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This story has been submitted to the People’s War website by Anne Wareing of the Lancashire Home Guard on behalf of Arthur Metcalf and has been added to the site with his permission…

I became a sergeant in the Royal Engineers after volunteering in 1940 through a motorcycle journal. I got a letter from the War Office to go for a medical in Blackburn,I passed A1 and went to the regiment in Mill Hill in London.

I was offered a place in the Irish Guards, but I outfaced the officer who had tried to make me join, turning the offer down in favour of the Royal Corps of Signals.

They put me on a battery in Lyme Regis, in the company office, not on the guns I had been trained for. I just wasn’t suited to office work; I had never used a telephone in my life before and couldn’t cope with it. I ended up in trouble after giving the wrong instructions, nearly sinking a boat in the Channel!

They moved me to the next battery with the T.A.’s from London. They were 6inch naval guns. I wanted to go on a course to be a gun artificer, but the battery sergeant stopped me because I was the best loader. This made me be awkward and I refused to obey an order one day, something about installing barbed wire or sandbags. I was threatened with a charge, from ‘Tiger’ the battery Sergeant Major. I ended up being marched in front of the Captain and the charge was read out, but dismissed, as there were irregularities. I got away with it, but later the Captain had a word. He stopped our landlady turfing out my wife and child.

I got offered a place as a dispatch rider, because I could ride a motorbike. I came home on leave first, but one of the Londoners got the job while I was away.

I made a model of a Lancaster bomber and the Sergeant Major and some of the officers wanted one, so they offered to ease my workload to give me time to make them.

But before I could do them, I was posted to the Royal Engineers in Hampshire, then up to Scotland. I did a training course at Leeds, which I passed with flying colours.

At Longmoor on my return they formed a new company, 980 IWT (Inland Water Transport), which could do anything. I was in my element and stayed with them until 1946.

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