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Confessions from a Reserved Occcupation.

On September 3rd 1939 I was living in Sunderland and approaching my fourteenth birthday. My sister fainted in church when the rector announced from the pulpit that war had been declared, then we heard the air-raid sirens for the first time.

My school, the Junior Technical School, was evacuated to Wensleydale where we shared Yorkbridge Grammar School. I was billeted with a charming couple, Mr. and Mrs. Newton, with whom I kept in touch until their deaths some twenty-odd years later. That seems to typify my comfortable war.

On leaving school I became an apprentice fitter and turner, an essential pre-requisite for my chosen career of marine engineer. I also enrolled at the local technical college for qualifications which would exempt me from the paperwork of science, maths, etc. for the two certificates of competence which must be held by the Chief Engineer Officer of ships in the British Mercantile Marine.

As an apprentice in heavy engineering, at sixteen years of age I was placed on alternate weeks of day and night shift. The hours were 7.30 am to 5 pm with a lunch break Monday to Friday and 7.30 am to 12 noon on Saturdays, a total of 47 1/2 hours. Night shift was 10 pm to 7.30 am five nights per week. Later we were on twelve-hour shifts from 7.30 to 7.30 with every other weekend as overtime.

Meanwhile I joined the Air Training Corps (ATC), took a certificate of proficiency in Morse, aircraft recognition and other subjects and was promoted to Corporal.

When at the age of 17 years I volunteered for flying duties in the RAF I had to attend a three-day residential course in Doncaster. The CO of my ATC squadron advised me to attend in uniform - a mistake. I found myself in a group of fellows who were in fashionable clothes, were up-to-date in the latest slang and who wore their pork-pie hats on the back of their heads in what, one assumes, they thought was a 'Devil-may-care' attitude.

The educational requirement was, I thought, pathetic and could be summed up as literacy and accurate numeracy. After the education tests we were called in to be interviewed by the air-crew selection board, each of whom had rings from cuffs to shoulder and a white 'Flying Officer Kite' moustache (large, luxuriant moustaches affected by officers in the RAF). They asked me apparently irrelevant questions but they must have been satisfied with my answers because they accepted me as PNB, Pilot Navigator, Bombardier, and told me that I could be mustered in any of these categories. Having satisfied the eye doctor, I went to the ear doctor only to be sent back to the selection board who informed me that I had failed the medical. I had travelled to Doncaster RAFVR and travelled home RAF (REJECT).

So what was a reserved occupation?

In the first year of the First World War, so many men had volunteered for the armed forces that the factories could not function properly and a form of reverse conscription was operated: skilled men were sent back to the factories and shipyards. The authorities were prepared for this in the Second World War and certain skilled men were not only exempt from military call-up but were forbidden by law to leave their trade or employment except to join air crews, submarines or the coalmines. So far as I understand it, a digit was drawn in the form of a lottery and if the National Insurance number of the conscript ended with that digit he was sent to the mines and became what was known as a 'Bevan boy', so called because he was conscripted under a scheme for which Mr. Ernest Bevan took responsibility. I mention this because I know of no-one approaching call-up age who would have actually opted for work in the coalmines.

A number of older apprentices tried to volunteer for the Royal Navy but were turned down because they were in reserved occupations. Oddly enough, at the end of their apprenticeship at the age of twenty-one, and after VE and VJ days were passed, they were conscripted into the Royal Navy as engine room artificers.

It will be seen that with long working hours and part-time education there was little time for contemplating one's navel but we were able to lead reasonable social lives. I speak for the 'squares' - the interesting 'hell-raisers' must be left to speak for themselves. We were members of the Youth Hostels Association and by hiking or cycling we could take a weekend away, spending Saturday night in a Youth Hostel. The price of a bed for the night was one shilling (5p) and it was sixpence (2.5p) for a cotton sleeping bag. We would prepare our own food in the kitchens which were equipped with calor gas stoves, then the warden would allot to each a chore which would ensure that the place would be clean and habitable for future use. There were also football and table tennis leagues.

We were able to go dancing when shifts permitted but most things closed at 10 pm which must seem strange to a generation which queues for admission to night clubs at midnight. There were also gangs of youths who roamed the blacked-out streets looking for the unsuspecting in order to attack them and give them a good kicking just for the fun of it. We all get our fun in different ways.

Our diet was monotonous but adequate. There are people who complain that they were hungry during the war but I must confess that this did not appear to be the experience of my immediate circle of friends. Supplements to the diet by courtesy of the USA included processed pork called Spam, dried milk, dried eggs, and dried fruit - in that day veritable delicacies. Babies had a ration of cod-liver oil and concentrated orange juice.

Rationing of other foods and coal continued until 1954.

I understand that statistically my home town, Sunderland, at that time produced a greater tonnage of shipping than any other town in the world, yet, strangely, the German bombers let us off comparatively lightly. Night shift was seldom disrupted by air-raid warnings but then we would hear the occasional thud of bombs in the distance. The next morning we would be told that some street in the old town had been hit or a cinema or department store had been destroyed, but I must confess that nothing happened to disrupt the normal tenor of my life which I remember as simply bed to work.

There was on the river Wear a small shipyard named Short's which took a small bomb but the German broadcaster nicknamed 'Lord Haw-Haw' told us that Short's, the home of the Sunderland flying boat, had been bombed. The home of the Sunderland flying boat was in Northern Ireland.

When it became apparent that preparations were being made to invade the continent, production of Merchant ships was eased and we switched to LCTs (Landing Craft Tanks). That was my contribution to the D-day landings.

Throughout the war I was not personally acquainted with one person who lost a life due to enemy action. Of my friends who were accepted as air crew, most became redundant at the end of the war and remustered into RAF ground crew before demobilisation. Only one was killed as a test pilot, years after the war ended.

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