MY WAR

MY WAR

Brigadier Stephen Gilbert

Written on Remembrance Sunday 2003

The world had to wait until 3 months after the outbreak of war in 1939 for my birth. It is therefore surprising that I remember any of it at all. However, I do have vivid memories particularly of the later years and, of course, the stories of the earlier part of the war come from my parents.

Until my mother and I were ‘evacuated’ to relations in Hinchley Wood, my parents lived in Ladbroke Road in Notting Hill Gate. When the blitz started and before there was an air raid shelter Marie Rambert, who ran her ballet School in the Mercury Theatre, would ask neighbours to come and shelter under the stage which was very strong being supported on steel girders. Apparently she found the bombing most inspiring and she would sweep baby me up into her arms and dance energetic fandangos. Unfortunately none of this rubbed off but I have danced in the arms of Dame Marie Rambert!

My father, then a clerk with Martins Bank, was called up into the ranks of the East Surrey Regiment and went to a tented camp at Kingston-on-Thames. He was soon selected for officer training and went to an O.C.T.U. at Barmouth in Wales. My mother and I followed. They were devoted and I think that, given the uncertainties of another world war, my mother decided to follow the drum for as long as possible. She managed this throughout the war and we therefore lived in a series of rented accommodation in Wales, England and then, mostly, in Scotland. Of course, all these journeys were by train and could include 13 pieces of luggage including the potty!

I learned to walk in Barmouth and was photographed on a walk to Arthog, but my father and his fellow officer cadets spent a great deal of time dashing up Cader Idris. When asked what regiment he wished to join on commissioning my father, a Londoner with Australian origins, asked for West or East Surreys, Middlesex or Royal Fusiliers. With true Army logic he went to the Cameronians (Scottish Rifles)! This proved a wonderful choice as it meant that we spent the rest of the war in the North where the effects, particularly air raids and rationing, were less noticeable.

He was posted to the notorious Maryhill Barracks, long since demolished, in Glasgow where he, as a Lieutenant, commanded a half company of recruits under training, many came from Ireland. He had 3 platoons, each commanded by a WO3 (a wartime rank introduced to help alleviate the shortage of junior officers). Apparently, when they were issued with their woollen army underwear, he and his platoon sergeant (a PhD!) found them stitching themselves in for the winter! I have a vivid memory of Glasgow’s cream coloured trams running at the bottom of our road, Fergus Drive, where we rented a flat.

We then went to Aberdeen where the family had a particular sadness. My sister, Sarah, was born and was severely deformed and died after a few months. I remember being miserable. We were in a house on the sea front. It was bitterly cold and I slept in a garret room with a skylight and woke one morning with snow on my bed.

At about this time he went to command a Mortar Platoon in Dalton-in-Furness and mother and I stayed with a Mrs Willerton and I slept in a drawer (open!) on their bedroom floor. One day, with another very small boy, we went down a cutting where a solo steam engine was waiting at a signal. The driver hauled us up into the cab and ran us back and forward. My first trip on the footplate and the start of my love of railways. What would today’s nanny state make of that? One Saturday morning father and a fellow officer took me to a nearby range and while they shot their pistols I popped away with an ineffective little wooden gun.

After this we went, in 1944, to Langholm in Dumfriesshire between Carlisle and Hawick and my parents rented a distillery manager’s house, Firbrae, on the A7 and overlooking the Esk. It was, and is, beautiful lowland countryside. We were surrounded by moors, owned by the Duke of Buccleuch, all around the house. My father joined the 6th (Lanarkshire) Battalion of the Cameronians, firstly as Mortar Platoon Commander, then Company Second-in-Command and eventually as Adjutant.

I went to my first school, the Langholm Academy, run in the finest Scottish academic tradition by the formidable Miss Burnett. It was a one mile walk along the river bank, past woollen mills with whirring machinery, to school. Sometimes mother took me on the back of her bicycle, named Mercury (she later found the identical model in the Science Museum, dated 1907) on a rather uncomfortable rug folded on the cycle rack. I think our education must have been very good. The shortage of paper was such that we did our letters on slates with wooden borders filled with fine sand. We wrote with our fingers and then had to carry them very gingerly up to the teacher. If they were correct we were then allowed to shake the sand level and to draw pictures.

It was about then that I got engaged for the first time. At the age of 4 I fell in love with Fiona Sinclair, aged 2. I think her mother had died in childbirth and her father, the Duke of Caithness, was away on active service and she was living with a Seaforth family with children, Michael and Bridget Anderson. Apparently, in classic style, I was overheard by their nanny proposing in the conservatory. After an initial refusal she accepted and we became inseparable for a short time.

Another couple came and shared the house with us as we knew that the men would soon be going to war. These were Doreen and George Henderson with baby son, John. I think that, once the men had gone, the companionship of the two wives was excellent. We also looked after a very fast greyhound, Goldie, who belonged to another Officer in the Regiment. Goldie would speed over the moors after hares and mother got into trouble with gamekeepers for that - but it was a supplement to rationing. While I was aware of the war, the fact of it was just part of life and all that I had ever known. I gave my mother a long description of a bomb proof house I would build for us all after the war so that we would all be safe. Domestic economies that the young now find strange were the norm. We would pick rose hips for syrup and I remember collecting moss on the moors for bandages – very absorbent in shell dressings.

Although we lived on a main trunk road there was normally hardly any traffic. The morning ‘bus would pass and the conductor would throw our newspaper, wrapped with a yellow band, into the garden and it was my job to find it. One day I remember having to wait to cross the road to go home when a seemingly endless convoy of, to me, massive Army trucks with huge white stars thundered south. This must have been a D Day build up. On another occasion the sky was filled with twin boomed aircraft (Lightnings) towing gliders south.

Then the time came for the battalion to go to war. I let the side down by crying at the little station as the battalion ‘entrained’. They must have been very fit. Father seemed to be endlessly taking soldiers on the Langholm Circuit – 90 miles in 3 days. The battalion was part of 52nd (Lowland) Division whose shoulder flash was St Andrew’s cross with ‘Mountain’ underneath as they had been originally trained for operations in Norway but in fact went into action for the first time at Walcheren – below sea level!

Father came back on leave and these were happy times. All my uncles and aunts were in the Forces. Those who were able came and stayed with us when on leave. Everyone seemed to be in uniform and this did not seem odd to me. Jack a RASC Major. Donald also a RASC Major and away in the Western Desert for 5 years. Their sister, Molly, a 2nd Officer in the WRNS who married her Naval Captain CO. I behaved particularly badly at her wedding in the Edinburgh Registry Office. She then had to be posted away from Sheerness as husbands and wives could not serve together. Edward was a Captain in the Argylls. Then my mother’s younger brother, Ian, having been in the HAC, was a Gunner and distinguished himself with a MBE for coordinating the 30 Corps fire plan for D Day.

When the war ended we were still in Langholm and really very happy. The locals were friendly. When troubled by mice in the house I remember a lad from a farm over the hills came to the door with a sack over his back. He wordlessly tipped out a grey ball of fur. This was Ross, named after the battalion pipe major, who stayed with my parents for many years and proved a good mouser.

The battalion’s war ended near Bremen and then formed part of the British Army of the Rhine being stationed in such places as Geilenkirchen and Delmenhorst. We moved back to London, my father was demobilised and went back to the bank, now as a manager and life became normal – whatever that was.

Much later I went to Sandhurst and had 37 very happy years in the Army – but that is another story.

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