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In 1938 I went to Avery Hill, (near South End Pond) Eltham to join up. I took the oath of allegiance and I got a shilling, but when I went to the first drill night I was told I wasn’t old enough. Well, I wanted to join up, to be a territorial, so I went to Mayplace Road, Bexleyheath, 331 company Royal Engineers, and I served from 1938-42 with them. My eldest brother was also in the Royal Engineers. He was a Major in a holding company which did repairs for people in the line. Another brother was in the RAF, a Warrant Officer One, a Wireless Operator. He was killed in a bombing raid over Peenemunde, Germany. My sister was in the ATS.

1939 the war started and in August I got called up with ten men and a vehicle with a searchlight, and went to a place called Stanford-le-Hope in Essex. Any aircraft coming over, you had to identify them and get your searchlight on them to give the ack-ack guns a chance to see where it was. Winter 1940 was absolutely freezing. In Essex there was so much ice you couldn’t walk, nothing could even drive on the roads. You’d think you were living in the arctic.

Then I got made a Lance Sergeant and another sergeant from the headquarters company and I went down to Taunton Manor Barracks with loads of other people from all over England who were there to see if they were going to pass the examination to become instructors to instruct people straight from civvie street. After a month I passed out. I went from there to Devizes in Wiltshire in the Norton Manor Barracks. The Wiltshires were one side of the road, and we were the other. I trained squad after squad after squad. Eventually we’d trained so many men that they had enough and all the instructors with the exception of me and eight men got turfed out to various units, and the CO was also moved elsewhere. This was early 1943.

I wrote to the CO and he said well, I got to start a Special Forces unit and I know I can trust you, will you come and you will sort the people out. So I joined 130 Special Forces. If you’d wanted to be in it, you’d apply and they put you through certain things, and if you passed we took you on. Then you took an oath of allegiance to your country to say you would not tell anybody, even when you left the unit, what you’ve been doing. We were 130 in all: a major, a captain, a lieutenant, fourteen sergeants of which I was a senior, fourteen corporals and fourteen lance corporals and the rest other ranks. The majority of them were trained experienced wireless operators. They knew how to look after mechanical and electrical equipment. We went all round England training. Every week it was a training exercise right up to the week before we left. Whatever they were doing, I used to see they were doing the right thing. They were very, very good blokes indeed.

After a time we went up to Scotland. We were there to make the Germans think we were going to land in Norway, which was a red herring. We used to get planes going over and they used to clock us, there’s no question about it. We were practicing landings at various coves each day, only to find our PT instructors waiting for us. Their first words were ‘strip to the waist’. I can assure you it was extremely cold. This went on day after day for four months: November, December, January, February. We returned each day to Dornoch.

At the end of February ’44, the CO called for me to arrange us leaving Dornoch to go to Carlisle and from there to York, our base. At York, the CO requested I select ten men to go, with a Military Police escort, to Gosport, Hampshire. I called everyone on parade, after numbering from the right, selected all even numbers to go to Hampshire, including me. We arrived at Gosport at 12am. I reported to the l/cmdr of the craft we were to board. He instructed me, to be fully equipped on deck during the hours of daylight. The navy really looked after us: plenty of good food and good beds—but daylight hours on deck. This went on for eight days. It was now well into the middle of March. My lads asked if they could get 48 hour passes, as we had not been home for eighteen months. The l/cmdr said on one condition, that anyone failing to report to their unit after 48 hours he would personally see they were punished. I am please to report, all returned to York.

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