HC Deb 24 July 1958 vol 592 cc812-22

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Colonel J. H. Harrison.]

9.58 p.m.

Mr. James Simmons (Brierley Hill)

I want to raise the question of the case of Sergeant Gribbin, a Regular soldier with eighteen years' service, a married man with four children. Last December he wrote me concerning irregularities that were taking place in the stores of the British Military Hospital at Tripoli. The information passed on to me was, in my opinion, rather startling, and I forwarded it to the War Office.

The Under-Secretary of State for War wrote to me on 18th February that the commanding officer of the hospital was satisfied with the condition of the store and considered that Sergeant Gribbin was capable of taking charge. He concluded his letter by saying: There appear to be no good grounds for my intervening in the matter. On receipt of further information, I again got into touch with the War Office and the Under-Secretary of State replied on 9th May. He said that further investigation of the previous report, upon which he had based his earlier letter to me, had proved that the report was incorrect in some respects. The situation had been investigated by the Director of Medical Services and the brigadier in charge of administration in the Middle East, who found that the position had been unsatisfactory.

The Under-Secretary went on to say that the buried stores—

It being Ten o'clock, the Motion for the Adjournment of the House lapsed, without Question put.

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Sir G. Wills.]

Mr. Simmons

He went on to say that the buried stores were time expired. I have heard of soldiers being time expired, but this is the first time that I have heard of stores being time expired. He said that they were condemned and the operating tables were unserviceable.

The letter went on to say that the sergeant's allegations had been proved to be substantially correct—I take it proved by this investigation. Did the sergeant get any medals? Oh, no. His C.O. had expressed satisfaction with the state of the stores, but the sergeant had proved himself right in asserting that they were not satisfactory. One cannot expect the sergeant to get medals when he proves his C.O. to be in the wrong.

To quote the Under-Secretary of State: The whole affair seems to have left a rather strained atmosphere at this unit … decided in fairness to all that Sergeant Gnibbin should be found employment elsewhere … probably in his best interests. On receipt of that letter, I was very angry and amazed. Why had Sergeant Gribbin been moved in fairness to all? He was the man who had done the spade work and who had exposed the scandal.

I at once wrote to the Under-Secretary, anxious to protect Sergeant Gribbin, to inquire whether the move meant any demotion for him, because Sergeant Gribbin himself was worried. He wrote to me on 17th January saying: I am a married man with four children and have been afraid that when matters came to a head I would be used as a scapegoat. Matters did come to a head. The sergeant had been proved to be right and the C.O. proved to be wrong, but the sergeant was to be moved.

In his letter of 4th June, the Under-Secretary said: I have been carefully into this case … can assure you this N.C.O. has suffered no demotion by his move. At the very time that letter was written, Sergeant Gribben had been disrated from a trade rating which he had held for eleven years. A soldier disrated from his trade has no defence or appeal, and so I made the appeal.

In reply, I had an amazing later of 1st July. This next episode should be entitled "Amery's amazing antics." This letter admitted that Sergeant Gribbin had been disrated because on 28th February, on leaving the sergeants mess at 2 p.m. he was in no condition to give full support to members of the survey board. It did not say that members of the survey board had to support him, but that he was in no condition to give support to members of the survey board. It was admitted in the letter: technically, disrating is not the way to deal with this sort of thing. We have accordingly made arrangements for the rating to be restored. Round 2 to Sergeant Gribbin.

However, in the same letter—and this is the scandalous part—the Under-Secretary said: I have learned that before that he went before a court-martial on 1st May on a charge of using insubordinate language to a superior officer … found guilty and reduced to rank of sergeant. There followed this amazing passage: He has not suffered loss of rank or pay or similar victimisation for what he did in Tripoli. What a coincidence it is that after he has proved his C.O. wrong and after the War Office has had to admit that his allegations were substantially correct, there is first an attempt to disrate him and he is then "put on a peg" and court-martialled. In that letter the Under-Secretary expressed the hope— that Sergeant Gribbin will repay my interest in his case by avoiding trouble and the consequential court-martial. He is now threatened with a further court-martial if he does not keep his mouth shut. How easy it is to provoke trouble and to make sure of getting him before another court-martial.

What was the first court-martial about? On 27th March, an order was published in the British Military Hospital, Tripoli: No issue of medical equipment is to be made in any circumstances after 1300 hours. Sergeant Gribbin naturally took that to be a natural consequence of the cleaning up of the mess which he had discovered, a tightening up of the hospital stores. At 11.30 p.m., an officer demanded the issue of a thermometer. The sergeant refused. He was under orders to refuse, and yet he was charged with insubordination.

I suggest that a deliberate trap was set and that this order was issued so that the sergeant was compelled either to disobey the order and be charged with disobeying an order or to disobey the order of the officer and thus to be wrong on that count. And remember, all this was going on in what the Minister himself has called "a strained atmosphere" in the unit.

Now Sergeant Gribbin is being posted to the Army Medical Depot at Ludgershall, but there is no guarantee that he will get a square deal even there. Why? Because confidential reports have already been sent on ahead to his new unit by his commanding officer, Lieut.-Colonel MacKenzie, who has had only two five-minute interviews with the sergeant, but who has been given the tip by the Director of Medical Services, who called Sergeant Gribbin "the most disloyal N.C.O. I have ever met," and sent in a stinker of a report.

This report was submitted on 9th July. It has gone ahead of Sergeant Gribbin, so that he can be given the full treatment when he gets there after the treatment he has had in Tripoli. I have proved the War Office wrong again and again in this case, but each time it has retreated and has ganged up to attack Sergeant Gribbin from another angle. I now ask for a civilian inquiry into the scandal of the stores at the British Medical Hospital at Tripoli.

Sergeant Gribbin refused to take over these stores in December and officially requested a board of officers to examine the books, stores, etc. I have in my possession his letter dated 13th December to his officer commanding. This request was ignored. On 13th February, two months later, daily Part I Orders listed a stocktaking board composed of officers all drawn from the British Medical Hospital, Tripoli. They were not impartial people; they were all drawn from the same hospital. Sergeant Gribbin was posted to his unit two days after the board was set up, on 15th February.

He was ordered to bury the stores on 29th January, prior to inspection by the Director of Medical Services, which took place on 7th February. It is untrue to say that the stores he buried were condemned. In the Army, before stores can be condemned a board of officers must have examined them to see whether they are serviceable. This is common Army practice.

These stores could not have been condemned because they were buried on 29th January and the general inspection took place on 7th February and the board of officers were appointed on 13th February—a fortnight after the stores were buried. These stores included medicines, dressings and dangerous drugs. In addition, there were five operating tables, valued at £40 each. They were a solid mass of rust. The Minister says that they were unserviceable; they were unserviceable because they had been left out in the rain and allowed to rust. There was also a spare portable X-ray machine floating about. Nobody knew where it had come from or where it was going, so it was sold to the 4th Royal Marine Commando.

Sergeant Gribbin should be present at the inquiry that I am asking for, because he is an experienced man. He has had eleven years in his present rating of Dispenser, Grade A, Class I. He has been in far better hospitals than that at Tripoli. His last posting was at the Military Hospital, Catterick Camp—a much bigger and more important hospital than this tinpot affair at Tripoli where all the trouble is coming from. He is being posted home because he knows too much. I appeal to the Minister to let him come home after the mess has been cleared up, with his rank of staff sergeant restored.

I want protection for this man, who has made the Army his career and has risked that career because of an innate sense of duty. In about four years he will be entitled to a pension, after 22 years' service. It will be a fairly decent Army pension at the rank of sergeant or staff sergeant. He has a wife and four children. No man will throw such a pension away recklessly; a man has to be imbued with an enormously strong sense of duty to take action which might risk a pension like that. This man took that risk.

If the present attitude towards this sergeant persists and traps and deliberate persecutions are continued, those who are "gunning" for him could deprive him of his pension. I would like to know more about this "bloke"—this very senior officer, the Director of Medical Services. When he tells an N.C.O. that he is the most disloyal N.C.O. he has ever met, because he has exposed a mess, it reveals a monstrous bias on the part of that senior and high-ranking officer. The Army and its senior officers owe some loyalty to the senior N.C.O.s who serve under them, especially when they do a difficult job and do their duty.

I urge the Minister to take over this case personally. I ask him not to let the wool be pulled over his eyes by the "brass hats" and "red tabs". Let him go into the job himself and clear up this cesspool of victimisation. Let him restore this man to his previous rank, and bring him back home to England with honour so that his wife and children do not suffer as a result of his being posted home. Let him destroy the vindictive confidential report prepared by Lieut.-Colonel MacKenzie, and let this man finish the remaining years of his Army career free from further persecution.

This man was proud to serve in the Army. He did so for 18 years with pride. He should be allowed to soldier on until he is time-expired, so that he can come back to this country and live here with pride in the career which he has chosen and which the Army today is trying to make intolerable for him.

10.15 p.m.

The Under-Secretary of State for War (Mr. Julian Amery)

The hon. Member for Brierley Hill (Mr. Simmons) has pleaded the case of Sergeant Gribbin with eloquence, as he has supported it in these past months with zeal. As the result partly of his activities, a good deal of publicity has attended this case.

If the allegations that have been made were substantiated, two very grave charges would lie against the Army. There would be a grave reflection on the efficiency of the Royal Army Medical Corps. There would also be a grave reflection on the sense of justice of the Army. I am, therefore, grateful to the hon. Member for having raised this matter on the Adjournment and so giving me an opportunity to deal with these two aspects of the case more fully than I could at Question Time.

Let me deal, first, with the question of efficiency. The scene which we are considering is the British Military Hospital at Tripoli. There, on 23rd October last year, Staff Sergeant Gribbin, as he then was, was posted to the stores. In December of that year he complained to his commanding officer about the state of the book-keeping and the state of the stores themselves. As the hon. Member has said, he asked for a board of officers to be appointed to look into this matter.

The commanding officer refused this request. He did so on two grounds: first, that a board of officers had checked the stores in February when he himself had taken over command; and, secondly, that there had been a second check by the Command Secretariat in August. These seemed to the commanding officer reasonable grounds for refusing the request. At the same time, he was impressed by the staff sergeant's criticisms of the book-keeping difficulties and irregularities and he accordingly appointed another staff sergeant to help Gribbin with the clerical work.

Staff Sergeant Gribbin was not satisfied with this solution and when, in February, the Director of Medical Services, Middle East, visited Tripoli, he made strong representations to him. He also took advantage of the visit of the Director-General of Medical Services a little later to renew his representations. As a result of these representations, which impressed the two officers concerned, a board of officers, for which Staff Sergeant Gribbin had asked, was convened, and with it a special investigations branch component. Therefore, it was not only the officers of the hospital who formed the board for which Staff Sergeant Gribbin had himself asked.

I outlined in answers to Questions by the hon. Member the other day the conclusions of the board. Broadly speaking, they showed that there had been irregularities on the bookkeeping side. These, in fact, boiled down, after investigation, to a deficiency of £12 and a surplus of £250 worth of stores, that is to say, £12 worth of stores were missing and £250 worth of unrecorded stores were in stock. There was no evidence whatsoever of dishonest practice. But there was evidence of incompetence in bookkeeping.

Where the disposals of stores were concerned, the board was satisfied with what it discovered. The burial of time-expired stores—the hon. Member may be surprised at my using that phrase—arose because drugs, as the hon. Member may have noticed from the dates on bottles on chemists' shelves, lose their potency after a certain time. As to the operating tables, it has been difficult to reach a conclusion. The best evidence is that they were left out in the open after they had become unserviceable. Staff Sergeant Gribbin himself, in his representations to the Special Investigation Branch, said he did not know when they had first been put out in the open.

There clearly was bad bookkeeping, and this showed a certain inefficiency. On the other hand, the discrepancies were relatively small, only £12 down, and £250 to the good. The hon. Member will also remember that this was the time when the garrison in Libya was being run down. Certain medical stores from different parts of Libya had, therefore, been accumulating in the hospital in Tripoli. The local commander came to the conclusion that there was no need here for disciplinary action. There was no serious reflection on the efficiency of the Royal Army Medical Corps. But steps were, of course, taken to make sure that this particular sort of inefficiency should not recur at the hospital.

It is clear from the story I have told that Staff Sergeant Gribbin, as he then was, was right in making the representations he did to his commanding officer, the Director of Medical Services in the Middle East and the Director-General of Medical Services. He was doing his duty, and did a service to the Army, and we are grateful to him for that service. It is, moreover, an unpleasant duty to have to perform. It is never easy to have to criticise the actions of one's superiors in any organisation.

The question now arises, and here I come to the second charge, whether Gribbin has been victimised on account of the representations he made. It is extremely difficult to discuss cases of this kind, when one has only paper evidence to go on and does not know all the personalities oneself. But I have looked carefully at Gribbin's qualifications reports over the years. The picture I form of him is that of a man of considerable ability, a man of very strong convictions, a man who resents infringement of what he conceives to be his rights or privileges, and, therefore, a man not always popular with his superiors—a man who is, perhaps, not very self-controlled, not always very disciplined, who has, in the course of his military career, once or twice, and perhaps more than that, got into trouble before.

Let me then, against this background, deal with the particular occurrences which have given rise to the charge of victimisation. The first is disrating. What happened? On 28th February, Gribbin was helping the board of officers which was investigating the representations which he had made. Although, as the hon. Member knows, he had already been posted away from the hospital, he continued, in practice, to work at the hospital and to help the board in its duties. He was, it appears, too drunk after lunch on this day to be able to help the board of officers. He was accordingly summoned next day before his commanding officer and was summarily disrated.

The decision seemed to the commanding officer to be in order, and he had some grounds for thinking this. The year before, in February, 1957, Gribbin had been warned by the Assistant Director of Medical Services in Libya that if he was again found in a condition in which drink prevented him from fulfilling his duties he would be summarily disrated. The regulations say that a man can be disrated for, and I quote, "lack of diligence". It certainly could be represented that to be so incapacitated as to be unable to fulfil one's duty was lack of diligence.

Mr. Simmons

He was too diligent.

Mr. Amery

The commanding officer had a case for thinking that disrating was the appropriate punishment. But when we received representations about the case at the War Office we thought that disrating was not the proper punishment for this. It was a disciplinary offence, not a trade or technical one, and so should have been dealt with as a disciplinary offence. This might have meant a severe reprimand or a forfeiture of rank, but not disrating. We therefore quashed the decision. So far from there having been victimisation, Staff Sergeant Gribbin, got off scot free on what was quite a serious offence for an n.c.o. of his seniority.

I come now to the question of loss of rank. This occurred a month after the disrating, again in the hospital. At 11.30 on the evening of 27th March the orderly medical officer called for a special thermometer. He called for it for a patient who was dangerously ill. He sent one of his soldiers to Staff Sergeant Gribbin, who referred the medical officer to the written order to which the hon. Member has drawn attention. This said that the stores would not be opened after a certain hour, and that they certainly would be closed before 11.30 p.m.

The medical officer went personally to Sergeant Gribbin, who was supervising a social function at the time in the hospital. He made strong representations to Sergeant Gribbin, explaining that this was an urgent case of a man dangerously ill. Staff Sergeant Gribbin not only lied about the whereabouts of the keys to the stores—according to the court-martial—but used what was held to be insubordinate language.

I do not want to repeat it in the House, but I will do to the hon. Member afterwards. It certainly was not to Sergeant Gribbin's credit. He was accordingly punished by reduction in rank. There was no trap here at all. To obstruct an officer in a case in which a patient is dangerously ill is not the kind of attitude for an n.c.o. to take. To use rough language was to lay himself open, not unnaturally, to a court-martial charge. I am not prepared to say that in these circumstances the punishment was excessive.

I hope that what I have said shows two things. First, there is no serious reflection on the efficiency of the Royal Army Medical Corps. The bookkeeping irregularities to which I have drawn attention were the kind of thing which can happen very easily in any organisation. Secondly, there was no victimisation of Sergeant Gribbin. I do not think, therefore, that there is a case for a civilian inquiry.

Out of all this, however, I hope two things will come, a still higher standard in the Medical Corps and the assurance that Sergeant Gribbin will get a square deal in the time that lies ahead of him in a new job.

10.29 p.m.

Mr. James Griffiths (Llanelly)

I was present when this question was raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Brierley Hill (Mr. Simmons) and have listened to what he said and to the Minister's reply. In fairness to this man and to everybody concerned I do not think that this matter should be left in this way. I ask the Under-Secretary seriously to consider whether the interests of the Army, of everyone, would not be best served by holding the kind of inquiry for which my hon. Friend has asked. A case of this kind can have an effect on the Army, especially on recruiting.

The Minister will know that when he dealt with this case at Question Time there was deep concern among Members on both sides of the House about it. It smelt of victimisation. In those circumstances, I hope that the Under-Secretary will reconsider the matter and see whether an inquiry can be held.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at twenty-nine minutes past Ten o'clock.