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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Ted Newcomen from the Hastings Community Learning Centre and has been added to the website on behalf of Jack Foster with his permission & he fully understand the site’s terms & conditions.

My name is Jack Foster and in 1939 I turned 14 years of age and was living with my mother in Gateshead. When war actually broke out we were on holiday visiting relatives in London and I can remember the kerbstones being painted white, sandbags being prepared, and tape stuck to the window-glass — all in anticipation of enemy bombing.
On our return to Gateshead my school was told to muster at the railway station and I was evacuated to a place called Shildon which appeared to be in the close vicinity of some huge marshalling yards — a likely target for bombing if ever there was one!
Here, I was billeted for a few weeks with an ex-miner, and his wife and son. My mother came to visit and was not impressed with the living conditions so she took me home, where not long after I left school and went to work for Haggies, the rope and cable manufacturer. On turning seventeen-and-a-half I registered six months early as a Bevan Boy so that I would get my choice of service — in my case the Royal Navy.
I was finally called up on the 14th December 1943 and sent for basic training at HMS Excaliber, a shore-based camp in Cheshire. Here for the next six weeks I learnt to march, salute, do semaphore, and generally become a novice sailor.
On completion, I was allocated to the naval depot at Chatham where I was then trained as a cook. Here I stayed in huge, long, blacked-out barrack buildings where we all slept in hammocks slung across the room. It was a smelly & generally unpleasant experience and I was relieved in April 1944 to be posted overseas to HMS Eland, the naval base in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
West Africa was known as ‘the white man’s grave’ for good reason — it was terribly humid. Malaria, dysentery, tropical ulcers, and prickly heat were endemic. We used to joke that it was ‘the last place that God made after Gateshead’. I can remember feeling that I was a very ‘young’ and small 18 year-old having to settle disputes between the different West African tribesmen under my command, who all seemed much older and towered over me in size. I was also struck by the poverty of the local people, which came as a great surprise to me after all the flag waving about the ‘great’ British Empire that I’d been exposed to as a child.
I served as a cook on HMS Kilhampton, a patrol boat with about 75 crew. Food was nearly all dried - even the mince came in blocks and had to be soaked in water for 24 hours. Fresh provisions were only available when we reached a port. I had to bake bread every other day, but before this we had to sieve the second-rate flour which was full of weevils. During action-stations it was my job to help load the depth charges onto the throwers as we swept the sealanes for enemy submarines along the West African coast. We always felt tired; you could never get enough sleep.
In May 1945 I returned to Britain and I can remember staying in a hostel in Victoria, London when it was bombed one night. My room had two beds, one on each wall with the door in between. When the bombing started my pal & I dived under his bed. Shortly, the place was rocked by a massive explosion and the whole window & frame blew into the room in single piece, covering everything in a cloud of plaster & dust. The wreckage blocked the door and we had to just wait as it took rescuers some time to get us out of the mess. As a result, I was seven hours late getting back to barracks and was classified as being AWOL, resulting in three days stoppage of leave!
In September 1945 I was posted to HMS Sheffield, a City Class Cruiser which was being re-fitted. At the war’s end I volunteered to stay in the service an extra 10 months and spent 1946 sailing the Caribbean and the east coast of the USA, showing the flag.
I finally returned to the UK on the aircraft carrier HMS Indefatigable. It was the only time in my naval career that I was ever seasick, due to the slow motion of the huge ship as opposed to the smaller vessels that I’d been used to.
The winter of 1946/47 was one of the most severe ever and I went down sick with the flu, eventually being sent home for a fortnight. We’d won the war but everything was in short supply — there was no coal and frequently no electricity. Finally, I was de-mobbed in April 1947.

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