RAF ABYAD - SIGNALS SECTION HQ - 1954-55
As Remembered By Lionel Drew
I served in the Signals Section HQ 205 Group for 17 months of my National Service in the RAF and was stationed at RAF Abyad from 1954/55 as a Teleprinter Operator.
One evening we were put on standby as there had been an attack on a base south of Abyad and I was ordered to go in to the slit trench and was given a Greener shotgun, and five rounds. I had never heard of or let alone seen a Greener before. The Sergeant who issued me with the weapon told me not to load it. I did notice that he was holding a Sten gun complete with a magazine of bullets! So when I got in the slit trench I loaded one of the 12 bore cartridges which contained ball bearings and were used in crowd control by the Egyptian police from whom they had been confiscated. Luckily, nothing came of that so we were all stood down.
We renamed the Greeners after a chap called Huckstep who fired 10 rounds of .303 at an Egyptian cutting the wire not 50 yards away - and missed. He was fined 10 shillings a round by the CO "for wasting Her Majesty's property".
In the last edition of The Canal Zoners there was mention of a camp called Huckstep which I found out was a camp near Cairo and was named after an American called Huckstep who was killed in an air crash near Cairo.
Although I was very
ill and in sickbay once after suffering from dysentery three times I still
enjoyed the experience of meeting people with whom I stayed in contact all
of their lives