Chapter 5 With the 2nd/6th Queens Royal Regiment

In 1939 there were a million coffins ready for the expected bombing casualties. The state paid for those persons who died by enemy action but if you were to depress people by being defeatist you could be fined or go to prison. On 26 October 1939 I volunteered for the army at Reading but after a medical lasting an hour they put me down as grade C and told me the army did not need me. As a result I had to get myself a job back in service until in March 1940 I was called up and had another medical and after ten minutes was passed A one. On Thursday 18 April 1940 I joined up at Reading barracks in the Royal Berkshire Regiment. I quite enjoyed the army life and never became so fit as then; I started at ten stone and got to eleven and a half stone. The barracks seemed to be old fashioned and possibly built halfway through the 19th century. Until 1868 soldiers could be flogged in peace time. A butler I worked with when told me that in 1913 when his elder brother joined the army; his mother wept for three days because of the disgrace!

In our platoon we had 31 soldiers plus two corporals and one sergeant, a nice, good man. One soldier had to keep an eye on the room, polish equipment and brush kit while the other 30 drilled in threes, in the past they were drilled in fours. Out of 31 we had some fools, some thick persons and a few bright people. On Friday afternoon you had to lay all your kit out for inspection. As a domestic servant for over nine years I found it quite easy, but not everyone did. I found this army very clean but if you tried to ‘bugger the army’ it would ‘bugger you’

I was not the first of the Whittles to be in the armed forces; my eldest brother Wilfred had served in the Royal Navy at Shotley near Ipswich from about 1925. Around 1936 he moved to the submarine service as he got 6d a day more. He reached the rank of Chief Petty Officer but out of the 14 submariners he trained with only 5 survived the war. On 9th June 1940 his submarines and others went to Oran in Algeria. Wilfred told me that the commander of the fleet had orders from the admiralty to persuade the French navy to surrender their warships to the Royal Navy. When the French refused his submarine started attacking a modern French battleship. This was sunk with large numbers of French sailors drowned and French aircraft were ordered to attack the submarine. The captain ordered the submarine to submerge so quickly that in the course of the dive every cup in the submarine was broken. As a result they could not get a cup of tea until they got back to Gibraltar. Wilfred said that they would have received a medal if it had not been for the ship they sunk being French. Roland, the second eldest volunteered at the start of the war and went into the Royal Military Police where he later became a lance corporal.

Clifford could not be called up because he was an epileptic and remained a gardener during the war. Gilmore had developed TB in 1938 and he had a piece of his leg taken off and put on his spine in Cheltenham hospital. This was paid for by a special fund from the Gloucestershire authorities. He was not fit enough to go in the forces and became a messenger for the armed forces although he did not have a uniform. Leslie Whittle joined the navy in January 1940 and spent the war as a signalman on convoy duty to the United States and the Soviet Union. Amongst the ships he served on were Escort Aircraft carriers which provided air cover for those convoys. From time to time he used to remind me that I spent less than four years in uniform while he had had to spend six years. Altogether six of the brothers went into the armed forces; three in the army, two in the navy and one in the air force.

At the beginning of June 1940, the whole British Army came back to England, a terrible thing to see the shambles of a great army glad to get back away from the German forces. Suddenly our platoon was turfed out of our room into a shed. We were told not to undo our boots in case Germans paratroopers might suddenly land. The main gate to the barracks was opened and lots of coaches arrived from Reading Station with tired, untidy and hungry soldiers desperate for food, a bed and some shelter. I was told that all around the station there were hundreds of persons cheering the soldiers as if they had won a great victory. Outside our barracks there were also hundreds of persons cheering and clapping as the soldiers came into the barracks.

The Lieutenant Colonel said that no soldiers must leave the barracks but the public could be allowed to come in, which they did. The atmosphere was quite wonderful and strange. What would happen to the UK! France was going to surrender; the USSR was on the side of the enemy! Nearly all of Europe was under German or Russian control. However, in the strange euphoria of that time, the Lieutenant Colonel ordered a large table to be put in the centre of the parade square in the main part of the barracks and that every evening there would be entertainment with any soldier or civilian able to get up on the table and do a turn. One soldier did a very funny turn, pretending that he was a woman! I felt that we, the civilians and soldiers, were united as never before. In the House of Commons, Mr Churchill made a great speech. He said it was not a victory for us but a defeat; victories were not made by retreats.

Amongst the people who had been outside the barracks on that day had been Violet Queenie and Vera Peachey from 15 Prospect Street, Reading, whom I had got to know. Violet, the older sister, had worked in domestic service with me. Both Vera and Violet had worked in service together, Vera as a cook and Violet as a maid. Vera was, however, now working as a packer at Huntley and Palmer. They had originally come from the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire and were a family of five having three brothers, the eldest of which, Jack, was in the Royal Navy as a cook. Their father Stephen Peachey had also been in the Royal Navy during World War One and been present at the Battle of Jutland in 1916 as a photographer. He had come out of the Royal Navy in 1922 under the Geddes axe and had gone into the Merchant Navy. His father and grandfather before him had been in the Royal Navy as well. Violet Peachey invited me around to visit them at Prospect Street but the first time I turned up it was nearly 10 p.m. at night, something Vera was to remind me of when I complained about my own son Timothy’s late hours, when a student.

On three evenings a party of soldiers from our unit, the Royal Berkshire Regiment, had to go to Chequers to guard Mr W. Churchill for the night. Each morning the Prime Minister used to talk briefly to the soldiers and tell them “we will win the war” and thanked them for guarding him, then he got in his car and drove away. They said that he was always cheerful. Vera Peachy commented to me that she was actually quite surprised when Churchill made his famous ‘We shall fight them on the beaches’ speech culminating in his statement that “we shall never surrender” for it had never occurred to her that we would ever surrender, no matter what happened. She also told me how, when the war started, she had said to her father that she hoped that the war would be quickly over but that her father had replied that, in that case, she was hoping for a German victory; for they were prepared for war and we were not. If we were going to win the war then it would be a long war.

Since we were now sleeping in a small shed and could not undress we had to kip as best we could. Out of the 31, three soldiers developed ‘stinking feet’ and had to go sick. For 13 days soldiers were not allowed to take off their uniforms because of the threat of invasion. Often at 2:00 or 3.00 a.m. a large number of us, who were still untrained, had to go out in lorries around Reading and the surrounding area in case the enemy were to come. There were also at this time a large number of enemy male persons aged from youths of about 14 through to elderly men of 60 or 70 to be interned and the authorities turned the tennis courts in the barracks into an internment camp for them.

Twice I went back into our old barrack room and listened to a sergeant and an officer talking to soldiers who had returned from France, they were mainly in bed and some were still asleep. It took a great deal of tact and diplomacy to try to get these soldiers who came from all over the UK to go back to their own units. After all, they were not members of the Royal Berkshire Regiment! The officer gently suggested to one soldier that he should go back to his unit. The soldier said “no sir, I am still bloody tired”. Another soldier said that he “can’t go – I haven’t got a shirt!” The officer said he would make sure that he would get a shirt, a pass, a railway ticket and some money, “will you go?” The soldier, a sergeant, agreed. All this time the army canteen was open all day and night so these soldiers could get food and drink whenever they wanted it and then go back to sleep.