Page 179 - Who Was Sapper Brown

I eventually reached the RAF Station and the Medical Centre, where a somewhat surprised Doctor was
summoned to see us. At this point, fear definitely took hold as he ‘sucked his teeth’ and looked worried,

muttering pneumonia. I remember bursting into tears and asking to see my husband, who eventually
appeared from somewhere, duly embarrassed at being disturbed for “domestic” reasons and a weeping wife!

Military wives of those days were expected to get on with life and cope, whatever the circumstances.
I am glad to report that all ended well, as tests discovered not the dreaded pneumonia, but an ear infection. So

antibiotics were duly given and we were escorted home to live to see another day.’

Resolution of a Controversy

‘An RAF family serving in Cyprus in 1962 suffered a stillbirth. In the late 1980s they contacted the
headquarters in Cyprus to enquire about the location of the grave so that they could visit. They did visit

and apparently were struck by the large number of children’s graves in the military cemetery. In 2001
they wrote to the Minister for the Armed Forces through their MP on the subject.’ 4

Since this cemetery opened in 1960, after the troubles of the Cyprus Emergency, it has served a

population of predominantly young, fit and healthy service personnel and their young families under

largely peacetime conditions. The few service personnel buried there usually died as a result of accidents
or the rare acute illness.

Dhekelia Military Cemetery is therefore very different from the typical graveyard of a village parish

church in the UK, which will contain a high proportion of graves of the very old as well as the very
young, reflecting the normal mortality pattern of a civilian population. The apparently high number of

graves of infants and young children who died throughout the 1960s in particular that strikes the visitor
to Dhekelia largely reflects the almost complete absence of graves of old people that would otherwise

balance the picture. It does not necessarily indicate an unnaturally high infant mortality rate or epidemic
outbreaks. People nowadays are also simply not exposed in daily life to the evidence in cemeteries of

the naturally high infant mortality rates worldwide before the 1970s, when the rate throughout Europe

alone in the 1960s was up to ten times the present one (see Annex).

The much smaller number of deaths recorded from the mid-1970s onwards also reflects the great
reduction in the number of service personnel on the island from January 1975, as a result of worldwide

defence cutbacks and a re-assessment of strategic needs following the partition of the island in 1974.

Nevertheless, in response to press interest and the concerns raised by the bereaved parents mentioned
above, in 2010 the MOD arranged for the infant mortality data from 1960 – 1966 to be subjected to

analysis by an independent specialist in epidemiology, Professor Stephen Evans of the London School
of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.The aim of this was to establish whether the numbers were indeed
5-6
higher than ought to have reasonably been expected, and thus whether further investigations might be

required. This analysis compared the figures with equivalent neonatal (0 – 28 days) and post-neonatal
(29 days – less than one year) data from England and Wales, and Scotland, covering the same period in

the 1960s.

4 Evans, Professor SJW (23 September 2010), Report on deaths of infants and children of military personnel in Cyprus

1960 – 1966, Introduction.
5 ‘Remembering our baby girl’ Cyprus Mail, October 2008 http://www.cyprusedirectory.com/cyprusguide/cyprus.
aspx?ID=15423

6 ‘Probe into 1960s mass babies deaths’ Cyprus Mail, 24 October 2010 www.cyprus-mail.com/cyprus/probe-1960s-mass-
baby-deaths/20101024

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