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My name is Peter Bailey. I was born in 1916. I was in the Surrey Police Force from 1937. When we were called up, another colleague of mine, we both decided we’d like to be Churchill Tank drivers.

We finished up going to a squadron, I don’t remember the name of it now, and there we started all this ‘funnies’ training. The ‘funnies’ are the armoured engineers of the 79th Armoured Division.

There was the Snake and the Conger. The Snake were lengths of tubular steel about this long, which you used to pack with gelignite with wooden ram rods like Swiss Rolls, and the cord went through it. I don’t know how they did this. They were all screwed together, you had to run with them because everything was done running in those days, and these pipes, they rested…, there’s a button there. They rested on that button, and it didn’t half hurt. Two of you used to run with these pipes. I think they were about 15 feet long each bit, and they were all joined up in a length, I forget how many hundreds of yards or whatever it was, and they were all connected, screwed together with what they called a firing box in the middle, somewhere, or towards the tail end, so that should they fail to explode with the press of a button, you could fire them with a machine gun at this box and set it off. And that was for blowing a channel through a minefield. If you needed more than one, well then, one would go in and do his job and then another one would go in and push another snake further on.

But then they changed it to the Conger, and that was one of these Bren Gun Carrier sort of things, stripped out, and where the engine had been was a cistern, a cylinder. On the right were two compressed air bottles, on the left there was a stack of hose pipe, like fire-brigade hose pipe but slightly smaller, and it was stacked in a way so that it went down in a box. Above was a rocket-launcher, and one end of the hosepipe went onto the rocket and the other end was connected to this big cistern. The big cistern in the middle had nitro-glycerine and the two compressed air bottles.

The Churchill tank to give protection to the poor NCO who was in this carrier on his own, drove up to the edge of the minefield, because the Germans put little flags there to tell you, but this is all on Worthing Downs at the back there, pulled up at the minefield so the tank was protecting this poor sod behind a bit, and then he fired the rocket, and then he turned on the nitro-glycerine, then the compressed air which sent the nitro-glycerine up the hosepipe, pressed the button and blew a passage through the minefield. That worked all right, did the same thing as the snake but the trouble was, delivering the nitro-glycerine.
And out in France, apparently there was a squadron in harbour as they called it, if you went into a field, that was harbour, or into a wood, that was harbour, and the Canadian General Service Corps or whatever you call it who do all the donkey work, were delivering nitro-glycerine in these cans or whatever, driving into rough country, blew up and all the tanks were… because they were all loaded with Petard bombs. You had about twenty or twenty-eight in a tank those bombs, so that was the end of the Conger being used any more.

622 words.

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