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| Aldershot is in the blood
BY DAVID McKIE Guardian, 06.04.2000 |
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Even before you get to the tattoo parlours in the shopping streets you know you are in a military town. Where else would you find, perched on a traffic island outside the railway station, a howitzer gun, once the potent deliverer of 25-pounders, apparently targeted on a drab grey office block which would richly deserve any bombardment addressed to it. Welcome to Aldershot, home of the British army. That at least is how, for a century and a half, it has chosen to style itself. But late last month a report in the Sunday Times predicted that this would not last. The army, it said, had secret plans to disperse its Aldershot presence, packing regiments off to places like Inverness where land is cheap. And yet if you took the army out of Aldershot, what would be left? The place would simply expire with a plaintive sigh, like a punctured balloon. The army is why it is there. After the Crimean war the prince consort incited the War Office to establish two permanent camps on empty moorland north and south of the Basingstoke Canal. "The state of popular feeling engendered by the war is such that you can now ask parliament for anything you want," he told them. There wasn't much here before a grateful government took his advice. "On every side," the Illustrated London News reported in 1856 after the chosen stretch of Aldershot Common had been bought at a knockdown price, "there is merely a waste of boggy moor, dreary and repellent in its aspect." Two maps in the military museum chart what followed. In the first, before 1854 when the project began, Aldershot is merely a huddle of houses around the Red Lion pub. In the second, from 1862, there are pubs everywhere. The map does not indicate brothels, but it's said they were everywhere too. Go north from the centre - like many run up in a hurry, a pretty dispiriting place - and all is military. Walk on from the Naafi roundabout - a name which persists even though the Naafi has now made way for a Burger King - and climb Gun Hill towards the military hospital. The roads on the new estates of semi-detacheds might look at first sight like anywhere else, except that there's a lurid notice warning of "service dogs on patrol" and the streets are named after notable battles: Cassino Close, Arnhem Close, Salerno Close. All over the area, places which used to ring to the disciplined tramp of boots have been superseded by clusters of what used to be called married quarters where the only disturbance is the chime of bells when Buster's Soft Ices calls. And yet in some ways the sense of a military occupation is grimmer now than it was when, like thousands of conscripted others, I made my reluctant way to Aldershot to begin two years of national service. A lot of the prison-like military buildings have gone, but some of the concrete creations which replaced them in the early 60s now seem hardly less oppressive. And whole streets where Mr and Mrs Johnny Civilian could roam as they chose are now sealed from the public by high mesh fences topped with barbed wire. Three weeks after Bloody Sunday in Derry, the IRA took its revenge. It blew up the officers' mess of the paratroop regiment, killing seven people: a padre, five women from the catering staff and a gardener. Elsewhere, on tracts of land the army has no present use for, the heath is returning, enhancing the sense that the occupation might be ending. Once a final break with Aldershot would have seemed impossible; like the railway leaving Swindon; or BNFL quitting Sellafield. Yet the one has been done and the other is on the cards. Could it really happen to Aldershot, "the only complete military town", as it used to be proudly claimed, "to be built in the kingdom since the Romans"? The Aldershot Mail, briefed by the MoD, says we should not believe a word of it. And certainly Geoffrey Hoon, our new defence secretary, must view any threat of departure with some trepidation. It is not just the bristling ranks of senior serving officers with Aldershot in their blood: it's the ghosts of Aldershot past which might most of all deter him. All those military heroes whose names leap at you off the street map: Kitchener. Alanbrooke. Redvers Buller. The great Duke of Wellington, whose equestrian statue was removed in the 1880s from its spot on the top of the triumphal arch at Hyde Park Corner to be redeployed at the heart of the military empire. The prince consort, who solemnly promised the War Office: "Put permanent buildings on the land and the country will never be allowed to sell it." And the Queen Empress herself, who got such a taste for travelling down to review her troops that she built a royal pavilion to do it from. How could any neophyte cabinet minister possibly muster the courage to pit himself against a contingent like that? |
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(c) 2000 |