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This story has been written onto the ´óÏó´«Ã½ People’s War site by Cornwall CSV Storygatherer, Martine Knight, on behalf of Ronnie Rashleigh. His story was given to the Trebah WW2 Video Archive, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund in 2004. The Trebah Garden Trust understands the terms and conditions of the site.

I was born in 1928 at the Miners and General Hospital in Redruth. We lived in Constantine. The war started on my 11th birthday, which was a coincidence as the First World War started on my mother’s 9th birthday.

As children we thought it was great to find bits of shrapnel from bombs, like the one that fell on a bungalow in Gweek, killing the elderly lady living there, Loveday Richards. Years later I was contacted by a man from Sussex who had the German pilots log book. It said that he’d hit his target in the Helford River, but he was either mistaken or was covering up his error.
I’ve still got a piece of silk from a land mine, which landed at Carwinnion in Mawnan, destroying two houses and damaging several others.

I left school in 1942 and went to work in Falmouth boatyard. I was in the stores and after I’d been there a week I cheekily asked if I could have a week’s holiday so I could go to Praa Sands with the Army Cadets. The week before a chap had gone inside the barbed wire to retrieve a football and got killed when a mine exploded so we were strongly advised not to try and retrieve anything.

After my holiday I was offered an apprenticeship and worked on building motor torpedo boats. They were very fast and had 4 Spitfire Merlin engines. Their top speed has never been disclosed, but it was 40+. For the launchings I had to fill an empty champagne bottle with water to look the part.
One of the jobs I had was to go and get bus tickets and cigarettes for the men. It took quite a bit of doing, as shops didn’t have many in stock so we had to go to as many as a dozen shops. In one shop the shopkeeper used to ask me lots of questions about what work I did and I thought she must be a German spy.
Just before D-Day we weren’t allowed to cross Lamanva Four Cross as all the troops were heading to Trebah. We had to leave Constantine at 5a.m. and go to Helston then Camborne and then into Penryn via Redruth just to get to work.

There used to be French tunny fishing boats, which mingled with our fishing boats to do espionage. They’d go and drop off, or pick up, whatever they had and then get towed back again. One boat was called ‘Pourquoi pas?’ which I believe means ‘Why not?’. The French used a thatched cottage on the Helford as their base and there was a big 3-masted schooner, called ‘Sunbeam 3’, moored off the Ferryboat inn, which belonged to Lord Runcimann and was the base ship for the Helford.
There were a couple of Mulberry harbours as well — spares in case anything went wrong on D-Day. A local man called John Roberts was christened on one of them as his father was stationed on board — they turned the bell upside down to use as a font.
A lot of boats were brought from the South and Southeast coasts of England to be stored in the Helford and after the war many were not reclaimed. They were sold at auction to pay the berthing fees.

Henry S. Whiteside, who owned the Budock Vean hotel, was known as the ‘Peanut King’. He had started off selling peanuts on the streets of London and ended up a millionaire. He bought the German Admiral Raeder’s yacht, which I think was called ‘The Scagarack’. It was magnificent, but when I went to do some work on it I stepped in wet varnish and left footprints all across the scrubbed deck. There was uproar!

I had changed to work at Port Navas boatyard and worked on building little canoes called Cockleshells. I’ve never seen one since and even the film, ‘Cockleshell Heroes’, didn’t show the sort of canoes we worked on. They were made of what we called chines and we made a prototype, which was then sent to a furniture factory in Gloucester. When it came back it looked fantastic, all done of pressed plywood. When it was tested they needed another person so I got pushed into the bow. As we went through the harbour we crossed the wash of other boats and, although there was a waterproof ‘apron’ to stop the water going into the boat, my top half got soaked through. They had a little two-stroke propeller engine, which could be raised or lowered through the middle of the bottom of the canoe. They were made in three sections and had little stabilising catamarans on them. After that I worked with a man called Harley Mead, who was a great yacht designer. He taught us draughtsmanship once a week.
There was a boom across Falmouth harbour. It was in three sections and a tug would tow the centre section open or closed to let ships in or out. It was the same system as that used at Scapa Flow where a German submarine sneaked in when it was open and destroyed HMS Royal Oak and then escaped. Churchill was so angry that he ordered all such systems to be reinforced. Outside the boom was classed as the War Zone and anyone who worked outside it got extra money.

Just before D-Day we had to change the gun mountings on the motor launches from single mounted Oerlikons to twin mounted Oerlikons. In so doing we had to drill some holes above the captain’s cabin and one went through the ships supply of cigarettes.
We went on board for the sea trials, even though we weren’t supposed to. As it was put through its paces with guns firing it certainly rolled hard over and I thought we’d capsize, but it was very exciting to a 15-year-old. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any extra money for being in the war zone as I wasn’t supposed to be there, but fortunately we weren’t attacked either!
I’ve still got a souvenir shell casing from that day.

We were once doing some repairs on board a landing craft when a German plane came over and fired on us. Our guns returned fire and my mate and me were caught in the middle and just had to hope we survived.

There were RAF rescue boats in Falmouth. They were called MASB’s — motor anti-submarine boats — and were about 75 feet long with three Napier Sea Lion engines. They were berthed at Prince of Wales pier and one rammed the pier so we had to repair it afloat. We had a fender tied alongside to work from and when the old Flushing ferry went by they’d try to create a wash to go over the fender and get us wet.

There was a ship in No.2 dock and there was an explosion on board. It was put about that a burner had burnt through into an oil tank, but that wasn’t true. In fact somebody had got into the docks and planted a bomb on board. He was caught at Truro railway station and I believe he was executed at the Tower of London.

Video details CWS040604 16:14:11 to 16:52:34

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