大象传媒

This story was submitted by Garry Lloyd, a CSV volunteer, on behalf of Jack Hobbs, who has given his permission for his story to be added to the website and understands the terms and conditions of the website.

When war broke out I was a 23 year-old conscientious objector. I didn鈥檛 believe in killing people. As I worked at London鈥檚 main postal sorting office I was in a reserved occupation. Even the Blitz, and twice being bombed out of our homes in Kensal Rise, in the north-west of the capital, did not undermine my pacifism.

But when I learned that Hitler was gassing the Jews in Germany I volunteered for war. Army recruitment was full so I was conscripted into the Royal Navy. Because I never wore a tie I thought a sailor鈥檚 square-rig uniform would suit me. I never found out. They trained me as an electrician and I became a petty officer, in collar-and-tie.

I saw service at Portsmouth, Chatham and aboard HMS Argos, an aircraft carrier, before they posted me to Crimond, a Naval Air Station beside a large lake in Aberdeenshire, on the east coast of Scotland. One of my responsibilities was the runway lights. Lest they were bombed we also had to muster emergency backup, a parallel string of lamps beside the flarepath.

These were vital for pilots taking off in Scotland鈥檚 uncertain weather. Meteorology was a hit-and-miss affair then and our base weather-foecaster I considered full of hot air. Three miles distant from the runway was a hill. Received wisdom on the station was: if you couldn鈥檛 see the hill it was raining, and if you could it was about to. I trusted the hill rather than the meteorologist before laying, and retrieving, the emergency lights.

One evening an American plane came down and couldn鈥檛 take off again because of trouble with its starter motor. The Yanks never repaired anything. They would throw out the old and put in a new one. But we did not have a replacement, so repair fell to me. I took the motor apart and got it going again. But it took all night. At five o鈥檆lock in the morning I cycled back to my Nissan hut, exhausted, and fell asleep. When dawn broke, and I was found in my bunk, I was charged with sleeping on duty and confined to barracks. They weren鈥檛 impressed that I had been up all night.

From Crimond we kept watch on the Norwegian coast, waiting for the German battle-cruiser Scharnhorst. It never appeared. I shared quarters with a sailor and stoker who spent much of their spare time ashore in the pub. Because I didn鈥檛 drink I remained on the base and remember long periods of boredom. We ate well and we weren鈥檛 bombed. Yet sailors derided civilians, which annoyed me because civilians had it far worse than we did. But my work was absorbing and when war ended I would like to have stayed in the Navy.

But the girl I met on leave, dancing at the Hammersmith Palais in London, was young, pretty and not short of admirers. So staying in the Navy was not an option. We married and had two sons. I went back to promotion in the Post Office and later joined the Home Office as a civil servant, working eventually with the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board. But I still hankered after my job in the Senior Service.

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