Sirmooree #80

95 On 1 st November he was sent to the Combined Operations Centre in Number 2 Sector, Lines of Communication, Manzai, as ‘orderly officer’, spending most of his time enciphering and deciphering messages. In this capacity he also took part in the campaign against the Mahsuds in the winter of 1919-1920. From mid-1920 until late 1921 he was a Grade 3 staff officer with the column that reoccupied Wana in Waziristan, for which he earned a mention in dispatches. In January 1922 he transferred to the 18th Garhwal Rifles, took part in the campaign on the Malabar coast against the Moplah rebels, and again went to Waziristan. He was promoted to Captain in April 1925 and served with the 11 th (Training Battalion) of the Regiment and then as Quartermaster of the 10 th Battalion. In May 1926 he was appointed Commandant of the Muscat Levy Corps which had come into being following the Treaty of Sib in 1920. He was commended by the Commander-in-Chief India for his service there, which mostly involved pulling the organisation into shape and roadbuilding. In the late 1920s he specialised in military law, serving as Deputy Assistant Judge Advocate General in India Northern Command and subsequently in Army HQ India during 1929 and 1930. In 1927 Stephens married a divorcee, Phyllis Gwendolyn Fletcher, in Rawalpindi. In a post-war letter his father ascribes his son’s subsequent downfall to her profligacy. Whatever the truth of the matter, he resigned from the Army on 10 th July 1931 because of debt and was declared bankrupt in the UK in 1932. He divorced Phyllis in 1933 on the grounds of her adultery. There were no children. Stephens had spectacularly varied employment during the rest of the 1930s. He read for the bar at Lincolns Inn and although he never qualified or practiced as a lawyer he collaborated with Sir Harry Lushington Stephen, a Judge of the High Court in Calcutta in 1901-14, on ‘A Digest of the Laws and Evidence of Court Martial’. He dabbled in journalism and organised the British Red Cross Ambulance Service in the Abyssinian crisis in 1935-36, for which he was again commended and awarded the Star of Abyssinia. (His nickname ‘Tin Eye’ came from the monocle he wore in his right eye because of damage inflicted by poison gas there). In 1937-39 he worked for the National Fitness Council for England, based in Lincoln, where he met his second wife, Joan www.2ndGoorkhas.com