Sapper Satire

Bill Tidy, who died a couple of days ago, did more than one version of his 'Iceberg' cartoon but it's none the less funny for that. I met him once through the odd intermediary of the Royal Engineers Museum, my former workplace many years past. I'd done a temporary exhibition on Sapper art and in the course of that discovered that the cartoonist had served with the RE as a young man. A little while later we were completing the post-War gallery of the Museum, a somewhat fraught business as the plan was held in the Curator John's head and nowhere else. With just hours to go before we were supposed to open I and the rest of the staff stood watching him attempt to arrange a mannequin only to see it topple over no matter what he did to it to cries of 'Bugger, bugger' from John, all of us completely unable to assist. I also remember the discussion about the Northern Ireland display which was supposed to feature a barricade being cleared; John called over one of the Corporals from the Project Team who assisted with display construction and slipped him some cash, and a couple of hours later he returned with a burned-out Ford. We never talked about where it came from. Anyway, we got it all done somehow. 

The question had arisen who might open the exhibition. It would have been easy enough to drag in some well-known retired officer, but boring. One morning as the dread day approached I asked John whether we'd got any further with the matter. 'Yes', he said, 'Bill Tidy's going to do it'. How did you manage that? I asked. 'Phoned him up', was the simple answer. Well, if you don't ask you don't get, I suppose. 

As it turned out, Tidy was clearly very, very tickled indeed to be asked to do the job, someone who in his military career had been no more than a lowly sapper now being feted by senior officers and dignitaries of the Corps. I suspect that John, who despite being a former Territorial RE officer retained an anarchistic streak, also enjoyed the slight but definite air of trepidation that surrounded our guest in case he did something really naughty. In the end all that happened was that when the Chief Royal Engineer, General Sir John Stibbon, invited Tidy to ascend the walkway over the displays and cut the ribbon, the cartoonist merely grinned and said, 'Ah, but if I follow a General, can I be sure he knows where he's going?' We all chuckled but you could almost hear the sound of the Chief Royal's teeth being gritted.

The errant mannequin that had caused so many problems was finally propped up against a box in a very odd way for someone supposed to be attacking a North Korean hideout, but the most interesting incident concerned the display which showed an armoured car being unpacked after being lowered into the Malayan jungle. The forest scene had been built by some outside contractors and was really impressive, with a pump-powered stream running past and convincing fake plants bedded into what we were assured was heat-treated, sterile soil. After a couple of weeks the soil began to sprout mushrooms. They were not a British species, apparently, so at least that had an authenticity too.