All Tanked Up - part 12

After the War.
It is perhaps some measure of the popularity of the Canadian troops in Britain that, at the end of hostilities, there were over 40,000 brides and 20,000 children waiting to be shipped to Canada to meet up with their Canadian husbands and fathers. Pete Friesen of the Garrys stayed on to help with the Canadian Wives’ Bureau in London where they took 800 girls at a time into the Portman Hotel (there were also two other hotels) for one night before sending them by boat train to Southampton.
Pete himself married Enid, an English girl; his younger brother Dave married Betty, a Scottish girl; and his elder brother Jack (‘Shorty’) married Joan, a Welsh girl.
In Headley the redundant army huts were quickly occupied, legally or illegally, by those who would otherwise have been homeless. Tom Grisdale recalls: “I came back after the war, and we lived with mother-in-law for a while up Liphook Road till we eventually got this Nissen hut in Rectory Field. They were moving in all these displaced Poles and Ukrainians – you came home out of the army and you couldn’t get anything.
“There were about 10 or 12 huts down by the side of the field opposite Tonards – we were No. 2. It was the remnants of an army camp, and squatters moved in after the army moved out. Then the Council took them over and put in a kitchen sink and a range, and made it into 3 rooms, but they could only brick it up three-quarters of the way because it was that shape, and if you got a frost, when it used to thaw out it was ghastly. All you had was a window at each end made of that reinforced glass so you couldn’t see out. They gave you a bath which you hung on the wall and put down in front of the range.”
Then in the early 50s: “We were about the second family to move into Erie Camp, No. 7. They bricked up these huts which were one big room – not up to the ceiling, half way – and at one end they divided in the middle so you got two bedrooms and one big room. There was still the old tin roof, and with the condensation we had to put umbrellas over the bed and the cot. The floors were concrete – and where they’d been breaking up wood for burning it was like dust, so we put roofing felt down.
“The Council put in a little range in the middle of this room, and you had one cold water tap, that’s all. The toilet was a little wooden place outside with an earth bucket which the Council used to come round at midnight to empty, slopping it all up against the door. It wasn’t bad – you had a bathroom with hot water and all that. We were happy there.”
Tom also remembers: “When you dug in your garden, you dug up knives, forks, spoons – they buried everything, and the story is they even buried army motorbikes.” They may or may not have buried motorbikes in Erie Camp; from recent stories in the local press, they do seem to have buried jeeps on Thursley Common, and Don Heather, as a lad, remembers seeing them burying a whole tank in a crater on Ludshott Common.
Over the years the huts disappeared from the village or were reused, in some cases more than once. One, for example, was moved to a site opposite Alex Johnston’s house in Headley Fields and used as the village’s Catholic Church until 1965, when a more permanent building was erected there. It was then moved again, this time to Beech Hill Road, and used as the Scout Hut until it finally burnt down spectacularly in 1985.
The huts at Erie Camp were replaced by council houses in the 60s and 70s, and this estate, now called Heatherlands, was eventually completed in 1978. The only reminder of its link with the Canadians is the name given to one of the roads there – ‘Maple Way’.
Still We Remember.
We cannot close this book without mentioning just a few examples of the happy memories which the name Headley evokes in many parts of Canada.
A young man from Headley Down went to work in Newfoundland in the fifties and met many Canadians there. They asked him from where he came. “Oh just a very tiny village called Headley Down.” “Really? We know it well! We were in Erie Camp and on Ludshott Common during the war!”
When Barry and Wendy Ford moved into Erie Estate they had one of the first telephones, needing it to run their business, and he suggested she should surprise her aunt in Canada by giving her a call. “In those days you had to go through the operator”, said Wendy. “The man in Canada asked me which exchange I was calling from, and was amazed when I told him Headley Down, saying he’d been at Erie Camp during the war – then when I said I was actually ringing from Erie Camp, he could hardly believe his ears. ‘Of all the calls I could have answered!’, he exclaimed – and we spent a long time chatting about Headley before I was put through to my aunt.” She adds:” It’s a pity, but I forgot to ask him his name.”
More recently, Katie Warner was visiting her sons in Canada: “I got off the plane in Toronto one afternoon and a man just outside the door said, ‘cab, madam?’ – I said, ‘no thank you’, but he said, ‘where do you come from?’ I said, ‘England, Hampshire’ – ‘What part?’ – and I started to explain, and he said, ‘Do you know Superior Camp? Do you know Erie?’ and he went all round the camps, around Longmoor, Bordon, the lot, Huron – all of them – he said, ‘I was there for about 4 years during the war’ – and when I mentioned this part of Headley he said, ‘I know it’. And another man I met actually knew the Congregational Institute – ‘I know the house you lived in’ – we were living in The Old Manse at one time.”
Mary Fawcett started writing to a Canadian pen friend during the war, and they still correspond 51 years later. Lieut. Jack Casey of the Sherbrooke Fusiliers gave her the address of his sister-in-law Joan, who was two years older than Mary, being 13 while Mary was 11 years old. Jack, a “very handsome man” according to Mary, had opened his own restaurant in London, Ontario, before joining up in 1941 and coming to England with his regiment late in 1942. He was billeted in Kenton House during his time in Headley, and is mentioned in Lt. Col. Jackson’s book on the Sherbrooke Regiment for his ‘coolness and disregard for personal safety’ having saved the lives of a party of troopers at a grenade-throwing practice in Wales when one of them dropped his grenade with the pin pulled out.
Jack Casey landed on Juno Beach during the D-Day invasion, and received a severe head injury there. He was brought back to Brookwood Hospital, but sadly died of his wounds. However, Mary kept up her correspondence with Joan – they met for the first time on Mary’s 21st birthday, and have continued to see each other many times since then.

For more information on Headley see http://www.headley-village.com^{About links}

For more information on the author see http://www.johnowensmith.co.uk^{About links}

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