大象传媒

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Home Guard in Cornwall, step-father ran North half, stables were the stores, . . . Northover Projector, SIP and two Molotov in a 鈥渇ish bag鈥�, . . . cosh for Norman, he carried his Mauser with dum-dum, . . . Hotchkiss machine gun, . . . narrow road with petrol flooding, . . . garages had sugar to disable petrol in tanks, . . . OP in a Tumulus, after they had done a proper evacuation, . . . handbooks on weapons, book said if nothing else put a line of soup plates in the road in front of the tanks.

I can remember the holidays, my step-father, who ran the Home Guard in the North half of Cornwall, stables were their stores, so one had quite fun playing with things like Northover Projectors, which was a fascinating device with about a six foot long length of drainpipe, with a breech at one end and you could project either a Mills Bomb, a Number 36 grenade, or an SIP which was a self igniting phosphorus bomb with a black powder charge behind it. I think this was used by the Home Guard, it was quite a 鈥榟airy鈥� device for the firers, a bit like the things Blacker Bombard or a Spigot Mortar, which they also had.
I remember my stepfather driving round Cornwall running the Home Guard and we had a lovely mixture there. We had in the Home Guard a Molotov Cocktail, which was an ordinary squash bottle or wine bottle full of petrol, a bit of rubber latex, and you see these thrown by terrorists, with a bit of rag out of the top. They didn鈥檛 throw them with a rag out of the top, but they sewed one of these into a 鈥渇ish bag鈥� and they had the self igniting SIP鈥檚, that鈥檚 self igniting phosphorous bombs, which was a ginger beer bottle containing phosphorous, and you were meant to throw the whole of that bag at a tank, and the SIP鈥檚 would shatter and soon as the air got to the phosphorous that would go off and with the petrol and the latex you would hopefully set the whole thing on fire. We also learnt to use any weapon that you could get hold of, in case anything happened, the SMELE鈥檚, the short magazine Lee Enfield rifle, the standard one, Bren Guns, Tommy Guns, Vickers Guns, Brownings, Lewis Guns, in fact one used to buy 1/6d. books from Gale and Polden, the instructions on how to use all that. So ones鈥� tour has bits and pieces and all that.
The Home Guard, the rifles they were issued with were not the same as the Army had, because we didn鈥檛 have enough. They had the American Ross Rifles, which was a different calibre, it was a .300 rifle, with a different type of ammunition. So they had to be very carefully marked with a red band, a painted band around the hand-grip, so you wouldn鈥檛 try to put a .303 round into a .300 rifle which wouldn鈥檛 do it any good at all My step-father used to carry a .45 pistol, and also he also had an old Mauser 9mm. Pistol, which he鈥檇 been given by his father who had it in the First World War which was the Cavalry pistol, the broom-handled one, with a wooden holster which you could clip on and turn it into a little sniping carbine. That would kill a man at about a mile and he had some Dum-dum ammunition for it which would have been fairly fatal to any German. As a last ditch defence I remember making for him at school a very nice cosh, it was all nicely made of oak and the head of it was hollowed out with at least a pound of lead in it, on the principle if you hit a German on his steel helmet you would probably break his neck with it.
I can also remember them demonstrating a Hotchkiss Machine Gun mounted on the back of a lorry. One of the ones that I saw in 鈥淒ad鈥檚 Army鈥� was true. They poured a whole lot of oil onto the road and someone skidded. I think in fact that one of the roads at the back of Camelford was set up, between high banks, on a steep road, with big tanks of petrol on each side, and if the Germans had come there they would have had to stick on the roads, because you couldn鈥檛 get off the road with any vehicles. You could have turned on the taps, flooded the road with petrol, and shoot a Verey Pistol into it to set it off. On the subject of petrol all the garages who had petrol also had quite reasonable stocks of sugar, which, if the Germans had landed, they would have put the sugar into their petrol tanks so the petrol would have been useless. That was one of the things that you were told to do to disable your cars if in fact they had come.
I remember one interesting one somewhere up on the North Coast near Boscastle, they established observation posts and my step-father had great fun in establishing an old tumulus, which was in a very good position, turned into an observation post, but before he actually had it done like that he did get the archaeological people to do a complete dig to make certain that we had found everything that could be done there.

Two other things with the Americans, I can remember before D-Day there was a very big build up of Americans, there were quite a lot around Launceston, and I do remember that there was a rather nasty affair on one night where some of the coloured Americans were turned out of a pub by their 鈥榮now-drops鈥�, their military police, which they took a dim view of. They went back to camp, got their guns, came back and shot-up the town square in Launceston. I wasn鈥檛 there at the time but I can remember some of the bullet holes in some of the windows.
I can also remember going round with my step-father, and the sight of going round Cornish lanes and at about every 25 yards the hedge would have been cut away and in the field, just the other side were stocks of ammunition. The whole of Cornwall was one whole monumental magazine, with the ammunition distributed all the way down and around the county.

I think the only other thing to do with Eton and the Scouts was that the Americans did come and play baseball on the field on one occasion, and knowing that we did play cricket they did warn us that if a ball comes your way, don鈥檛 try to stop it, it鈥檚 too hard, you鈥檒l get hurt. But we did survive that lot.

I can remember the end of the war quite clearly because for VE Day we all had illegal radios that we weren鈥檛 meant to have, but we thought it was going to be VE Day and we actually beat them to it, and the night before we beat the place up. I can remember that we managed to break out of the house and play round the streets and we took every fire extinguisher down and let everything off, and we had a real party.
The other thing was that at Eton during the war there were a lot of Scouts in the country who couldn鈥檛 go camping because either they had no camping equipment or it had been destroyed and there were no Scoutmasters or anything else. We had quite a collection of camping equipment because we had six troops of Scouts at Eton, and the masters at the school also acted as Scoutmasters. So in fact for several years we used to run a national scout camp of up to a couple of a hundred Scouts who would come in and we would provide them with all the camping equipment they needed, the organisation, troop leaders, Scoutmasters and everything else. We had a big headquarters campsite there for about thirty or forty of us who were running the place and cooking on it. We learnt to do all sorts of things there, I can remember making drop scones in large quantities and we got a large steel plate from the local ironmonger, and we used to mix-up in a washing up bowl a drop scone mixture. There was dried eggs which used to come in little waxed cardboard boxes, and we used to have the equivalent of a dozen eggs in, oh something about five inches high, by three inches wide, and an inch and a half thick. We used to have a lot of fun doing that and forming a drop scone crew. The first one would butter the plate, the second one would put the dollops of mixture round it, the third one would come and turn them over, and then I think the first one would come around again, put the butter on them and someone else would put the jam on and then you would hand them round to people round the fire. You had to be very careful because the jam at the point was extremely hot.鈥�

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