大象传媒

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Mr A.E.(Ted) Manning my late father, was well established at Yate,Gloucestershire with a small but thriving road haulage business which he had built up from scratch over the previous 12 years. He was above conscription age and was at first involved with the Air Raid Precaution organisation that provided street Wardens to protect the. local population from air bombing. Elementary training was available, particularly with regard to the prompt extinguishing of incendiary bombs.

Because of his knowledge of transport matters he was asked to take the position of
Ambulance Officer for South Gloucestershire, as the area was known for wartime administration purposes. He agreed, but on the condition that the post would be purely voluntary and unpaid to give him the independence from bureaucracy which he felt would cramp his style. At this time the Blitz had not affected the West Country unduly and a regular Ambulance Service was still in place. His first task was to take over the existing vehicles and equipment, and bring the unit up to operational standard. He soon found that due to lack of routine servicing the vehicles were unreliable and not too clean. They were poorly equipped and the existing volunteer drivers needed training and bringing to strength. Shortages of materials caused more than one argument with County Headquarters. Despite the pressure of running his own business in the war-time conditions of petrol rationing lack of spares and the loss of one of his vehicles to the Ministry of War Transport under the Defence of the Realm Act, somehow or other he was able to bring things together. Resplendent in his
dark blue battle-dress uniform with yellow badges and insignia, he was able to proudly
present a smoothly running unit to an inspection by Princess Marina.Shortly
afterwards the bombing of Bristol, Avonmouth and other West Country targets required the redeployment of most emergency services to where they were most needed, and in the case of Gloucestershire the regular ambulance service was needed elsewhere leaving the Civil Defence volunteers to deal for a time with practically any accident emergency.

The vehicles provided to carry out the task of the Civil Defence Ambulance
service were a motley collection of large cars that had been commandeered at the outbreak of hostilities. Most had been hastily converted to four-stretcher ambulances by the simple expedient of chopping off the saloons behind the front seats and installing what were virtually boxes fitted with runners to accept the stretchers. They were each equipped with heavy wood and canvas stretchers, blankets, wooden splints, a very basic first aid kit, water bottles and strangely a fireman's axe. Some vehicles were designated as Sitting Case Ambulances and were simply large civilian cars, usually American, presumably because of their ample seating capacity. One unit of particular interest was another American car which towed a very large caravan which had been omprehensively fitted out as a mobile operating theatre complete with its own generator, and intended for serious work if the hospital services became totally disabled. Perhaps it was just as well that this particular unit was never called into
service! Most of the vehicles were American; I remember especially a beautiful Buick Straight Eight and a Pontiac.The Armstrong Siddeley ambulance with
preselector gearbox, although dignified, didn't seem quite the same! The headquarters of the local service was at the Chipping Sodbury workhouse as it was then known, where there was good garage and storage space and an adequate yard for vehicle washing and routine servicing. Some vehicles were stationed at outposts, I believe one at Winterboume and possibly one at Downend.

The drivers of the ambulances were recruited from ladies who wished to help the war effort in some way, and of course the main requirement apart from a willingness to take part in all aspects of ambulance work was the ability to drive. This narrowed the field somewhat, for in those days a fairly low percentage of women held driving licences. Their experience in the main was with small family cars, so a great deal of retraining was required to enable them to manoeuvre the wider, longer and more powerful ambulances. They were expected to double as ambulance attendants as required, and be capable of routine daily checks, basic maintenance and vehicle cleaning. The training of driving and vehicle related skills were carried out by Ted Manning, and the Red Cross instructed the drivers on first aid. Most of the unit attended lectures at the new United States Hospital at Frenchay where a great deal of expertise was generously available, especially as a very proficient Burns Unit had just been installed there. Some of the British-built buildings erected for the Americans are still in use at the present Frenchay Hospital.

Drivers worked on an "on call" rota basis, as did the local Red Cross ambulance attendants, and calls for the ambulance service came first by telephone to Ted Manning who then allocated suitable vehicles and personnel for specific tasks. In his absence my late mother manned the telephone and several times turned out an ambulance for an urgent case without prior reference to Control, who complained to the District Officer. She recalled with great glee that his response was to congratulate her on her initiative! The call-outs should have emanated from the Civil Defence Control Centre at Chipping Sodbury, but most frequently came as direct requests from local doctors and Police around the Area. As a senior Civil Defence Officer the Ambulance Officer was also alerted by telephone from the Control Centre of the air raid "State of Alert", which was a 24-hour advisory service warning the recipients of Red, Amber, or Green conditions, depending on the activity of German aircraft in the locality. This was in addition to the public air raid sirens, so if a single enemy aircraft was lost or roaming around looking for likely targets, an awful lot of people had quite a few sleepless nights without getting out of bed!

The majority of call-outs was the result of urgent requests from the Police, and covered a wide variety of medical and accident incidents. Patients with minor complaints and injuries were taken to the Chipping Sodbury Cottage Hospital which was run by local doctors, but more serious cases were transported to Bristol Hospitals, usually the General or Royal Infirmary. During the Bristol Blitz trips to Bristol at night often resulted in long delays at the hospitals, and gave rise to many hair-raising tales of narrow escapes! Road traffic accidents, despite petrol rationing, were even then fairly frequent occurrences and the volunteers very quickly became aware of the value of their first aid training. One afternoon Ted responded to a call to attend a lady who had been knocked down on the road to find his own sister with a severe leg injury. When advised of a serious incident which may have caused distress to his lady drivers Ted often took one of the ambulances himself, and although essentially a practical man, the compassionate side of his nature often caused him some sorrow at the sight of such unaccustomed carnage. He was silently moved when he successfully transported a Land Girl to hospital who had lost her leg in a threshing accident, but delighted to see her much later being happily hoisted by celebrating friends into a Bristol restaurant. An Airspeed Oxford aircraft crashed disastrously at Horton, and when the pilot, an experienced New Zealander, was prised unconscious from the wreckage and hastily conveyed to hospital, the local doctor on the scene being very concerned for him. During the journey to Bristol he briefly regained consciousness
and thought the ambulance attendant was an angell - how true! The next day he was sitting up in bed, black and blue all over with bruising, but otherwise quite fit and celebrating a minor miracle.

But not all dangerous occurances had such happy endings for when a Wellington bomber crashed in the country both the Fire and Ambulance services had difficulty in reaching the site over ploughed fields. When they arrived it it appeared that the pilot had attempted a crash landing instead of taking to his parachute in order to save his injured crew. Although some of the crew survived, the poor young man perished in
the fire. The gruesome details of this incident remained in the minds of those present forr a long time.

Inevitably, life also has a humourous edge, and during the war it was just as well that there were occasions when the funny side of life erupted. One morning Ted
asked a lady driver to top up the ambulance engines, and later received a telephone call to say that she had run out of oil and would he please supply some more. Some what mystified, he drove to the yard to find that she had used the best part of a
five gallon drum of oil and had only dealt with one vehicle so far. She was attempting to fill the engine to the top of the filling hole. His response is not recorded. So much for training! I was then a lad in my early teens and living amongst transport vehicles all my life, I had learned to drive as soon as my feet could reach the pedals, always under the eagle eye of my father and always on fields or private roads.One day I found myself abandoned at the ambulance yard, having been denied the pleasure of accompanying father on a call out and contemplating the three-quarter mile walk home, I was unable to resist the temptation to carefully drive his Rover Speed Pilot Sports Saloon home.When father returned with an ambulance to our own transport yard, no doubt for a cup of tea, he double-took the sight of his car in the yard and found me rather promptly. Since that day I have been told the error of my ways by Policemen, growled at by Master Gunners, thrown out by Adjutants, and disciplined by Directors, but never, ever, have I had a dressing down that came within a mile of the verbal explosion that hit me that morning! But the lesson was well learnt, and we were friends again the next day. One night at the height of the Blitz Ted had delivered a patient to the Royal Infirmary and was sheltering in a basement full of patients waitings for the air raid to subside before returning home The hard-pressed medical staff was struggling to treat a patient with oxygen but the equipment was faulty Ted dashed Out amongst the anti-aircraft shrapnel to his ambulance for his tool kit, cut a washer from a rubber glove, and soon had the apparatus working again. All in a day's work.

When the service was disbanded at the end of the war and the vehicles and equipment removed for disposal, it was almost as if it had never existed except in the memories of those involved. The only memento rescued was a fireman's axe, which no doubt was Purloined for purely practical purposes and is still in my possession as part of the equipment for my vintage Fire Appliance. My father did not collect his Defence Medal to which I believe he was entitled probably because he was never impressed with such conventional rewards, 1 wish he had.

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