David Carroll - Dads Army: The Home Guard 1940-1944

DADS ARMY

THE HOME GUARD 19401944

DAVID CARROLL

For Sam

First published in 2002

This edition first published in 2009

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

David Carroll, 2002, 2009, 2013

The right of David Carroll to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9989 5

Original typesetting by The History Press

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to everyone who shared their Home Guard memories with me, and whose personal recollections form such a vital part of this book.

Frank and Joan Shaw have been extremely generous in allowing me to draw without hindrance from their splendid volume We Remember the Home Guard. I am also indebted to the individual contributors to that book who have permitted me to quote from their respective accounts. Chris Blount of BBC Radio Cornwall has given me access to his 1991 oral documentary on the subject from which I have drawn on Rex Daveys memories and Eric Higgss account of the events surrounding 7 September 1940. Bill Grifin, of the Choughs Association at Newquay, supplied me with a great deal of information and literature relating to the Home Guard in his part of the world, including Captain W.A. Owens vivid eye-witness account of the London Stand Down parade (contained in the Choughs Annual Register of 1944). I am indebted to the many and mainly unknown authors of various Home Guard Battalion histories, a large number of which were printed and circulated privately. They all proved invaluable to me in my research. My chapter about Britains Secret Army would not have been possible without the help of David Lampes definitive account of the subject, The Last Ditch, from which source much of the background information was drawn. Equally vital was the personal memoir written by Frederick J. Simpson of Dorset, which describes in detail his experiences as a member of Auxiliary Units. I am most grateful to him for allowing me to quote from it at such length. Bombers & Mash:The Domestic Front 19391945 by Raynes Minns yielded valuable background information for my chapter about women in the Home Guard.

I should like to thank the following for the use of copyright material:

The Phoney War (Michael Joseph, London, 1961), E.S. Turner and reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.; The Last Ditch (1968), David Lampe and Cassell plc; From Dusk Till Dawn (1945), A.G. Street, Cassell plc and Blandford Press; Please You Draw Near (1969), Ernest Raymond and Cassell plc; The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume Two: My Country Right or Left (1968), A.M. Heath & Co. Ltd. on behalf of Bill Hamilton as the Literary Executor of the Estate of the late Sonia Brownell Orwell and Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd.; The Home Guard of Britain by Charles Graves (Hutchinson 1943), reprinted by permission of the Random House Group Ltd.; The Real Dads Army by Norman Longmate (Hutchinson 1974), David Bolt Associates; four lines from Watching Post from the Complete Poems of C. Day Lewis (Sinclair-Stevenson 1992), the Estate of C. Day Lewis; Civilians at War: Journals 19381946 (1984), George Beardmore and John Murray (Publishers) Ltd.; Hare Joins the Home Guard (Wm. Collins 1941), the Trustees of the Alison Uttley Literary Property Trust; Memoirs of the Forties by Julian Maclaren-Ross (Sphere Books Ltd. edn., MacDonald & Co. 1991), the late Alan Ross; Further Particulars (1987), C.H. Rolph, Oxford University Press and David Higham Associates; extracts from messages and broadcasts by King George VI, the Registrar of the Royal Archives; various letters, documents and publications issued by the War Office, extracts from Sir Edward Griggs speech to the House of Commons and Sir Winston Churchills third anniversary message to the Home Guard, the Controller of Her Majestys Stationery Office. The originals of the documents from which many of the contemporary extracts in this book are taken are held in the Public Record Office. I have made every effort to contact all copyright holders. Any omissions are entirely unintentional, and I would be pleased to rectify them (upon notification) in any subsequent edition of this work.

Lastly, my greatest thanks go to Jonathan Falconer at Sutton Publishing for guiding me through this project, Bernadette Walsh for her support and Bill Pertwee for generously contributing a Foreword.

FOREWORD

Memories of the actual Local Defence Volunteers, later the Home Guard, came flooding back to me during the day of the first rehearsal of televisions Dads Army (and my role as Chief Air Raid Warden Hodges).

In June 1940, my mother and I were staying with my aunt and uncle at Belvedere in Kent. On the night of Anthony Edens broadcast asking for volunteers to help fight a possible German invasion force, my uncle went straight down to the local police station to enlist. Uncle Bill Tobin was a strapping great Irishman of 6 ft 3 in who had been through the First World War; in fact he was a boy bugler in the Boer War. In one encounter with the Germans during the First World War he had single-handedly silenced an enemy machine-gun crew by, believe it or not, strangling them! So you can see he was slightly eccentric and pretty courageous. Just the sort of man Anthony Eden hoped would answer his call. On the night in question Uncle Bill said to the police sergeant on duty at the station, Im Captain Tobin (his rank in the First World War) and Im taking command of the local volunteers. Apparently, so we heard afterwards, the police sergeant hadnt listened to Edens broadcast and thought that here was some lunatic playing games. He proceeded to try and calm my uncle. Rather like the great radio comedian of the day, Robb Wilton, he started shuffling some papers about on his desk and licking his pencil. My uncle told him hed be back when he had pulled himself together. He then went home and, using his obvious strength, started taking the large furniture table, chairs, sideboard, bookcases, etc. out of the house and laying it across the road like a barricade. My aunt, who was Brazilian like my mother, just laughed at anything her husband did, and filling up the road with her furniture was just another one of his eccentric acts. My uncles final remark on the matter seemed even more eccentric. Well, they wont get through tonight. You can imagine my astonishment when I first read Jimmy Perry and David Crofts script for the Columbia feature film of Dads Army that we did in the early 1970s. Here was Captain Mainwaring assembling a roadblock of household furniture at Walmington-on-Sea. When I told the writers about my uncles antics they too were astonished, as they had seriously thought of cutting out the furniture scene from the script because it seemed just too ridiculous. Fact certainly is stranger than fiction as they say.

This was only one of the incidents I remember from those strange days of 1940. Soon after the episode concerning my uncle, my mother and I moved into a bungalow on Dartford Heath, also in Kent. There, we were not only a mile or so from a huge gathering of anti-aircraft guns based on the heath but we were also directly under, or so it seemed, the majority of air battles being fought out in the summer skies between the fighters and bombers of the Luftwaffe and our own Spitfires and Hurricanes. During these battles there were several instances that concerned the Home Guard. I remember a Heinkel bomber coming over very low one afternoon as I was walking up the road from the bus-stop after my college studies. The plane seemed to be dropping all sorts of things on to the surrounding area to lighten its load on its way back to Germany. In fact, it was so low I could see the front gunner in his turret. I dived into a ditch soiling my blazer in the process. When I got home I told my mother what had happened. Oh, dont worry, she said. Mr Stewart next door is in the Home Guard. Hell sort it out. That remark typified what nearly everyone thought about the Home Guard. They were the guardians of the civilian population, and this feeling had developed very quickly. The Home Guard, of course, were among us all every day of the week because most of them worked in jobs and services that were a part of our everyday lives.