Captured Memories Extracts

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CAPTURED MEMORIES 1930–1945 Across the Threshold of War: The Thirties and the War by

Peter Liddle

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First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Pen & Sword Military an imprint of Pen & Sword Books Ltd 47 Church Street Barnsley South Yorkshire S70 2AS Copyright Š Peter Liddle 2011 ISBN 978 1 84884 233 5 The right of Peter Liddle to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.

Typeset in Sabon by Phoenix Typesetting, Auldgirth, Dumfriesshire Printed and bound in England by CPI UK

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Contents Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Introduction

viii x xv

SECTION ONE – THE THIRTIES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Wilfred Shaw – Poverty and the Search for Employment Humphrey Prideaux – Eton, Oxford, Germany and India with his British Army Regiment Annie Millar – Working Class Upbringing in Glasgow George Savile – The Education of a Gentleman Joseph Reck – An Orphanage Upbringing in Preston Barbara Castle – Labour Party Conviction and Activism in Oxford and Bradford Peter Hill-Norton – Dartmouth and the Making of a Naval Officer Oswald Mosley – Fascism in Britain

3 7 11 14 17 20 27 35

SECTION TWO – 1939–1945 AT SEA 1 Loftus Peyton-Jones – Arctic Convoys, Battle of the Barents Sea, Submarine Loss, Capture, Escape, and Successful Evasion 2 Frank Arkle – St Nazaire Raid, Severe Wounds and Captivity 3 Vernon Upton GM – The Merchant Navy in Wartime and Leadership in Lifeboat Survival 4 Henry Leach – Loss of his Father at Sea, the Sinking of Scharnhorst 5 Clarence Smith – USS West Virginia and Disaster at Pearl Harbor

v

57 68 77 92 102

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Captured Memories 1930–1945 IN THE AIR 1 George ‘Ben’ Bennions – Battle of Britain Pilot 2 John Cunningham – Night-Fighter Pilot with Radar 3 William Reid – Lancaster Bomber Pilot VC 4 C.K. ‘Tuck’ Belton, American Air Force Pilot – Shot Down Over Europe, Successful Evader and Work with the Dutch Resistance 5 Heinz Migeod – Luftwaffe Pilot and his National Socialist Beliefs ON LAND 1 Chandos Blair – Capture 1940, Escape 1941 2 Roland Gibbs – Retreat and Advance in North Africa 1942/3 3 Eric Wilson – A Victoria Cross in Somaliland 4 James Dunning – Commando Training, the Lofoten Islands and Dieppe Raids 5 Richard Wood – The Management of Personal Disaster in North Africa 6 Joachim Ronneberg – Norwegian Leader of the Telemark Raid 7 Mike Gibson Horrocks – Infantry Action in Italy from Cassino Northwards 8 Gerhard Kaeppner – A German in the fighting for Cassino and Normandy 9 James Bradley – Prisoner of the Japanese, the Siam/Burma Railway, Escape and Japanese Retribution 10 David Smiley – Household Cavalry in the Middle East and North Africa, SOE in Albania and Siam 11 Sidney Scroggie – A Scot’s way to Triumph over Disaster in Italy 12 Tony Younger – Dunkirk 1940, D-Day 1944, Crossing of the Rhine 1945 13 John Killick – Arnhem, Capture and Captivity 14 Rodney Percy – Factory Work, Home Guard and Burma ON THE HOME FRONT 1 Mary Blackmore – Hull Blitz, Women’s Land Army and Bletchley Park 2 Irene Broughton – Mill Girl, Wartime Bride, and Pregnant Widow 3 Madge Wear – Overseas Evacuee Escort and Bermondsey Blitz Re-housing vi

107 116 122

131 138

151 159 163 168 178 182 191 198 207 217 232 239 249 263

271 280 285

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Contents 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Bill Wootton – Bomb Disposal in London Frank Robinson – Bevin Boy in a Yorkshire Pit Joan Bright Astley – In Corridors of Power Fanny Hugill – The Wrens, D-Day and Admiral Ramsay John Bishop – A Conscientious Objector Maria Jankowska – A Polish Woman and Resistance, the Warsaw Uprising Manya Stern – A Polish Jewess, Life under German Occupation, Forced Labour, Bergen-Belsen Patricia Solk – ATS Driver, Mechanic and Dispatch Rider Brenda Pritchett – Southampton Blitz, Dance Band Singer Joan Potter – Evacuee, WAAF Coastal Command, Clerk and Bandswoman Basil Blackwell – Admiralty Weapon Research Bernard Lovell – Development Work in Radar

291 295 300 307 315

Index

377

vii

321 328 336 343 349 353 361

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Introduction How I came to record people’s memories of the past and why I believe it is so important that this work is undertaken, are explained in some detail in the introduction to Captured Memories 1900-18. Suffice to say here that teaching history made me aware of the important but perishable nature of our heritage of memory. I became so anxious about society’s seeming indifference to the disappearance of this element of our past that I felt impelled to make a contribution to its rescue.

With the support of others, this led to the creation of two new archives, one dedicated to the First World War – the Liddle Collection in the University of Leeds – and one to the Second World War – the Second World War Experience Centre. These archives contain original letters, diaries, photographs, artwork, newspapers, maps, artefacts, and manuscripts and typescript recollections, but from their foundation, in 1968 and 1999 respectively, a special concern was the recording by interview of memories of the wars and of the period leading up to them.

In forty-two years I have probably recorded 4,000 men and women and I remember clearly today so many by name and the occasion of the recording, their helpfulness, hospitality, recollections, each with the imprint of individuality.

Sometimes the meeting provided special challenge, yes, on both sides of the interviewing equation – a blind man with no hands, another man who always kept his word so didn’t break our appointment in the very week his wife had died. Sometimes, indeed often in recording the testimony of European Jews and Allied Far East Prisoners of War, I have been in the midst of such turbulent emotions that I have felt utterly drained at the end of the session, and aware of what we had untilled for the person delving into such a past! There are two such interviews in this book and a third, challenging in another way, listening to judgements beyond the boundaries of differences of view.

Of course, one of the privileges of my work is being taken into a past that so fascinates me; into the clattering noise of a working mill with duties demanding manual dexterity, or into the mind of someone for whom political perspective governed every action. I might add that hearing the circumstances of action on land vividly described is thrilling, but can also be xv

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Captured Memories 1930–1945 uncomfortably disturbing. There is an example of that in the book relating to Arnhem. This man, I think, educates the reader to the fact that in a beleaguered defensive position under attack, fear was instilled not by the insistent hammering of machine-gun fire, the whoop and crash of mortars, and crunching explosion of shells, the smells, the choking smoke and dust, and what training, duty and self-preservation called you to do, but temporary inaction, a sudden menacing silence – the silence followed by the reverberation of heavy engine noise betokening the approach of an enemy tank, then the tank seen through the haze of battle, its turret traversing, the gun barrel directly on your ruined building, its target. That was what induced fear.

Mentioning that education for me, reminds me of another truth behind the experience of active service. The interview given to me by His Grace the Duke of Devonshire is not selected for use here, but his answer to a question of the demands of campaigning in Italy under certain circumstances seemed to me to be so enlightening: ‘Oh it’s not what you have to do that matters, it’s who you are doing it with, that does.’ He then went on to name NCOs and men in the ranks with whom he still exchanged Christmas cards!

Selection for inclusion in this book focussing upon the Thirties and the Second World War has been difficult in that I have been spoiled for choice.

The principal criterion has been that the interviewee gave an outstanding account of his or her experience. The subordinate criterion was an attempt to offer wide-ranging but of course not comprehensive coverage of experience during these years. For example, for the war years, I regret that there are no civilian internees selected, nor experiences of any Channel Islander enduring Occupation, though these subjects are well represented in the Centre’s holdings. I am mindful too that however good an interview is in telling us what it was like to be there, it can only be that man’s experience.

The sailor and the Commando who survived St Nazaire would have kindred but very different stories to tell. On numbers of occasions I have felt how much I would like to be given the time in my life to share with readers the fabulous riches in the Centre on such topics as St Nazaire, but this volume is not the setting for an all-round account of particular events, still less, of campaigns.

When all deliberations were over – and that includes those over the actual length of the book – however reluctant I was at the exclusion of some, I was comfortable with those selected for both sections of the book. For Section One it was important to have memories of both poverty and privilege and they are certainly in evidence. Likewise there is representation of those who offered political solutions to the country’s social and economic problems.

Oswald Mosley’s interview I regarded at the time and no less now, to be particularly important and Barbara Castle’s is full of interest and absolutely ‘true’ to her. I should add that many of the people selected for the war years xvi

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Introduction have interesting memories of growing up in the Thirties and these memories are included here as the background context for their wartime recollections.

In Section One there is evocative recall too of professional preparation for Service careers in the Royal Navy, from Admiral of the Fleet the Lord HillNorton, and for the Army, from Sir Humphrey Prideaux.

For the 1939-45 years, the Senior Service has Loftus Peyton-Jones’s and Frank Arkle’s riveting accounts of action, the sharp-eyed observations but also moving stories related by Admiral of the Fleet, Sir Henry Leach, and then from the Mercantile Marine, lifeboat survival leadership described in such detail by Vernon Upton, who was to earn his George Medal following this exploit. You may imagine how pleased I was to be able to include a graphic account of the disaster at Pearl Harbor too. Those looking for Wrens, (indeed for WAAF and ATS recall too) will find them later in the book though they could justifiably have been included in the Service sections.

From the war in the air, there is a Battle of Britain fighter pilot, ‘Ben’ Bennions, a Lancaster Bomber pilot, William Reid, who earned a Victoria Cross, the famous ‘Cat’s Eyes’ Cunningham, an American pilot, ‘Tuck’ Belton, shot down and joining those who aided him, the Dutch Resistance, and quite extraordinarily, a German pilot holding on today to his National Socialist convictions.

The soldiers selected offer vivid recall of defeat in France in 1940, of the return to France in 1944, and of North West Europe in 1944-5. John Killick’s account of a last stand at Arnhem is compelling in the extreme. The raids on the Lofoten Islands and on Dieppe, the Western Desert, Cassino and campaigning in Italy, Burma in 1945, SOE operations, including the Telemark success and endeavour in Albania and Siam, POW experience and escape, Far Eastern captivity with the additional drama of escape, recapture and Japanese retribution, will I feel sure grip the reader’s attention, as will an account of the action that earned Eric Wilson a VC in Somaliland. There are two quite exceptional accounts of calamitous wounding and paths to recovery, that of Richard Wood (the Lord Holderness) and of Sidney Scroggie.

Wrens, ATS, and WAAF are within the Home Front section and here will be found stories of evacuation, the Blitz on several cities, decoding at Bletchley Park, bomb disposal, Bevin Boy labour in the mines, top-level secretarial duties, the escorting of evacuees overseas, women’s work on the land, and scientific development in radar and weapons – the accounts here of Bernard Lovell and Basil Blackwell some may judge as the most important in the book. There is still more in this section that holds interest, like that of the Leeds mill girl with her war wedding and personal tragedy as a pregnant war widow, the teenage dance band singer who sang for badly disfigured servicemen and an account of how Blitz rehousing responsibilities were carried out. xvii

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Captured Memories 1930–1945 The Home Front heading for this section is rather stretched in the case of two women who were far from Britain in 1939 and who provide, with one other example (James Bradley), perhaps the most sobering evidence in the book. Manya Stern was a Polish Jewess, Maria Jankowska, a Catholic Pole.

The Centre has compelling testimony of those from Eastern Poland too, invaded by the Soviet Union in mid September 1939, but in this book, Manya’s and Maria’s stories highlight, in a microcosmic way, the tragic ineffectuality for Poland of Britain’s stand in support of the country on 3 September 1939. With tragedy piled on tragedy, the Polish people were to have no freedom nearly six years later when Nazi Germany was defeated, nor indeed for more than forty years until the collapse of the Soviet Western Empire of satellites.

With two exceptions, my questions have been omitted or implied in the editing so that the interviewee delivers his story as a monologue, designedly far better for the reader. As for further editing, very little has been done – simply correction if an error were now known to have been made, an avoidance of repetition actually on the tape, and just occasionally some slight change to cut out ambiguity or make something clearer.

In making these recordings I tried to make the men and women young again, telling me of happenings in their lives as if they were just to have occurred, and how they reacted to them at the time. I believe this comes through in the written word and is in fact a deserved tribute to the physical, mental and emotional effort given unstintingly by all those in the book and by so many more who might well have been included. They have given us the essence of what it was to be there, in those years that so crucially defined the future of humanity in the twentieth century. It is my hope that this book offers the reader not just glimpses of the past but, collectively, a convincingly close view.

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1 WILFRED SHAW Poverty and the Search for Employment In working with Wilfred Shaw in May 2002 to capture his memories I was deeply moved by his understated account of his impoverished youth.

However, there was an uplifting development to his story, something that, almost visibly during the interview, led to a squaring of his shoulders and a lifting of his head as he talked and I listened. From struggling with adversity even when in employment, Wilfred, his family virtually destitute, found himself with a new family, one that supported him as well as fairly requiring his contribution: it was his regiment in the Army, the Green Howards. I realize that this is a story with many parallels but as I left his home in Oldham I felt a renewed awareness of what was called for from people striving against such circumstances of impoverishment in the Thirties, together with an admiration for a man who had nonetheless achieved self-respect and the respect of others. Reflecting upon his story I could not but recognize the role his regiment had played in the making of this man. The interview with Wilfred Shaw remains for me a memorable encounter.

I was born in Cambridge Street, Royton, Oldham, in 1920. I know nothing about my father, I was illegitimate. My mother was born from a very poor family in Cambridge Street and at one period in her life she was in an establishment known as the ‘Scattered Homes’. When grandmother went into the local workhouse at Oldham Hospital, when the workhouse was there, four of grandmother’s children, including my mother, were put in this Scattered Homes as young children. And well that’s as far as I can tell you about that.

I went into a secondary school called Blackshaw Lane. At that time we’d moved from Royton and I went to live with mother and the person I knew as me father who actually wasn’t, a chap called Leonard Charlesworth, but we were brought up as a family and I went to the local school at Blackshaw Lane. It was quite definitely a period of extreme poverty. You ask whether we had shoes, well we had clogs. I used to wear clogs and a jersey and a tie.

The jersey by the way had gone into holes at certain parts and they used to get a needle and wool and darn them, nothing ever discarded, but you never felt ashamed because everybody else was the same. I left at fourteen and the 3

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Captured Memories 1930–1945 only job that was available to people like me in those days with an education like mine, which you could say was practically nil, was to go into the local cotton mill, which I did.

I was to work in two or three mills but the first one I ever went in was the Park Mill, which was just on top of the hill above where I was born. I remember my mother taking me at fourteen years of age and begging and pleading with the mill overlooker to give me a job. He agreed to give me a job on condition that I would start for nothing. Later I was to be paid for putting tubes into a barrel, which were then put onto spindles before the mule spinning took place and they were spun onto these tubes. The only money I got was for when I did tubing, and I think I got the opportunity to fill about three barrels in the first week I was there and they handed me a wage packet, which contained the fabulous amount of tuppence in old currency.

I should explain with regard to money and any chance of buying anything ourselves, our fun in life came from making our own things. I mean, if you found an old pram or pram wheels, they were like gold. You could get four wheels even if they were different sizes sometimes, and you could make a bogie, a piece of wood with two wheels and a piece of rope and you guiding it, you know, you could go down the nearest hill sort of thing. And we used to make our own bows and arrows. The material for all the stuff you made came from the local mill. Everything came from a cotton mill like a great big cane, which you bent, you know, and put notches in and then a string across.

And you made arrows and we used to tip them with tin. We used to cut a triangle and then shape it round into an arrowhead, and we used to test them by firing them over the local church. And yes, everything like that, ropes for example, came out of the mill and my sister and her friends, they played skipping rope and they would tie one end to a lamp post and somebody would turn the other end and the other girls would skip.

Now yes, I was in the choir at one time at the local church in Hayside, St Mark’s. I was in the choir there until they found out where the noise were coming from and then they didn’t want me anymore.

From the mill I brought into my home five shillings. Later on it got to fifteen shillings. Like I say, I worked in that mill and in another mill too. You used to work in bare feet and the oil used to squelch between your toes as you were walking along in the alleyways between the machinery and I hated it. As a young lad of fourteen, I was never very big – I was just a young kid, you know, and I hated it, and there came a time when I just packed my bags and I went of my own accord to work in Birmingham in an iron foundry.

I had told my mother how fed up I was, and I had an uncle who was already working in Birmingham. He used to come home periodically and he used to tell these wonderful tales about how the money was better in Birmingham. This captured my imagination and I thought I would like to go 4

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The Thirties to work there with my Uncle Harry. Ultimately I went and was living with his family for a time and working at this place called the Parkinson Stove Company where they made cookers. But everything was done on a conveyor belt, and my uncle used to knock out the castings and they were full of black sand, and my job was brushing off the black sand with a steel brush. We got so dirty on that job, and there was no baths, no form of washing facilities, that they wouldn’t allow us to travel on the buses so we had to walk it home and get in the bath when we got home. However, at least this was better money than the mill.

It was something like two pound ten shillings or getting on for three pound I should imagine, which was quite a fair amount, you know, and I was there when war broke out. That was September the third 1939. I didn’t go into the Army immediately, as I thought I’d like a move so I went of my own accord then down to Bristol. I hadn’t a clue where I were going to stay or anything and I just went and I jumped on a bus and went to a place, I can still remember it, it’s called Knowle Park and went in a shop there and asked this woman in the shop: ‘Do you know where I could get digs? I’ve just come to work here on spec sort of thing and do you know anybody who can put me up?’ She said: ‘Well, I think Mrs Turner might, across the road.’ It was number two, The Square, Knowle Park, and I went there and initially she refused me. I said: ‘Well, I’ll just have to look elsewhere.’ Then she said: ‘Would you object to sleeping with my son, you’d be sharing a bed with him?’

I said: ‘No,’ and she took me in for a weekly lodging.

I’m sure the money wasn’t enough for her really to keep me but she was very sympathetic towards me. I lived there and I got a job initially on the railway, driving a horse and cart. And when I went up to feed the horse, the man in charge said: ‘Do you know anything about horses?’ I said that I did but in fact I didn’t. The first day out I finished up delivering these parcels and it was the middle of winter in Bristol and I came back about two to three hours later than everybody else so he said: ‘I think you were telling me lies weren’t you, I don’t think you know anything about horses do you?’ I had to admit I didn’t but that I was desperate for a job. He told me he liked my cheek, that I should come back in the morning and he’d find another job for me somewhere. I went in doing something else just knocking around, around the stable yards and things like that. After a week or two I got another job in a shop charging accumulators in a cellar. And I used to take them out on one of these carts, which was a bicycle as well, like you used to see for Walls ice-cream, and I used to take these batteries and take out the old ones, the old accumulators and batteries, and put the ones in that I’d charged, and then back to the shop and charge all that lot.

And then my birthday came around and I had to register then for military service. So I went and I was passed, passed A1 and ultimately I got my papers through to report for the Army.

5