Article on John Millard – by Ian Parker
“His accepting the surrender of the Italian fort at Jimma alone, by a bluff that he was ahead of an advancing British column, and then placing it under the protection of the British flag, to prevent the Ethiopian patriots from looting and pillaging it, was typical. A couple of days later, well into the night, as he was relaxing in the Governor’s palace in luxury, and drinking his best brandy, whilst it was pouring with rain outside, his ADC called to tell him that the short-arsed little Ethiopian at the gate, who had been insisting for the past hour that he be allowed to enter, said his name was Highly Salacious, or something like that. Millard had to house him for the night, and got to know him.
“I think I told you, I had a sudden chance to fly in a private charter into Southern Sudan for the first time in 20 years, following the peace agreement. We lived in Juba from 1980 to 1985. The SPLA rebellion started in 1983. Eventually we pulled out as the rebels closed in though they never took Juba. All flights came in very high in fear of SAM 7 missiles.
“I visited my old house in the Arab quarter on ‘s. .t alley’, so called because it was on the edge of town, and across the track were the Dinka settlements of thatched tukuls in long grass. At night the little kids would come onto the track to deposit their posho coils, since they worried about snakes in the grass. When we had been out for an evening, we always had to get the night watchman to hose the underside of the car to wash off the residue.
“We left, expecting to be away for perhaps three months, and against Jane’s advice, left most of our possessions including all the house furniture, fridges, cookers, linen, cutlery, a 12 kva generator, a landrover in the rnabati garage, and three shipping containers full of stores, equipment and supplies. Twenty years later, not only the landrover but the garage as well, had disappeared, together with the containers and every stick of our stuff. There were three young Sudanese living in the house, very friendly and showed us around. Such is Life
“John Millard had no regimental number, though he definitely joined the Regiment as a private and was sent to Eldoret for basic training, at the outbreak of hostilities. The Brass discovered him there and whisked him away smartly. He became involved in SOE and Intelligence, as he had been in OCTU at Cambridge, where he may have been recruited for covert operations, even before the War, but he never spoke about it. His first assignment was recruiting Ethiopian guerrillas and sabotaging Italian supply lines in Southern Ethiopia from March to July 1941, at which he was very successful. He was only a couple of miles behind the enemy lines during the action at Colito where Nigel Leakey [KR 145] won his V.C. Millard single-handedly took the last remaining Italian outpost in the South at Jimma, by bluff, pretending he was in the vanguard of advancing British columns. In so doing he saved many hundreds of Italian soldiers, farmers, and nuns from marauding Patriots. He was blasted by a jealous Fluffy Fowkes, the overall commander, who wanted the glory for himself, and he should have been decorated for this action, but was not.
“I had the pleasure of taking him trout fishing in Ethiopia, in 1989 when he was over 80 years old, together with his Cambridge pal Ian McKenzie, Chairman of the Standard Bank of South Africa, who led the South African 1st Division across the Rhine in 1944. Also with us was Pat Flatt who was in Burma behind Jap lines. For four nights I had the privilege of listening to the exchanges about those times in the evening over many scotch whiskys. I also recall having to part Millard from his pal McKenzie, at about 0100hrs in the morning when they disagreed about some issue, and invited each other to “step outside” to settle the matter.
“His wife Corinne was the daughter of the Chief Justice of Ireland and I believe was a member of the Guineas family. Latterly, they owned a huge estate in the West of Ireland, where John hunted and fished to his heart’s content. But he was an African, and could not bear to live in Europe. Apart from being one of the founders of the East African Wildlife Society and its Chairman, he was also on the board of East African Breweries, and many other organisations.
“I was at his 90th Birthday party at the ancestral home of Lord Francis Scott at Rongai, he danced on stable top with a girl less than a quarter his age. What a life! What a man! What a dume!”