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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Bill Ross of the ‘Action Desk — Sheffield’ Team on behalf of Arnold Stone, and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr. Stone fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

Other parts to this story are at:
Part Two: A7748382

Part Three: A7748472

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My name is Arnold Stone and I was born at Rodley, which is a suburb of Leeds, on the 24th of February 1915 .

My experiences started in 1937. I had joined what was the Leeds City Tramways and Transport Department early in 1934 as a junior. This was a department of the Leeds Corporation that was concerned with the movement of people by the medium of trams and buses, and it was an integral part of the city’s life. Briefly, the undertaking was taking between 300,000 and 350,00 people through its fleet, which consisted of more than 300 tramcars and 75 buses that served at this particular time. I was involved as a junior in the tR.A.F.fic section of the organisation, which was responsible for the provision of the services and the control of the army of drivers, conductors and inspectors who were responsible for running the organisation.

It was in the first part of 1937 that the possibility of hostilities in Europe came a little nearer and it was decided by the government, that plans should be prepared for the evacuation of young children from the more populated towns and cities, so that they would be in a place of safety. Obviously a large part of the responsibility for this movement would rest on the local transport undertakings. I happened to be the person involved in the local transport scene who was given the responsibility of building up the program and liasing with the schools and other transport organisations to provide a plan that could come into operation at short notice. Basically the system worked on providing transport from the assembly points at various schools to the railway stations in the city centre (there were three in Leeds at this time), and also providing special transport direct to more local places such as Otley and Ilkley.

Meetings were organised at the various schools and the position was explained to parents and numbers were obtained as to the number of likely evacuees from the various schools, so that some general program of how they would be collected and how they would be dispersed could be arranged. This meant that I had to liase closely with the education department and other road transport undertakings and the railway companies so that a full and complete program could be devised. The details were all finalised and the full schedule regarding evacuations was completed in 1938. There the matter remained until late August of the following year when it became obvious that a start had to made on the evacuation of children from the various cities, and this took place on the Thursday and Friday of the week before war was declared. Thursday the 31st of August and Friday the 1st of September were the particular days. My superior officers told me that I had arranged the programme and it was my job to put it into force. I had 24hours notice or so to do this and I remember spending two very long and hectic days carrying out the programme which consisted of sending a specific number of trams or buses to a particular school to pick up the children and take them to the railway stations for movement to their safer destination by train. Other buses had to be sent to the schools to move children out to places which were nearer the city, but which were considered to be safe areas.

The number that we had given of the children likely to be moved were considerably greater than the numbers that actually travelled on the day concerned. No doubt this was probably due to the fact that many parents at a late stage had some misgivings and had decided that they did not want their children to be involved in this. We however could not anticipate that happening and we had to provide vehicles based on the numbers which we had been given and this involved a lot of to-ing and fro-ing with vehicles not being required at one particular point being switched to another. The major part of the work was done by bus, as by 1939 a considerable part of the tramway fleet had been put into disuse and buses had substituted on many routes. These were the more flexible way of dealing with this evacuation plan. Unfortunately coinciding with this was the call up of people from the Territorial Army. We had always encouraged our staff to be members and many of them enjoyed the facilities that were provided and the fortnight’s break which they got at a summer camps during the 1930’s.

Unfortunately when the time came, they had to leave their civilian occupation and report to various centres. It meant that at a time when we were at our maximum in evacuating school children and providing our normal level of daily services, we were losing drivers at the rate of some 15 to 20 each hour. However, the program was finally completed; there were a few snags and everyone appeared to be satisfied with the plan. It is perhaps interesting to note that over more recent years I have come into contact with people who were evacuated as children under this particular program. At that time I had no concept nor did I visualise the children leaving various schools in busloads with gas masks, suitcases and carrier bags. I could only try to ensure that the right number of vehicles were in the right places at the right time, to convey the right number of people to the right destination.

It is perhaps interesting to note that over a period of many years since the war, I have come across people who were evacuated under the program. None has ever complained that anything went wrong and I can only content myself with the knowledge that I did play a part in what was an important part of the war preliminaries. Some 50,000 or so children were moved safely to some other place as a first step.

The following day, it was back to the normal task of providing an adequate service of trams and buses, a procedure which changed considerably. I continued in the employment of the transport department for a few months and I was actively engaged in cutting back services on the grounds of fuel economy, or expanding services to meet the demands of people engaged in war time activities. I suddenly had a little spare time, but my wife Gladys and I were married at St Mary’s Church, Buslingthorpe on the 21st July 1940 and moved to a semi-detached house in Bramley, some 2 or 3 miles from where I was born. The reception was rather restricted due to food rationing and the like and the only accommodation available was at the school where Gladys’ father was the caretaker. We were joined by family and friends and I did manage to follow it by 4 days break at Morecambe. After that we should perhaps have been able to settle down to married life, only some 8 weeks or so after the event, I was called up for service in the Royal Air Force. This was a particular branch of the forces which I had expressed an interest in and by the middle of September of that same year, I found myself at number 7 recruit centre at Fadgate, near Warrington and I became AC2, my R.A.F. number 1-075203.

To say the recruit centre was something of a shock is perhaps an understatement. The only side that I could say I enjoyed was the physical one and I found myself plunged into an entirely different world. During our 7 weeks or so at the recruitment centre we were graded into grades and I was classed as a Clerk — general duties and that was the occupation that I was supposed to follow during my service with the Air Force.

This led me to my first posting, which was to the R.A.F. Records office at Ruislip. This was an old R.A.F. station which had always been the focal point for the keeping of records and my task, along with that of many others, was to report for duty at a particular block each morning when we were given a list of numbers and we then had to extricate from many boxes of files, the record card for that particular person so that suitable entries all round could be made on the record. This took the greater part of the day, and then in the evenings, we had to reverse the process and to put the cards back into the relevant boxes. To say that this was an exacting or an exciting task would be an exaggeration, and had it not been for the fact that we were billeted out at Ickenham, it could have been extremely tedious.

I did feel that my war effort was not a very great one and in our conversation with my old employers back in Leeds, I indicated what I was doing and I was rather surprised when they sought to get my release from the forces to return to what they regarded as a more essential occupation with the Transport Department. There was plenty there to keep me going, including the provision of special services to the Royal Ordanance factory at Barnbull to the Avril works, which were being constructed at Yeadon, and to be many other places which had switched over to war time production. To the same time all the services were cut back, public transport for instance, ceased to operate from 9p.m. and some very limited services were operated on Sundays. There were staffing problems due to the many men who were called up into the services and the employment of women on a large scale began.

I found myself involved in a variety of things as, for instance, when there was an air raid on the West Leeds area in 1941 and Woollenden Bridge had to be closed to tR.A.F.fic for several days due to the presence of unexploded bombs. This meant that the tramway services to the whole of west Leeds could not continue and we had to obtain buses from other undertakings. Very few people can perhaps recall this, but buses from the West Yorkshire Road Company, from Huddersfield, Halifax, Hull and even Todmorden were borrowed at very short notice and helped to supplement services at very short notice until the trams could resume operation. This sort of thing and many other emergency measures kept me fully occupied, and the Air Force did grant two further 6 month extensions to my release so that in all, I was back in the City and at home for some 18 months.

During this time I had to help in other things and became a member of ‘T’ Company of the 8th West Yorkshire Battalion of the Home Guards. ‘T’ Company consisted entirely of transport personnel. Our basic duty was to defend the premises and properties of the City’s Transport Dept. Membership of the Home Guard meant that I was still a serving member of the Royal Air Force, I was also in khaki, so had the rare distinction of serving in two different branches of the armed forces at the same time. In addition to all this, my wife and I were members of the Local Warden Services and put in regular appearances whenever warnings were sounded. It did mean that on some occasions, our sleep was more limited but I never objected to this. I was for one brief period recalled to the R.A.F. but it was found that an error had been made and I served for exactly one hour at the Headquarters of 51 Group, before a telegram was received saying I should be back with Leeds City Transport, so it was a question of in and out very quickly.

When I was recalled for service with the Royal Air Force, I was surprised to find myself posted to the staff of the Regional Transport Commissioner at Leeds. I should explain that under war time conditions the Regional Transport Commissioner, who was previously, in peace time, the Chairman of the Transport Commissioners, had two small units of the Army and the Royal Air Force within his offices. Their duties generally were to liase with him under his staff and to ensure that any problems were quickly and easily dealt with. The Army staff generally dealt with convoy movements through the area and close contacts with the various ordinance branches and in the R.A.F. It was a question of co-ordinating movements within the area so far as R.A.F. convoys were concerned, and liasing with the police on the passages of long loads, which included a crashed or damaged aircraft being carried on the 60ft long loaders (a feature of the R.A.F. transport at that time), and also the co-ordination of road transport movements so that vehicles which had brought traffic north to the Humber Estuaries for loading onto the Russian convoys could be found return loads to the South of England, from for instances the Avril factory at Yeadon or the Royal Ordinance Factory at Barnbull or from other large firms concerned in all production.

Both the Army and R.A.F. units were also involved in the larger rail transport movements. The Army Unit consisted of 4 people and was under the control of a Major, whilst the R.A.F. unit was under the control of a Squadron Leader who had the assistance of a clerk and a despatch rider. I found myself the clerk to a Squadron Leader who had fought in the First World War and who didn’t know a great deal about movements generally, but who was a most helpful senior officer. I was given the rank of Corporal and I enjoyed my stay there and found the work interesting, if not exacting. At the same time, it gave me the facility to do a bit of unofficial helping out of the Leeds City Transport staff with the scheduling and the like. We also built up a very good relationship with a number of people, including liasing with the local police about a convoy and long vehicle movements, and we were successful in finding return loads for most of the vehicles that had come up from the South of England to the Humber Port.

Part Two is at: A7748382

Pr-BR

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