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Memories of a Sapper, Royal Engineers Part One 鈥� TA Call-up 1/9/39 - 248th Field Company, Bedford to Iraq in 1941.

Part one of an oral history interview with the Hon. Alderman Bill Astle conducted by Jenny Ford on behalf of Bedford Museum

鈥淚 worked at W. H. Allen as an apprentice fitter. In April 1939 I joined the Territorial Army, Royal Engineers, Ashburnham Road, Bedford when I was 18 and 8 months old. I joined 248th Field Company. I was later transferred to 286th which was also a Bedford Company, that was made up during the war. Subsequently I left them and I had various Units that I was transferred to - every other branch of the Service does the same thing.

I actually was called-up two days before the war broke out, on September the 1st to Ashburnham Road, we were told to report there, Ashburnham Road, Bedford, 248th Field Company. The 248th Field Company subsequently went to France and came out - via Dunkirk, they came back.

If you were a certain age you were kept with a Field Company if you were under that age you were sent to either a non-combatant unit or a Training Battalion. Some of the younger ones, not too younger than myself incidentally, they went to Training Battalions and some went on, at that time, Searchlights. The Searchlights were taken away from the Royal Engineers and subsequently given to the Royal Artillery. We all did training but I did training with the 248th Field Unit, the Field Company that I was in. I didn鈥檛 have to go to a Training Battalion as you all did your training in the Unit you were with irrespective of what arm of the Service you were. We drilled and learnt the bridge building, mines, demolitions all that sort of thing. A Field Company鈥檚 job incidentally was mine lifting, a major part of it. It is a very dangerous job! And of course bridging, Bailey bridging or folding boat bridging or composite bridge, make it of whatever you could get hold of.

We had a cook come with us, an old sweat and I mean an old sweat, his name was Swaine. Everything he cooked other than sweets of course, he put an OXO in so he became known as OXO Swaine, everything was OXO. And one day we were down at Leiston in Suffolk, we had been laying mines and it was a bitter, bitter winter and they erected anti-invasion scaffolding up in the sea and we came back and he said, 鈥極h, you are alright tonight I鈥檝e got a dish here we used to make in China鈥� and it was herrings in tomato sauce in rice! And of course everybody felt highly delighted having been frozen stiff and then you come home to herrings in tomato sauce in rice, that was one of his inventions you know. He used to play poker dice in the local pub with the Policeman. He beat the Policeman hands down, he was a bit wider than what the Policeman was. OXO Swaine, an odd looking character and he was the Sergeant Cook. However, OXO disappeared somewhere eventually, due to his age I suppose, to the depot somewhere and we soldiered on, so we soldiered on.

I was sent down for a course to Gorse Road, Park Royal, London on a Fitters course in order to have a Rolls Royce certificate that I was a Fitter and that鈥檚 where I met my wife. We were married in 1942 during my embarkation leave. That was early 1940 I should think, about 1940 time, early 1940. We were then stationed at Fornham Hall, Fornham Park, Bury St.Edmunds and that was later demolished. It looked like a sort of, oh, like Woburn Abbey I suppose, and it was later demolished because of it being a landmark. And incidentally we moved from Bedford to Fornham Park and we were the first people that had occupied it as occupiers. A caretaker lived there. We were the first since the First World War when it was the same Unit that moved in, the 248th Field Company from the First World War was also billeted there. And it was a weird place. If you can imagine something like Miss Haversham鈥檚 place in Great Expectations - that was the same. Four poster beds, sheets etc. still on the beds and when you tried to pick them up they fell to pieces in your hands. Also, it had a library in there, a very big library and when the door closed in the library you got lost because you couldn鈥檛 see the way out, it was part of the book display, it disappeared. It was on telly a little while ago, a family called Gillstrap used to live there but the Queen stayed there as well. It still had the furniture in and I felt a pang of regret when they removed all the furniture that was in there and put it in the cellars down below. But there is another humorous bit to that - in the cellars down below there were a lot of bottles in racks and they still had the stuff in them going back to, probably the 1890s or something like that and they made us smash all the bottles. Because we all had a drink, the snow was on the ground and some of us went to sleep underneath the trucks in the snow, they made us smash all the bottles.

You never ceased to train. You were always on demolitions, live demolitions and studying mines as they were discovered. Sometimes later on you found yourself dealing with one that you鈥檇 never dealt with before and to say the least your hands used to shake a bit because at any time they could go off. We had one called an 鈥楽鈥� mine, a German mine and that was the shape of a jam jar. It was metal and it had an inner canister the case it had three prongs on the top and if you stood on it, it jumped about to shoulder height and it went off and the original ones had three hundred ball bearings inside.

The Major that commanded the Field Company was Major C. M. Wells of the brewing family, later to become Lieutenant Colonel Wells. Both Companies were Bedford Companies. They had a surfeit you see of volunteers so they formed another Company you see. A peace time Army doesn鈥檛 consist terrifically of what its war time strength is, because its war time strength is made up by Reservists or Territorial Army. In fact, it maybe of interest to know that both the 50th Northumbrian Division which I was in for a bit and the 51st Highland Division, a Scottish Division, were both Territorial Army Divisions and as such the basis of them were all like me, pre-war amateur soldiers if you like to call it that. You soon became a professional the hard way (laughter!) but we were all, people sometimes if they wanted to take the mickey out you they called you 鈥楽aturday night soldiers鈥� but it鈥檚 like that. It has also got a parity to it in as much one Rudyard Kipling wrote,

鈥楾ommy, tell me this and tell me that and tell me how is your soul?
But it鈥檚 a thin red line of heroes when the drums begin to roll.鈥�

We went to the north of England - you trained all the time. We went to the north of England, Morpeth, Sunderland, Birtley, around that way, up there. One of the jobs that I had up there, two of us went on, it was Invasion scare time and two of us went on the branch railway line, on a bridge which went to Boldon Colliery and the bridge was mined if you liked to call it that. It had the explosives there and we, two of us, me and a chap called Wollaston, we were put on there to put the, if necessary to put the detonators in to blow the bridge. Two of us were left on the bridge. And the funny part of that is that at time they formed the predecessors of the Home Guard, they were called the Local Defence Volunteers, the LDVs they were called then and they came down. We had nothing we just sort of slept under a bush the two of us, that was your lot or go under the bridge if it was too bad, the rain. These people had a tent and they even, you are not going to believe this - they even made a great fuss that they hadn鈥檛 got a butter dish so they found them a butter dish. And what they did do? Their cooking fire, great to our horror, we buried the detonators, obviously you couldn鈥檛 have them above ground so we buried them, we knew where they were but these people went and lit the cooking fire over the detonators! There was a great panic and we had to chuck water over the fire and excavate the detonators again! We buried them for safety actually. So that was another laughable incident.

I was subsequently posted from that Unit and went overseas. I went to another Unit and was posted overseas. I left the Unit at a place, we鈥檇 been there twice incidentally, a place called Shudy Camps which is near Bartlow, near Haverhill in Suffolk, it鈥檚 not too far from Cambridge actually. It鈥檚 near Bartlow which is on the Newmarket Line. And I was sent from there to Higham Heath where I joined another Unit. Higham Heath, just outside Bury St.Edmunds, and from there we went by train to Gourock, Scotland and then boarded the troopship and away I went overseas.

Well we went to India first. We went from Gourock, the convoy split in two, our half stopped to take on water at Freetown, Sierra Leone but we weren鈥檛 allowed ashore. It then went - my bit of the convoy then went to Cape Town and we went ashore and the people were very nice to us in Cape Town. And then we re-embarked and sailed for India so I finished up at, the boat docked at Ballard, Ballard Bombay. From Bombay we went up to a place that all soldiers make jokes about, a place called Deolali, yes because they used to take so long to get repatriated that they used to go round the bend! So they always refer to anybody who has unfortunately gone a bit that way, the Army word is Doolalli.

Anyway, we thought we were destined for Burma but we went from Deolali back to Bombay and we boarded the Lancashire, a troopship called the Lancashire and we sailed up the Persian Gulf to Basrah, Iraq. From Basrah we went north with the transport and some by rail and incidentally it was a narrow gauge railway there in Iraq, we went up Kirkuk where we had to build our own camp, there were no buildings there. You would never forget it - everything smelt of oil, crude oil, your clothes, the bed you slept in, your food the lot, all smelt of crude oil. What they did there to repair the roads - the very last dregs of refining, the very last dregs that were left in the refining process - instead of using tarmac they鈥檇 mix it with sand and put it on the road. And then, and in the winter you could see a tank go there and suddenly spin round like a gramophone record, it became slippy on the top.

Wherever you were you built your own accommodation, built your own stuff. What we generally used to do if we came across anything like a metal bed, anything like that we generally used to make sure that the local medical Corp got it, either put it in the hospital or something because they had to find the stuff from somewhere, from there.

We built over the River Zab, built Bailey bridges over the River Zab, over there and exercises. You do it all the time, even if you come out of the 鈥榣ine鈥� you still train, you still train. You could have an Infantry Unit come out of 鈥榣ine鈥� and you could find a mortar crew who had been firing, probably for two or three years, not all the time, I mean they had leave. When they came out of 鈥榣ine鈥� they were training them to do it, they had been training for two or three years and they went to lectures on how to do it and they鈥檇 been doing it for two or three years, the real thing. The same thing happened to us, refresher courses they used to call it, that鈥檚 how they got over it but you were doing the same thing. Mind you if it was a Mine School that was useful because there might be new mines they鈥檇 come across so that was useful.

I鈥檒l always remember it - the sheep that they had in Iraq were I suppose direct descendants of biblical sheep. You could eat the forequarters and the hindquarters and the other bit was just like a xylophone, there was no meat on it on the other bit. And the meat, if ever you got any there, there it had a horrible green shimmer to it. Although we did manage to get turkeys there at Christmas time, they had got those there, they have in the Middle East and chickens as well you know. We had a cook, he was a good bloke, but you see there was no Catering Corp then, they were ordinary blokes, our bloke was a bricklayer, the cook, a bloke from Bolton, Alan Ashton. Before we went abroad the King came and inspected us and that day the dinner was laid on. He never lived it down! And he made some pan cakes and there was like a bend in the pancake and it was like a shock absorber. Your teeth came apart again and he went down in history because he said, 鈥業 don鈥檛 know what you blokes are moaning at鈥� he said, 鈥榓ll the catering officer said was they wanted a bit more jam!鈥� And he never lived it down, his pancakes stayed with him forever. But he improved, he became alright. He was a lovely bloke. He was spotlessly clean. We had various ones. The last Unit I was with his name was Tommy Price and his people had a shop in London that used to make wedding cakes and cakes that looked like Cathedrals. And at the end of his shift, when he finished cooking, at the end of the day he used to take his whites off, wash them and he鈥檇 put a new set on the following morning, he never put the same ones on twice. He wrestled at Blackfriars, he was only a shortish bloke, Tommy Price spotlessly clean.鈥�

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