THE WIDE WORLD

In June 1953 I left Stockport Grammar School for ever and marched out into the wide world thinking I was pretty well equipped, after all, I had 13 GCSE’s.  If ever a bloke was in for a shock it was me!  I went straight down to Harrod’s Farm at Whatcote in Warwickshire and was plunged into the world of work.  I learned to milk cows, feed pigs, drive a tractor, grind and mix feed in the barn, do all kinds of field work and how to use a fork, shovel and my back and arms.  It was bloody hard but the grub was good and I slept like a log every night.  My pay was £1 a week, I put half in the bank and spent the other half on Woodbines.

Years later a doctor told me that the best thing that could happen to any young person at the end of puberty was to be put in a situation where they worked hard and fed well because it built up bone mass and in the final analysis, this was the single most important factor that influenced health, particularly in illness or old age.  I still don’t know whether this is true but I followed this regime to the letter.  After a year I had filled out and had muscles in places I never knew they existed.

Harrod’s was a 300 acre farm near Whatcote and about seven miles from Stratford on Avon in Warwickshire.  You couldn’t possibly imagine a greater contrast to the world I had been reared in.  Tarmac was swapped for dirt roads and mud, townscape and mills for rolling green countryside and people for animals.  Even the climate was different, it was softer and warmer.  We had no mains electricity but a Lister Diesel running a 6KVA alternator, just enough for the milking machine, some lights and the TV, the first I had ever seen.  The water came from a well outside the back door, it was my first job in the morning to pump up enough to fill a 400 gallon tank above the kitchen ceiling, I knew it was full when it overflowed into the yard.  The buildings got their water from a spring in the field behind and above the farm.  It wasn’t regarded as clean enough for the house.  There was no lavatory, just a wooden seat across a big pit which took our muck and the run off from the pigs as well.

Graham and I got up at 0530 to milk about 40 cows in two shippons.  In summer I had to bring them in from the field where they had been overnight and in good weather this was a joy.  I soon learned that they knew exactly what was expected of them and they were usually at the gate.  All you had to do was open it and then go to the shippons and start tying them up as they came in.  Jesse was always last, she was the oldest cow in the herd and was well past her best, you could hang your hat on her anywhere you wanted.  Sometimes she was twenty minutes behind the others but always gave her ration of milk and had a heifer calf every time.  Lionel would ask after her at breakfast, he thought the world of her.  She died shortly after I left and Lionel buried her on the farm, there was no way he would send her to the knackers or the kennels.  The South Warwickshire Hunt had kennels nearby and would always collect casualties as they boiled them up and fed them to the hounds.  I often think of Lionel and his respect for Jesse when I hear earnest animal rights activists sounding off about the way farmers treat their animals.  They haven’t enough experience to know that there is a world of difference between a proper farmer and someone who just exploits animals for production.  They tar everyone with the same brush and it is inaccurate and grossly unfair.

We milked using Manus bucket type machines powered by vacuum which was piped round the shippons above the stalls.  We carried the milk in the buckets up to the dairy and poured it into a tank above a surface cooler with cold water circulating through it.  The reservoir above the cooler had a plate in it with openings for two sile wads.  These were circular cotton wool pads, covered by a perforated metal disc and retained by a circular spring clip, they filtered the worst of the muck out of the milk and it trickled down the plates of the cooler, giving up its heat to the water as it went and running into a ten gallon kit on the floor below.  Later, Lionel invested in a Blow ‘in-can’ cooler with an ice bank.  This was a great improvement and meant we could get the milk cooler in summer when water temperature was higher.  Every month the Recorder turned up, she was a lady paid by the Milk Marketing Board to record the yields of all our cows so that any calves we sold could be backed up by certified records of how good a milker the dam had been.  We also used the ‘billycock bull’, in other words, artificial insemination of the cows by a man from the MMB.  The semen used was from very high quality bulls who’s production had been stored in liquid nitrogen cooled containers.  Many of these bulls were long dead but still performing a vital service.  I’ve often thought that it was strange but as far as I know, all the inseminators at that time were men!  Very strange!

After about a week I was left to milk on my own in the evenings and when I had proved my competence, Graham and I used to take turns to milk in the morning, one week on and one week off.  After milking the kits were taken down the lane to a milk stand on the roadside in the Land-Rover, the empties were brought back from the day before and then the next job was breakfast.  By this time, Lionel, the Missus and young Stephen their adopted son, were up and platefuls of home fed bacon, fried eggs and fresh white bread  washed down with lots of tea was our lot.  Addie (short for Adelaide) always made sure we had enough and a Woodbine tasted nice with the tea.  Whoever had milked then went out to wash all the milking tackle and once a week, strip down all the milking machines and scrub and sterilise the parts,  everyone else got on with the business of the day.  There is nothing in this world beats a good breakfast made with home-produced bacon, eggs and bread when you’ve been up for three hours working hard.  Everybody worries about their weight nowadays but we never had that problem.  We tanked up on cholesterol and then went out and burned it off.  I have no time at all for all the well-meaning people who are forever drumming it into us that these things are bad for us.  The problem lies not in the fat but in ourselves, that we are idle.  If cholesterol is so bad, why does God put it in mother’s milk?

For quite a long time I followed Lionel round and helped him while learning the essentials of my new trade.  He would show me a job and then go away and leave me to do it.  When he thought I would be finished he came back, inspected the job, gave any praise, bollocking or helpful hints needed and on to the next job.  Every now and again he would let drop pearls of wisdom or family history and I stored them all up.  He told me stories about his father and how bad farming was in the Hungry Thirties.  According to Lionel, many farms were almost derelict just before WWII, there was no money to be had.  He showed me one place in the sloping field behind the farmhouse where his father had established a rabbit warren.  It had been fenced off and they fed the rabbits, caught them when they were grown and sold them on Stratford market.  One time his father bought a boat load of cheese from a ship that had run aground on the East Coast.  He had a big barn empty at the time and Lionel said they put a bed in of thorn clippings from hedge-cutting, filled the barn with pigs and fed them on the cheese.  He said it was amazing how clean and dry they laid, they did well and the profit kept them going for a year.  God knows what it was like trying to muck the barn out afterwards!  Just imagine all the thorns interwoven and cemented with old pig muck.  I’m glad I didn’t get that job.

Our neighbour over the hill behind the farm was a bachelor called Tom Boswell.  His farm was a Church Farm and was one of the holdings that had been abandoned before the war.  Tom was a wonderful character, he lived on his own and I never saw him dressed up or shaven, funny thing is he didn’t have a beard.  He always seemed to have about five days growth.  He never wore socks and had definite views on a lot of things and got most excited about fox-hunting.  It wasn’t that he liked foxes, none of us did.  Occasionally one would get into the hens or ducks and anyone who has seen the aftermath of a marauding fox in a confined space will hate them for life!  No, what Tom really hated was the fox hunters!  For some reason, one of the conditions of his tenancy was that the hunt should not be allowed to cross his land.  Lionel said that this was surprising because on the whole, the Church wasn’t anti-hunting.

We were farming in the territory of the South Warwickshire Hunt, it was their kennels which collected any casualties we had to feed to the hounds.  One of the leading lights of the hunt was Sir Francis Wetherby who lived in a large house near Whatcote.  This was the same family which ran the register for all racehorses, Wetherby’s.  Lionel told me that there was no love lost between Tom and the Wetherby’s and in his younger days, Tom had gassed a vixen and her cubs down their earth, we used to use Cymag for pest destruction, it produced Hydrocyanic gas when it came into contact with the smallest amount of water and was deadly.  He took the bodies down to Whatcote one night and arranged them on Sir Francis’s lawn in full view of the house.  The story was that  the fox-hunting knight was delighted with the scene but soon changed his tune when he found out they were stiff!

We used to see the hunt every now and again and I have to admit that they were a brave sight as they streamed across the fields following the hounds and jumping everything in their path.  Actually, the quality of their jumping was sometimes questionable and if one horse was forced through the thorn hedge instead of over, the others would go for the gap and you soon had a hole like a gateway.  A gang of hunt employees used to go round repairing holes in fences and hedges and all you had to do was ring them up and they would come and sort the problem out.  Lionel said they once came right past the farm in full cry after a fox and charged up the hill behind the house towards the hedge at the top.  When the fox got to about 15 yards from the hedge there was a loud boom and the fox dropped dead with two barrels from Tom’s gun right in its face.  By the time the hunt realised what had happened and got the hounds under control Tom was long gone but Lionel said it was a sight worth seeing, all these hyped up riders going absolutely berserk because their ‘sport’ had been ruined.

Nowadays of course there is a violent anti-blood sports movement and I have to admit I hold no brief for fox-hunting.  All the defences about fox control and clean kills are smoke screens.  The hunt as a whole,  couldn’t care less about a few hens murdered during the night and as far as they are concerned, the more foxes the better the sport.  When the hounds catch the fox they simply tear it to pieces and if you heard the fox scream as it died you’d have little doubt about what it was suffering.  However, I’ll also admit to the fact that much of my opposition is grounded in the fact that the hunters were often the beneficiaries of unearned privilege by reason of family wealth or breeding, and that’s what winds me up!  I had a .22 rifle and occasionally I’d find foxes in their earths, I used to shoot them in the head after digging until I could see them although this wasn’t always necessary, if you sat quietly they would eventually poke their head round the corner to see what was going on.  That’s as clean and painless a kill as you can get.  Once they were dead we just filled the mouth of the earth in and Mother Nature took care of any cubs and the bodies.  There was a shooting bloke about who often came to the farm, his name was Tom Firnam, I’m not sure of the spelling.  I don’t know who he was or what he did for a living but he was an interesting fellow and showed me how to zero my rifle and how to use it safely.

My problem with banning hunting is that I fear that a broad brush approach will be taken and it will be the end of coursing rabbits or hares with a single dog and ratting with ferrets and terriers.  A single dog kills instantaneously and so does a terrier if it gets a rat.  If I was a rat or a rabbit and had the choice between Cymag and a contest with a terrier or Myxomatosis and a net I know which one I would choose.  I didn’t keep a dog or a ferret then but in later years I had many a happy hour ratting and rabbiting.

I must say a word here about myxomatosis.  I first saw this horrible disease when I was at Harrods.  Rabbits were a serious problem even in the mid 50’s but Lionel said it was nothing to what it had been like during and before the war, whole fields could be ruined by rabbits eating off the vegetation as fast as it grew.  Myxomatosis  is a viral disease of rabbits which is highly infectious and usually fatal although in recent years some immunity seems to have built up.  The effects are swelling of mucous membranes and skin tumours, in essence their nasal passage, throat and eyes swell up until the are blind and can’t breathe and they die.  It’s a dirty horrible death for any animal.  I think it was first introduced in Australia and came here after the war.  I know there was a problem but mixy as we called it was probably the biggest single man made example of animal cruelty ever perpetrated and personally I’m ashamed to belong to a species that could do such a thing.

As time went by, the jobs got bigger.  I would be given the tractor and the muck spreader and left alone to cart and spread muck all day, or disc cultivate or harrow or even drill corn.  After about three months I was definitely a useful member of the team and well worth the magnificent wage of a pound a week!  We were soon into harvest.  Our combine was a bagger, it was driven by Arthur the tractor driver and Graham tied bags and looked after the settings.  When full the bags were slid down a chute on to the ground and I followed them round with a tractor and trailer picking the bags up.  I soon found that, hard as it was, I was quite capable of lifting a 280 lb. sack up off the floor and putting it on the trailer.  At the farm, I had to carry them up the stairs to the granary floor in the barn and stack them neatly in rows.  I remember the stairs were covered with moss and could be slippy, the first job was always to scatter some ashes from the Esse stove on them so as you had a firm grip.  When we’d got the grain we baled as much straw as we needed and then burned the rest, this is illegal now but was a good way of clearing the rubbish off the field before cultivation.  A lot of the cereals were winter sown and the quicker we could get the fields cultivated and broken down to a seed bed after harvest, the better the chance of early drilling and a good crop the following year.  If the rotation demanded that a field went down to grass the following year we would sow the grass with the corn and simply leave the field to green over after we had baled the straw.

There was no end to the variety of jobs that had to be done.  Fieldwork, barn work and tending the animals was only the start, I soon found out that a farmer had to be a carpenter, mechanic, builder and office worker.  We seldom got anyone in to do anything, if something went wrong we fixed it  The only outside help I can remember that year was when the TV went wrong, the picture shrank to about three-quarters of the size it should have been.  When the man came out he soon identified the problem, the governor on the Lister diesel driving the alternator had slipped a bit.  We speeded it up a touch and hey presto, the picture was the right size.  When we went to bed at night the last one up would go out to the back of the barn and stop the Lister.  On a dark night it was as well to take a torch with you, there were some fair size rats round there near the privy and the pig pen!

Graham had a beautiful Triumph Thunderbird motorcycle.  It was serviced by a firm in Shipston on Stour and I think their name was Watson.  They sent a bike to the Isle of Man TT races every year and Graham’s was tuned up as far as you could go with a standard engine. His home town was London and on his weekends off you could hear him for about three miles down the road.  Lionel and I used to stand there listening if it was a warm quiet night.  I remember that he reckoned he could average a mile a minute even on those country roads and I wouldn’t doubt it for a minute!  Graham’s parents weren’t too happy about him having this powerful bike.  In the end they promised him that if he would sell it they would buy him a car.  This sounded like a good deal to Graham so he agreed.  We saw him off to London on the weekend of the changeover and listened to the glorious note of the Triumph for the last time.  On Sunday night he arrived back in a pre-war Austin Ruby.  It looked to be in wonderful condition but was definitely no speed machine, the tyres were narrower than the ones on his bike!  He got out in the yard and said “All right, don’t laugh”.  His parents had found this motor in an old lady’s garage.  She hadn’t used it since her husband died and it was very low mileage.  Graham had no idea what he was getting until he saw it and his face must have been a picture.  Apart from anything else, he was a tall lad and had to fold himself up like a hairpin to get in it.  I remember we once got it up to 60 mph. coming down Edge Hill on the way back from Banbury and it was definitely an experience.  Actually, it was a lovely little thing, all leather upholstery, a windscreen that opened like a trapdoor and the thermometer for the radiator temperature was mounted integrally in the radiator cap so you could always see it as you drove along.  In the end he got rather attached to it but would never admit it to anyone. 

Mentioning Edge Hill reminds me of a story that Lionel told me about the owner of a big estate up there.  A man went to the estate office looking for work and the owner set him on to turning a large grindstone in the farm buildings.  Later in the day he went in to the barn and found the bloke sitting down next to the stone.  He chided him for doing nothing but the man protested that there was nothing to sharpen.  The owner told him that was nothing to do with it, he wanted work, the work was turning the stone so get on with it!

Lionel liked his cars, he had an Austin Hereford while I was their and this was considered to be top of the range then, I think it was an A90.  I only had a provisional licence but this was all I needed to drive tractors on the road so I was as mobile as anyone if not quite as fast!

On the subject of mechanical things, the biggest machines we ever saw were the American bombers which I think were stationed near Banbury.  They were enormous eight engined planes that flew low over us at times and we always stopped to watch them.  The noise they made was tremendous.  I remember being in the Dutch barn one day when they went over and all the tin sheets on the roof rattled.

We didn’t need a lot of entertainment in the evenings, we were too tired.  An hour of TV, a lot of leg-pulling conversation and sometimes an hour in the village pub was all we wanted.  Lionel once told me that when he was a lad, all the young men used to gather on the village green in Whatcote with a stick apiece.  They used to start hitting each other on the shins and the last man on the green was the winner!  It always puzzled me how this could be seen as entertainment, I suppose they hadn’t much else to do!  I’d like to see the pub in Whatcote again before I die.  In those days it was, I suppose, little changed since the 17^th. Century, there was a low stone shelf across the back wall behind the bar and the barrels were racked up on their.  Beer and cider was drawn straight from the wood and you could specify ‘long or short drop’ depending on how much froth you liked.  I’ll bet it has been ruined now and might even have a juke box.

The best relaxation of the lot was pig-killing which we usually did just after harvest.  On a Friday, the butcher would arrive and our candidate for bacon was brought out into the yard, shot with a humane killer and its throat cut to bleed it as it lay there.  Most people collected the blood for black puddings but we never bothered.  We’d work its legs about and roll it over to make sure we got as much blood out as possible then piled wheat straw over it and set it on fire.  Lionel said only wheat straw would do, barley straw gave the bacon an oily taste.  When that had burned off we turned it over and did the other side, then we scrubbed all the burnt hair and muck off it and the butcher gutted it.  We hung it in the barn overnight.  The following morning the butcher returned to cut the pig up into sides, hams and shoulders for curing and the rest was either for rendering down for fat and by products like chitterlings and faggots or, best of the lot, for immediate consumption.  For about three or four days we struggled to eat everything before it went off, we had no refrigerator.  Some was given away on the grounds that when the recipient killed a pig we’d get some of their pig meat.  We ate until we could eat no more.  The work schedule became flexible that weekend as we slept off enormous meals in the front room draped across easy chairs and sofas.  Breakfast was a feast as the liver had to be disposed of and pig cheek was lay there for a snack at any time of the day.  It was always said, and quite true, that all that was wasted was the tail and the squeal.

Lionel would take the sides, hams and shoulders into the cellar and lay them out on stone slabs on a bed of salt.  More salt was poured on top and rubbed in until your hands were sore.  The hams were treated exactly the same but a small amount of nitrate was pushed down the side of the bone into the knuckle joint to make sure nothing nasty fired up in there.  This was a common cause of spoiled hams.  After about four weeks of daily rubbing and turning, the bacon and ham was hung up to dry and covered with butter muslin sewn up tight to stop fly strike.  A pig lasted us a year and I can tell you that what they sell in supermarkets nowadays as bacon is a pale imitation of the real thing.  I knew one Dales farmer who used to bury a ham in the garden, I’m not quite sure how he prepared it but I have eaten some of it and it was good!  The same bloke made sausages and they were hung to dry in the kitchen.  They stayed there for months and were wonderful when cooked.

There was a walled garden at the bottom of the yard and we used to help Lionel dig it over.  I say dig but that is wrong, the soil was very heavy clay and the tool used to turn it over was a heavy two tine fork.  A spade was useless as the clay just stuck to it.  The method was to turn it over in clods and leave it for the frost to break it down to a seed bed which could be worked up in spring.  Lionel always said that a good cultivation on that land was one where the clods were big enough for a hare to hide behind, the frost used to do the work for us if we left it alone.  My favourite treat was Lionel’s sprouts.  He had his own ritual for Sunday dinner; he would put a pan on the Esse solid fuel stove with about three gallons of water in and a handful of salt.  When the water was almost boiling he would go down the garden, cut the sprouts and peel them and then bring them back up to the house and throw them straight into the pan.  If they were white with frost this was so much the better.  Addie would have everything else ready and after about three minutes during which Lionel washed his hands, the sprouts were fished out with a strainer and straight on the plates.  A lump of home made butter and some more salt and they were eaten like toffees and just as sweet.  I’ll have to stop for a bit and eat something!  Recounting the diet at Harrods is making me hungry, probably the best indication of just how good it was.

The farm was well-equipped because Lionel liked machinery and justified it by contracting for other farmers if we had spare capacity.  We had four tractors, a David Brown Cropmaster paraffin which was my workhorse, fast on the road and handy for trailer work round the farm, a Ford Major diesel, an International Farmall which had a bigger engine and was used for a lot of field work and a little David Brown paraffin crawler which we used when nothing else would go in wet weather.  During the war all that was available was the old Fordson paraffin tractor which was the universal tractor.  They were very basic and on heavy land like Harrods would just about pull two furrows when ploughing.  The Ford Major would do three and the Farmall played with three and would have done four if we’d had a hydraulic plough that size.  We had a four furrow but this was a trailer plough and was used with the crawler.  We had a New Holland baler, the old fashioned one with canvas delivery sheets to the ram.  It made large bales which were a bugger to handle.  At the end of a day bale carting the insides of your forearms were raw from the cut ends of the seed grass and the odd thistle.  There was a Massey Harris combine, with a Newage petrol engine and this always found full employment in harvest with us and the neighbours.

We had the usual discs, a scuffle, which was a heavy tine cultivator, spike and chain harrows, a muck spreader and a variety of buckrakes, and hay-making machinery.  One I remember in particular was a Massey Harris  Dickey, which doubled as a rower and side rake.  It had half inch thick spring steel tines which broke with distressing frequency.  I remember finishing rowing a field for baling once and realising I had broken a tine.  Lionel was convinced it would smash the baler if it went through it so we went out after tea and turned 15 acres by hand with rakes.  We never found it but the following day Arthur did as he was baling, he said he heard it go chunk, chunk so he marked that bale with a fag packet under the string and opened it up later.  The New Holland had chopped the tine into three pieces and there wasn’t a chip in the knives.  Some things would stop the baler however, he picked up an old ploughshare one day and even the New Holland couldn’t chew that up!  The knives hung in the barn for years afterwards, they were twisted up like tissue paper.  We used old fashioned cutter bars in the combine and mowing machine and it was my job to keep them all sharp and rivet new blades in place of any that were damaged.  I used to enjoy a couple of hours in the barn sorting all the blades ready for the next day.  This was usually done after tea and I never resented the extra work, it was so satisfying.  I remember the spare blades were Tyzack and had an elephant stamped on them.

We made a lot of arable silage, we would plant a field with peas, beans and vetches and cut them when the heads had formed but were still green.  After wilting for a couple of days this was buckraked into a pit near the farmstead and rolled with the tractor or sometimes the crawler.  We put molasses and potatoes in layers with the green crop and sheeted the whole lot over to cook.  In winter, the drill was to cut it out with a hay knife and fork it into a trailer to take it to the cattle which were in the shippons all winter.  It was good feed but smelled terrible.  We never got rid of the smell in winter and I remember Graham and me getting ready one night to go for a pint at the pub in Whatcote.  We’d run out of Brylcreem and Graham mixed some aftershave with goose grease and put this on his head.  Two hours later in the pub the after shave had worn off and he smelt terrible, even people who smelt of silage themselves were moving away from him.  I remember when I went for my army medical the examining doctor asked me how often I bathed!  We were feeding silage at the time and he evidently thought I had a bad case of BO!  He was right, but it wasn’t me that stunk.  I told him but I don’t think he believed me.

Looking back, I was ready for work, I took to Harrods like a duck to water.  I have little doubt that I was a cocky little bugger when I first got there but with a bit of patience and a lot of hard work, they knocked it out of me.  Lionel told me in later years that I was the best pupil they had ever had.  I should explain that the grand plan was that I did a year of practical work and then intended to go to Agricultural College, in fact my name was down for Reese Heath.  As we’ll see later, this never happened but it was no fault of mine.  Physically and mentally the transition was total.  I became a proper country boy, learned quickly and even picked up a Warwickshire accent.  I put on weight which was all bone and muscle and, with hindsight, did just what the doctor told me was the right thing.  At a formative age I worked like a horse and ate like one as well.  I feel sorry for young people nowadays who don’t have this opportunity.  My generation walked to school, played outside all the time and then went into hard physical work.  We never went to the gym or jogged, there was no need, we were ‘working out’ every minute of the day!  Another thing we were doing was being exposed to all sorts of germs and infections, this must have resulted in a pretty good stock of antibodies and a well honed immune system.  After all, if we didn’t develop them we didn’t survive.  So, whether it was genes or what, I started out well on the land and began to develop skills which I still have.  Father had a theory about it, he reckoned farming was in the blood and Uncle Stan once told me I was a throw back to old Alex, my great-grandfather, he had seen a picture of him once and said I looked just like him.  I think the main skills I learned at Harrods were organisation, working out a job beforehand and identifying what had to be done to achieve the goal, and the start of an understanding of mechanical things.

Lionel was a wonderful teacher, he used to point out simple things like thinking ahead and never walking across the yard from barn to shippon without carrying something, every time you did this it saved a return trip.  A simple concept but how many people go all through life without learning it.  I remember he was once talking to a commercial traveller who was trying to sell him something or other.  The man offered him a piece of toffee and Lionel refused it.  I knew he loved sweets, he didn’t smoke, and asked him afterwards why he had refused the offer.  He told me that it was a salesman’s trick because psychologically he would be in the man’s debt if he took it.  Simple but true.

One of my favourite jobs, because it took all day and I was my own master, was grinding and mixing feed for the cows and pigs.  We had a disc grinder that was driven off the Lister Diesel engine and I ground barley very coarse and mixed various concentrates with it.  The smell was lovely, it was dusty but it was clean muck.  That’s another thing, nowadays all muck is dirty, we used to make a distinction between ‘clean’ muck and ‘dirty’, there was a lot of difference in getting covered in barley dust and being plastered with muck from the privy and the pig sties when we emptied the pit and spread it on the fields!

I loved field work, at first it was harrowing or scuffling, you couldn’t go far wrong with these, but eventually I graduated to mowing and ploughing.  I never got to baling and combining, I wasn’t there long enough.  Mowing was good, it was demanding and you could see exactly what you’d done.  Some crops were better to mow than others.  I remember once being sent at dawn to mow a field of Lucerne, Graham was milking that week.  It was a lovely summer morning, dew and mist on the fields and a clean job to go to.  I set out full of the joys of spring but after about twenty minutes in the field everything had gone wrong.  The crop was so matted and tangled that the swathe board of the mower wouldn’t part the cut crop from the standing.  It just clogged up and the safety mechanism allowed the mower blade to break back and disengage.  I had got about once round the field and was making a lousy job.  I stopped and lit a fag while I pondered the problem.  Just then Lionel appeared at the gate and came over.  He had known of course what was going to happen and had come to set me right.  We took the swathe board off the mower and I carried on without it.  The cut wasn’t as neat as usual but at least I could get on.  Lionel told me that there was a stock joke about Lucerne which was that if you got it cut and dried there was no need to bale and cart it, you just dropped a hook in it at the field gate and dragged the whole lot up to the barn!  Bit of an exaggeration but not far from the truth.

Another job where he caught me out was the first ploughing I ever did.  I had been weaned on cross ploughing but this was just playing at it.  Cross ploughing was common on that land, you ploughed the field twice, once the normal way and then at right angles to the original furrows.  It looked rough but was a good way of breaking the heavy clay down to a tilth.  I was sent to plough a field that had been down to grass for about six years.  The top soil I was turning over was a mat of grass and roots and lea ploughing as it was called was usually the top ploughman’s job.  Graham helped me mark it out the day before and I went down with the Major the next morning to get on with it.  The field was a small one at Shipleys, no doubt a corruption of sheep leys.  It was detached from Harrods and was about two miles away on the far side of Whatcote.  I took a flask and sandwiches and was master of all I surveyed. 

I got going and immediately identified the problem.  I could plough it all right but the sod turned back over behind me and when I got to the end of the stint and looked back you couldn’t tell I had been over it!  I tried again and this time watched the furrow rolling back behind me.  I knew there was a solution but didn’t know what it was.  I altered the disc coulters so they cut deeper and fiddled with the draught but after about half an hour had got no nearer.  Just then I saw a face peeping over the hedge.  It was Mr Pritchard, a well respected local farmer.  He wished me good morning and then observed that I seemed to be having a bit of a problem.  He came in the field and I told him what I had done to try to improve things.  He said I was on the right track but there was one more thing that had to be done.  He asked me to lift the plough out of the ground, took my hammer and broke the wings of all three ploughshares, the hardened castings that form the front of the mouldboard.  I was aghast!  Mr Pritchard laughed at me and told me the shares were worn anyway and he bet me that Lionel would turn up to see how I was going on and then would set me straight by doing just what he had done.  He told me to try it and it was a miracle, the furrow rolled over and stayed there because as the wings were broken off, the furrow was tearing a clod out in the corner and this acted as a prop which held the furrow in place.  Don’t tell Lionel anything he said, let him think you worked it out for yourself, and off he went.  Sure enough, half an hour later Lionel came into the field.  He watched me working for a while and then met me at the end of the stint where I lifted the plough out.  I stopped, he glanced at the shares, looked at me with his head cocked on one side and said “You seem to be doing all right, see you at teatime.”  With that he went and the subject was never mentioned again.  Years later I told him about Mr Pritchard and he laughed.  He said he had an idea somebody had helped me but that didn’t matter, what counted with him was the fact he’d sent me to do a job and I’d cracked it.  Let’s add another skill to the ones I learned at Harrods, I began to get the first inklings of man management!

We all used to help one another.  I remember going to Stratford on the tractor one morning for a spare part during harvest.  As I passed Mr Haines’s farm I saw him and his farm man swinging the starting handle on their old Fordson tractor.  I went to Stratford and on my way back as I passed I noticed they were still swinging the handle!  Intrigued, I stopped and walked into the yard.  It was well known in the district that they were both horsemen and didn’t understand engines.  I asked if I could help and ‘Daddy’ Haines told me that he couldn’t understand what the trouble was.  The tractor always started first pull of the handle but it wasn’t having any this particular morning.  I should explain that paraffin tractors had to be started on petrol.  It wasn’t until the manifold had got hot that you could turn them over on to paraffin as it had to vaporise before it would burn.  The tractor had two tanks, a small one for petrol and a main tank for the paraffin or more correctly, vaporising oil.  Its official name was tractor vaporising oil or TVO for short.  When you were finishing with the tractor the usual thing was to turn over to petrol so that when you stopped the carburettor float chamber was full of petrol and you would be ready for the next cold start.  Another way was to turn the fuel tap to the all off position and leave the engine running until it ran out of fuel.  This meant the float chamber was empty and when you turned the petrol tap in the morning you were sure of a full carb of neat petrol.  I had a look at the fuel tap and sure enough, they were on petrol.  I opened the drain in the bottom of the float chamber but nothing came out, no petrol.  I looked in the tank and it was bone dry.  I told Mr Haines what the trouble was and he said “Well, I’m blessed.  Who’d have thought that a little thing like that would stop it.”  We poured some juice in and it started first swing.

Shortly before I left Harrods Mr Haines asked Lionel if I could plough for him a couple of evenings so they could catch up on the field work.  Lionel agreed and off I went to plough with the Fordson and two furrows.  It was a different ball game all together from our tackle.  It was a trailer plough, the tractor had no hydraulics and there was no seat, you stood up to drive it.  There was one pedal which was both clutch and brake with a chain and a hook to hold it down when parked or starting.  At the end of the stint you pulled a lever on the plough and a catch engaged with the bull wheel and lifted the plough out of the ground.  All was well and with the old engine roaring flat out through the open exhaust pipe I was getting the business done.  The tractor had no lights but as the light faded my eyes got used to the dark and I carried on.  Paraffin engines run very hot and as it came dark you could see a blue flame coming from the exhaust pipe, this was no problem, it was always there when the engine was working hard but in daylight was invisible.  In the gloom I noticed a figure running over the ploughing, it was Mr Haines.  He was waving his arms at me and evidently wanted me to stop so I did.  “Stop young man, you’ll damage my tractor!”  He’d seen the flame and decided that this young lad was going to destroy his beloved tractor.  Of course he had never seen it working hard at night and no amount of explanation from me helped.  I was dismissed with ignominy and Lionel laughed until he cried when I told him the following morning.

After almost a year, a small cloud no bigger than a man’s hand appeared on the horizon in the form of a buff envelope.  As everyone knows, these always mean trouble!  It was my call-up papers for National Service.  The Queen had decided she wanted my body for two years!  I went to Birmingham, got graded C3, (not to be employed in infantry or artillery), and the army, with it’s usual stunning efficiency allocated me to the infantry , the First Battalion the Cheshire Regiment and ordered me to present myself for training at The Dale, Chester, the home of the 22nd. of Foot.  There’s an old Jewish joke which I often quote, If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.  My life was to change again completely, agricultural college went down the tube and  I had absolutely no say in what happened.  I was not consulted and another formative experience bore down on me.

                                                ARMY LIFE  1954 TO 1953

In July 1954 I left Harrods, went home briefly to dump my belongings and reported on the 15 July  at The Dale at Chester which was the main depot of the First Battalion the Cheshire Regiment, or as we were soon informed, the historic 22nd. of Foot where I was to receive my initial training which would make me into a soldier.  What happened to me there will be hard for modern generations to believe.  Even now, in 1999, it’s recognised that if the same methods were used today half the intake would go AWOL (Absent Without Leave).   We were officially described as Intake 54/14 and consisted of about 100 young men from all walks and conditions of life.  The job of the Depot was to convert us from raw recruits into trained, disciplined soldiers in six weeks.  We had to understand Army methods, be able to do drill, handle a rifle or Light Machine Gun and be perfectly fit by the end of the training, the Battalion would complete our training on the job.  They had a very simple method of accomplishing their end, they liquidised us and poured us into their mould.  This sounds like an exaggeration but is pretty close to the truth, their aim was to break you and rebuild you the shape they wanted.  Here’s how they did it.

The first job was to get us kitted out.  We were taken down to the stores, given a kit bag and issued with everything we would need.  As far as I remember it went something like this:  Three pair socks, two pair ammunition boots, three vests, three underpants, three shirts, one set PT kit, two battledress, one pair denims, one beret, one tie, one pair gloves, one cap comforter, one tin hat, one set webbing, one set mess tins and knife and fork, one regimental badge, two collar dogs, and a set of Cheshire shoulder flashes.  Then we went to the tailor where our uniforms were marked for alteration.  I remember that here we were measured by a lady of indeterminate age who paid a lot of attention to our inside leg measurement and used technical phrases like “giving us plenty of ballroom.”  This was traumatic stuff for a young lad.

Laden down like camels we were then marched over to our billets where we slept about 30 to a room.  A corporal helped us sort out where to put all the stuff and then they fed us.  We soon found out that everything was done together, to a timetable and at the double.  We never walked anywhere unless we were actually marching.  Indeed, it was an offence to be seen “slouching about”.  After the meal they left us for the rest of the day to get sorted out.  We were lucky, we had an old soldier who had re-enlisted with us and he showed us the ropes.  Then to bed knowing we had to be up at 0600 the following morning.  This was a lie in to me so that was OK but some of the lads didn’t even know six o’clock in the morning existed!  The first night’s sleep in the barrack room was an experience in itself.  I had always slept alone and having about 30 snuffling, farting and in some cases, crying bed fellows took some handling.  The following morning we were woken by the nice helpful corporal who started our day by screaming at us and acting as though he was mad.  We soon found out that this was par for the course, they were all mad and we had to join them!

I can’t remember the actual timetable but I can recall everything that happened to us, not necessarily in the right order.  The first thing was to cut our hair.  I say cut, but it would be more accurate to say that we were taken away, penned up and sheared.  Short back and sides and short on top was the standard cut.  One or two officers had longer hair but everyone else was in the club.  Then we were taken to the Medical Officer where we were told to strip off and line up to be examined.  Remember that in most cases, even our mothers hadn’t seen us naked for ten years!  All the MO seemed to be interested in was our penis and balls.  He used a pencil to actually move things about to examine them while we stood there and thought of England.  Actually I was wondering what they did with the pencil afterwards.  Having made sure that we weren’t ruptured or disease ridden, we left what we later learned was called the “short arm” inspection, got dressed and went to meet another nice man, the Sergeant Major who was going to teach us drill and marching.  At this point they hadn’t let us touch a gun, they didn’t want to complicate things for us.

Our first encounter with the parade ground and Sergeant Major was terrifying.  All this bloke did was scream at us, he wasn’t shouting but actually screaming.  His face was bright red and it was obvious that he hated us and was very angry.  We couldn’t even tell what he was saying and he had a squad of whippers in, sergeants and corporals who moved amongst us and set us right when we turned the wrong way.  It was a shambles even though we were all trying but the funny thing was that after about two weeks we quite enjoyed parades and drill.  It was mind numbing but comfortable in a strange sort of way, all you had to do was obey the orders in a smart and soldierly fashion and it was a piece of cake.  Of course, this was what drill was all about, part of the brainwashing process to turn you into a killing machine.  The bottom line was that you had to obey orders efficiently and keep your nose clean.

They soon sorted us out into platoons, we were Gaza Platoon, named after some battle the Cheshires had once distinguished themselves in.  The process of breaking us down welded the platoon into a homogenous unit.  We were all in the shit together and we developed a solid front to the rest of the world.  True, there were some who didn’t fit in and their lives were made a misery, not only by the training staff but by us.  We instinctively knew that in unity lay strength and ultimately, survival, so anyone who damaged this was our enemy as well.  This was just what the trainers wanted so they did nothing to stop any discrimination in the barrack room.  The end result of this was that some blokes were broken and simply vanished, they would be transferred to somewhere else and given another chance or simply re-graded medically and slung back into Civvy street.  We didn’t know this at the time of course because this knowledge of the workings of the system would have given us an escape route and we all wanted one.

One bizarre segment of our indoctrination was a lecture by the Regimental Padre who explained to us that the admonition “Thou shalt not kill” which we had all learned in the Ten Commandments didn’t apply if the target was foreign.  This interesting demolition of the concept of the brotherhood of man was reinforced by examples such as “Look at this way, if you found a man raping your mother you’d be justified in killing him.”  It was all right for us to kill, maim and destroy as long as it was The Enemy we were doing it to and we’d be told who ‘the enemy’ was when the time came. Above all we had to remember that God was on our side!   As a corollary we were told was that it was all right to do anything as long as it was contained in an order.  Of course I didn’t buy this but the alternative was conscientious objection and as we weren’t actually being asked to do anything it seemed OK to go along with the Padre just for a quiet life.  Again, this was the intention.  You can’t have a soldier who won’t kill when told to so you have to overcome any psychological barriers there are to him doing it.  Any previous indoctrination by religion had to be selectively erased.

One of the good things about training was the emphasis on being clean, well shaven, smartly dressed and polite.  We soon learned the basics of polishing boots, ‘blancoing’ webbing (blanco was the trade name of the proprietary treatment we used on our webbing to keep it clean and coloured light green.  In the old days it was done with pipe clay), ironing shirts and uniforms and having a clean shave in ten seconds flat.  Apart from free time in the evenings which was largely spent polishing boots, badges and ironing denims or uniforms for the next day , the worse thing about training was everything had to be done in a rush.  You never had time to think, you always had to be somewhere dressed in different clothes than the last task and so there was a mad dash to change and get fell in ready for whatever came next.

One day they put guns into our hands and things became interesting for a change.  We were taught how to strip them down, clean them and, most important, aim them.  The rifle was also introduced to the parade ground and we had to learn complicated things like shouldering, sloping and presenting arms.  we couldn’t see quite what this had to do with killing people but by this time we were all convinced that the best route to a quiet life was to do as we were told.

Once we had guns we were qualified for Guard Duty.  This was a ceremonial guard at the entrance to the depot.  The guard had to be turned out in best battledress and boots and be absolutely immaculate.  When we paraded for guard we were inspected by an officer and he selected the ‘Stickman’.  This was an honorary promotion and was keenly contested because the Stickman went back to billets and had a nights sleep, all he had to do was be on parade the following morning when the guard fell out.  I think I got Stickman once but am not sure.

Eventually the day came when we were put into lorries and driven down to Sealand Ranges to actually shoot at something.  We all practised with the rifle and the Bren Light Machine Gun.  We soon learned to respect the quality of the Short Lee Enfield Rifle and the Bren.  We got some training with the Sten gun and this took me back to our war-time escapade in the back garden at Norris Avenue.

A word or two about the Sten wouldn’t be out of place.  At the beginning of the war we were short of automatic weapons and what was wanted was a light, cheap automatic gun for use at close range.  The Sten design was simple and brilliant.  It could be made out of low grade materials and was almost a throw-away weapon.  It was not accurate, but then it didn’t need to be, it was intended for use at close quarters where you could hardly miss.  Using 9 mm. rim fire ammunition it did the job either on single shot or automatic.  It was at one time standard equipment for Dispatch Riders (Don Rs) who rode their motor bikes with the Sten slung across their back.  They soon found out that it was a mistake to travel with the magazine on the gun because if you went over a bump on the road, the breech block could recoil past the magazine and on its way back up, pick a round up shove it up the spout and fire it.  The usual consequence of this was that the Don R got the back of his head blown off.

After a couple of outings to Sealand, we had to shoot our qualification.  Your level of pay depended on your qualifications and one which gave you a pay increase was to shoot a near perfect course on the range and be qualified as a Marksman.  This was quite rare and none of us really thought we could get it.  Remember I was graded C3 because of my eyesight.  On Sept 1 1954 We shot the course and I scored 101 (Marksman) with the rifle and 168 (First Class) with the Bren.  This gave the powers that be a bit of a problem, here was a bloke graded C3 because of his eyesight and he’d produced the only marksman score in the intake.  There was definitely a suspicion that there had been a bit of help.  Down in the butts where the targets were, there was a party of blokes, often your mates, marking up the scores and pasting patches on the targets.  In theory, they didn’t know who was shooting at what but the army knew that we were cunning buggers and they also knew that it was just about impossible to tell the difference between a hole made by  a .303 bullet and a lead pencil!  There was some scepticism about my performance.  The following day, the Sergeant Major told me to draw my rifle and he drove me down to the ranges by myself.  I was set up on the range and made to shoot the course again.  I scored one better than the previous day, largely because of the weather.  The SM asked me how come I was graded C3 if I could see like that and I told him that I was just about blind without my glasses but could see perfectly well with them.  I could only suppose I was graded on my unaided vision.  Anyway, they gave me my Marksman badge and I have to admit I was very proud to sew it on my sleeve.  Father thought it was a bit special as well which was nice.

The rifle wasn’t just useful for shooting with, we all had a bayonet, in effect, a short stabbing sword which clipped on the end of the rifle barrel.  It was meant for use at close quarters and we were trained to attack and kill the enemy with it.  They taught us how to kill quietly with bayonet and strangulation and gave us a grounding in unarmed combat and various other ways of killing.  Writing it down like this, 45 years later it seems far-fetched but it was a different age and we were the next generation of cannon-fodder.

On a less aggressive note, but equally unpleasant, they exposed us to gas in sealed rooms and demonstrated how the gas mask could save our lives.  We were taught how to move quietly either upright or on our bellies and how to use camouflage to render ourselves less visible.  As a grand finale we went on a ‘night scheme’ where we played war games and were fired at with live ammunition just to get us used to it.

Our six weeks was almost up.  We knew we would be posted to the battalion but didn’t know where they would be as they were just arriving back in the UK after a tour of duty in Egypt.  Our next landmark was the passing out parade.  By this time our mothers wouldn’t have known us.  The training was hard and the worst six weeks I ever had in my life but it did have its compensations,  We were different men than the callow youths who had come through the gates in June.  Mentally we were all changed, we were a lot harder and our attitudes towards death and violence had been changed, perhaps for ever.  I don’t think we realised this at the time but it was so.

We had one piece of light entertainment while we were at the Dale.  We were informed one weekend that we were all detailed to act as marshals at an air display nearby.   This was a day out, a complete change and off we went on the Saturday to an RAF airfield in Cheshire, I’ve tried to remember the name of it but it completely escapes me.  The Saturday passed without incident, all we had to do was stand in front of the ropes holding the crowds back and make sure nobody encroached on to the airfield.  Sunday was to give us all a bit of a shock.  Just before lunch there was a display by a flight of Meteor jets.  Remember that in those days, a jet propelled aircraft was like rocket science to us.  We very seldom saw one.  These lads put on a really good display and went into a manoeuvre where they followed each other in line astern and dived down from a great height, flat out as it seemed to us, and pulled out of the dive very close to the ground before going into a loop and diving down again on to the airfield before roaring off straight and level into the distance.  All went well until one of the planes failed to pull out after doing the loop and plunged straight into the ground about 600 yards away.  He never knew what hit him because they reckoned he had blacked out because of the G forces during the loop, these things weren’t properly understood then.  What made it worse though was the fact that the pilot’s wife and children were stood on the ropes just behind me and of course, it was a terrible shock for them.  This brought the display to an end and we went back to barracks.

The interesting thing to me about this occurrence is that it didn’t really upset us.  I shall speak more about this later but I think we all had scar tissue from the war.  Death, particularly violent death, didn’t affect us as much as it would today’s generation of our age.  We were, to a large extent, hardened to death and of course, all the training we were going through reinforced this.

I was to be cheated of my moment of glory in the passing out parade.  Shortly before the day I developed an abscess under an impacted molar and was taken into the military hospital at Chester where they operated on me.  It was regarded as a fairly serious operation then and it took me a fortnight to recover.  I think the anaesthetic did as much damage as the knife, it took me three days to recover from it.  We were well looked after and the main thing I remember is that we had the choice each evening of either having a mug of Ovaltine and a biscuit or a bottle of Guinness, guess which I went for!  Father came down for me and my kit and I went home for a fortnights end of training and convalescent leave before joining my mates in Lichfield Barracks where we were warehoused until the Battalion had settled down in their new quarters at Meannee Barracks, Colchester.

The Barracks at Lichfield were a disgrace.  I think they were actually quarters for the Staffordshire Regiment and one block had been opened up for us while we waited to go to Colchester.  They were typical mid-nineteenth century army barracks, absolutely unchanged since they were built.  Each floor had a large cast-iron bunker full of coke, a large open fireplace and that was it.  It was the end of September and starting to get cold but we were not allowed fires as according to the army the heating season hadn’t started.  I don’t think they really knew what to do with us so the Non Commissioned Officers (NCO's) who were with us just set us on to cleaning everything.  For about six weeks all we did was parade and bull the place up.  Cleaning was always called bullshit because it was said to baffle brains.  The motto was ‘If it moves, salute it, if it’s still, paint it white.’  One day, we were all paraded with full kit, loaded on to wagons, taken to the station and shipped down to Colchester to join the real army, the battalion.

When I came away from The Dale I was allocated to the Assault Pioneers.  Some explanation is needed here.  An infantry battalion is divided into companies.  The actual foot soldiers were in companies designated with a letter of the alphabet, A company, B Company etc.  I think we had four of these.  There was a headquarters company which comprised all the battalion administration and another which was called Support Company.  This consisted of four platoons, Machine Gunners, Mortars, Assault Pioneers and, best of all the Anti-Tank platoon.  These were all specialist platoons and had extra training.  Machine Gunners manned the Vickers medium machine guns which were the battalions main killing weapon.  Mortars were equipped with the Three Inch Mortar, an incredibly simple weapon but capable of putting down enormous weights of explosives.  The Assault pioneers were the demolition experts and tunnellers.   Anti-Tank platoon manned four Seventeen Pounder guns which were a splendid piece of kit.  Somewhere between the Dale and Colchester there was a change of plan.  I was allocated to Anti-Tank which in itself was great as far as I was concerned, it was what I wanted to do, but in terms of my grading meant I had the satisfaction of having seen the army cock up as comprehensively as it could.  They had taken me, C3 (unfit for infantry or artillery), put me in the infantry and excelled themselves by getting me into artillery as well!  Well done lads and definitely par for the course.

At Colchester we were billeted in Spiders.  These were WWII wooden huts and were warm and comfortable.  The barrack rooms were smaller, about  18 to a room and we were kept together as gun crews.  This meant I was living with the group I would be with all my army life because crews were never split up unless it was absolutely necessary.  In every sense of the word it was a family and I took to it like a duck to water.  As usual, there was a downside and it was called the Company Sergeant Major, Ted Talbot.  We used to call him Terrible Ted and he had the capacity to make our lives a misery.  In his defence, he was a soldier through and through and was competent, if ever things had got sticky we could have relied on him but this didn’t mean we had to like him.  The only time I ever saw him laugh was when a lad called Doyle did a brilliant impersonation of him at the Christmas do we had at Colchester.  Perhaps he had a human side and was fond of kids, if so he took good care we never saw it.

When I first got to Colchester we had a temporary platoon sergeant who was a bastard.  He had a nasty habit of crapping in wash basins when he got drunk and making us clean it up.  He left us shortly after I arrived and joined the regimental police, more of him later.  His replacement was Sergeant Edward Lancaster.  Ted was a cracker, he made us do all we had to but in a way which made us glad to do it.  Hard to explain but he had the knack of commanding without ordering if you see what I mean.  I think I learned a lot from Ted about man management  We settled down to life with the battalion.  There were regular passes out into the town and we had interesting things to do like learn about the guns and care for them.

The 17pdr. was the last in a long line of conventional anti-tank guns.  Starting with the Boyes Rifle at the beginning of the war, the army had developed a small calibre, high velocity artillery gun which could penetrate the skin of tanks and armoured vehicles, the 2 Pounder anti-tank gun.  It was designated 2pdr because the armour piercing round weighed two pounds.  As armour improved it was upgraded to the 6Pdr which was essentially the same but larger.  Faced with the German Tigers and the possibility of having to deal with the Russian T34 and the JS3 the army took a leaf out of the German book and produced a weapon to match their 88mm.  The 17pdr was 77mm. but just as hard hitting.  Unlike the 88 and its American counterpart it had no antiaircraft role and was thus a simpler weapon to use.  It could fire a variety of ammunition including High Explosive (HE).  Each gun weighed 3 tons and was towed by a Stuart which was an ex. US Army Honey Tank with the turret taken off.  These had rubber shod tracks, two Cadillac  V8 engine and Hydramatic drive.  It was the heaviest equipment the battalion had, we were kings of the road and we knew it.

My training went on apace, it was easy to learn because I was working with men who had been with the guns in Egypt.  They knew their job and passed on knowledge willingly within the family.  Also, being a specialist platoon we had our own REME gun fitter, ‘Rich’ Richards.  he was a regular and had spent all his service on 17s and was a mine of information. Our days were spent  cleaning the guns and towers, maintaining stores and doing gun drill.  We didn’t do any where near as much square bashing as the other platoons in Support Co. largely because Ted was a bit overweight and avoided it whenever possible.  I spent a lot of spare time in the stores with our platoon store man Bert Hollingworth who was a lot older than us but was still doing national service.  He shared with another Stockport lad, Bernie Simms who was a sort of general regimental dogsbody.  He painted signs and did a bit of decorating.  Bert was a carpenter in Civvy street and came from Poynton just north of Hazel Grove.  He had a coke stove and we used to get red hot and cook little treats on it and brew up.  He slept in the stores sharing with Bernie and they had the best billet in the camp.  We spent many happy hours in there smoking and yarning and working out what we would do when we got out.  All NS men had one thing on their collective minds and when you met someone the first question was always “How long have you got to do?”

An interesting and significant thing happened one day.  We had gone down to the Motor Transport Pool in the camp to bring back one of our Stuarts which had been in for a service.  We found it was blocked in by an Antar tractor and low loader.  This was a tank carrier and was the largest motor vehicle the army had at the time.  We looked for a driver to move it but it was NAFFI break and there was nobody about.  We were in a hurry so I did the obvious thing, I jumped in the bugger and shifted it.  It was big and I had to squeeze it back into a corner of the yard so it was out of the way.  As I jumped down a voice shouted from the window of a hut across the yard, it was Captain Kingdom, the battalion MT Officer.  With my heart in my boots I ran across the yard, pulled up at attention in front of the window and saluted as he had his cap on.  “Have you got a driving licence?”  No point in lying so I told him no.  “Where did you learn to drive like that?”  “Taught myself, Sir”  He told me they were waiting for a driver to be sent up from the local supply depot because none of his drivers was capable of moving it.  He gave me a piece of paper and for one horrible moment I thought it was some sort of disciplinary action but when I looked it was a certificate to say I was ready for my driving test.  He went round and had a word with Ted Lancaster and that afternoon an MT sergeant took me out in an Austin 15cwt. truck, had me drive him around the Essex countryside for the afternoon, this included a couple of stops while he had a pint, and on our return took me into the MT office where Captain Kingdom gave me a pink slip.  I asked him what it was and he told me to take it to the local licensing office and they would give me a full licence.  He was right, I got it and that’s the only driving test I ever did.

We had been hearing rumours for a while about a new anti-tank gun.  The gun itself wasn’t secret but the principle it worked on and, more importantly, the ammunition, was very hush hush.  This was the Battalion Anti Tank gun, BAT for short.  Great excitement one day when a low loader turned up and we took delivery.  I was taken off the 17pdr. and put on the BAT crew and we started by cleaning the thing until it gleamed and then taking a quick course with a sergeant from Larkhill on Salisbury Plain where the army had its gunnery school.  We weren’t the only ones, everyone was trained but we found out why we had been dedicated when word came through that we were to load all the guns and towers on a train and set off for Larkhill where we were to fire the 17s and do some test firing with the BAT.  Deep joy!

Once on the ranges we had a wonderful time.  We zeroed the 17pdr gun sights and test fired them at targets then we fired at scrap tanks which were dotted about the ranges at various distances.  We all swapped jobs on the guns and I can’t tell you how satisfying it was to aim and fire a couple of rounds at a tank 1200 yards away and hit it full on both times.  The noise of the guns was incredible and the concussion when you fired shook every bone in your body.  When the solid armour piercing round hit the tank there was a flash and a big cloud of red dust which was the rust flying off.  The beauty of the 17 was that it was such high velocity that the trajectory of the round was almost flat.  If you pointed it right and the range was somewhere near accurate you hit it.  From a gunner’s point of view it was a wonderful weapon.

Then, the BAT crew had their moment of glory.  We were lined up and given a lecture by a bloke in a civilian suit.  He explained that they had been having a lot of problems with the ammunition.  I should explain here that the chief virtue of the BAT was that it was recoilless, in other words, it didn’t need complicated hydraulic buffer systems to absorb the shock of hurling a round at incredible speed so it could be made twice the calibre of the 17 but only half as heavy.  The way it worked was this: The ammunition for the 17 was like a big rifle cartridge, it was built exactly the same way.  The propellant charge was held in a brass cartridge case and was detonated by a percussion cap in the base.  The 17pdr shot itself was jammed in the end of the brass cartridge so when it was pushed into the breech and the breech block was closed, any gas from the explosive had only one way to go which was to go up the spout and shove the armour piercing shell out at incredible speed.

The BAT was different.  The ammunition was much larger and the case had a plastic end cap instead of solid brass.  There was no percussion cap, the primer was fired electrically by a high voltage current through the rim of the cartridge.  The gun was different as well.  There was a conventional breech block but it had a hole through the middle about four inches in diameter and a funnel shaped venturi mounted over the hole.  When you fired the gun, four fifths of the force of the explosion escaped out of the venturi and the other fifth drove the round up the barrel.  This meant the round was fairly low velocity but much heavier.  The gun hardly moved when it fired.  We put a glass of water on top of the breech and it never spilled, quite amazing.

Anyway, back to this bloke and the ammunition.  He told us that unfortunately they were having trouble in that the rounds didn’t always go off.  Technically this is what is known as a hang fire.  They are the last thing you want because there is a good chance that the train of combustion has actually started and the round can explode at any time.  Obviously, the longer you can leave the gun if you get a hang fire the better but the army, in its wisdom had decreed that half an hour was about right.  The other thing he warned us about was the back blast.  When the gun was fired a flame thirty feet long came out of the venturi and anybody stood in the way was a goner.  With that he wished us luck and told us to fire five rounds.  Somewhat less enthusiastic, we went into our drill.  I should say that what helped was the fact that Ted stood beside us while we did it.

We fired the first three rounds with no problem at all.  The only thing that bothered us was that the range needed to be a lot more accurate as you were lobbing the rounds rather than stabbing them.  The ammunition was designed for this, it was High Explosive Squash Head, HESH for short.  The idea was that when the round hit the tank it didn’t penetrate but squashed out on the armour forming a shaped charge.  The special fuse was mounted in the back of the round and ignited a fraction after the round hit.  As the shaped charge went off it either punctured the armour with a jet of hot gas or vibrated a white hot piece off the inside which flew round in the confined space and brewed up.

However all this left our minds as we fired the fourth round and there was a deathly hush, just the click of the magneto and nothing else.  We went through the drill and fired a second time, still nothing.  We all crouched there round the gun and waited for someone to make a suggestion.  I was right next to the breech block and I whispered to Ted, “I can hear fizzing!”  Ted told us to stand fast while he consulted with the brains.  He went out in a wide arc away from the gun and approached the Brass who were standing there waiting for somebody else to say something.  I saw Ted salute but just then a dull roaring started in the venturi and rapidly became the biggest fire work display you have ever seen.  A solid jet of flame twenty feet long was roaring out of the back of the gun.  The gun started to move forward even though the brakes were on, it was jet propelled.  We just hung on to it and followed.  After what seemed an age the flame died down and we all relaxed.  All the paint had gone off the venturi but apart from that everything seemed to be OK.

At this point we realised that there was a bit of a commotion going on in the background.  We could hardly restrain ourselves when we saw what had happened.  The observers had been standing well back and to the side to avoid the back blast but when the hang fire started they had moved closer to see what was going on.  When the round burned the gun had slewed and the tail end of the flame had caught the group.  The immaculate suit of the ordnance bloke and the expensive uniforms were ruined.  It hadn’t done facial hair much good either.  In the end they all retreated except the senior officer, a Colonel.  “Well, what are you waiting for?  Get the dud out and fire the last round”

Easier said than done, the case was that hot that we couldn’t open the breech.  We let it cool down while we stood by and had a smoke and eventually got the round out.  We loaded the last one and fired it, no trouble at all.  The Colonel came over then and said some nice things to us and we packed up for the day.  All our mates had been watching and we had a good do in the NAFFI that night!

We went back to Colchester, complete with a slightly used BAT and some misgivings about having to fire it again.  Actually, we had little doubt that the brains department would eventually sort out the ammunition but personally, I was more concerned about the trajectory, I could see that we were going to have to be a lot more accurate with our ranging, we had no range finders, it was all done by eye.  This isn’t so bad with artillery but anti tank is slightly different, you wanted a hit first time because the act of firing revealed where you were and we didn’t want to encourage incoming mail.  We were learning our craft and topics such as this were the subject of many conversations.

There was a lot to learn.  One of the big problems with the 17 was hiding it.  We didn’t just drop the gun off the tower and fire it, though in extremity this was an option!  We called this ‘crash action’.  Our preferred method was to find a good location with some cover and rising ground behind where we would dig the gun into a shallow pit so that only the barrel and the top of the gun shield was visible.  We would erect a camouflage net over the top and camp out round the gun with our rations and ready use ammunition.  The Stuart would be sent back and hidden, within easy reach but out of harms way.  If everything went wrong we needed it for our strategic withdrawal.  Digging gun pits was made much easier by judiciously placing five small charges of  808 plastic explosive, one at each corner and one in the middle.  This broke the ground and made digging much easier. 

Anti tank work was all about concealment and ambush.  Ideally you hid the gun so well that you could knock off several tanks before anybody could pick out where you were dug in.  This wasn’t easy and we soon became experts in selecting the right place, a lot depended on it.  There was another problem with the 17, it had an enormous muzzle flash on account of the large charges we used to get the velocity.  This was alleviated to some extent by the muzzle brake which diverted a lot of the gas to each side when you fired and incidentally, cut down on the recoil.  Problem was that this flame could scorch the earth and leave a signature or even set fire to dry undergrowth and grass.  It was as well to bear this in mind as it could be, literally, a dead giveaway.

We spent a lot of time in the training areas around Colchester by day and night, digging in and practising gun drill on our own or, occasionally, doing schemes or war games with the rest of the battalion and the Tank Corps as well who became our enemy.  We weren’t allowed ammunition of course but were issued with thunderflashes to simulate rounds fired.  Umpires assessed our performance and decided whether it was a kill or not.  He also decided whether we had been detected and deemed destroyed.   Everyone had their own job round the gun.  As I remember it there was the gun commander who stood to the left side and selected targets and ranges, No. 1 was the gunlayer, he aimed and fired the gun.  No. 2 stood behind him, repeated the orders, set the range on the sight, opened the breech for the loading of the first round, after that it was automatic, the recoil actuated a cam that dropped the breech block and ejected the empty case.  He also opened the breech to unload any unfired round and kept an eye on everything that was going on.  No. 3 was the loader who actually shoved the round up the spout, this automatically closed the breech.  No 4 and 5 passed ammunition up to the loader.  When training we swapped jobs regularly so that we could all do any job.  This rotation included the Gun Commander who was always a corporal or lance-corporal.

I remember on one scheme it was my turn to be commander so I was entrusted with the thunderflashes.  The only trouble was I’d forgotten to grab them when we piled out to get into action and the Stuart was too far away to get them.  We decided to carry on without them and of course, this was exactly the time when an umpire turned up and informed us there was an enemy tank at 400 yards coming straight for us.  I shouted all the necessary orders, we aimed and fired and at the point where I should have thrown the thunderflash in front of the gun I simply shouted BANG! As loud as I could.  The umpire was taken aback at this and asked why I hadn’t got thunderflashes.  I told him the truth and, after bollocking me for having forgotten them, congratulated me on my initiative!  Big sigh of relief but for weeks afterwards people were shouting BANG whenever I walked into a room!

We had another bit of excitement at Colchester.  The gun layer on our crew was a bloke called Mick Burgess, he was a genuine tough guy, Regimental boxing champion and hard as nails, he was also, as I found out later, the best gun layer I have ever seen.  One day a posse of Military Police arrived and arrested Mick.  We were baffled but word soon spread that he had been arrested for desertion from the Green Howards, a rifle regiment.  Shortly afterwards he was returned to the fold and told us the story.  He came from Manchester and had had a rough life.  He ended up in court getting 18 months for garage breaking and the judge told him that the next time he offended it was five years guaranteed.  He served that sentence in the same prison as Haigh the Acid Bath killer as I remember.  However, when he was released he decided the best thing to do was join the army, criminal convictions were no bar evidently.  He enlisted for 22 years in the Green Howards but when he had been in for a while realised he was in a Rifle Regiment.  These were rather special units and the main characteristic was that they did everything at the double with arms at the trail and, being heavily built, this didn’t suit him at all so he deserted and joined the Cheshires, also on 22 years engagement.  Going into another regiment was probably the best place for a deserter to hide and he got away with it for about six months but was eventually found out.  Nothing ever came of it and we came to the conclusion that the army had made a sensible decision on the grounds that he was a valuable soldier who had simply arranged his own transfer.  Of course, the fact that the Cheshires didn’t want to loose a good heavyweight boxer might have had some bearing on the matter!  I remember that later while we were in Berlin, I got into trouble in a bar with a very aggressive Argyll and Sutherland Highlander, it was something to do with referring to his regiment as the ‘Sheep Shaggers’, and Mick rescued me from a fate worse than death by simply putting his arm round me and smiling at the bloke. 

Shortly after Christmas 1954 we started to get word that the battalion was on the move again.  At first we thought it might be Korea and I wasn’t very happy about this, I was too young to die!  Eventually we were told that we were going to Berlin and this suited us down to the ground, at that time it was recognised as probably the best active service posting a regiment could have.  I was to serve out the rest of my time holding back the communist hordes, but first, there was a spot of leave.

I arrived back home in Heaton Moor a very different lad than the one who had left home to go farming 18 months before.  Bill Rae was in the army as well, he was in the Catering Corps and I think I missed seeing him that leave.  Home was much the same as ever, father was at GGA, mother was at home with Leslie and Dorothy was doing nursing training at Manchester Eye Hospital.  I’ve just been talking to Dorothy today as I write this, asking whether she can remember Bernie Simms taking her out one night, he was on embarkation leave as well, she can’t remember a thing about it.  As I remember it Bernie spun her some yarn about her meeting him at the end of Heaton Moor Road where he would pick her up in his car.  I think he turned up on the bus with some cock and bull story about it having broken down.  Whatever, Dorothy was very scathing about the sort of blokes I was mixing with in the army!

One bit of excitement was a visit from my cousin Pat Crawford who was over in this country playing for Australia in the tests.  This was so important that father let me have the car to drive Pat around.  We got on well together and he went on to play in the Test Series.  Afterwards, he signed as professional for the East Lancashire Cricket club during the Aussie winter months and met a lass from Blackburn called Sheila  Wharmby who he married, I have an idea he did a second year at Church Cricket Club as pro.  They had a boy but sadly, shortly afterwards Pat went AWOL back to Oz.  Last anybody heard from him was in the late 50’s when he was managing a pub somewhere in the Outback, Uncle Stan did all he could to find him but as far as I know his wife never heard from him again.  This was a big disappointment for father, he thought, and I agreed, that this was a lousy way to treat anyone.

Leave was soon over and it was back to Colchester where we got stuck into packing everything up ready for the move to Berlin.  I was about to leave England’s shores for the first time!  This was in Spring 1955.

I had one strange experience at Colchester before we left.  We had got in the habit of going for a drink to a pub in the main street which had a gentlemen only bar.  This was presided over by a well built lady who ran a tight ship.  We liked it for that reason, there was never any trouble with drunken and licentious soldiery in there.  One night though we got a bit silly and started drinking shorts, we must have been bored because we worked our way along the shelf behind the bar.  The barmaid told us that it would lead to trouble but we took no notice.  A couple of hours later we reached the Tia Maria and I decided it was a good time to go out the back and have a pee.  That was the last thing I remembered for a while until I came to in the arms of the barmaid in the back of a large car driving sedately along the road to the Barracks.  She told me that they had taken pity on me and were taking me home to bed.  I remember clearly telling her she reminded me of my mother and just before settling down again on her ample bosom, commented that if they drove in through the gates they would probably get the guard turned out for them!  Imagine my horror when that was what happened, out sprang the guard, resplendent in shiny boots and crisp uniforms and as they crashed to attention, the driver of the car got out and walked slowly round the back.  I was wishing a hole would open and swallow me up but had to admit that the bloke was doing all right.  He inspected the guard, congratulated the Provost Sergeant on the turnout (by the way, it was he of the turds in the wash basins) got back into the car and drove down the lines.  He knew exactly where to go and they helped me into the hut, lay me face down on the bed (the barmaid whispered in my ear that this would stop the dreaded whirling pit), he said goodnight, she kissed me goodnight and off I went to sleep.

Shortly after I had a rude awakening when I found the Provost Sergeant shaking me and frothing at the mouth.  I didn’t understand what was going on but remember Ted Lancaster asking what I had done wrong.  As I was innocent of any breach of Queen’s Regulations I was left to sleep it off.  The following morning Ted took me on one side and asked me where I had been the night before.  I told him and asked him what was going on.  He told me that the bloke who had brought me back to the billets was the Brigadier commanding the Colchester area and that was why the guard had turned out for him.  I got a message later in the day saying that from then on I was limited to one free Guinness every night in the gentlemen’s bar until we left on posting but that if I was seen drinking anywhere else I would be in the glasshouse so fast my feet wouldn’t touch the ground.  To this day I don’t know who the bloke was but he certainly did me a good turn and I have never forgotten it.

BERLIN 1955 AND 1956

The first trip abroad must always be a memorable event, I think it was even more so for me because of the circumstances.  We weren’t going on holiday but as a fighting unit dedicated to helping the defence of Berlin.  This might seem a little melodramatic today but in those days Berlin was a beleaguered city, surrounded by the Russian  Zone and divided into four occupied sectors, Russian, American, French and British.  In 1948/49 the Russians had blockaded the city and it was supplied by air lift by the Allies.  In 1961, the Berlin Wall was built to seal off the Russian Sector from the West.  When I was there we had access to the Russian Sector quite freely but it was an uneasy truce as we will see.

The battalion embarked at Harwich on the Empire Parkeston, the troopship which was to take us to the Hook of Holland.  We were crammed in to the ship and fed on mulligatawny soup, bread and tea.  I asked one of the crew whether the rough finish on the paintwork below decks was some sort of fireproof coating and he told me that this was the barnacles from when she was last sunk!  Evidently the ship had started off in life as a German cattle boat, we had sunk it and raised it at the end of the war for conversion into a troopship.  I seem to remember that eventually it sank again at its moorings in Harwich.  However, this night it didn’t sink.  We set off and soon realised that the North Sea was in a bad mood.  Before long the heads were awash in half digested mulligatawny soup.  I have a funny idea that they had a good reason for feeding us on soup, it made it easier to clean up if there was a rough crossing.  I was a bit queasy but survived without being sick and about seven hours later we disembarked and got on the Blue Train which was to take us to Berlin.

The train ride was great, I’ve always loved train travel and this was a real journey, it took us over 24 hours to reach Berlin.  Everything we saw through the windows was new and I soon became an important bloke because of the smattering of German I had learned at school.  I remember one of the lads commented on the fact that the Germans didn’t seem to have much imagination because all the stations were called Ausgang!  I also remember clearly seeing the overhead railway running over the river at Wuppertal.  Eventually we reached the border between West and East Germany.  I’d like to say that it was here we saw our first Russians but we were made to lower the blinds before we got to the border and they weren’t raised again until we entered the British Sector in Berlin, very boring.

Once in Berlin we were taken to our billets in Mercedes buses.  We had a longer ride than the infantry companies, they were in the barracks at Spandau, we were kept separate from the Battalion on Gatow Aerodrome up the Kladow road out of Berlin.  Gatow under the Nazis had been a training centre for Luftwaffe fighter pilots and all the accommodation was first class.  Small rooms sleeping about six, plenty of toilets, showers and baths and the whole place was clean, light, airy and very well built.  We had a cookhouse just across the road and a hangar down on the airfield for the guns and transport.  We couldn’t believe our luck especially when we found out that the whole place was steam heated from a central boiler house.  All there was time for was a wash, a quick meal and then to bed.  I crashed out and went straight to sleep but was soon awoken by the sound of gunfire!  We went outside and in the sky down the road saw tracer flying up into the air and the flash of explosions.  We thought that this was it and the Russians had decided to take over.  However, Major Cross, our Officer Commanding (OC) came out of the office and told us that it was nothing to worry about.  He reckoned it was pay night at the big Russian camp over in the Zone and they were paid half in money and half in ammunition and this was their way of letting off steam.  Personally I never believed it, I thought it was the Russkies just letting us know that they knew we had arrived and this was their way of welcoming us.  Anyway, there was nothing we could do about it and so we went to bed.

The following day we started the process of settling in to our billets, sorting out the guns and stores and generally getting our bearings.  When the Germans had built the airfield they had planted pine woods on all the areas not needed for any other purpose.  This was for camouflage of course but the result by the time we got there was that the whole place was a pine forest and our billets were an island in the middle.  It was very pleasant.  The rooms were well lit with two big windows in each and all you could see outside was trees.  We noticed that there were two sets of windows, one opening in and one out with a six inch gap between.  When we got into the German winter of 1955 we found out what they were for!  However, this was spring, the sun was shining, we were well fed and had plenty to do and had no problems at all.

We soon found out that there was an RAF contingent who actually used the place as an airfield.  The main airport was at Templehof in the American Sector and the French had one as well, I forget the name.  We soon struck up acquaintance with the RAF blokes and I made firm friends with one or two.  I can remember Smudge Smith and Slim Seaton, a little fat lad who came from Doncaster.  They had connections that were to lead to many happy days later on. 

About a mile down the road from the billets was the airfield and our hangar.  This was an enormous space and we were allocated one end of it for the guns and some adjacent rooms for storage.  We didn’t keep the stores for the guns down there, Bert had his little kingdom at the billets.  There was a concrete apron outside the hangar where we could play with the guns in the open air with a view right out over the airfield to the border of the Zone.  We were told we were under constant observation from the Russian side but this didn’t worry us one bit, after all, they had been on our side during the war and we couldn’t imagine having to fight them.

Some inkling of this attitude must have been present in the minds of our lords and masters because we soon had a round of what can only be described as indoctrination lectures.  Bearded men in uniforms with no badges or insignia came and told us all about the Russians.  They reckoned there were very few actual Russians in Berlin and that most of the troops were Mongolian on the grounds that they were less likely to defect.  We were told how stupid they were, they didn’t understand toilets and washed fish in them, they couldn’t change light bulbs and were substandard in general and untrustworthy.  We had to be ready at all times to take up arms against them and defend the Berliners from the ultimate take-over which was what the Russians wanted.  Back in the billets we agreed that this bloke must have thought we were stupid.  We never saw any Mongolians and if they were so sub standard how had they managed to take Berlin before us?

Then we had lectures on dangers to avoid in the city, bath tub brandy, nasty women and Russian spies who would try to get vital information out of us.  The nearest thing we had to vital information was how many guns we had and seeing as they could count them every day as we cleaned and drilled we didn’t think they would be expending too much espionage effort on us.  On the whole I think we were resentful because we thought we were being patronised and told a lot of bull.  Whoever had authorised this sort of treatment for us was definitely out of touch and furthermore, must have thought we were substandard as well.

It didn’t take us long to settle down to a routine much the same as Colchester.  Life was occupied with the guns, gun drill, some parades but not many and lectures on the mechanics of the guns and ammunition.  I was very interested and got Richie to win a 17pdr. Manual for me.  I just about learned it by heart, I was always asking him questions and helped him many a time to do tests and adjustments to the guns which officially I wasn’t required to know anything about.  I didn’t realise it but I was getting to be the company expert on the 17.  Come to think, they weren’t so daft because when billets were allocated I found myself in a room with two corporals, Ken Collins and Ronnie Dean, and a lance-corporal Chris Byrne, all regulars, that is, signed on for at least seven years.

The battalion didn’t leave us alone.  We were required to attend for regimental parades about once a week.  These were supervised by the Regimental Sergeant Major who was a fearsome man!  I can’t remember his name, we all referred to him as Tara.  I remember that at that time I was convinced that we were commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Charles Oboe, it took me a while to realise that he was actually called Rodgers.  (Charlie Oboe was radio speak for CO!)

Our trips down to Spandau Barracks helped orient us and we got an idea which direction the bright lights lay.  The road to Spandau followed the side of the River Havel which, at this point, opened out into the Havel See which was a large open stretch of water, it reminded me of Windermere in the Lake District.

In Spandau I was struck by one very forbidding building which looked like a brick imitation of a castle and was surrounded by several fences, one of which was electrified.  I soon found out that this was Spandau Gaol and that the prisoners inside were Rudolph Hess, Albert Speer, Walther Funk and Admiral Raeder.  Later we were to get more closely acquainted.

One of the reasons I was called down to Spandau was to do an intelligence test.  It was a piece of cake and I did it and thought no more about it.  Later, Major Cross sent for me and told me that I had got top marks and had qualified for a WOSB, a War Office Selection Board.  He said that if I took it up I would be sent back to UK to Aldershot, given the test and failed because of my working class background and regional accent.  He apologised for this and said he didn’t agree with the selection process but he wanted me to have a clear idea of what would happen to me.  He asked me what I wanted to do because this was one of the few occasions when the army gave you a choice.  I told him I’d rather stay with the guns and the lads I knew, I was very happy serving under him and had no desire to become an officer.  He told me it was a sensible decision, dismissed me and the following morning I looked at company orders and found I had been promoted to Lance Corporal!

Promotion made no difference at all to my life.  The rank of Lance Corporal is the worst in the army, you haven’t enough authority to be a real NCO but there is a perceptible barrier between you and your mates.  Ted Lancaster helped me a lot to make the transition from the ranks and on the whole, it caused me no problems.  Up to the rank of sergeant we all mixed together anyway, it wasn’t until you got three stripes that you were admitted to the sergeants mess and mixed with all the senior NCO’s.  Talking about the sergeant’s mess reminds me of Ted’s party trick.  If he was in the mess, weather conditions were right and he had taken a few beers on board, he would do his party piece.  I was privileged to witness it first at Colchester.  Ted would straighten himself up and march out of the mess on to the parade ground.  Choosing his moment he would shout “Moon!  Moon in!” and the moon would vanish behind a cloud.  Then, “Moon!  Moon out!” and out it would come again to roars of applause from the audience.  Ted would then march of in full regimental manner and like as not collapse into the arms of his comrades.  Great stuff!

                                    GUARD DUTIES AND CEREMONIALS

One of the advantages about being detached from Battalion was that we didn’t have to do guard duty at the entrance to the camp as this was manned by the RAF and civilian security.  However, we soon found that we had to make up by doing other guard duties in the Sector.

The first we encountered was Border Patrol.  About eight of us were given two Austin Champs and a German security policeman who knew the route and could speak English.  The Austin Champ was the British Army Jeep, Jeep by the way was the Yank’s corruption of the designation of their standard small transport which was originally General Purpose Vehicle, abbreviated to GP and corrupted to Jeep.  Ours was a heavier vehicle than the American one and had a Rolls Royce engine, the particular ones we had also had a Telefunken radio in the back which we could use to contact the Military Police HQ as we went round the border.

Our job was to patrol the border with the Russian Zone where it ran alongside the perimeter of the British Sector.  This was largely in open country but occasionally the border passed through a village.  In those days it was partly fenced and guarded by Volks Polizei  or VOPOS for short.  In many places like villages, there was no physical barrier, just a white line painted down the middle of the road.

At intervals along the route there were Military Police Telephone (MPT’s) which we knew were tapped and monitored by the Russians but this didn’t bother us because all it told them was where we were and they knew that anyway because the whole of the border was lined with watch towers manned by VOPOS who could see where we were and reported back.  Usually we used the MPT’s to report in but occasionally used the Telefunken instead just to keep the VOPOS on their toes.  We were told that the radios were special and scrambled the signal and that the Russians hadn’t cracked it yet.

At one point on the border we had to go into the Eiskeller, an appendix shaped aberration in the border which we used to call the Cabbage Patch because that was the main crop growing there.  The entrance was a narrow gap in the wire and it was fenced all round and ringed with watch towers.  The VOPOS were always a bit nervous about the Cabbage Patch and we used to wind them up by reporting in on the Telefunken when we entered.  I should mention that unless it was a really bad night, we didn’t show any lights at all.   The Rolls Royce engines were very quiet and if the conditions were just right we could trickle slowly round the Eiskeller without being spotted, there was a lot of cover.  On the way out we would call in from the MPT at the entrance but speak very quickly.  The result was that the VOPOS thought we were just going in. 

We would trickle quietly off down the track and then stop to see what happened.  After a while a searchlight would stab the darkness, then another until the whole place was bathed in light.  One memorable night the we thought the VOPOS must have been really wound up because they started firing so we decided to scarpa.  Off we went like hell down the border in the dark, it was a very rough track because it followed the line of the border fence regardless of the terrain so there were lots of blind summits even though the track was straight.  Cresting one of these we found a bed in the middle of the track, we swerved to avoid it and ended up with the nose of the Champ stuck through the fence