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WW2 People’s War
Two Railway Clerks

Neil Hare and Matthew Glover worked in the District Office of the London Midland and Scottish Railway Company in Ayr, on the coast thirty miles south of Glasgow. The company spent little money on office mechanisation --- even typewriters were not standard issue to stations --- consequently their clerks has to be adept with pen and paper at calculating tons, hundredweights, quarters and pounds and also pounds, shillings and pence. And neat, firm handwriting was a distinct advantage in correspondence and form filling with the ubiquitous carbon copies. Neil and Matt were clever clerks, highly regarded by their superiors.
In the spring of 1940 the phoney war was ending and more belligerent engagement was taking over. The two colleagues decided to volunteer for military service rather than wait to be called up. Together they took the train to the Royal Engineers Railway Operating Depot at Melbourne a few miles South of Derby. The Royal Engineers were then recruiting hundreds of clerks, signalmen, surfacemen, drivers and firemen, guards and shunters to construct, operate and maintain railways in the war zones. Neil and Matt ‘signed on for the duration’ (of the war) and were given consecutive identity numbers. There followed a rigorous and comprehensive training, both military and railway, that was suspended for a few days in the following hard winter when the whole unit was deployed on neighbouring lines to clear snowdrifts from stations and rail tracks.
On the completion of their training they went separate ways and did not meet again until they were civilians.
Neil returned to Scotland, to the embryonic Military Port Number 2 at Cairnryan, only 25 miles south of his home at Girvan, the Clyde Coast Holiday resort. He remained at Cairnryan while quays were built, dockside cranes were installed, and railway sidings and a two mile track to the main line near Stranraer was laid.
The proximity to Girvan was an advantage; no time was lost going to and from leave in long, tedious wartime rail journeys and even a night in his own bed was possible for a family celebration. In army vernacular ‘he had a cushy billet’ which he readily acknowledged.
He stayed at Cairnryan throughout his military service and returned to civilian life in 1947 after passing through the ranks to Warrant Officer Class 1 --- Regimental Sergeant Major.
Matt Glover’s army service was more varied. When the two friends parted at Melbourne he ‘got his knees brown’ --- more army parlance, this time indicating service in the Middle East. He sailed the pre-Suez Canal route round the Cape of Good Hope to the Persian Gulf as part of the PAI Force. The Force was formed to utilise existing railways and build new ones then operate and maintain them to provide a supply line for military equipment from the Persian Gulf through Persia and Iraq to South Russia. Supplies were brought in from Britain, India, Australia, New Zealand and the Americas and delivered at the Russian frontier. Russian isolationism prevented delivery beyond that point.
Matt’s promotion exceeded that of his friend. He was ‘commissioned in the field’ (appointed 2nd lieutenant at the site of operations) and continued up the scale to major.
When the Mediterranean was wrested from the Axis Powers the supply line through Persia and Iraq (like that past Iceland and round the North Cape to Archangel) became largely redundant. Matt’s unit was transferred to Sicily and then to Italy where it had to repair war damaged railways rather than operate its own lines.
He returned to the United Kingdom in 1946 and was put in charge of the railway sidings and operation at the Command Ordnance Deport at Didcot, Berkshire until he was ‘demobbed’ (left the army).
Neil Hare took up his civilian life where he left t in 1940 but, because of a rigid policy of promotion by age seniority only, he was never granted the status and responsibility that his army service showed he deserved.
Matt Glover was restless before the war. He contemplated joining the Argentine Railways as many railwaymen did in the 1930s. In 1947 Britain no longer had an interest in the country’s railways; instead he went to South Africa for a number of years before taking an appointment in the London office of a South African tobacco company.
Thus the early careers of two young men that were very similar and promised to continue so in army life, as indicated by consecutive personal numbers, suddenly took off in increasingly different courses throughout the rest of their working lives.

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