大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Morwenna Nadar of CSV/大象传媒 LONDON on behalf of Reg Harriden and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

When the war started in 1939 I was nearly 16 years old and 18 months into a 7 year Precision Engineering Apprenticeship, working 44 hours a week for a weekly wage of about 10s. (or 50p. in today鈥檚 money).
The company I worked for was making war weapons so extra hours of work were needed. In fact, after Dunkirk we worked 8-12 hours a day for 41 days without a day of rest.
I was attending evening classes at Redhill Technical College, but the blackout regulations meant we had to attend classes during daylight hours on Saturdays and Sundays.

I was a member of a Scout Group which provided volunteer stretcher bearers for East Surrey hospital, which at that time was between Reigate and Redhill.
Our job was to move patients to safety in the event of an air-raid and transport raid victims within the hospital.
We were on duty alternate weeks, quickly getting to the hospital if there was a daylight raid and we were not at work, but sleeping each night in a shed in the hospital grounds.
This meant a 1 mile cycle ride home for breakfast in the morning and then a 3 mile ride to be at work by 7.30.

I was eating my lunch one Sunday when the sirens sounded, so on to my bjke I jumped and reported for duty. Soon there were aircraft overhead and the sound of bombs falling. One, at least, sounded very near. A couple of minutes later someone came running to tell us that a bomb had fallen in the middle of the road, 200 yards round the corner, and there were casualties. We picked up stretchers and dashed round, arriving before the ambulances. I helped to load a very seriously injured gentleman, whose major injury was the loss of a leg, on to a stretcher and into the ambulance, before helping with the other casualties.
Later on, back at the hospital, I took the same gentleman to the mortuary.
After the All Clear sounded I rode home, finished my lunch, and then sat and cried like a baby. I was 16 years and 6 months old.

My apprenticeship, a reserved occupation, was completed in 1944, and I then started work in the drawing office at The Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough.
My first job there was preparing diagrams for the instruction booklets concerning the loading into aircraft and the securing of earth-moving machines such as bulldozers, excavators, cranes, etc. The limited load capacity of the aircraft needed the machines to be dismantled and loaded into 2 or more aircraft.
No drawings existed of a caterpillar truck wound up like a Swiss roll, a bulldozer blade with its support arms folded over, and many other weirdly shaped items that made up a load. So these had to be measured and then drawn to scale on a pre-printed diagram of the aircraft area, to show where the anchor points on the machines and the aircraft had to be.

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