My two Cyprus books have been selling well ‘From the Foam of the Sea’ a novel set largely on the island first
published in 2007 and now out in a new edition. It has been compared to the work of Alistair MacLean and Desmoid Bagley.
My non-fiction book The British and Cyprus was published in 2015 and an updated edition came out in 2021 read below an extract from the book.
Introduction
Kolossi Castle 1974 and 1992
On the night of July 19 1974 a RAF Nimrod XV241, from No 203 squadron, in the maritime reconnaissance role, took off from Luqa Airbase Malta. It climbed into a starlit night sky turning east, its objective the island of Cyprus just over 1,000 miles away.
XV241 Co-pilot Colin Pomeroy was initially disappointed at missing the Annual Summer Ball in the Officers Mess that night but was about to see history in the making. Colin recalls the approach to Cyprus.
Some 150 miles out we could clearly see from the flight deck, fires burning out of control on the Troodos Mountains and soon we were down at low level off Kyrenia above the grey invasion fleet. Although we were scanned by search and fire control radars, not one anti aircraft gun pointed upwards at us, which was most comforting, but we made a point of neither flying directly over or towards any of the Turkish Warships. 1
On that same July day the Commando Carrier HMS Hermes with 41 Commando Royal Marines embarked, arrived off the southern shore of Cyprus. Hermes had arrived off Malta, home then for 41 Commando, three days earlier after a deployment to the USA and Canada. However the declining situation on Cyprus had required the diversion to the island for an ‘indefinite period’. On the 21 July the main body of the Commando were flown off Hermes into the Eastern Sovereign Base Area of Dhekelia.2
Two thousand three hundred airline miles to the north-west the advance party of 40 Commando Royal Marines, the United Kingdom Land Forces spearhead Unit for July, had left Seaton Barracks, Plymouth for RAF Lyneham and air transport to Cyprus to reinforce the garrison. Nobody knew quite what to expect. Yours truly, a young Marine Commando then fresh from training, would be in the next wave.
All this activity was the result of the Turkish Invasion of July 20, an event that many on Cyprus and in Greece to this day blame on the British. To them it was the fruition of nearly one hundred years of misguided rule, and involvement with the island, by Britain.
In 1992 I returned to Cyprus for the first time since the invasion of 1974. Yet near twenty years on, it all looked so different, from Kolossi Castle’s sandstone battlements I tried and largely failed to locate the old position me and my fellow Marines had occupied. The Vehicle Check Point (VCP) had been on the north side of the Episkopi-Akrotiri SBA.
It had been within sight of the castle which was just outside the base area. The original Crusader Castle was built in 1210 more than likely by the order of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, otherwise known as the Hospitallers, the order lives on today with its headquarters at Valletta, Malta. However the castle passed between the two great orders, the Hospitallers and the Templars over the years until the latter were indicted for heresy. Some say, the present castle dates to 1454 built on the ruins of the original.
The keep is over seventy feet high, and in the east side is a panel bearing the coat-of-arms of the Lusignans. Here abouts the Knights cultivated vines that produced Commanderia, one of the oldest wines that are still drunk. Thick and sweet, more like a fortified wine, ‘it was famous throughout European Christendom, and fuddled successive Plantagenet Kings.’ 3 On the south side of the sugar factory there is an inscription saying the building was repaired in 1591 when Murad was the Pasha of Cyprus. The Englishman Fynes Moryson passed this way in 1596 who commented on the cultivation of sugar-cane and the use of the mills. By 1900 the Scotsman, Cecil Ducan Hay, with his family, lived on the Kolossi Estate, in a house attached to the keep. He planted the Cypress trees that are now taller than the keep, while the family used one of the huge castle rooms as a badminton court. 4
Somewhere nearby sand bags had been filled to build the Sanger. Our task to regulate the flow of traffic into and out of the SBA, which included members of the Greek National Guard and the Greek Cypriot Defence Force, Turkish and Greek Cypriot refugees. For in the face of the Turkish invasion people flooded into the British Bases. Mainly Turkish Cypriots to Episkopi-Akrotiri and Greek Cypriots to Dhekelia and foreign nationals and tourists to both.
The invasion was the result of a mainland Greek plot, by the Military Junta then in power in Athens, to bring about Enosis, the union of Cyprus with Greece, by deposing the Cypriot President Archbishop Makarios. Makarios had once been a champion of Enosis but had come to realise it could never work given the volatile mix on Cyprus and the stance of Turkey. Enosis was not a new idea even in the 1950s. Indeed at the start of British rule in 1878 the Bishop of Kition, welcoming Sir Garnet Wolseley landing at Larnaca, raised the subject, hoping Cyprus could in time be ‘united with Mother Greece, with which it is naturally connected’. 5
The only concrete result of the 1974 plot was the invasion by Turkey and the division of the island along the green line, thus the Greeks had really scored an own-goal.
I walked along the Akrotiri road half hoping to find the Sanger, or even a rotting sand bag or discarded trenching tool. Off duty time had been passed reading or listening to the forces radio. There had been tense night patrols amid the plantations to ‘dominate the ground’ and stop arms smuggling through the base area. Once we put out a ‘contact’ report over the radio when a donkey jumped us. The Greek National Guard fired on us across the border. Apparently they thought we were Turkish Paratroops was one yarn we were told, while another was that we had taken an offensive stance with our Observation Posts overlooking the SBA boundary. A Marine from A Company was wounded in another encounter, but in this case fire was returned wounding one of the Greek National Guard who later died.