Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 287
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[Page 287]
141
By this time the members of the Party had become much better acquainted with each other and more disposed to tolerate differing opinions about political, social, and sporting matters. But I remembered that in the beginning a very nice Englishman, Rowlands, a tutor at one of the colleges of Oxford University, had been very scathing about the Labour Party Government in Australia. Quite guilelessly I ventured the opinion that there might be one in Britain in the near future. Such an outrageous suggestion immediately provoked his wrath, and our blossoming friendship wilted for the time being. "Labour governments may be alright for you colonials", he snapped, "but not for us in Britain". During the long trek from Iraq we had no batmen or servants, and the officers had to fend for themselves in rather rough living conditions. At first, some of the town dwellers were quite hopeless as cooks, and a few erstwhile city toffs gradually lost their well groomed elegance and became pathetically dishevelled as the march progressed.
The Party was now divided into three parts. The Russian and Persian linguists and some other specialists were hurried off up the excellent Russian toll-road to Kasvin, where Dunsterville still had his headquarters. Another section under a New Zealand Major, Starnes, set off northwards, beyond Bjiar, to a village, Sain Kaleh, half-way to Armenia, to hold our flank against possible Turkish incursions. The remainder including myself stopped at Hamadan indefinitely. The Russian officers had all left us at Kermanshah to go on ahead, post-haste, in Model-T-Ford vanettes supplied by a Motor Company (of a hundred of these vehicles) with Burmese drivers: we never saw most of them again.
On my recovery I was appointed Field Engineer, Royal Engineers, for the Hamadan Lines-of-Communication Area, and a few months later confirmation of this appointment, with promotion to Temporary Major R.E., appeared in the London Gazette. I set up my headquarters in a requisitioned mansion in Hamadan, big enough also for an officers' mess and sleeping quarters. In rear a field workshop was established to accommodate about forty Persian skilled workers: carpenters, timber-pit sawyers and