大象传媒

I was about 13-and-a-half when the war started. I was not very tall or big as a boy, but I was a patrol leader in the Boy Scouts in Westcliff on Sea. Our Scoutmaster was working a lot of overtime, and so we ran our own meetings until he arrived just before the end.

On Friday, 1 September 1939, the caretaker of the chapel hall where we met suggested that, in the circumstances, we should all go home and not have a meeting that night. We were well aware of the likelihood of war. As we gathered outside the hall, it was decided that the younger ones should go home and a group of us with bikes would cycle down to the ARP (Air Raid Precaution) headquarters in Southend to see if we could be of help.

We were soon helping with the sandbagging of the windows and entrance to the large house which had been converted to offices for the ARP Headquarters. We were there until 11pm or so before we were sent home.

The next morning, several of us returned, and we were soon integrated into the ARP system as messengers and tea makers, or given any other odd jobs they could find for us. Later I was sent off to an area office at the back of the Technical College hall, to act as their messenger and tea boy. I was proud that that my Scout training was being put to use in helping defend my country.

We were told that we couldn't go back to school because the air raid shelters had not been completed, so for most of a month I was busy running errands and making endless pots of tea, which seemed to be essential for the smooth running of the ARP.

It wasn't long before I was moved on to the College hall, in which a gas mask fitting centre had been established to supply all the people who had not bothered to get one the previous year. There I was, busy with the inevitable tea brewing as well as seeing that the various fitters had supplies of gas masks in different sizes. Queues of people went through that hall every day until eventually supplies of ready-assembled gas masks began to run out.

I was taken into a small room, where I was quickly shown how to assemble them with a small hand machine designed to stretch the rubber band which joined the rubber face piece to the canister. For several days I worked flat out, assembling masks until fresh supplies arrived.

Sadly, my war effort came to an end when we were recalled to school, but it has always remained in my memory that we, as Scouts, were trusted to do any job we were given without constant supervision, in those initial stages of getting the ARP up and running.

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