Memoirs of GD Fell

When Bill arrived, he found that the Commanding Officer was a young lieutenant who clearly felt out of his depth with this situation. Bill introduced himself and as Bill effectively outranked the CO by a large margin, he was happy to accept Bill’s advice. Bill was given a briefing on the situation – The GCNG had staged a military coup. Initial reports were that Makarios had been killed, but that later turned out to be incorrect. Bill then arranged radio communications with 9th Signal Regiment and agreed details for a convoy to evacuate non-military personnel from the leave camp when the situation on the island was more stable. In the meantime, we would stay in the relative safety of the leave camp, protected by the soldiers already there.

For many years, a significant proportion of Greek Cypriots had wanted ENOSIS (Union with Greece), to unite the Greek people in a single united Greece. They had been disappointed when Great Britain gave Cyprus independence in 1960, because the treaty of independence had established a new Government with proportional representation for the minority Turkish Cypriot community. This prevented ENOSIS.

By 1974, Greece was governed by a military Junta which influenced the GCNG to stage the Coup to overthrow Makarios’s elected Cypriot Government with the aim of imposing ENOSIS.

While Bill was in the Commanding Officer’s office, David and I went exploring the leave camp. It was a lovely quiet and peaceful place with stone built holiday chalets, canvas tents for the more adventurous families to sleep in, badminton courts, tennis courts, a hockey pitch that doubled up as a parade ground, a small cinema and an indoor recreation block. We looked around the snooker rooms on the lower ground floor, then made our way up to the table tennis tables and pinball machines on the next floor up and then peered into the bar area, imaginatively named "The Fox and Hounds" as admittance was strictly limited to adults. Finally we arrived at the family lounge area and immediately spotted a couple of soldiers, in uniform, on the balcony placing the final few sandbags to finish their defences. Of course we went out to look at their ‘den’ and the General Purpose Machine Gun they were setting up. The soldiers were friendly to us and showed us their ammunition and weapons and allowed us to look down the road towards Troodos village, but didn’t allow us to touch the weapons. After about 15 minutes, we decided to let Bill and Winnie know where we were before heading back to the gun emplacement. Bill told us he was going back to the camp site at Prodromos Dam to pick up a few things we’d left behind, because we were re-locating to the leave camp.