PART 1: JULY 1939 – NOVEMBER 1940

N: Tell me what happened when you were conscripted.

D: Following threatening moves, well-documented in history, by Hitler from 1936, 37 and 38 and then on to 1939, the government of the day (Neville Chamberlain was then Prime Minister), decided that we should have to have conscription in this country. The conscription act was passed I suppose about March or April 1939 and it was for people, only men folk, males of the age 20-21 to be conscripted into the services and you had a choice of which service you wanted to go to a certain extent. You would be conscripted and you would serve 6 months training with the colours, and then you would be on the reserve for 3 years.

N: So when did you hear that you were going to be conscripted.

D: Well this (I knew that I should be in that age group when it was announced), came out on the news, you know, after it had been passed in parliament and I realised I was there and I should be going. We had to register at the local labour exchanges.

Giving our names and addresses and ages and then we got, I suppose, from the local labour exchanges our instructions, where we were to report to, our travel warrants and, as I said, the local money was then about 10 shillings and sixpence, equivalent of 50p today. My instructions were to report to Waterloo Barracks West in Aldershot on Saturday 15th July 1939 which I duly did, getting the train down to London, I remember, across to Waterloo and then down to Aldershot. At Aldershot Station we were met, I remember, by a nice chap, a regular Sergeant, I think his name was Jackson, Sergeant Jackson. All – we were all recognised, he knew who we were. We were all getting off the train I suppose in just our ordinary clothes carrying a small suitcase of odds and bits and pieces, so he collected them and he said “We know where you’re all going. You are all coming to Waterloo Barracks West” which wasn’t very far away from Aldershot Station and there we were.

During the course of the afternoon or early evening, I think about 120 of us went and we were taken into the 21st anti-tank training regiment. Now I had thought when I had the opportunity of knowing what service I wanted to go into I thought it would be the army and I thought I would like to join the Artillery, visualising artillery as big guns way behind the lines firing out over a long way away at the Germans or something. I hadn’t realised of course that there were these little two pounder anti-tank guns which I had been posted to.

Now the War Office, the military bigwigs’, ideas of these little two pounder anti-tank guns were they were a high-velocity, armour piercing shell. I think the top brass were still thinking in terms of where World War I finished. So they visualised these anti-tank guns as being in some way in the front line of the infantry and they would knock out the German tanks before they ever got anywhere near to the front line of the infantry. That was the thinking at that point. Anyway, that was how I got into the 21st anti-tank regiment.

Now I suppose that first evening we were told and detailed which barrack rooms we were going to. I think we were issued with a pair of pyjamas and various odd bits of clothing etc., like that, to see us through the night. So then there was lights out and everything else. We had a meal – we had some supper. Next morning, and this was rather interesting. You had seen 120 people arrive at Waterloo Barracks West in Aldershot all in their different ranges of civilian clothes and it wasn’t long before we were all standing around all in the same brown canvass jackets and slacks with a fore-and-aft cap and all looking more or less alike. That was the start. We went on that day I suppose, getting kit. You were given a towel, and I think, changes of underwear or something like that. One of the things we did do in those days was change – we had to change our underwear once a week, roll it up, put our label on it, tie it up in a bundle, put it through, eventually it went off to a laundry somewhere and eventually it came back to be used the next week. Anyway, I think that was day one.

We were then getting organised. There were various regular army people who were there of course who were going to train us – the new group they’d got. The initial training started. The initial training was I suppose learning how to march, stand to attention, stand at ease, stand easy, knowing what to do, right dress and that was lining up and getting yourselves into lines properly. That was one of the starts. Another thing I always remember: they said “Well you will be getting paid at the end of the week but you must learn to be able to salute properly the officer in charge who will be giving you your money.” So we had to remember how to go up to the officer and stand in front of his table. He gave us our money we had to remember to stand to attention, salute, turn round and walk away. Just a little bit of army discipline I suppose. The few weeks went on generally consisting of training, marching, and rifle drill, which was very different from the rifle drill you will see now.

N: How is it different?

D: Well you handle your rifles differently. To start with the rifles we had then were an old original rifle which came through I suppose from World War I. It was much bigger, much longer, much heavier to handle than the present day rifles and you had to remember how to stand with it and hold it by your side. You had to remember had to learn how to fix the bayonet, you had to remember how to lift it up correctly and put it on your shoulder and that sort of thing. Now I wasn’t too badly off. I’d had some of that because in the school OTC [Officer Training Corps] we had been doing similar sort of things of rifle drill and marching. The anti-tank gun drill wasn’t quite so easy. That was fairly hard going. The anti-tank gun itself I think at that point weighed probably something between 1500 weight and a ton. So it was a fairly heavy little item to lift and manoeuvre. It was towed behind what would now be a fairly large jeep and was then a 1500 weight truck. We we had to learn how to take it, tow it up to where it was going to be, unhitch it, turn it and get it all fixed up. You had to take the wheels off before it was going to fire, you were going to fire it and hopefully hit some German tanks.

Another thing I remember. When you had been put down in your firing position your truck disappeared off somewhere to the back. Now originally, I don’t know whether the guns in the artillery had been towed by horses because it was rather interesting that when you wanted to signal for your truck to come back and pick you up and tow you away somewhere else, you turned round and you did the semaphore signal ‘H’ for horse. So the people sitting at the back, even if they hadn’t got horses then, saw you do your sign “Horse” and they came.

We also learned a bit more semaphore, which was particularly interesting and easy to learn to my mind, because you have to remember when you are sending a message in semaphore then the person you are sending it to, whether he is looking at you from some distance away through binoculars, always sees it the other way round. So you also have to remember when he is sending something back to you that you are also seeing it the opposite way round. I am talking now what was happening in those early days. This has probably gone long since out of fashion. I am talking about what was then. So really those were our days.

You had to be fairly fit to do all the rifle drill, PT, marching and the anti-tank gun drill. So life went on over the first few weeks, I suppose from 15th July, and we were getting used to it. On the war front I think the government were getting more and more nervous. Somewhere in the first fortnight of the middle of August, all the army reservists were called up. So we had a whole lot of people coming into our barracks, army reservist people who had perhaps previously served quite a few years and now they had all come back. So we all started to get together. They of course had been trained and they knew what they were going to do. We of course were still very much in the stage of being trained. So anyway, that was the 21st anti-tank regiment. The time went on, days passed You had a bath and in those days you had to have a bath not less that once every ten days. Not very hygienic but that was what was laid down.

N: Not less than. So..

D: You hadn’t got to go more than ten days without having a bath.

N: Could you have one every day.

D: You could have one every day if you wanted to sneak off to the bath, if you had got time. This went on – by this time of course we were running towards the 3rd September and people knew what was going to happen. You felt it. I do remember the 3rd September 1939 and of course that was a Friday. Friday was payday and being up on pay parade and hearing one or two of the regulars talking “Oh yes. Hitler had then marched into Poland and that was more or less it.” Anyway, things went on. Interestingly enough, about that time there were changes made to the military. Everybody was called up and everything was British Army from that point. Whereas it had been reckoned that us conscripts who were called in from civvy life at the beginning had got to be treated fairly lightly, after that date that everything changed and we were just the same as everybody else.

N: And what was the mood like in the camp when you heard about the invasion of Poland. Did the mood change?

D: I don’t think so. The mood was perhaps rather – you didn’t really know what was going to happen. It was all perhaps rather in some respects I suppose light-hearted. But from that point and that weekend, we started building air-raid shelters very furiously and seriously. It was hard work and I remember the Saturday and particularly the Sunday working. I suppose we were doing about 12 hour days building air-raid shelters. I do remember hearing on the barrack room radio, I suppose it was evening news, Neville Chamberlain’s comments which he had originally made on the Sunday morning at 11 o’clock.

N: What was he saying?

D: Chamberlain’s comments by eleven o’clock or quarter to eleven on the Sunday morning that – wait a minute that was 3 September – “we have warned Mr Hitler that unless you pull back by that time a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such assurance has been received consequently this country is at war with Germany”. You have probably heard this. You have heard this so many times.

Then of course life carried on. The regiment, the 21st anti-tank regiment was at that point being got ready for war.. I remember that all the equipment was coming in.  We were carrying on. We were doing guard duties and all sorts of things. I remember the anti-tank regiment themselves, the regulars, went off pretty soon in September. It was on one of the nights I was on guard duty. I was on picket duty. You could see they were all on the barrack square, all ready to go. I finished my picket duty and by the time I came out two or three hours later hey were all gone..

We then carried on. We then were moved to another regiment, what we called then the 22nd anti-tank regiment or something. We carried on training, we were in the same barracks, and more less going on with the same training. I remember another odd thing which shows how the army authorities don’t always think. It was decided of course that we had to have injections, particularly the typhoid, typhoid A and typhoid B. So one day – we were doing marching drill and the order came out that we had got to go out to the Cambridge hospital, the main one in Aldershot, and have our injections. Everything was dropped, we marched off, had our injections and having had our injections, back to barracks to get on with the next item of training. The next item of training was rifle drill but somebody hadn’t thought of the effect of the injections and then going back to rifle drill. Quite frankly we really were all creased up, absolutely. I don’t think I took my shirt off for 24 hours, I couldn’t we were virtually crippled, it was so painful in this arm.

We were jogging along through September and October. I had also got on a driving course then although I could drive a little bit of a motorcar but we had some very nice days. We used to drive round Aldershot and we had some very happy days. Mornings I remember driving out and around Aldershot stopping at various cafes for a tea and a bun – that was a char and wad as it was known – and back to the barracks.

At that point too I was one of the people who seemed to have been thought I might be due for OCTU, that was the Officer cadet training unit. I got round to see some local nearby barracks. I was interviewed by a fairly crusty old colonel. At that point I was developing rather a nasty touch of flu. Anyway, I don’t think I came out of that interview very well. So I was turned down for that. Anyway, we continued and the the battery that I was in was the unit of about 40/50 people, the drivers, an MT [Military Transport] clerk, and a motor transport clerk.

Before you were allowed to take a vehicle you had to get an authorisation signed by an officer and I got myself the job of battery MT clerk which was quite a nice little job, looking back on it. I had my little office and my bed in there and lived in there and slept in there as well and used to write out a few requisitions and get them signed by the MT officer and all that sort of thing. It was a very nice little job, apparently, I thought at that point. It was quite comfortable. I remember the MT officer, who was a nice sort of bloke, a young chap who had been called up from the reserve. He would say “Oh, yes, Campion. What can I do for you now?”, that sort of thing. I had little do. Normally I would get the requisitions, the authorisations to drive the vehicle, all filled in first, and then get it signed. I had a habit of going up to him and saying “Well, sir, if you can sign me two or three requisitions in advance, I’ll fill them in advance when necessary” and that system worked quite nicely until one morning I went in and there was the battery Sergeant Major there instead: he also had the authority to sign these things. He said “What do you want Bombadier? What do you want?” and I said “Well, you know…” and tried to explain. He said, “You get them filled in properly”. Now that was Battery Sergeant Major Wannel and I suppose at that point in 1939 he had probably had at least 15 years service. He wasn’t going have the wool pulled over his eyes by some young bombadier who had been in the army a couple of months. I had got one stripe by that point. I was Lance Bombadier Campion.

We had some leave. People getting very agitated about that time. There was almost a riot on one occasion because we had been called up and we hadn’t had any leave.

N: So how long was this by now?

D: Well it couldn’t have been more than two and a half months, ten weeks or something like that. I remember I went home for leave, to Kempston before Christmas. I was actually back in the barracks for Christmas and we had our usual Christmas dinners. The tradition was that the officers all came out and served Christmas dinner in the other ranks mess.  So, anyway, that was a nice time and a few people I suppose had too much to drink. Life just went on, Christmas and that sort of thing.

I suppose we must have got into January 1940 and there were things coming around, to Command orders, then to Regimental orders and down to Battery orders and at that point they were wanting people to do codes and ciphers, which were expanding of course. Now codes and ciphers had always been regarded as one of the most secret things you could have in the army, which was fair enough I suppose., There wasn’t much necessity for them in peace time, and they had always been handled by the Army Education Corps. It came round on Battery Orders one day oh that they were wanting people to go and train to do cipher work and it was a very simple requirement: you had to have had some education and you had to have some military knowledge and I suppose I had got a little bit of both at that point. I remember talking about it again to the Battery Sergeant Major, Wannel, and he said “Oh, Campion, the C.O. [Commanding Officer] and I think you might be suitable to go on this course.” I said “Well I don’t know, am I ever going to OCTU, perhaps to infantry then?” He said “Oh, you don’t want to go to the bloody infantry. You’ll get over to France and you’ll last 24 hours when the war starts.” So my friend Dickie Bird and I thought we’d put our names down to go on this course and 2 or 3 weeks later we got instructions to report to the Hyde Park Barracks in Knightsbridge. We went into Number 3 intelligence school, or something like that, and we spent 10 or 14 days learning how to do ciphers and coding, that’s coding and ciphering outgoing messages and deciphering and decoding incoming messages.

I think there were about 15 of us on the course. It wasn’t all that easy because you had got to be able to do it in fairly difficult situations if necessary.

So anyway, I think of the original 12/18 of us who had started on this course after about a fortnight I think it was only about 10 of us who were regarded as suitable and able to go on and do it somewhere else. So that was it. Dickie Bird and myself had been passed as being able to do codes and ciphers.

The ciphers were all there, laid down in various books. The other thing of course which we were using was the typex machine which was really only the thing which they were working on in Bletchley.

The machine was a an ordinary typewriter keyboard and had various discs and things inside which were pushed round in different order. So basically when you pressed an A on the typewriter keyboard what may have come printed out on the message you were going to send, but it might have been any other letter at random.

You programmed the cipher into the typex and you had to know what you were doing otherwise the thing went wrong. We were in touch with cipher offices all round the world and you had to know what time it was. When I was in the Far East, we had a clock with two lots of hands, one was local time and the other was Greenwich Mean Time and you always changed your cipher at Greenwich Mean Time. There was no time of course such as 12 midnight. It was either 23:59 or 00:01.

You had to programme the typex machine it manually. There were hundreds and thousands of possible combinations of cipher but only four lots of discs. The one in Bletchley I think only had three. But programming it was really a relatively simple matter. You had to be extremely careful to follow the instructions and you had to make jolly sure you got the right thing for the right date.

N:  Otherwise you’d be sending the wrong messages.

D: Otherwise you’d be sending the whole thing out and it just would come out all cock-eyed. The other thing we did and I am talking later now, all within the cipher office, we had an instructions, I am talking now Far East, among ourselves that one person did it and another person checked it but you never started using it on the basis of what one person had done. You always had two of you send a message in order to cover yourselves.

So anyway, coming back to where I was. Yes, the typex machine. Hope I’m not telling you anything highly secret! Don’t think so now. It is probably all done by computer now anyway. I went back to Aldershot after that. Now what was the next thing that had happened? Oh the next thing that had happened was that Hitler had invaded Norway. Now for some reason or other we got on this little group of people who were going to Norway. So where did we get to? Off on a train somewhere or other and we got into Glasgow eventually, and this group of officers were going to Norway, and of course one or two infantry battalions had gone as well. We didn’t go from Glasgow. Eventually we travelled across to Edinburgh and went on a cruiser to Norway. We had been messed about here and there and it was like all those things in the army of those days. You know the war had started, and nobody really knew what was going on or what was being done. We got on this cruiser and eventually set off to Andalsnes. Now that wasn’t a very comfortable voyage. Sailors living on warships in those days didn’t have a lot of comfort. They built the warship and they put in everything that was needed in the warship and then they said “Well now the sailors must find somewhere to hang their hammocks”. That was the sort of thing what it was.

I remember it was quite a nice little voyage across. This was getting on towards March/April 1940. Nice little voyage going across on this cruiser and of course we were out and about and up on deck and all the side rails and everything were down and I do remember a warning coming over from, I suppose, the Captain of the ship “Don’t fall over because if you fall off we shan’t stop to pick you up.” Anyway, we got into Andalsnes to bit of bombing from the Germans. There were odd German planes about and we didn’t know what we were going to do and I don’t think we actually did any ciphers over there but we got up to about I suppose about 10 miles inland or something like that, really waiting for something to happen. But of course at that point Norway was collapsing and all the troops were coming back. I do remember at one stage two of us, or three of us, were sent down into Andalsnes one day to try and find out what was going, and I remember getting into a fairly nasty sort of air raid. Only about two German bombers. We got into some sort of air raid shelter. A few bombs dropping and I remember one bomb coming fairly close and you think “well, this is a bit too close”. Fortunately it was a dud. Anyway that all went over and back, back up to where we were about 10 miles away. Can’t remember the name of the place and then of course anyway we were told we were evacuating back from Norway.

N: So how long had you been in Norway.

D: Oh not much more than a long weekend I don’t think, something like that. One of my nearly little short wars. So we went, and we were going back and we were told we had got to be back in the town of Adalsnes itself for the evening when various British ships would be coming to pick us up and I remember that one day we spent sitting on a mountainside in Norway under a rock, you know, but safe. And there were German planes flying up and down and a few bullets whistling into the grass. Anyway we got down into Andalsnes.

N: Was the German plane shooting at you?

D: Well I don’t know whether he was, I think he was just shooting at anything. Probably couldn’t see us anyway. No I think it was just shooting at anybody. Anyway, we got down into Andalsnes. First of all some civilian ship came in, sort of um I don’t know quite what it was, tried to get in, come in pick us up, couldn’t get in properly.

N: Why not?

D: Because the skipper couldn’t manoeuvre it in properly. So they were out and they were quickly told to buzz off and at that point another cruiser came in, got us in, got us picked up and I suppose we found somewhere, some bench or something to sleep on and sailed back to Britain. I didn’t know until years later that the navy officer running that evacuation that night was a chap called Commander Peter Millburn who was subsequently Director of Muntons [Campion’s employer in England] because he was a member of the Wells family. I thought it was interesting actually that he had been there organising the evacuation the night I had come off. Anyway, where did we get back to? Oh two or three days later we got back to I suppose back into Glasgow. That’s right. What happened to us then?

N: Didn’t you go to Dover?

D: No, not quite at that point, haven’t quite got to Dover yet. Is this making any sense at all? It is as I am remembering things and what is going through my mind. Anyway back on a train, getting back to I think it was St Pancras, King’s Cross at sometime in the morning to see that Hitler had attacked France, and the war had started there.

So we got back and into Dover. Dover Castle. That is quite interesting because the cliffs under Dover Castle are absolutely honeycombed with caves. Then there were a lot of military offices and things there, admiralty as well. We spent most of that week in Dover in the caves under Dover Castle. One thing I remember was of course we were living under there and you were permanently day or night in artificial light, so we used to get out and walk and I had been out for my walk one day, one morning and somebody said to me, and I was known as Des then, “Come on Des, get your kit together, you’re going to Dunkirk”. I said “What, this isn’t the right thing to be doing”, and what had happened was the War Office had lost contact with Lord Gort. He was the C. in C. [Commander in Chief of the British Expeditionary Force in France] there at that point. They had lost contact with Gort’s HQ and they thought perhaps the cipher books had been compromised or they had lost them, so they thought the best thing to do is send over a couple of chaps with cipher books, find Lord Gort’s headquarters and communication would be resumed. So there it was, this one officer, what was his name, Lieutenant. Belton. He rather crazily volunteered, and somebody had drawn the wrong straw for me so I was going with him, and we were all there and waiting about. Now fortunately at that point the chief cipher officer intervened. He was a very quiet little man, but I think he was a very tough little character with commonsense. He spent a lot of time that morning talking to the War Office in London on the telephone persuading them what a completely silly idea this was. I know there was a warship, a cruiser or a destroyer or something, laid on to take us over, you know. Never had a warship laid on to take me on since you know.

N: So why did he say it was a silly idea?

D: Well, even if we had got over and got ashore without getting bombed, could we have got along, two blokes with cipher books, and said “Look, we are looking for Lord Gort’s headquarters, we are coming with a couple of cipher books.” No, it was a crazy idea. So that didn’t come off, fortunately, probably.  So we were just carrying on. Dunkirk finished and everybody had come back and the whole thing was complete and we then were off and went on a train t back to Aldershot and got a room or put in some barracks somewhere. I seem to remember I went into the barracks I had been living in and I saw all my old mates, and told them what I had been doing and everything else.

N: They hadn’t moved anywhere?.

D: That had lot had been there since July 1939 and there were still quite a few of them messing around doing things. I remember at that point meeting some of the chaps who had gone over with the original 21st anti-tank regiment and taken a whole lot of flak when Hitler broke through

D: I went to France again after Dunkirk because the idea was then that, they had hoped to retain that west bit of France. That was a funny old trip too. That was a long weekend, as in Norway.

As I said, I had been and I had seen these odd-bods who were around in Aldershot. Oh I did at that point meet a couple of blokes who had actually gone off with the 21st anti-tank regiment and had been there right at the front and most of them must have had some horrific casualties there. I remember meeting one of them who had come back. He was a Geordie and he said in his Geordie voice “You might as well have thrown a bloody stone at the fucking tank”. That was his impression. That was the idea of how good the anti-tank gun was because it was just no good at all, those 2lb armour casing shells were no good.

I think it was that the German tanks were tougher. But you see of course the other thing was the German tanks were supported by low-flying aircraft. Now this had first been demonstrated by British Army on Salisbury Plain in about 1935 and there had been military from various places around the world and of course the British Chiefs of Staff at once said “Well, tanks being supported by low-flying aircraft? We don’t think there’s much future in this.” So they didn’t bother. Hitler’s lot saw it and they were thinking this is a jolly good idea and they worked on it so there it was. That was how that lot had got disposed of.

N: Did you have to travel with your typex machine?

D: No, we hadn’t got typex machines with us at that point. When you were working on ciphers, and to go back to what ciphers are, they go in various degrees or security or how secure they may be according to where they are in terms of the importance of the military or airforce units. I mean obviously you don’t get things like typex machines at anything lower than command headquarters Or divisional headquarters.

N: So how would you be expected to receive and send messages then?

D: Well you would use cipher books. There are quite a lot of various forms of cipher which can be used. D: You could use a pen and paper. The message would probably go out on a radio at that point. The person you were sending to would have a code name. and the letters would have to be read out at that point.

I went to France again after Dunkirk because the idea was then that, they had hoped to retain that west bit of France. That was a funny old trip too. That was a long weekend, as in Norway. We had been back in Aldershot a few days after Dunkirk, I had been back seeing a chap called Ronnie Eade who I was quite friendly with at that point. Back and in and out at the barrack room. We had been out and had a few beers together in the canteen and everything else. We then got our instructions we were going back to France. We went from Southampton to Saint Nazaire. When we got there we started unloading and getting the equipment off and all that sort of thing. I remember I was a bit annoyed. There was one officer there. Now who was he? A chap with a fairly high-flowered double-barrelled name and all he was worried about was “Bombadier where is the officers’ mess kit.” I was only a bombadier at that point and couldn’t care less about the officers’ mess kit really. These are little memories which stick in the mind.

N: So you had to set up a camp did you?

D: We didn’t. We never got anything set up. We got dumped on the beach. We probably lay down on the beach to sleep. It was more or less coming up to summer. I had been into Aldershot on a Thursday night and said “Cheerio”, and at that point we were then off and down to Southampton and across to Frances, you see. That was on the Friday. Getting stuff unloaded. Saturday morning we started loading again because the French were just packing up at that point, getting stuff loaded up back on the boat and on the Saturday afternoon, I remember it was a nice sunny day, we sailed back to Southampton, you see, and that was it. The boat leaning over a bit like that, you see, I don’t quite know why. There was one ship, one of the liners in use, a fairly biggish thing which had been used in the evacuation of Dunkirk, and was coming back loaded and it got bombed of course. When a bomb fell down the funnel, it exploded.

There were a lot of casualties. I think the boat eventually sunk. I don’t think it ever got home. I am trying to remember the name of it. It began with an A. But ours got back and we got back into Southampton And I went back to Aldershot and I got a great cheer. On the Sunday evening I went back into the barrack room again and everyone said “where have you been Des”. “Oh, I’ve been to France”. “Well why didn’t you stop Hitler” or something like that. So that was my little French trip you see.

At this point we were back in Aldershot and from the next point we went up to Newmarket, to Lower Hare Park which is a country estate about 3 miles from Newmarket centre, near the racecourse, and we were then with second division headquarters. I have forgotten what the General’s name was in charge of that division at that point but that was a fairly quiet bit of life. We had a cipher office in the grounds; we were in part of the house. I seem to remember that two or three of us who were in the cipher office were just more or less billeted in a stable or something. We had camp beds in what had been a stable.

It was quite a pleasant life. This must have been June/July 1940.  It was quite a pleasant existence, messages coming and going. Typex machines doing ciphering here and there. Bicycling. Yes. I had a bicycle. I had been over to Bedford and collected my bicycle at that point and in time off we could bicycle in to Newmarket or you could bicycle even along to Cambridge. So life drifted along there. Then there was a bit of the Blitz starting. I seem to remember that a lot of the Blitz started at night but I think there was a Sunday or a Saturday in August 1940 that there was the first German Blitz and a lot of German planes came up the Thames on a Saturday afternoon. I remember being in the office on the Sunday morning and switching on the radio and I heard, I think I was the only one in the office at that point, I heard that three or four hundred people had been killed up and down the dockside, London docks, which of course was really a bit horrific at that point because hearing of 3 or 4 hundred people being killed in one lot was a lot at that point. We hadn’t got used perhaps to the larger numbers of people which were killed subsequently in different raids.

Anyway, life went on there. We had a few German planes over. There was a squadron, a bomber squadron of Wellington bombers stationed on the racecourse which was only a mile or two away from where we were. I remember one night, we were just hearing them going off. I remember one night one crashed on take off. There was an awful noise of bombs going off and explosions and fires and everything else. I suppose at that point we were beginning to think, and wondering what was going to happen, and where the war was going to finish. I had been made Sergeant by then. We were living in Sergeant’s mess and at that point all cipher operators were more or less controlled from what was MI1BX in the War Office and it came around that they wanted a couple of people to go to Singapore. This was October 1940 and they wanted these two people for Singapore, for a fairly big job and my friend Dickie Bird and I thought “Well, you know, there’s no war out there, we’ll have a go. What are we going to do?” So we said “Yes, alright.” They wanted two people so we said alright, we two will go. So that’s why we were scheduled to go to Singapore. So we went home on our respective leaves then we got up, reported up to transit camp in London, and during our stay in this camp it was fairly frightening because there was quite a lot of London Blitz going on at that point. I remember one night, we were out, we had been out and around quite near to Piccadilly Circus somewhere in a pub and I do remember a bomb coming down very close there and glasses of beer jumping up and down on the pub counter which was a bit alarming I suppose.

N: Weren’t the people then in air raid shelters?

D: Well, no. We hadn’t been. It wasn’t I think a major raid. Besides major raids, you occasionally got odd bombers going over, so that was probably what it was.