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My name is Bert Meakin and I was a gunner with the 51st Medium Regiment, Royal Artillery. Having been evacuated from France at the time of Dunkirk My regiment (51st Medium, Artillery) was assigned to guarding internees on the Isle of Man. The hotels on the sea front in Douglas had been fenced in and out regiment had the task of guarding the residents to make sure they didn’t stray. This lasted for about 8 weeks before other troops came to replace us. During this time I didn’t manage to do any guarding, I went on a PT instructors’ course with taken by C.B. Holmes the 100yards record holder at the time and a sergeant in the Army. Every morning before breakfast all the men were taken to a car park in the centre of Douglas and we instructors led daily exercises. I was billeted in a guest house on circular road and kept in touch with the owner for a long time after the war.

We were next moved to the North West coastal defence. The regiment was split into 3 groups and I was assigned to defending the Ribble estuary and shipping passing on their way to Preston. We had a 4 inch Naval Gun in an emplacement in Lytham where I was also billeted. All shipping passing us had to show certain flags as a code to allow them to pass. If any forgot we gave them a shot across the bow to wake them up but never had to fire in anger. We stayed in a guest house and next door Arthur Askey, the entertainer, was staying during the summer season while he appeared at Blackpool. He provided us with our own entertainment and was great fun.

In December 1940 we mover to Ellesmere, Shropshire, and the regiment came back together. We received new equipment to replace that that had been lost in France. It was basically the same 6 inch howitzer but on pneumatic tyres rather than iron wheels. On exercises these proved to be dangerous, when fired they would bounce all over the place and you took your life in your hands to be near one.

We were assigned to fire watch duties in Liverpool and Birkenhead and spent 3 nights out of 5 on the roofs of warehouses dealing with incendiaries with sand and stirrup pumps. This lasted for over a month before we were sent down to Bedford in March 1941.

At Bedford we received new and modern guns 4/5s and 5/5s firing 60 and 100lb shells, much better than anything we had used before. The training was better and much more intense. We went on joint exercises with other groups and this lasted over a year until June 1942. During this time we got a reasonable rugby team together and played other forces teams; and leave was available, I managed 2 spells of 7 days.

In June 1942 we received orders to move. We knew we were off either to Burma or the Middle East but knew no more than that. We went to Liverpool and embarked on a Dutch vessel Sibajak but after 20 minutes sailing on of the turbines blew up and we had to return to port Camel Laird engineers ‘fixed’ the problem overnight and we sailed the next day only for the same thing to happen. We were sent back to our Billets in Bedford, which were still empty for 2 weeks while they fixed the ship properly. So 2 weeks later is was back to Liverpool and we sailed to Greenock, Scotland to meet up with a convoy. When we got there the convoy had left so we waited and eventually set off for Gibraltar with a Hospital ship and a corvette as escort. From Gibraltar we sailed on our own to Freetown to meet a convoy, but had again missed it so had to wait another 2 weeks for another convoy. We eventually sailed with 30 other vessels to Durban arriving hungry as we had run out of food and survived the last few days on pickles and hard biscuits. We were in Durban for a couple of days before sailing on a British ship Altmark which took us to Suez; the journey had taken us a total of 14 weeks We went to a transit camp outside Cairo and met our guns that had got there before us.

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