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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Roger Marsh of the ‘Action Desk — Sheffield’ Team on behalf of Reg Reid, and has been added to the site with the author's permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

The Lighter Side of War

By
Don Alexander

CHAPTER 4: Vauxhall (Bedford) engine plant, Luton July-August 1940

The air of frenzied but ordered activity, the clashing of metal, the huge size of the place - and that was just the canteen! Only kidding - Reg was observing the assembly line in an enormous, recently expanded Vauxhall factory. He watched, fascinated, the manufacture of engines for Bedford 3 ton lorries - one of the workhorses of the Army. Nearly all the Sheffield lads at Newark had worked with steel, a world away from Reg's work at Hallamshire Golf Club on the moorland heights of Lodge Moor. Before Springburn he had only known lawn mower and motorbike engines. Now he was aquainted with the big 6 cylinder overhead valve engines being assembled at Luton.

There were masses of men on the shop floor. Chamberlain, before he was ousted from office in May, wanted to learn lessons from the First World War. Men were needed in factories until women could be trained to do some of the jobs. Get the production out to match troop numbers - try to make sure the troops were well-equipped. Chamberlain, a Brummie industrialist, was that rarity in British governments - someone who understood and cared about industry. Army recruitment up to June 1940, was no more than sixty thousand men a month. There were just ten British divisions in Belgium. The Germans created havoc by their dive bombers breaking through the rear of enemy lines, and with their brilliant conception of grouping armoured (panzer) divisions and very rapid advance, which quickly led to the collapse of France and the Low Countries by June 1940.

Churchill rallied British morale by focussing on the heroic rescue of the Army at Dunkirk by the Navy and many hundreds of small boats, and he then doubled recruitment month by month. Scores of infantry battalions were quickly assembled, though they had initially to rely on 300, 000 First World War rifles - and many backup units like the RASC and the Home Guard drilled with wooden rifles!

It was against this background that Reg spent two months in Luton, and got to know a girl there at a Women's Voluntary Service club. The WVS did sterling work helping troops feel at home in strange places, and moreover, this girl made him some buns - and was pretty with it. Her sister was going out with an Irish lad, a lorry driver intending to join the British Army. There was a flood of volunteers from Northern Ireland to fight the Nazis, but this lad was from Southern Ireland - and from a town where there was strong anti-British, if not altogether pro-Nazi sentiment. Like other volunteers from the Republic, he would have to go on leave to his parents' home in civvies. Reg can only remember him as Paddy (naturally) and can't remember the girl's name, but the four enjoyed times out together.

Friendships were short in wartime though, and no promises were made as he left Luton to meet up with Stan Smith and Frank Turton at High Wycombe, the furniture-making town in Buckinghamshire.

Pr-BR

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