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What follows is a clear indication of the innocence of teenagers in the 40s, compared with the knowledge and experience of those to day, possibly fostered by TV. It must be understood that about 1940/41 the whole of Briton was going through an incredible time of change, at home and in the forces. There was evacuation, rationing, which induced the Black Market, bombing, recruitment, and families being split. In the forces, the need to recruit men and women in vast numbers, clothe and train them, move, and temporarily and strategically accommodate them was paramount. The logistics were complicated and enormous, with the result anomalies arose, leading to strange outcomes. Being billeted was one of them,
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In Newcastle on Tyne, the number of sailors who would shortly descend on Newcastle for specialist training overwhelmed the Billeting Master-at-arms. RDF, Radio Direction Finding, the forerunner of Radar, was being fitted in ships and they urgently needed operators and maintenance staff, and these were arriving in days, me among them. Ferried by train and bus we arrive at a street of three storey Victorian houses and were delivered to the awaiting landlady. At that time, the U-Boats were in ascendancy and many of the students sent on courses were long serving men who had volunteered for the course, having had enough of the dangers of convoy work. We were given merely a bunk in a room full of cheap, black steel beds and we kept our belongings under the bed. With so many of us to a room, there was just enough room to move between the beds. Almost as soon as we were in the room, the older guys, presumably from past experience, knew exactly where we were, in a brothel, and to make the point, pulled back the sheets to reveal stained mattresses. The quiet of that night and those following, were broken repeatedly by the stamp of feet on the steps of the house next door, where trade was still in progress.

My nature, and that of most of the men there, was that if you have no solution to a problem, then forget it and get on with life. However, because it was so extraordinary I foolishly wrote and told my mother in humorous vein, but she could not see the funny side. Instead she, innocently, wrote a letter of complaint, to a naval Commander friend she knew. She forgot two things, the Navy is a club, the Commanders are trained in the tactics of war and the best form of defence is attack. They attacked.

The only meal we had on the premises was breakfast, prepared and given by the girls from next door. One day some of the lads were having fun with the girls when a pewter teapot got damaged This was all authority needed, all of us were put on report for riotous behaviour, when there was hardly elbow room for breakfast let alone a riot. For the rest of the time that we were boarded in the brothel, we were forced to scrub out the school rooms when not being taught. After that we were found new individual billets. I never did admit to my mother’s letter, ‘if there is no solution…’

We were in basic training for a month, at times it seemed endless, at others it passed quickly. How we felt was a barometer of what was happening, how interested we were or what Chalky White was putting us through in the rain.. A week to ten days before our departure we had a celebration of sorts, which involved blanket tossing. Some poor specimen would be persuaded or shanghaied into getting into a standard Navy issue blanket and then about six of his classmates would start counting, heaving the blanket on each count and then, when three was reached. throwing him up in the air. Inevitably it was my turn and they threw me so high I could see over the roof of the cabins. I made the mistake of telling them so and that was my downfall – from a great, actually an even greater, height.
An error in communication was hardly surprising with that lot who, out of reach of authority, rarely stopped talking. One of the group suggested they should count to four but only those in his immediate vicinity heard him so the bulk of the tossers were counting to three. I described an arc, a parabola? – Who cares? I was still seeing over the roofs, but landed on my hand, feet away from the blanket. There was a tiny amount of consternation, mostly ensuring none of the blanket tossers were held responsible. I assumed I had an acute sprain. I thought I should report to the Sick Bay and have it attended to. This prompted advice and discussion, mostly on how I should relate the incident in case it would affect my pension, some on denying any direct responsibility, but there was very little talk of how hurt I was.

I went to the Sick Bay and on the way concocted a story about tripping over a kerb. In hindsight this was stupid as any Sickbay Attendant would probably consider you can’t break anything just tripping and so he would take my word for it that it was a sprain, wrap it in lead solution and send me on my way, which indeed was what happened. For the next week or ten days I endured my sprain until it was time to go on draft at which time I was presented to a Surgeon Commander who made me have an X-ray and the result showed I had multiple fractures with torn ligaments. It was a well autographed, plaster cast which weighed me down on my way to Newcastle upon Tyne.

The Newcastle Period I had made some good friends among the Geordies in our class even before we knew our next posting, so I was luckier than most. Sent to Newcastle I had my feet metaphorically under a number of tables even before we had arrived – which was obviously a great asset. It is a cliché but nonetheless a truism that the Northumberland and Durham people are the salt of the earth, shining examples of the widely held theory that those who have suffered deprivation not only help one another but can be generous to a fault. As an immigrant, I couple the Northern Irish in the same category. To make the point about the Northumbrians, one night I had been to a dance and had taken a young woman home afterwards. I had missed the last tram back into Newcastle and started back following the tram tracks as a guide until I arrived at a set of points, a fork, and then I was completely foxed as to which line led to the City Centre. I noticed there was a light in the downstairs window of one of the houses near the junction and rang the bell. I explained my dilemma to the man who opened the door, he said it was miles into Newcastle, invited me in for a cup of tea and, when he had given me the once-over, suggested I doss down on his couch until the first tram at about five or six next morning. In fact his wife gave me breakfast before sending me on my way. That was not an isolated case, a number of my friends had other experiences equally open handed, equally trusting, I think it is inbred.

Permanently broke, permanently hungry, we worked long hours. Lectures went on after the evening meal, we attended evening classes for metal work and electrical practicals; then there were parades and we had menial duties connected with Rutherford College where we were being taught, with little time for socialising, just an hour or two here and there, and Sundays. At night the four of us, the Geordies, who lived at home, and myself would walk back from class into town singing in harmony, eating chip butties covered in salt and mustard to make them seem like sausages, generally relaxing after a day’s study, before going home to do more homework. In one of the streets there was an optician’s shop with a tortoise in the window wearing tortoiseshell spectacles as an advertisement. One of our group thought the tortoise looked like me and after a lot of persuasion the others agreed and I was called Torty for the time I was in Newcastle, not only by them, but everyone they came in contact with who also knew me. I had no say in the matter.

The New Boys We spent the first month at Butlins Holiday camp at Skegness which had been renamed HMS Royal Arthur and sounded in our ears like an aircraft carrier. Inevitably the result was that Smith and some others were able to give rein to their fantasies in the local pubs, not realising that the girls of Skegness had heard it all before as each new batch of amateurs arrived and was put through the mincer – within the proscribed month of basic training – so that we came out marching, thinking and looking alike, transformed in to automata, or so the Navy vainly hoped.

At the holiday camp we occupied the made over chalets, two to a chalet, ate in the dining halls and relaxed in other parts of the buildings, Once again the Navy showed the English lack of appreciation of Irish traditions. Two men from Belfast, one Catholic and one Protestant, were put together because they were Irish. I occupied the next chalet and the fights which went on inside the Irish domain were often fierce to the point of becoming bloody, but make some derogatory remark against the Irish and they were both at you.

The first week passed on wings, there was so much to learn both about being a sailor – with knots, lashing ropes, boxing a compass and so on. Then there were the traditions of the Navy, the reasons for the ridiculous uniform, as we were decked out in ‘square rig’, called that because the whole uniform was square, presumably because sailors in the time of Nelson were expected to ‘make and mend’ their own clothes and the design had therefore to be simple. Even the term, ‘make and mend’, had come down to us for ‘free time’. The collar was square, the tunic jersey was square, even the trousers were square and made wide enough to be kicked off in the sea if the need arose. The front was designed with a quick-release system, in that there was a huge flap which dropped down to reveal two side flaps crossing the lower abdomen as well as one’s underpants – a quick flip of the buttons and the trousers would be off in moments. Nelson was never recorded as having made any comment on any of the other advantages of his design, or, on second thoughts perhaps he did..

When the sailors got hold of the uniform there had to be further amendments to show that they were sons of the sea and not civvies dressed up. The tunic was altered from a ‘V’ in the front to be squarer showing more of the shirt, and the blue edging to the shirt. The whole collar were scrubbed and washed with all sorts of prescriptions to bring the colour out, with exactly that intent, if a sailor had been serving for years his collar would have been washed hundreds of times in sea water and would therefore be faded. Ergo, all new entrants wanted to appear anything but a novice. Some were persuaded, by ruthless shopkeepers to buy collars of a light colour, but they soon realised the synthetic colour was an even bigger badge that they were initiates, rather than an indication of long service. The washing never gave an even colour change, there were always corners where, because the ribbon over-lapped, the colour was stronger. Such vanity did not stop there, the trousers had to have gussets set in to make them even wider, and a silver three-penny piece had to be sewn into the centre of the bow on the hat ribbon, an accomplishment I was good at which augmented my ten shillings a fortnight with the sale of my services in this regard.

The Changes to Naval Life In1940, Part 1 Prior to 1940 the Navy in today’s terms was a cross between a monk’s seminary and a football supporters club. Lower Deck life aboard ship was hard, totally masculine, and without any privacy. Shore leave was limited, often only a few hours and lived at strength 10. The sailors were proud of the Navy and proud to be in the Navy, but their relationship with society was varied. Allegedly, notices on establishments in towns adjacent to a dockyard read – ‘Dogs and sailors not admitted’.

WW2 was tough on the regular Navy and even tougher of the poor innocents joining. Prior to it, most of the Navy Lower Deck was recruited as ‘boys’, many from orphanages. More than their home, it was a secure haven, they had camaraderie, almost every need was catered for, and every year was like the rest. For those with ambition there was a limited ladder to climb. The chasm between them and the Wardroom, not only didn’t bother them, they accepted it. From the Wardroom aspect, there was a glass wall and no matter how high a promoted man might rise as an officer, there was an unwritten view expressed or not, ‘he was Lower Deck, you know!’

Then came the HO’s – Hostilities only – volunteers or recruits, of every class. Round pegs in square holes, some found their vocation, and then the rest. In the beginning all HO’s were resented by the Regulars. The phrase HO was an insult. a put down, and it took several years for the stigma to be dropped, because the HOs had proved themselves. We, from sheltered civilian life, in our teens, knew nothing of life,. Four letter words interspersed into sentences and even between syllables were rare in the ’40s at that age. Talk of brothels, sexual deviance in all its forms, living in crowded conditions for weeks on end with little respite, having to guard food because of hunger, or mis-appropriation, all had to be accepted. Punishments through ignorance, misunderstanding, or with good reason, could be cruel and unnecessarily harsh, all without putting a foot on a ship. This is no exaggeration as later pieces will give proof. One had to be a tortoise, with a thick shell, keep one’s head low, preferably close to the ground for scuttlebutt, say little, be cautious of whom to trust and go slowly.

JAIL I had been a quasi-sailor for all of three weeks when I was put on cell duty, at cells which contained two men accused of attempted murder. We had a Chief Gunner’s Mate who took us for drill. His favourite punishment for serious offences like talking in the ranks, being incompetent, not obeying orders properly was to make a man run round the parade ground with a rifle held above the head at full stretch. Be assured it is very painful after a while, especially in pouring rain without an oilskin. The two men had attacked him, one with a knife, the other a bayonet on different occasions, our sympathies were with them. Naval Jail in those days included picking Oakum – teased out hemp rope, used on tall ships for filling the seams of the deck planks. A piece of rope about a foot long and two inches thick was weighed, then the prisoner, with just his fingers had to reduce the twisted rope to its original hemp fibres, the wear and tear on the fingernails had to be experienced to be appreciated. At the end, the huge pile of fluff was weighed again. The prisoners were only given meat on one or two days a week and had to eat with a spoon. To an innocent civvie, this all seemed extreme and as I was sympathetic with the prisoners, I smuggled proper meals into them, begged from the Wren kitchen-staff and helped them pick oakum, hardly realising that if I was caught, I would be in there beside them.

The Home Guard And Buck-HousePresumably, as a morale booster, some genius at Whitehall thought it would be a ‘terrific idea’ if the HG were to mount guard at Buck H, not realising what the poor devils would suffer at the delicate hands of the Guards’ Drill Sergeants. An edict was sent to the platoons and read out at parades. I assumed it was to combine an honour for the HG while paying homage to His Majesty, KG6. They wanted men over six foot in height and it was up to the platoon to provide the ‘volunteers’. Skipper set about this by making us fall in, putting us through arms drill, finally picking those he thought would disgrace us least – I was one.
We reported to Wellington Barracks on Birdcage Walk each evening for about two hours, to be trained in the finer art of guarding. This involved stamping the feet at every opportunity until the Achilles tendons ached, carrying a rifle at the ‘slope’ and marching back and forth, in fact doing everything old Skip had taught us but with ‘snap’. ‘Put a snap in it, lad’, was the cry all round the parade ground. There was a S’nt Mayhah, not a sergeant major, with his dress cap placed parallel to the ground, the black peak flat on his face so he had to hold his head back to see where he was going and a device under his left arm, called a ‘pace stick’. To give a guide to the level of detail these guys entered into, the S’nt Mayhah invariably held this pace stick parallel to the ground, with the point held between the first finger and thumb of the left hand, with the remainder of his fingers extended, while, as he walked, his right hand was loosely closed with thumb extended on top and the arm raised to shoulder level on alternate strides. Someone in our platoon wondered who had time to wind them all up before we arrived.
The S’nt Mayhah had a voice like thunder and a penchant for abusing his own sergeants, I assume to impress upon us civilians the yawning gap there was between a soldier and a Home Guard. That we were held in complete contempt was patent on arrival and I’m sure the fact that the S’nt Mayhah probably had additional duties in consequence didn’t help our cause. One other odd peculiar particular was the Officer-In-Charge. Dressed like the S’nt Mayhah in his uniform but with a Sam Brown across his chest, his hat also had the flattened brim. He marched back and forth, parallel to the railings of the parade ground on Birdcage Walk, swagger stick like the pace stick, under his arm, precisely held, but he looked neither to left or right, he ignored what was going on beside him, of which he was in charge, and just stamped his feet as he turned round at each precise end of a the exact course of pacing. Periodically a sergeant or the S’nt Mayhah would stand in his path, sufficiently far along the track so he could put on the breaks and stamp to a halt. They would salute one another for the umpteenth time, shout something completely unintelligible at one another as if they were a field apart, salute yet again and then after a few ritual stamps of the feet they would part company and the officer would start his pacing again like an automaton. In fact I remember as a child seeing a German automaton on which a soldier came out of a sentry box, move jerkily to the other end on a straight track, rotated and then disappeared into another sentry box. Later this was copied but instead of soldiers they had designed it with a railway engine which went into a shed, perhaps because this made more sense.
It was June and the weather was so hot even for London. I had only a singlet on under my battledress tunic, a great mistake. For hours on end, night after night, we sloped arms and ordered arms and we tried to ‘put a snap in it’, but achieving that was almost impossible towards the end of the evening because our collar bones were sore with the repeated battering they had received from the rifles as we obeyed the instruction, shouted in our ear, strength five, ‘don’t put it down, slap it down’. Add to this the fact that we had done a full day’s work before reaching the parade ground and also that we were being abused as if we were raw recruits and this was our chosen profession, you can imagine the build up of resentment among us. My friend Farrer, who had also been conscripted, was becoming as miserable and bolshie as I was . The whole thing came to a crunch, on a Saturday I think it was, when they were trying to put the finishing touches to our education. Now, not only my collarbone, which had been broken years before, but the skin over it was so sore I could barely take the rubbing of the uniform on it. Therefore at each order to ‘Shoulder arms’ I tried to find a spot on my shoulder on which to lay the rifle and this took time. Unknown to me a sergeant, taller than I and a great deal stronger, was standing immediately behind me watching me as I laid the rifle down tentatively. Another sergeant gave the order to ‘Present’ (hold the rifle in both hands upright in front of the face), which I did with alacrity and relief and immediately we were ordered to ‘Shoulder arms’. This time the man behind me hit the rifle on the barrel when it was about six inches from my shoulder, so that it literally crashed down on all the pain – “I told you to smack it down not lay it down”, he bellowed in my ear. For a moment I was staggered both by the pain and the brutality. One minute they were implying we were a useless bunch of no-hopers who would never make the grade and the next we were treated as if we were fully trained but malingering. I took the rifle off my shoulder and turned to the sergeant and explained rather tersely that I was a civilian trying my best but as my best was not good enough I was resigning from his care. After all these years I have no idea what I really said, I more or less just walked off the parade ground. Whether the automaton saw me is unlikely, whether he cared is a definite negative, we were all probably an interruption in his social round. Farrer either left or was weeded out because there was none of our platoon at the Gates of Buckingham Palace in June when the pictures were taken for the Press. Perhaps we were all dismissed in the end and real Guardsmen were dressed in our awful uniforms and set out there, pretending – serve ’em right!

The Very Odd Home Guard ExerciseOur office platoon of the Westminster Battalion had to perform the odd exercises, which could take place in parks, on Wimbledon Common, anywhere. Of them all this was the oddest. They generally consisted of creeping about in an ill-fitting uniform with an empty rifle, drinking tea at an all night stall with big wedges of sandwiches and /or a pink and white coconut cake to fill the corners, and riding in the back of the Rolls.
However, one night we were told we were going to enter into an exercise with another HG unit from, I believe, Transport House. The idea was we would be the invading army and were to attack HQ, which was to be Transport House, while they, the enemy defending Transport House, would stop us. I forget the details but several things stand out clearly; there were no ground rules laid down about how the sortie was to be carried out, we were formed into groups of about four and sent out to follow different routes. We set off. Half way between our office and theirs, standing in the centre of a square, was a church that had recently been severely bombed. My mate and I, with a couple of others, started walking towards our objective and it soon dawned on us that there was absolutely no hope of passing undetected in those streets unless one could hide. There were a few buildings with steps leading down to a basement entrance, but they were traps for sure. Then we saw the church. Immediately we realised that if we could climb into the half-torn bell-tower and stay there undetected, the defenders would pass us by, which is exactly what happened, although our perches were precarious, to say the least, and today the Health and Safety Act would preclude soldiers from being allowed to take cover like that for merely a practice, We duly arrived at our goal and said that we had captured it. This was obvious as there was only one man there manning a telephone, and there were four of us. When we retired to the basement of our office we felt pretty satisfied with our evening’s work.
During the following week all hell broke loose. We thought we were going to be praised for initiative and inventiveness, instead we were castigated by the powers-that-were for not playing to rules they had thought up after we had beaten the enemy, though not by Sir, who agreed that we were right. The British Military seem to be totally crazy and have strange ideas about war. I sometime wonder if it has dawned on them even now, as it seems to have done on every other nation, that the idea is to kill the other side by any means at all and not get our own chaps killed at all – after all dead is dead. I often think they have always had it the other way round – ‘it’s not cricket, old man, to hide in a church.’

My next posting was to the Rent Department. Miss Veezey, a charming if slightly tentative young woman hated being brought face to face with the seamier side of life, presented by the area that we had to work in. The Management had decided I was a more robust specimen. The day I was appointed I was called into the Secretary’s sanctum. The sheer fact of being called was proof enough that one was either to be honoured or due for a dressing down. From long experience with Headmasters Studies and knowing I never did anything I was likely to be honoured for, I went with my tail between my legs..
“Ah! Riggs,” No suggestion of sitting down. A bad sign!
“Do you possess a hat, Riggs?”
“No. Sir.” I said completely mystified.
“You will understand that this Firm has a long tradition, it is not long since all the staff were required to wear frock-coats and top hats,” he said, or words to that effect, with total equanimity, and not a smile such the idea might engender. I just nodded, aghast at what might be coming next, my mind distracted with the vision of tens of my colleagues going in and out of the office in stove-pipe hats and frock coats. He continued, “If you are to represent us you will have to provide yourself with a hat. If you simply can’t wear it you must carry it, but never go anywhere on business without it.” Class dismissed.
As I went back to my new desk in my new department I was thinking it was a bit rich, making me buy a hat, when all I received was one half-crown per week less deductions, but consoled myself that I was lucky, my predecessors had had to pay in tens and hundreds for their tutelage, while I was being paid. They, poor devils probably had to buy a frock-coat and a topper. I bought a Porkpie Hat, and proud I was of it, too.
Rent collecting was a juggling act, especially in the rain. There was the rent book with its hard, damaged cover, with all the names and payments and a thick red rubber band to keep the place in the book. There was the pouch with the cash under the jacket, the inevitable hat, the pencil, the householder’s rent book and last but not least the rent itself, and only one pair of hands. The routine was to stick the hat either between the knees or on the head, get hold of the money, that was most important, hand back the change, mark up the main book, mark up the householder’s book, say a nice thank you, put the rent book under the arm and retrieve the hat. Easy? Try it with an umbrella as well. Miss Veezey was no fool.
That was only the basics, there were always the garrulous who were hard to get away from politely, withholdingthe book and cash until they had had their say. Short of wrestling with them one was a captive audience, There were the flats where one had to climb uncarpeted stairs which children had dampened and the atmosphere was thick to emphasise the point. In some cases an elderly, undernourished, bodiless hand with a greasy, brown paper covered rent book, mucky money, would appear through the four inch slit between door and jamb – Miss Veezey.’s horror. Once I had shown myself capable of collecting rent and knew what I was doing, I was transferred upstairs to the Holy of Holies, the Surveyor’s Department, where another, altogether different class of being was housed. These people spoke a different language, had more freedom of movement and dictated their own letters rather than have them corrected, like essay-time at school. The dictating machines recorded mechanically onto a rotating tube of a black shellac-type material, and the playback needle was of bamboo. When the typist had typed up the letters she would engage a shaving device which would scrape off a thin shaving and reveal untrammelled shellac to receive the next offering – we have come a long way in 60 years.
I learned other things, but my main job then was to take a taxi each morning and visit the areas of our property which had been damaged since my last visit and make a superficial estimate of the percentage of damage both structural and cosmetic which had happened and note it down to enable the registration of War Damage claims. Sometimes, when the raids increased and occurred in daylight as well as at night, I could actually be out recording when further damage arose.
The day came when I received my papers and was about to head off to the Navy. On the day I departed, I left a huge ‘Property Vacant, This Space For Sale’ standard notice. Poor Sam Clutton! There was a guarantee given to us that all members of staff who were called up or volunteered for war service would be reinstated. Cluttons was a renowned firm and anyone who had managed to get taken on was not likely to throw up the chance of rejoining. To keep the place going through the years with men leaving like leaves in the Fall, he was ultimately faced with the problem that not enough of them had been killed. On release I went to the office looking for my job back, he nearly had a fit. I suspect I was only one of a long queue. When he discovered I had married an Irish girl and was temporarily living in Ireland, the look of relief and the persuasion he put into his monologue was a slight blow to my ego. I had worked directly under him and we had a rapport, but I could see his dilemma and someone had to go to the wall. I was probably just one of many.