Why the heck not?

Philip Hensher recounts how a handful of British mercenaries in the 1960s, headed by the Buchanesque Jim Johnson (pictured above), trained a rag-tag force of Yemeni tribesmen to defeat the full might of the Egyptian army in a conflict that Nasser later referred to as ‘my Vietnam’

‘Enormous fun and a tremendous adventure,’ one of the participants called it afterwards, voicing the sentiments of every British soldier running amok since the beginning of time. Probably there were soldiers under Boadicea who said exactly the same thing. This little known story from the very end of the imperial adventure is redolent of cheek, bravado and the undertaking of a challenge for no other reason than thinking ‘Why the heck not?’ It is almost incredible that it took place well within living memory.

Although Aden had been a British crown colony since 1838, Yemen in the early 1960s was pretty well terra incognita for the western world. It was known to the Romans as Arabia Felix. It had been ruled by the same line of priest-kings for eight centuries. The country was closed to foreigners, and outside a very few urban areas, there was no infrastructure whatsoever. Most of the population had never seen a white man. (When the heroes of this story turned up in rural areas, the locals took to rolling up their trousers without invitation to discover whether they were the same strange colour all over.)

The foreigners who did live there endured a peculiar, Waughish existence of absurdity and constraint. If Ronald Bailey, until 1962 the British Consul in Taiz (the country’s second city) wanted to go for a walk, he first had to obtain permission from the Imam, which could take two weeks to arrive:

If permission was eventually granted, he was obliged to perambulate carrying an open umbrella, to demonstrate that he was a figure of importance, so that people would treat him with respect.