just one of the three that made up the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland – Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), Nyasaland (now Malawi) and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). All were under the umbrella of the federal government, with a governor in each of the three countries and a governor general overseeing all of them. It was one of those ‘blue sky’ ideas cooked up by the Colonial Office in London in 1950. It was doomed to failure and lasted precisely ten years from 1953 to 1963.
If the idea of a federation with so many governors was confusing to an outsider, then the idea of Southern Rhodesia – the only country within the federation to have had its own internal self-government and parliament since 1923 – was even more confusing. It’s no wonder there were undercurrents of unrest amongst the indigenous population.
Social unrest requires government action and as a result, every white male over the age of 18 who had completed his education was required to do national service. A university course was the only exemption, and even that was temporary. Conscientious objectors were recommended to do their national service or conscientiously object from the inside of a prison cell.
This left me in a dispiriting situation. I had just left the United Kingdom, where national service was being phasedout. Had I stayed, given my age, I would have escaped it. Now I had arrived in a country which for a period of time required me to do national service.
I have always believed that if one is required to do something and has no choice in the matter, then the best thing to do is to make the most of it and enjoy it. I don’t doubt that my early experience at boarding school informed my way of thinking, but when it came to tough regimes – and national service in Rhodesia was certainly that – I already had the mental tools to cope.
Llewellyn Barracks, 12 miles north of Bulawayo, had previously been an RAF (Royal Air Force) pilot training camp during World War II, so it already had the infrastructure for military training. It was here that I went to do my army training with the Royal Rhodesia Regiment in the winter of 1959. Despite this being Africa, it really felt like winter, with nighttime temperatures dropping well below freezing. When I arrived the camp was undergoing renovation, which meant that none of the barracks had heating or hot water. Each day dawned with the rude awakening of a cold shower.
Things didn’t improve much after that. There was little time off in the army. The daily routine of weapons training, drill and PT (Physical Training) saw to that. The staff instructors always took a sadistic delight in finding something for us to do. Often this something stretched well into the night. Top of their to-do list was a full kit inspection in which everything had to be laid out perfectly on our beds. Even if you thought it was correct (and it generally was), they invariably didn’t think so, andrevealed their displeasure by tossing over your bed, spilling everything across the barrack room floor.
There was rarely any respite from full kit inspections. The same routine was repeated over and over until the instructors got bored and went off to annoy someone else. When we did have downtime it was spent well away from the barracks, hoisting beers in the canteen, putting the world to rights and playing snooker. The more talented among us provided the accompaniment by bashing out music on makeshift instruments.
We managed to find entertainment in the great outdoors if we were overnighting in the bush on exercise. While not quite in the mould of David Attenborough, we would often go out hunting for spiders and scorpions, put them under a glass jar and take bets on which would annihilate the other first.
The victor’s prize was its freedom. We
There was one major aspect to living in Southern Rhodesia that had never been explained to me. The country was just one of the three that made up the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland – Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), Nyasaland (now Malawi) and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). All were under the umbrella of the federal government, with a governor in each of the three countries and a governor general overseeing all of them. It was one of those ‘blue sky’ ideas cooked up by the Colonial Office in London in 1950. It was doomed to failure and lasted precisely ten years from 1953 to 1963.
If the idea of a federation with so many governors was confusing to an outsider, then the idea of Southern Rhodesia – the only country within the federation to have had its own internal self-government and parliament since 1923 – was even more confusing. It’s no wonder there were undercurrents of unrest amongst the indigenous population.
Social unrest requires government action and as a result, every white male over the age of 18 who had completed his education was required to do national service. A university course was the only exemption, and even that was temporary. Conscientious objectors were recommended to do their national service or conscientiously object from the inside of a prison cell.
This left me in a dispiriting situation. I had just left the United Kingdom, where national service was being phasedout. Had I stayed, given my age, I would have escaped it. Now I had arrived in a country which for a period of time required me to do national service.
I have always believed that if one is required to do something and has no choice in the matter, then the best thing to do is to make the most of it and enjoy it. I don’t doubt that my early experience at boarding school informed my way of thinking, but when it came to tough regimes – and national service in Rhodesia was certainly that – I already had the mental tools to cope.
Llewellyn Barracks, 12 miles north of Bulawayo, had previously been an RAF (Royal Air Force) pilot training camp during World War II, so it already had the infrastructure for military training. It was here that I went to do my army training with the Royal Rhodesia Regiment in the winter of 1959. Despite this being Africa, it really felt like winter, with nighttime temperatures dropping well below freezing. When I arrived the camp was undergoing renovation, which meant that none of the barracks had heating or hot water. Each day dawned with the rude awakening of a cold shower.
Things didn’t improve much after that. There was little time off in the army. The daily routine of weapons training, drill and PT (Physical Training) saw to that. The staff instructors always took a sadistic delight in finding something for us to do. Often this something stretched well into the night. Top of their to-do list was a full kit inspection in which everything had to be laid out perfectly on our beds. Even if you thought it was correct (and it generally was), they invariably didn’t think so, andrevealed their displeasure by tossing over your bed, spilling everything across the barrack room floor.
There was rarely any respite from full kit inspections. The same routine was repeated over and over until the instructors got bored and went off to annoy someone else. When we did have downtime it was spent well away from the barracks, hoisting beers in the canteen, putting the world to rights and playing snooker. The more talented among us provided the accompaniment by bashing out music on makeshift instruments.
We managed to find entertainment in the great outdoors if we were overnighting in the bush on exercise. While not quite in the mould of David Attenborough, we would often go out hunting for spiders and scorpions, put them under a glass jar and take bets on which would annihilate the other first.
The victor’s prize was its freedom. We
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