Joanna Lumley's legacy of misery: She fought to allow retired Gurkhas into Britain with her heart in the right place. Five years on, even they say it's backfired terribly

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Shortly before 7pm last Tuesday, a multi-national scrum of shoppers began jostling for position in the fruit and vegetable section of Morrisons supermarket, Aldershot.

Their target: a variety of items reaching their sell-by date that were about to be sold for 9p, regardless of their original price.

A Romanian couple managed to grab the celery (down from 69p), while a Hampshire pensioner snatched the satsumas (reduced from 99p). But they were no match for the tenacious band of Nepalese incomers, who manoeuvered beside the tray with polite but practised efficiency to sweep up the most coveted bargains.

Why were they so desperate to buy this cheap produce, I asked one of the traditionally dressed Gurkha clan, Mrs Yam Kumari, a careworn woman who looked much older than her 53 years, as she clutched a plump cabbage.

Victory? Since Joanna Lumley spearheaded the Gurkhas' campaign to grant them rights to live in Britain, many miserable former soldiers are seen trudging through Aldershot - the home of the Army

Gurkhas are often seen in bookmakers in Aldershot, placing bets on horse racing and football

Since she spoke no English, she beckoned her seven-year-old granddaughter to deliver her explanation — she had come to Britain seven years ago with her husband, a soldier in the Gurkha regiment, with the promise of a better life, but was now a lonely widow and had fallen on hard times.

The following morning, wandering through the town, I happened upon another arresting scene. As there are so many needy Nepalese residents in Aldershot, the Citizens Advice Bureau was holding a drop-in session exclusively for them, and with the doors about to open, a forlorn sea of wizened, Himalayan faces stretched down the road.

Hunched against the rain in shawls and woollen hats, many leaning on sticks, the problems that had brought them here were many and varied. 

One man was about to return home for a three-month holiday and wondered whether the council would continue to pay his rent. A diabetic woman wanted to know how to obtain home-help from social services.

Unrecognisable now as the fearsome warrior who once fought in the jungles of Borneo, Mr Tul Bahadur Gurung, 71, anxiously brandished a final demand for £790.89p in water charges in front of me as he waited in the queue, insisting it had been sent to the wrong address.

Spend a few days in Aldershot, and you quickly become accustomed to such miserable stories. 

When you enter this rundown Hampshire town, there is still a proud sign that welcomes you to ‘the home of the British Army’, yet the days when squaddies marched through its streets have long gone. Oddly, in fact, during Remembrance week when the nation was honouring our Armed Services, I saw not one soldier.

Instead, wherever you look, there are Nepalese people; many of them old and infirm. You see them gathered on park benches (prompting local MP Sir Gerald Howarth to remark, controversially, a few weeks ago, that there weren’t enough seats for everyone else); you see them trudging — often in large groups, as is their custom — through the paved precinct, with its boarded-up windows and everything-for-a-pound shops.

You see them in the GP surgeries forced to employ Nepalese-speaking staff and extra doctors to cope with the caseload (according to Sir Gerald, 3,000 have enlisted in one practice); in the new Nepalese grocery stores and restaurants; and the six Nepalese jewellers that have opened in the town (the last remaining English one has moved to Farnham).

Because they are so unhappy and homesick, you see them in the churches and religious halls, too, particularly those of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are said to have converted hundreds from Hinduism and Buddhism after a slickly targeted recruitment drive. 

Miss Lumley celebrated with Gurkhas at the time, but now many face a sorry existence in Britain with little money and few opportunities to return to Nepal to see family and friends

Nepalese men and women in Aldersshot paid their respects at a Remembrance service in the last week

Sad sight: Dozens of Gurkhas queue outside the Citizens Advice Bureau in Aldershot

Drop into Coral, the bookmakers, and you will see many of the menfolk there, playing bingo and gambling — Lord knows how they can afford it — on everything from horseracing to Premier League football.

Why are so many Nepalese living in Aldershot (or Gurkha Town, as locals have renamed it) an out-of-the-way place whose smallness and insularity makes them still more visible?

According to the 2011 Census, more than 6,000 Nepalese people reside in the borough of Rushmoor, which includes Aldershot and Farnborough: about half of them in each town. Given that significant numbers of Gurkhas and their dependants have continued to arrive in the three years since then, the regiment’s welfare organisation believes their numbers could have swelled to 10,000: more than one in ten of the local population.

And because Aldershot’s population is smaller than Farnborough’s, with 36,000 people, it is here the impact is most evident. The Gurkhas are divided, roughly fifty-fifty, into two groups who have settled in Aldershot for very different reasons — with very different outcomes. 

The patriarchs of the younger families, or so-called ‘post 97-ers’, are mostly former Gurkhas who were stationed in Hong Kong until 1997, when Britain handed the colony back to China, whereupon they were rebased to local Crookham Barracks.

Fluent in English and versed in British customs, not to mention independent, loyal and hard-working — trademark regimental qualities — upon retirement they were granted leave to remain and have integrated extremely well.

A Kent University study judged these ex-Gurkhas of working age to be the most economically active and self-reliant social group in Britain, with 95.1 per cent in employment. Many own their own homes and have started businesses.

Their families appear to be faring equally well. I was helped this week by Min Gurung, 49, a corporal in the 1st Gurkha Rifles when he retired in 2003, now head of security for a Saudi prince, and his wife Sharada, a teaching assistant.

Their daughters, aged 18 and 10, are bright, and the older girl, who gained a string of A-starred GCSEs, hopes to become a doctor. It is within the second group, who retired from the Gurkhas before 1997, that the myriad social problems that now beset Aldershot are rooted.

These are the people who had never previously set foot in Britain, but were tempted to migrate here — with the offer of free social housing and healthcare, and other benefits — after campaigners, championed with eloquent ferocity by Joanna Lumley (whose father served with the regiment), famously won them settlement rights.

Though Nepal has never been part of the Commonwealth, the Gurkhas have fought under the Union flag since 1815, when their bravery and tenacity in skirmishes with the East India Company was so impressive that they were invited to join the British Army. 

It is estimated that 45,000 of their soldiers have since died for this country, and they have been awarded the Victoria Cross on 26 occasions. 

The campaign for all Gurkhas to be allowed to settle in Britain began after it emerged that only those who retired after 1997 — when their base moved from Hong Kong to Aldershot — would be permitted to live here. But it really captured the public’s imagination when Miss Lumley — enormously popular after her role in the TV sitcom Absolutely Fabulous — took up the cudgels.

Many Gurkhas pass the time away by aimlessly walking around Aldershot and browsing shop windows

Pictured outside a statue of the Unknown Soldier earlier this year, Miss Lumley's campaign saw Gurkhas granted the right to stay but a full military pension is not available for those who retired before 1997

Who will forget how the actress stood triumphantly among the decorated veterans on the High Court steps in 2008, leading the cry of ‘Ayo Gorkhali!’ (forward Gurkhas!) after a judge ordered the government to recognise its ‘debt of honour’ to them?

Or the joyous scenes the following year, when then Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that some 36,000 Gurkhas who retired before 1997 could make their homes in Britain, together with their wives and any immediate dependants aged under 18.

For Miss Lumley, it was ‘a wonderful moment in our democratic history’. Five years later, by all accounts, she still hasn’t set foot in Aldershot to witness the results of her heroic campaign. If she did, she might just reconsider those words.

She would certainly find her halo has slipped, not only among hard-pressed local townsfolk but many Gurkhas, who have awoken — too late — to the grim realities of life in the milk-and-honey land they envisaged.

Hanging on the walls of the British Gurkha Welfare Society, alongside the medals and battle images, there are many photographs marking the settlement victory, but you will find none of Miss Lumley. The society’s chairman, Major Dal Dewan, told me: ‘The whole campaign was a fiasco.’

His anger centres on the issue of the Gurkhas’ military pension, historically set much lower than that of native British soldiers because it was intended to provide for them in Nepal, where the cost of living is a fraction of Britain’s.

In 2007, the rules were changed to give parity to those who retired after 1997. For the remainder, however, it remained at about one-third of the standard rate — and that was only for Gurkhas with a minimum of 15 years’ service.

For many others, there was no pension at all: just a pittance of around £30 a month from their welfare association in Nepal.

Among the thousands who have descended on Aldershot and its environs since 2009, it is estimated that about 70 per cent are in this category. So they are almost all dependent on the welfare state. 

Sardonically, Major Dewan refers to them as ‘Lumley’s Legacy’. This also happens to be the name of a Facebook group where white Aldershot residents vent their grievances against the Nepalese.

Talking to them this week, one could well understand why they had relocated here, often selling their Himalayan small-holdings and borrowing from friends and relatives to scrape together £2,000 or more they need to pay for their flights, accommodation and UK visa.

Sitting, ramrod-backed in his flat above Aldershot High Street, Harka Gurum, 68, told me how he had been demobbed from the Gurkhas after just four years in the Sixties, when the MoD made cutbacks. He was handed a one-off payment of £180 and got no pension.

Afterwards, he worked as an electrician for the British Army in Nepal. But when he retired, he and his wife could barely afford food, much less medical treatment for the blood pressure and diabetes they both suffered. 

In 2010, therefore, taking advantage of the new settlement rights, they left their friends and family in the beautiful town of Pokhara, which nestles beside a mountain-fringed lake, and wound up in this cramped, chilly, featureless bedsit looking out at a redbrick car park wall.

Harka Gurum, with his wife, Gau Suba, moved from Pokhara, Nepal, to Aldershot so he could provide food and medical treatment for himself and his wife

Financially, they are far better off, receiving a monthly pension credit of £904 between them, plus their £595 monthly rent and various other entitlements. Plus, of course, free prescriptions and the healthcare they require.

Accustomed to a culture where several generations of the same family often live under the same roof and the younger ones tend to their elders, and unable to speak more than a word or two of English, they are depressed and desperate to go home.

‘All we do is watch the Nepali satellite TV channel and wander around town every day, looking in shop windows,’ said Mr Gurum.

‘Local people are usually friendly, but young boys sometimes run up behind us and shout bad things. One knocked my glasses off, and we have had Coke cans thrown at us. They don’t seem to know we fought for them. They don’t know their history.’

The couple have somehow saved enough from their benefits to fly home for an extended break (a return air ticket costs upwards of £500) and say they would return to Nepal permanently — if only they were paid a reasonable military pension.

This is the mantra one hears from virtually all the older Gurkhas in Aldershot, some of whom are forced to live in cramped and ill-maintained rented flats where damp is a permanent feature and mould grows on the walls — although local letting agents say they are usually model tenants who keep their homes spotless and even cover ceramic tiles with cling-film.

Through the British Gurkha Welfare Society, they are fighting for a pension equal to that paid to their British counterparts: about £600 a month for the lower ranks.

The case is currently before the European Court of Human Rights, and a ruling is thought to be imminent.

Major Dewan insists he wrote to Joanna Lumley during the campaign, pleading for her to lobby the government for pension parity in addition to residency rights, because he foresaw the misery that would result from the large-scale arrival of ailing, elderly and impoverished Gurkha families.

Lumley replied ‘very diplomatically’ says Major Dewan, but whether she could do anything about pension rights is not clear. I put his criticisms of the campaign to her, but by last night, Lumley had not responded.

Should the Gurkhas win the latest legal struggle, he is confident many will gladly abandon the drab confines of Aldershot and head homewards, thus saving British taxpayers tens of millions in welfare benefits, freeing up badly needed housing and hospital beds, and easing the pressures on social services.

The thousands who cheered the Gurkha veterans as they marched past the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday would not begrudge the veterans a home in Britain

However, Sir Gerald Howarth fears that granting the Gurkhas equal pensions would only encourage more to come. During a recent Commons debate, Sir Gerald described the plight of older Gurkhas in Aldershot as ‘a tragic consequence of Lumley’s campaign’.

He said it had ‘done a major disservice’, both to them and ‘the indigenous population’, some of whom had moved away because they had ‘seen the character of Aldershot change massively’.

Given that the Gurkhas are so firmly entrenched, it certainly seems unlikely that they might beat a mass retreat. On the contrary, some older Nepalese are fighting to bring younger relatives over to care for them.

Men such as Mr Lal Bahadur Pun, a sprightly 86-year-old, whom I found wandering the streets aimlessly in his green regimental blazer and tie. He has just won a landmark High Court case, granting his adult daughter the right to come from Nepal to nurse his wife, who is incontinent and suffers dementia.

After the bloody encounters he braved on Britain’s behalf, few would begrudge him a home here — certainly not the thousands who cheered the Gurkha veterans as they marched past the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday.

It would take a hard heart to deny him the comfort of his daughter’s presence during his last years, too. Yet the truth is that her arrival is only likely, in the short term at least, to add to the local burden.

Will we soon find her scrabbling for cheap food at Morrisons, or queuing outside the Citizens Advice Bureau? She will, after all, need to be housed and fed.

Such are the harsh realities of life in a town that is today more like a shabby suburb of Kathmandu than the home of the British Army, and has reaped the whirlwind of a populist campaign that lacked foresight, valiantly fought though it may have been.

That, for all her undoubtedly good intentions, is Joanna Lumley’s legacy.