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The 110th Manchester

In about March 1939 the 52nd (Manchester) RA, TA, Regiment, with HQ at Ardwick Barracks, appealed for recruits. The appeal was so successful that a 2nd line regiment was formed – 110th Manchester. This is the regiment my father, Denis W Pursglove, joined in April 1939. Between then and September 1939 most evenings and weekends were taken up with drills at an old mill building. In July the regiment went by train to spend 7 days in a tented camp at Tilshead on Salisbury Plain. My father remembers that the weather was hot and sunny, and the food ‘pretty awful’. The Regimental Quartermaster Sergeant, whose name was Jeanes, had little idea of open-air cooking in bulk. My father remembers the following from 110 Regiment:
Lt-Col Dane (or possibly Dehn)
Major Horace Laing (a hotelier from Prestbury)
The Adjutant, Capt F. Harris
Capt Jim S. Robertson
Second Lieutenant Hellewell
Capt Lou Evans (whom my father was to meet again at Almaza in Egypt. In civilian life he was an insurance man).
Lieut Derek Bannister (whose wife, Nan, worked with my mother in the District Bank, Manchester)
Lieut Wandford
RSM French
BSM Carney, Baker, Fraser
Sgts Houghton (an old Hulmeian, like my father), Gadd, Grimshaw, Halliday, Yates (who was a signaller), Cantley, Maguire, Stevenson

On 1 September 1939 the regiment was ‘embodied’ i.e. called up to join the proper Army. They took the King’s shilling at Sunny Brow School on Hyde Road, near the Lake Entrance to Belle Vue.
This latter venue, comprising zoo, gardens and dirt-track stadium, was commandeered by the regiment between September 1939 and January 1940. Those on all-night guard duty were treated to the alarming sounds of the animals’ dawn chorus!
My father lost touch with 110 Regiment until a chance meeting in Belgium, when they were part of 59 Division. However he did meet J D (‘Joe’) Cantley again after the war. Cantley, in 1939, was a barrister aged 30 who somehow missed being commissioned in the TA. He subsequently went to 125 OCTU, Ilkley and finished the war as a senior officer in the Judge Advocate’s Department, Algiers. Later he was appointed a High Court judge and knighted. Joe Cantley married a Mrs Gerard, the widow of Denis Gerard. Her son, Peter Gerard, worked at Woolcombers in Bradford, and through him Judge Cantley renewed contact with my father. My father remembers Joe Cantley as ‘a very nice man’. Joe Cantley died aged 80+.

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