A Walking Contradiction
The hereditary peer who opposes the hereditary system, the pacifist who has sought out wars and revolutions, he has written a book about his experiences as a wartime pilot.
A few days after celebrating his sixtieth birthday John Kilbracken left his home in Killegar, on the Leitrim/Cavan border, to fly to London for a couple of weeks. There he would meet with his publishers and agents to discuss the sales of his recently published book of war memoirs and plans for his next two books, one on the history of the Swordfish aeroplane and the other on bird watching. He was looking forward to meeting on October 30 with a group of liberal Labour peers. The next day, November 1, he planned, as Lord Kilbracken, the only peer both resident in Ireland and active in the Lords, to intervene in the House of Lords debate on Northern Ireland. He was hopeful that the debate would be used to announce a British government initiative in the North.
John Godley was born in London in 1919 and first came to his family home in Killegar at the age of six. He inherited the title Lord Kilbracken in 1950 and became an Irish citizen only at the age of 51 when, in the wake of the Bloody Sunday massacre he renounced his British passport and handed back his war decorations.
His new book, Bring Back My Stringbag, (Peter Davies £6.50) is the story of the experiences during World War 2 which won him his decorations and which set him on a road which would pass through over 70 countries in the following 25 years, turning him into a walking contradiction. A pacifist who sought out wars and revolutions, a hereditary peer who opposes the system which elevated him to a status of influence.
Bring Back My Stringbag opens on July 1, 1940 with the 19 year-old John Godley cavalierly and impulsively enlisting in the Fleet Air Arm, drawn by a fascination with flying, agog at the prospect of being paid to learn to fly, untroubled that the probable price of tuition would be death. His own or that of his equally cavalier opponents. The book closes in 1945 with John Godley terrified of flying, concealing his terror from the young pilots he was assigned to train, only admitting his fears when a faulty hydraulics system brought him tumbling out of the sky, missing death by seconds. In between, the book describes the role of several Swordfish squadrons with which Godley served. The "stringbags", Swordfish biplanes, anachronistic contraptions of struts and wires, were primarily used to protect merchant convoys from marauding German ships and V-boats.
Today Kilbracken comforts his pacifism with the knowledge that the men almost certainly killed by his rockets and torpedoes were warriors equally bent on destruction, and blesses the change which diverted him from the RAF and a possible role as a bomber pilot raining death on civilians.
The book details the accumulation of hammerblows which shattered the romanticism of flying. The realisation, in 1942, that half his squadron had been lost within a couple of months. The four engine failures, anyone of which might have been the end ("My Pegasus stopped dead. No warning, just silence. The elastic, as we used to say, had broken"). The deaths or disappearances of friends. The hour spent clinging to life in the freezing Atlantic. The dozens of hazardous deck-landings on aircraft carriers. The routine accidents, planes overturning, sudden spins, stalls, the growing fear. Then the loss of nerve and the final entry in the flight logbook: Eliot's This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but with a whimper.
After the war John Godley went to Oxford to finish the education that had begun at Eton and Balliol. In 1947 he became a journalist and two years later received a letter from the Mayor of Christchurch, New Zealand. His great-grandfather had founded the province of Canterbury in 1850 and Godley was invited to participate in the Centennial celebrations. Hustling for four or five guineas a week sponsorships and acquiring a car and a promise of free maintenance, he set off overland for New Zealand in 1949. He slept in a tent along the way and by the time he reached Tehran was newsworthy enough to finance his journey by endorsing motoring products. In Calcutta he was offered a free KLM flight to Australia and set foot on a plane for the first time since the war.
In the decade following the war Godley, now Lord Kilbracken, could only overcome his fear of flying two or three times despite his extensive travels. He returned to England by boat in March 1951 and resigned his staff job on the Express a few months later. On his way to New Zealand, while heading South East through Iran he had halted at an oasis to get petrol. On being told through sign language that another traveller "from far away" was in a nearby tent, he encountered photographer Henri Cartier Bresson with his Balinese wife. After resigning from the Express Kilbracken went to Bali, his only contact the name of a Balinese prince picked up from the Bressons.
Over the next few years Kilbracken continued his travels, seeking out stories too difficult or obscure for most journalists. In 1957 he acquired a visa for Russia, a feat in itself, and besides interviewing Khruschev, made the front page of the Express by disguising himself as a Russian and marching in Red Square during the fortieth anniversary of the 1917 revolution. In September 1962, while covering a story about deep-sea diving by oceanographer Ed Link off Corsica, Kilbracken borrowed a Leica when a photographer failed to turn up on schedule. The result made the front page of the Daily Mail and for the seven pictures eventually used the paper paid far higher fees that they did for the accompanying articles. So, Kilbracken promptly bought a secondhand Leica and earned a reputation as an excellent photographer as well as greatly increasing his earnings from journalism.
His fear of flying now well buried, Kilbracken flew to Saudi Arabia in 1964 and from there by truck, mule and foot to the Royalist headquarters in the Yemen where a civil war was in progress. There he was quartered with a British mercenary officer. At their first meeting the mercenary grumbled about conditions, as those people tend to do, and ended by saying that to top it all he was sick and tired carrying this bloody thing around. "This" was a Bolex 16mm movie camera. The mercenary's London bosses wanted film of the fighting for propaganda purposes. "Your troubles are over!" said Kilbracken, who had failed to convince any TV company to loan him a camera. On the strength of an 8-minute news piece shot with the mercenary's camera and shown on ITV, Kilbracken borrowed a camera from the BBC and returned later to the Yemen to film a documentary on the civil war.
Early in 1966 he sent back to Europe the first reports of the truth behind the image of Portugal's "enlightened" colonialism in Mozambique. He later became a patron of the Committee For Freedom In Mozambique and Angola. The same year he was persuaded by Arab friends to investigate the forgotten war of liberation being fought by the Kurds in Iraq. He has returned to Iraq several times since then, writing series of articles for newspapers or reports for minority rights groups on that obscure war which continued on and off for twenty years.
He helped found and became president of the British-Kurdish Friendship Society and is mildly bitter but not surprised that the West took little notice of the Kurds until the fighting erupted in Iran and oil supplies became involved. The plight of the Kurds, which has involved him passionately over the years, comes up again and again in his conversations and obviously informs his thinking on Northern Ireland.
In August 1973 Kilbracken took part in a "Children Together" scheme to bring groups of Ballymurphy and Shankhill teenagers to the South for holidays. UDA intimidation forced the cancellation of the Shankill part of the scheme, but for several years Kilbracken has given over part of his house to the kids. Another house on his estate was sold cheaply to the Belfast youth leaders and has been voluntarily renovated and each summer catered for about a hundred children. This year the children didn't come. Some of them, whom Kilbracken grew to know well and formed friendships with over the years, have become young men. One that he knows of is imprisoned. "For blowing up a bridge", he smiles wryly. Donald Fagan, the Ballymurphy youth leader who pushed the scheme, has married and left the country, apparently tired out by the conflict.
A young girl who stayed at Killegar had spent three years in Armagh prison without trial, accused of murder. Eventually she was released without charge, her only crime, according to Kilbracken, that she had two brothers in the IRA. "I have first-hand experience", 'he says, "of gross lawbreaking by the security forces." He has spoken on the North several times in the House of Lords, has reported on allegations of brutality and gave evidence to the Gardiner Commission.
Despite the "maverick" tag Kilbracken's views on the North are scarcely revolutionary. "I believe in a united Ireland, ultimately. In the meantime I think there should be a gradual, phased withdrawal of the British Army and British politicians, together with the establishment of a devolved government with considerable powers." His renunciation of his British passport and war decorations following Bloody Sunday was not an impulsive conversion. His 1966 series of articles on the Kurds for the Evening Standard is peppered with allusions to Ireland's history.
Kilbracken has lived permanently at KilIegar since 1970, each year rebuilding some part of the huge house which burnt down at the beginning of the decade. The progress of the rebuilding depends on his earnings. The days of the wandering foreign correspondent are gone. When Kilbracken sent 4,000 words from Peking at the height of his career it cost ten shillings per word to transmit, two thousand pounds just to get the story back. No Irish newspaper could afford such extravagance and Fleet St. is in decline. Television has the money but it's not his scene.
His newspaper contacts have become tenuous since his withdrawal to Killegar and his anti-imperialist statements and gestures have not helped his popularity. His title has its drawbacks, placing an artificial barrier between Kilbracken and those who take note of such things. It also has its advantages, allowing him a platform for his beliefs. "And it's quite useful for getting credit from a bookmaker!" Apart from that, Kilbracken seems aware that he is the bearer of an outdated symbol of an outdated system.
In his room above Killegar's rolling countryside Kilbracken concentrates now on writing books. On the wall a handwritten deed to the family home, dated 1734. A picture of General Barzani, the Kurdish leader, another of a Yemeni slave girl, both taken by Kilbracken. In a corner a collection of Kilbracken's seven books, some of them translated into foreign languages, and on the floor several bottles of photographic chemicals and a Durst enlarger. On a table, an old, dusty flintlock pistol, partially covered by House of Lords notepaper and a map of Iraq. And on the other side of the room, on top of John Godley's WWII flight logbooks, a small, shiny, plastic Airfix Swordfish.