One evening last January, in the pale green dining room of Ottawa's
Rideau Hall, Winston Churchill sat at a banquet table, ruddy-faced in
an atmosphere redolent of brandy and cigars. He was Prime Minister
again, and enjoying it. Sitting near him were Lords Ismay, Cherwell and
Alexander. Among the 40 guests, few noticed the tall, slim British
general seated downtable. But suddenly Churchill waved a brandy glass
at the officer and bellowed:”Templer! Malaya!”The buzz of conversation, momentarily suspended, was resumed. Five
minutes later, Churchill bawled:”Templer! Full powers!”Ten minutes later his gruff voice cut through the cigar smoke again:”Full power, Templer. Very heady stuff. Use it sparingly.”There had been a council of war at Rideau Hall over Commonwealth
defenses. Most urgent subject: the 3-year “state of emergency” in
Malaya, where Communist terrorists 1> had taken more than 3,000 lives;
2> were costing $150,000 a day to combat; 3> threatened tin and rubber
production, Britain's best dollar earners. A few months before,
Communists had ambushed and killed High Commissioner Sir Henry Gurney,
the topflight colonial administrator who had been sent out to put order
into Malaya's civil service. Said the London Daily Telegraph: “The
trouble [has been] not only murder, but mugwumpery.”Churchill ran a broad finger down Britain's army list and halted at the
fifth name: General Sir Gerald Walter Robert Templer, K.C.B., K.B.E.,
C.M.G., D.S.O. A message to Cobham, Surrey brought 54-year-old General
Templer flying to the banquet room in Ottawa. Three weeks later he was
in Malaya, with such military and political powers in his kit bag as no
British soldier had had since Cromwell.Polo & Palestine. The dragon-tooth soil of Northern Ireland has farrowed
a fine litter of Britain's great generals—Montgomery, Alexander, Dill,
Alanbrooke, Auchinleck. It also farrowed Gerald Templer, a thin,
deceptively fragile-looking, tough soldier. His father, a dedicated
officer in the Royal Irish Fusiliers, had some discussion with his
mother about what to call the child, but there was no discussion about
his career: it was Wellington, Sandhurst, and the army. Says his
mother, now in her 80s : “He always wanted to be a soldier, and I did
my best to make him so.”So did he. He scraped into World War I as a subaltern at the age of 18,
made the retreat from the Somme. In 1919 he was part of a hush-hush
force in the Caspian Sea area which helped defend the White Russian
fleet from Bolshevik attack: “All pretty unsatisfactory from a
political point of view, though great fun for a young officer.” Now he
likes to say that he is the “only senior British officer who ever
fought the Russians.” Between the world wars, he played polo and rode
to hounds, became bayonet-fighting champion of the British army, made
the 1924 Olympic squad as a 120-yard hurdler. He also saw action in
Palestine, where he won a D.S.O. in guerrilla skirmishes against the
Arabs. Palestine taught him “the mind and method of the guerrilla,” and
introduced him u> the Arab-Jewish problem: “I can remember lying in bed
weeping about the tragedy of it.”
