大象传媒

A Small Boy at War

The Home Front

At the beginning of WW2 I was five years, fifteen days, & seven hours old. (actually I am not sure about the hours). I lived at Darley Dale in mid Derbyshire with my parents, my eighty year old maternal grandparents, & my two month old brother.

The kitchen had been turned into our survival room. It had all that was needed - a sink, a cooking range, & a gas cooker. The window was protected by a lattice of sticky tape & a blackout screen could be clamped tightly to the window frame. The pantry opened off the kitchen. We were totally prepared for war.

On the second night of the war, the air raid siren just 100yd away on the school roof, woke us abruptly. We all ran down to our shelter - except for my brother who had to be carried & Grandma who was only capable of very slow progress. Everyone put their gas masks on except Peter who was put into his. Babies were issued with a noxious smelling rubber bag into which they were inserted. The whole thing zipped up & the baby鈥檚 head could be seen through the plastic window - until the latter fogged up of course. It was fitted with a bellows type hand pump to supply air. Naturally he screamed, & was then effectively without a gas mask until big enough for the Mickey Mouse type. This was in red & blue with a goggle type visor - a design I coveted. I thought my standard civilian pattern with single visor vastly inferior.

By the following night Grandma had decided she would prefer to be killed in her bed. Grandfather took the same view so the problem of us all getting under the kitchen table, which was going to protect us from bombs, was eased. A few months later we were invited to share a neighbour鈥檚 lavish air raid shelter which was the size of a sitting room. My grandparents continued to sleep peacefully at home. Eventually we decided that Darley Dale was not a prime Luftwaffe target, so air raid warnings were ignored.

Sheffield was however very much on Hitler鈥檚 hit list. One night my father woke me up & carried me some hundred yards to a point where we could see over the hills. I can still remember the huge orange glow that hung in the sky over Sheffield, some 20 miles away.This was the worst night of the Sheffield blitz.

Of course we often heard German aircraft flying high overhead. They made a curious droning beat totally unlike any Allied aircraft. The only aircraft I ever saw at close quarters was a German ME109 fighter, exhibited in Matlock to raise money for the war effort. It had been little damaged and sat there menacingly on its spindly undercarriage. Somehow the smell of this plane, which I suppose was a mixture of fuel, oil, and hydraulic fluid, seemed frighteningly foreign - perhaps a Spitfire smells just the same.

At the beginning of the war Grandpa acquired a large map of Western Europe which was mounted on the dining room wall. Included with the map were small English, French, and German flags on pins. With the help of the 大象传媒 news (for which there had to be absolute silence), he looked forward to plotting the advance of the allies into Germany. In the event, trying to keep up with the German blitzkrieg was not only totally disheartening but virtually impossible. The project was abandoned.

Whilst of course I knew there was food rationing, I never found this to be a burden personally. A somewhat finicky eater anyway, I actually found the Spam, the Corned Beef and the omelettes made from dried egg (that came in olive brown waxed packets bearing the American eagle) were more to my taste than the gristly mincemeat, boiled mutton and soggy vegetables which constituted the normal English diet. But I did dislike the wheat flakes that replaced Kellogg鈥檚 corn flakes and greatly missed the occasional treat of a Walls ice cream wafer from the Stop Me & Buy One man.

The Council School next door became an Emergency Evacuation Centre manned, amongst others, by my mother. Another boy & I were recruited as dispatch riders (on pedal cycles) to carry messages to another centre, Churchtown School, a mile away. I was now officially enrolled in the defence of my country. We were never tested under fire.
School

I started school within days of the outbreak of war. I cannot remember the war intruding very much on school life. Of course we took our gas masks in their cardboard boxes with us wherever we went and if there was an air raid warning, we all trotted off to the shelters that had been built in an adjacent field.

However one particular memory if I do have is that of collecting aluminium milk bottle tops to make Spitfires. I do not actually know how many milk bottle tops are required to make a Spitfire but we were rewarded in accordance with how many tops we delivered to the school. If you collected, say, 100 tops you became a corporal and were given a badge of rank accordingly. With 500 tops you could become a lieutenant. I struggled for at least a month to become a lieutenant only to be humiliated by a boy from Matlock who was a Field Marshall in next to no time at all.

Munitions

In 1940 my great uncle, Chairman & Managing Director of the family cutlery firm in Sheffield, saw the opportunity to sell after difficult trading conditions through the twenties & thirties. It was bought by a Jewish family who had left Germany in 1937. Bringing with them the entire contents of their cutlery factory on a train, they had already taken over a factory in the city. Father continued to run the works for them, so he was in the fairly unique position of working for German nationals for most of the war!

Out went the two gas engines that had powered the factory since my great grandfather built it in 1880, superseded by electric motors. In came new machines & the factory was switched to war work. I was given the magnets out of the engine magnetos but they were not very powerful!

I well remember going there (where to my astonishment I was addressed by the old retainers as 鈥淢aster Philip鈥� - father being 鈥淢r Henry鈥�). Girls thumped out parts for Sten guns on hand powered fly presses. Men lifted white hot brass billets on to drop stamps to be forged into bomb caps. Die casting machines churned out aluminium knifes, forks, & spoons for the troops (known a KFS & probably still issued today) A bewildering world of ceaseless activity, smoke, & noise. I used to take bits home for my toy box.

Benno (who spoke no English) & Julius (who was far from fluent) visited us periodically in Darley Dale. This usually included lunch or tea at a local hotel. Mother always told the staff & other guests that they were Dutch refugees, safe in the knowledge that people in Derbyshire did not speak much German.

The Defence of Darley Dale

My father was much too old for the armed forces, in my opinion at least. Actually, then in his late thirties, as Works Manager of the family firm he was in a 鈥淩eserved Occupation鈥� & deemed more valuable to the war effort in that capacity. He was however the Quartermaster Sergeant in the local Home Guard, responsible for the issue of uniforms, weapons, & all the other military paraphernalia. The total lack of equipment in the early days meant his task was not unduly onerous.

But, having swapped their LDV (Local Defence Volunteer) armbands for those bearing the words 鈥淗ome Guard鈥� the equipping of this elite force began, albeit sporadically. Our house seemed to be a transit store & I remember the oily smell of the rifles propped against the banisters & the quite appalling odour of the khaki denims piled up in front of them. Kitted out in their denims, forage caps with Sherwood Foresters badges & with black leather belts & gaiters, the recruits certainly assumed a more soldierly appearance. Unfortunately the ex World War 1 US Army rifles used .300 ammunition & the cartridges that accompanied them were the standard .303 British issue. So the Home Guard were not yet a really lethal force.

I was a frequent but unofficial attendee of the Sunday morning drill parade which took place in the yard of the Stancliffe Stone Company, a quadrangle not unlike a real parade ground. By then there was a store there as well as at our house & there was great excitement when new kit arrived. There were Lewis guns, a medium machine gun from, it was said, fighter aircraft of WW1, in long wooden boxes with rope handles. There were piles of ammunition boxes with broad arrows & mysterious codes painted on in yellow letters. New serge battledress & greatcoats were eventually issued & the Home Guard started looking like real soldiers complete with tin hats & proper military gas masks, webbing & water bottles.

An innovative weapon was the Blacker Bombard, a round ball coated with thick sticky grease & mounted on a stick. The idea was that you stuck it on a German tank as it rumbled past. The thought that the tank crew might see you in advance of your attack seems not to have occurred to the War Office. One or two experiments out on the range at Wragg鈥� s Quarry rapidly convinced the local Home Guard it was a dangerous enough weapon in its own right without the intervention of enemy tanks.

The disused Wragg鈥檚 Quarry on Beeley Moor was a convenient place to establish a firing range with a minimal chance of killing the local inhabitants. It was not of course entirely without risk once the Home Guard had been issued with Lee Enfield rifles that matched their ammunition. I think range practice & drill parades were on alternate Sundays, so again I was frequently there in my capacity of unofficial observer. I was not there though when a stray bullet went through the driver鈥檚 door of my father鈥檚 Austin Seven, deflating the two air cushions of the front seats before exiting via an equally neat hole in the other door.

However I was a witness to the initial trials of the Sten sub machine gun. My father, perhaps in his role of custodian of materiel, or perhaps because of his expertise in the manufacture of Sten gun triggers, decided to demonstrate. Unknown to him, in discharging the spent cartridge the breech mechanism hammered open & closed at precisely the point where your fingers would wrap round the barrel. The result was inevitable & he was very lucky to have escaped with a partially severed little finger, copious quantities of blood & a severe telling off by my mother subsequently - she had no time for family heroes.

This did not put my father off the Sten gun. For the remainder of the war he kept one at the back of my mother鈥檚 dressing table together with six fully loaded magazines & two sacks full of boxed ammunition!

There was of course some serious soldiering to be done. With the only large field in Darley Dale covered in large wooden stakes put there by the Army, the only opportunity for the German airborne forces to launch their expected attack on rural Derbyshire was on the surrounding moorland. So it was here, at Gladwin鈥檚 Mark near Wragg鈥檚 quarry that the Home Guard established their permanent roadblock. Each member had to report for duty on two nights in every week. In the case of father鈥檚 headquarters鈥� platoon it was apparently convenient to have a pre-meeting in a room at the Square and Compass!

That the Home Guard was now a well trained & lethal force was not in doubt, at least not in the mind of a small boy. Nor perhaps in the mind of the Chief Constable of, I think, Lincolnshire. In the early hours, when signalled to stop at the checkpoint, he instructed his driver to carry on. (In those days Chief Constables were frequently retired Colonel鈥檚 who saw no good reason to accept orders from amateurs) He changed his mind when a bullet shattered the rear window & then the windscreen of his car. They were lucky to escape with their lives.

The Real Army

My first experience of what I thought of as a real soldiers came immediately after the fall of Dunkirk. In the centre of Darley Dale there is the Whitworth Institute, given to the village by Lady Whitworth in memory of her husband Sir Joseph, the eminent Victorian engineer. It is a large stone building incorporating a Hotel and set in an extensive park. A large contingent of the British Expeditionary Force camped out here after the evacuation. Badly shocked, they wandered around the area at something of a loss and my grandfather invited four of them to come in for a cup of tea. This was the first of daily visits for something like the next six weeks or so. Apparently they readily admitted to being frightened to death by the Stuka dive bombers and one of them, who rarely spoke, was suffering from what today we would call post traumatic stress disorder.

They were very grateful for the hospitality and, although I cannot remember this, used to spend their afternoons playing with me. They were seriously concerned for our future welfare and wanted to dig a trench in the garden to protect as in the event of air raids Grandfather, a retired nursery man was quite horrified with this proposal so it was kindly rejected!

My next real soldier was Larry, a corporal in the Royal Signals, and more importantly boy friend of Clarice, our twenty year old maid - not that she wore a uniform of course but was, like my mother, permanently clad in a floral overall. Larry was soon despatched to join the 8th Army fighting Rommel in the Western Desert. Every few months I received a letter from Larry telling me about the palm trees the dates, & the camels he had seen. In every letter there was a note in the coinage of the country he was passing through. Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria were followed by Morocco & Italy. Finally a note issued by the British Occupying Power marked his arrival in Germany. I still have the notes in a wooden cigar box of the era. Larry & Clarice married at the end of the war.

Quads were 4X4 Artillery Tractors. A convoy of these curious vehicles, towing trailers & field guns, crashed descending the hairpins of nearby Rowsley Bar. Having killed two soldiers in this attempt, they then tried to negotiate the notorious Sydnope Hill down into Darley Dale. This time they were more successful - only one was killed. As small boys do, I went to see the survivors & their vehicles in the field at the bottom of the hill. The men, some bandaged, sat around smoking & drinking tea. Disappointingly there was no visible damage to the Quads.

The Whitworth Institute became a driver training school for the Royal Army Service Corps. Initially new recruits were confined to the park where they did untold damage to the trees & walls despite the white lines painted down the 鈥渞oads鈥�. Later, they took to the public roads. The narrow Derbyshire lanes were for ever crowded with slow moving convoys going absolutely nowhere. I was greatly intrigued by some of the trucks that had dual control - presumably for the more erratic pupils. The commanding officer at the Institute earned national notoriety for requiring soldiers to address officers with the greeting 鈥淗i di Hi鈥� to which the reply was 鈥淗o di Ho鈥�. Once it reached the tabloid press, this nonsense was rapidly banned.

With the Intelligence Corps having taken over Smedley鈥檚, the largest Hydro in the town, Matlock was always full of soldiers Many were from other nations, their shoulder flashes bearing such legends as Norge, Canada, and Belge. There were servicemen home on leave & patients from the military hospitals that had been established in other large Hydro鈥檚.The latter wore a bright blue uniform with a white shirt, red tie, and matching blue forage cap irrespective of the service from which they came.

Given the large size of my family, few relations were directly engaged in the war. Many of my uncles had fought in the first war and were too old, and most of my cousin鈥檚 were too young - but not all of them of course. My Uncle Lewis, a subaltern in WW1 was now a Bomb Disposal Officer. He later became a major in the Intelligence Corps - based at Matlock! His son, Patrick, was a radio operator in the RAF I think it was the Christmas of 1941 that Pat sent me a card. This was an official RAF greeting card with a photograph of a Stirling four engine bomber. It merely said 鈥渢his is the type of aircraft and flying in at the moment鈥�. The night he posted it, Pat left for a night raid on the German battleships at Brest. His aircraft was seen going down in flames over the target - there were no parachutes. I recently gave this card to his sister.

The same German battleships were to prove an acute embarrassment to another ccousin, a gunner on the batteries at Dover. He was for ever held responsible by the family for allowing the ships to slip through the straits undetected & without a shot being fired!

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