Memories of Frank Yates Chapter 23

Memories of Frank Yates CHAPTER 23

After a regrouping stop at St. Nicholas at Wade, in Kent, the regiment took over the defence of the Kent Coalfield. It was a surprise, to a lot of people that such a coalfield existed. The presence of coal seams, deep under the chalk, had been discovered when preliminary borings had been taken for a prospective channel tunnel. The pits, such as Betteshanger, Tilmanstone and Eythorne, although working flat out, could not provide enough coal for the needs of Kent, and there was a net import from the Midlands.
Battery HQ was in Ramsgate and our troop took over the defence of Eythorne, with its four guns and predictors. We, Bob, John and I, occupied a very large house, in Eythorne village. The house had a double curved staircase and two enormous bedrooms, a pink one and a blue one, two reception rooms and a music room. Set in a large garden, the house was quite something!
Some influential senior officer pulled strings and got us evicted from the house, which he annexed for his own use. We were relegated to a disused public house in the colliery housing estate. It was tiny, smaller than the average terrace house, and a real come down from Eythorne House, although closer to the pit. Bob was swapped for a Capt. Smith. During our stay at Eythorne, I went off by train, from Shepherdswell station, for a day out in Canterbury and a visit to the “flicks” and I gave a talk to the colliery Home Guard on aircraft recognition. They were a much more competent bunch than “Dads’ Army and looked at my silhouette posters as though interested! They actually did become interested when I told them that the Germans were using several JU 88’s, on the Eastern front as brothels, flying comforts to the Wehrmacht
. During the Eythorne, period, Major Boulton fixed up a visit for us and for the chaps at Betteshanger to pay a visit to see the rail mounted naval guns, parked in tunnels, and occasionally run out to fire a few enormous 12 in. shells across the channel.
The CO of the battery refused our request to poop one off, because the locals had just had their broken windows replaced, after the last effort!
We followed the usual routine, spending a large part of each day visiting the gun sites, all within the colliery perimeter, but still needing quite a long time on the bike. Occasionally I would enjoy a “Thrash” to Ramsgate, to BHQ. The road, through Sandwich, was good and empty and I could do my impression of a “T.T.” rider!
Religion reared its head in Eythorne, on two occasions; I attended morning service at Eythorne Church, and helped to swell the meagre congregation. The Vicar reciprocated by inviting me to tea, where, for the only time in my life, I ate quince jam, made by the Vicar’s wife, from their quince tree. Not bad.
.Bill Smith was on leave, when I set out with my haversack full of money and the necessary list to pay the men on the gun sites. Site no. two was on the top of a slag heap, approached by driving round to the back of the heap, then climbing a gentle slope to the hut and the gun pit, situated at the front, with a steep slope down to ground level. When I arrived there was a small crowd at the bottom of the steep slope, an ambulance, the pit manager’s car and an air of chaos.
I found out from the sergeant what had happened. Several of the gunners had been gleaning the slag heap for small bits of coal, to supplement the meagre fuel ration when the lance bombardier, whose name was, I think, Atkins, had lost his footing on the steep slope, and whilst sliding, unable to stop, had reached out for something to stop his slide. Catastrophically, it was the high tension, overhead power line feed to the colliery. There was a blue flash and a bang and the poor lad was rolled into an unconscious ball and thrown to the bottom. They were putting him into the ambulance as I arrived and I noticed that his wristwatch was sunken into his blackened wrist and that the hand was a kind of combination of woollen glove and flesh. His boots were charred, still smoking, and the soles had come away from the uppers.
The ambulance sped off to hospital, and I dashed back to the pub to inform Battery HQ and went back to the gun site to wait for major Boulton and continue the pay parade. When he arrived, he got the story from the sergeant, and pointed out that the confines of the gun site were clearly marked and gleaning coal outside these boundaries probably constituted trespass. I was daft enough to suggest that we could concoct a story about our men being in the danger zone because they were doing the daily gun/ predictor line up drill. He, rightly, tore me off a large strip, in his bank manager mode and pointed out, forcibly, that the absolute truth would be told. He also explained that the Army, the colliery owners, and the Electricity Board might be involved in legal proceedings, and so the facts must be correct.
A week later the sergeant and I were summoned to a Court of Enquiry at Regimental HQ, at Ashford. We were driven in a battery jeep, the driver complaining that it was a very poor example. On arriving at RHQ, I discovered that the parking brake had been on for the whole journey. Unusually the parking brake, on a jeep is a friction band which grips the propeller shaft, and if the brake is left on, the big engine overrides it and the vehicle can be driven away. Very few jeeps had a useful hand brake.
After the Court, attended by a lawyer, in a wig and gown, from the Judge Advocate’s Department, I was sent for by the colonel, who had lately taken over from Col. Mitchell. I wondered what I had done wrong. He chatted a bit then asked me for my officer’s book, which is always carried and is a record of service and inoculations and such. He wrote in it, that according to War Office Directive so and so, I was now a Full lieutenant. I was naturally pleased as it made an improvement in status, not to mention pay.
The poor chap who diced with 22,000 volts survived, he lost his left forearm. He received a disability pension and went home to Leeds.
One of the results of the Court of Enquiry was that the person, who shouldered the blame and was severely reprimanded, was Bill Smith, my troop commander. He was on leave at the time!! The Army reasoned that he should have seen the prospective danger and issued orders forbidding anyone from the slag heap. Considering that Bill had only been in charge for a week before going on leave, and that the gun site had been there for years without anyone seeing any danger, it was patently unjust.
I went on leave about this time, September 1943, and Peggy and I fixed a date for our wedding, I suppose that it might be nearer the truth to say that Peggy decided that we ought to marry on my next leave and I agreed. This would be in December and she would make tentative arrangements pending my fixing a definite date for my next leave. Brother Don was in India, where I would have been had I stayed in the same unit in 1939. Brother Len took me to meet his Home guard unit, in which he had a commission. I went with him to Wessington, where his firm mined ganister and stored their coal reserves. He had acquired a Remington .22 repeating rifle and permission from the farmer to shoot rabbits for the pot. I suppose that it would be much easier with a shot gun!
I took the opportunity to ask Len if he would be my Best Man and he was kind enough to agree.
When I got back to Kent, the troop had left Eythorne and moved into billets in Sandwich, I was back with Bob and John and we had a very comfortable house, by the little river Stour, The ancient Cinque Port is very picturesque and a most pleasant spot. We worked out a training programme for the men, who were hardly overworked. We received a strange weapon called a PIAT (Projector, Infantry, Anti Tank), together with a little instruction booklet. Major Boulton delivered the thing and said that he would come along on the next day to watch my demonstration. It was a 40 inch long steel tube, with two fold down footrests, inside was a spring loaded piston with two folding handles. You stood on the footrests, bent over, got hold of the handles and pulled them up their slots, compressing the fearsome spring until it engaged in a catch. The large (Dummy) bomb was slid into the tube and the whole thing pointed at an enemy tank, using two handgrips. On pulling the trigger, the bomb was projected forwards at high speed and the firer pushed backwards. The weight of the weapon and the strength needed to cock the spring and the nerve needed to get near a tank made it an excellent weapon for Superman! Anyway the demonstration went well and the troops thought that I was an expert, and all had a go at cocking the spring. Major Boulton managed to cock it, but I thought that his glasses steamed up a bit!
The Army loved organising courses and a lot of people enjoyed the cushy life, running them. Whenever details of a course arrived, it seemed that my name was the first to be thought of. Off I went on a Royal Artillery mechanical transport course at Rhyl. As it turned out, I enjoyed the month’s course. On signing into the hotel, in which we were accommodated, the ATS. Girl receptionist asked me for half a crown, being the month’s temporary subscription to the “Shanghai Club”, the only place in which a drink could be obtained on a Sunday or after 10 o’clock on a weekday. As it turned out we tended to use the club all the time not just on Sundays. Apart from the military, the main customers were the Liverpool Repertory Company, evacuated to the seafront theatre in Rhyl. An ever present at the bar was a chap called Noel Johnson, who after the war became “Dick Barton, Special Agent”, an immensely popular radio serial, broadcast every day. The company was very good, equally as good at acting, as drinking. I well remember seeing the chilling “Night Must Fall” and the entertaining “Ghost Train”.
The course was very good, we did a lot of classroom work, about engines and how they worked, we rode motor bikes up and down Welsh mountains, we were instructed how to get off a bike at 30 mph, we rode them down the beds of streams, we stopped and removed and replaced tyres.
We had driving instruction on Bedford lorries. I had problems, because, apart from half an hour of driving a 15 cwt. truck at Topcliffe, two years before, I had never driven a four wheeled vehicle
A lot of time was spent in learning how to diagnose engine faults. When we stopped for coffee during our sessions with the trucks, we knew, that, when we got back into the truck, it would fail to start and that the faults would progressively be harder to find! The drill was to unscrew the “banjo” petrol pipe union to the carburettor, making sure that petrol was delivered when the engine was turned On getting no fuel, I knew that the fault must lie between the tank and the engine and spent a lot of time under the truck looking for the blockage, before realising that such a fault had never been discussed and so I went back to the carburettor union and found that the “banjo” union had been specially made out of SOLID brass! Much satisfaction from the devious instructors! On another occasion, there was fuel available, so the next stage was to insert a lamp bulb into the circuit between the coil and distributor low voltage terminals. The bulb should go on and off as the engine turned. It didn’t. The ingenious jokers had put a tiny scrap of cigarette paper between the contact breaker points!
The great joke day came after lunch one day when we reported to the swimming pool car park, ready for a spot of lorry driving. It looked like being a nice afternoon, after a wet morning, spent in the classroom. The Bedford was waiting, tailboard down, engine idling, ready for the trip out to the quiet roads used for driving instruction. One of our chirpy sergeants said “Hop on board, gentlemen” As soon as we put a hand on the truck we received a considerable, rhythmic, electrical shock and “stuck” to the damp vehicle. After quickly turning off the ignition, the comedians lifted the bonnet and showed us the arrangement. They had connected a wire, from one of the spark plugs, down into a puddle, over which they had positioned the truck. The damp asphalt and our damp shoes completed the circuit, through us, to the lorry “earth”, the big rubber tyres insulating the vehicle. After the sergeants had stopped rolling about with glee, they suggested that we could not have had a better demonstration of the working of an ignition circuit! They were right!
When I got back to Sandwich, Major Boulton gathered all the available officers and I had to give them a talk on fault finding!

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