The Colonel’s sharp little eyes stared at me hard and I wondered for a moment if I’d said too much. But it was true and I was damned if I was going to leave the Inquiry without making the point. If they were going to blame him for what had happened, at least they ought to realise that without the driving force of his personality nobody would have been saved and the loss of life would have been that much greater.
Probably they knew that already. But it made no difference.
After hearing over a dozen witnesses they passed the depositions to the Director of Army Legal Services and in due course the next step towards Court Martial proceedings was taken. This was a Summary of Evidence and again I was called. Iain was present throughout the examination of witnesses, and this, more than anything else, seemed to exmphasise the seriousness of his situation.
I understand he had the right to question witnesses. Whether he availed himself of this right I do not know; in my case he certainly did not, sitting tense and very still, his eyes never raised to my face. I was in the room almost two hours and all the time I was conscious of the nervous tension in him, could literally feel it. And he looked desperately ill.
I thought perhaps he would contact me afterwards, but he didn’t, and though I stayed the night in Edinburgh just in case, I had no word from him. Perhaps he thought it would be unwise. In any case there was nothing I could have done — only given him moral support. Back in London I wrote him a carefully worded letter beginning Dear Major Braddock and inquiring whether there was anything I could do to help. I received no reply.
The waiting I knew would be hard on him, a nervous strain. The loneliness, too. This worried me as much as anything else, and in desperation I went and saw his wife.
I’d kept a newspaper cutting that gave her address and I found her living in one of the back streets of Hertford, a small woman with doe-like eyes and a will that was hard as iron. I went in the evening with the story that I was a welfare worker for SAAFA, but nothing I could say would induce her to visit her husband. She got the Army allowance, and that was all she wanted of him. And the only clues she gave us to why they had parted was when she said, ‘I had five years of it.’ And added, ‘Nerves are one thing, but nerves and drink…. No, I don’t want to see him again.’
Yet she still had his photograph in a silver frame standing on a table beside the TV set — aged about thirty, I thought, and much as I remembered him in the Glasgow days, the lines of his face barely showing, but still that scar above the bridge of the nose. ‘If it’s any comfort to him in his present circumstances,’ she said as she showed me to the door, ‘you can tell him both the girls are well and pray for him nightly.’ And she added, her lips tight and no tenderness in her eyes, ‘I told them he’d been killed — and then this business with reporters coming here and the news of it on the telly, you can imagine the shock it was — how I felt.’
Christmas came and went, the New Year. Marjorie wrote from Rodil that Iain was in hospital. ‘My father says they think Major Braddock is suffering from some sort of nervous breakdown. It’s not serious apparently, but I thought you’d like to know. It’s the waiting, of course. And now I can’t help feeling sorry for him.’
There was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t very well write to him again, and if I tried to visit him the authorities would wonder at my interest. I was working all the time and so January slipped into February with news from Marjorie that he was out of hospital. The rest of her letter was about the fishing and how the solan geese were starting to come back. ‘Soon there’ll be all manner of birds and it’ll be warmer with clear skies. Come back then and paint. It’s so beautiful in the spring….’
And then at last the official letter notifying me that Major Braddock’s Court Martial would be held in Edinburgh on February 24, starting at 10 a.m.: — You are pursuant to Section 103 of the Army Act, 1955, and Rule 91 of the Rules of Procedure (Army), 1956, made thereunder, hereby summoned and required to attend at the sitting of the said court… and so to attend from day to day until you shall be duly discharged; whereof you shall fail at your peril. Four days later I got an airmail letter from Lane in Vancouver. Obviously he was paying somebody to keep him posted. ‘Tell your brother that I’m flying over immediately and will be in Edinburgh on the 24th. Tell him also that I have some fresh evidence. My agents have located one of the Military Policemen acting as his escort on the Duart Castle. This man survived on one of the boats that reached Ireland and he is prepared to swear that Sergeant Iain Alasdair Ross was on that life-raft. He also saw Second-Lieutenant George Braddock clinging to it. Furthermore, he says he would recognise your brother …’
The Court Martial was held at Dreghorn Camp just outside Edinburgh. It opened prompt at ten o’clock with the swearing in of the Court. For this ceremony the witnesses were present, all of us standing at the back of the court. It was a bare, rather bleak room, but the arrangement of the desks and tables and the grouping of the officers transformed it, and the colour of the uniforms made it impressive so that I was conscious of the atmosphere, the sense of being caught up in the Military legal machine. Instead of a judge with his wig and scarlet robes, five officers sat in judgment. And in the body of the court — the accused, the officer defending him, the Prosecuting Officer, all the various officials, even to the NCOs on duty, in full dress. The effect was overpowering and I wondered how my brother felt as the doors closed and quiet descended. The Judge Advocate, seated on the President’s right hand, read the convening order.
From where I stood I could see only the back of Iain’s head, hunched down into his shoulders, which sagged slightly as he sat slumped in his seat, staring down at the table in front of him. He seemed quite passive, almost dazed, and when he was asked if he objected to being tried by the President or any of the other members of the Court his reply was inaudible. And then the Judge Advocate’s voice, clear and crisp: ‘Everybody will stand uncovered whilst the Court is sworn.’ A shuffle of chairs and the court-room rose to its feet as he faced the President. ‘Please repeat after me-’ The Brigadier spoke the words he knew by heart in a clipped, very clear voice: ‘I swear by Almighty God that I will well and truly try the Accused before the Court according to the evidence and that I will duly administer justice according to the Army Act, 1955, without partiality, favour or affection …’
The four other officers who constituted the Court were sworn and then the President swore in the Judge Advocate himself. After that the witnesses were ushered out into an adjoining room. There were altogether twenty-seven witnesses. Most of them were from Northton — Field, Rafferty, Flint, the M.O., Phipps, Sergeant Wetherby and several other ranks I’d never seen before, including the Signals NCO who’d been on duty when the fatal order was given. Cliff was there and another civilian who turned out to be Fellowes, the pilot who had flown the plane from which Mike Ferguson had jumped to his death. Wentworth, too, and a young Captain whom Field told me was the Commander of L4400. Both Brigadier Matthieson and the BGS from the War Office had also been called, but their rank enabled them to avoid the tedium of waiting in the confines of that small room.
There was a Military Policeman on the door to see that we didn’t discuss the case, nothing to do but sit and smoke, and I had ample opportunity to consider what my brother must be going through in the next room. Occasionally we could hear the murmur of voices, the stamp of boots as some NCO moved, the scrape of chairs, the sound of coughing.
The preliminaries took just over an hour — the reading of the charges and the Prosecuting Officer’s speech in which he put his case. We could just hear the murmur of his voice. The first witness was called shortly after eleven-thirty. This was the Signals NCO. He was followed by the duty driver, then Flint, then Wentworth. Wentworth was still giving evidence when the Court adjourned for lunch. The order in which the witnesses had been called was our only indication of the course the case was taking. Clearly the Prosecuting Officer was establishing the fact of the order to evacuate having been given.