1984 – 1987
Suzuki GS400
…I was posted out to Roberts Barracks, Osnabrück, West Germany!
We were all asked to fill out a couple of forms to indicate where we would like to be posted to after passing out from training regiment. I can’t remember which postings I asked for but I do remember they were all UK postings.
As a general rule of thumb we discovered later was that those that selected UK postings went to Germany and those that selected Germany went to UK postings.
Typical British Army.
For my first few journeys to the “Traz” I ended up catching the “Boat Train”.
That was a journey and a half. Intercity 125 from Bridgend to London, underground to Liverpool Street Station then a crappy old train to Harwich Ferry terminal, transfer onto the cross channel ferry from Harwich to the Hook of Holland and then a final train journey in one of those trains that have separate compartments with 6 seats in each from the Hook to Osnabruck. The taxi to the barracks was a Mercedes, I think that was, and still is, the only time I have ever traveled in a Mercedes.
I think the journey took at least a full day but again I can’t quite remember the details because alcohol was sold on most of these segments.
The Border Police/Customs Officers would board the train on the Dutch side of the Dutch/Germany border wearing very 1960’s looking uniforms, they’d check our passports and bags and then get off the train at the first station on the German side of the border, the opposite happened on the return trip.
Eventually I got fed up with this trip and upgraded my bike, my father and I went to Two Wheel Services in Bridgend where he advised me on which bike to get next, boy did I wish I hadn’t listened.
I ended up with a brand new red Suzuki GS400 and had a couple of hundred quid off because it had a dent in the fuel tank.
Ultimately I guess it was a step up the ladder though with 2 cylinders and about 44 bhp, I probably traveled the 600 mile journey, 250 miles to Dover and 350 miles to Roberts Barracks, at least 15 times during my stay in Osnabruck, coming home for long weekends and annual leave. Long weekends consisted of leaving on a Thursday after work racing down to Calais, Dunkirk or Zeebrugge and catch the ferry across to Dover, ride home and get drunk for 3 days before riding back to Dover, catch the ferry across the channel then zoom back up the E4 motorway to Osnabruck usually arriving just as everyone is getting up ready for a parade or a run on Monday morning.
I travelled on The Herald of Free Enterprise a few times, thankfully in its more popular upright stance.
I would negotiate my way round London’s south circular staring in wonderment at all the different nationalities and races as I passed through the southern boroughs. I think I can confidently say that that was when I saw my first ever real life black man, and then down the A2 to Dover, again that was pre M2 motorway. Later on parts of the M25 and M2 would be built so I would use those instead, a bit quicker but I would have to carry a gallon of petrol with me as there were no services built on that route yet and I couldn’t quite get to Membury Services on a single tank, so the choice was either turn right towards London and call in Heston Services to fill up with both petrol and one of the stunning curries they used to serve up back then or I could use my spare gallon and motor on to Membury.
Coming home one particularly cold winter another bike, a GSX1100, kept zooming past me and then I’d see him in the next services trying to get warm again, I was pulling into Leigh Delamare and there he was laying on the floor with his bike on top of him. Apparently he’d stopped but couldn’t straighten his frozen legs quick enough to keep the bike upright.
I used to give off an involuntary whoop of excitement when the radio mast came into sight, finally I can get off the bike and stretch my legs.
This bike had a really annoying electrical issue. I would be riding along and suddenly it would lose power, I’d splutter along for a while and the fault would go away. I did try taking it to die Autowerkstatt Suzuki in Osnabruck but can you imagine trying to explain to a German speaking mechanic in English what the intermittent fault was. I had no hope. So I would take the risk again on the next long weekend and splutter down the E4 motorway to Calais or Dunkirk for another drunken long weekend.
I had some good times in Germany but I also had a “days to do” chart counting down from about 300 days to discharge. Made some good friends too. When I arrived the barrack block was pretty much empty, the squadron was away on a posting somewhere or other, all that were left was a rear guard made up of those that were either ill or alcoholics.
So us new arrivals, Danny “Bear” Dawkins-Smith and myself got dragged up the NAFFI and forced to drink Rusty Nails(rum and coke I think) until severe drunkenness took over…
Sadly Danny passed away in 2022, not long after our 40th anniversary meet at Chepstow.
It was in the Traz that I met the man who was to become my new best mate, Vince, we ended up as room mates eventually, biking buddies and just great friends, he was my best man at my wedding some years later. Other room mates were Johnny Priestman from Hull and Tommy from Kendal (his mother sent me a Kendal Mint cake because she thought I looked undernourished). Turns out Vince liked a drink or two so inevitably we would end up in a bar somewhere drinking Blackcurrent Corn or German Lager and then stagger back to the barracks in the early hours.
The photo below is of me throwing up through Vince’s’ window, the Post Office Corp sorting office was directly below and my sick would end up trickling down their windows. Of course because Vince’s’ bed was next to the window above theirs he would get the blame, being a good mate I would of course let him take the blame…
Life in the army is mainly repetition and boredom. A typical cycle of boredom would involve getting called out randomly at stupid o’clock in the morning on an exercise called Active Edge, we would load all the APC’s and trucks up from our stores, got out and live in a field for a while, come back to camp, unload the vehicles into the stores and go to bed. Next day we would empty the stores to clean all the kit, put it all back in the stores. Next day or so empty the stores again to clean and paint the shelves and floor before putting it all back in again, then someone with a good imagination would get us to empty the stores again to take an inventory and put it all back. Then a month later we would get woken up at stupid o’clock in the morning and load the vehicles for another round of Active Edge…
We took part in Exercise Lionheart, the largest military exercise since WW2. I think this lasted three weeks, maybe four. We dug trenches, built bridges, moved the previously built bridges a couple of feet because some officer would decide it’s in the wrong place(yes, that did actually happen once), laid minefields, fence them off, played at being the enemy, slept when we could, got woken up just before dawn just in case we got attacked, ate food from ration packs, cleaned our rifles. Oh and dug trenches, everywhere.
Johnny and me were tasked with guarding what we were told was a nuclear demolition charge on a bridge for a number of days, we camped out under the bridge and quickly ran out of food, the only thing left in my ration pack was the apple pie that we had been told not to eat because there were cases of food poisoning being blamed on it, I was starving, I ate mine, it cleared out my constipation though.
About 2 weeks or so into the exercise we were introduced to some mobile showers, my understanding was that these were compulsory for NCO’s but not for us, so I didn’t have a shower.
After Lionheart came Northern Ireland, a four and a half month posting to Omagh, this was a great time, lots of training in advance to prepare us, at last something with a bit of purpose.
I was to be a member of a four man search team. Our job was to search areas and buildings for arms, explosives, tripwires etc,. One of the worse jobs was to search the site where a culvert bomb or something had been planted and gone off, killing or maiming the occupants of a car, to check for secondary devices that would also have been planted with the sole intention of killing or maiming the police or medics attending the scene.
I suffered a horrific injury while out there, one that I was going to have to live with for many years after.
Our little section had been in the NAAFI most of the day and thought it would be a good idea to take a trip down to the “safe” pub in Omagh. Our transport for the day was going to be an abandoned shopping trolley. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I lost control, span out at the bottom of the hill and damaged my big toe nail. It was black for years. I should have claimed compensation(probably could now).
Not too long after coming back to Germany I found myself working as a barman in the officers mess, I can’t remember how that came about but it wasn’t such a bad job, it got me out of doing ‘normal’ army stuff for a while.
And so came the end of my army career, I loaded most of my worldly possessions onto my bike and headed home again. It’s amazing how much a couple of bungees and some string can hold.
The bike survived the journey home and I think I kept it for a year or so after discharge. I don’t remember when I changed it but obviously I did for my Suzuki GS550L, another Two Wheel Services purchase.
The job market was a tough place back in the mid 80s and I was struggling to find something for my skillset. There aren’t that many jobs for someone who can run great distances carrying heavy things, build temporary bridges, lay minefields but can also shoot a 5 round grouping of 3 inches with an SLR rifle from 300yards after drinking 6 or 7 pints of Germanys finest lager the night before, so I got a job at the local BP petrol station for 2 months until a more suitable job came along, I was paid £15 a shift, three shifts a week, plus I could fill up my tank whenever I needed to. I couldn’t earn more than that because they would have stopped my benefits if I had.
That was the one and only time I have ever collected benefits of any kind.
I managed to secure a job as an electrician with CBSL, a computer reseller\bureau company based in Cardiff. I was second choice and got turned down at first, turns out the first guy couldn’t run great distances carrying a heavy load, build bridges, lay minefields or shoot a 5 round grouping of 3 inches with an SLR rifle from 300 yards after drinking 6 or 7 pints of Germany’s finest lager the night before. Who’d have thought. So they got rid of him and employed me instead.
I loved this job, travelled all over Britain with my old boss Brian Phipps, turns out Brian liked a drink or 2, good job Vince taught me well, so we spent a lot of time in hotels trying to empty the bar of it’s stock of alcohol. He also liked a snack or two. He tended to book nice little hotels where the drinks could be added to the food bill or we would have rooms which weren’t on-suite but get charged for on-suite so we could use the difference in cost in the bar.
It turned out that the main role was installing computer cable, 15 core serial cables to start with, they used to get it specially made with the company name and phone number printed along its length(0222 837410), we were early pioneers back then. I must have soldered literally millions of joints in those first few years. The progressed to 8 core cable(still soldered) then co-axial cable and then twisted pair cables.
Various company buyouts and mergers occurred over the years.
I moved to Radius Computer Maintenance when the cabling jobs dried up where my new manager became Rick Palmer and became a bit of a do anything kind. I would be fixing printers, changing disks and computer components etc. as well as still doing cabling jobs and maintenance of the Radius offices. After Rick I had another manager for a short while, he got sacked for exposing himself to the receptionist in the Darlaston office lol.
In about 2001 I got transferred back to CBSL, now called Practice Net at the request of the new owners after a management buyout. Dale, Bob and Jean became company bosses.
After this staff numbers started to declined from the heydays of about 100 to just the 3 of us, Dale, Bob and Jean had decided to retire and handed the company over to Phil and Paul, I had already left for CGI at that point, more of that much later.
I spent a total of 27 years at CBSL/Radius/Practice Net in the end and still do the odd install for them 8 years after leaving.
I guess I should write a bit about the bike
I can remember “racing” it down the Gower, two up, with John Whiting on the back. Both of us knee down around the bends but not much else really.