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March 10, 2004, Scotsman TOY STORY HAD NO HAPPY EVER AFTER Gethin Chamberlain WHAT the people of Basra needed in the immediate aftermath of the war was water, electricity and fuel to cook with, writes Gethin Chamberlain. Well-meaning though some of the aid efforts were, not all of them addressed those problems. One story stuck in the minds of the soldiers out there: the battle of the Argos toys. A newspaper had been raising money to buy toys for children in Basra and Baghdad. Argos had agreed to supply the toys and the plan was for the army to deliver them. A ten-ton truck from the 1st (UK) Headquarters and Signal Regiment turned up at the company's warehouses in Milton Keynes and loaded up with trampolines, slides, swings and teddy bears. Paul Geddes, the marketing director for Argos, was quoted as being "delighted to play a part in brightening the lives" of the underprivileged children. In Basra, Captain Brian Gilfillan was given the task of handing out the toys to the children . "Argos sent a huge batch of quality toys and they came down from Basra airport in four or five Bedford trucks," he says. "So I said 'Right, let's do the hospitals' - and it was absolutely manic. "The plan was to go to each bed to issue them with a toy but that did not go to plan. "Patients and relatives were literally fighting the security guards. They were all over us because they had had nothing all their lives and they wanted these toys." Beating a hasty retreat, they tried again the next day, this time using United States Humvee vehicles to get in to the distribution point. "They left these toys with us - slides and go-karts, quality toys. The next day we drove in again but this time we got bricked," he says. "There were about 400 kids all trying to get their hands on the toys and when we tried to impose some order on things, they started throwing stones at us. "I got a gash on my leg and a couple of the others got cut. We had to run for our lives under this volume of bricks and bottles raining down on us." And still he had the toys - GBP 50,000 worth of toys. He had to get rid of them somehow, and he was not risking another direct approach. Capt Gilfillan turned to God, or rather his representative in the Black Watch, the padre. He told him he was stumped. But the padre remembered that there was an archbishop in Basra. Why not, he suggested, take them to the archbishop and dump the problem on him. "We waited till it got dark," Capt Gilfillan says, "and we drove them to the archbishop's cathedral and we dumped the lot in his garage. "It was the only way we could do it." Even then, his troubles were not quite over. Reversing up to the building in the darkness, one of the drivers had run over the centuries-old stone steps. And a little while later, a bill arrived from the archbishop for the repairs.
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................................................................................................................. Copyright ©2004 Gethin Chamberlain. All rights reserved. |
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