WAR HERO’S LAST BATTLE
He charged up the D-Day beaches and rose to be head of the Army. But Lord Bramall’s final stand came when, aged 92, he was accused of child abuse on the word of a fantasist. Here, in a candid interview devoid of self-pity, he talks about that nightmare an
Field Marshal lord Bramall of Bushfield was barely out of short trousers when he began fighting for his country. in 1940, aged 17 and still at eton, he joined the Home Guard. Four years later he was charging up a Normandy beach in the d-day landings. The following year, he saw action in Holland and was awarded the Military Cross. He commanded troops in Borneo and rose through the ranks to become the Head of the Army in 1979, then Chief of the defence Staff from 1982 to 1985, rubbing shoulders with prime ministers and presidents.
Needless to say, at the age of 94, he is a rich fount of colourful — and occasionally hilarious — anecdotes.
‘We were going over on the Royal Yacht to the anniversary of the d-day landings when President Clinton and i were quite alone on the top deck,’ he tells me.
‘We were passing a line of ships and there was an enormous hulk in front of us. The President said to me: “What’s that over there?”
‘i said: ‘‘Mr President, that is the USS George Washington, the largest ship in the United States navy’’ — and this was the Commander-in- chief of the U.S. navy. How embarrassing.’ But what did the President say? ‘He said, ‘‘Gee!’’ ‘dwin’ as lord Bramall is known (short for edwin) chuckles as he continues reminiscing.
‘The president i thought was very nice in every way was George Bush Senior. Of course, he is in trouble because he put his hand on somebody’s bottom and made a blue joke or something when he was 91, so everybody’s at him now.’ dwin looks as if he’s tasted something particularly nasty in the glass of sherry he’s sipping.
‘Of course, you can’t say “i think it’s wrong”, because if you say that you are almost guilty of a crime. You can’t even make a joke about it.’ The word ‘preposterous’ is written large across his face.
lord Bramall is a delightful man with a slightly crooked smile and a keen brain. He tells me his heart is ‘all right’ and his blood pressure ‘very good’, but he walks with sticks owing to a ‘muscular deterioration at the bottom of my spine, which is not surprising with the life i’ve led’.
He was brought up in a time when ‘one couldn’t have hang-ups because nobody had time for them. if somebody got bolshy about something, people said “don’t you know there’s a war on — we can’t be bothered with you”.
‘i knew a lady once in the Wrens who said, “if i don’t get my bottom pinched by a sailor every day, i think there is something wrong with me”. Of course, that was during the war. A different time.’
YeS indeed. This week, Westminster has been swept by allegations of sexual harassment, and Sir Michael Fallon was forced to resign as defence Secretary on Wednesday following allegations made by his Cabinet colleague, Andrea leadsom, relating to an incident six years ago.
‘i was sorry he’s going,’ says dwin. ‘He was a good defence secretary.
‘i am extremely worried about this absolute determination of the world to denounce people; this frenzy of witch-hunts being whipped up on Twitter and social media.
‘it’s the danger of exploitation that is terribly worrying. it gives an excuse for people to damage reputations. This is happening now with Ministers.
‘ loads of ladies are coming forward. Now i’m sure some of these are genuine cases and oughtn’t to have happened, but anybody on Twitter can say, “Oh, this happened” and it has to be taken seriously. But i don’t want to get onto all of that.’
We’re in the sitting room of the family home in a leafy Hampshire village to talk about his book, The Bramall Papers: Reflections in War And Peace. This unique collection of personal papers from a remarkable career, dating from the Fifties to the present day, testifies to dwin’s original thought on military strategy and leadership, not to mention his skills as an orator.
lord Bramall is widely recognised as the most brilliant military man of his generation, and there are, he says, ‘important messages’ in this collection of letters, lectures and speeches — not just for lovers of military history but for all of us in a perilous world.
There is, though, as he chats about his life and times, a huge elephant in the room. He knows it and i know it.
On March 4 two years ago, dwin was having breakfast with his frail wife Avril, who was suffering with Alzheimer’s disease, when there was a knock at the door.
Two police officers, a man and a woman, asked to talk to him. lord Bramall showed them in, i suspect with his inimitable charm, only to find himself caught up in one of the most scurrilous witch-hunts in this country’s recent history.
A fantasist, known only as ‘Nick’, had accused this thoroughly decent man of belonging to a network of murderous ‘ ViP’ paedophiles — alleged to have included former prime minister Sir edward Heath and former Home Secretary lord Brittan — operating at the heart of the British military and political establishment.
it would be ten long months — during which period his beloved wife died — before officers leading the now utterly discredited Operation Midland dropped the investigation into this war hero, loving husband and father-of-two.
And it wasn’t until October 2016 that the Metropolitan Police apologised to lord Bramall for the way it had handled allegations of historical child sex abuse against him. in September this year, the Met confirmed it had paid £100,000 in compensation to lord Bramall and lady Brittan (widow of lord Brittan).
dwin and Avril were married for 66 years and her portrait, painted by dwin during a posting to Hong Kong in the Seventies, hangs at the foot of the stairs. The sitting room is filled with photographs of them together through the years.
An elegant woman, Avril was possessed of a head- turning beauty, he says. dwin was captivated when, shortly after his return from World War ii, they were introduced by her brother, who’d served in his battalion.
‘She was marvellous, of course, absolutely marvellous,’ he says. ‘She was the daughter of a soldier and the sister of a soldier, so she was an enormous help to me. We were together all over the world. ‘it’s very sad. i miss her a lot. But, of course, she was not really functioning properly at all for the last two years. Memory, i suppose, was the thing. if you’d said to her — this is in the early days — “What month is it?”, she wouldn’t know.
‘We took her to the doctors. it’s very important to have it properly diagnosed because you get certain allowances. And then, of course, we had to have carers and hoists and … a horrible business.
‘For a long time i was the carer but, eventually, i couldn’t do that.
‘But she died at home. We didn’t put her in a home or anything. She died here. We slept together upstairs. She had a hospital bed eventually and i put a single bed next to it so that we could hold hands and things like that. When
‘When I had these ridiculous accusations, my wife was dying. She had Alzheimer’ s. There were 20 police here for 10 hours. They pulled everything out.It was awful for my wife. She said ,‘‘ what are all these people doing ?’’ You couldn’ t really explain to her’
she did die, she died quite quietly and I was beside her.’
He pauses, lost in thought for a moment, and his features soften.
BeHInd him is another of his paintings of the old cricket ground in Hong Kong where dwin, an able cricketer and honorary life president of the MCC, scored a century. Those, though, were less complicated days.
‘Long before I had any idea of sex, I always thought, “When I grow up I’m going to have a family, be a father”. It must be so much more difficult for young people to grow up now. The pressures must be awful.’
He suddenly leans forward in his armchair. ‘When I had these absolutely outrageous and ridiculous and completely unsubstantiated accusations against me, my wife was dying. She had Alzheimer’s and I was closing on 92.
‘There were 20 police officers here for ten hours. They went through everything: every book, every pile of papers, pulled every- thing out. My wife was downstairs, and later on she was more or less always upstairs. It was awful for her. She said: “What are all these people doing?” You couldn’t really explain to her. Periodically she’d say, “Have I done something wrong?” And I said, “You haven’t done anything wrong, and nor, for that matter, have I. The whole thing is a complete witch-hunt.”
‘Originally, when they came to the house, all I was told was that 40 years ago I’d abused an under- age male. I didn’t know what abuse might have meant at all.
‘When eventually, after putting off my [police] interview twice — because I think they knew they were barking up completely the wrong tree — I got what the charges were [in April 2015], they were so absolutely ridiculous.
‘One of them was that I was supposed to have organised the torture of a small boy in the middle of Salisbury Plain, and that I’d had a sex orgy on Remem- brance Sunday, and another one at dolphin Square [ an apartment block near Westminster] with the usual suspects, including Jimmy Savile, who I’d never met.
‘no self-respecting police officer could possibly heve believed it, but because the chap [nick] had said it, he had to be believed so they went through the process of keeping me a suspect for ten months.’ dwin shakes his head. ‘Unbelievable. All my friends thought it was utter rubbish.
‘Luckily, because it was complete rubbish, I didn’t lose a huge amount of sleep over it — but there again, you do think about it.
‘Of course, it was ridiculous but the politicians started it. Theresa May said: “You must believe these people.” They must be called the victims. One policeman actually said he [nick] was a credible witness who was telling the truth. It was monstrous. He wasn’t telling one word of the truth. everyone was telling them that he was a fantasist but they wouldn’t believe it.
‘ eventually, I got a written apology saying they should never have done it. They misled the magistrate in order to get a search warrant. The whole thing was a disgrace.
‘Just like the stress of battle, it could have done me no good at all, but somehow I’ve managed to live through it.’ D
WIn is from a generation made of sterner stuff, one in which you did your duty — be that as a soldier or a husband — and never complained.
Born in Tonbridge, Kent, he says he was ‘introduced to war at a very impressionable age’.
‘I watched the Battle of Britain happening overhead and experienced the Blitz in London before I joined the Home Guard at 17, and the proper Army at 18.
‘There are a few soldiers who are fearless but I certainly wasn’t one of them. I was very frightened — but you knew you had to try to overcome it.
‘I’ll tell you a silly story. I was at preparatory school and I’d just come off in a rugby match. There was a master I respected who said: “Bramall, you funked that tackle.”
‘When I was standing on the beaches of normandy, I heard that voice in my head and thought: “I’d better not do it again.’’
‘ I never had nightmares or dreams, even though one has lots of near misses if you’ve been in battle for any length of time.
‘I had one awful experience later on in normandy when I was grouped around a vehicle with four other members of the company waiting for orders. ‘ One of them said to the others: “do you think we’ve had it?” But he said it fairly calmly.
‘Soon after he said that, a shell came through the vehicle and killed everybody except me.’ Many years later, dwin took his son
Nicholas, who is now a landscape gardener, to that very spot.
‘We did a battlefield tour and I said, “That’s the place your father nearly didn’t survive”. I don’t think my son was frightfully interested but it didn’t affect me at all.
‘It’s extraordinary really but in this generation they are encouraged to see counsellors. It’s actually put in their heads: “Poor chap, he’s been in battle for a couple of days, he needs counselling’” … and so on.
‘I don’t think that occurred to me. It was horrible at the time, but I’ve lived the rest of my life with happy things, sad things — mostly happy things. You take them as they come.’
That happy life includes, as well as his son, a grown-up daughter Sarah, who lives near him, two grandchildren and five great-grandchildren — one of whom, Alexander, took the photograph for the cover of his new book. Today, Dwin also has a carer to help him. ‘She’s a nice lady but I don’t really need much caring in my life, because I can bath myself and get into bed and everything, but she cooks and does secretarial things for me.
‘And this book has obviously been of great interest to me. When you get to my age, if you don’t have something to do you just, well, fade away.’ He lapses into silence for a moment.
I tell him I can’t quite imagine this wondrous man fading quietly.
‘Of course, my wife was cremated, she is in a churchyard up there,’ he nods towards the village church.
‘My ashes will be beside her. We’ll have a headstone. The family already have it sorted.
‘I am genuinely not afraid of dying, but I do worry about how I’m going to die. The nicest thing, of course, would be not to wake up in the morning. But …’ He shrugs.
‘What you feel is, whatever else happens, it will be perfect peace.’
Which is just as it should be for this truly remarkable man.
The Bramall Papers by Field Marshal Lord Bramall is published by Pen & Sword, £25.