Tommy's Story: The Life Experience of a Salford Man, A British Soldier of World War Two.

By A J Denny

Tommy’s story begins in an impoverished Salford of a bygone time. It follows Tommy through his childhood and youth. This leads into the main part of the story about Tommy’s experiences as a British soldier seeing combat in the Libyan Desert with the British 7th Armoured Division, which leads to capture and life as a prisoner of war and eventual escape and spectacular journey to reach freedom.

The story has twists and turns that will keep the reader not knowing how it will finish until the end. It contains shocking first-hand accounts of war and the harshness of living in a war environment, but also moments of hope and endeavour, and the laughter of life and romance in the most bizarre of situations. The story travels between continents and countries, highlighting the importance of how a grasp of different languages can remove cultural barriers and, in Tommy’s story, probably saved his life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Legend Press
• Release date: Jul 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781787193178

Book preview

Epilogue

Introduction

This book begins in the northwest of England in the ‘dirty old town’ of Salford, so-named in Ewan MacColl’s song. MacColl was not only an English folk singer of repute but also a native of the Broughton area of Salford, which is precisely where Tommy’s story begins. The story starts with an insight into a way of life as seen through the eyes of an old man. Tommy relives the memories of his early life as a child and young man, telling of his experiences of living and growing up in an inner city part of a Salford of bygone days. Some of his stories go back so far that very few people who shared his experience of the place are still living, and such times are now largely consigned to history books, or are viewed through old photographs or film reels depicting life as it was back then. Tommy’s memories are special, as they describe a past that is at great variance with today’s complicated world. Very little now remains for others to see of his early life.

From Salford the story develops into one man’s extraordinary adventure and series of journeys that were undertaken following enlistment as a full time British soldier during the Second World War. Tommy’s experiences of life were to change dramatically and irrevocably due to the act of a worldwide war. Yet the story is not simply a chronologically accurate account of the war; there are many other historical books on the subject, but the aim of writing this story is two-pronged: firstly to tell the tale of a normal working-class man and his pre-war way of life, and secondly to recount his fascinating experience of the war itself.

At the time of writing this book Tommy is ninety-six years old and although his memory fades him and he is partially deaf, his physical health is still fairly good. This is amazing when I consider what he went through during the war years. Tommy’s story, I am sure, will amaze, sadden, frighten and intrigue you as it has me. He was a normal young man who, along with so many others of the day, simply got caught up in the extraordinary events of his time and was changed forever. These men had no option but to go wherever in the world they were needed and to perform whatever duties were asked of them. Some were fortunate to live to tell their personal stories to those willing to listen. I feel privileged to have listened to such an amazing story as Tommy’s, and I believe that, to some degree, this story keeps alive the unique memories of Tommy and his fellow soldiers for others to appreciate.

My reason for writing Tommy’s story was in the first instance simply that it was a tale of human endurance, resourcefulness and humour, asking to be told. There is no doubt that many other stories exist of those who have served in various wars, if they were both willing and given the chance to describe their experiences. As the years pass, fewer and fewer soldiers are alive to give their version of this truly worldwide war. Many were never given the opportunity or, if they were, did not wish to revisit what had happened and so their individual stories have now been lost. In the second instance, the story is of particular interest to me, since the storyteller, Tommy, is my great uncle. As a small child my mother and other family members told me stories of what happened to Tommy during the war. He himself rarely spoke in any detail about his wartime experiences, tending to entertain and joke at family gatherings, recounting only the odd tale. He would amaze my family and me when he appeared to speak in fluent German and Italian or else sang songs in these languages. Tommy was a favourite uncle of my mother’s, and after she became ill with cancer and subsequently died in 2004, I decided to investigate further the stories I had heard as a child.

I have not had close contact with my Great Uncle Tommy for much of my life. As a child I recall him visiting my home several times and then again when I was a young man, including my eighteenth birthday party. After this it was usually at family gatherings that I would see him, and later at my mother’s birthday party her last birthday before she died and my sister’s wedding. Some time after my mother died I cautiously asked Tommy if he was willing to talk to me in more depth about the war and tell me the full story of the war from his own perspective. I suggested that it would be good to write his story for others to read. At the time this was to enable my family to read about their oldest living relative. I was acutely aware that he was now an old man and that if I did not act soon I might not have the opportunity to do so later. I was afraid that my great uncle’s story would be lost to my family forever.

When Tommy agreed, I was greatly relieved and after several visits and many telephone conversations this is the story that emerged. As I started to write the book I realised that the story that was unfolding was not only of interest to my family but perhaps to a much wider audience. I found that the story was materialising into something of significance to more than just my family. It became not just about Tommy, my own relative, but about all the British ‘Tommys’ who were taken from villages, towns and cities to do battle on foreign land during the Second World War, so many of whom were never to return home. Hence the intended audience is anyone who has an interest in personal histories and another’s astonishing memories of the war years which, after all, affected so many of our family members.

This is Tommy’s story as told by him to me.

Chapter one: The family and early memories of Salford

Tommy is a Salford lad born-and-bred and proud to be so. He came into this world on 12 April 1915, born in the midst of a major world war, and war was to play an important part in his life thereafter. In fact, the effects of war were felt immediately by Tommy from a very early age. He was not to see his father until he was four years old, as he was serving in the First World War, the ‘Great War’, and was away fighting the Turks at Gallipoli by the time Tommy was born.

Tommy’s life began humbly in an old-fashioned two-bedroom terrace house in a poor, working-class area placed at the very heart of the city of Salford, within Greater Manchester. To be precise, he was born at number 25, High Holborn Terraces, in the area known locally as Lower Broughton. His house was the last in a row of old terrace houses that were old even by that day’s standard. The houses were built on top of a steep hill next to a large wall that overlooked Briggs, a wallpaper and chemical firm.

High Holborn Terraces were positioned off a well-known local road, Blackfriars Road, and near to Silk Street. Living in the house when Tommy was a child were his mum and dad (following his father’s return from the Great War), his brothers Jim and John and his sister Lily. In addition, Tommy’s mother’s brothers, Jim and Ted, lived next door and other uncles on his mother’s side lived close by in this close-knit community of old Salford.

This house and the entire street no longer exist today, the street having been demolished to make way for more modern housing. Thus it befell the same fate as many other houses in the area. I suppose this was a good thing at the time as most of the old housing had no indoor toilet or adequate water supply and was usually infested with cockroaches and other insects. Tommy told me however that his house was in a good state for its age.

The area of Lower Broughton is special for me also as my dad, mum, other family members and myself were all born there. I was born at home, surprisingly in the very house that Tommy’s mother and father lived in during the Second World War, which is the time period in which most of the book is set. I had previously assumed that they moved to this house after High Holborn Terraces were demolished sometime in the 1960s and it was only through researching this story that I found out I was wrong and they had in fact moved much earlier and had lived for many years in the very house where I was born in 1966. The address was 5, Beech Street, Lower Broughton. The house suffered the same felt and also belongs to bygone history.

Tommy’s mother (my great-grandmother) was born on the sixteenth of June 1880. She was of Irish stock and a good and kind woman when sober! But she was also a woman known to have a fiery nature on occasions and most usually after she had had a drink – or several. I have often been told in the past by my mother and other family members that my great-grandmother liked a drink of stout or Guinness and would either frequent the snug room of the local pub herself or, as was more often the case, would send my Uncle Harry, my mum’s brother, jug-in-hand to the pub to fill it up with her preferred tipple. But when she drank she was not shy of telling you how she felt about you, good or bad, and she was certainly not afraid of who was listening to her either. Uncle Harry was often the recipient of her tongue I have been told. Her name, ‘Reilley’, is a truly Irish sounding surname even today. Elizabeth Ellen Reilley (her full name) was born on a farm in Dundalk in Southern Ireland and close to the historically troubled border with Northern Ireland. Today Dundalk is famous for its racecourse.

Tommy’s mother had told him he was very nearly born in Ireland himself. She had been heavily pregnant with him when she happened to have been visiting her family in Dundalk. She started having labour pains but managed to get back to England before she gave birth to him – lucky Salford! Elizabeth had originally come over to England with her five brothers to set up home in Salford. She had moved to England some years before Tommy was born. Tommy does not recall his mother saying exactly when this was although he thinks it was when she was a child.

Tommy’s father’s background was in stark contrast to that of his mother. His father was called John Tysall; he was a southerner (born thirteenth of October 1878) and a true cockney from the area of Bow Bells in the East End of London. He was a smartly dressed man and was known to be a kind and quiet person. When my mother was a child whenever my Great Grandad visited he would give her a gift of a shiny old penny. He kept this tradition going my sister Sharon told me and would do the same for her. My sister recalls being amazed how shinny he was able to get the pennies and he must had polished them for hours. According to my family he was considered by all who knew him a real gentleman. He was also known for being very clever and he would impress people with his understanding of the English language, especially the meaning of words. Apparently he would ask people to open any page of a dictionary and pick a word, and he would tell them without fail what that word meant. Tommy’s said his grandmother (Eliza Tysall, Formerly Hood) and other family members on his father side had all been teachers in schools in the London area. Later on, Eliza moved to Birmingham where she continued to teach before moving to Smiths Court, Springfield lane in Salford.

Tommy’s dad enjoyed baffling people with his ability to write the whole of the Lord’s Prayer on the back of a stamp or matchbox. He would sharpen a pencil to such a very fine point that he only needed a square inch of space on which to write a prayer down. People could not believe how he managed this and no matter how they tried one was ever able to copy him. Tommy recalls many happy childhood memories of being with his dad who would take him all over the place as a small boy.

Tommy’s father worked at CPA printers in Manchester. This was his main job through the week but he regularly had weekend work in a local ‘bookies’ in Salford; this was run by his wife’s brother, Billy Reilley. However, bookmakers’ shops in those days were rather different from those of today. The building was an ordinary-looking house in which the bookie lived with his family. It had no public entrance but had a hatch at the back of the building. Anyone wanting to place a bet had to give the bet to a ‘runner’ who was usually stationed in the entry, which was behind the house. The runner would collect the punter’s bet and give it to the bookie through the hatch. A bookmaker was an illegal trade back in those days and the bookie had to be careful to keep out of the way of the police who would close the bookie down if they could. The police would arrest and book the runner on a regular basis and generally try to disrupt the business; the bookie would compensate the runner by paying his fines when he was caught and the runner would continue to work. However the runner typically did not last long in the job and usually after about twelve months, depending on how much the bookie was pressurised by the police, he would have to sack the runner (as was the fate of my Uncle Harry on at least one occasion) and quickly find another one to keep the business going. The world of gambling was very different then and people could only legally have a bet if they were at the horseracing venue at the time of the race.

This is not the only thing that was so different in Tommy’s early life compared with most people’s lives today. There were very few cars on the streets in Salford at the time and the main modes of transport for people were the trains and trams that ran throughout Salford and Manchester as they did in other main cities and towns up and down the country. To see a horse-driven cart clattering along was a common daily sight on both the main roads and the cobbled backstreets of Salford. The main roads were wide in comparison with today’s roads and often trams would travel down the centre of them. The working horses went about their business delivering various things to people’s houses and a variety of supplies to the local shops. The jobs done on a daily basis using a horse and cart included the delivery of the local papers of the day in tightly packed bundles to the newsagents as well as the delivery of milk to people’s homes. The milk was delivered in large churns placed on the back of these horse-driven carts. The driver would pull up and wait for people to come out of their houses to collect the milk. He would measure out by the pint into the jugs they brought to him. These old milk carts were a prelude to the motorised milk float that became a familiar sight to us all.

The rag-and-bone man was also a famous and common sight in old Salford then, as he has been for many people since. The rag-and-bone man had a long and established history going back many years before automotive transport was available for the masses. Because of the limited opportunity people had to travel in those days they relied greatly on the rag-and-bone man to supply some of the materials they required for daily living. You would see him riding along the backstreets of Salford, going about his business collecting, selling and exchanging worn clothing on the back of his scruffy-looking horse and cart. Before he was seen he could usually be heard shouting ‘rag-bone, rag-bone, rag-boooon’, repeating this many times over as he went about his busy trade in the inner city. The popular television sitcom programme in the 1970s, Steptoe and Son, centred on a rag-and-bone business.

In addition to collecting and selling clothing the rag-and-bone man would exchange things such as donkey stones and general household supplies for clothing. The donkey stone was a white or brown browning stone roughly the size of a bar soap, which would be used to ferociously clean the front-door stone for it to be the best in the street. Amongst the many household tasks, it was one in which many women took great pride. Those houses with the cleanest, shiniest step were making a statement to the rest of the street about that family’s self-respect and worth to the community.

This place seems so strange and distant compared to today’s standards. There were no central heating systems available in people’s homes, and no electricity or gas supply piped directly into people’s houses. All that they had were gaslights or oil lanterns to light up their homes. When Tommy was a lad there were no hot water boilers and people either had to wash in cold water or wait for water to be heated on the open fire. There was no indoor toilet and consequently going to the toilet in winter was a particular hardship. People did not have the luxury of washing machines, and the washing of clothes was done manually by hand usually by the womenfolk, in the back yards of their houses where they