All Tanked Up - part 6

A Few Problems.
Given the large number of troops, both British and Canadian, who passed through the village during the war, it is gratifying to find how fond are people’s memories of that time, and how few the problems which they now recall. Reactions against the first Canadians stationed at Bordon, mentioned earlier, might have stemmed from the fact that some of the initial ‘waves’ contained ex-convicts. “If you had six months to go in prison, you could apply for early release to join the army”, said Pat Lewis. “To some extent, the army were looking for this sort of person – who was prepared to take chances and to fight. A lot of us went straight from school into the army, so we were high on dreams, but these guys were in jail and used to hard living – it takes a crook to catch a crook, sort of thing – so the army was glad to have them.
“Before you could get into the tank regiments, however, you had to sit an education and an intelligence test.” The Sherbrookes started off as a mounted machine-gun regiment, “but then”, Pat says, “they decided to make us a tank regiment, and the test they gave us took away nearly half of our people.” This didn’t necessarily weed out all the rougher elements though, and indeed those who were more ‘street-wise’ helped the rest of the men in the regiment look after themselves.
The local press, being censored, was very restricted as to the hard facts it could publish, but any case that came to a civil court seemed to be fair game. Thus we read that Canadian soldiers were involved in a number of vehicle accidents: such as the Bombardier driving his Colonel’s car at night along the Grayshott straight in October 1940 who “did feloniously kill and slay” a trooper of the 10th Hussars walking along the road outside Stonehaven; and the Canadian despatch rider who was killed when his motor bike ran into a 3-ton anti-aircraft lorry crossing the road at Headley Mill in July 1942.
Other reported incidents involved accidental deaths among Canadian servicemen in Headley, such as the soldier who shot his friend while fooling around with a loaded pistol outside Church Gate Stores in August 1942. Joyce Stevens, who lives next door in Suters, remembers hearing it happen. She also remembers a couple of soldiers arguing over a girl outside the little wooden shops (now the parade of shops) next to the Holly Bush. “It ended up with a gang fight and one of them was kicked to death”, she said. This was probably the incident recorded in the Herald as occurring on 15th March 1943, in which a Canadian soldier was found guilty of manslaughter and given 13 days imprisonment. The judge said it was “one of those cases where death resulted unexpectedly from a blow struck in a fight.”
The Strathcona’s first fatality occurred on 17th June 1942 when, according to a Herald article which was surprisingly uncensored for the time: “Lieutenant Richard Anderson Squires, 2nd Armoured Regiment, Canadian Forces, lost his life as the result of falling from a tank at Ludshott Common. The deceased officer, who was in his 32nd year, was the son of the late Sir Richard Anderson Squires, twice prime minister of Newfoundland.” The Straths’ official record adds: “He was our only Newfoundlander, and very popular.” He was buried in Brookwood Cemetery.
Towards the end of the war, when the Princess Louise’s Fusiliers had returned from Italy and were stationed for a short time at the Headley end of Ludshott Common, the body of a 24 year-old Private was found, “in full battle dress but without his cap”, in a frozen static water tank underneath an inch of ice. He had arrived at the camp on 30th October 1944, and should have proceeded to Canada with a PoW escort group on 23rd November. Posted as ‘absent without leave’ on 9th November, his body was not discovered until the beginning of January 1945. The Herald describes the water tank as “brick, 20ft diameter, 12 ft deep and holding 12,600 galls. It was mainly below ground level. Its edges were surrounded by grass which sloped up from the main drive in and a footpath – a rise of about 1 ft in 1 ft. The tank was right opposite the NAAFI canteen. The top was in no way protected – wire netting and poles had been removed in September.” An open verdict was recorded by the Winchester District Coroner.
Some Memories.
For every event which was reported there must have been dozens which remain only in the memories of those involved. Joyce Stevens, right opposite the Holly Bush, recalls hearing “an awful kerfuffle at turning out time when Sally Stevens, the landlady, was saying goodnight to everybody as she always did. I remember she was wearing a white blouse, and she’d got blood all down the front of it because one of the soldiers had broken off a bottle or something and cut someone.”
Sally is fondly remembered by the troops; as Major Macdougall writes in his Short History of the South Alberta Regiment: “We must not forget to mention that 300 lb bundle of good humour, whose only regret was that, while she had played with Canadians in the last war, in this war she could only mother them.” He also recalls Christmas here in 1942, when “all ranks enjoyed themselves to the full, and I mean to the full.” He continues that: “Apart from a few slight run-ins with our friends the Elgins, who were at Headley Down, the day passed peacefully enough.”
Elsie Johnson (née Pearce) was living with her parents in their shop (now closed) in Fullers Vale at the bottom of Beech Hill. She says: “I can remember one incident on a Saturday night. Mabel and I had come home from work – we often didn’t get back till nine – and mum and dad were scrubbing out the shop. We had a plain white wooden floor and stairs, and every Saturday night without fail they were scrubbed. Newspapers were put down, and the lights were on downstairs, though you couldn’t see much of them through the shutters, and some Canadians walking back down to the village tried to get in. They thought it was a pub. Father shouted to them that we were shut and we didn’t sell liquor, but they climbed the bank on the left hand side, and walked in through the kitchen door. I can see dad now, coming up the stairs with a scrubbing brush in his hand – and with brute force we all pushed these lads out. We didn’t know any of them, but they were determined it was a pub and that they were coming in for a drink.”
John Ellis at Headley Mill found a different way to deal with such things: “One night after midnight, a party of noisy Canadians, obviously the worse for drink, took a short cut past the mill to get back to Bordon Camp. When they got to the house they stopped just under our window, and created the most frightful din. The house was not then modernised, and each bedroom had a wash hand-stand complete with wash bowl and water jug. I got out of bed, in spite of Dorothy’s protestations, eased up the sash window, took the 3 gallon jug of cold water and poured it over them. There was deathly silence. We didn’t hear another thing – we didn’t even hear them move away.”
Betty Parker remembers talking to a Canadian motorcyclist and his pillion passenger outside Eashing Cottages in Arford – the passenger decided to get off, but the other drove away. Almost straight away he ran into a lorry at the corner, and was killed. “Those Harley Davidson machines always looked powerful to us”, Jim Clark says, “and so did the ‘Indians’, which were the other motorbikes they used.” He too remembers a fatal motorbike accident nearby: “One of them hit a tank by Arford House – went straight into it as he was coming down the hill.” Not a nice place to meet oncoming traffic even now.
Mary Fawcett, living down Beech Hill at the time, recalls a Canadian on a Harley Davidson crashing through the hedge at the Honeysuckle Lane bend, hitting an electric pole and taking out the whole of the public electricity supply in the area. She also remembers a tank coming along Fullers Vale failing to take the bend at the bottom of Beech Hill and hitting the post box which was then in the gatepost at the bottom of Kenton House drive. The post box was then moved to its present safer place.
Joyce Dickie, on her way home from Bordon telephone exchange where she sometimes had to work until midnight, was walking up Barley Mow Hill when she heard a girl screaming her head off from a piece of common land opposite Barley Mow House. “I thought, ‘Oh my golly, now what do I do? I can’t just walk by and not do anything when somebody’s screaming for help’. And yet I had in my mind what was going on, but I didn’t know what to do. Anyway, I put on as gruff a voice as I could, and I said, ‘What’s going on over there?’ And this girl came out, and the soldier with her. Well, she was terrified, and I think she’d taken on a bit more than she’d realised. She begged me to take her home, and I thought, what if I meet the fellow when I come back up again? I did go home with her, but that chap plagued me for weeks afterwards – wanted me to go out with him, but eventually he got fed up.”
Altogether, Barley Mow Hill seemed to be quite a centre of activity at this time. “The ‘provos’ were always busy up this road”, says Grace Barnes speaking of Glayshers Hill, “because we had an ‘interesting’ house just round the corner where the telephone exchange is now.” Glayshers Hill led from the Provo’s quarters in Erie Camp down to Barley Mow Hill. “We didn’t dare get out and about in the road much – you kept yourself pretty quiet”, she said.
However the Provost Corps themselves, according to Battle-dress Patrol, the official war memoirs of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, felt that: “Despite long years of training and waiting and the consequent boredom, I think it fair to say that our troops were well behaved. Provost units had much less trouble with them than might be thought. We like to think our approach helped; provost men were taught and encouraged to help soldiers who were in trouble – sick, broke or overdue off leave. At times more stern action was necessary when dealing with public disorder and drunkenness, but these causes were surprisingly rare.”

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.