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Name F. Arthur Melson
Interview Date 27th April 2005
Subjects covered Gas Masks, Childhood, Digging for Victory, Make do and Mend (Salvage), Rationing, Military Presence (Prisioners of War)
Location Oxford, Cowley, Horspath,
People Included Cowley Barracks, Metal Products Recovery Depot, Horspath Road. Oxon and Bucks Regiment.

This is an edited extract of a recorded interview conducted by Museum of Oxford with Mr F. Arthur Melson. It has been submitted to the People’s War website with her permission. A full version of the interview transcript and audio recording will be available at the Centre for Oxfordshire Studies.

Gas Masks
… and we were also of course at the start of the war um, everybody was issued with gasmasks, um adults had a black thing with a, an oval glass panel to peer through and adults and children, I had one of those so eight year olds must have had that type of mask. And my sister who was four years younger had what they called a Mickey Mouse one which had, um, a red rubber mask with a blue canister and a sort of valve on the front and big bulbous eye pieces, they were known as Mickey Mouse gasmasks and my youngest sister who was only nine months old had a complete um canvas bag, that you put the whole baby inside and shut it up and pumped the little, a hand pump on the side to um, put air into the bag, if you stopped pumping, I suppose the baby would be in trouble you know but um, they were completely in-cased because you couldn’t put a mask on them and one of the good things of course was that um, you couldn’t wear glasses with a gas mask so if you had a gasmask on, you couldn’t, if there was a trial at school, you couldn’t put your gasmask on with your glasses so if you had glasses you couldn’t see the blackboard so that was, that was great you know. You couldn’t wear glasses because the air would get in at the side of the gasmask where the arms of the glasses were, and one of the tests they used to do was to put a piece of paper on the end of your gasmask and you had to breathe in and if the paper fell off obviously the air was getting in round the side of the gasmask so that was one of the things that they did.

Childhood
We had fun when the Americans came um, they had quite a big camp there, they were quite a long time at the Cowley barracks and they, um installed about three telephones for each man I should think, had an enormous amount of telephones installed which the British army never had to have, and um they also put an armed guard on the back gate which was our way in um, which at the end of Brasenose rift way there was a back way into the barracks and they put an armed guard there and we used to go and tease him and half a dozen of us would go down one way and sort of jeer at him and he would come down there to chase us, to chase them off, and the rest of us would charge in through the gate and then he would chase us in and out of the huts, I mean, why we wanted to be chased by an armed guard I’ll never know but it was all great fun.

Digging for Victory
Conkers were um, were collectable because um, that was animal food, pig food, and so we were set about collecting those at, by the school and um, you got little um, ribbons, coloured ribbons to tie to, to pin on your coat according how much you managed to collect.

The school organised the collecting of acorns, and um, as I say conkers as well were collectable, and I think rosehips if I remember rightly um, from the hedgerows, because they could be turned into rosehip syrup which was a medicine for throats and the like, you know, and I remember they were collectable as well. As well as jam jars, which most people kept at home for bottling and making their own jam, I know my mother used to make marrow jam what else she put in it, can you imagine jam made of marrows? It um, tasted alright, we enjoyed it.

Make do and Mend (Salvage)
There was a place called MPRD, Metal Products Recovery Depot I think it was or something like that um, where lots of crash, all the crash aeroplanes were dumped, were dumped there and the material was salvaged, um brass and instruments and various bits and pieces and lots of my friends used to go over there and get bits and pieces, you could get bullet-proof glass as it was known as from the cockpits and um bullet-proof rubber from the fuel tanks, which was a spongy rubber which couldn’t be or if it was penetrated by a bullet the hole closed up and kept the fuel in. I never went there because I was very squeamish as a child and lots of the planes were blood stained and there might be odd body parts in there you know that kept me away but I did get lots of trophies which I swapped with various friends. I had a twenty-millimetre cannon shell which was one of my prize possessions I never knew whether it was live or dead I think it was a dead one but um, I still had the thing and that was great fun.

Rationing
… of course it was only in the early days of the war when there was still cars on the road because petrol became short and, um, first off it was rationed and then it was completely stopped and, um, cars were just put up on wooden blocks to take the weight off the tyres for the duration of the war which nobody thought would be all that long I suppose you know. But I remember our car stood on wooden blocks, there weren’t many cars anyway I think um, there were only two or three people owned cars in our road and so um, it was you know, quite a nice quiet time for children to play in the streets and all the rest of it.

Military Presence
I um, as I say I lived um, on the Horsepath Road, near the Cowley barracks, and one of the, at the end of Dunkirk when lots of the troops were coming back in dribs and drabs um, pre-war soldiers all had as part of their uniform what they called a swagger-stick which was a little black cane with a silver knob at the end with the Oxford and Bucks emblem on the thing, and they came back from Dunkirk and they were weighed down with all sorts of equipment and kitbags and they didn’t want to know about swagger-sticks anymore, you know, they were more interested in guns and bullets you know, swagger-sticks were old hat so boys used to offer to carry their kit bags from, they would catch a bus from the Swan and have to walk from the Swan up to the Cowley barracks and if you were lucky enough, you could get a soldier with a swagger-stick and he would give you his swagger-stick if you would carry his kit bag, and that was a real trophy to get hold of. …

And um, prisoners of war mostly Italians worked there. Italians were only too glad to surrender and get taken prisoner because they didn’t have to go and fight anymore and they didn’t want to fight anyway and they had old army uniforms with coloured patches, big discs of different colours on their backs and on their legs of their trousers so that if they ran away they could be seen easily, or that, that was the idea. And they worked on the airplane dumps recovering the um, the metal and we used to go and shout insults at them like ‘Musso the wop he’s a bigga the flop’ which um, was related to Mussolini of course which was something that came in one of the comics and um, they all just used to laugh and smile at us and we, we thought we’d you know, we’d done our bit for the war effort, it was a, it was a bit of fun.

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