大象传媒

I was 18 years old in February 1937 and was considering my future which was not promising as there was so little choice of employment in those days in the North-East of England, in particular West Hartlepool. I was working as a 鈥榮pare hand鈥� at the local steelworks which involved relieving machine operators as required. The talk was that war was inevitable and I decided that I would join the army and choose my regiment rather than wait for call-up. I would do a few years in the forces and if war did not come, I would enter the police force perhaps.

I joined the 4/7th Royal Dragoon Guards at the cavalry barracks in Colinton, Edinburgh and in September 1938 was detached from my regiment to a motorised squadron attached to the Scots Greys in Palestine and served there until December 1939 when we were recalled to Britain for service in the BEF (British Expeditionary Force) in France. I was there for the period known as the 鈥榩hony war鈥� when nothing seemed to be happening. I was home on leave when the 鈥榖alloon went up鈥� with the invasion of Belgium by the Germans. Returning to France, things seemed rather chaotic and I did not reach my regiment before Dunkirk was cut off, and after a few false alarms, we were instructed to get out of France as quickly as possible. The roads were packed with refugees and were constantly being attacked by enemy aircraft. We could not get to any channel port and finished up at St Malo on the west coast and were taken off by a former holiday steamer and reached Southampton without being attacked.

In all the confusion, it transpired that my mum and my dad had been informed that I was missing, believed killed. Fortunately, I was allowed a telegram when I landed to inform them that I was okay so their agony was short-lived, thankfully. For a few months, I was posted to various places in Scotland while everybody got sorted out and organized. Then I was posted to Bovington Tank Depot in Dorset to help form a new Regiment from a decimated 1st Lothian Border Yeomanry who had a pretty rough time at St Valerie. The idea was to train up new recruits. Apart from that, we were in the first line of defence if Hitler had invaded.

During the Battle of Britain, I had a grandstand view of dogfights and saw planes falling from the sky. I remember one unfortunate flier plummeting to the ground with his parachute on fire. I don鈥檛 know whether he was British or German as I couldn鈥檛 see, but I was sorry for anyone dying like that.

For some months, we trained our new intake and then on 24th December 1940 I was home to get married in a manse in West Lothian. I was married at 7pm, a simple family affair with only my wifes鈥檚 brother as best man and her best friend as bridesmaid and the two of us of course, we were the only ones at the Church. The ceremony was in the vestry, there was no photographs allowed in the vestry anyway, because of the blackout regulations, which were very strict of course. It had to be in the evening to allow close family to attend because due to the restrictions to working in wartime, we weren鈥檛 allowed to take days off, unless we were very ill or something. It may seem strange to get married in a church at 7 pm on Christmas Eve but strange things went on during the war. At that time Christmas Day was almost a normal working day in Scotland, although things have changed since of course. This fact caught us out when we went to catch the train from Edinburgh to West Hartlepool because at that time you had to change at Newcastle. We caught the train nicely at 10 o鈥檆lock and arrived in Newcastle at 1am on Christmas Day and of course it was Sunday services in England apart from wartime restrictions and shortages. We found out there was no train to West Hartlepool until about 8 o鈥檆lock on Christmas morning. However, we were fortunate enough to get a milk train going from Newcastle to Sunderland, where a taxi driver took pity on us and took us to Hartlepool for about half fare, as we couldn鈥檛 afford full fare.

A few months later the regiment moved to Whitby and then to Helmsley in Yorks for actual tank training on the moors.

About May 1942, due to the heavy demand on our troops with the commitments the British had in Greece, Egypt, Cyprus and Crete, I was posted to Egypt and travelled packed like a herring in the Queen Mary, which was used as a troop carrier and sailed without convoy because of her speed. I remember it well, it was the best food I ever had in the war, because it had come direct from the USA, carrying GI鈥檚 to England and was full of Yankee rations.

One rather gruesome episode happened in the Queen Mary which might be worth mentioning. A week out of Britain, I had raging toothache. The Medical staff said they had not the proper facilities for filling, so they offered me either an extraction or to suffer until I got to our destination, and of course being in war time our destination was secret and we did not know where we were going or how long it would take to get there, although we could make an educated guess of course. So, I opted for an extraction. I was stuck in a chair and given a cocaine injection and they set to work. This was my first extraction, and this when I discovered that my molars were difficult to say the least, to shift. It took two men to hold me in the chair and the dentist hauling away for quite a while. Needless to say, I was not in a hurry to visit a dentist again for several years. We had to go round the Cape and round Africa to the Red Sea and landed at Port Said and then to Cairo. After a month or two in Cairo, training for desert conditions, I was posted to the 50th Royal Tank Regiment, which was a Liverpool Regiment, as a Tank Commander, fitted with the Valentine Tank, which I knew very well. The first real task of what to expect came during the German push for Alexandria, when I was under a Stuka dive-bombing attack. The noise was terrible. I felt like a pea in a whistle, dust and stones flying in on me, I was praying hard I can tell you.

Actually, shortly after I landed in Egypt, there was one rather unusual social event which happened when I went to the desert just before El Alamein. I had never met my wife鈥檚 brother, who was also in the Tank Corps, and I got word from my wife of his number and army address. I remember I did not have any writing paper at the time and sacrificed three pieces of my toilet paper rations (it wasn鈥檛 Andrex) to write to him. When I got a reply, it transpired that he was just a few miles away in a Field Depot. I somehow wangled transport to go and see him for an hour or two where we had a pint in the canteen and got acquainted. It can鈥檛 be often that a person meets their brother in law for the first time in a patch of sand in the 鈥淏lue鈥� as we used to call it.

More to follow on The Battle of El Alamein in Bill Williams鈥檚 War 2.

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