August 1939 to Spring 1940
I was called up in August 1939, together with my elder brother John and the other lads of the village of Downton. We were already part of the Territorial 4th Battalion, the Wiltshire Regiment having joined in the previous May as a result of a visit from a recruiting unit. The menace of Hitler’s Germany was the best recruiting sergeant, and although most of us were married, no one thought we were wildly irresponsible in joining up. Most of us thought it was better to be in a unit with people you knew than to wait to be called up, when there would be no choice.
We were a pretty motley crowd, mostly farm labourers, drivers, shop assistants and the like. I claimed to be a motor mechanic although [as explained in the previous chapter] I had had no formal training.
My call-up was not unexpected, but was still rather a shock. I was cycling off to work when the postman handed me a blue OHMS letter telling me to report at 11 am that day at St. Paul’s Church Room in Salisbury. I cycled on to work, collected the pay due to me, packed up my tools and went home to change into uniform. The new Battle Dress had recently been introduced into the Regular Army, but Terriers were using up the old World War One issue that took a bit of getting in to. The jacket was tightly buttoned to the neck, with the collar fastened even tighter with a brass hook and eye. The trousers were cut fairly short in the leg and the lower leg was encased in puttees. These consisted of two rolls of khaki material about three inches wide and six or seven feet long, which were wrapped over the trousers starting at the ankle and overlapping to leave half an inch or so to show, winding round and round until they reached the knee. The odd end was then tucked in and concealed by pulling the trouser down over, having first remembered to leave enough slack. Thus accoutred, and feeling like a trussed chicken, I arrived at the church room rather later than the appointed hour to find a seething hungry mass of men being shouted at by an irate sergeant major. I did not know then, but this was to be a common experience during the next six years.
After a sleepless night, lying on bare boards with one blanket, we moved the next day to Old Sarum airfield just a few miles away, into an empty aircraft hangar shaped like an overgrown Nissen Hut with open ends, making an effective wind tunnel. Here we were issued with kit bags and various items of equipment. The weather had turned wet and windy, and a fine moisture blew through, and we sat miserably on our new kit bags wondering if the concrete floor would be harder to sleep on than the wooden one of the previous nights.
At this time, war had not been officially declared, as last minute overtures were being made to Hitler, but on Sunday, September 3rd, sitting in our hangar with the rain still falling, we heard Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister, announce that all efforts had failed and we were now at war. This news cheered us all up, as we, and I think most people in Britain, were pleased that at long last we had stopped kow-towing to Hitler and were having a go at him, and anyway we now knew where we stood.
We stayed at Old Sarum through the worst of the winter, training to be soldiers! And mounting guard on the installations and on the aircraft dispersed all over the grass field. We learnt to polish buttons, of which we had more than enough, and learnt some of the dodges, which make life for the lower ranks a bit less tiresome. Our pay as privates was two shillings a day (10p), but we married men made a compulsory allotment of half that total to our wives. They, poor things, were getting, as far as I can remember, only £1.40 weekly allowance, plus the husband’s contribution, making a grand total of £1.75 on which to live and keep house.
The result naturally was that within a few weeks many families were in dire distress and those who, like us, were buying furniture on hire purchase fell behind with payments. The hire purchase company threatened to repossess. My meagre wage was of no help to Beccy, indeed none of us in the 4th Wilts received our full amount of 35p weekly due to a device, known as “compulsory savings” by which 10p was deducted to be held to our credit, but I cannot recall ever having it paid back to me. The remaining five shillings soon went on writing paper, envelopes, stamps, Blanco for cleaning webbing equipment, Brasso for the buttons and badges, and the odd Woodbine, which in those days I did enjoy. Any surplus was saved to buy a bus ticket to Downton when I could manage it.
This state of affairs must have been prevalent all over the country, because Parliament took note and first of all declared a moratorium on the repayment of debts of servicemen, and went on to make a supplementary allowance to wives and dependants. They even dated this extra pay from the day war started, and I had an ecstatic letter from Beccy telling me that she had received a warrant for just over fifty pounds to bring her up to date. This cleared our debts with a bit left over, and a great weight was lifted off our shoulders.
I was greatly impressed by the timely way the Government had come to our rescue once they saw the need. I was not so impressed when I found that married men had to pay this money back by instalments, and it was only towards the end of the war that my trade pay as a mechanic, plus a few other extras, exceeded the stoppages. Beccy knew nothing of this of course.
Some of our crowd were lucky enough to have their money made up to their pre-war pay, but they were mostly civil servants, council workers, or employees of large firms. The rest of us had no such luck, just put up with it. The general feeling was, I think, that it was what we might have expected; being merely an extension of the treatment a lot of us had had from civilian employers.
This must have been so, because one day I was marched into an office where three civilians sat behind a table. The centre man told me that as I had the trade of motor mechanic before the war, and as this was a reserved occupation I could, if I wished, be given an immediate discharge from the army. My only thought, as I recall was, “Well, I didn’t go through all this just to go tamely home again”, and politely refused.