My National Service (1955- 1957) The Making of a Man

By Brian Holdich

My National Service (19551957): The Making of a Man is the story of young man who joined the British Army as an Infantry Soldier and served for two years as part of conscripted National Service. It is a very personal story, giving detailed description about everyday Army life and journeying over 28,000 miles to far off places including the Far E

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ladey Adey Publications
• Release date: Mar 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9781913579623

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My National Service

(1955 – 1957)

The Making of a Man

Also by Brian Holdich

My Indian Journey

India Revisited

The 2001 New York City Marathon

Stanground Boy

(Yesterday in Poems)

The Man from the PRU

The Torchbearers

(The Olympic Torch in Peterborough)

My National Service (1955 – 1957)

The Making of a Man

Brian Holdich

Foreword by

Major (Rtd) Reverend Neil Knox

Copyright ©2019 by Brian Holdich

Revised Edition ©March 2023 by Brian Holdich

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library.

ISBN: 978-0-9956231-2-5 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-913579-62-3 (E-Publication)

Publisher: Ladey Adey Publications, 1 Ermine Street, Ancaster, Lincolnshire, UK.

Cover Picture by Abbirose Adey, Ladey Adey Publications.

Author address is Market Deeping, Peterborough, UK.

Royalties collected from the sale of this book

will go to charity which include the

St Guthlac’s Church in Market Deeping.

Dedication

I dedicate this book to two brothers

who fought in the First World War,

one being my father Tom,

who survived the horrors of trench warfare

and the other, his younger brother Charles,

aged 19, who never returned home.

Travelling 28,000 miles in 2 years

Brian’s Travels during his National Service

Acknowledgements

To the Reverend Neil Knox, who kindly wrote the foreword for this book. He was a Regular soldier in the British Army for many years. He served in Northern Ireland during all the troubles there, achieving the rank of Major. We met when Neil was a curate at the St Guthlac’s Church in Market Deeping where he became extremely popular.

I must give my heartfelt thanks to Caron Romaine who typed the original manuscript of this book. I must have annoyed her at times with constant alterations, but she never showed any annoyance with me and I’ll always be grateful for that.

I have to thank an unknown soldier who, like me, was in B Company of the Essex Regiment in Hong Kong. He gave me all the small photographs used in this book. In all honesty, I have completely forgotten his name and I would personally loved to have thanked him.

The wise words of my good friend Ted Roberts, who was in the RAF during the Second World War. He would often give me invaluable information concerning this particular war.

Another good friend, my next door neighbour, Geoff Chambers. Geoff worked out the total number of miles I travelled during my two years in the Army, exactly 28,000 miles.

Brian Holdich May 2019.

About the Author

Brian Holdich was born in Stanground, Peterborough in 1935 when after attending Stamford School he started an apprenticeship in Electrical Engineering. He was then called up in 1955 to serve his two years National Service where he spent the majority of his time in the British Army in Hong Kong. Here he played plenty of football but unfortunately no cricket. It was in the early days in the army that he took up boxing again, just to prove a point and he had some success.

On being demobbed in February 1957 he eventually joined the Prudential as ‘The Man from the Pru’ where he found happiness in a well loved occupation.

In retirement he can often be found watching his old club, Market Deeping Cricket Club and in his late forties he became a walker when he completed fourteen marathons. When his last marathon ‘The New York City Marathon’, which proved to be really tough and he suffered a badly damaged ankle which put an end to his marathon walking. Another enjoyment for Brian was when he discovered the

joy of writing having been the author with this book being his seventh and last book.

It was due to his charity work that he was nominated to be a Torchbearer on 3rd July 2012 when he carried the Olympic Torch through the crowded streets of his home city of Peterborough.

Brian had been married to Kathleen for fifty eight years until they had to say goodbye when she passed away in 2020. They have a daughter and a son, three grandchildren and three great grandchildren.

National Service

The First World War brought death and destruction on a monumental scale prompting people to remark, Never again. Yet, a mere 21 years after Armistice Day, the Second World War was to happen again against the old enemy, Germany.

It was then after the Second World War that the British Government brought in a National Service being formed across the whole of Great Britain involving thousands of young men. At the age of 18 they would be required to serve two years National Service in Her Majesty’s Forces.

This would mean that Great Britain would be more prepared in the event of another World War than it had ever been before.

Evidently NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) was formed initially involving 12 founding countries. This is now 29 countries which include Great Britain, America and many other countries across the world with the premise that if any of these nations were attacked by a hostile enemy then NATO would act in the appropriate forceful manner, despite the fear of another World War, which fortunately has never materialised.

To make the world a much safer place it meant that many of Great Britain’s National Service soldiers would invariably be sent abroad soon after their army training had finished. In order to keep the peace in many countries across the world; Hong Kong, India, Singapore, Cyprus, Malta, Malaya and Yemen to name just a few countries where hostilities had already broken out and not forgetting Germany where since the end of the Second World War many British soldiers were still required but not any more.

There was a great need that British soldiers would always be needed somewhere in the world. So here was I about to become a National Service soldier and I felt I was well up for the task by being fit and in good health. So I had no real fears whatsoever on leaving civilian life, well maybe just slightly nervous, but I rather stupidly believed that my army training would be a mere formality. I soon realised how wrong I could possibly be!

Foreword

You will often hear people lament the ending of conscription in 1960 to National Service believing it would perhaps help improve the fabric of our society today. Certainly, for those who completed National Service, it provided an opportunity to encounter and travel far beyond the normal horizon open to many young men at the time. Brian’s book strikingly captures the experience of a 19-year old young man, from the suburbs of industrial Peterborough, on National Service in the mid 1950s.

In his account, we journey with him on a two year round-the-world adventure where he outlines his hopes for the experience as well as capturing the highs and lows that transpire in his 28,000 miles of travel. From the inevitable shock of basic training, where men from wide socio-economic backgrounds are seemingly arbitrarily thrown together in the transition process from civilian to soldier, we see how these life-long friendships, unique to the military environment, are forged. He paints a vivid picture of the arduous voyage on an ageing troopship from Southampton, through the Mediterranean and Suez Canal, before reaching his destination of Hong Kong where he would remain for 14 months. In so doing, we are given a window to images from a bygone era from a spotlessly clean Mediterranean to arriving in the embryonic metropolis of Hong Kong.

From humorous encounters and experiences in a colonial Hong Kong, spanning ballroom dancing to field exercises, whilst protecting the border in the New Territories only a stone’s throw from the Chinese town of Shenzhen, we then head back to Great Britain on a return journey which, touched the emerging Suez Crisis necessitating a re-route home around the Cape of South Africa calling in at Zanzibar and apartheid Cape Town.

This book is so much more than a diary account of what took place over Brian’s two years of National Service in the 1950s; this is a story about how the experience touched, shaped and ‘made’ the man. In his own words;

I can remember it far more than any other two years of my entire life… it was the making of me.

Major (Retired) Reverend Neil Knox

Introduction

I first thought about writing this book 23 years ago, after I was made redundant from The Prudential. At that time, I rather reluctantly came to the conclusion that it was a far too arduous a venture for me to even contemplate. One big fear was whether I would find a publisher willing to publish my work. So, I shelved the idea: hoping to come back to it at another time; hoping that my memory would hold and that dementia would not strike. If it did, all my National Service memories would disappear completely. So I had to move quickly.

I decided to undertake the task of writing about my National Service days as I continue to surprise myself with how much I remember from those ‘never to be forgotten’ days, now over sixty years ago. Looking back to that time, I realise that my time in the army was the pinnacle of my teenage years, which I’m sure I’ll never forget. Is it any wonder then, that I can recall what happened at that time most clearly. Yet, things that happened a few months, or even a few weeks ago I’ve drawn a blank! The fear of dementia as we get older is never far away and I believe writing this book has helped me enormously revealing the answers to difficult questions that have been stored away somewhere in my brain. I’m so grateful that my memory is still good.

Conscription or National Service as it was more commonly known had one willing occupant who was actually looking forward to serving in Her Majesty’s Forces. The reason for this was that I wanted to travel and see as much of the world as I possibly could. Previously, I had been turned down in my application to join the REME. Although, I wasn’t too disappointed I felt I stood a better chance of achieving what had