Introduction

The 75th anniversary of D-Day in 2019 triggered wartime recollections by former employees of Marconi Radar. Inevitably the passage of time has ensured that most were mere children in 1945. Nevertheless the intervening 80-odd years has not dimmed the memories of this fateful era, which are recorded below.

Memories

1) By Don Halstead

At the end of August 1939 my parents and I (age 3) moved from Glasgow to the small Nottinghamshire village of Tuxford. I suspect the move was triggered by the wish to get me away from the dour Scottish climate, thought to have triggered the attacks of allegedly bronchial asthma which plagued me from the age of two. In fact we discovered after 35 years of misery that the underlying problem was that I was hugely allergic to feathers, wool and household dust (i.e. people!) due to a genetic defect passed down from my father's side, but that is another story! It was as well we left when we did, for we had been living close to the Clyde in an area that was to suffer huge bombing and damage in the massive Glasgow blitz.

 
My father was a Methodist minister, responsible for a large cluster of chapels in the Tuxford area. His very first service at Tuxford was on the morning of September 3rd, 1939 .... interrupted mid-stream by the local grocer who strode in without warning, or permission, to proclaim "We are at war ...". Father never quite forgave him for that interruption; how was one supposed to follow that?

 
As a small boy I had no great appreciation of the early years of the war. I do remember being woken in the late hours and enjoying sheltering under the stairs with the occasional drone of engines overhead as bombers tried to find Sheffield, Derby, Nottingham and other prime targets. The nearest bombs fell to us was in 1940 on the nearby tiny village of Laxton, famous even today as one of the last outposts of strip farming. A pilot, lost and looking for any target, seems to have followed the dimmed lights of an ambulance returning from an ARP lecture and released six bombs once he saw buildings. They killed the village schoolmistress and damaged several houses, which I remember seeing, aged 4. Other targets in the area were the Ransome and Marles ball-bearing plant at Newark-on-Trent and military camps around Ollerton. My father was appointed ARP warden for our road and issued with tin hat, whistle and stirrup pump, none of which got used as far as I know. The pump wasn't even powerful enough to wash our windows .....

Most of my route to the local primary school was along the Great North Road, notable for the lorries which regularly crashed at the foot of our road, probably due to overloading, bald tyres or worn-out tyres. We children tried to avoid treading on cracked paving slabs because those nasty Nazis might have buried mines or butterfly bombs under them; the vibrations from heavy traffic were a much more likely cause. One sign of something unusual in the early summer of 1944 were the bundles of twisted-pair cables which kept building up along the hedges and bridges bordering the North Road, presumably linking some military outfits into the local telephone exchange; manual, of course, staffed by ladies 24 hours round the clock who asked you what number you wanted to be connected to, often responding that 'all the lines are busy!' and always writing down costs to add to your bill.

There were no school meals or even somewhere to eat sandwiches, so lunch meant a brisk mile-long walk in each direction and a hurried meal, all in little more than an hour. For a long time one even had to carry your gas mask in its cardboard case as essential luggage.
So, at 12.15 on June 6th 1944, a fine but overcast morning as I remember it, I was rushing up Markham Road, the hill that led to the Manse, hot and sticky, when half-way up our next door neighbour suddenly erupted through her garden gate and smothered me in her capacious bosom. She was practically hysterical and could only keep on exclaiming "They've landed, they've landed, they've landed ....". After a moment I managed to extricate myself and, scared out of my wits, ran the rest of the way to burst through our kitchen door and yell out that 'The Germans are coming!" Fortunately my parents had heard the news, possibly on the radio via John Snagge's announcement, and calmed me down with the correct interpretation of "They've landed".

That autumn we moved from Tuxford to Thorne, the mining community near Doncaster. Today the A1 bypasses Tuxford. It threads under Markham Road, and our Manse was the one building that had to be demolished to make way for the bypass. As I have driven up and down the Great North Road in more recent years it has been a very odd sensation to drive under the new bridge and to look up thirty feet to the empty space where for those five years I lived, played, slept, sheltered, and once panicked.

2) By Robin Reynolds

 
D-Day - the main thing  I remember about it was that the sun was shining as I waited for the bus to take me to school and there was a general feeling of optimism in  the air.

I was born, at a very early age, in St. Mary’s Hospital, Paddington on Winston Churchill’s 60th. birthday. Now it appears it is a favourite venue for Royals to be born. My parents were living in Seaview, Isle of Wight at the time and my mother probably pulled a few strings with some of her friends to give birth there.
So I was nearly five years old when war was declared and obviously did not know what that entailed until six anti-aircraft guns were deployed not far from our back fence. We were right on the coast and had a panoramic view of the Solent right across to Portsmouth and Southsea from an upstairs window. What we did not know at the time was that we were in a direct line between Ventnor which had a CH Radar and Portsmouth an important naval base. We often found complete incendiary bombs in the garden which we used to collect up in the morning after a raid. The filings of the case were ideal for making sparklers as it was magnesium. We did not have an air raid shelter as such but a reinforced room within the house and used to shelter in there underneath a large strong table.

Father was in the Home Guard and was the sergeant of the local platoon. He had been wounded in WW1 so was not eligible for call-up. My brother was an RAF apprentice and my sister was a Land Girl.  One day Father arrived home with a Lewis gun, covered in grease and it had probably been in storage since WW1. He had been told to strip it down, clean off the grease and re-assemble it in readiness in case it was needed. My brother was home on leave at the time and helped him with the task, I was told to keep well away but I could watch if I wanted to. Just as well I did watch as neither of them could re-assemble it so I did it for them.

Later on things were starting to get a bit more difficult, the Channel Islands had been occupied and they thought we would be next. Our local sweet-shop closed and the owner who was Jewish thought it wise to leave the island. I was put down to be evacuated to Canada but fortunately the ship was full and I would have to wait for the next crossing. I say ’fortunately’ because the ship, the SS City of Benares got sunk by a U-Boat just off the coast of Ireland with great loss of life. Food was getting difficult to obtain despite rationing as it had to be shipped across the Solent. Meat in particular was in very short supply so it was decided that we would breed rabbits primarily for their meat but we also had fur as a bi-product. Another thing we were advised to do was to assemble various tinned foods, to place them in large biscuit tins and bury them in the garden as an emergency supply in case we did get occupied. I often wonder how many tins are still buried in gardens.

We were fairly lucky as we had a large garden so vegetables and fruit were in plentiful supply. Also being right on the coast fish were available with a little bit of luck. If there had been an air raid during the night and bombs had been jettisoned in the Solent then if the tide was right we could collect ‘bombed fish’ on the beach. A bit burnt but mostly edible.

The view from the upstairs window was one of my favourite spots if there was any action but I was often reprimanded for watching dogfights in case any stray bullets came our way. The shipping was also quite spectacular and safer to watch but the Dunkirk evacuation went by almost unnoticed as we did not know what was going on until it was virtually over. The Navy took over Seaview pier and I suspect something top secret went on there probably with small boats. We befriended one of the Petty Officers from there and naturally did not ask but we were not even allowed to know his name. We always had to call him PO.

Someone had the bright idea of getting all the kids to collect waste paper during the summer school holiday with a prize for the one who collected the most and a party with the prizes given out. I collected the most as it happened and was awarded First Prize, a box of pencils. I was a bit miffed about this actually because I thought I should get third prize. No one had explained to me that First Prize was better than Third Prize.

When I was about eight there was a bit of a lull in the fighting around us and for some reason we moved to Berkshire where we hardly knew there was a war on. We lived in Sunninghill in a house virtually opposite the entrance to Windsor Park and not far from the end of Ascot racecourse. It was obviously after the Americans had joined in the war as one time we were queuing in the local fish and chip shop, and I always remembered an American serviceman in front of us ordering 36 portions of fish and chips. So another late supper for us.

I think we only stayed there for just under a year and then moved to Surrey. I was a bit older then and more independent so I got more involved in what was going on. We moved to a farm labourer’s cottage in Abinger Hammer directly on to what is now known as the A25. There was the railway line behind us which went from Redhill to Reading, known as the ‘Reading Rattler’ and we had a narrow lane alongside us known as Beggars Lane which led up to the North Downs past a sand pit and on to two chalk pits. The chalk pits were used by the army most days for rifle practice and for grenade throwing and after school we used to go up to see what souvenirs we could find such as spent cartridge cases and pieces of hand grenade. One lad took home a complete sticky bomb that he had found but I don’t think his dad was well pleased with that as it was probably still live. The other side of the A25 we faced a large area of watercress beds which were fed with water from the river Tillingbourne. It was not very deep and could be waded across in most places but that was not good enough for us as we wanted to swim. So several of us boys used to build a dam across the river until it was just about deep enough. We were enjoying ourselves there one summer afternoon when we could hear a lot of gunfire and thought it a little strange as we could also hear bullets whistling overhead. On investigation we discovered that an ammunition train had caught fire and was stationary just outside Gomshall station and bullets were flying everywhere. We managed to get home OK by keeping low and crawling along in the watercress beds sheltering from the bullets behind the banks of the cress beds. 

 
Things were building up to D-Day by then and convoys of troops and armour were continuously passing on their way towards Portsmouth along the narrow A25 in the front of our cottage. It was also very narrow through Shere where I went to school . We had to cross this busy road at lunchtime to go to the village hall for our school dinner and it was there that I witnessed a young lad get knocked over by an armoured car in his haste to get across the road.

In the days just before D-Day a lot of military vehicles parked up along the road side hidden from  above by the overhanging trees so we knew something big was going on. We heard the news of the invasion on the early morning BBC news and I remember it was lovely sunny morning with barely a breath of wind just like it was this year. Not long after D-Day we started to receive the V1 Doodlebugs which were so unpredictable as they appeared in all sorts of odd places. One arrived fairly close by just skimming over the hedge tops, one landed in Abinger Common Churchyard and one arrived just as us kids were sitting down to our school dinner. Later on the V2s were being launched but none came near us thank goodness. One Saturday morning when we were playing in the sand pit we heard a strange whooshing sound which grew louder followed by a bang. We had no idea what that could be so rushed home to discover we were OK but the neighbouring cottage had been hit by something which did not explode. The old lady who lived there had been killed and we were totally mystified  as to what it was until we learnt later that it was a reserve fuel tank from a Mosquito that had been jettisoned in error.

We naturally followed the progress of the war on the BBC news and were overjoyed when VE day was announced. We didn’t live in a street as such so did not hold a street party but were invited across the road to a bunch of houses where the watercress workers lived and shared in their party. About this time I took the school exam which was the precursor to the 11 plus and passed to go to the Grammar School in Guildford.

We heard the news of the “nukes” being dropped in Japan on our trusty old Phillips wireless set and looked forward to peace being declared there. We were back in Seaview on holiday when Victory in Japan was announced and joined in the celebrations there. I managed to get my leg burned by a Thunderflash that exploded too close to me but that was all. Eventually the prisoners that the Japanese held were released and shipped back to UK. I remember that our neighbour’s son came back minus his tongue which the Japs had removed.

Very soon after that we moved to Holland-on-Sea so I never went to Guildford Grammar school and the Clacton County High was full so I had to go to the local Secondary School  for two years and then take the exam that got me into Colchester Tech. But that is another story.

3) Further note from Don Halstead

 
The nearest I got to experiencing action was from my grandmother's bedroom window in Newark-on-Trent, in Nottinghamshire. Her house was almost opposite what must have been a repair and recycling site for damaged planes, probably from airfields such as those Alan H-S wrote about in his response. The long Queen Mary vehicles regularly inched their way past with fuselages with all sorts of damage, but I don't think I really understood the background.

I had never heard of Chelmsford or what was happening here, but clearly it was lively here too. Ron Howick told me of his older brother and his friends finding unspent cartridges lying around, perhaps on on Galleywood Common during the Battle of Britain, and building them into a bonfire to see what happened. The resulting blasts, with bullets flying in all directions, were spectacular. Dick Wood, of Research and eventually Radar, recounted Marconi workers being driven on a bus, one of the survivors of the raids either side of the viaduct which had had its windows blown out, soo that travel was well ventilated. Somewhere in the depths of the countryside the bell rang, and rang. Someone on the top deck had let their weekly ticket blow away away and fellow passengers had to search the ploughed fields to find it before being able to finish the journey. Peter Eves had a story of watching a V-1 flying over the Broomfield area. He was so intent on watching it that he stepped backwards and fell into a pond. And Peter Helsdon once wrote of the rocket batteries in Central Park which had to take care that they didn't aim so low that they demolished the viaduct.
What an era!

4)Comment by Robin Reynolds

 
I also visited my grandmother during the war. She lived in Occold on the Suffolk/Norfolk border in an old thatched cottage built the same year as the village church in about 1600. Drinking water came from the village pump and washing water from the pond. No WC of course but a Thunderbox in the garden.
The disadvantage of getting washing water from my granny’s pond is that it contained a large number of well sized rudd. More than once my aunt would inadvertently catch one of these when collecting a scoop of water and would not realise it until she heard a lot of splashing about in the kitchen.

One thing I discovered, being a nosy b****r, that as there were a lot of old cracked wooden beams in the house, If I looked very carefully I could find old coins that had been hidden away years ago, George 3rd. James and others I could not identify. I still have them somewhere if I could only remember where.

It was quite near Horham which was an active USAF base flying Fortesses on a daily basis to bomb Germany and we often saw aircraft limping home on a wing and a prayer in a sorry damaged state. Most evenings there would be a number of Americans walking past on their way to the village pub in Occold and we used to entertain them by setting up target practice for them in the form of an old German helmet that my father had brought back from WW1, stuck on a post so they could throw stones at it.

The helmet and the rest of my father’s memorabilia I donated to the Royal West Kent museum in Chatham.

After the war, my two aunts went to live with my grandmother and were “domestics” to Willy Rush a local farmer. I found out much later that he was a great friend of Tom Perkins who lived at the time in the next village and they used to go shooting together.

What a small world we live in.

5) Don Halstead again

 
As I have mentioned, my father was a Methodist minister, operating during the war in a cluster of predominantly farming communities. All Methodist ministers were expected to visit their flocks in their homes on a regular basis, even with strict petrol rationing. Occasionally he would take me with him because farmers' wives loved my curly golden hair and might even treat me to a few precious eggs. However, such visits often were rather curate's egg-ish experiences:

(A) because access to farmhouses often involved crossing the crew yard (a Lincolnshire term for a courtyard which cattle often occupied) and could have a treacherously slippery surface of mixed mud, straw and manure;

(B) the only toilet facilities always seemed to be on the far side of the yard, in those days tended to be the deep drop type familiar to many of us, ponged to high heaven despite generous applications of lime - itself evil smelling - and had capacious seats which were well suited to ample adults but left a small boy terrified of falling through. And then there was the torn up newspaper .....

Years later I was teasing father about his habit of making such detailed notes about folk he visited. "Donald,"he said, "I am known to everyone because of what I do and my clerical collar. But heaven help me if I don't remember all the members of the family and forget to ask after the state of Grandma's chilblains...."

6) By Alan Hartley-Smith

 
I used to spend summers with my paternal grandparents in Dowsby in the Lincolnshire Fens with the same "facilities" - I did the drinking water fetching each evening using a pair of enamel buckets on a yoke, and then the milk was delivered to the door from a pony cart holding a churn from which it was dispensed with a long-handled dipper poured from height into a jug without spilling a drop. Washing water was from rainwater tubs in the yard, then into a coal-fired range in the living-room and a similarly fired copper in the working kitchen for laundry days - their thunderbox was a single-holer but some houses had doubles! Oil and candle lighting and main cooking on a paraffin-fired stove and oven housed in an outhouse next to the kitchen door, with a kettle for tea permanently simmering on the range. As my father was a police officer he gave a helmet to Grandma who had it hanging on a hook visible from the open kitchen door to deter peddlers and gypsies! Happy days.

I can add a little more to this remembrance. I was 4 at the start of the war living in Lincoln and therefore right in the middle of a clutch of fighter and bomber bases - Scampton to the north where the Dambusters were based, Waddington to the south another Lancaster bomber base (much later Vulcans), plus several fighter bases in the flat fen country, including Coninsby the present home of the RAF Memorial Flight, and another Lancaster base at Skellingthorpe whose main runway pointed straight at our house so fully-loaded aircraft streamed over at what seemed just above roof-height at night and in the morning returned, usually higher but occasionally not so high and with rough sounding engines and trailing smoke which I went outside to see if it was around breakfast-time before going to school, which was next to a Rustons works which manufactured tanks so we saw road transporters trundling past. My father was in a reserved occupation in the City police but had plenty of experience of the war through the bombing of factories and continual movement of Army and RAF forces  I also have memories of the street parties for VE and VJ days

Seems a long while ago now.

7) By Alan Turk

 
I arrived in the world in Cheltenham during June 1938, so Robin is my senior by a few years. The events of 1939-45 were largely a mystery to me and I can’t put any definite dates to those that I recall (it’s a long time ago!). One of my memories is of warm summer days with aircraft droning gently and soporifically overhead, which seemed perfectly benign at the time, but I guess they may well have been Spitfires or Hurricanes. Later, at my first school, some of my diminutive schoolmates seemed to be experts in aircraft recognition, distinguishing with ease between single and double fuselage types, which appeared at the time to be the sole way of classifying them.

During my early school days it became a regular thing in the classroom that pupils were required to do gas-mask practice. It was a totally meaningless exercise as far as I was concerned, and a somewhat unpleasant one to boot, but was no doubt an important activity.

My mother recounted in later years how when I was still little more than a baby she held me in her arms one night as German bombers approached, dropping bombs as they came, aiming for the nearby railway line. As far as I know, they failed to hit it, though I believe there were numerous near-misses. This would have been the line that once linked Cheltenham to the village of Andoversford and then branched north-eastwards to Kingham and southwards to Swindon and beyond. She said she could hear the explosions as the planes came nearer and nearer, and was sure that the next one would hit our bungalow. As it happened, there were no more bombs on that occasion, so we were spared.

There were various possible targets in and around Cheltenham and Gloucester. One may well have been the Dowty Equipment factory at Arle Court, where aircraft undercarriages were manufactured and tested. Close by was an establishment known by local people as the War Office, probably on the site of today’s GCHQ. My father was in the Royal Army Pay Corps, a “pen-pusher” as such clerical privates were known. He never went out of the country but had to do all the arduous training exercises that front-line personnel had to do. As a small child I didn’t know him except from my mother’s frequent references to him. I wanted him home, very badly; so badly in fact that on one occasion I set off, pushing my tricycle (I hadn’t yet learned to ride it!) in an attempt to go to the “War Office” (I only had a vague idea of where it was) and get the war stopped so that Daddy could come home. Fortunately, someone told my mother where I had been seen, and she came hot-foot to take me back home, much to my chagrin. After he was demobbed he worked for a good many years at Dowty’s.

One place that was definitely hit, though I can’t imagine why it would have been a target, was Cheltenham's Black and White Coach station. People used to speak of “the night when the Black and White clock stopped” as a point of reference for other events.

One memory that may have been related to D-Day, though I cannot be certain, is of an occasion when I was visiting my grandparents in Andoversford, where one of my uncles had a cycle sales and repair shop, together with a newsagent’s business and a sideline charging accumulators for wireless sets. He was well aware, as all my relatives were, of my interest in trains, and I often stood beside the road below the railway embankment, watching the trains as they passed. One day he was walking along beside the road with me as a train came through, heading south, laden with soldiers. As I often did, I waved at the train and some of the soldiers waved back. One of them threw something to me from the window. “Stay here,” said my uncle, “and I’ll see if I can find it.” Crossing the road he discovered it had landed in some long grass at the bottom of the embankment, so it was a miracle that he found what turned out to be a Mars bar. I made it last a very long time! My guess now is that the soldiers were heading for Southampton or Portsmouth, ready for embarkation to France. I wonder if the one that lobbed me the Mars bar ever came back ….

8) By Alan Matthews

 
My Grandfather had a small blacksmith’s business at Hutton and Father was an Agricultural Engineering apprentice at J Brittan Pash in Chelmsford when his father died in 1918. He had a younger sister and his mother had no pension or money, so Father joined the Air Force and volunteered for a 6 year Posting to Iraq with RAF armoured cars ( later to become the RAF Regiment) with no visits home, to earn some money for the family. He left the Airforce in 1929 to work at Hutton Poplar school as a maintenance engineer and went to night school in London to get some qualifications.

When the war broke out in 1939 he was on reserve, called-up straight away and sent to France with Fighter Command as a Motor Transport Flight Sergeant.

Father was later appointed as the senior NCO in charge of a group who were destroying any useful items left on Fighter Command airfields as the Germans overran France. Naturally they were the last men out (switching off the lights?) and were trying to make it to Boulogne somehow to escape capture. On the way they passed through a village and standing in the open truck, father caught an apple thrown by a French boy. To his surprise the apple came apart revealing a very poignant note inside which has survived and a copy of which is below.

He told me that a little later, as they were on a road just outside Boulogne, a local in a car stopped them and said “do not go on in that direction, the Germans are only a mile or so further on and are also close behind you as well, but I will guide you to the port on small local roads”. They followed him and arrived that night at the port where there was one destroyer which was the only one of three which had been over the previous day and had returned to try to find more soldiers.

When the destroyer ( HMS Vimiera) had docked at 1.40 in the morning, there were no troops to be seen, but they tannoyed the town and troops appeared from their hiding places. The boat shelled the roads to the town to keep the Germans away while the troops boarded and then it sailed away into the foggy night back to England.

An Officer on one of the other two destroyers had been killed by a mortar from the shore the previous day, so it was all a bit dodgy to put it mildly.

The Vimura just made it out with about 1500 men packed on the decks – forbidden to move in case the ship capsized as they went across the Channel at night. It was so close that the Germans were firing at them with rifles from the quay as they left and they were lucky not to be dive bombed because of fog !!

Father was awarded a Mention in Despatches for getting the group home.

He later was at Debden with Group Captain Townsend (of Princess Margaret Fame) as his C/O, then at Coventry during the bombing, North Africa and Germany. He left the Air Force in 1951, just before I started my apprenticeship with Marconi.

There is a broad account of this evacuation of Boulogne on the net and it agreed with the story my Father told me..

9) By Nick Pinnock

My father was in a reserved occupation and when I was researching what that actually meant I was surprised to find that it took such a large document to list all of them, apparently a reaction to experiences from 1914-18 when the Army had so many recruits that there was often insufficient staffing in industrial infrastructure to keep the bullets flying.

Dad’s employer produced, of all things, cardboard boxes and cartons, which were considered essential war materiel for containing ammunition as well as so much else, and my father was therefore doubly on the list of reserved occupations because he was appointed Works Canteen Manager soon after the outbreak of war. He would probably not have been anyone’s first choice for front-line duties because of his rather weak eye-sight, but he volunteered for the Local Defence Volunteers immediately its formation was announced. Notably he asked to join the company’s squad of “para-shooters”, whose job it was to be to take pot-shots at the German para-troopers who were expected to be landing soon and taking over Britain’s essential factories. I am now the custodian of Dad’s files, and amongst them is the memorandum he got rejecting his application because there were only about a dozen rifles for distribution and they were to be allocated to men with previous military experience. (You just have to wonder what would have been the use of a superannuated Lee-Enfield against a Hun dropping at terminal velocity, anyway.)

So, Dad ended up guarding hearth and home instead for a while, joining the Home Guard around his precious much-loved bungalow, bought only in 1938. Eventually, it became more important for him to transfer to the unit that looked after his employer’s works, because his duties as Canteen Manager meant that he had to be available to manage the stockpiling and management of emergency food supplies. In his Home Guard capacity around the works, he then spent many nights dealing with the incendiary bombs that landed on the roofs, because that area was a favourite target for the Luftwaffe—Thames Board Mills was slap-bang next-door to petrol storage tanks operated by Standard Oil. Dangerous work, especially so since some of the 1kg bombs were booby-trapped with explosives as well as incendiary material.

But it was well before that transfer happened when, on Saturday 5 April 1941 at 4:15 in the morning, two parachute mines were dropped over Chadwell St Mary, one of which exploded in the air. Extensive minor damage was caused over an area three miles wide, which included the Woodside Estate where Mum and Dad lived. Every roof tile on a whole estate of houses was lifted or loosened. In its own minor way, this event had exactly the opposite effect to that intended by the bombers, because all the neighbours pulled together to fix their roofs, and that work cemented a feeling of community spirit that lasted well into my youth. Nonetheless, I am sure that my parents never got over the shock of the damage—it must have emphasised the potential devastation that could have been visited upon them.

To the best of my knowledge, there was only one human casualty in my (rather large) family for the whole of the 1939-45 conflict; nobody was even physically wounded amongst all my uncles and cousins with the exception of my Dad’s cousin who was an officer in the Royal Tank Regiment, adjutant to his Regiment. A Captain shortly to be promoted to Major, he was killed in Italy on 8 August 1944 by a land-mine. I suspect that he was in a soft-skinned vehicle like a Jeep, because he and a fellow Captain were killed by the same mine, and such a duo would have been unlikely in their favoured mode of transport, the Churchill tank.

Dad used to joke that he had attained the same rank as Corporal Hitler. At some stage he had this photograph taken of him, doing his take on what an Austrian house-painter (said to be the part-Jewish product of an illicit union between one of his antecedents and a house-maid) really looked like, had he been decorating our bungalow. (Dad was always a great one for dressing up and playing the fool, if only Mum would let him.)

Dad always said that, upon his retirement, he was going to write a book. But ill-health got in the way and took his life much too soon. I guess that having done research into all the things he might have told me at his knee but never actually did, and all the things he might have written in his book, I sometimes feel obliged to spread the knowledge I came by in the process of building a chronicle based partially on all his photo-albums and miscellanea. So, my apologies if this is actually of no interest to you. But I still wonder why, even he, with his life relatively untouched by the deeper tragedies of war, never really talked about it. Not really, really, talked about it, I mean.

By Alastair Thomas (a memory of D-Day+75years!)

Those who remember me from Marconi Radar will recall that my continuing hobby was the restoration and driving of old cars. I have two brothers: one collected old cars as well and the other collected military vehicles. The latter pointed out to us that the commemoration of D-Day during Normandy75 would be very well attended so we bought a Ford 60 cwt Light Artillery Tractor in October 2015. This is a so-called Canadian Military Pattern (CMP) truck built to a British specification when all the trucks lost at Dunkerque had to be replaced. We got off to a slow start but managed to complete the job shortly before the event. We dressed the truck as belonging to the 15th Manx Light AA Regiment who landed on D-Day as part of the 7th Armoured Division. We left Portsmouth on 2 June arriving at Ouisterham the following morning. The main events were a gathering of all UK and Commonwealth vehicles on the 4th and a line up of hundreds of vehicles on the beach at Arrowmanches on the 6th. We even got on the telly. We returned the following Sunday.

I enclose a picture of the truck and one of Arrowmanches beach.

Clifford's War

Don Halstead, July 2019 [E&OE]

Readers may remember my personal memory of D-Day as a frightened young boy, scared witless by the inadvertent impression that the Germans had landed. Not only did I post that to MOGS, triggering a number of other fascinating memories, but I shared it with numerous relations and acquaintances. The most surprising reaction was from a local lady I know through her splendid work running the Essex Heartbeat Support Group for those of us with arrhythmic heart problems or pacemakers; Jenny Turner.

She mentioned that her by now 94 year old father had arrived in France in support of the Pegasus attack at 2100 hours on D-Day! The preciseness of that timing inevitably intrigued me, and it launched Jenny and I on a virtual journey of exploration following the death of her father just ten days after the recent anniversary.

Clifford Head, so far as I know, had no connection with Marconi, but I think his story well worth recounting here. After all, he lived in the Galleywood area! What follows is a summary of what we now know of Clifford's War, published here by gracious permission of Jenny.

Clifford Dennis Head was born in Islington in January 1925. He enlisted in the Army at Maidstone in February 1943, aged just 18, probably in the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. He trained at Bulford Camp (still active today?) on the edge of Salisbury Plain before moving elsewhere.

The 2nd Battalion Ox and Bucks formed part of the 6th Airlanding Brigade. D Company, commanded by Major John Howard, were the spearhead of the whole invasion, landing at Pegasus Bridge at 0016 on June 6th. Wikipedia contains a wealth of information about Operation Tonga, the airborne operations between 5 and 7 June, including Operation Mallard in which, on the evening of 6 June around 2100 hours, some 250 Horsa and other gliders carried the remainder of the 2nd Battalion to Normandy to support the initial landings. Youtube has numerous clips of the air fleet preparing, taking off and in flight - quite astounding - and of 6th Airborne as well.

 I have to admit that I was quite unaware of Operation Mallard, so another bit of my education is now complete. Clearly Clifford, aged 19, was involved in it; details of Mallard are in Wikipedia. He stayed in Normandy until early September; some 90 days of fierce fighting during which the Brigade suffered 800 casualties (dead, injured or missing) out of a strength of 8,500.

Back in the UK in November he married Iris, his childhood sweetheart and sister of his best friend; he was 19, she 18. It was the start of a marriage of nigh on 75 years; Iris survives him.

In December and the following January he and his colleagues were in Belgium, rushed there to help contain the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge, fought in the most atrocious Arctic-style conditions. The Bastogne War Museum, which I have visited, is a vivid illustration of the brutality, in every sense, of that operation . Afterwards Clifford served in Holland and Germany until May 1945. During that time airborne operations included Arnhem and the crossing of the Rhine, but we have no details of any Clifford involvement. He was always very reticent about his wartime experiences, in common with many of his peers, only being prepared very occasionally to talk to his grandsons about them.

In November 1945 he embarked on HMT Worcestershire in Liverpool on a voyage that took him first to Burma, from January to April 1946, and then on to India where he probably was in the British Indian Army. There are suggestions in his diaries of guarding VIPs during that time. Well, Mountbatten was out there; who knows! But his photos and papers include references to a host of places, including Madras, Calcutta and Bombay.

He returned to the UK in 1947, around the time of India's partition, and raised a daughter, Jenny, and a son, Christopher. Jenny's view of her father is perhaps best expressed in her last Father's Day card to him on the day he passed away: "You'll always be my hero", and clearly he was, and will be.

Clifford kept his red beret and the Airborne badges from his uniform. They may well be displayed at his funeral next week, along with the Legion d'honneur decoration he was awarded in recent years as a veteran of the liberation of France by President Francois Hollande.

Clifford, sir, it has been quite an experience learning about your early years. Rest in peace - and Thank you.

Footnotes

So far we have found no on-line references to Clifford, apart from his picture .

There is, of course, a huge amount of material about the Normandy campaign, both on and off the web. I have refrained from quoting URLs en masse; the reader can find them with ease, but one starting point is the Pegasus Archive.

Extracts from three diaries in particular are readily available, those of:

Major John Howard, commander of that initial landing,

Lt.Col. Geoffrey Pine-Coffin (inevitably known as 'Wooden Box' to his troops) who led the immediate follow-up para landings at Pegasus, and

Lt Richard Todd, sometime actor who was also part of that follow-up force, and who played Major Howard in the film of The Longest Day.