A Rugby Man (4)

This photograph from the 1939-40 season. Playing for Birmingham University (which is why they all look so young I suppose). My father is in the back row, fourth from the left.

Shikoku Island, Japan 1946: Press Cutting

I came across this press cutting among my father's photographs.

It mentions the occupation by (among others) the Royal Welch Fusilliers. Part of the front page is seen on the other side of the cutting, giving a date: May 29, 1946. The paper is called the (something) Times - but which Times is not clear as this has been cut off.

 

For interest, here is the rest of the other side of the cutting. It gives a flavour for the politics of the time...

A Rugby Man (3)

My father loved his rugby - and was a fine player. This cartoon, together with the associated text, appeared in the local Chester newspaper sometime between 1947-48.

Celtic Roots (1)

My father, who left his country when he went to University in Birmingham, England in the mid-1930's (the first of his family to do so) and never lived there again, became a passionate and self-appointed 'ambassador' for everything Welsh. His feelings were driven on the one side by 'hwyl' (intense pride and passion) and on the other 'hiraeth' (longing - for home). These words are Welsh and, apart from when he was at school, as a child he spoke it as his first language in the village (of Hirwaun), at home and with his friends. Later he often used it to describe specific ideas or objects in his story telling and then took delight in teaching the pronunciation of the word or phrase to the listener, whilst explaining its meaning.

Welsh is one of the recognised Celtic languages and being Welsh for my father also meant being Celtic. Indeed, he was always saying: "I am a Celt", and would then go on to describe their characteristics; (according to him they were natural communicators, expressive in body language, good with their hands, temperamental, etc). These, of course, were his own characteristics (at least to a great extent) so the coincidence was not surprising. He knew a lot about them and had many books, learned and otherwise, that detailed their history, myths and legends and pictured their archaeological remains and artefacts; including their many megaliths (standing stones and stone circles).

In my early teens, on one of our many trips to Wales, just the two of us, when we used to stay with my Uncle Yorath and Aunt Mari at the Hirwaun YMCA (which Yorath used to run), he  took me up to the 'Centurions Grave' and the megalith 'Maen Llia'. I remember that it was a wonderful day; he parked the car just off the minor road and we walked up through a forestry plantation to the top of a short hill; there a gate opened out onto an area of open grassland and, a short distance ahead of us, was a standing stone. (Image below from Wikimedia Commons).

This, he told me, was the 'Centurion's Grave'. It stands by the Roman road of Sarn Helen, which runs for nearly 260 km - 160 miles from South to North Wales, on the part of the road that runs across the Brecon Beacons, about 2 kilometres north of Ystradfellte. He said that in the 1930's his history teacher had taken the class on a field trip up to the Roman road of Sarn Helen, which runs for nearly 260 km - 160 miles from South to North Wales. It connects a number of Roman forts and towns and must have been an important route for trade and travel for the Romans and others. By lunchtime they had reached the tall (at almost 2.7 metres - 10 feet) and rather slim standing stone. They sat and ate their packed lunches at the foot of the stone admiring the view and listening to their teacher's story of its origin.

Known formally as 'Maen Madoc' it bears a Latin inscription: DERVAC(IVS) FILIVS (H)IC IACIT – "Of Dervacus, Son of Justus. He lies here". He showed me the incised letters, which are on one of the  narrow sides of the stones, and we ran our fingers over the ancient script; then, in  a repeat of that moment from the past we sat down and ate our own packed lunches, drinking tea from his battered old Thermos flask (that had been to Africa and back).

Apparently roadside graves were often a feature of Roman burials but 'Dervacius' is a sixth century Roman name so, although widely recognised as a Roman memorial stone, it is believed that this is an ancient standing stone that was later used by the Romans. Indeed, it may well have been erected in Bronze Age times.

Years later, sometime around the publication of the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000, I returned to the stone hoping to capture some of the magic of that day. I was surprised to see that a new barbed wire fence now lay along the Roman Road, separating the stone from the road itself (visible in the picture above). Outraged I stormed off to the national Park office to complain; as far as I knew the land had been always been open. I was told by a rather rude Park officer that the land had been closed off because of the Rights of Way Act... confusing (because the Act was meant to establish open access to land). Ironically, during my research for this post I found out that the stone was moved, a few yards from its original position, in 1940 by the Ministry of Works. So, at least for this standing stone, it has seen some change in its recent history; but that doesn't change its significance for me and my father of course.

After lunch we dropped down the hill to visit one of his favourite standing stones; the massive and towering Maen Llia (also seen during that school outing). He stands by it in the picture above, taken by Joyce Shaw in 1995. It is close to the Centurion's Grave and can be found on the moorland a short distance from the same minor road that we parked on, which runs between Ystravellte and Hoel Senni in the Brecon Beacons National Park, in South Wales. There are many stories to be told about it (click here) but they generally have something to do with the stone getting up and walking to drink water from, or swim in local streams at specific times of the year. Indeed, that these standing stones drink water is a common myth and no doubt was once a generally held belief among the Celts; shared for instance as far away as Carnac in Brittany, France. Here the legions of stones go to the river to drink once night a year, on Christmas Eve. (Which must be quite a sight as there are literally thousands of them! The pictures below are from Carnac in 2009).

I wonder if all this folklore provides us with an insight to the way the Celts thought? Whatever their ancient purpose these stones are, in modern times, felt to be the bearers of some message; be it actual in the form of an astronomical calendar or invisible, associated with the uncanny or the sacred. They are certainly inspiring, whatever the original motivation of their builders.

In the days when it was possible to visit Stonehenge, as we did many times when I was a child (when we could drive there from home in a little over an hour), and walk among the megaliths unimpeded by fences (or people), my father would often place his hands on the great stones as if he was seeking some strange power held within them. I did the same and was awe-struck by the size of the human endeavour that was implied by their construction; equally for the nearby stone avenues and stone circle at Avebury which, for me, were less sophisticated and held a greater sense of raw power than I could feel at Stonehenge. Imagine a circle formed of many stones like Maen Llia and you have the ring at Avebury.

Above all for my father the Celts were story tellers. He genuinely felt that he was following in an ancient tradition and his own tales often strayed into the mystical...


As a footnote to this story, also mentioned in another post, I recently came across these pictures of my father at Stonehenge and of Stonehenge itself, from during the Second World War when he was doing his officer training (probably on Salisbury Plain). Given the clothing (gloves) and the slightly pained expressions it looks like winter, most likely 1942-43. He is standing (on the right) on one of the fallen menhirs. He never mentioned it to me, but it is marvellous to know that he visited the site at that time. I can imagine his feelings...

A Rugby Man (2)

This image shows my father in a team photograph; they are standing in front of the (rugby) posts but the ball being held by the player sitting in the middle of the front row seems to be a football (never my father's game). It is either from his time in the Army or from just after the war when he played for Chester. He is at the end of the back row on the right.

Etajima Island Japan 1946

My father's journey from Tokyo and then to Hiroshima was not a coincidence. It was always the intention that D Company of the Second Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, in which he was a Major, would find itself on Etajima Island. The Imperial Japanese Naval Academy, which was founded in Tokyo in 1876, moved to the island of Etajima in the Inland Sea near the coast of Hiroshima City in 1888.

The Allied Forces closed the school in 1945 but it had played a significant role in the war as one of the Japanese Navy's most important bases and a centre of their operations. More than one ship had been scuttled in the harbour by the end of the war but, of greater significance to the allies, were the massive stores of explosives in the form of shells and other munitions.

When D company arrived they were billeted in the naval college. The picture below has "Main Entrance Etajima Barracks" written on the back:

My father was told that his first job would be to: “clear that the explosives from the island in one week”. He told me that the island was "virtually hollow". A network of underground caves formed a honeycomb under the island; indeed there were at least 28 separate caves each with its own jetty on the shoreline from which the warships would have been supplied with munitions.

My father told me that when he stepped onto the island the tunnels were full of 23,000 tonnes of weeping explosives, torpedoes and other armaments. Its removal would be a highly dangerous task as much of it was unstable and "could go up any minute". However, when he asked for volunteers his entire company stepped forward. "They were as tough as they were brave" he said.

The caves were serviced by an electric railway which was recommissioned in order to get the explosives out. I got the impression from him that the little trains were actually quite a lot of fun once they got them working. A lot of his men had some experience of working underground (in the coal mines back home) and took to the task with ease. They used the trains to take the explosives, bombs and other armaments out to the jetties where they were loaded into barges. The barges were towed 10 to 15 miles out to sea where they were used by the New Zealand navy for target practice. The explosions could be heard easily on the mainland.

The job was duly completed within the week but not without incident. There is a story about a group of Americans; believing that some of the caves held valuable items like binoculars, they had been trying to burn open one of the steel reinforced doors which provided the above ground entrance to the caves with a blowtorch. As soon as the door was breached the flame ignited the weeping explosives causing a huge explosion. My father recalls that, at that moment, he had been having breakfast with his commanding officer, Appreece-Jones “when the whole thing went up”. “What the hell was that" said the boss...

Another classic tale involves a scuttled Japanese battleship that was lying in the bay. He and his men decided to swim out to it (presumably unaware or unconcerned about the sharks). They went about exploring the ship and in due course they found a huge and very beautiful hardwood table bolted to the floor of the map room. After a brief discussion they decided to remove it; they unbolted it, took it apart and floated it back to the island where they reassembled it in the commanding officer's centre of operations. Everybody was happy until the (ranking) American commander saw the table during a visit and instructed that it should be brought to his headquarters.

Now nobody was happy including Appreece-Jones. After a conference they reluctantly decided that the Americans could have the table; with one small caveat. The table was then duly returned to the battleship and reassembled, piece by piece and in its entirety, back in the map room. A message was then sent to the Americans that the table was waiting (in the battleship) for them to collect at their convenience!

After the caves had been cleared there was another job to do. There were many Koreans in Japan at the end of the War. The majority had been taken as slave labour and, indeed, a significant number of the casualties at Hiroshima has been Koreans. There is a Korean shrine at the peace park in Hiroshima city. It is beautiful, poignant and sad. Like the rest. This was something that I knew little or nothing about until I visited the site.

There had been a number of Koreans on Etajima. At the surrender they had been angry and wanted to "even the score"; they picked up guns and other weapons and, as described by my father, had started "raiding all over the island". He was told by his commanding officer that he had to solve the problem and pacify them so that they could be repatriated. He had command of a company of battle hardened troops and, when he asked "Do I go in hard" Appreece-Jones had said, simply, "Yes". 

They armed jeeps with machine guns and began to patrol the island and round up the stragglers when and where they found them. He told of a chase along a river as a Korean and his men tried to to outrun them on a boat. They were in the jeeps and kept firing across the bows of the boat until it hove to and they were able to capture them.

He had been assigned a female Japanese interpreter (I got the distinct impression that they became firm friends). She said that he should ask the leader to take off his shirt, which he did. It revealed the tattoo of a dragon that wound its way across his torso and down to one of his calves. She said "Yakuza" a Japanese word that (simplistically) means gangster.

They finally tracked down the last of the Koreans to the mountains in the middle of the island. They were in two groups but to find them they would have to march on foot. When he described the situation I could tell that he had revelled in the challenge. "You've got to remember that we had been through the War to the end. We were the toughest troops you could imagine and we wouldn't take any nonsense. We were willing to take on anything or anybody. When we started the march up into the hills it had been raining hard for days. The mountain road we were walking up was like a stream.

"Eventually we came over a rise and there we saw a large clearing with a village. The village headman came out to meet us" here my father paused. "I had never seen anybody so terrified" were his exact words; "because the Yanks had been in before and had given them a pretty rough time". He speculated at this point in the story. His shared his feelings from his perspective at that moment: "Thank God. I don't want to see this in my country" were his thoughts. However, it soon became clear to him that there was another reason for the man's terror; the Koreans were in the village.

My father said that it was at this point that he bought his 'Japanese bear'. He bought if from the head man "to placate him" and calm him down, in doing so to show him that he had good intentions. The 'Hokkaido Bear' is a Japanese icon - a carved wooden bear with a fish in its mouth. This bear is more rough hewn with a similar basic stance, but with no fish. It was chewed by my parent's boxer dog Skipper when my parents lived in in Africa, but is still a magnificent carving and something I have always loved.

The Koreans were persuaded to give themselves up; by all accounts my father's men were pretty heavily armed and "looked like they meant business". They were marched back down the mountain and were eventually repatriated. He too went home and refused a full time commission in the army.

My father's commanding officer, Appreece-Jones, received a CBE for the successful completion of the removal of the munitions from Etajima; he sent a letter of thanks to my father who also received a mention in dispatches. Later this mention, which was kept on his civil service file, was a contributing factor towards his receiving an OBE during his career in Africa 15 years later. At about the same time that he received his OBE they received a visit from Apreece-Jones in Malawi (who by then had taken on an official position within the government) who said to my father: “if you'd stayed in the army you would have been ‘the next big thing’ by now Bryn”. Que sera sera as they say.

The base at Etajima was reopened in 1956. It now serves as the location for the First Service School and Officer Candidate School of the Japan Maritime Self-Defence Force and is the home of the Japanese naval museum.

Miyajima Island Images 1946

While officially named 'Itsukushima' after its famous Shinto shrine and the even more famous torii gate that stands in the estuary mouth in front of the shrine (ranked as one of Japan's three best views), the small island that lies just off the coastline in Hiroshima Bay is more commonly referred to as Miyajima Island (which actually means "shrine island").

For my father it was known as "Paradise Island" and, although we discussed it after I returned from my visit there in 2011, by that time his recollections of it were only faint.

However, the picture above shows the beautiful little box (5-6 cm across) that my father brought back from Japan. It was only after he died that I studied it properly and realised that it depicted scenes from Miyajima Island. On the lid are carved the torii, the Senjokaku hall or pavillion, the shrine itself (the buildings on stilts to the left of the torii) and the five-storey pagoda that appear in the pictures below; which were taken by my father in 1946 and by me when I visited the Island in 2011.

On the back of this photograph he has written: "Paradise Island the Gates of Paradise".

On this: "Lens looking out to sea".

Above and below are my own photographs of the extraordinary arch of the torii gate, which is made of huge, largely unmodified tree trunks. One or more torii gates mark the approach and entrance to all Shinto shrines; here though both the gate, standing in the centre of the estuary mouth and the shrine itself which is set on stilts to stand above the high tide, are unique for being built over the water.

The trunks are massive. People push coins into the vegetation that covers the base of each trunk. Below is the view towards the land with the Itsukushima shrine standing on its stilts; here the sea can be seen in the bottom half of the picture. On the back of the photograph my father has written: "Shrine.. (and what I assume to be his interpretation of the name Itsukushima)".

On this he has written: "View of Gate from the shore".

This next photograph shows the five-storey pagoda standing next to the Senjokaku hall whose roof is also visible. Senjokaku means "pavilion of 1000 mats" in Japanese and apparently the  name describes the spaciousness of the building, as the hall is approximately the size of one thousand tradional straw-made tatami mats. My father wrote on the back: "Paradise Island 46, Temple - Buddhist"; and indeed the hall dates back to 1587 and was commissioned for the purpose of chanting Buddhist sutras for fallen soldiers by one of the three unifiers of ancient Japan, Toyotomi Hidiyoshi. Formally it is known as the Hokoku Shrine. The Five-Storied Pagoda is believed to have been built around 1407 and is also an important Buddhist site.

Some of my own photographs of the pagoda. An extraordinary structure and painted bright orange.

The great Senjokaku hall . A beautiful combination of tree lined corridors, polished wooden floors and vaulted ceilings.

The outer structure frames vistas across the little town and the wooded hills beyond (see below).

The rafters of the hall are decked with pictures, many of them faded and old. The very special representation below shows a samurai warrior together with his horse swimming across a river. This image is quite amazing and says so much about the celebration of the relationship between the man and the horse, the culture of the warrior, his basic toughness and determination. I wonder if my father saw this image when he was there himself? When I showed it to him he was clearly moved by it; he was a man who had ridden horses and who understood the imagery very well.