大象传媒

I was born on the 25th of May 1927. Thinking back to those days, in the early 1930鈥檚, motorcars were very rare on the road. At the end of the war when we were all celebrating VE day, I arrived home and my Dad said 鈥淭here are two letters for you here John鈥�. One was that I was playing for South Liverpool on the Saturday, that was a well known team in the south end of the city, and the other letter was a calling-up paper for the Army. So from 1945 to 1948 I was away from England. I spent about 12 months in Cairo and then I was in Jerusalem the other 18 months, just outside of it. So the war for me lasted from 1939 until 1948 which was a long war.

They were interesting times, I was called up in the East Yorkshire where we鈥檇 done the training and then one night we were all called up to board a train. We didn鈥檛 know where we were going but we finished up in the docks at Southampton. From there we got on a ship and again we didn鈥檛 know where we were going, we were on there for three weeks. We made a stop at Malta, and one or two islands like but we eventually finished at Port Said.

From there we went into a transit camp, the East Yorkshire regiment was hard-working. We were playing football in this transit camp and had to go on dock police duty for the military police. So, I volunteered and was selected to go and we moved to a little village just outside Suez, there was a military police camp there with about 4 tents. But I couldn鈥檛 believe it, there was two tables with fruit on, that was absolutely unbelievable! There was bombing all of the time. With the weather being so good out there it was almost like being in a hotel away from the East Yorkshire Regiment. You had to learn a bit about the Egyptian law, if one of our lads was arrested by Egyptians you had to go to the police station and there were certain things you had to do to get your man out of the jail.

Anyway back to the police, I was in the football team there, the results of the team were put in the national Egyptian mail. I was known as 鈥楤enno鈥�, short of Bennison, by a fellow called Ted Lloyd he鈥檚 now in Australia. I also remember at the time how there were hundreds maybe thousands prisoners of war, Germans and Italians, who were just wandering around, waiting to be taken home.

'This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by 大象传媒 Radio Merseyside鈥檚 People鈥檚 War team on behalf of the author and has been added to the site with his / her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.'

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.