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After so much action, being repatriated was a very strange experience. Having had some say in what was going on for so long, it made one feel like a piece of merchandise being shipped from place to place
. It was a pretty uneventful trip with little to do except play a few deck games and sleep. It was basically a shipload of troops going the other way this time all of them a bit weary.
I shared a cabin with three other half colonels the name of only one can I remember. It was pretty cramped with two bunks each side of the cabin with a washbasin by the door. One chap was a Gunner , one a CRE, and the third, D’Abreau, a doctor. He had served with an Indian division and had become fascinated with yogi and other Indian customs. First thing every morning throughout the voyage three of us were stymied. Either we had to get up very early, or stay in our bunks and watch him contemplate his navel on the floor with folded legs. Having done this for some time he then stood against the door upside down with his head on the floor. He maintained that this replenished his brain with blood.
It turned out that before the war he had been quite a well known plastic surgeon and told innumerable amusing stories of operations on the toes, boobs and noses of some of his more wealthy patients. I met him again once in London 10 years later when he had a very affluent practice in Harley Street.
The voyage home took just over three weeks. We docked at Glasgow on 18th April 1945, disembarked and went to a holding centre in Nottingham the next day. On April 20th I arrived home at Ulcombe on 28 days leave.
Those 28 days turned out to be nearer 3 months during which time I must have got around quite a bit but I don’t remember much about it at all. There were celebrations everywhere when VE Day was announced on the 8th of May. On the 18th June, Mama’s birthday, I reverted to a war substantive rank of temporary major and three weeks later, on the 10th July, promoted back to temporary Lieutenant Colonel and posted to command No. 4 Command Workshops REME in York.
In the meantime I had bought myself a second hand car from Roots in Maidstone. I think it was a Standard 9, its big ends went within 500 miles! I drove it up to York musing on what it would be like to have a command in the UK with all its red tape and to be quartered in proper barracks.
When I got there, I found that my command consisted of the Infantry Barracks, the Cavalry Barracks alongside and, almost immediately opposite on the other side of the road, the pretty sizeable Base Workshop. The Workshops consisted of several factory like buildings.
My unit, was housed in the Infantry Barracks and all the warrant and non commissioned officers together with the other ranks were well housed in the barrack quarters. For some reason the officers mess and quarters in the main building were being completely gutted and refurbished. In consequence our Officers quarters and mess consisted of an extensive array of Nissan temporary buildings arranged in a large horseshoe on the parade ground in front of the main building. The Cavalry Barracks next door accommodated a contingent of ATS.
I have no record of the number of bodies involved in this lot for which I was responsible. To the best of my recollection, I think that there were about 150/200 permanent civilian staff in the workshops. In the Infantry Barracks I had just on 400 ‘licentious soldiery’, Officers, WOs, NCOs and ORs. Many of them had recently returned from long terms of overseas service. In the Cavalry Barracks, strictly ‘off limits’ to any male other than me as the overall CO, was the home of some 150 ATS officers and other ranks. The ATS’s CO was a very forbidding rather large lady. She held the equivalent rank of Lieut. Colonel, which in the ATS was called Chief Commander. Before June 1941 this rank was known as Chief Commandant and she still continued to use this form. I think she found it more impressive. Her name was Pymm and ‘Chief Commandant Pymm’ was a person to be reckoned with in more ways than one.
It was a nice command but it had its problems. The engineering side was a cake walk. I had an excellent ATS stores Officer Capt Catherine Franks always known to everyone as ‘Frankie’. She later married one of my workshop officers Peter Dodd a released POW from Germany. She looked after most of the paperwork of the workshops while the civilians and REME warrant officers kept the workshops running smoothly.
Most of the problems were not associated with engineering. The unit was used by the War Office as a receiving unit for all REME personnel being repatriated from service overseas. We also had some cases of returning British POWs who had been released from captivity by our advancing forces in Europe. Inevitably a number of personal, psychological and logistical matters of all kinds kept cropping up and had to be resolved.
To me personally, quite a major hazard was my immediate superior, the DDME at Command HQ - one Brigadier ‘Jimmy’ James. He was a pleasant tubby little man but his one big fault was that he preferred my mess to his own. His office was only just down the road in the centre of York city. In consequence, two or three times a week he used to turn up ‘just to see how things were getting on’, automatically inviting himself to lunch at the same time. This meant that I always had Command HQ round my neck.
In addition there was a never ending stream of paper emanating from Command HQ. This was ‘peace time soldiering’ with a vengeance. Having existed quite adequately with only Kings Regulations and the Manual of Military Law for so long, all this bumph quite put me off any thoughts of staying in the Army permanently. This thought had been strongly recommended by ‘Jimmy’ James.
Nevertheless in spite of these trials and tribulations we managed to have quite a good time. The ATS officers next door were frequent guests in the mess, including, once in a while, the Chief Commandant herself.
As we were the first occupants of the temporary mess on the parade ground it was pretty spartan. One thing that I had always considered essential in a permanent mess was an open fire place. So in spite of the fact that we were in wooden buildings I persuaded the local RE unit to lend me some bricklayers. They built a brick fireplace and chimney at the end of the anti room together with a small annexe on one side that became known as ‘Potter’s Bar’.
Initially there was a bit of a problem with the chimney smoking that shortly afterwards was cured by a small design change. However during the ‘smoky’ period I was a bit insistent that my way of stoking the fire was the only way to keep smoke in the room to a minimum. A sequel to this was an occasion when I had invited an officer to come to lunch and he turned up at the mess a bit early before I had left my office. A junior officer took him into the anti-room gave him a drink and made conversation. It was a cold morning, the fire had not long been alight and the guest, a major, picked up the poker and started to rearrange the burning logs. ‘Excuse me sir’ said the subaltern ‘only the Colonel pokes the fire’. This comment subsequently got around outside and became a humorous greeting when I visited other messes.
I was in York just over 6 months. During this time everyone was pretty relaxed and tried to enjoy life to the full. There was a regular exchange of entertaining with messes of other units in the area where several were stationed. For us the ATS always provided good company for dinners at local pubs and restaurants. A number of attachments were made during these 6 months. Peter Dodd and I both became engaged to ATS officers ‘next door’ and subsequently married soon afterwards.
The biggest mess party of all was on the night of VJ Day on the 15th August. The news came through just after we had finished dinner. The balloon went up with a bang. All the troops were milling about on what was left of the parade ground and some of our younger members filled a couple of our fire buckets with beer and handed them out through the windows to the troops outside. The whole war was over at last.
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On January the 20th 1946 I drew my civilian issue of suit, raincoat, shoes, shirt and a few other things from the quartermaster’s stores and was formally released from service in the Army with paid leave until 21 May 1946. I assume that was the actual date of discharge.
It had been just three months short of 7 years of a pretty varied experience. Long periods of boredom, frustration and discomfort, punctuated with long and short periods of very intense fright. In between there were many interludes of great interest when I saw things and went places that would have been impossible in normal circumstances. A time of making and losing friends.

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