War and Liberty: One man's story

WAR AND LIBERTY

One Man’s Story

Franklin Medhurst, D.F.C.

Abridged

Smashwords Edition

Editor Victoria Medhurst

Cover design by Lisa McGrath

Copyright Franklin Medhurst 2017

Cover photos copyright Franklin Medhurst 2017

All rights reserved.

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite eBook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author and editor.

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Copyright acknowledgement

Wealth not Want: The Role of the Commonwealth in the World Crisis (1952) The School of Planning and Research for Regional Development, London.

Dedication

To Friend and Foe.

But primarily

To the source of my inspiration

Jenny, my wife.

Contents

Copyright

Preface

Chapter One - Thrust and Counterthrust

Chapter Two - The King’s Shilling

Chapter Three - The Road Not Taken

Chapter Four - A Sword, Almost a Fish

Chapter Five - Between Two Seas

Chapter Six - A Hole in the Ark

Chapter Seven - A Contest of Bluff

Chapter Eight - Holding the Line

Chapter Nine - Grounded

Chapter Ten - Out of the Woods

Chapter Eleven - Changing Horses

Chapter Twelve - A Distant Roar

Chapter Thirteen - A Pinch of Salt

Chapter Fourteen - Carry On Flying

Chapter Fifteen - In Perspective

Chapter Sixteen - A World Concert of All Regions

Endnotes

Further Reading

The Author

Preface

We live in a world of fast-moving change, change with greater social implications than ever before. The instrument of this change, the digital revolution, was very dimly perceived during World War Two through the development of radar and cryptic coding. Its evolution at the end of the twentieth century led to an explosion in its technology in the early years of the twenty-first. It enabled a few people to become globally exceedingly wealthy, emphasizing the great distance between rich and poor.

One product of this revolution is the mobile phone. It is available to more people in the world than fresh water and has together with the internet and television, spread knowledge of the poverty gap worldwide, contributing to great migrations from poor to wealthy countries in search of employment.

This unprecedented social upheaval was waymarked by the British vote to leave the European Union and by the appointment of a populist candidate as a result of the American election. The 2016 political change and the preceding election campaigns, noted for their poor presentation of the facts and misleading information, would never have been allowed to go unchallenged in mid-twentieth century Britain.

I speak as one who remembers that time. Born into a working-class artisan family, I served as an airman in World War Two. After the war I trained and worked as an architect and planner and later became a graduate in global politics: all relevant in the pursuit of an understanding of the world I had fought for.

The vision of the world I and so many others, upheld, honoured humanity’s fundamental desire for liberty and truth. Yet these are often denied by governments and autocracies around the world. These denials may be foretokens of a descent into a future where a widening gap between power and poverty is far worse than any dystopia yet conceived. All this on a rapidly overheating, overcrowded planet.

To avoid such a descent, it needs to be shouted from the rooftops that stability is now the highest concern of humanity. Since the end of World War Two, western Europe has been a stable multi-nation community. Change is inevitable but unity must be the aim in an unsettled world.

Yet maintaining stability in Europe can only be a beginning. There is a greater need for the peoples of the world to unite. It will be an enormous task, although one where I think the founding of a World Concert of All Regions has a part to play (see Chapter Sixteen). Climate change, the growth of massive world military power blocs, the rapid increase in global population, the downgrading of the world's ecology and the urgent need to save the world's life-giving soils from destruction, are all threatening issues which can be tackled only by unity and stability, and time is short.

War and Liberty is not just my personal story; I hope it also reflects a spirit of democracy, justice and the principle of equality.

*******

Chapter One

THRUST AND COUNTERTHRUST

One of my earliest impressions in life was riding on a bicycle. In seeking work my father moved the family to a tiny hamlet, Doughton, two miles south-west of Tetbury, Gloucestershire. In the spring of 1922 when I was about two years old, my father strapped a cushion to the top bar of his Sunbeam bicycle and we cycled to Old Market, Bristol, when it was then an old market. We were going to visit my grandfather who lived in Webb Street, where I had been born over the thundering slap of a leather-belt drive in his glass-engraving workshop at the rear. I recall the strapped-on cushion which was my seat and stopping somewhere on the journey at an inn, set back in dark towering woods. Children were not allowed in pubs, so I was seated on bench in the sunshine. My father brought out lemonade and returned for his beer amongst the regulars. The road was lightly used, mostly by bicycles and horse traffic. We returned the following day but I have no memory of that. Later, living in Fishponds, Bristol, the same device was used in late summer to go blackberrying on a Sunday morning.

Between the wars I spent my teenage years exploring, by bicycle, the western lands of Somerset, Devon, Wiltshire and Dorset, in the company of a sturdy band of cyclists, members of the Somerset Road Club. The forty-eight hour working week then finished at noon on Saturday. Every Sunday, come rain, sun, fog or snow, we were up at dawn and away in the byways, lanes and moorland tracks, exploring the sights and scents of nature and the West Country's history: its monuments, coasts, villages and rivers. We wandered incomprehensibly among the stones of Stonehenge, marvelled at the sweep of Chesil Bank and explored Lorna Doone country with its graveyards and churches. We delighted in the quietness of remote thatched villages and ports from Watchet (the home of the air test for the first radio-controlled aircraft, the Queen Bee), to Dawlish, and the estuary at Dartmouth. These excursions were supplemented in the summer months by early morning time trials, lasting from twenty-five miles to twelve hours (about 200 miles), developing mastery and tenacity over machine and self. This was in the wettest, windiest and warmest part of Britain.

These were days long before Lycra and helmets. We dressed comfortably in shorts and jerseys and sped off, hair flying in the wind; indeed, I still do but with greater effort, a vastly reduced mileage and minus one leg. Then, it was a hard-working but carefree life, learning about people, places and self, with growing freedom and confidence and an understanding of the birthright of teenage liberty.

In the mid-1950s I was inspired by the lone round-the-world yachtsman, Francis Chichester, to take up single-handed sailing in wooden dinghies, but in the mid-1960s I graduated to a seven-metre, five-ton cabin sloop, Kalispera, beautifully built of elm boards on oak frames with a mahogany coach-roof and brass fittings. I put down my own mooring on a tidal sandbank, Belle Isle, upstream of the harbour at Whitby, North Yorkshire. The swing bridge would open for two hours each side of high tide on my signal of three blasts on a wind horn. Because the North Sea is comparably shallow water, its conditions can change rapidly, so that contemplation and reflection are not an option. A single-handed sailor is immersed in a world concerned with wind, tide and storm clouds, as well as the skills of sailing.

On a return trip from Scarborough, having first consulted the harbour master, I ran into a force 7−8 gale, tacking with a greatly reduced sail against a horizontal rainstorm. The coastguard at Robin Hood’s Bay was forewarned, but did not see me despite my navigation lights, so he alerted the Whitby lifeboat. This was before the days of ship-to-shore radio, but in any case, I could not leave the tiller in the rain-lashed open cockpit. The lifeboat found me as I turned for harbour at the Whitby Bell Buoy, one mile offshore, when I no longer needed help after a lonely eight hours at sea. Tacking up the coast until I could hear the waves crashing on the aptly named Beast Cliff, as I put around, the tiller was visibly bending under the force of wind and currents, causing the thought to flash through my mind as I saw the white breakers pounding the cliff face: 'If it breaks now, I've had it!' But that is why tillers were made of ash, a tough and flexible tree of the olive family: they bend without breaking.

On tying up in port, never before did a cup of tea taste of nirvana. As with life, it is the passage that is significant, not the destination. Whereas in cycling, the passage invokes contemplation, in times of prolonged danger the cares of the world vanish in the greater concern for survival. Fear was not a conscious factor; wonderment at the forces of nature and the stoutness of my craft, were. It was the application of the skills of seamanship as far as I had learnt them that occupied me. These two sports, cycling and sailing, stimulated contemplation and combat, those two opposing compatriots, in counterthrusts of the mind.

I had left school as a very average pupil at the age of fourteen, taken a short course in typewriting on a thumping Underwood machine as big and as heavy as a small car engine, and learnt Pitman's shorthand and elementary bookkeeping. This was enough to set me up for clerking, first in building and later in law. The builders’ firm I worked for was owned by three brothers: one was a mason, one was a plasterer and one managed the business. They employed half a dozen craftsmen. Their yard was located on a corner site in the small county town of Taunton. It was opposite a brewery and near a fruit importer; the air was imbued with the strong smell of fermentation on one side and the contrasting aroma of overripe fruit on the other. Along the street was the fire station, served by a volunteer force. Whenever the fire hooter sounded thunderously over the rooftops, I heard the clatter of a score of hobnailed boots as the volunteers dropped their work, ran pell-mell to the station and quickly changed into uniform and helmet. Hanging onto the sides of the fire engine with its turntable ladders on top, they fervently proclaimed their haste by the pealing of a bell, clanging as the engine raced to the scene.

As a sole office employee my work varied from keeping accounts, making up wages, checking time sheets and stock, and recording the work of the carpentry shop above the office (which was ankle-deep in shavings), to serving the occasional customer. At first I travelled on a second-hand bicycle, purchased for seven shillings and sixpence,¹ for my daily journey to work which was, for me, a week's wage.

As a wage earner, I was soon able to replace this with a sports machine. In those times the bicycle was seen as a sign of poverty, because of its global availability and low cost. Yet it was an active, constructive and intellectually liberating poverty, unlike the sedentary acceptance of the then-occasional affluent motorist. The stigma was one that did not easily fade. More than half a century later when cycling with Jenny, my wife, through the outer Hebridean islands, a journalist fellow passenger on a small ferry thought we must be too poor to own a car and was astonished to find we were to stay in the same hotel as she.

My work in building introduced me to the crafts of house construction, but after three years, with a wage increased to only nine shillings, I found work with a solicitor at ten shillings and sixpence per week. His firm was based in Minehead, Somerset, and he wanted to set up a second office in the county town. I was installed in the business street off the town centre to carry out minor admin work on accounts, mortgages and rent receipts, while undertaking two days’ training a week at the Minehead office. The return fare for the twenty-one mile journey was two shillings. By cycling a return hilly commute of forty-two miles, I was able to pocket this and substantially increase my wealth.

The sensual thrill of the gyroscopic balance on a bicycle’s two spinning wheels is an instinctive experience akin to flying. Swooping silently down hills between fragrant summer hedgerows or frosted winter thickets: banking, the effort of climbing, changes of speed, the manipulation of gears and the balancing sense of movement in different planes − each has affinities with that which I understood to be the romance of the interwar flying period,