大象传媒

November 28 1939

"You'll have to shave your beard off sir." said the recruiting sargeant, and it was a long time before anyone called me sir again.

When war broke out I met two of my old school friends who were both in the RAF and they told me to join too, as they said that the food was very good and so was the accommodation - no sleeping in trenches or dugouts.

However in November 1939 they were not taking any airforce or navy recruits and all they could offer me at Romford was the Coldstream Guards and the RASC for which they had 16 clerical vacancies and 4 drivers! I thought driving might be best as at least I would not have to do any marching and would be out of the rain! As I had to be a proffessional driver, a lorry driver or a chauffeur, so I decided on the latter, as I only had driven an Austin 7 before the war.

On my signing on papers I was registered as a chauffeur!

I had to report in December to the Norfolk Hotel, Cliftonville, which I thought was promising, but when I got there it was stripped to the bare boards abd there was no heating!

6 of us shared one bare room, a barber, a bell-boy from the Comerland Hotel in London, a chauffeur, a tea planter from Ceylon, myself, and Joe Finn, a very powerful man who had been a stoker in the navy during te first world war, and since then a member of the Shanghai Police where he was known as the toughest man. We took many of his stories with a pinch of salt, but strangeley enough 3 years later in Meerut, India, I met the wife of the chief of Shanghai Police and she confirmed everything Joe had told me!

There were 750 recruits there and that first day the food was so terrible there was nearly a mutiny. Breakfast was 2" square of bacon, a spoonful of baked beans and half a slice of fried bread. Lunch was stew, two small pieces of meat a few bits of carrot and a potato. Tea was a slice of bread and margarine and a piece of yellow cake!

Apparently the army had catered for 250 men and 750 turned up. They sent 250 back home on leave the next day, followed by the others so I was home on leave 3 weeks after joining the Army.

1939/40 was one of the coldest winters oin record and we did all our drill on the promenade and sands and with the north wind blowing all the time we were frozen stiff. 15 died of pneumonia over christmas and at one timethere were less than 200 men on parade out of 750.

About 4 weeks after my first leave I was sent home for what was called embarkation leave but when I came back I found that I had been posted to No 3 Bridge Co. RASC. Our lorries carried all the material tneeded for the Engineers to build bridges. We moved to private quarters in Margate. Bloody awful they were too and after a month moved to a delightful private hotel in Westgate.

The hotel was owned by an ex-Captain of the Romford Golf Course and we had many mutual friends. Right opposite was a pub called the Nottingham castle whose landlord used to live in Harold Wood and was a neighbour of one of the masters at West Ham Art School where I was for 3 years.

After about 3 weeks I was sent home on another embarkation leave which was cutshort as the BEF was in full retreat in France.

All our lorries were parked on the front and side streets of Westgate and as nos 1 and 2 Bridge Coys had lost all their equipment we had to be moved to a safe spot, and Walingford was chosen.We were told it was a little village with 1 pub, but it turned out that there were 14 others all within about 5 minutes walk.

I spent 2 years there and thoroughly enjoyed it. On our second night there we met Colenel Gale who had been O.C. of the 4th Royal Berks Regt in France but was discharged as being too old, so he had taken over the local home guard - a real "Dad's Army"

Wallingford had a very fine "men only" club which everyone from the local poacher to the Town Mayor was a member and on out third night the Colenel took my pal, Jimmy Gordon and muself there and made us both members. We had been there a week before any of our officers were made members!

Col. Gale and his wife were very good to me. I spent 2 christmases with them and every Sunday I would have a bath and tea with them, and I saw them on many evenings at the pub. Everybody in Wallingford knwe the Colenel and I made many firends there.

Back to Work!

I was in H.Q Company and was a spare driver and fatigue man and it was then I found out that I was fairly god at organising things, but before that after 2 weeks at Wallingford we were suddenly all sent down to Portsmouth on one Thursday to go over to France. On Friday morning we were at the docks and all our equipment was being loaded on a boat and we had to listen to soldiers coming back and telling us that we would never be able to land as the Germans had already captured the French Ports

On Friday afternoon all our stuff was taken off the boat and on Saturday we returned to Walingford.

The Saturday papers had large headlines saying that we were the new BEF that was actually in France fighting to stop the German advance on the Chanel Ports. The infantry were our drivers lined up in threes with rifles slung. The motorcycle troops were our 40 dispatch riders, the heavy equipment shown being loaded was our bridging equipment and the only thing that was not ours was a gun they had found which was labeled heavy artillery. That was the type of propaganda we got in the war.

Back in Wallingford we became a very important unit in the Army as we were the only Bridge company in the Army and as a result various sections of our company were sent to all the army exercises being held all over the counrty. Although there were 500 men in the unit we might have and number up to 3 or 4 hundred away.

This made catering a bit difficult as the corporal in charge of the mess room never seemed to know how many men would be in for meals and merely accepted what the sargeant cook gave him, and of course the cook was flogging food to friends in Walingford.

It all came to a head over the butter rations as everybody should have had one pat of butter and one margarine a day, and many of the men coming back from exercises complained that they never got their butter ration. As I was a spare man, having failed my driving test in a lorry, I was given the job of seeing that every man got his butter! I was installed in the doorman's kiosk of the hall we were billetted in and I asked my section officer to tell the sergeant-major to let me have the exact number of men who would be in barracks for tea and I would then go to the cook and tell him what amount of butter he would have to give. This, of course, annoyed him, but as a result the men were all satisfied. Other complaints followed from men who had been fed by other units when on exercise that they had received larger breakfasts and lunches than they were getting here so when the mess corporal went on leave my officer wanted me to take over the mess duties. I agreed but told him that this time I must get a daily record of the food that was issued to the sergeant cook. I was given the rank of acting unpaid lance corporal!

I was therefore able to know exactly what food was cooked and how much each man should have. When the corporal in charge of the mess came back I was sent back to my normal duties. However, it was not long before the orderly officers were getting complaints that they were not getting the amount that the were receiving when Corporal Ford was in charge, so my officer sent for me and told me that he was putting me in charge permanently!

This time I said no, I had not joined the army to dish out food. I explained to him how I had done it and said that if the mess corporal had done the same thing everything would have been all right. He reluctantly agreed but the sergeant-major I know was very annoyed and as a result a shortwhile later I found that I was being posted to Aldershot to attend a sanitary course at the Army School of Hygene, which meant that I would be the official company sanitary man! And there was nothing I could do about it as I had to go at 6.a.m. the next morning. I spent the worst 2 weeks of my life in the army there as all the other men were typical "sanitary man " types.

On the night I came back I went round to the club where I met our workshop officer, Maconachie ( a famous Irish badminton player) who assked me where I had been as he had not seen me for some time. I told him, and said that I was applying for a posting as I was not going to be a sanitary man! He said that his TMT Corporal was leaving soon and if I was prepared to work in his office first he would se that I got the job when available. A technical Mechanical Transport Corporal is classes as a tradesman and the pay ws higher than a normal corporal of course I agreed.

I was therefore transferred to our workshop secrtion which did all the maintenance work on our lorries and issued all the petrol they needed. We had three old hand pumps holding 500 gallons each and when I took over I found that we were 200 gallons short. Stealing petrol was a criminal offence and any one responsible was court-martialled, officers as well. Well, I found out the cause. Various lorries were out all the time on exercises and all were issued with a number of extra 2 gallon cans. They were made of very thin metal and all cans with the seal unbroken were classified as full in spite of the fact that many were only half full and when I took over I found that instead of 500 gallons of petrol there were actually 300.

Maconachie was very worried but I found we had a man in the section who had worked for years on a hand worked pump so I put him on the pumps and he knew how to fiddle them so that every driver who came in for 15 gallons only got 14 1/2. In 2 weeks we had made up the missing 200 gallons. Maconachie ws so relieved that Ted Hindle and I got free pints that evening.

My training as a commercial artist then came in useful as I decided to design a board with colourful designs for all the diferent vehicles so that he could see at a glancewhere all the vehicles were, in workshops, in their sections or on exercise. The adjutant was so impressed that I had to design a larger one for the CO

The next thing that came along was a very large exercise involving the whole of Southern Command when General Montgomery took over. I was left in charge of the camp with 12 men and told to keep the petrol pumps working and serve any army vehicle that wanted petrol. But as we were not part of the exercise I might have difficulty in getting petrol from the supply depot as all the various field petrol supplies set up for the exercise would have priority. I knew the sergeant at the depot and explained the position to him, and he said that he would do what he could, but I must be certain that I could take the whole of the 1000 gallon load when the tanker came in. As each of our three tanks held 500 gallons I thought it would be fairly simple to do that.

Everything went fairly smoothly and in the second week of the exercise if I wanted petrol urgently - on one or two occasions 2000 gallons a day I got because the sergeant was fed up with sending 1000 gallons to all the field petrol stations I had set up and finding everything so disorganised that half the lorries had to bring the petrol back. Apparently I was the only person who always took the full load and yet I never ran out of petrol.

When the results of the Southern command exercise came in it appeared that the petrol supply system had been a failure. Unit after unit had found that they could not get enough petrol at the official supply points but all of those who were anywhere near me said that they were able to fill up at No 3 Bridge Co. I was told this later by my Company Adjutant and it was shortly after this that my name came up for a commission,

I was sent on a pre OCTU course for 2 weeks at Halifax, but after a week we were all told that we were going into the Indian Army.

I had thoroughly enjoyed the two years I had spent at Wallingford. Colenel Gale and his wife had been very good to me. I spent 2 christmases with them and always had a bath and tea with them every Sunday. I met a lot of the local people including Frank Jenkins, the Mayor, at the Wallingford club, and when all the other ranks below officers were banned because some sergeant had stolen the secretary's wallet, they had a special committee meeting to make me a member.

Those of us at Halifax who wanted to join the Indian Army had to pass a board of 3 retired Indian Officers, which I did and I was discharged from the British Army and re enlisted in the Indian Army.

As a young commercial artist I had never organised anything in my life and my 5 years in the Indian Army only happened bacause I was good at cutting up butter!

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