Gin-swilling, bed-hopping, gun-toting... it’s the REAL story of the ‘bored army wives club’ caught up in the Aden insurgency Sun, sex and savagery... torrid truth behind Jessica’s new TV show
SUN glints on the lazy waves of a warm sea as blond children run laughing into the water. Their mothers, elegant in colourful bikinis, sunbathe on the beach. These images, on a 1960s cine film, capture a colonial paradise, complete with cocktail sand camel rides, bazaars full of bargains, and a social life centred around the military messes, bars and clubs.
It looks like the Caribbean, or even the Far East, but this is Aden, once a British colony, where diplomats, servicemen and their families enjoyed a hedonistic lifestyle, East meeting West.
The period footage is used in tonight’s dazzling new BBC One drama The Last Post starring Jessica Raine, of Call The Midwife fame. She plays a glamorous but troubled Army wife who seeks solace in duty-free booze, dancing and adultery after being posted to one of the last outposts of Imperial Britain.
It was a steamy atmosphere that former diplomat Sir Christopher Meyer recalls as akin to the scandal-ridden Happy Valley in Kenya, another corner of colonial excess, where sexual shenanigans were rife.
Yet life in Aden was fraught with tension – and the most extreme danger. A brutal insurgency increasingly meant no Briton was safe, as those who were there at the time recall all too vividly. In one of the most horrifying episodes, a grenade was tossed on to the dance floor of the officers’ mess in RAF Khormaksar on Christmas Eve 1964, where a children’s party was in full swing, killing 16-yearold Gillian Sidey.
In the end, as the attacks grew ever more barbaric, even wives and mothers carried guns. Service families struggled valiantly to maintain a sense of normality. But grenades were thrown at military families out for a stroll. Bombs exploded near children playing on the beach and attacks on Ma’ala Straight, where many families lived, became so frequent it was dubbed Murder Mile.
I spoke to men and women posted to Aden for my book on Army wives, and many recall a turbulent and exotic cocktail of glamour and terror – bombings and assassinations alongside family days on the beach, nights of drinking and dancing, and the pressure cooker world of life on a sprawling military base.
Indeed the best way for many to pass the time was to have an affair, says Jonathan Walker, author of Aden Insurgency and an historical adviser to the show.
‘There would have been a lot of drinking – Aden was a duty-free port,’ he says. ‘A lot of the wives were just married and it was their first taste of travel. Here they had freedom, sunshine, money and time to play.’
There were more curious aspects to life, of course. Mid ge Lackie, wife of a soldier in the Royal Signals, recalls arriving at the airport as a young bride, having never left Scotland before, in 1960.
She was astonished, first by the hairdryer-heat, then by being addressed by her husband’s Army number – ‘Wife of 23510313’ – and herded into what looked like a cattle pen to wait until he collected her.
She had a further surprise when a shortage of military quarters meant the pair had to share a flat with another couple, naturists who insisted on walking around naked. They y were not the only ones keen to shed d their clothes.
In 1963, the expat newspaper, The Dhow, ran a scurrilous account of ‘the love life of the Forces in Aden’.’. It was eyebrow-raising stuff and the he British press leapt on stories of ginnswilling and bed-hopping in this oututpost of Empire that had, apparently, y, become known ‘ the bored wives es club’. As becomes clear in the BBC C series, there is only so much bridgege you can play.
It is written by Bafta award-winnning playwright Peter Moffat, who grew up in Aden where his father served with the Royal Military Police. ‘Young married couples in the heart of the 1960s living in extremely close proximity in a very alien and dangerous environment has always struck me as ripe territory for drama,’ he says.
Aden had become important as a refuelling station for British ships travelling to the Indian empire and grew to be one of the world’s busiest ports. But the sunny idyll was blown apart on December 10, 1963 when a grenade was hurled at the High Commissioner, Sir Kennedy Trevaskis, as he waited to board a plane.
He was wounded and his assistant and a bystander were killed. In response, thousands were rounded up and imprisoned. There were allegations of mistreatment and torture – often false – and riots ensued.
Then tribes in the Radfan, a moun- tainous area bordering Yemen, began attacking convoys. British troops were sent in, and in May 1964 two SAS men were killed and decapitated, their heads displayed on spikes.
One Briton, a young political officer called Stephen Day, recalls how his life was saved at his post near the Yemen border when a tribal leader, using a Kalashnikov, held off a mob surrounding his vehicle.
Yet life in Aden itself carried on as normal. Day had arrived there in 1961 and managed to woo and marry his wife Angela, a beautiful brunette, four years later as the tension grew. I interviewed them both.
Their marriage was sealed with a tribal wedding in the mountains where Stephen was based. The
The wives had sunshine, freedom, some money – and time to play
tribesmen invited Angela to take part in a shooting competition and were amazed when she hit th the tin-can target with her first shot. The Days were the targets of several assassination attempts, but luck and loyal tribal allies saved them.
An army engineer, who had come to check their drive for landmines, was killed in an ambush meant for Stephen. After Angela had a baby, they decided that it was safer for her to leave Aden.
Stephen remained behind in a rapidly deteriorating situation. ‘The nationalists were competing to gain respect – and therefore power – by attacking the British. So the killing continued.’
But in 1964 an up surge in violence, prompted by Harold Wilson’ s announcement that independence would be conferred by 1968, brought the war uncomfortably close to home.
In November, two grenades were thrown into the Oasis Bar, where servicemen and their wives social- ised. A corporal living in a nearby flat remembered ‘a terrific explosion and the building shaking’. Two servicemen were killed.
Many wives proved to be every bit as stoical as the CO’s wife in The Last Post. In 1965 Bette Viner, received a phone call informing her that her Brigadier husband had been decapitated and his head was on display in the marketplace. She phoned headquarters to verify this news and was informed that the brigadier was alive and well.
Moffat has his own example: ‘My mum remembers standing on the balcony of our flat in her first week in Aden and seeing a hand grenade thrown, killing a fiveyear-old boy, and my dad rushing out to try and do something.’
The attacks continued. In June 1965, a bomb exploded in the officers’ mess of the military headquarters. Tourists shopping at Steamer Point were picked off intermittently by a sniper. A young Stella Rimington, later the head of MI5, stopped off to shop there on her way to India and felt ‘ an uneasy sensation in the small of my back, wondering if anyone had a rifle trained on it’. In February 1967, the mother of a houseboy working f or a diplomat was kidnapped. The boy was forced to plant a bomb in their flat timed to detonate during a cocktail party.
Two British wives were killed, ten others wounded. On Black Tuesday, as June, 20, 1967 became known, a group of South Arabian Police recruits mutinied. A lorry carrying 19 soldiers was sprayed with machine-gun bullets. Some were killed instantly while others lay screaming with pain as blood seeped into the sand.
The mutiny spread to the nearby town of Crater where army patrols were ambushed and massacred. Three soldiers were seized, subjected to a mock trial and hanged. Their mutilated bodies were then dragged through the streets and burned. By the end of the day, 24 soldiers had been killed, the highest number in a single day since the Korean War.
Crater became a lawless, no-go area. But Lieutenant Colonel Colin Campbell Mitchell, commanding officer of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, led his regiment into the town and retook it, to the accompaniment of bagpipes.
He became a hero back in Britain, dubbed ‘Mad Mitch’ by the press due to his disregard for his safety. He implemented a form of martial law to crush suspected terrorists. ‘They know that if they start trouble we’ll blow their bloody heads off,’ he announced.
The British government now abandoned their loyal Arab all i es and began negotiating with t he National Liberation Front, the most violent of the terrorist groups.
The last troops left at the end of November 1967. ‘Gone Away – No Milk, No Papers,’ was the message scrawled by a soldier on the wall of Aden’s empty prison. It summed up the indecent haste of Britain’s departure – a sunny paradise lost amid bloodshed, bravery and political expediency.
Aden descended into chaos from which it never recovered. It is now part of the failed state of Yemen, gripped by civil war and famine and home to Al Qaeda.
Grenades were thrown at military families out for a stroll