Yeomen of England

by Ken Tout

  It is difficult to recreate the atmosphere of 1940 in Britain. The government launched campaigns to warn about possible enemy spies, whilst loudly proclaiming the incarceration of a multitude of suspect enemy aliens. Posters screamed ‘Walls have ears’ or ‘Be like Dad, keep Mum!’ Signposts and name plates were removed from roads and railway stations. Campanologists were preparing to ring the alarm on church bells and the code word ‘Cromwell’ was circulated as the signal that the enemy had landed. Indeed, rumour had it that some enemy troops had actually come ashore and been consumed in an oily fire. Post-war research has denied that story, but a Pioneer Corps man showed patrolling Reg Spittles a handful of German tunic buttons from bodies which his unit had buried by the beach after an abortive landing. Whom to believe?

  As with the 1794 Yeomanry, Britain now formed a Home Guard of part-time volunteers to guard the homeland. One of the first volunteers in Northampton was George Dixon, the 1914–18 diarist. Johnny Howell, 17 years old and later a 1NY trooper, proudly wore his LDV armband as he guarded a railway arch in Dorset. He was not too impressed by their secret weapon, a 40-gallon drum filled with inflammable liquid which they were to spray via a hand pump on to approaching German tanks. True to Yeomanry tradition, the Yorkshire County Hunt volunteered to bring their horses to Home Guard service in order to spot German parachutists, calling themselves ‘The Parashots’, according to the Daily Sketch.

  Bill Moseley, a Northants Yeoman on a course at Bovington, was paraded with several other students and told to man a venerable relic, an experimental tank called the ‘Independent’, stored in what would become the famous Bovington Tank Museum. It had a huge engine which needed six men to start it. It boasted five turrets but with nothing larger than machine guns. And fatally, even once its engine had been bullied into starting, it could not be made to move. It was towed down to the cliffs above Lulworth and set up as an extempore fort, where Bill was appointed signaller. His contact was an officer on an opposite cliff. There was no wireless, so the officer had a heliograph with which, if the sun was up and in the right direction, he could send da-dit-dit-dit / dit-dah-dit / dah-dah-dah, / etc. to spell Cromwell.

  At the highest level of government there was concern as to what would happen if the Germans reached London with the king still at Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle. And what about the beloved queen and princesses? The king was persuaded that, at a certain point, he must go to Canada which had vowed to fight on after the demise of the mother country. The King’s Company of the Grenadier Guards could protect the royal family in their palaces, but what would happen en route between Windsor and the port of departure in Liverpool, given the possibility of enemy infiltrators?

  Lieutenant Colonel Prior Palmer of 2NY was instructed to select a subaltern of impeccable manners and utmost efficiency, together with a troop of cars manned by NCOs and troopers of a similar character, for a top-secret mission, code-named ‘COATS’. The instructions were so precise and imperative that Prior Palmer was able to make an educated guess as to what was afoot. He selected Lieutenant M.J.M. Humblecroft and suitable crews for four Guy ‘wheeled tanks’. Heading to an anonymous rendezvous and being redirected, the troop found itself entering Windsor Castle. There they were teamed up with a similar troop of the 12th Lancers (Lieutenant Morris) and a company of the Coldstream Guards under a Lieutenant Ian Liddell, who later in the war died whilst winning the Victoria Cross. The group was commanded by Major Jimmy Coats, hence the name of the mission.

  The king called the tiny convoy ‘my private army’. Two armoured cars of each troop would be fitted with comfortable seats in the turret, while the other two cars would be munitioned to battle standard. The Lancers would carry the king, or if he refused to go at that juncture, the queen and aides, and the NY cars would carry the two princesses. So for a time Lieutenant Humblecroft, Sergeant Paul Curtis and crews had the delight of driving Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose around Windsor on test exercises. Fortunately the Coats mission was never needed as the Germans were defeated in the Battle of Britain and the invasion was postponed indefinitely on 17 September 1940. It is not thought that the gunners in the two adapted NY cars were allowed to retain the comfortable chairs designed for the princesses.

  Other men or small groups were suddenly despatched to various sideshows of the greater strategic war. Six NY men including Trooper Tom Cooper, later a lieutenant, were attached to a reconnaissance and signals unit (with an ‘independent company’, later commando) ‘somewhere in England’, put aboard the Ulster Princess at Leith and, on Whit Monday 1940, found themselves going ashore in Norway at Bodo, ‘a beautiful small fishing port with coloured wooden houses set on stone foundations’. The group was known as ‘The Scissors’, placed between two larger British landings, an abortive expedition intended to prevent the Germans from taking over Norway. Tom Cooper reflected:

  We were housed at first in a large red barn which contained the rear HQ wireless link back to London. We were issued with French police Mauser pistols, American gangster type ‘Tommy guns’ and, more important, warm wool-lined parkas. We had no sooner reached the forward HQ than the army withdrew. L/Cpl Crippin found an abandoned motor cycle and that saved our boots on the journey back to Bodo. During our absence beautiful Bodo had been bombed completely and only the stone foundations of the wooden houses remained. We embarked on a destroyer whose superstructure was badly chopped about. Travelled to the island of Harstad. We were transhipped in mid ocean to the Lancastria. And eventually arrived back in Gourrock. After a short period in Arisaig and Lochailort we moved to Lands End, England with a zone including the Scillies before I was sent back to the NY.

  After his purposeless adventure in an abortive trek around remote northern locations, Tom Cooper might have thought that the war had given him enough surprises. He was not to know that, after being commissioned, he would eventually be attached to the Madras Guards.

  From within the two NY regiments, as the threat of invasion receded, trained men were now being despatched to the Middle and Near East where other Yeomanry regiments, horsed or motorised, were already in action. Officers in particular arrived and, after a day or a week or a month, departed usually to unknown destinations overseas. Over about two years the NY contributed more than sixty officers to the Middle East war, a number in excess of its own total officer strength, and ORs were similarly drafted in considerable numbers. Territorials like George Jelley, Reg Spittles, Sandy Saunders and Jack Aris, and early arrivals like Fred Leary, formed a continuing firm spine of experience and tradition. In effect all soldiers from all types of recruitment were now ‘regulars’. They watched and waited as Reg remembers:

  Of course we were unhappy to lose good mates. One day you would be soldiering with someone and tripping over them in the tent, and the next day they were packing up and disappearing for ever, almost without notice. Some officers you never even learned their names. I was happy not to be sent as I was arranging to get married. Of course we had joined up to fight for our country and wanted to do something more than just training and drilling. But we knew that at some time our turn would come and, in any case, until that day there was not very much you could do about it, knowing so little about what was really going on.

  One of the most unusual assignments involved Sergeant Reg King (later MM) also of 2NY, who was ordered to go home and fetch his civilian clothes. On call up as a Territorial he had been promoted three times in quick succession, ‘the blind leading the blind’ as he says, and his first sergeant’s task was to mark out bed spaces for an entire regiment on the floor of Northampton Drill Hall. He was then sent on a promotion course to the Guards Depot at Caterham and promoted again to warrant officer grade 3 (WOIII). Within a short time the War Office abolished that rank and that of troop sergeant major, so Reg reverted to troop sergeant and was sent home for his clothes:

  40 sergeants, WO’s and officers were, under great secrecy, kitted out with civilian clothes, issued with passports as British Government empl
oyees and sent up to the Clyde, on a troop ship full of RAF going to CANADA for flying training. I was in a group with Maj Peter Grant (1NY), Capt R.H. Courage (2NY), Capt John Profumo (1NY), Capt Robinson (15/19th Lancers), a captain from 2RGH and 2 from 2RTR. We went to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where we at last learned what we were to do. We went by train to Washington, DC, and ultimately to Fort Knox, Kentucky, USA to tell the Americans what kind of Armoured Fighting Vehicle would suit the British Army, under the Lease/Lend Act. The fact is: we were largely responsible for helping the Americans (who had no recent experience of tank warfare) to arrive at the final SHERMAN TANK design. We then went back to Camp Borden, Ontario, Canada to help train instructors on the tanks and guns that would come from the USA. Then eventually back to Blighty.

  Meanwhile, away in the Middle East, the reign of the horsed Yeoman was coming to a gradual end. If King George III had needed 10,000 horses to defend his kingdom, King George VI needed none in the front line. Even up to 1941 Yeomanry regiments had rendered good service while horsed in wide, open regions against scattered foes. Now the command came to hand in their cherished horses and learn the mysteries of battle while riding noisy machines powered by the internal combustion engine. It was 1942 before the proud Cheshire Yeomanry dismounted and had imposed on them the prosaic title of 5th Lines of Communications Signals Regiment. Did they remember that one of their officers, the Duke of Westminster, adapted the prototype of the Rolls-Royce armoured car at his own expense in 1914?

  The two NY regiments were still brigaded together with 2RGH and shared many common experiences of training in larger formations on ‘schemes’. Much of the routine was still on a peacetime basis and the extent of ‘bullshit’ depended on the colonel. The 2NY found popular Prior Palmer promoted and a new colonel, D.A.R.B. Cooke, a traditional cavalryman, in charge. In Reg Spittles’ words, the new colonel’s philosophy was ‘if it moves shoot it. If it doesn’t move, paint it.’ Sandy Saunders was astonished to be told to polish the ‘unpolishable’ gunmetal buttons on his greatcoat. Fred Leary gradually adapted to the routine:

  Very often the four squadrons camped apart within a radius of about three miles. A few times we would all be in one camp such as Ogbourne [Wiltshire] or Beverley. At these times there would be a twenty-four hour guard, known as a ‘quarter guard’. The guard was mounted at 09.00 hours with a certain amount of ceremony. The officer of the day would inspect the thirteen men of the new guard. Why thirteen men? Because the ‘best turned out man’, in the officer’s opinion, would be given the ‘stick’, not on his hand as in school days, but a ‘swagger stick’. Meaning he could run a few errands for the RSM and finish his duty at 12.00 hours. The rest of the men would be on duty until 09.00 next morning. So it was worth a bit of effort to win ‘stick man’. Not so easy if your only way of creasing trousers was laying them out under your bedding on the ground and sleeping on them overnight.6

  At this time the army was calling up 18-year-old men to be given initial training and be posted to various military tasks, many of them becoming the tank crews for the D-Day campaign and thereafter, often commanded by the old Territorials as NCOs. No real choice was offered on registering for call up and the boy might be directed to navy, army, air force or even to compulsory work down a coal mine, also known as the ‘Bevin Boys’. Once within the army the choice was again limited. When Stan Hicken was asked what regiment he would like to join he replied: ‘The Warwickshire Yeomanry’ (his home unit). He was told: ‘They are overseas and you are too young to go overseas’ and was sent to the Northants. At first Stan’s ideas about the army were rather naïve and he would soon learn that the old attitudes died fast:

  Roy Gadsby and I had been selected by our squadron leader as potential officers, so one day we were sent for an interview. I went in first and there was this purple-faced major (not NY) sitting there and he was quite insulting. The first thing he asked me was ‘Do you ride a horse?’ So I said I could but I didn’t much care for it. He said, ‘Oh! So your father’s a stationmaster, isn’t he?’ I said ‘No, he’s a special relief man – does any job, including stationmaster’. The officer replied ‘So if you ran up a mess bill and couldn’t pay it, would he be in a position to pay it for you?’ I felt he was just out to insult my father. That didn’t go down well with me. And obviously I didn’t go down well with him. I heard no more about being an officer.7

  In October 1942 in the Western Desert the crucial Second Battle of El Alamein took place and several Yeomanry units revealed that they were fit to stand with the best of regular units. An old Yeomanry cavalry brigade had now become the 8th Armoured Brigade, with their horses exchanged for Crusader, Grant and Sherman tanks. These were crewed by the Sherwood Rangers (Notts Yeomanry), Staffordshire Yeomanry and an RTR battalion with the Kent Yeomanry as artillery. Similarly, the 9th Armoured Brigade had the Royal Wilts and Warwickshires now in tanks, joined by the 3rd Hussars with the Middlesex Yeomanry in a signals role. In advancing against elite enemy troops like the 15th and 21st Panzers, the brigades performed heroically, suffering considerable casualties but launching the great advance through Benghazi and Tripoli and eventually on to Sicily and mainland Italy.

  In England the pleasant association of the two Northants regiments with their Gloucester comrades was about to end. Planning was continuing for a ‘Second Front’ landing in France to relieve the Russians who were under tremendous pressure on the Eastern Front. The three regiments were still stationed in adjacent locations near the Marlborough Downs. The 2NY had become notable for the ‘shoot it or paint it’ regime of Lieutenant Colonel Cooke, not always popular with the men who had to paint the same stones time and time again. There were universal plaudits, therefore, for the lorry driver who managed to crash into the highly decorated sentry box, smashing it to pieces and scattering some of the colonel’s sacred stones. The lorry driver subsequently learned new and colourful terms of endearment.

  Whilst the First and Second NY Lines, Siamese twins until now, prepared to separate and differentiate, a 4th Northamptonshire Yeomanry was suddenly and quietly invented. Throughout the war British tactics had included a considerable input of deception, misleading the enemy as to future intentions. A deception officer named David Strangeways was told to convince Turkey that the Allies had forces in nearby Iraq, the purpose being to keep Turkey from joining Germany in the war. With a few operators and two radio sets he simulated an entire regimental programme of messages from his fictional 4NY close to the border, on which the Turks could eavesdrop. Strangeways later invented ‘the man who never was’, an officer’s body floated ashore in Spain. The 1NY’s Sergeant Dick ‘Bandy’ Spicer would himself be posted to a similar deception unit in preparation for D-Day 1944.

  The question of the ‘Second Front’ was now looming high in the thoughts of both the high commanders and the troopers. Lieutenant Colonel W. A. Howkins, NY, had been disappointed to be medically downgraded due to a serious hearing problem. After various promotions he was appointed Secretary to the Joint Planning Staff of Britain and America, and in this capacity attended and did much of the organising of the Casablanca Conference. There Roosevelt and Churchill, in the absence of Stalin who was supervising the critical Stalingrad battle, decided that the Second Front would not take place in the summer of 1943 but in 1944. Thereafter sent to Washington, one important element of Howkins’ role was to plan the way in which civil affairs would be handled by the military as the armies advanced into enemy countries.

  At a far more humble level, the residents of quiet Stow-cum-Quy village near Cambridge were awakened by something like a tropical storm: thundering engines, flashing backfires and huge clouds of dust along a narrow lane. The 2NY had arrived with their new heavier tanks, Valentines and Matildas, which replaced the lighter vehicles of YAD days. Arnold Morley, 8 years old at the time and like little Bertie Taylor forty years earlier, decided that these new machines must be investigated. Borrowing an old wheelbarrow, Arnold and pal Jimmy Taylor approached the NY sentry and demanded ci
tizens’ rights to collect old newspapers for the war salvage effort. This was referred to the corporal of the guard and on to more eminent authorities, such as RSM Kenward. Like Bertie of old, Arnold and Jimmy got their contract to collect old newspapers daily, with suitable bonuses whenever passing the cookhouse.

  Despite not directly confronting the enemy, life around tanks could be dangerous at times. Just before Christmas 1942 1NY went to 75mm cannon practice at Linney Head ranges, on the historic Castlemartin Yeomanry preserves. Lieutenant Godby commanded one of the tanks where a corporal, acting as gun loader, somehow caught his wedding ring in the open gun mechanism and the shell jammed. Before any misfire action could be taken the shell exploded, blowing off the loader’s hand. The full impact of the explosion caught the lieutenant who was killed instantaneously. In another accident, on a very steep hill in Gloucester, the brakes of a tank suddenly failed. It ran down the incline, knocking over and killing two men, Trooper Len Webb and Lance Corporal Charles Doger de Speville, the latter being a barrister-at-law who had come from the Seychelles to join up and was awaiting a commission. The two NY lines lost seventeen men in England due to accidents or exposure-related illnesses.

  Such pre-battle losses may have encouraged several NY colonels and majors to assemble at the Ritz Hotel, London, in 1943, not for convivial purposes, but to discuss extending the 1930s Old Comrades Association into a new trust to care for soldiers of the current war. The Earl Spencer of the day took the chair and much discussion centred on whether such provision should be available only for those who fought wearing the regimental badge, or whether it might include the considerable number of men who passed through the regiment but fought wearing other badges. In the event the crucial criterion of service in the NY ‘at any time’ won the day.