´óÏó´«Ã½

Bert Kershaw was born on October 25, 1919, the only son of professional stage artiste Foster Kershaw, who performed monologues at theatres throughout Britain, managing every local accent except Geordie. Often at school in Blackpool, where his father took six-month engagements, Bert entered a children’s talent contest, borrowing some of Foster’s act. After the war, he again went into dad’s business, this time as a salesman for his flour-milling firm.
At the start of the war, I was a third of the way through my apprenticeship as a time-serving engineer, and if my call-up papers had arrived six weeks later I’d have been in a reserved occupation and wouldn’t have been able to leave. But I don’t regret going in and I wouldn’t go back into engineering when I came out.
I’ve got two stories to tell. The first one concerns my time in the 503 Advance Ordnance Workshops at Tobruk, where we’d been sent, by destroyer, to relieve the Aussies. Before that, we’d been in Egypt at Alexandria, stripping the tanks right down and rebuilding them. It took us four to five days to do each one. There were 200 of us in a normal base workshop. But the advance workshop was nearer the line and there were just 40 of us. Over a period of eight months we were bombed by night and shelled by day. We slept in sewers, 23 feet down, because that gave the most security anywhere.
My most vivid memory of this time was a 36-hour one, when we worked non-stop getting the tanks ready for the push-out. I don’t know how we kept awake, but we would all have carried on doing it.
Captain Warren came to us on the third morning and told us to leave the workshop and go to bed. We said: ‘We can’t, we’ve got this to do’ but he said ‘That’s an order’, so we stopped work and went to bed. I slept for eight solid hours. But we were young and fit and we would have done it again if we’d had to.
While we were at Rafa, in Palestine, Winston Churchill came on a low-key visit to inspect the CDL tank we were building. It was terrific and it really worked but he didn’t like it because it had no firepower. The idea was that the tanks would line up, they would have a slot with a shutter at the back of which was a searchlight, giving out a flat, triangular beam. The triangles met, in the middle of the darkness and the shutters were in different colours, to give the illusion of distance. Three or four of these tanks were used on the Rhine crossing by the 11th Armoured Division, as well as Buffalo tanks and flail tanks, but the Ministry of Defence abandoned the CDL, as Churchill wanted, because there was too much risk of life. They thought it could either be a brilliant success or a catastrophic failure and they didn’t feel they could justify using it on that basis.
My second memory is a personal one and concerns my wife Joan, before we got married. I’d been in the Middle East for three and a half years and was due for 28 days’ leave. She wrote to me to say she’d already volunteered to join the WAAFs and had had her inoculations ready to come out to our part of the world. I wasn’t allowed to tell her I was coming home, so I got everyone in the tents to write and tell her what life was like — the flies and everything.
My plan worked, she changed her mind and just managed to get her name off the overseas list. She then served in supply depots in England as a first class teleprint operator up to the time she was demobbed.
I proposed to Joan on my first day back but she said ‘Not yet.’ My 28 days was commuted to 21 and two days before I was due to leave she said ‘Let’s get married’. Well, I had to go back but they gave me compassionate leave — we called it passionate leave! — and our wedding took place six weeks later, on July 3rd, 1944.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.