Our Land at War: A Portrait of Rural Britain 1939–45. Duff Hart-Davis
used to living and working in the open air.
Melville House, a huge, square, four-storey building, the Palladian home of the Leslie-Melville family at Monimail in East Fife, became the Coleshill of the north – a training centre, surrounded by woods and farmland, approached by a beech avenue and equipped with all the facilities needed for firing weapons, setting demolition charges and learning hand-to-hand combat. Behind the house a gentle slope made an ideal background for a small-arms range, and rail tracks were laid in the woods so that budding demolition experts could practise blowing them up. When a German prisoner-of-war camp was established at Annsmuir, near the railway station at Ladybank, Wehrmacht uniforms found their way into Melville House to add verisimilitude to the training.
As recruits went through the mill there, hideouts were being dug or built all over Scotland. Ruined castles made ideal sites: caverns were dug out beneath heaps of stone at the foot of collapsed walls, with access via a single, spring-loaded slab. Once a few rainstorms had swept over the rubble, there was no sign that anyone had been there for centuries. Other dens were made beneath houses in villages and entered through cellars – but always with an escape tunnel leading to a disguised exit some distance away. By the end of 1940 about a hundred units were fully established, and Maxwell himself had driven 70,000 miles overseeing their creation. In Britain as a whole some 3000 men were trained to go to ground, and they were issued with liberal amounts of ammunition and explosives. They remained ready for action throughout the war; but so deeply secret was the organization that its existence was not officially admitted until the middle of the 1950s.
Later in the war a parallel clandestine organization was formed, under the cover name of the Special Duties Section of the Auxiliary Units. This was a secret radio network staffed mainly by women, who went to ground with transmitters in hideouts of their own, charged with the task of keeping communications open in the event of an invasion. Like the operational bunkers, every den was elaborately concealed: if there was no building at hand tall enough to carry a forty-foot aerial, men from the Royal Corps of Signals would climb a tree, cutting grooves in the trunk, laying the wire in them and filling them with plaster of Paris painted to resemble the bark.
During the Phoney War Fleming at times thought uneasily of Rogue Male, a thriller by Geoffrey Household set in the 1930s. In the novel an anonymous British sportsman, ‘who couldn’t resist the temptation to stalk the impossible’, is at large in central Europe, bent on personally assassinating a loathsome dictator. The target’s name is never mentioned, but clearly it is Hitler whom the rifleman has in his sights.
Before he can fire a shot, he is seized by security men and beaten up, but escapes and flees back to England. Even there, however, he is not safe. Enemy agents pursue him so tenaciously that he is forced to go to ground in an old badger sett, with the entrance tunnel disguised as an ‘apparent rabbit hole’ in the side of a sunken lane. His only ally is a feral cat which he calls Asmodeus – the legendary king of the demons – and in the end it is this animal, or, rather, its skin, that saves him. The chase is immensely exciting, and the claustrophobic atmosphere of the dank hideaway is powerfully evoked. The timing of the novel’s publication, in 1939, was extraordinarily apt, and the book foreshadowed many of the elements – the claustrophobic subterranean redoubts, the nocturnal forays – with which the Auxiliary Units became familiar.
Above ground there was at first no place for female talent in the Home Guard; but in 1942 the Women’s Home Guard Auxiliaries were formed, and girls were allowed to join the men, both in the office and in the field. At St Ives in Huntingdonshire a small team dealt with telephone and radio equipment in the local headquarters, and also took part in night exercises. One of them remembered how disconcerting it was to find ‘well-respected businessmen from the town crawling along ditches in camouflage, with blackened faces’, and another gave herself a nasty fright when she blundered on all fours into a big, solid, warm lump, which turned out to be a recumbent cow. In the office they whiled away spare time by sending each other frivolous radio messages – until some of them were intercepted by staff at Wyton Airfield, three miles away, who thought the traffic was coded signals transmitted by enemy agents, and the girls were severely reprimanded.
Yet another agency at work in town and country was the Royal Observer Corps, whose members spotted, identified and tracked any aircraft that appeared in the sky and reported its details to group headquarters, whence the message was swiftly passed to the RAF. The organization’s motto was ‘Forewarned, Forearmed’ – and success depended on continuous vigilance backed by speedy reaction. During the Battle of Britain the volunteer observers, stationed in posts about ten miles apart, furnished the only means of tracking enemy aircraft once they had crossed the coast; and so valuable was their work that in April 1941 the King awarded the Corps the prefix ‘Royal’.
The two-man crews devised any number of comfortable lairs from which to keep watch: wooden huts, little brick buildings, concrete boxes on prominent mounds, penthouses on the roofs of factories. One outpost was beautifully captured by the war artist Eric Ravilious, whose delicate watercolour portrayed two watchers standing in a kind of grouse butt, protected by sandbags and a canvas screen, with a single telephone wire disappearing through the air above a wintry landscape. Still more elaborate was a contraption in Ayrshire which consisted of a heavy metal post sunk into the ground, topped by a revolving cross-piece, on either end of which was a padded seat made from a car’s steering wheel. Each seat revolved individually, and one of the team was always aloft, binoculars at the ready.
Although able to operate only in daylight, and often blinded by fog, the Observer Corps provided a vital service throughout the war. But in the autumn of 1940 the enormous, all-round effort of the Auxiliary Units in going to ground proved unnecessary – for the time being, at any rate. It has never become clear why, on 17 September 1940, Hitler ordered the postponement of Operation Sealion until the spring, or why in the end he abandoned his invasion plan altogether. Instead, he unleashed the full fury of the Luftwaffe in the Blitz on London.
Six
Necessity is the mother of invention
Traditional proverb
When petrol rationing came into force on 19 September 1939, only 10 per cent of the population had cars; and now each owner was limited to seven gallons – or about 200 miles – a month. The result was that many people put their vehicles into storage, mounting them on blocks in shed or garage to take the weight off the tyres. After November 1940 no new cars were built for civilian use, and those that were available (about 400 in the whole country) were allocated for use by doctors, police and so on. Buses ceased to run, leaving many country people marooned, and most rural roads were almost free of traffic.
Restrictions brought out a rash of new bicyclists, who often discovered that travel on velocipedes is hard going: as someone pointed out, ‘A bicycle finds out the uphill gradients in a remarkable manner.’ Because they lacked both practice and confidence, and rode machines bedevilled by lack of maintenance, these novices were a menace to other road-users; but boys soon mastered the trick of catching hold of the back of a slow-moving lorry and getting a tow uphill. Children lucky enough to own bicycles rode to and from school as a matter of course.
Old pony traps and governess carts were dragged out of sheds in surprising numbers: dusted down and polished up, they commanded two or three times the price that any owner would have dared ask before the war: £30 or £40 instead of £10 or £12. The writer Penelope Chetwode (wife of the poet John Betjeman) described how she taught Mrs John Piper, wife of the artist, to ride. Myfanwy had never been near a horse before, but now she sold her car, bought a 14.1 hands black gelding, and after minimal instruction was riding twenty or thirty miles a day around her home near Henley-on-Thames.
Farmers were allowed an extra ration of fuel. Even so, lack of petrol often meant that they had to move their sheep and cattle to market on foot, sometimes walking ten or twenty miles a day. Because the police began to stop private cars and ask drivers to justify their journey, many farmers took to carrying a decoy sack of wheat, or the punctured front tyre of a tractor, which