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Memories of an Artillery Gunner Part Two - Dunkirk, Wales and Coastal Battery 358

An interview with Mr. Jack Clifton conducted by Jenny Ford on behalf of Bedford Museum.

“We were on the beaches then and I must say contrary to what you read the Bedfordshire Unit didn’t stick together, I don’t know, there were groups of them but not in what I would call a properly organised Section. Anyway we were there and of course it was nice sitting by the sea there, it was lovely, the sun blazing down and that was on Monday. Monday was alright, Tuesday we were getting a bit hungry, oh yes then we knew we were adjacent to Dunkirk, you could see the Jetty sticking out and a blooming oil depot smoking like mad. It was smoking, well to my knowledge a week later.

Because we were there from Monday to Friday morning and anyway walked down the beach and there was one of these little shop things, you see at seaside places. It had been hit by a shell or a bomb and all the stuff was lying around and postcards, I picked up a couple of cards I was looking at them and suddenly ‘You’re looting!’ I looked round, I would say it was a 19 year old Second Lieutenant waving his revolver at me. I said, ‘They are no b….. good to anybody’ I said, ‘The place is bombed.’ ‘You’re looting!’ ‘Please yourself!’ I threw them down. Poor old boy he was panic stricken I think. Anyway we didn’t see many of the Regiment after that. Me and my friend Ron, we walked off. We went into Dunkirk and the Jetty there which is featured in lots of films was all lined up with troops and we were herded off, shoved off, ‘You’ve no business here.’ And there were the Guards - they went on, military precision with their rifles, tin hats, straight onto a boat and away. We wandered back and found a place with another Unit, an Infantry mob it was that were having a ‘brew up’. One thing with soldiers they always share and so we had a drink of tea and few biscuits and if I remember rightly a sandwich.

A great crocodile of us men were marching out, I say marching, paddling out to sea everyday, we were in water up to here, getting cold and wet from Bray-Dunes. It’s lovely dunes, lovely sand and we used to march out, paddle out up to our chest and boats used to come in and take off some and disappear and we’d wait there for next one but the next one never came. I remember on one occasion we got a bit fed up and we wandered further down the beach. We thought well we’ll get a bit further down and went further down and oh, it was a nice sheltered spot there. Oh, this is a nice spot so we sat down and a Unit had given us a bit of grub and we sat down there and we heard ‘fire’ we jumped out of skins we thought they were bombs but it wasn’t! We were sitting more or less under an anti-aircraft gun. I must admit it made us jump a bit. We decided to change our position never mind the shelter, we went back to where we where.

We went out and I think it was on the Thursday night, late evening and we got on a boat. We did get on a boat this time and we got the, I think it was Captain Wells, I may have been mistaken but it looked like him, we’d got him on board and another chap. I think his name was Sharp and he was the Chemist from the local Boots here and poor old lad he wasn’t physically strong at all he had been used to fixing up doses of medicine for Boots and he passed out and he was unconscious in this boat. Anyway, the chap rowing got us to the side of the boat that was going to take us off. And you know the scrambling nets that they let down the side of the boat, we had to all get off sharp. I remember sticking him over one shoulder and Ron got the other side of me and between us we got him up the scramble net and I must admit by the time we got nearly to the top my strength was going and I knew I was going to fall. And a chap said, ‘Hold on mate, hold on, hold on!’ He leaned over and he grabbed my collar and another grabbed hold of Sharp and pulled him off me on board and then we were helped over, good job too or we would have fallen.
Mind you I was very fit and although I say it myself I was very strong in those days and yes, I never saw him again, they took him off take him down below. We stayed on deck and passed out. A sailor came round and ‘Want a cigarette mate?’ Well I didn’t smoke, never had done so I said, ‘No’ but Ron was a smoker, he took one, put it in his mouth and I remember waking up and the cigarette was still in his mouth. We were being dived bombed! We’d passed out, just went to sleep just like that, straight away. I remember sitting on this hatch, I remember that, old Ron was there and he’d put the cigarette in his mouth and I don’t remember anything else until the noise of the guns anyway they didn’t hit and oh, a few hours later we set off and landed at Margate. Oh, what a relief it was! There the locals were lining the pier there with cups of tea and sandwiches and cigarettes, oh it was great you couldn’t believe your luck. Then we marched off to the station and believe it or not they made us march in step! Laughter! We got on the train and there was a whole train load of us and lots of them fell asleep again immediately and we did too just afterwards, but I remember saying, ‘I haven’t cleaned my teeth for a week!’ And I still had my toothbrush in my pocket so I wandered around and found some water in the toilet and did my teeth and I felt a lot better for that. I know it was a daft thing to do, but! When we woke up we were in WALES!

It was Caenarfon Castle. From there we were sent home. Given a ticket we had a short leave but nobody bothered with the ticket collector when we got to Bedford, we came into St.John’s Station, everybody just vaulted the fence there, the ticket collector … oih, oih! Of course I lived just over from the bridge from there. I’d never seen tears in my Dad’s eyes before but … I can’t be sure now whether we had a week’s leave it may have been 10 days. Then we went back to Caenarfon and I was paid 4 bob short in my money. I never did get it! They’d run out, all these troops coming back on leave so … that was it.

You couldn’t believe your luck to be back home. Quiet! Of course we were all fed up there in Caenarfon I must admit and the rest of lads had jokes with the seagulls, the seagulls used to raid us for food. So they used to get a bit of fat, tie a bit of string on it and another bit here and throw it up in the air and the seagull used to try to grab one bit that was hanging down and another seagull used to grab the other, all very wicked I know. We needed a bit of fun. We were there for a fortnight I think. There wasn’t much discipline there because old Ron and I used to disappear, well nobody knew, and we used to go walking over the hills, very nice. We climbed Snowdon and big notices at the bottom for the train, ‘Officers Only’ so old Ron and said, ‘We’ll walk up’ so we did, we walked up. When we got to the top there were a lot of officers there and a lot of other ranks, we walked up but we rode down by the train. Yes, it was a big relief. The population there were very, very good to us. The Welsh in some places are funny but they were very good to us. We used to go there and have a cup of tea and a cake, pay for it, get a cup of tea and a cake and the old ladies were in there too and if the old ladies left a cake, oooh, straight across the floor and - you didn’t want it to get stale! We were in tents, we had to sleep on the deck, on the ground but they didn’t supply us with sleeping bags or anything like that but anyway we were hardened. You get hard, if you tell somebody you slept on the deck, but you get used to it, yes! Anyway, that was it.

When we were at Caenarfon, same Regiment and then we were posted all over the show. I was posted to 358 Battery, that’s a coastal Regiment and Ron was posted to Edinburgh. He didn’t want to go to Edinburgh, so he came with me! But he was soon posted off again. He was lucky. We went to this Regiment and we were told we were going to man Coastal Guns and we didn’t know where, it was all hush, hush and we went off again in a train. Stop, start and we eventually finished up at New Romney in Kent, there was a railway station then, long since gone, we pulled up there and we were a mixed mob then. Not all Bedford boys, there were quite a few Bedford boys, Kempston boys but mainly people from other Regiments and Regulars, a tough lot some of them were too. Anyway we fell in there and we were marched about two miles down …

It was a Coastal Defence Regiment, Head Quarters at Dover and we were on the outskirts of Dymchurch and we marched in and they had two guns there manned by Marines. I won’t use the adjective they used but anyway we were very lucky according to them with the right adjectives to be posted there and they felt they were very lucky to get out of it! - ‘It’ll drive you mad here, mate!’ Anyway we took over from the Marines and we were issued with .303 Lee Enfield rifles, we were very lucky because they were in short supply then, and we were given 75 rounds of ammunition and we were taken to the guns. They were 6’ last war Naval guns and we had, you won’t believe this, 16, one - six, rounds of ammunition per gun! And we were given with our .303’s 75 rounds of .303 and in front of us, between us and the Germans - was one roll of wire, this round wire and that was it! The Marines, as I say, they marched off and called out various rude remarks and how lucky we were and off they went. And then of course you get the lectures then, about what you’d got to do and how lucky we were to be there, all the old blah! The Germans were likely to invade the country and we were there to ‘see them off’ and I said to the Major, a chap from Manchester he was, I said, ‘We haven’t got much ammunition’ I said ‘16 rounds! In your talk just now you said when we get proficient with the guns we can get off 8 rounds a minute,’ ‘ah, yes’ he said, ‘but you’d never do that in action, there’d be less than that.’ I said, ‘Alright then, three minutes firing then what would we do?’ ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘don’t worry. We’ll send Driver Edwards down to Dymchurch for some more shells!’ And I thought to myself ‘who is he kidding?’ I’ve never forgotten his words and I just couldn’t believe it. Shortly after that poor old Driver Edwards was killed. He was a Bedford lad. I think, if I remember rightly, his wife had just had a baby or was just expecting one, I know a baby came into it. He was the chap that would have driven the Scammell lorry we had for the ammunition. This lorry wouldn’t have held more than three dozen rounds because they were heavy, they weighed a 100 lbs. each.

We were there and at first it was lovely. We didn’t see any Germans, didn’t see any aircraft and you could see Dover just down there and Folkestone. Dover was our Head Quarters and there was Hyde, it was a holiday camp, it was very nice beautiful sunny weather and then one day it started! An old fighter came whizzing over us and he dropped a bomb which fortunately landed the other side of the road. At the other side of the road was a big house and it landed in the drive, mind you there were no civilians there, all evacuated. So then we had to take more care but until then we used to set, I’m sure the War Office don’t know this, but we used set fishing lines on the beach. Bait them when the tide came in and when the tide went out, ooh, there were all sorts of fish there, plaice, cod, so we used to take them to the Cook House and we used to have a good feed there. But then it was stopped. It was said that the German reconnaissance planes could see that there were no anti-tank precautions there, if they saw footprints on the beach they knew it wasn’t mined, so that stopped the fishing. They never did mine that beach but they came along eventually some months afterwards and put up anti-barge things, just pipes. You see them on the films about the French invasion, they were anti-tank, supposed to stop the tanks and barges and what not.

The beach wasn’t mined ever. Oh yes as I said, we had one roll of dannit wire in front of us and then when they put the anti-tank things in, the anti-barge poles, we’d been there some months before they did this, they then came along and strengthened the wire in front of us, these rolls. They put three, one either side and one on top and I thought to myself, ‘who the devil is that going to stop?’ All they have got to do is sling their overcoat over the top one and walk over! Apparently the military didn’t think of that! It was absolute madness we mustn’t fire our rifles, conserve ammunition. Actually I did fire mine on one occasion. I fired at a German plane that was very low, I thought ‘I’ll get you!’ I didn’t bring it down! We were there, a few of the boys, we had lots of aeroplanes over us and when they did London I’ve never seen so many aeroplanes in all my life that came over, the sky was absolutely full of them. They reckoned there was 800, I don’t know who counted them but that’s what they reckoned when they came over.

But we were bombed and a few casualties. I had a charmed life. I came off duty one morning, I’d been on nights and I thought well I’ll go and have a bath, wake me up. In this hotel, it was only a beach thing not a brick building, I went in there and there was a section set off where there were washbasins and had three baths in it and at the other end of the corridor there were two more baths and I think they must have been for the 2nd class guests or maybe the staff, I don’t know, they weren’t nearly as good. Anyway I went into the best one and put my towel down and I whipped off for my soap and I came back and there was somebody else was there. I said, ‘Eh, that was mine’ ‘oh!’ he said, ‘it was empty, I’m in it.’ ‘Oh, you can have it’ he said, ‘I’ll go to the one down the corridor.’ Off he went and I got in the bath and ‘wham’ it went down, ‘wham’ we were being bombed! I was fortunate. I leapt out of the bath and you try getting dressed when you are soaking wet, it’s very difficult. I couldn’t get my trousers on! Anyway I dashed out of the cubicle and in came a Sergeant with blood streaming down his face and he’d been hit, well grazed actually, I went out the other bathroom was flat, a direct hit on that. Poor old boy in there, old Johnny Coates, a nice chap he was, a North Country boy he was, he used to love singing. I was the unlucky so and so that had to go and pick him up with another soldier. Whooooh, gave me the creeps it did and I thought to myself that could have been me, poor old Johnny. Yes we lost, I think it was 14 of us on that Battery at that ‘do’.

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