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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Roger Marsh of the ‘Action Desk — Sheffield’ Team on behalf of Reg Reid and has been added to the site with the author's permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

The Lighter Side of War

By
Don Alexander

CHAPTER 5: No. 1 Heavy Repair Shop (HRS) RASC High Wycombe September 1940 - January 1941

This working unit was set up in a big civilian furniture factory commandeered by the Army in the rolling wooded hills of Buckinghamshire. The shop floor roused workshops for engines, gear boxes and back axles with an impressive array of machine tools - lathes etc. - to recondition these vital components.

The lads were billeted upstairs in offices overlooking the workshop floor. In a corner of a loading bay stood Reg's faithful Excelsior Manxman motor bike. The work was heavy, greasy, mucky and cold and Guard Duty, in comparison, was almost a pleasure.
Once on night guard Reg investigated a loud snoring sound disturbing the still late-evening air. It was a little owl on a telephone wire. Magical!

An elderly couple who lived nearby saw him as they passed the main gate with its wooden red and white barrier, and got talking with him. During the course of conversation the wife asked him what he was missing most about home.

"A hot bath" was the soldier's immediate reply - the showers at the factory are cold.
"You can come to our house tonight and have one." "But I'm on guard".
"We insist. Come on, son. Hitler won't invade tonight."

When a well-scrubbed, clean and contented Reg related this happy incident to Stan Smith - the selfsame Smithy who had helped himself to Reg's diseased potential girlfriend in Glasgow and had been indirectly responsible for Reg's tattoo - now helped himself to the couple's hospitality. He went round to their house, got his hot bath after tea and toast, and repaid them by leaving the blackest of black tide marks round their white enamelled bath.
They never got invited for a bath again. Smithy's fault once more - though Reg reasoned in the lad's favour that but for him, he wouldn't have got on the Glasgow course.

Smithy was Mr. Clean, though, compared with one of the lads who never had a bath or a shower, and restricted himself to what North African veterans would later call an `Arab wash' - two fingers dipped in water and dabbed around the face. The Arabs are short of water though, rainy High Wycombe wasn't, and this lad stank. A sergeant eventually detailed six motor mechs, 3rd class privates, to strip him down to his privates and hose and scrub him down - with ice cold water and a yard brush!

`Girly' Ruth Hawes

Love came to Reg while he was at the Heavy Repair Shops, in the shape of black-haired `Girly' Ruth Hawes. They met in High Wycombe town centre, and started going out together. This time he kept `Smithy' out of it! She lived at 63 Suffield Road - the address is still imprinted in his brain over sixty years later.

Her parents were a bit dubious about this cheeky-faced Northerner with the dirty job. They had two sons in the Army, one with the Infantry in Egypt - but rather fancied their daughter getting to know one of the nice RAF lads, stationed near High Wycombe, who came to their Methodist New Connexion Church. The Battle of Britain was raging and the RAF were all heroes in the summer and autumn of 1940. They surmised, moreover, that a RAF lad would be more likely to get a `nice office job' after the war - not work in a garage or furniture factory. Be that as it may, `Girly' Ruth preferred Reg with his good looks and sense of humour. He made her laugh, he was a skilled man at his job. As a Class 3 mechanic, his pay had doubled from seven shillings to fourteen shillings a week, and there was the bonus of Sundays out together on his Manxman' motorbike.

He didn't just want her for sex - in those days only a rascal would go all the way with a girl before marriage, and Reg, being a gentleman, refrained. Admittedly he was mindful too of the cautionary tale of Stan Smith and the pretty Glaswegienne..... not that `Girly' Ruth was of easy virtue of course!

They soon got engaged and a highlight of the week was what was then regarded as heavy petting on Sunday evenings in the front room of the house in Suffield Road. With the lights out, curtains drawn, flickering flames from the coal fire highlighting her breasts `like monumental marble' and her parents out playing bridge it was a dream come true.

The bridge game was always at friends of her parents after the Methodist New Connexion chapel service, but one day the friends were ill, and Mr. and Mrs. Hawes came back unexpectedly early. Mr. Hawes had an ability to turn the door knob and burst in in one movement and he, closely followed by Mrs. Hawes, found Reg with a tape measure round `Girly' Ruth's breasts. (Jane Russell had appeared upon the silver screen and suddenly girls wanted larger breasts again - after the 1920s and `30s flat-chested look).

She ran upstairs still clutching her bra while Reg made his excuses and left. They were engaged after all but her parents were strict Methodists - they'd read about rough-necked roistering army boys in the High Wycombe Examiner - or whatever the local paper was called. Just the previous week, they'd read about a youth from the same unit as Reg who, in attempting to burgle booze from a club had, while the club was open, fallen through a high window onto an upturned table, a leg of which had pierced his chest - or perhaps shoulder. It can't have pierced a lung because he survived. In fact he hadn't realised at first that part of the table leg which had snapped was sticking through him. He must have been drunk when he attempted the burglary, in his army greatcoat! The paper went on to say another quick-thinking soldier who had been drinking in the club with friends helped the lad off with his coat and called for an ambulance. They might have had a better opinion of Reg if they had known he was that soldier!

These episodes didn't affect his relationship with `Girly' Ruth at first, but there was a gradual cooling off between them. Sometimes when he asked her out, she had other things to do and refused. She did go to Sheffield with him though, by rail on Tuesday 10th December 1940, and they stayed that night with his parents at Walkley - she in an attic room, he on the settee downstairs. His dad was on his best behaviour and expressed pleasure that Reg's pay had doubled from seven shillings a week to fourteen shillings; now he was a 3rd class mechanic.
He put on his broadest Sheffield accent when he noticed his son's tattoo. "At least if tha gets blown up we'll know thi by tattoo on thi arm!" Ruth was both bemused and amused.

His mother recited lists of young women she knew who had now been called up to work in steel, tool and armament factories. Women were working in the melting shops in overhead crane cabins, bringing scrap in huge ladles to the furnaces and taking molten steel to be poured into ingot moulds. Women were even on the shop floor in rolling mills working with tongs, handling the hot steel bars or strip, guiding these as they snaked along the floor and through the rolls.

One girl called Bottomley worked allocating the young women jobs - industry/land or armed services and she interviewed a posh woman called Cholmondley, who was annoyed at the literal pronunciation of her name.

"My name is pronounced Chumley, you should learn to pronounce names right." Miss Bottomley replied, "That's all right, so long as you don't call me Bumley!" War was becoming quite a leveller!

Luftwaffe night raids had hit London in September and October 1940 and his mam and dad wondered how safe Reg and Ruth were in High Wycombe. Coventry was raided 14th November but Sheffield had not yet been targeted, except for a few raids in August by a small number of bombers. Some hoped that the city was just a bit too far away from the enemy bases in France and the Low Countries.
They hoped in vain.

Reg and Ruth caught the eleven o'clock train to London from Sheffield on the morning of Thursday 12th December 1940. Reg was a bit annoyed that Ruth seemed to enjoy the flirtations of a RAF bloke, a `Brylcreem boy' going back to his base at High Wycombe. The three of them then took the local train to High Wycombe. Reg stayed overnight at Ruth's, on the settee.

Next morning he went to work at HRS to find all the lads looking shocked at him.
300 German bomber aircraft, Heinkel Us, Dornier 17's and Junkers JU 88's from a base in France had bombed Sheffield in what the Luftwaffe called `Operation Crucible'. The raid began just hours after Ruth and Reg had left, and lasted from 7pm Thursday 12th December to 4am Friday 13th December 1940. A further ninety bombers raided the city on the night of Sunday 15th December, after Luftwaffe spotter planes assessed the damage during the day on Saturday the 14th.

About seven hundred people were killed with many hundreds more injured. 82,000 properties were damaged, thousands beyond repair. Apart from some rolling mills in Attercliffe, steel production wasn't affected, and only hundreds, of Sheffield's many thousands of metal working factories were hit. The lads in the Heavy Repair shops didn't know these details, of course, but they knew Sheffield had been heavily `blitzed'. There was concern for Reg and for Frank Turton who was still there that very day. Fortunately Frank was able to ring through to say Walkley wasn't much affected. Reg's parents were alive and well, but he painted a bleak picture of the city centre which was virtually all destroyed. A bright glow from thousands of burning buildings lit the sky from the city. Most shops in the town centre and on the Moor were just heaps of rubble and twisted steelwork, and trams had been blasted apart. Over seventy people had died in the cellar of the Marples Hotel, a pub Reg, Frank and Stan Smith knew in town.

After Frank's return, Reg introduced another girl, whom he'd met in High Wycombe, to him. Frank was a solid type, an engineer from a spring-making family in Sheffield, who was a bit shy with women. The girl and the springmaker got on well and she invited Reg and Ruth to tea with them. Ruth excused herself and Reg went on his own.

Walking back to their billet at the former furniture factory the two men passed through a park by some watercress beds, moonlight reflecting on the water. Suddenly all hell was let loose. An isolated German bomber jettisoned a stick of perhaps six bombs, all of which fell with ear-splitting screech into the said beds, and didn't explode!

Frank's firm at home made big coiled and leaf springs for the railways and he shot up in the air as if propelled by one of his coiled springs, as Reg `legged it' (to use to-day's (2005) jargon) out of the park. Frank looked up at the sky:

"Somebody up there loves us".
"Who - the Jerry pilot?"
"No, God".
"It's a good job he does 'cos no bugger down here does!"

Reg was just a bit disillusioned, even more so the next day when he had a bit of a contretemps with the Mechanical Company Sergeant Major.
Word got round about his escapade with the tape measure and `Girly' Ruth's breasts, which the MSM found more interesting than the Sheffield Blitz or the escapade with the bombs in the park.

"Get a grip on her tits laddie, don't just measure them."
"At least we're engaged," Reg got back at him. "I'm not a married man having a bit on the side."

This hit home with the MSM who was married with children, yet had taken up with a mistress in High Wycombe. The Sheffielder knew he was in for it as soon as he had opened his big gob. The MSM was the type who wouldn't let a perceived insult rest. He wanted revenge.

A few days later Reg got notice of transfer to a transport unit, 133 Coy RASC at South Littleton, near Evesham, Gloucestershire. It was a posting unit - and the troops there were rumoured to be going to Burma. Even though things hadn't been going too well between them there was a tearful goodbye from `Girly' Ruth and they promised to see each other when they could, be faithful, write often. It was the parting of the ways for him with Walkley lads Frank Turton and Stan Smith too. He promised to get back to High Wycombe when he had some leave to see them as well as `Girly' Ruth.

Service in the Heavy Repair Shops had been enjoyable, there was no bull, plenty of shop floor banter and they were always in working clothes except when on Guard Duty.
The thought of service in Burma caused some foreboding but he reasoned that everything would be for the best, and the MSM might even have done him a good turn getting him posted. Our man wasn't one to enjoy being in one place for too long. Stan Smith and Frank Turton in fact were destined to spend all six years of their service at the Heavy Repair Shops, working on axles, gear boxes and engines.

*Details from `The Sheffield Blitz -Operation Crucible', Alistair Lofthouse, 2001

Pr-BR

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