In the Army, Too!

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 327, 12 April 1928, Page 9

In the Army, Too!

High-Placed Officer who Lost His Temper

A DARJEELING DANCE

On the top of all the fuss in the Mediterranean Fleet comes a letter from India which seems to show that the “way we have in the Navy” (Mediterranean version) is also followed by the junior service at Darjeeling. Strangely enough, it was received by an ex-bandsman of the Mediterranean and North Sea fleets, Mr. Victor Stear, from his brother, a temporary bandsman “loaned” from the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry and at present near Darjeeling, in India. The army man, who plays the violin, writes: “The Ladies’ Social Club gave a dance last evening, but it was not the success it might have been. An officer of field rank was present, ‘slightly the worse/ He asked the chaplain’s wife for a dance and when she said ‘No/ swore at her. “Then we put on a waltz, and he came up swearing, told us to take it off and put on a fox-trot, or something with some life in it.” The ex-naval bandsman, who now plays in a picture orchestra in the city, says that when he was in the Mediterranean fleet before the war the officers were divided into two classes, the ones who liked the band and the others who thought the bandsmen “ought to stack their instruments and take up the deck scrubbers ! ”

In peace time Mr. Stear played the piano and the ’cello, but at Jutland and the Dogger Bank he was a rangefinder. The bandsmen were primarily marines in the war. He came to the Dominion on H.M.S. New Zealand in 1919, and liked the country so much that he purchased his discharge and settled here.

“On several occasions the band has been sworn at by officers,” he says, “but these were only trivialities. ~ I can never remember the rules of the service being so far forgotten that an admiral should refuse to acknowledge a captain’s salute.”