A don at war

AFTERTHOUGHT JOHN WELLS

There were at Oxford in the 'thirties two under- graduates of the same name. As they were exact contemporaries and were both reading Greats it was the habit of those teaching them to make the distinction of calling the one Good Hunt, and the other Bad Hunt. Good Hunt, G.N.S., a saintly and reticent person who has been plagued for much of his life with ill-health, is now I believe working for the Clarendon Press in Oxford. Bad Hunt, D.W.S., is at present our High Commissioner in Lagos. As such it has been his duty to report on the events leading up to the present war, to make an assessment of which side was likely to win and when, and to advise Whitehall, presumably, as to what military and political commitment should be made to either side. In short, an important figure, and one who deserves to be drawn out of the shadows of his present obscurity and into the light of public interest.

In public, as might be expected by reason of his official position, Sir David has given the strongest possible support to the Federal side in Nigeria. Opening a new £500,000 engineering building at the Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria last November, he criticised the former

Nigerian Minister of Defence for having severed the 'great connection' between the RAE

and the Nigerian Air Force but insisted that the close relations between the British and the Nigerian Army and the Navy had been main- tained and strengthened. 'For instance the suc- cessful and expedient operation carried out by the Nigerian Navy leading to the capture of Bonny (a port necessary to the Federal blockade of Biafra) was a result of the warship supplied by Britain.' Speaking at Kaduna in January this year, his tone was even more reassuring: 'we have tried to play the role of a friend in need. Despite all accusations against Britain, the bulk of the weapons ir the hands of the Federal forces come from Britain.'

In private his attitude is clearly more difficult to assess. Certainly he has his roots fairly deep

in Lagos. He was Assistant High Commis- sioner there from 1960 until 1962, he is keenly interested in the archaeology of the region, and is, one would imagine, even more firmly estab-

lished there since his marriage earlier this year to Miss Iro Myrianthousi, formerly editor of the social magazine, Lagos This Week, and the

niece of the Leventis brothers whose trading organisation represents one of the largest busi- ness interests in Federal Nigeria. Biafra Radio goes so far as to refer to him in perfectly seri- ous news bulletins as 'Alhaji Hunt,' signifying one who has been to Mecca and who is there- fore in sympathy with the Mohammedan Emirs of the Northern Region. This can how- ever be discounted as mean-minded prejudice on the part of the Biafrans. As Sir David himself said in the same speech at Kaduna in January, 'I have never come across them saying anything that is true.'

Good or bad, Sir David Hunt must clearly emerge eventually as one of the central figures

in the tragedy : as a civil servant he has re- mained relatively anonymous, but some clues to his character can be found in his memoirs of life as an intelligence officer, A Don at War, published by William Kimber (1966).

His enthusiasm for donnish detachment seems

from the start to have been less than his en- thusiasm for the commitment of war. 'Oddly enough,' he writes in a characteristic passage, 'the fact of my being a don had something to do with the war.' A Fellowship at Magdalen,' he considered, 'would be a good place to go to war from. Nor was I thinking only of the pleasures of the High Table, the port after dinner and a fine set of rooms in the cloisters. As I intended to specialise in Greek archaeo- logy I meant to use the endowments of Mag- dalen to finance my travels in Greece v‘hich then and now I account the ideal place for travels. I had two fine trips to Greece . . and the nearer the war approached the more I congratulated myself on having chosen a good method of awaiting it.'

This frankness of purpose and capacity for self-congratulation continues for almost 300 pages. 'I was extremely pleased to be told that I had been selected as G1 Intelligence. This was my second promotion within three months: I had hardly got used to the rank of major when I found myself putting up an extra pip.' 'This was after I had "taken flannel" as a full colonel.' My immediate chief was a Scotsman called Joe Ewart. As his obituary 'in The Times said, "he was always anxious to see the right person in the right job." I was all the more flat- tered that he thought I was one of the right per- sons.' The author also makes no secret of his delight at finding himself wherever possible in the company of other right persons. 'The man in the next bed to me was already known as a dress designer, but with nothing of the fame which now surrounds the name of Hardy Amies.' Or, a few lines on : 'One bed further along was occupied by the present Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South- West . . .' There is even an open appeal to Mr Powell at one point to return a book he has borrowed from the author. It is this gratuitous dropping of names perhaps, more than any- thing else, combined with the ingenuously hust- ling ambition of the writer, that gives the book its faint odour of originality.

For the rest there is little to recommend it. The don surfaces very briefly from time to time to offer a scrap of philology or a shred of erudition, but it is the soldier who holds the stage. Montgomery comes in for a hammering —'Heaven forbid that I should seem to depre- ciate any of the arts of leadership . . .'—and there are the conventional military assessments of the German and Italian soldier.

It is clearly for abler pens than mine to draw parallels between the attitude of such a man as an intelligence officer and that of the same man as a High Commissioner: between his attitude to the social structure of the British Army and his attitude to the social structure of Nigeria: between his generalised contempt for the Italians and his feelings for any other 'enemy' race: even to comment on his attitude to war as a means of achieving political ends. Cer- tainly it is for historian rather than reviewer to apportion blame and responsibility in time of war. I will confine myself to quoting, in con- clusion, Sir David's account of how he acquired his 'most spectacular war wound.' The lava- tories (at the Hotel Eden, in Rome) were of a fairly old pattern but I was not paying much attention to this as I pulled the chain. The next thing I knew I was flat on my back. A very large brass ball had burst its way out of the cistern and fallen on my forehead.' The moral being perhaps that even as a High Commis- sioner you have to be very careful when pull- ing the chain; on anyone.