SEVERAL towns in Central Scotland were festooned with Union flags last weekend. Let us play innocent: If it was an expression of euphoria at Rangers Football Club’s league table victory could not the emblem/flag of the club have been displayed? Or could, if national flags are to be used, some of them be the Scottish Saltire? Well we know better than that.

I was a soldier in the last days of the British Empire and my little heart swelled with pride as dawn broke while I stood alone on the deck of the big blue and white troopship HMT Dilwara lying in company with quiet elegant grey warships off a floodlit Rock of Gibraltar – the fabled pillars of Hercules. At various high points on the lighted grey rock and the town below, and streaming from the stern and mainmast of the cruisers and destroyers around us, were the emblems of empire – the Red Ensign, White Ensign and above all the Union Jack.

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A Scottish Regiment – 600 men of the Royal Highland Fusiliers – were the main passengers on their way to fight in the jungles of Malaya. I was a Royal Engineer sapper/surveyor and would disembark at Aden, where I was to spend two years surveying the Arabian Peninsula (not all of it).

The Royal Highland Fusiliers were a recent amalgam of The Royal Scots Fusiliers recruiting mainly in Ayrshire, and the Highland Light Infantry recruiting in Glasgow. The private soldiers were mainly 18-year-old National Servicemen. Many of them must have been Rangers fans. Many of them must have been Celtic fans, I do not know because there was never a hint of discord or difference. A godless lot perhaps.

Before leaving Southampton we were sent to our bunks in the troop decks. Multiple-tiered with nine or 12 inches of headroom. We were addressed over the ship’s system by Princess Margaret, the Colonel-in-Chief of the regiment (same as Ruth Davidson), who cheerily remarked that not all of us would be returning home.

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On that trip and frequently during my army service, I experienced many memorable encounters with the Union flag. Later on that trip in the Red Sea we passed a sister ship – Her Majesty’s Troopship Captain Cook. She was going home steaming north. We had left home and were steaming south. The ships had altered course so that we were only a mile apart. It was evening and the sun was setting in the west over the mountains of the Sinai Peninsula. The low, red sun painted the white Captain Cook pink against the deep blue of the sea and pastel greens and yellows of the sky. The two ships blasted out their horns for half an hour and the strongly coloured red, white and blue of the ensigns and flags added the ultimate touch of magic to emotional pride and patriotism.

A final highlight a few years later was in Borneo where the British Army manned remote fortresses on the remote Sarawak/Indonesia border. Geology and geography had bequeathed to the landscape little beehive-shaped hills which our soldiers honeycombed and reinforced and fortified with the felled trees and sandbagged excavated soil. Then flat on top was the log helipad to allow the Wessex and Whirlwind helicopters of the Royal Air Force and Fleet Air Arm and the Scouts of the Army Air Corps to resupply.

I was to carry out surveying observations in the area. As we flew towards the little brown mound in the green hilly vastness, a transport aircraft dropped the fuel we would need in drums, each suspended from several multicoloured parachutes. These sedately drifted down to land around the little brown mound with the Union flag fluttering at the top. It was actually very sad – but uplifting.

The British Empire was perhaps no worse then any old empire, but that is not the reason that regrettably I no longer have the same feelings for the flag of the United Kingdom that I have described in this letter. I found these high street flags last week to be sinister and oppressive and dishonest.

Victor Moncrieff
Lanark