HC Deb 07 April 1955 vol 539 cc1415-24

4.5 p.m.

Sir Frank Medlicott (Norfolk, Central)

The matter which I wish to raise is very different in character from those which have been previously discussed today. It concerns an event which took place at an Army barracks on 24th October last. It is, unfortunately, necessary for me to give the House some very painful details, but I will be brief in that respect and will not dwell upon them.

I quote from statements which were made by counsel for the Director of Public Prosecutions at the trial of this matter. He said that on the morning of 24th October, four boys of the Infantry Boys' Battalion, Plumer Barracks, Plymouth, accused one of their fellow-soldiers, Private Peter Foden, of carrying tales and squealing to the commanding officer. He was thereupon assaulted by these four boys.

Later that same Sunday, these four boys were joined by seven others and the eleven boys entered the barrack room where Private Foden was and began to beat him up. These are the words of prosecuting counsel: He was kicked, he was hit he was thrown on the floor and jumped on. Then he was carried outside the barrack-room and thrown down a grass bank, coming to rest against a wall at the bottom. He was then picked up, taken along to the ablutions and held under a shower. He was taken back to the barrack-room, put upon his bed and beaten up again. He was then punched and kicked and had his head banged against the wall. The assault went on for between half an hour and three-quarters. Finally, a corporal instructor came on the scene and found Foden lying on his bed semi-conscious. Both his eyes were closed and badly swollen, the left side of his face was completely bruised and his lips bloated. His teeth appeared to have been knocked back into his throat and he had extreme difficulty in talking. Foden was then taken to hospital, where he died three days later.

An inquest found that he died as the result of taking a cleaning fluid containing some kind of chemical poison, but I suggest that this, far from being an extenuating circumstance, goes to show that this boy of 16, who, incidentally, was an orphan, was not only in great physical pain but must have been in extreme mental anguish as well to have taken such a course.

Ten of the boys were convicted at the Hampshire Assizes and are now serving terms of imprisonment. Mr. Justice Byrne ordered that the case should be reported to the Secretary of State for War to ensure that such an appalling episode should never occur again. He went on to say: This is a boys' battalion and parents who allow their sons to enlist in this battalion have a right to expect that the military authorities will look after them properly. This case indicates quite plainly to my mind that the military authorities have failed in their duty. How such a state of affairs can go on in a camp, where officers, warrant officers and non-commissioned officers are supposed to be doing their duty. seems to me to be incredible. Following upon these criticisms and the death of Private Foden, the Secretary of State for War, with commendable promptitude, appointed a court of inquiry to inquire into the facts of the case and also set up a committee of inquiry into the whole organisation and administration of boys' units generally. In the short time available to me I want to confine part of my remarks to the Foden case and the other part to the question of these boys' units generally.

At the hearing it was stated by the prosecution that there had been trouble in this unit between the commanding officer and a certain sergeant-major. The commanding officer is stated to have said, "I have got my little spies." It was further alleged that as a result of this statement by the commanding officer the sergeant-major incited these boys to commit this savage attack, and it was further said that one of the corporals encouraged this offence to take place.

Therefore, we have a situation in which, at a court of assize, a commanding officer was accused of having said that he had spies in the unit to bring him tales about commissioned officers, and two non-commissioned officers were accused of having incited this offence, for which ten boys, aged 17 to 15, are now in prison.

One of the reasons I have raised the matter today is that not only do I feel that the War Office should make some statement on the matter, but I believe it may be glad of the opportunity of so doing and of dealing with these very serious charges made against an officer and non-commissioned officers in this unit. I appreciate that the War Office was in a difficulty, because the proceedings of a court of inquiry are confidential. But it seems to me to disclose a rather unsatisfactory position when evidence given at an assize court which casts serious reflections upon officers and non-commissioned officers was published, while the evidence given at a court of inquiry, which, presumably, has to some extent cleared them of these charges, is confidential and can neither be published nor weighed.

While realising the difficulty the Minister is in through not being able to give us the evidence on which the War Office has acted or has failed to act, nevertheless, I should like to ask him to give us an assurance that this commanding officer and these non-commissioned officers are no longer with units of this character or units where special knowledge is required of how to deal with young soldiers or cadets. We ought to have that assurance, so that there is no risk of their not knowing, either as a result of negligence or through lack of understanding, the special needs of units of this nature.

It is also necessary to ask what inquiries were made by the War Office into the quite extraordinary condition which must have existed in this unit where, during a large part of a Sunday, ten boys were able to indulge in this terrible exhibition of sadism without a single boy or a group of boys coming forward in the way one would expect ordinary British boys to do and say, "This has gone on long enough." Nothing was done until this boy was practically on the point of death. It indicates there must have been in existence a serious amount of tyranny or bullying if boys were afraid to come forward to stop what was going on.

I want to pass quickly to my second point, relating to the Report of the Committee on the Organisation and Administration of Boys' Units in the Army, which was published and laid before Parliament only last week. I will not attempt to discuss it in detail now, but I can only hope there will be an opportunity of dealing with it in a longer debate because it contains some most valuable and helpful information. I want to ask the Minister what action is being taken immediately to implement the more urgent recommendations of the Committee. The Secretary of State for War has been good enough to say that he accepts these recommendations in principle, and I would like to know how quickly the more urgent ones will be implemented.

I refer, in particular, to the recommendation that there should be greater contact between the officers and N.C.Os. and the boys in the units. That is obviously a good recommendation and I want to make sure that it has been accepted. The Report states: The most serious weakness which runs through the whole system of appointments is discontinuity and shortness of term. In other words, there is too rapid a changeover of the officers. Indeed, the Report continues: In one or two units the rate of turn-over of staffing … was little short of disastrous. It goes on to criticise the accommodation and the amenities of these units.

Perhaps the most important of all the recommendations relating to this case of Private Foden is the recommendation that in future a confidential report should be made to the commanding officer of each unit about the previous history of every boy coming into it. Especially should that be done where a boy has been to an approved school, or has been placed on probation, or has been committed to the care of a local authority.

Here, I have some sympathy with the position of the War Office and of the commanding officer, because I believe that had this commanding officer been told of the previous record of some of the boys concerned in this case he would have been put on his guard, and would have taken steps which might have prevented the tragedy occurring. I do not think that this matter rests entirely with the War Office, but I hope that as a result of this case it may be possible to ensure that the War Office is not presented unknowingly with problem boys who may give rise to disastrous incidents of this kind.

I have already spoken for longer than I had intended, but I should like to make two other brief points. The first is that this experiment of boys' units is an interesting but difficult one. Its object is to produce not ordinary soldiers for the rank and file but long-term Regular warrant officers and senior N.C.Os. It is clear, therefore, that the standard of training and discipline and administration required in these units should not be, as it is here apparently, lower than that of an ordinary unit, but that it should be the highest the Army can devise.

I want to underline that by reading a sentence in the Committee's Report which relates to the problem of staffing these units: It would be untrue to say that failure in this respect has been limited to one case of brutal bullying. … In other words, there is the clear inference that the Foden case is not the only one and that there have been other cases where bullying has taken place.

My final point is that there has been a falling off in the attitude of the War Office towards the problem of Army welfare. I had the privilege of some experience in that matter during the war and I came across the great divergence of opinion which exists in military circles. The older type of Regular officer is inclined to think that there need be no welfare system apart from that which exists inside the regiment, but I suggest that this is no longer applicable to the Army of today.

In the old days, when the British Army consisted largely of regiments, each regiment was able to build up its own tradition of welfare, but today a large proportion of the Army consists of hundreds of thousands of men who are not serving in regiments as we understand them. There are lines of communication troops; there are reinforcement groups, transportation units, training battalions, boys' training battalions; indeed, a whole host of units dealing with essential tasks, but far removed from regimental traditions as the Army in the best sense understands them.

That fact was realised by some most distinguished officers, of whom I would mention General Sir Bernard Paget and Field Marshal Montgomery, and who were largely responsible for the system of Army welfare which was set up during the late war. In my view, it has been a mistake for the War Office so to have reduced the provision of what I might call technical Army welfare and I would draw attention to paragraph 65 of the Report, which says that certain amenities are essential in relation to Army units of this kind. It refers to the provision of canteens, games rooms, reading rooms, workshop and hobby rooms, educational classrooms and suitable playing fields and other amenities.

I thought that about ten years ago, as a result of our experience during the war, that was all accepted by the War Office as a basic minimum for all units, and it is with some sense of shock and disappointment that one finds that in this type of boys' unit—where, above all, these things should have been provided—the Report says that most of these facilities were not available.

It may well be that, as a result of this case and of the Report, good will come out of evil, and that there will be a great increase in the attention paid to this kind of amenity. I know that some of the older officers think we were inclined, during the war, to make the Army too luxurious, but I do not think that that view was accepted by the greatest of all our Generals, who found that the provision of intelligent education services, proper amenities, decent accommodation and ample recreation was not incompatible with building up tough fighting soldiers, as was evidenced by the results achieved, especially in the final and decisive campaign in North-West Europe.

I have asked the Minister to give us an assurance that the more obvious and the more urgent of the Committee's recommendations will be implemented speedily. If that can be done, not only will it help to remove the rather unhappy reflections which have been passed upon military administration by this case, but thousands of boy soldiers and their parents will be deeply grateful, and, furthermore, I am sure that, as the result of raising the standards of these boys' battalions, the Army itself will be greatly advantaged.

4.23 p.m.

The Under-Secretary of State for War (Mr. Fitzroy Maclean)

We should be grateful to my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Norfolk, Central (Sir F. Medlicott) for raising this matter, and I personally want to express my gratitude to him for having let me know in advance the specific points he intended to raise. We should also be grateful to him for the valuable and constructive comments he has made.

As he has said, this tragic occurrence showed quite clearly that there was something very wrong in the boys' battalion in question—and beyond that, too. My right hon. Friend has made no attempt to shirk that issue. As soon as the trial of the boys who were tried in the civil court was over, a court of inquiry was convened and, as a result, a number of measures were taken immediately. That court of inquiry, and the very careful investigations which accompanied and followed it, showed first and foremost that what was at fault was not so much the individuals as the system.

The court of inquiry and the connected investigations produced no evidence of neglect of duty by the officers or N.C.Os. of the unit, nor did they produce anything that could be regarded as a case for disciplinary action. As my right hon. Friend has pointed out, the proceedings of courts of inquiry are privileged documents, and it will not be possible for us therefore to publish proceedings of the court in question. I personally regret that in this case, because I have no doubt that if the proceedings could be published, they would show hon. Members as clearly as they have shown my right hon. Friend and myself, who have read them carefully, that there was no case for disciplinary action against any of the officers or N.C.Os. concerned.

As I have said, immediate measures were taken to put things right after the court of inquiry into the boys' battalion concerned. First, the battalion was reorganised under a new commanding officer, increased supervision was instituted and the supervisory staff, which had until then been short, was also increased in scale, increased recreational activities were organised and increased recreational facilities provided. Some undesirable boys in the unit were discharged, and in future greater care will be taken in checking the references of boys admitted to the battalion. That meets one of the points which my hon. Friend the Member for Norfolk, Central mentioned.

In addition to the court of inquiry, my right hon. Friend instituted a general inquiry into the whole subject of boys' units. For that purpose he set up a committee which consisted of two distinguished educationalists, Mr. Hallward and Mr. Bruce Lockhart, and one distinguished soldier, Lieutenant-General Sir Euan Miller. They have produced an able and very frank report which, as hon. Members will be aware, has since been published as a White Paper, and my right hon. Friend, as he indicated in the foreword to that Paper, has accepted in principle the recommendations which the report contains. Hon. Members will be familiar with those recommendations and therefore I will not now recapitulate them. I will say only that, broadly, the main recommendation is that in future a boys' battalion should be less of a unit and more of a school and that its organisation, amenities, buildings and so on should be on the lines of a school and less on the lines of a military unit than hitherto.

To take only one example, one of the bad points of the old system was that when boys had finished their day's work at about 5.30, in the same way as trained soldiers, they were free to do anything they liked. It is clearly desirable that their whole day should be filled up in the way a boy's time is filled up at a school.

Another very important recommendation was that there should be changes in the selection and also in the terms of service of the staff of these units—that we should aim at getting the highest possible quality of officer and N.C.O. and also that, as far as possible, there should be continuity. Hon. Members will realise that those are two requirements which it is not always easy to combine. It is not always possible, for instance, to pin down a young officer of outstanding ability in one unit for a period of years.

To implement these recommendations a new branch of the Military Training Directorate is being set up under a senior officer who will devote his whole time to implementing the recommendations and, after that, to watching the problems of boys' units. To help him in that task there will be a standing committee of experts. That is the general picture. Those are the steps which have been taken so far to put things right.

Perhaps I might now deal briefly with some of the specific points made by my hon. and gallant Friend. He mentioned that it was unfortunate that the proceedings of the court of inquiry cannot be made public. In this case it would, in a way, make my task very much easier today if we could publish them. I think that they would satisfy hon. Members that no injustice has been done. The whole purpose of a court of inquiry is that there should be a private investigation at which those giving evidence can speak freely without fear of the consequences. For that reason these proceedings are privileged documents which cannot be published and cannot be used at a court-martial. Its name—a court of inquiry—is perhaps rather misleading, because it does not, technically speaking, constitute a judicial process. The change of the name to "board of inquiry" which is contemplated may help to clear up that misapprehension.

There was no evidence of neglect of duty and no case for disciplinary action against any individual members of the staff of the boys' battalion in question. There is now a new commanding officer, and the company sergeant major mentioned by my hon. Friend has been posted from the battalion. My hon. and gallant Friend mentioned organised bullying. The proceedings have not brought to light any evidence of organised, large-scale intimidation in this unit. The incident in question occurred on one day in one single platoon. My hon. and gallant Friend asked how it was possible for that to happen without anybody knowing about it. It happened on a Sunday, the only Sunday in the month when there was not a church parade.

During the day, both the company commander and the company sergeant major went into the hut. On both occasions nothing untoward was occurring and there were no sign that anything was wrong. It is a rule in boys' units that no grown up non-commissioned officer lives in the same hut as the boys. In future, as I have already said, there will be increased supervision in off-duty hours. An orderly officer and an N.C.O. will keep an eye on things during off-duty hours.

I have already indicated what steps are being taken to implement the recommendations of the Committee. A new branch is being set up together with a standing committee; we have already increased supervision and there is a new system of selection. It is proposed to transfer the boys' battalion from Plymouth to Weedon, where new barracks are already being built to accommodate it.

My hon. Friend suggested that there was a lack of welfare facilities in the unit at the time. That point needs clearing up. In fact, there were, perhaps not adequate welfare facilities, but they were considerable. They included a boys' club, a unit library, two gymnasia, two football clubs, and two hockey grounds and the usual Army Education Corps facilities for evening study, woodwork and other handicrafts. Since then, steps have been taken to improve these facilities, and there is no doubt that under the new system a much higher standard will prevail.

This tragic occurrence has served to bring to light a state of affairs far from satisfactory. My right hon. Friend took prompt steps to have the problem investigated thoroughly. As a result we are confident that good will come of evil; that we shall have a higher standard and that a proper degree of importance will be accorded to these extremely vital units.