Captured Memories, 1930–1945: Across the Threshold of War: The Thirties and the War

By Peter Liddle

In this sequel to his successful first volume Peter Liddle brings his years of Oral History experience to the Thirties and the Second World War. He was the founder/Director of a new archive in 1999 specifically dedicated to the rescue of evidence of the Second World War which now documents the lives of more than nine thousand people in that war. Many of the most vivid recollections he has recorded covering this period appear in this book.For the Thirties poverty is movingly exemplified in recall of orphanage upbringing, labor in an East Lancashire mill and Glasgow childhood. Privileged public schools and university education is here too, with political convictions expressed by Barbara Castle and quite exceptionally by Oswald Mosley.For the War, there is a section on the sea which includes graphic detail of battle, lifeboat command, the St Nazaire Raid, and of Pearl Harbor. A George Medallist and an Admiral of the Fleet add special distinction here.For the air, a Battle of Britain Spitfire Pilot, Britains most successful night-fighter pilot, a Lancaster Bomber Pilot VC, an American pilot shot down over Belgium, surviving to fight with the Resistance, and a German Pilot retaining his national Socialist convictions present outstanding material.For the land, Dunkirk, North Africa, Italy, Singapore, D-Day, Arnhem, the Rhine Crossing, are all there but so Commando raids, SOE operations, capture, escapes, severe wounding, and a VC earned in Somaliland. A German describes the hand to hand fighting at Cassino, a Field Marshal, his service in North Africa, and Joachim Ronneberg his part in the Telemark Raid in Norway.In the Home Front section, women feature prominently was WAAF, Wrens, ATS, Bletchley Park, the Land Army, war work in factories, dance band singing, Blitz experience in several towns, war widowhood, and overseas evacuation, all feature. There is an account of bomb disposal, of the stance of a Conscientious Objector, and then four people quite exceptional for the significance of their material. Two are from Poland, a jewess who survived against all odds, and a woman who became involved in the Warsaw Uprising; the others are Sir Basil Blackwell working on the development of weaponry for the Admiralty and finally Sir Bernard Lovell on radar.This book does much to dissolve the intervening years. The essence of what is was to be young and to be there lies within these pages.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 13, 2011
• ISBN: 9781844687381

Peter Liddle

Dr Peter Liddle is a leading historian of the First World War and has concentrated on the personal experience of the men and women who took part. He founded the Liddle Collection, a repository of documents and memorabilia connected to the conflict, which is housed in the Brotherton Library, the University of Leeds. His many books include Captured Memories 1900-1918, Captured Memories 1930-1945, The Soldiers War 1914-1918, The Gallipoli Experience Reconsidered, The 1916 Battle of the Somme Reconsidered and, as editor, Facing Armageddon, Britain Goes to War and Britain and the Widening War.Contributors: Holger Afflerbach, Phylomena Badsey, Niall Barr, Chris Bellamy, Nick Bosanquet, Peter Burness, George Cassar, Tim Cook, Irene Guerrini, Clive Harris, Kate Kennedy, Ross Kennedy, William Philpott, Marco Pluviano, Chris Pugsley, Duncan Redford, Matthew Richardson, Alan Sharp, Yigal Sheffy, Jack Sheldon, Edward Spiers, David Welch, Ian Whitehead

Book preview

Section One

The Thirties

1

WILFRED SHAW

Poverty and the Search for Employment

In working with Wilfred Shaw in May 2002 to capture his memories I was deeply moved by his understated account of his impoverished youth. However, there was an uplifting development to his story, something that, almost visibly during the interview, led to a squaring of his shoulders and a lifting of his head as he talked and I listened. From struggling with adversity even when in employment, Wilfred, his family virtually destitute, found himself with a new family, one that supported him as well as fairly requiring his contribution: it was his regiment in the Army, the Green Howards. I realize that this is a story with many parallels but as I left his home in Oldham I felt a renewed awareness of what was called for from people striving against such circumstances of impoverishment in the Thirties, together with an admiration for a man who had nonetheless achieved self-respect and the respect of others. Reflecting upon his story I could not but recognize the role his regiment had played in the making of this man. The interview with Wilfred Shaw remains for me a memorable encounter.

I was born in Cambridge Street, Royton, Oldham, in 1920. I know nothing about my father, I was illegitimate. My mother was born from a very poor family in Cambridge Street and at one period in her life she was in an establishment known as the ‘Scattered Homes’. When grandmother went into the local workhouse at Oldham Hospital, when the workhouse was there, four of grandmother's children, including my mother, were put in this Scattered Homes as young children. And well that's as far as I can tell you about that.

I went into a secondary school called Blackshaw Lane. At that time we’d moved from Royton and I went to live with mother and the person I knew as me father who actually wasn’t, a chap called Leonard Charlesworth, but we were brought up as a family and I went to the local school at Blackshaw Lane. It was quite definitely a period of extreme poverty. You ask whether we had shoes, well we had clogs. I used to wear clogs and a jersey and a tie. The jersey by the way had gone into holes at certain parts and they used to get a needle and wool and darn them, nothing ever discarded, but you never felt ashamed because everybody else was the same. I left at fourteen and the only job that was available to people like me in those days with an education like mine, which you could say was practically nil, was to go into the local cotton mill, which I did.

I was to work in two or three mills but the first one I ever went in was the Park Mill, which was just on top of the hill above where I was born. I remember my mother taking me at fourteen years of age and begging and pleading with the mill overlooker to give me a job. He agreed to give me a job on condition that I would start for nothing. Later I was to be paid for putting tubes into a barrel, which were then put onto spindles before the mule spinning took place and they were spun onto these tubes. The only money I got was for when I did tubing, and I think I got the opportunity to fill about three barrels in the first week I was there and they handed me a wage packet, which contained the fabulous amount of tuppence in old currency.

I should explain with regard to money and any chance of buying anything ourselves, our fun in life came from making our own things. I mean, if you found an old pram or pram wheels, they were like gold. You could get four wheels even if they were different sizes sometimes, and you could make a bogie, a piece of wood with two wheels and a piece of rope and you guiding it, you know, you could go down the nearest hill sort of thing. And we used to make our own bows and arrows. The material for all the stuff you made came from the local mill. Everything came from a cotton mill like a great big cane, which you bent, you know, and put notches in and then a string across. And you made arrows and we used to tip them with tin. We used to cut a triangle and then shape it round into an arrowhead, and we used to test them by firing them over the local church. And yes, everything like that, ropes for example, came out of the mill and my sister and her friends, they played skipping rope and they would tie one end to a lamp post and somebody would turn the other end and the other girls would skip.

Now yes, I was in the choir at one time at the local church in Hayside, St Mark's. I was in the choir there until they found out where the noise were coming from and then they didn’t want me anymore.

From the mill I brought into my home five shillings. Later on it got to fifteen shillings. Like I say, I worked in that mill and in another mill too. You used to work in bare feet and the oil used to squelch between your toes as you were walking along in the alleyways between the machinery and I hated it. As a young lad of fourteen, I was never very big – I was just a young kid, you know, and I hated it, and there came a time when I just packed my bags and I went of my own accord to work in Birmingham in an iron foundry.

I had told my mother how fed up I was, and I had an uncle who was already working in Birmingham. He used to come home periodically and he used to tell these wonderful tales about how the money was better in Birmingham. This captured my imagination and I thought I would like to go to work there with my Uncle Harry. Ultimately I went and was living with his family for a time and working at this place called the Parkinson Stove Company where they made cookers. But everything was done on a conveyor belt, and my uncle used to knock out the castings and they were full of black sand, and my job was brushing off the black sand with a steel brush. We got so dirty on that job, and there was no baths, no form of washing facilities, that they wouldn’t allow us to travel on the buses so we had to walk it home and get in the bath when we got home. However, at least this was better money than the mill.

It was something like two pound ten shillings or getting on for three pound I should imagine, which was quite a fair amount, you know, and I was there when war broke out. That was September the third 1939. I didn’t go into the Army immediately, as I thought I’d like a move so I went of my own accord then down to Bristol. I hadn’t a clue where I were going to stay or anything and I just went and I jumped on a bus and went to a place, I can still remember it, it's called Knowle Park and went in a shop there and asked this woman in the shop: ‘Do you know where I could get digs? I’ve just come to work here on spec sort of thing and do you know anybody who can put me up?’ She said: ‘Well, I think Mrs Turner might, across the road.’ It was number two, The Square, Knowle Park, and I went there and initially she refused me. I said: ‘Well, I’ll just have to look elsewhere.’ Then she said: ‘Would you object to sleeping with my son, you’d be sharing a bed with him?’ I said: ‘No,’ and she took me in for a weekly lodging.

I’m sure the money wasn’t enough for her really to keep me but she was very sympathetic towards me. I lived there and I got a job initially on the railway, driving a horse and cart. And when I went up to feed the horse, the man in charge said: ‘Do you know anything about horses?’ I said that I did but in fact I didn’t. The first day out I finished up delivering these parcels and it was the middle of winter in Bristol and I came back about two to three hours later than everybody else so he said: ‘I think you were telling me lies weren’t you, I don’t think you know anything about horses do you?’ I had to admit I didn’t but that I was desperate for a job. He told me he liked my cheek, that I should come back in the morning and he’d find another job for me somewhere. I went in doing something else just knocking around, around the stable yards and things like that. After a week or two I got another job in a shop charging accumulators in a cellar. And I used to take them out on one of these carts, which was a bicycle as well, like you used to see for Walls ice-cream, and I used to take these batteries and take out the old ones, the old accumulators and batteries, and put the ones in that I’d charged, and then back to the shop and charge all that lot.

And then my birthday came around and I had to register then for military service. So I went and I was passed, passed A1 and ultimately I got my papers through to report for the Army.

Wilfred served with distinction in the 6th Battalion Green Howards as a signaller in North Africa and was wounded twice. He then served in Sicily and North West Europe. He told me he felt embarrassed by his poor education when he first joined the Battalion but such was the comradeship that ‘I am proud to have served in the regiment and with such men and, each year till now on Armistice Day, proud to accept the challenge of reciting the famous words of Remembrance – it's not easy but I do it.’

2

SIR HUMPHREY P.T. PRIDEAUX Kt, OBE

Eton, Oxford, Germany, and India with his British Army Regiment

I had gone to see Sir Humphrey Prideaux in October 2003, at his home in Odiham, because of his war service and I was far from disappointed in this respect but it was the range of his life experience in the Thirties that particularly captivated me, leaving a lasting memory of a gracious gentleman relating details of a happy, consistently enjoyable, privileged and purposeful life.

I was born in December 1915 in London in Ladbroke Square, and we moved in my quite early youth just after the First War, down to Hurst Green near Oxted, in Surrey, and I went to St Aubin's Prep School, Rottingdean, and then on to Eton. My father was a solicitor, and he was also clerk to the Goldsmiths’ Company, one of the twelve great Livery Companies. In fact, although a lawyer by profession, most of his work was in running and organizing, as the Chief Executive in effect, The Goldsmiths’ Company.

I went to Eton in 1928 and left in 1933. I was a history specialist and went on to read history at Oxford, and Robert Birley, who went on to Charterhouse as Headmaster and then came back later as Headmaster at Eton, was a man who made a very great impression on me in my youth. It was his method of teaching and his method of treating one as an equal without any condescension and respecting any ideas that one had oneself in a way which was very gratifying for a young sixteen or seventeen-year-old.

I was, even then, interested in politics. I don’t think I went through a sort of rabid socialist phase like so many people do at that age, but I was always certainly very interested in politics and at Eton we had a flourishing political society to which I belonged. It attracted quite a range of high-level speakers. I remember the one outstanding occasion when Gandhi came to talk to us, complete with loincloth, or incomplete with loincloth, one might say, and that was a memorable experience which I have never forgotten. He made an impression by his complete sincerity and his complete simplicity, and although I think that we, most of us, thought that he was barking mad frankly, he did make an impression through the simplicity and directness of his approach.

What was happening in Europe keenly held my interest. In the autumn of 1934, I went with my mother to the passion play at Oberammergau and we drove through Germany by car, which in those days was not totally an un-adventurous thing to do, and I remember then being enormously impressed by what we could notice, even then, as the emergence of the Hitler Youth and the sort of emergence of Germany in the form in which it was then developing, very much under Hitler, and thinking then that there was bound to be a cultural clash of some sort with that mindset.

I think it was the impression of a strong emerging nationhood – a sort of sense of national identity and the sheer enthusiasm, it seemed, of everyone. I remember during our journey out to Oberammergau, and on the way back, we came across several youth rallies and the tremendous enthusiasm and energy of these young men, stripped to the waist very often, I recall clearly. This was summertime and they demonstrated a sort of bursting vigour, self-confidence and national pride.

Then I went to Trinity College, Oxford, of which I have very happy memories. I loved Oxford. I loved Trinity and I kept in touch with it really all my life ever since. I read history and I enjoyed it enormously. I have gone on reading history ever since really. In those days, Trinity was an all-male college. It was quite small. We were only about 150 undergraduates. It was a very friendly place and I lived in college for the first two years and then moved out into digs. My tutor was a man named Wernham, Professor Wernham, and he became a great friend. They were three very happy years.

I was politically very aware, as I’ve said, and this was one of the reasons why I decided to join the Army immediately I came down. I think one realized that there was bound to be some sort of conflict, and it was a good thing to get in at the beginning, so to speak. I was very conscious of what was going on in Germany, and Italy under Mussolini as well, and in a way apprehensive. I don’t mean physically apprehensive, but apprehensive that it was bound to lead to some sort of ideological conflict.

Well, the system in those days if you wanted to go to join the Army was that you did an attachment to your regiment during your second year at university – during the long vacation in your second year – and then if you got a reasonably good degree – you had to get a first or a second – you got a subsidy. It was all rather unfair really compared to the boys who went to Sandhurst. You got a bit of a financial head start, and you got a bit of backdated seniority as well. So I had made up my mind when I was halfway through Oxford that this was what I wanted to do. I did my attachment in the summer of 1935.

I had originally intended to join the Grenadier Guards and I did my attachment with them in the summer of 1935, but while I was at Oxford I had become great friends with a man called Jim Ashton, who was destined to join the Carbineers, and so I changed my mind, partly because I wanted to stay with my friend and partly because the Carbineers was a horsed cavalry regiment and horses were very much in the forefront of my interest, and so I changed – not without some embarrassment to my father, I may say in recollection, but I did successfully change and therefore went to the 3rd Carbineers, the Prince of Wales’ Dragoon Guards.

I joined them at Sialkot, just North of Lahore in the Punjab. They were assisting the Civil Power in India. This was, of course, before Partition and India was one entity. On leave, we were able to go up into beautiful Kashmir and I had one wonderful leave in one of the hill states beyond Kashmir when, with my Indian tracker, we were entirely alone for six weeks – a great spiritual experience. I was in pursuit of bear and I got my bear – I am rather ashamed of that now – but I got my bear. But the real value of the experience was living in isolation for six weeks. There was a variety of deer upon which you could live, tracking it, killing it, and then, the Indian, butchering it and cooking it. He was a local man and a very nice man. I remember him well. But it was extraordinary really, thinking back, from the security point of view, that one was entirely unprotected. I mean we camped each night. Just pitched a tent where we were and without any thought that anybody would molest you in the night.

In Sialkot it was a typical Indian cantonment from the days of the Raj, I suppose, with bungalows and gardens. But the most outstanding recollection one has was the extraordinary lifestyle. There was I, a young 21-year-old subaltern, and I had a syce, a groom, for every pony that I had and I had four. I had a khitmagar, a waiter, a bhai, a servant, and I had a bearer, who saw to your being smartly dressed in the morning, and you were ‘dressed’ in the morning. You were waited on hand and foot. It was the most extraordinary existence in that sort of way, but it was a life which I loved. Polo in the afternoon, and all that. All our activities were focussed on our horses – Polo, cross-country riding and a lot of work with sabres and dummy thrusting and that kind of thing. You spent a very large part of every day on the back of a horse. In the cold weather there were extensive manoeuvres and we used to go off for three or four weeks at a time on manoeuvres and training.

I am rather ashamed in hindsight to admit that the cultural experience of being in India rather passed me by but happily, in my later life, I have put that right.

I should mention that in our role of supporting the Civil Power we did have to deal with one riot but luckily not a serious one like Amritsar. We had to move down into the town itself in order to deal with a crowd which was threatening. All the trouble was inter-communal between Hindus and Muslims. We had to put on a show of force I suppose really. We moved down into the town and must have been quite an impressive sight with some six hundred horses. We formed a kind of square round the mob which was battling it out, and it was dealt with quite quickly. They melted away eventually under what was, I suppose, really an overwhelming show of force.

In 1939 I went back to England on leave and then, because the war broke out in that September, I was given a mobilization appointment, which was the procedure in those days and did not then return to join my regiment.

Sir Humphrey's experience of the war that lay ahead was not to be with his regiment but in 1940 with 1st Armoured Division covering the retirement of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and evacuating from Brest, not Dunkirk. After this it was Staff College, both as a student then as an instructor, leading him on to Staff planning of supply for D-Day and beyond, and in 1944, on the HQ Staff of the Guards Armoured Division in France and later, North West Europe.

3

ANNIE MILLAR

Working Class Upbringing in Maryhill, Glasgow

Annie Millar made no fuss about the underprivileged circumstances of her Glasgow upbringing in the years before the outbreak of the Second World War. I found it impressive that it had not left her with any vestige of resentment. I also found it interesting that her account challenges preconceptions of the unrelieved awfulness of working class life in Glasgow. The interview took place at her home in the Princess Marie Louise Home and Hospital complex in Erskine, Renfrewshire, in December 2004.

I was born in 1920 in a tenement in a working class district of Glasgow, Maryhill, after my father came back from the First World War. My father was a painter and decorator. He had had a hard time from the stories he used to tell my brother and me on every Sunday evening, I seem to remember. He’d been on the Somme and then torpedoed in the Mediterranean and was resentful of the priority in rescue being given to the horses, more difficult to replace, he said they were told, than the men.

Tenements were blocks of flats, maybe about twenty to thirty people in one block, and we all lived there until the new houses were built. There was an outside lavatory shared by three families. There were only four of us in our family, my brother and me, and my mother and father, but in the big families there would be eight or ten.

I have no memories of drunkenness in our property but there was plenty adjacent to us. Our block was mixed with regard to religion, not sectarian, but there was some tension on the 12th of July and the Orange Parades and on the days of the Rangers-Celtic matches. In the main, people were very tolerant but there were always some looking for trouble.

We simply had to live together in accord and most people were poor and that made them all equal, it didn’t matter what their religion was, and, as I say, we did help one another; people who had more, helped the rest. Yes, there were some children wearing under their outer clothes greased newspapers for warmth during the winter. Again, the big families were of course the worst off. Some of them were in conditions of dire poverty on the man of the house's small wage of two pounds or two pounds ten shillings a week.

I’ve seen shoes all sealed up or people take their shoes off and the socks that they had on had no feet in them.

When we had to have the doctor, it would be half a crown a time – two shillings and sixpence for a visit – but you got good attention from your family doctor, and doctors were very much called upon, especially when there were any children being born, and many a doctor's bill wasn’t paid from the previous baby till the next one was due. That's the kind of doctors they were.

As children we had the usual games, skipping ropes with rhymes or chants. And we had our Sunday school treats. The first event of Christmas was the Sunday school treat.

It was a small Mission House that I went to and they had the tree decorated, and Christmas trees were not very much seen in Scotland but the Christmas Sunday school always had a Christmas tree. For our Christmas treat you got your ‘poke’, your bag with a cake and a biscuit, chocolate and an orange and an apple. You got that and then there were sweets given out to you and there were games played, and then gifts were handed down from the tree.

If you were Catholic, the priest had a great influence over any Catholic family. The policeman was an important figure for all children, treated with respect but a little fear too. The policeman seemed to know you and that had an impact, the same with schoolteachers, too. The primary school I went to was very good. All the teachers took a great interest in us. I remember we had a drill hall there and we used to be drilled in it by the janitor. He would march you up and down and you would get games and all that in this drill hall.

First of all in the morning you got the Bible and then the ‘Three R's’. There was great emphasis on English grammar and spelling and handwriting. I had a teacher who had a wooden pointer and she would go up and down the classroom and my goodness, with your pen-holder and nib, you dare not get a blot on your paper.

Now I remember that I was very interested in the Royal Family but my father wasn’t. He didn’t care very much for the Royal Family, and I remember when we got a piano and I had to learn to play one of the songs in the tutor, it was God Save the King and I wasn’t allowed to play it in case the neighbours heard. My father was from Inverness and he kept his head down. He was a very quiet person and he didn’t want to upset the neighbours with me strumming away at the national anthem and perhaps giving Catholic neighbours the wrong idea. I should add that I am sure that that is not the case now.

Anyway, I left school when I was fourteen, a bad time to leave with regard to unemployment. I had every opportunity to stay on but I didn’t want to. I had the opportunity to go to a tutor for shorthand and typewriting but I wasn’t interested, and I finished up in a big warehouse, a manufacturing warehouse as a clerk.

The goods used to come in in bulk. They were shirtings and pyjamas, mainly menswear and all that kind of thing and I used to book that in and keep track of it. We used to send a lot of it out to Northern Ireland to get it finished and then I was responsible for it coming back in and booking it in. And then we used to get lots of orders from London, Cheapside, the North of England and really all over. The person who I was under and who had to teach me was not helpful. She was a woman of about forty-five to fifty and I don’t think she could change her ways. She had been there for many years and I don’t think she was able to start training a young person. She hadn’t the patience. So I had a pretty hard time of it, but I got there. The employers were very good. I had a good employer.

If you had anything that didn’t please you, you could go to them and talk to them and they would clear it up, but they weren’t what you would call very generous with the wages. You had to go crawling to get an increase once a year. You had to ask for it. You didn’t get it automatically, and that was something I didn’t like doing. I had to say: ‘I am due an increase, can I have it?’ However, they were good employers.

For recreation we did a lot of walking and we entertained friends in our own home. We were encouraged to bring our friends home. We went to the cinema and saw silent films. I remember Walter Beerie, Janet Gaynor, and a lot of Tugboat Annie films. Oh yes, and Ronald Colman. He was everyone's heartthrob, the perfect English gentleman. Then there were lots of musicals like Broadway Melody and of course there was Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

I should have said that I met my future husband when I was working in the warehouse at the age of seventeen or eighteen. He was six years older, also a Protestant, a handloom pattern weaver and as he was a Territorial, off he had to go right at the start of the war.

Annie was to serve in the ATS when she was called up.

4

GEORGE HALIFAX LUMLEY SAVILE 3rd Baron, DL

The Education of a Gentleman

Lord Savile's interest in music and his benefactions towards West Yorkshire causes were well known to me before I met him. I was introduced to him at Leeds University, where I was warmed by the fact that clearly he was captivated by the 1914-18 collection that I had built up and was now housed permanently in Brotherton Library. My keenness that somehow something similar, for the Second World War, should be undertaken, if not at the university, then somewhere, and my interest in his Army service in that war, led to a continuing happy association. In April 2001 I was invited to his sixteenth century home, Gryce Hall, Shelley, near Huddersfield, for lunch and a tape-recording session. It is frustrating that my diary does not record what I remember so well, his gracious courtliness, his continuing interest in others and how he might help, his appetite for life, his questioning keenness to learn, as well as his having enthralling memories to share.

I was born in London in January 1919 but at that time we lived mainly in the home we had in the Dukeries, Rufford Abbey, in north Nottinghamshire, where I spent the first eighteen years of my life. It was a great family home, having been originally a Cistercian abbey, dissolved by Henry VIII. One of Henry's favourites was Lady Mary Talbot, daughter of the then Lord Shrewsbury. She married Sir George Savile, the first Baronet, and so Rufford Abbey came to a woman.

My father, until he succeeded his uncle in 1896, was a diplomat in the Foreign Office. He spoke European languages very well. For my prep school I was at Ludgrove, and then I was at Eton for four happy years from 1932 to 1936. I had a wonderful housemaster, George Lyttelton, who was more like an uncle than a schoolmaster. My particular enjoyment at Eton was music. I played the piano. I actually played in two school concerts during the time I was there and I learnt to love cathedral church music. I say ‘cathedral’ because all the lovely hymns and anthems meant a lot to me while I was at Eton.

I was very bad at sports. Occasionally I played Eton Fives, as it is called, and I had to play the field games, a thing called ‘side post’ and cricket, but I was one of those who was not fortunately endowed at games, unlike my father.

On leaving Eton I was sent to a languages crammer to prepare me for going abroad to learn European languages. I went first to live with a family in Munich to learn German from about January 1937 to early March 1938, but with summer holidays at Rufford Abbey in between.

Nineteen-thirty-seven was a year when one was pretty certain there was likely to be war and actually, as a student, I saw the ‘christening’ of the Rome/Berlin Axis and I saw it when Mussolini came over to Munich, as it were, for the formal public celebration. The two leaders drove past me after a great reception. I saw Hitler and Mussolini almost as close as you are to me now, standing up in a black Mercedes, but of the two, I thought Mussolini had by far a more intelligent face.

I used to see the Brownshirts walking about Munich and especially around the beer halls and everybody was meant to give the Nazi salute as they passed, but to avoid this, those that knew better cut down through a little residential strasse, colloquially renamed the Intelligentsia Strasse.

I didn’t associate at all in Nazi circles but in Royalist circles, the Bavarian Royalist circle. The family I was with detested Hitler and all his works. Conversation about the menace of Hitler was their staple diet but of course privately spoken. They had to be very careful but they dreaded what was going to happen and thought it would get worse as things developed further.

However, for me, life was all great fun. I went to the opera in the evenings and learnt about all the operas that I like now. I studied while I was at Munich and I learned German and did a lot of sightseeing of some of Ludwig II's castles. I remember seeing the very spot where Ludwig II was drowned.

Neuschwanstein Castle was a preposterous mock Versailles with its hall of mirrors, and chandeliers which Versailles did not have. Herrenchiemsee Castle too, I remember.

I might mention that I went on learning the piano and my teacher knew Prince Rupprecht's aide-de-camp and arranged an interview for me with the Prince in November 1937. I was just eighteen. He spoke remarkably good English and although I had learnt up a little German, but no, he spoke in English, talking about his visits to Scotland. He couldn’t have been more interesting – a man of high intellect and culture. He said he hadn’t been to England for five years and of course he did not talk about political matters. I would have loved to have talked with him about the First World War.

Anyway, I left Germany just a few days before the Anschluss in March 1938. I came back home more or less for another holiday before going in May 1938 to rub up my French with a French family living near Saint-Germain-en-Laye. I remember being impressed from what I saw of the French Army in and around Paris; that it looked very efficient. Subsequent events proved me quite wrong but I remember very well the state visit of the King and Queen to Paris in July 1938 and the Army looked simply terrific.

Our new Queen, Elizabeth, had a great triumph. She really swept Paris off its feet. With other students learning French we swarmed round the Champs Elysees, admiring the lights in the Palace. On the first night of the visit, a state dinner was given by Monsieur Lebrun, the French President, and his wife. However, a very different atmosphere prevailed that September following upon Hitler's warlike speech at the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremburg. There was a rally there every September and from then on we knew that there was great trouble ahead. I remember sitting listening to the wireless hearing the announcement that Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister, had proposed a flight to see Hitler at Berchtesgaden, and we knew we were all living in very troubled days indeed.

I remember very well how events unfolded, internationally, and for me personally. With no success achieved in reaching agreement over the Czechoslovakia issue at a second meeting, the one at Bad Godesberg, war looked imminent. It was arranged for me to come back to England because the situation was so bad. I remember so well when it was announced that Mr Chamberlain and the other leaders, Monsieur Daladier and Mussolini, were going to meet Hitler at Munich and I came back to London the very day that peace was saved, or should I say now, war was delayed.

For me the next stage was that I would have gone to Italy to learn Italian with the possibility afterwards of serving as an unpaid honorary attaché at the embassy in Rome, and I started learning some Italian in the Berlitz School in London but then of course, conscription was announced and there was the trouble I think with Albania and of course, I didn’t go. So I had what you might call a year's respite, from 30 September 1938 until 20 October 1939, when I joined the Army. It was really like a holiday, going to a few dances and a few race meetings and visiting different places in Britain, but certainly it was a year off work or preparing for a career.

Lord Savile was to be commissioned into the Duke of Wellington's West Riding Regiment but he served overseas in two campaigns in Burma with the 1st Battalion Lincoln Regiment.

5

JOSEPH RECK

An Orphanage Upbringing in Preston

Of the many people I have listened to when they talked of the miseries of their poverty-stricken childhood in the Thirties, the loveless background in which Joseph Reck spent his early years left a lasting impression on me, especially with regard to the longer-term influences on someone brought up in such a way. I met him at his Liverpool home in November 2004.

I was born in Bootle in September 1919. My father was a postman and my mother married him when she was sixteen years of age. He had six sons and one daughter. He died about 1922 when I was the age of two. My mother was left with the children with no possible means of income. It came to the situation as I was the next to youngest child, I was placed in a children's home in Preston and there I stayed for two years. At the end of two years I was brought home and went to the local St James's School in the infants, where I spent one term and then I was removed and went back into the orphanage, St Vincent de Paul Orphanage, where I stayed until I was twelve years of age.

During this time the Government had decided that orphanage children should be transferred to Australia or Canada. I believe my mother got a letter asking if she would object. It appears she must have objected because I was brought home from Preston. A strange sort of situation when I look back on it. I was introduced to my brothers. I’d only met two of them up to that time. I’d never seen my mother during my time at the orphanage either. Trying to fit names onto faces, and they were trying to understand me, who spoke a completely different language to them, was awkward for everyone.

We never ever became brothers in that true sense of the word because they had no control or no effect on my growing up. We were so different. I am speaking of a later time now, after I’d left the orphanage. They used to sit down to Sunday evening meal and there’d be lots of bread and butter, ham and such like, and one day I was sitting listening to them, thinking there is no way I can stay here, I simply don’t belong. If I spoke they looked at each other and said: ‘Yes, you have a point’, and then changed the conversation. We never ever became brothers I don’t think.

We never fell out but when I was seventeen I left. I’d been working in the Post Office from fourteen to sixteen as a telegraph boy, and I went in for the National Civil Service examination. I failed that, only just, but I did fail it and left the Post Office, and then decided I’d like to be a joiner. I was then offered to go on a course in a place called Wallsend, in Newcastle, to which I couldn’t have gone quick enough. I know my mother complained because I received 12/6d that week for dole or whatever they called it at the time and I’d spent it on buying two shirts and something else. She was very angry about it. She said she needed the money. I stayed in Wallsend for a while and then went to work in Newcastle in a manufacturing joinery, and then got another job in Newcastle.

Returning to the question of the orphanage and my relationship, or lack of it, with my family. In an orphanage, especially run by the Church, the Catholic Church, they are basically very conservative in their views, and these views are indirectly given to you. If you’re sat at a table with a lot of young people at a time when there was no work and there was little opportunity of employment, in the main the people round the table will have socialist views. Three of my brothers had joined the Forces because of the lack of work. A regular topic of talk at the table would be socialism and at that age I simply could not understand that the Government was responsible for everything that was happening to them. And this was the conversation; that the Government was responsible. It was the Government's fault. This seemed to go right through their feelings. We were poor because the Government wouldn’t help us.

Now as for the orphanage itself, the one thing that is missing from your life in situations like that, is love. There is no love. The nuns haven’t time for love. God knows they’ve got enough to do to keep the place going. They would go out collecting from vegetable shops and butchers and with tins on the streets. They hadn’t time for individuals. In fact they probably didn’t even notice what one person looked like as against the other.

There was no individual personal affection given whatsoever. None. I am not saying at all that there was harsh or abusive treatment, just no love. When I was eight or ten years old there, there were children of I would say up to fourteen and probably fifteen. As boys do, often they would get into fights. Then something would happen and they would be brought down to the dining room – this would be at breakfast. They would be stripped and caned as they stood bare. They would be sent to the showers first, cold water shower, then brought in there, and on a platform, caned in front of the whole orphanage and then be sent out again.

When you were very young – if you think I was there from four and a half or so – it was strange to see this and you would sit there, well, for want of a better word, goggle-eyed, scarcely able to take it in, frightened in one sense, certainly. This was the rule, right! But there was no love. There was no room for love. You had to understand that. The effect it had is, I think, I’ve gone through life making sure that nobody got too close to me. Friendly you could be, but I can count on one hand the amount of friends I’ve made in life. I’d always be too cautious. I was always the person that when you’re out in a crowd, others would be telling the jokes. I’d tell jokes but the jokes are my jokes and banter is a cover-up to make sure I don’t get involved. As for institutional life preparing me for the Army, I ‘had it made’.

However, before that, when I left the Post Office, I went to night school college, for the point of learning about joinery. In the course of this I collected some books about what is called ‘international history’. Not English history. And one of these books I kept for many, many years, and then when these things would come up I would read what the world thought about Britain when she said this or that didn’t happen, what the world's reaction was to this. It was a marvellous book and it was incredible to read a complete opposite to what we were told in England. This I always kept so therefore when the situation arose with Hitler, my views about what Hitler was doing or planning were at variance with the English newspapers. In the 1938 crisis I didn’t have much love for Churchill from what I could read about his background. And I had no respect for Chamberlain as I thought he was completely the wrong man, and I also thought that they’d approached the thing totally wrong where they could have stopped Hitler before he went into the Rhineland long before this war started.

In December 1939, despite the concern of an eye specialist about Joseph Reck's sight, the twenty-year-old enlisted in the Army. He served in the Royal Corps of Signals in the Western Desert, briefly in India, in Palestine, Italy and North West Europe. When I met him, he had for some time been registered blind.

6

BARBARA CASTLE

Baroness Castle of Blackburn, PC GCOT

A Labour Party Conviction and Activism in Oxford and Bradford

Despite her physical frailty when I met her at her home in Ibstone, High Wycombe, in September 2000, neither in appearance, in relation to her well-known hairstyle and colour, nor in her liveliness of mind and adamant adherence to her convictions, did Barbara Castle disappoint. She was interesting throughout a long interview and I got no impression of doubt in her convictions or mellowing of her views, with the burden, or experience, of time.

I was born in Chesterfield in 1910, Barbara Anne Betts, but the family only stayed in Chesterfield three months because my father was an inspector of taxes and these men of high integrity are moved around at five-yearly intervals to prevent them getting too close to the locality.

My schooling was at Love Lane Elementary School, Pontefract, followed by Pontefract and District Girls’ High School. When we moved to Bradford, I was about ten or eleven. As my father was a very bookish man, he wanted us to have an academic education. He had to pay for all his children to go to the local grammar school.

My parents had met in Hind Street Chapel, Coventry, and both had therefore a religious upbringing. My father rebelled against what seemed to him the ‘greyness’ of the chapel life. He moved over to High Church and then out into rationalism. My mother stayed with the church and we were brought up as churchgoers. However, my father insisted that we children should decide for ourselves in such matters. For many years we stayed as churchgoers but I had a parallel interest of politics.

Again this was very much as a result of family background because my father was a socialist and an avid reader. He had a very wide interest in literature and art and to him and to me the disciplines of religion became synonymous with the ethics of socialism. So the two, as it were, merged – no, not Christian Socialists but we were socialists who had an enormous respect for the ethics of Christianity.

In Bradford at that time, the Independent Labour Party was very dominant. Bradford had been Keir Hardie's home when he founded the Independent Labour Party and we were very proud of that and very active in the Party, but many of the figures who later became very politically active had, as children, been to a socialist Sunday school. Vic Feather, who later became General Secretary of the TUC, was a protégé of my father and he was very much an example of what I mean. They were taught that socialism was a secular form of Christianity; that all the teaching of the church had found expression in real life in the ethics of socialism and the two merged to form a very profound influence on me.

My father was editor of the Independent Labour Party paper, the Bradford Pioneer. As a civil servant he couldn’t engage openly in politics but he used to write under his initials and I remember reading articles of his about Jesus of Nazareth. He was fascinated by the great tragedy of Jesus of Nazareth and he said I am writing this about the man. It is for others to write about Jesus, and so for me, politics and religion merged quite naturally into one.

I was immensely influenced by the industrial character of Bradford and by its location because I loved the moors and I loved walking on the moors and of course, Bradford was in the valley with its suburbs radiating out up the hills and it fascinated me. The stark beauty of the industrial environment. However, its effect on individual lives shocked me. I remember I used to go as a schoolgirl in my gym tunic and long black woollen stockings, canvassing at election times for Labour candidates and I remember going down one mean street under the lee of a woollen mill and a very white-faced woman came to the door. The stench from the dye works section of the mill was appalling and she looked ill and I remember thinking to myself passionately as I went home, I couldn’t bear to live in that environment. So why should anybody else, and that was the sort of practical nature of my socialism.

And there was too, the influence of people like Margaret McMillan, who was really before my time slightly but her memory and her ethic dominated the thinking and work of the Independent Labour Party because she gave up the life of the comfortable middle-class woman of her upbringing to come and work for a pittance for the Independent Labour Party. She got herself on the School Board and she campaigned for free school meals for the necessity of school children and she used to argue that you cannot educate children with empty bellies. That kind of practical form of socialism deeply was embedded in me and I remember the campaign she launched for the establishment of public baths because a lot of these rows of back-to-back houses had got no bathroom and the Council apparently said that she was ‘obsessed’ with cleanliness.

However, she won over the Medical Officer of the City of Bradford to her side and she described how, when they got their way and got school medical examinations, they found that at one school, out of 200 children, half had never had their clothes off for six months. Now that kind of thing shakes one to the core if you are an idealistic and passionate young early teenager. It had a profound influence and she has always been one of my great role models. She got her public baths and she got her free meals and Bradford was ahead of the national acceptance of these standards.

She was the pioneer of nursery schools too, and the whole nursery school movement spread throughout the country. There were others, of course, and there was Montessori and the rest of it but on practical terms there was this woman of very firm advanced ideas coming to this industrial area with so many impoverished parts to it and just applying those things in practical terms. And the way she fought for the humanisation of education – I mean, children in those days in the elementary schools worked in sort of chain gangs. You know, on one long desk, and she said children must learn while they play. It's got to be that kind of education.

Returning to my own life, from school I went to St Hugh's, Oxford. I mustn’t be ungrateful to them because when I later became Minister of Transport they made me an Honorary Fellow and I have always got on extremely well with everybody there, but when I went up in, it would be sort of 1929, I suppose, Oxford was a very restrictive place and the chaperonage rules at the university were ludicrous to me. I mean, I had been free to go out if I wanted in the middle of the night and roam the moors but the freedom I had enjoyed and the adult discussions were something I missed terribly because there were large numbers of, well, shall I say, a substantial minority of the St Hugh's students, brought up very differently. It was purely a women's college then. There were students who had been presented at Court and had been educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College or Roedean you know, and that was not my background. I got on quite well with them but they used to tease me for my northern accent and the more they teased me, the more I broadened it and so you know it was a stimulus in a way.

I was studying politics and this was one of my problems, I suppose. I wanted to study PPE: politics, philosophy and economics, and it was only in its second year when I arrived and we were weighed down with set books. It hadn’t developed as a ‘school’, a proper academic mix, and my house tutor at St Hugh's was a medieval historian. They didn’t understand that to someone from the north, economics was something that actually applied to people's lives. They were so insulated, you see, most of them.

Yes, these things did hamper me. I worked very hard when I first got up there. Of course, I was an exhibitionist and I didn’t want to let my father down. I had passed my Law Preliminary in a term because I was working hard and then after that something broke in me. I had been slogging through school you know – Matriculation, Higher Certificate, University Entrance and so on and so forth and then my Law Preliminary, swotting up Roman law, as soon as I set foot in the place because there wasn’t any preliminary exam that fitted the modernity of PPE, and something exploded in me. So I really threw myself into the life of the Labour Club and discussions over cocoa around the fire in one's room and with two or three fellow spirits and then those who had these same ideas, and going on long cycle rides into the surrounding countryside, but I didn’t work. So I only got a Third. I didn’t deserve that, I don’t think, but that of course hurt me because it hurt my father.

Returning to politics, I was politically active, believe it or not, from the very first Labour Government of 1924 and of course I was fourteen at that time and I remember it well. I had always been taught to think for myself and to speak up for myself and I remember lecturing one of our local party notables, Willie Leach MP, when the 1924 Minority Government was formed with the support of the Liberals, and I remember telling one Independent Labour Party gathering, do what we have got to do. You have got to go in and put forward our socialist principles and let us be beaten on them. Show up the Liberals and then have an honourable defeat if it has to be, but oh, they thought, you know this is a rash young woman.

Well, I am sure history proved me right because of course they had the Zinoviev letter and the reds under the bed scare, and the Liberals were very poor allies indeed and the Government fell with some ignominy. Well then, when the 1931 National Government came, led by Ramsay MacDonald, who had just been the Labour Government's Prime Minister, I was up at Oxford and so was young Tony Greenwood, who was later to be a very prominent colleague in the political world of Labour. He and I moved a motion in the Labour Club to depose Ramsay MacDonald, who was our Honorary President. MacDonald had very nearly destroyed the Labour Party.

I remember I went round with a collecting box for money for the election and I found myself opposite Ramsay MacDonald's daughter, Sheila, who was up at Somerville and really my heart ached for her when I saw her. You know she just drew herself up but her face was ashen. She was isolated in the place, though it was very interesting. In our Labour Clubs we were so active, we were so alive, we had such an interesting repertory of speakers that all the Tories, large numbers of Young Tories, joined our club. Their own was respectable and dull and they would come to pack the meeting to vote against the deposition of Ramsay MacDonald because they were in favour of the formation of the National Government and of the destruction of the Labour Government. Of course they were. So it was always a very tumultuous political background and a radical one in which I worked at the university and Tony Greenwood and I went off and did street corner meetings in our area. That is when I first started my street corner work and formed the view that the financial odds were always so heavily stacked against the Labour Party. We had very little money and the Tories had large money bags. So the only strong weapon was the street corner meeting, the open-air meeting. Go to the workers. They can’t afford to come to you and that influenced my political activities for many years.

Of course when the Spanish Civil War broke out in July 1936 it was absolutely taken for granted in our house that we were on the side of the democratically elected Republican Government. First of all it was a human identification. My parents were active in the Spanish Committee that helped refugees. This was before I went to Oxford because we were always hard up because my father had to pay so much in fees for our education and also we adored books and were forever buying them, so our pocket money was meagre.

Now as hard up as we were, we took in four refugees. Three of them were young and you know it was a good test of my socialism because mother and father said: ‘Well, I am sorry you will have to share your pocket money with them.’ I had the most natural sense of resentment in the world but of course we accepted it – had to – and later on we were proud of it and you know you suddenly thought – particularly so when Franco won with the help of Mussolini and Hitler, who was pouring aid in to the Franco regime – that you had done something to support right against might.

Another thing which stands out vividly in my mind is how in Bradford, which was far from being a revolutionary sort of environment, it was contrary to our ethic that we should not support the democratically elected government and when the Labour Party decided on a policy of non-intervention, we were horrified. How can you not intervene, how can you say: ‘Oh well, it was out of your hands. Let them fight it out,’ when you know that Britain's two emerging enemies, Mussolini and Hitler, were pouring money into the rebellious side under Franco?

No, I did not see as serious a challenge to democracy, from Soviet Russia as from Fascism, in response to your question. I will tell you why, because the Communist Party at that time, was the most active source of opposition to Franco. Many of them suffered for it in their countries of origin. One of our refugees was the most delightful young man from Madrid who was a communist and of course, he had to flee for his life as Franco advanced over his area. Communists were under threat, not threatening us from the Soviet Union.

There was The Tribune newspaper, which had been founded with the help of Sir Stafford Cripps, one of our few rich socialists and a ‘leftie’, though certainly no communist. He was too well-off for that, and he put a lot of money into Tribune and he sent me, in I suppose it would be about 1939,