The Army’s Youngest Recruit in Southwater

When the war first began I was 14 and I was living in Southwater. I had been working for a local butcher since the age of 9 until I left school at 14 — including a spell working in a slaughterhouse at 9 years old, which was a bit unnerving! When I left school, the butcher’s friend - who had a smallholding — her step-son had had an accident and couldn’t do the milkround, so she asked me to take over the milkround as I knew the village.

I lost my job as milkman, because the step-son recovered and I was desperate to get an apprenticeship as an engineer. I’d written to the RAF to see if they were doing apprenticeships, but they wrote back to say that because of the war, they had stopped. Then there was a call for Local Defence Volunteers, so I shot round to the policeman, because you had to go to register at the police office. The policeman said “Well Robert, I know you and I suppose it’d be alright if you joined the LDV, but you’d better ask Captain Erwin who’s running the thing.” So I went to him, and I knew him quite well, because when I did my milk round, I’d delivered milk to him. They agreed to

A chap I knew was going up to London everyday, so I went up to London everyday with him - delivering bricks for air raid shelters, and timber for boxes for ammunition. We’d pick up cattle feed from the London docks and bring it back, so I was up there all day while the Jerries were bombing London. I used to get dropped off in the docks and the chap would say “You go and booked the lorry in, and I’ll go and unload it”. If there was a raid on, the wardens would shovel you into a shelter, there was a door each end. I used to go in one end, go through the shelter, look out the other and if there was no one about I used to kip out and run like anything to the docks, then I’d hitch lifts to different docks — like down to Tooley Street.

After a while of this I figured that since I was putting myself in danger every day I might as well be in one of the armed forces and doing something. So one Saturday afternoon I had a half day off from work and I thought I’ll go in and see if I can get an apprenticeship in the Army, maybe I can get in the engineers or something like that. When I walked into the recruiting office the chap in there said “How old are you?” I replied that I was fifteen. He said “Well there are no apprenticeships, but you look older than that, if you’d have told me you were eighteen I’d have believed you!”
So I went out of the door — waited a few minutes and walked back in, he said “Can I help?” I said “Yes I’d like to join the army” and he said “How old are you?”
I replied “Eighteen” and he said “Right, that’s fine!”
So he got some papers out, fills them in and signs it. Then he told me to come in Wednesday morning and he’d give me a ticket for the train to Brighton, where I had to go to Oddfellows and if I passed my medical. I remember thinking “Great, I’m in — I can go and do something useful!”

I told my parents that I’d been accepted as a young trainee solider, and my mum was fine about it. I was getting paid 17 shillings and 6 a week and I made an allotment of 7 bob a week to be paid to my mother, but she never took it. She opened a bank account, and put every penny of it into the account. When I came home she gave me the post office savings book and said “Here you go — there’s all the money you allotted to us

I had a cousin who was eighteen months older than me, I told him I was going to go into the army and I went round to see him on the Wednesday morning before I went to brighton to say cheerio. Well he’d just come home from work for breakfast and he said “Hang On a minutes I’m coming with you” He managed to get into the army as well, even though he was seventeen and we were together for about three weeks, but I never saw him again until after the war. He went out to the Middle East.

Lots of young men fibbed out their age to get into the army, but I think I was probably one of the youngest. I saw a lot of terrible things; we relieved a concentration camp in German, not Belsen, but a local one that killed locals, mainly for German dissidents and it was terrible.

On VE Day we were in Germany, there were some SS troops holed up in some big wood, and we’d taken a load of ordinary German soldiers prisoners and they’d been disarmed. When our General heard that the war was over, he re-armed the German soldiers and told them to go out and clear out the SS troops in the woods. He wouldn’t put in British troops because the Armistice had been signed, but the Germans were still fighting amongst themselves. The SS soldiers were the worse, they were the people that would shoot the civilians, and burn the civilians. After the treaty was signed they still thought they could win the war, they had it ingrained in them, and they wouldn’t give up. VE Day for me was chaos, there were ex-POW that had been released from the camps, there were all the civilians who were streaming down the road trying to get away from the Russians, I ended up in a place called Schwerin, that was within the Russian zone, and they marked it off so the civilians couldn’t get out, we didn’t know when we would go home.

This story was submitted to the People’s War website by Eleanor Fell, on behalf of Robert Piper. Robert has given his permission for his story to go onto the People’s War website and understands the terms and conditions of the site.

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