大象传媒

ABROAD FOR THE FIRST TIME

My name is Stuart Hammond, I was 13 and a half when I listened to with my parents to the radio on the 3rd September 1939 and heard the Prime Minister, Mr. Chamberlain, informing us that a state of war existed between Germany and ourselves. This news was received with great dismay, as at this time the nation was still recovering from the terrible events that cost us so many casualties in the first world war only 20 years before.

There is no doubt that the Spanish civil war and the bombing of Guernica by the German air force a few years before convinced the Government that the Germans might well bomb London early on in the war and an evacuation of children from London was ordered a few days after the 3rd September. I found myself saying goodbye to my mother at a railway station near to my school, the Acland Central, Kentish Town, in north London. I was joining thousands of other children, on a journey to an unknown destination, carrying a small suitcase and a cardboard box containing my gas mask, and wearing an identity tag around my neck.

After a journey lasting a couple of hours the train pulled in at a station in Bedfordshire named Leighton Buzzard. We all got off the train and our teachers directed us to a grassy bank outside the station to await allocation to foster parents. We were all given a large bar of Cadbury鈥檚 chocolate! I was eventually ushered with eleven other boys onto a coach and we were driven a few miles to the village of Great Billington. We were now in sight of where we would be sleeping that night 鈥� the rectory. This and the Church were on top of a steep hill and we found we had been taken in by the vicar鈥檚 wife. We must have been a pretty tired bunch of lads who laid down that night on mattresses on the floor of the attic of this large rambling house surrounded, as we were to discover the next morning, by a large garden and with a marvellous view over miles of countryside.

The main view south was towards the Chilterns, and closer to us a large acreage of plum orchards in Eaton Bray. The weather was sunny and warm and being early September, the plums were ripening and being so plentiful we ate a lot of these sweet and tasty Victoria鈥檚. Unfortunately many of had stomach ache through over-eating .

Our accommodation was only temporary as there was no school large enough in the village and within a few weeks we were transferred to Dunstable. Here I was billeted with new foster parents. They were a retired couple and strict Methodists. For the first time in my life I was given a room of my own. Their name was Mr. & Mrs. Herbert and I was looked after very well. Food was not plentiful but Mr. Herbert was a keen gardener and we never went short of vegetables and soft fruits. I was introduced to bread pudding, which was good filler for growing lad.

There was a large modern senior school in the town and we integrated with the pupils already there although sometimes we had to take our classes in various halls elsewhere in the town. We settled down to study for the School Certificate, which we would take in our 16th year.

After arriving in Dunstable we entered a period called the 鈥榩honey war鈥�. London was not raided straight away and some of the evacuees began to drift back to their homes in London 鈥� against government advice of course. The children were missing their homes and parents 鈥� and perhaps not too happy with their new homes 鈥� and I too succumbed to the temptation to return. It was with the consent of my foster parents that I made one journey back to north London by train and two by cycling. I would leave on a Friday afternoon and return on Sunday. The A5 was a busy road and I managed the journey without mishap. It was a fairly easy journey when I reached Barnet as it was downhill all the way to my home, but coming back was a bit hard 鈥搉o multi-geared bikes in those days!

After the Battle of Britain in 1940 when we stood alone in defying Hitler, the air raids on London began. The town then began to fill with people who had been bombed out or trying to escape the terror of the air raids. My own parents arrived and were lucky to find a cottage to rent. By now I had got used to living with Mr.& Mrs. Herbert and was quite happy with them and they with me 鈥� and the expectation by my parents that I should come to live with them caused me and my foster parents some heartache. However, I had no option but to leave and live with my parents. Soon the small cottage became quite crowded when my mother鈥檚 sister and her mother were bombed out and they also came to Dunstable to seek refuge and respite from the raids.

When the raids subsided our guests found a property in Cuffley to live in and my mother and I were on our own again, my father being away in the Army. My mother worked in factory producing bomb sights for our bombers.

I left school at the age of 16 and spent the following two years as a junior clerk with the publishing house of Macmillan situated in a narrow street behind the National Gallery in London. At the end of this period, at the age of 18, I received my 鈥榗alling-up papers鈥� and had to leave my job with a promise that it would be available to me when I returned from the forces.

The instructions I received required me to report to the RAF at Cardington in Bedfordshire in mid-May, 1944. I had belonged to the RAF Cadet Force soon after leaving school and having been given the choice I opted for the RAF to serve in.
The weather during the next few weeks was warm and dry as I was initiated, with hundreds of other recruits, into the routine of parade ground drills and route marching and living with 20 other chaps in a Nissan hut. All this came to an abrupt end however as we left for a more permanent location at Skegness. We had become used to the sight of the enormous hangar near to the camp that housed an airship, probably the only one in the country, and it was this that we could see for some time as we sat in the back the three-ton lorries taking us to the east coast.

It was now early June as we arrived in Skegness and we were allocated accommodation in requisitioned houses 鈥� quite an improvement on the huts we had at Cardington.. We discovered that we were here for three months of basic training, in other words more of the same but probably a bit more intensive, and this it certainly was as we made regular visits to the firing range and the assault course, and went on long route marches. There were about 20,000 recruits being trained here and we were all in for a big shock before long. 鈥淒鈥� day took place within a short time of our arrival and there was much speculation that the war may be over before Christmas 鈥� the news was very promising at first but as our troops were unable to take Caen and got bogged down in the 鈥榖ocage鈥�, we were not so sure. In Skegness we were training hard and getting very fit, and most us were wondering when our training would start to be radar operators, aircraft fitters, and etc. Towards the end of the three months the bombshell was dropped. We all received a letter from the Air Minister to inform us that we would be taken out of the RAF and put into the Army instead. Astounded, but without
any means to appeal, we accepted the inevitable and we were taken off to various Army depots to exchange our blue uniforms for kharki

The changeover was made in late September in Huyton, Liverpool, and I was put in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. I had no connection with Wales but got on well with my new brothers in arms most of whom seemed to be named Jones. From Liverpool we were taken to a camp called Eglington in Northern Ireland. Londonderry was a few miles away. We were trained in much the same way as we had been in Skegness but the route marches always seemed to cover, or included a night on, boggy peatland.

In December our training finished and we knew that our next destination would in Europe. In the Ardennes the battle of the bulge was being fought in severely cold weather, and it was just as bad with heavy snow in the town of Newport in Wales where we arrived in late December. After embarkation leave we were taken across the channel and I set foot on the continent for the first time. We went by train across Belgium and we de-trained at Louvain. A march through this old town took us to a large gloomy barracks where we were to be held and sent to where we were needed to push the Germans back across the Rhine. Conditions were very primitve and probably not much different from those when it was in use during the first world war.

A list was posted each day giving names of those who were to move out of Louvain. One morning a notice was put up requesting names of people who had had clerical experience and I responded. To my surprise I was accepted and posted to the 1st Bucks Battalion who were stationed in Brussels in another large barracks near to the centre of the city. My duties would be in the Orderly Room, HQ of the Bn. For the time being the prospect of being sent north to the front was lifted. However, in early March we were sent north with the task of escorting civilian scientists and specialists in uniform to the front and sometimes beyond to investigate sites of military importance with possible secret programmes including nuclear weapons, rockets and submarines. We were called the 鈥楾鈥� Force. Such was the speed of our advance towards the Rhine that we soon found ourselves in a town called Haaksbergen, recently liberated, near to the German border.

Within a few days of the war ending officially on 8th May, the role of the 1 Bucks Bn changed again and we became part of the occupation force as we crossed the border into the Ruhr and passing unimaginable devastation. We set up our HQ in a coalmining town called Kamen, beyond Dusseldorf. There had been a bad coalmining accident here recently with many casualties. There had鈥檔t been much damage to the town and we were soon living in requisitioned houses and using the showers at the pithead.

Gen. Montgomery now changed the name of the Army from British Liberation Army to British Army of the Rhine. He also issued a non-fraternisation order which meant that we were to have no social contact with the Germans 鈥� this lasted six months.

The 1 Bucks Bn was disbanded and we were sent to a barracks in the Harz mountains, Bad Gandersheim, and put into another regiment, the 1st Bn Worcestershire Regt. Again my duties were in the Orderly Room. It was now 1946.

In the south, in Yugoslavia, Marshall Tito was threatening to take over Trieste on the shores of the Adriatic, and a large port. In response to this situation we were sent there to be on hand in case of trouble. And so I spent the next year or so in this area and actually moving for some months to Pula where I was promoted to Orderly Room Sjt.

It was from here in mid-summer, 1947, that I was given leave to return home to be married.

Soon after I returned to Pula the Bn moved back to Germany and we found ourselves in fairly modern barracks in Luneburg. In late 1947 my demobilisation number came up and I was sent back to York in the UK to be returned to 鈥榗ivvy street鈥�.

After the euphoria of being home again and out of uniform wore off it came as a shock to find that it was not going to be easy to find accommodation because of the housing shortage. I discovered that my job was indeed available to me with the publishing firm I was employed by before entering the army, but the wage they would pay me would be the same as I received on leaving. Now married with more responsibilities it was impossible for me to accept their terms and I looked around for another position. It became clear that jobs were few and far between and the future for a newly married couple was not going to be easy.

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