One crowded year of glorious life
Simon Courtauld
LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY by Alan Hoe Gollancz, £13.99, pp.507 David Stirling's period of active ser- vice in the Western Desert lasted little more than a year.. Had he not raised a detachment, initially of 60 men, which adopted the name of Special Air Service, the other 74 years of his life would proba- bly have merited 300 words towards the foot of the obituaries pages. Such a life poses something of a problem for the biographer: how much attention should he give to all the other years? Alan Floe devotes half of his book to the period UP to Stirling's release from Colditz in 1945; but this still leaves 250 pages on his post-war activities. There was the Capri- corn Africa Society, which aimed to bring racial equality and understanding to the central African countries; his international television company; his involvement with royalist Yemen and Saudi Arabia against Nasser in the 1960s; and his security com- pany, Watchguard. Then came his efforts to resist communist influence in Britain, through GB75 and the Better Britain Soci- ety, his alliance with moderate trade union- Ism and his ideas for educational reform.
Stirling's role during those years is well worth recalling — though too much of the book is given over to recorded interviews with him and to memoranda and letters relating to his various schemes. Unques- tionably he was intellectually serious even describing himself as a left-winger and, whether over Africa or education, he was genuinely concerned for the greatest happiness of the greatest number. But he was also the Phantom Major, founder of the SAS, and his association with trade union leaders was clearly an embarrass- ment to some of them.
It was not just that he was labelled `blimpish' and 'eccentric', but that he could be more than a little naive — saying, for instance, that GB75 would act only against political strikes, not against genuine strikes in defence of workers' rights. And he should not really have been surprised that his ideas for a one-year 'citizenship' course for 16-year-olds should be branded in the press, however unfairly, as an attempt to establish a modern version of a fascist youth movement.
The principal reason for the inevitable failure of the Capricorn Africa Society Utopian in its objects and actively support- ed by Laurens van der Post — was that it comprised only those Africans who were `loyal' or 'on side'. To the black national- ists, of course, they were Uncle Toms. Stir- ling claimed that both Kenyatta and Kaunda were attracted at one stage by the Society's philosophy, but it seems likely that they were attracted rather by the idea of meeting him (Stirling once gave Kaunda lunch at White's). He was stimulating com- pany, a tireless campaigner and enthusiast for whatever cause he thought worthy of support, and he always had what he liked to call 'the big picture' in his mind. On one occasion, in Africa in 1956, while on a fund-raising and lecture tour (he got a cousin of mine in Rhodesia to stump up £10,000), he became distracted for days by events in Hungary and kept telephoning the then Minister of Defence, Anthony Head, with plans for an SAS drop into the country.
In fact Stirling had little to do with the SAS after 1943; he remained president of the SAS Association, but the nearest he came to what he called 'the sharp end' was in 1963 when, with an unofficial nod from Sir Alec Douglas-Home, he helped to raise an ex-SAS unit to support Yemeni royal- ists, a task later taken on by his company Watchguard, under contract to Saudi Ara- bia.
However, opportunities for a bit of real action did occasionally present themselves.
`Typical 60's monstrosity.' In Nairobi in 1954, while walking home from dinner with a friend, Stirling, accord- ing to his own account, was 'set upon by two blackamoors intent on murder ... We turned the tables and they were despatched to their maker in rather short order.' On the night the SAS raised the Iranian embassy siege, Stirling was said to have tackled a youth who demanded his wallet, leaving him suspended from the railings in Green Park.
There were other occasions, no doubt, for the schoolboy pranks which he never grew out of. At one SAS Association meet- ing, during a speech by one of the directors which Stirling found too long and boring, he disappeared under the table and 'got my hand up between his legs with an extremely firm grip on his headquarter equipment'. When playing snooker at White's, he would dip a finger in his glass of kummel and smear it surreptitiously on his opponent's cue.
Life for Stirling was nothing if it was not fun. Even in the desert, he would describe those arduous and frightening raids behind German lines, in a letter home to 'My dear Mum', as 'tremendous fun'. Alan Hoe's account of these times in 1941-42, with snatches of dialogue between Stirling and Captain Jock Lewes recalls war films of the Richard Todd/Jack Hawkins era — though neither actor would have been quite right to play Stirling, whether bluffing his way into Benghazi with Fitzroy Maclean and Randolph Churchill or railing against Mid- dle East Headquarters as 'fossilised layers of shit'.
He once said, over-modestly, 'I have achieved little in my life except huge per- sonal enjoyment'. Quite apart from the fun, Stirling's remarkable achievement, by the time of his capture in Tunisia at the begin- ning of 1943, was to have destroyed 350 German aircraft on the ground with the SAS units which he formed. Hoe omits to mention that this was the more significant because many of the planes were the latest Messerschmitt 109Fs, which were vastly superior to the ageing British Hurricanes and Gloster Gauntlet biplanes.
Stirling spent the rest of the war as a prisoner, and his active contribution to the SAS was finished. After 1945, one feels that his great energy and imagination could have been put to better, more practical use. But he went striding off instead into too many political minefields. However, his irregular soldier's mind continued to be active until the end: only two days before his death in the London Clinic, in Novem- ber 1990, he telephoned a friend to talk about starting covert operations against Saddam Hussein.
Stirling acknowledged that there was more than a touch of Walter Mitty in him. His dream did come true, in the Western Desert, at the age of 26. But, sadly, the dreams that came afterwards were really never more than illusions.
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