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Re: my father, Denis Walter Pursglove (b. 15.04.1916). Non-commissioned number 904011; commissioned number 137536

My father joined the Territorial Army in April 1939. He had tried to join the RAF Volunteer Reserve but was refused. His ability in maths led him to be posted as a gunner to 110 (Manchester) Field Regiment, Royal Artillery. In January 1940 he was sent to 123 OCTU, Catterick. 123 OCTU took about 50 cadets for 5 months, split into 3 or 4 squads. He remembers the CO, Lieutenant-Colonel Waller, RSM Phipps and 3 members of staff: Major Wheeler, Capt Zambra and Capt Smith (Nottinghamshire Yeomanry, TA). Among his fellow cadets were R.H. Guest, who had won caps for England at Rugby, and the author and historian R. Lewin. Cadets were instructed in gun drill, driving, vehicle maintenance, map reading, man-management and fitness/endurance. After five months my father was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant and posted to the 58th (Sussex) Field Regiment, Royal Artillery. He missed Dunkirk, at which the regiment’s Sergeant (later Sergeant-Major) J H Baker won the DCM. He was stationed at Styrrup, near Worksop. Here he met John B Eldridge, recently married, whose wife, in contravention of military regulations, followed him everywhere. At Styrrup, too, as an officer, he had to buy himself new boots; these brought up a blister, which turned septic. As a result he found himself in hospital in Doncaster. He was then given sick leave, during which time Manchester was heavily bombed. It was possible to read a newspaper in Didsbury by the light of the fires burning in Piccadilly. He had to help deal with an incendiary bomb at home (an incident described by E. Madge Pursglove) and, when septicaemia recurred, was again hospitalized, this time in Davyhulme, where my mother visited him during a heavy air raid. On recovering he reported to Woolwich Barracks, where he met Major H W Tilson who had made an attempt on Everest. On the night of 29/30 December, the worst night of the London blitz, he was on the roof of Somerset House with Clare Shaw (a junior official in the Inland Revenue) and T.H. Sinclair (ex Manchester GS, an Oxford Soccer Blue, now a Treasury official). After some two weeks at Woolwich he rejoined the regiment, now based at Brenzett, near Ashford, Kent. The CO was Col Heath, his deputy Major H B Dyer and the Adjutant Monty Witham. Later he was stationed at, Eastry, Sutton Vallence, Dover (Fort Burgoyne), Bekesbourne Aerodrome and New Romney. At Eastry he was billeted in Updown House. Betteshanger Colliery was nearby and he remembers at one morning parade, on the driveway of the house, during an address by the CO Captain Bernie Drayson, Gunner Wilson, a collier, stepped forward and harangued him on industrial relations. Captain Drayson was later captured in North Africa, imprisoned in Italy, from where he escaped. In later years he was Conservative MP for Skipton. During my father’s time at Eastry he played in a scratch cricket match on the county ground, Canterbury, drank in the Falstaff pub, Canterbury and attended a church parade in the cathedral. Two Land Army girls used to come regularly to Updown House to collect swill. One of them was nicknamed ‘Swilly Tilly’. It was from Eastry that, in September 1941, he was given a week’s leave to get married. While at New Romney he and Second Lieutenant Bob Sherston found beach huts to sleep in, a move frowned on by senior officers. Another Second Lieutenant, Norman W Harrison, got married while they were there and a big party was held in his honour on Boxing Day 1941. While at New Romney, too, he was employed flash-spotting (i.e. marking the position of German big guns firing on Dover) from the lighthouse at Dungeness. There he encountered a school acquaintance, Amos Rogerson, who was serving in a flash-spotting regiment.
!n 1941 the regiment had acquired a third battery, 441. It had been commanded by Major Chater Jack DSO MC, a World War I veteran, whose wife was connected with Suttons Seeds of Reading. He, however, was replaced by Leslie Smith, a banker in civilian life. Three officers were assigned to E-troop, 441 Battery, among them my father, who was second-in-command. The Troop Commander was Capt Tony Cavanagh, whom my father recalls as ‘very glamorous’. Two other members of 441 Battery whom he remembers were Second Lieutenant Carline, who emigrated to Australia after the war, and Hugh Romanes. At one point there was a problem with the mess accounts, which Second Lieutenants Turcan and Charles Edinburgh were given the task of sorting out.
By 1942 my father was a captain. His regiment assembled at Bromley, Kent, where he remembers being inspected by King George VI, who was accompanied by the Minister for War, P.J. Grigg. On 31.05.42 the regiment left from Liverpool for a 'secret destination' (which turned out to be North Africa) aboard the Laconia. The Laconia was part of a convoy and was accompanied by warships. She was sunk on the voyage home. On 5 June he took command of A Troop 229 Battery. The acting CO of 229 Battery was Major J S Dodd, in civilian life a solicitor. The first port of call was Freetown, Sierra Leone (13.06.42 - 19.06.42), followed by Cape Town (01.07.42 - 04.07.42). There he recalls that black American troops, wanting to celebrate American Independence Day, fell foul of local apartheid restrictions. The regiment arrived in Egypt on 26.07.42, disembarking at Port Tewfik.
My father took part in the battles of Alam Halfa (31.08.42) and El Alamein (23.10.42). His troop contributed to the 1000-gun barrage which marked the opening of the latter battle.
After the battle, like many others, he contracted jaundice and was taken by hospital ship from Alexandria to Sidon (in what was then Syria). In Sidon he encountered (in the Gents!) Lieutenant-General Brian Horrocks whom he knew slightly, having met him when General Horrocks commanded the 44th (Home Counties) Division in England. After Alamein 44th Infantry Division was disbanded and the regiment became part of 5th Army Group Royal Artillery (5 AGRA), 30 Corps, 8th Army. It remained in 5 AGRA until 1945. After Alamein, too, 441 Battery, commanded by Major Davies (from Lancashire; later lost a foot in action), left the regiment.
My father reached Cairo, by train, in December 1942. Here, at the Almaza transit camp, he met Capt Lou Evans of 110 Manchester. From Cairo he hitched a ride via Mersa Matruh and Tobruk to Benghazi (where the Eighth Army now was) in an armoured car of the Derbyshire Yeomanry, commanded by a Yorkshireman from Halifax, Captain Birkett, whom he had met at OCTU.
After the fall of Tripoli (23.01.43), as a former civil servant, he was temporarily posted to the Military Government (Milgov) as Assistant Revenue Officer. The head of Milgov was Brigadier Lush and my father remembers working with a Maltese, Major Caccia, and Major Williamson, a banker in civilian life. His interpreters were Messrs Salafia (also Maltese), and Edouard Shalom, a resident of Cairo, and he dealt with senior Italian Officials Dottore Lombardo and Dottore Squiccimarro. There were two hotels in the town, the Grand and the El Mehari and at the latter he met a former fellow-pupil at South Manchester Grammar School, John Lythgoe. He recalls finding, in a pit in the desert, huge caches of worthless notes left behind by the Italians. Although Barclays Bank opened up in Tripoli within a week, these notes, to his regret, remained unnegotiable. On the square in Tripoli he remembers the locals’ amazement at the spectacle of the pipe band of 51st Highland Division. It was here, too, that he met Captain Bill Postlethwaite, whom he was to meet again after the war and who worked in the insurance industry. His old friend Sergeant Ron Bernthal, of 4th Royal Horse Artillery, whom he was also to meet, equally unexpectedly, in Germany. While in Tripoli the troops were entertained by an ENSA party which included Leslie Henson and Vivien Leigh, as well as a detachment of the Dagenham Girl Pipers, which included Peggy Irish and Margaret Fraser.
He missed the battles of Medenine (06.03.43), Mareth (21.03.43) and Wadi Akarit (12.04.43), returning to 229 Battery on 13 April. The Battery Captain, a regular soldier, Fred Boxall, had suffered a broken leg at Wadi Akarit and my father replaced him. He then saw action at Enfidaville (23.04.43) and the fall of Tunis on 7 May. To this day he remembers the dates of these battles.
In May 1943 the regiment, instead of being sent with most of the rest of the Eighth Army to Sicily, was moved back to Tripoli. In December 1943 it moved via Setif, in the Atlas Mountains (which he remembers as 'bloody cold') and Forest of Ferdinand, to Algiers, where it boarded the Samaria. The regiment arrived in Liverpool on 09.12.43, where it was greeted by a brass band, and entrained for Felixstowe.
His memories of North Africa include:
- driving a truck (inadvertently) down the wrong side of the road in Cairo
- being given complicated instructions on how to get to the desert 'highway' (a beaten track through the sand), which omitted to mention a right turn at the Great Pyramid.
- In August 1942 being with a signaller (Gunner Dooley) in a forward position on Ruweisat Ridge, seeking sporadic targets. They were protected by a stone sangar. A stray enemy shell landed behind their refuge, within two feet of it, severing the field telephone cable.
- Finding himself with a signaller among beturbanned troops of 4th Indian Division.
- The signallers Sergeants Pinfield, Barltrop and Cornford and fellow-officers Cedric Astbury, from Kent, and Neil Pallot, from Bristol
- Finding himself, on 24.10.42, in the same gully in the Munassib Depresion as Captain David Corbett-Price, in civilian life a Bank of England Official, who later lost an eye in action
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My father next saw action in France. The regiment, now the 84th (Sussex) Medium Regiment, RA and equipped with 4.5 inch and 5.5 inch guns, replacing the 25-pounders they had had in North Africa, embarked for France on MT ships T1 and T4 on D-Day itself (6 June 1944). Before embarkation the regiment's vehicles had been waterproofed, a process which, in the event, proved to be only partially effective. Before embarkation, too, my father remembers receiving large quantities of 'funny money' to be distributed to the troops for use in France. When the original invasion date, 5 June, was abandoned, the ‘money’ had to be recalled and reissued the following day.
The ships left the Thames on 6 June and arrived off Courseuilles-sur-mer on the Normandy coast on 9 June. During the landing, on Gold Beach, the truck party which included my father became separated from his unit. He remembers action in the 'Falaise gap', where the large numbers of dead horses (horses were used by the Germans to haul their guns), and their smell, left a strong impression. So too did the actions of a light ack-ack regiment (using their guns as field guns) and the French macquis in breaking up a German position.
In early September 1944 he was at the liberation of Brussels. His unit was camped in the Bois de la Cambre whence he and Sergeant Pointon were each offered a bath and hospitality by the Bloch-Renkin family who lived on the Rue Isabella. He was later offered a job by M. Bloch (which he turned down), but our family remained in touch with the Bloch-Renkin family for many years after the war.
The 84th Sussex were next involved in 'Operation Market Garden', as part of the force trying to link up with the paratroopers at Arnhem. On about 18 September a party of some six men, returning from mass, was killed by exploding aerial shells. One casualty was Artificer Staff Sergeant Slater who, together with Bombardier Edgar, was responsible for the engineering aspect of the guns. En route, at Nijmegen, he learned of my birth on 22.09.44. One incident from this time has remained with him, when a linguistic confusion between 'Dutch' and 'Deutsch' caused some local Dutch civilians to get very angry. In December 1944 the regiment was in the Antwerp area, but was hurriedly moved south to the Namur-Charleroi area to help deal with the German counteroffensive in the Ardennes (‘the ‘Battle of the Bulge’). He remembers a snowy Christmas Day and a magnificent Christmas dinner, prepared alfresco in very difficult circumstances by, among others, Bombardier Worsnip.
In December 1943 my father had become adjutant to the CO, replacing Captain Geoff Harper, who had been promoted to Staff Captain, 5 AGRA. His Second in Command was Major Hugh B Dyer and the Assistant Adjutant Lieutenant Sydney Dyer.At the end of March 1945, promoted to Major, he relinquished the post of adjutant and became CO of 250 Battery (the regiment had two batteries, 250 and 251. 251 Battery was commanded by Major Ross Chadwick, ex-TA and a Bank Manager in civilian life. Among the other officers in 251 Battery were Captain A B Shipten MC, Captain CE Drake MC and Captain M I D Greenhill The following month, on April 11, his jeep was blown up by a mine. He himself was walking ahead and was unhurt. His driver L/Bdr G A Moore, from Lupset, Wakefield, sustained a broken leg but was not evacuated.
When the Allies resumed their push towards the Rhine, my father saw action at the Reichswald Forest. He crossed into Germany on a pontoon bridge.
In early May he was at Sandbostel, near Bremen, where 250 Battery was responsible for a Russian DP camp. After the end of hostilities the camp was visited by General Horrocks who, as a Russian speaker, was able to communicate with the inmates.
On 30 May 250 Battery took over Braunlage, in the Harz mountains, from the Americans. Here, as Senior Officer, my father had dealings with the Mayor, Herr Schmidt, and had his photograph taken by the resort's foremost photographer. His interpreter, von Heydekampf, had formerly been a prominent industrialist and was in constant fear of being indicted for war crimes. He also had dealings with Colonel Aumann (in civilian life a dentist from Magdeburg), who was in charge of the military hospital in Braunlage. Among the patients in the hospital were Russian soldiers who had drunk vehicle fuel. As a result the senior officer among them went blind and three or four others died and were buried by the regimental padre.
In July 1945 his unit was billeted in the small German village of Simander. Here he unexpectedly met Captain Keith Mellor, of 10th Medium Regiment, who lived five doors away in the same road (at 20 Elmsmere Road) and whose father was manager of the District Bank in Manchester, where my mother worked. While he was at Simander a Russian Major Shepilev, plus two officers and an RSM, arrived at breakfast time in a horse-drawn landau for a joint exercise with a British group to mark out with stakes a stretch of the boundary between the British and Russian zones. They breakfasted on Scotch whisky. Gunner Eales and, subsequently Flight-Lieutenant Dietrich, who had a Russian mother, acted as interpreters. At one point during the exercise a river had to be crossed. The British soldiers went off in search of a bridge; the Russian soldier was ordered into the river on the spot and waded across. Lunch, with copious amounts of vodka, was provided by a Russian female soldier, supervising some German women. During the boundary-marking operation news came of Churchill's defeat in the General Election, a fact which the Russians found difficult to comprehend.
Shortly after Major Shepilev's arrival a Russian sergeant deserted to my father's regiment, causing great consternation. Another Russian encountered by my father was a female soldier (possibly NKVD), a Jewess, who herded into lorries reluctant Russian PoWs, who were extremely scared at the prospect of repatriation.
In later years my mother would jokingly refer to my father as the 'Beast of Braunlage'!
After Simander he was at Lüneburg, where he met John Midgley, his former House Prefect in Byrom House at William Hulme’s Grammar School, who was in the Intelligence Corps. There was an officers’ club at Lüneburg and they were entertained by Ivy Bensons’s All-Girl Band and by the Dagenham Girl Pipers, who had entertained them in Tripoli. Margaret Fraser and Peggy Irish were again with them. At Lüneburg he also remembers a detachment of the YWCA serving coffee — Mrs Bulles, whose family owned a mill in the Bradford area, and Renee Minton from Whitstable. At Lüneburg, too, he was briefly (for about two weeks) CO of the Regiment, taking over from Lieutenant-Colonal G L Fitzgerald.
Among the other names my father recalls are: from the 84th Sgts Verrall, Apps and Varltrop, RQMS Crowhurst, the MO Captain Neil McGuire and Regimental Sergeant Clerk B A Barton; from 250 Battery Major A H Victor Groom MC, Captains A F A Smith MC and 2 bars, Reg Farmery and Rollo Charles MC.
My father was demobbed at Ashton-under-Lyne Barracks in March 1946. Like all servicemen, he had been given a number, based on age and service. His was 23 and he had originally been due for demobilisation in November 1945.
My father was mentioned in despatches (13 January 1944) and holds the 1939-45 Medal, the Africa Star, the France and Germany Star, the Defence medal, the War Medal and the Territorial Army Efficiency Medal.

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