MEMORIES
My Wartime Memories by Harry Grenville - Arbeitslager 295
Some older residents may remember the area between the church and the railway line at Cattistock. This was an encampment of Nissen huts from early in the war until well into the late 1940’s. From the look of the bungalows now occupying the site it seems as if the residential use dates from some time in the 1950’s. Early occupants of the camp, as far as I can piece together, included a detachment of the Royal Sussex, an anti-aircraft battery, US troops waiting to embark for D-Day and an Italian Prisoner of War camp. When I came to the scene in September 1946 Germans had taken the place of the Italians and Cattistock camp served as headquarters for a number of subsidiary camps scattered all over the county as well as over 150 individual Germans billeted directly on farms. The purpose of No.295 PoW camp was to supply agricultural labour at a time when the bulk of our own agricultural workers had not yet been released from H.M. Forces. To the Germans it was an Arbeitslager, a work camp. The story goes that when it was opened the incoming Commanding Officer was given the choice of Cattistock and a rather more convenient site at Charminster with better road communications to the satellite camps. The Colonel chose Cattistock because the fishing was better.
The sub-camps, known as hostels, each containing between 25 and over 150 prisoners were run by NCOs, anything between a lance corporal for the tiny hostel on the hilltop between Piddletrenthide and Cerne Abbas to a senior warrent officer for Beaminster 1 and 11, situated in the grounds of Parnham House when it was pretty well derelict. When I have visited Parnham since then I have often looked for traces of the foundation of the Nissen huts but the demolition people must have done the job very well. Other hostels were a large one on Bradford down and one right in the middle of Martinstown. This was quite popular with the local population because the Germans used to lay on musical entertainments and play at village dances. Two more small hostels were at Godmanstone and the charming Yellowham Wood encampment not far from the A35 but it might as well have been in the Forest of Arden so completely was it surrounded by magnificent oaks and limes. The two remote hostels were Longburton, almost on top of Sherborne, and Burton Bradstock much sought after by Germans because you could go for a swim after work. Some enthusiasts kept this up right through the winter. I shall have more to say about the 1946/47 winter!
By late 1946 security was not taken seriously. The wartime barbed wire had been replaced by a token wire, a single strand of barbed wire about 4 inches from the ground which one simply stepped over. At first the Germans were restricted in various ways; they were forbidden “to consort with female persons, to use public transport and to enter licensed premises” in the portentous language of the War Office Prisoner of War Directorate. One by one these regulations were overtaken by events.
One group from Cattistock were taken by truck each morning to work for the County Council on the sewage scheme at Upwey. If one of them reported sick in the morning and was subsequently declared fit for work we could only get him to his gang by putting him on a train at Cattistock Halt bound for Upwey. Nobody could tell a Dorset farmer what to do, so if he wanted to take his Germans to the pub after work there was none to say no. Finally, when a Watford parish priest, in ignorance of War Office rules, married a German PoW to a north London “female person” that prohibition looked a bit deflated. We had a role call each evening at Cattistock and at the hostels, a rather relaxed affair, but we did discover an absentee one dark evening. He turned up sometime later, having walked to the top of the hill on the Frampton side of Maiden Newton to look at the street lights of Dorchester. He said he had not seen a town with the lights on for some years and he just felt like taking a look. British personnel at Cattistock belonged to a company of the Pioneer Corps and were not really top notch front-line troops, to put it kindly. Some thought it their patriotic duty to wander around of an evening to see if they could spot, and then report, a PoW in the company of a female person. In such cases the German was wheeled in before the Commandant and charged with an offence against paragraph 39 of King’s Regulations as applied to prisoners of war. This was the portmanteau formula about “good order and military discipline”. However good his English might be, the Geneva Convention demanded that the charge and all proceedings should be translated, so I often found myself mouthing my standard German phases and the reverse for all the individual’s defence. Theft was taken very seriously and always resulted in at least a week’s detention.
The post-war Labour Government was anxious to promotes a policy of demilitarisation not only in the British zone of occupation in what has now become North-Rhine-westphalia but also in the minds of individual Germans and this included prisoners of war. One of the curious results Of this was the abolition of military ranks in everyday usage. Thus the senior German, known s the camp leader was not Hauptfeldwebel Schultz but Herr Schultz and so on right down the line. Despite my best efforts I could not reverse the process: all the clerks in my interpreter’s office insisted on addressing me as Herr Leutnant and when in due course I required a second pip on my shoulder, as Herr Oberleutnant.
The PoW directorate at the War Office put a great effort into political re-education. This took several forms. One was the publication and wide distribution of a booklet called Leitfaden zur Staatsbuergerkunde (Guide to Citizenship.) I still have a copy and it is pretty heavy going –very earnest. The wonder is that any PoWs actually read it. But they did. I think they were beginning to realise that they had been brain washed and many genuinely wanted to find out more about how western democracies worked. Some of the older ones could remember the Weimar republic and wanted to refresh their memories. Another thread in the re-education tapestry was Wilton Park, a country house in Berkshire run by the Foreign office. Here selected PoW’s attended 4-week courses to equip them with the intellectual resources to lead the re-education effort in the camps. I hit upon an excellent choice ( perhaps influenced by some of the senior people in the camp leader’s circle ) by sending a bright young man called fritz Berndt who came back full of ideas. He started courses in political education at Cattistock and in the hostels and edited a very good monthly magazine called Aufbau ( roughly translated as reconstruction.) I still have some copies and marvel at the effort that must have gone into typing up 25 pages every month and turning out probably 100- 150 copies on a creaky old Gestetner. There were worthy articles on politics, history, philosophy but also reviews of concerts and plays put on by the hostels, crossword puzzles and descriptions of some of the day-to-day activities at Cattistock such as the bakery staffed by the Germans or the workshop which kept the Army trucks running between the hostels. I remember one of the miscellaneous puzzles; “I don’t disagree with the opponents of anti-vegetarianism.” Q. Does he eat meat? The third strand in the re-education programme was the provision of outside lectures. This was done by the Foreign Office department run by an off-the-scale attractive young woman called Miss Stern whom I met once or twice in London. She sent MP’s, trade unionists, business people and even a Swiss secondary school teacher to explain the Swiss system of government. Many of the speakers were fluent enough in German, some I interpreted for and some carried on just in English in the hope that they would be understood. A lively interest was taken in English classes. Some were run by the linguists among the Germans themselves and some by an education Corps sergeant from Dorchester Barracks who thought that a good way of teaching English was to explain the finer points of cricket. It worked too!
The Foreign Office also undertook to attach political gradings to PoW’s. A civil servant called Mr. Bloxham occasionally visited and conducted 10–15 minute interviews in which he tried to assess the extent to which an individual had been affected by Nazi–ism. There were certain organisations which were pretty harmless such as the overall trade union with which the Nazi’s had replaced individual unions. Almost everyone belonged to this. If you were a member of the Waffen-SS your date of joining was important. After some time in 1944 they took Conscripts, before that only volunteers, so you had to be pretty committed and that counted against you. There was an element of bluff in all this: we had to pretend that we had everybody’s complete record of service which would be checked. Mr Bloxham was good at detecting liars and he insisted that I sat in on interviews and eventually conducted some of my own. At one point he said that I could finish the process on my own and he wouldn’t need to come again. I protested that I needed some more formal training but apparently this system of apprenticeship was the norm. In fact I was sent off to do 250 interviews in a German working company attached to the Armoured Corps at Lulworth. Their Officer’s Mess was in a different world to our little Cattistock establishment in terms of comfort, so I quite enjoyed my 3 weekends there. The political gradings were B+, B, and B- for the politically neutral of various hues, by far the majority. They were repatriated strictly in order of date of capture. A+ and A were people who were judged to be “reliable, potentially democratic, persons” who could be expected to take a leading part in the reconstruction of the eventual German state. They received some priority in date of repatriation. Cs were unrepentant Nazis who were isolated in a camp in Caithness and subjected to intensive counter propaganda. I discovered two Cs at Lulworth and duly had them transferred. They turned out to be Yugoslavs, probably Croats, which makes recent events in the Balkans more easily understood. Just before the camp closed down a procedure called civilianisation made its appearance. This resulted in PoWs who could show that they had paid employment and somewhere to live and did not want to be repatriated to be released in this country. The bureaucracy was quite horrendous; one of the German clerks and I would literally be filling in forms for an entire day: Home Office Aliens Department, Police, Ministry of Labour and our own dear War Office to name but a few.
The main logistical problem at Cattistock was to keep in touch with the hostels. A small fleet of Bedford 3- tonners, driven by PoWs distributed rations, fuel, blankets, furniture and transferred prisoners from hostel to hostel when necessary or working parties at farms. Sick parade could only be at Cattistock where there was a little camp hospital and a German doctor. You would have to be very ill indeed to be spared a journey to Cattistock in the back of a 3- tonner. No wonder the health record was good. I had to visit each hostel at least once a week and individual billetees on farms once a month to act as a kind of welfare officer in case there were any problems.
There often were, in particular former inhabitants of Russian occupation zone that had difficulty hearing from their families and could not send food parcels at all. An offshoot of the NAFFI ran a sort of camp canteen where tobacco could be bought, also strictly rationed chocolate, tins of Nescafe (valuable currency in post-war Germany), shoe polish ( ditto )and many other goods. The currency was “camp money “, rather crudely printed vouchers for various sums. I had to carry supplies of this paper money to the hostels and billetee’s because of course the Geneva Convention demands that prisoners of war must be paid for any civilian work they do. My transport was a 350cc army Matchless motor bike because I could not hang around about waiting for the ration truck to unload or to keep it waiting for me. In 1946/47 this was far from funny. Some will remember that snow was a severe problem from mid- January to well into March. On many occasions I carried a shovel on the back of the bike to dig out snowdrifts. Our relations with the great Western Railway were very good; they had to be because Maiden Newton station was the arrival point for sometimes quite large contingents of PoWs from other camps which were closing down and other groups travelled to base camps in readiness for repatriation. Incidentally, all these movement orders came in the post, signed by J.W.Hackett Lt. Col., G.S.O.111, South West District Taunton. He was to become General Sir John Hackett, Chief of the Defence Staff.
Nowadays I sometimes wonder about the Geneva Convention. It is quite clear that repatriation of prisoners of war should be undertaken as soon as possible after the signing of a peace treaty between the former belligerents. No such treaty has ever been signed because there was no such thing as a German state at the end of the war and when eventually there were two the Russians would not sign while West Germany existed. Strictly, therefore, we could have kept the PoWs indefinitely. Most of them would by now be even more elderly gentlemen than I am.
Bobs memories of World War II
Bob was born in 1924, the family lived in a dwelling on Cattistock Hill, only the remains still exist. The family moved to Maiden Newton when Bob was six years old. The family lived at 7 Cattistock Road and kept geese and chickens in a field opposite their home. This is currently the area occupied by the bus shelter and an area in front of the flats of Webbers Piece. Bob attended the village school and recalls the children tending gardens in what is now Canon’s Gardens. There were woodwork lessons for boys in Cromwell Hall, which is now a private residence. The girls had cookery lessons in the old village hall. Bob left school at 14 years old and went to work for Cox and Hill who were builders, their number of employees dwindled because of the war, so Bob also worked with Bob Nobbs whose father F.W.Nobbs was an undertaker.
There were dances at the old milk factory, in the large cheese room on the first floor. Dances were also held at that time in the village hall, which was the area above the current hardware shop. Bob was in the church choir, led by Arthur “Skip” Squires and also used to help pump the church organ. He remembers Skip, who kept dairy cows, he went around dishing out milk to villagers. There was also a dairy, run by the Mearns family, this was opposite the present War Memorial. Johnnie Bishop used to live in Dorchester Road and Bob recalls that he would recharge radio batteries for 1/6d (old money) and accumulators for 6d. He remembers Harry Nobbs owning the paper shop and George Nobbs who was an engineer at the milk factory.
When Bob was 16 years old he became a member of the Home Guard as a messenger and would spend every 3rd night sleeping at an observation post up on Norden Hill.
He also trained as a machine gunner and alongside Harold Trump they guarded a position in Frome Vauchurch, now opposite ”Sunnyside “, there were barrage balloons there in position to deter low flying aircraft.
When Bob was 18 years old he was called up and joined the Navy as a Radar operator. He had to use his travel warrant to travel to North Wales for his training at HMS Glendower. Bob spent most of his active service on the destroyer HMS Brilliant as a radar operator, he saw active service in Gibraltar, The Atlantic, Alexandria, and Casablanca. When stationed in Algiers he was able to meet up for a short time, with his cousin Cyril Read. They never met again and Bob believes Cyril was lost at sea, as he was serving on the Cruiser Penelope, which was sunk off Angio.
At one time when Bob’s ship docked at Portsmouth he was granted leave, no one knew about this and he just turned up at home, this was a very emotional time for Bob and all his family.
Bob’s saddest memory was being part of the escort for the HMS Leopoldville, a ship carrying many American troops, some of whom were from Piddlehinton Camp. The ship was torpedoed and 802 people were lost, Bob was involved in the recovery operation. In 2004 he was invited to attend a service at Piddlehinton Camp to plant trees in memory of those who lost their lives on the HMS Leopoldville. Fortunately Bob was on leave for VE and VJ Day and he remembers the celebrations around the ancient Cross at the centre of the village. The local W.I. gave a fountain pen to all the local servicemen, when the war was over.
Bob was demobbed in 1946 and returned to work in the building trade. In 1948 he began working for Webb and Ford and stayed there for 41 years until retirement. Bob married Doris Mentern in 1949, they lived locally and raised their three children here. Bob still lives in Maiden Newton.
Ann Tuck - Wartime memories
Ann came to live in Maiden Newton in 1940. Her father, Fred Reynolds was already in the area working on building the BBC radio station at Rampisham, where he was Chief Rigger. The family originally lived in Daventry, but after the bombing of Coventry, Ann and her mother joined her father in Maiden Newton when Ann was 5 years old. On Christmas Day Ann’s dad had to be at work at the Radio Station for 7.30 am in order to make sure everything was in order for the transmission of the King’s speech at 3pm. Once this was over he would head for home at 3.15pm when her mum would start to cook their Christmas dinner.
Ann’s family lived in the newly built council houses, now known as Newton Road. Their house backed on to an area that was used as a camp for American troops. This area is now Stanstead Road and the camp area spread across to the village hall. Ann remembers the troops and the layout of their camp. It seems that the local people did not go hungry as rather than waste food it would be given away, and Ann remembers not being able to fully open the door of the outside toilet, as supplies would sometimes be stored in there. An army lorry was positioned at the top of their garden (on guard duty) and Ann used to sit in there and watch the activities of the camp. Vegetables were supplied from their own garden. The village had a bakers, butchers, hardware shop, corner shop, (Weston and Hardings), post office, corn shop and milk factory, they never wanted for food. Ann attended the village school, the headmaster was Mr Tremlett and the teachers Mrs Scriven who lived at 39 Dorchester Rd, Miss Lathey and Miss Allison. The children could also attend Brownies, Girl Guides, Scouts and Cubs. Ann belonged to the Brownies, run by Pauline Budden and Miss Westmacott who both lived at Chilfrome. The girl Guides were run by Mrs Patchen who lived at the Old Mill on the Dorchester Road.
The village hall was used by the troops, but occasional dances were held at Maiden Newton House.
The local ARP Centre was where Cheverels Nursing Home is now.
The rector was Canon Slemick who lived in Dorchester Road. Ann remembers him as a delightful man. When attending Confirmation classes the local children would wait for him to let someone in, wait until he had sat himself down, then the next child would knock the door and so-on, whether he realised what they were up to is not known!
Ann recalls some of the villagers who left to join the services, and can remember Dick Hardy who worked in the Corner shop,he later became a prisoner-of war. Ann’s happiest memory of this time was the celebration parties for children on VE Day and VJ Day. These parties were held in a field in Frome Lane, (first field past the current bungalows). Ann’s dad was one of the organisers, along with Mrs Wells-Furby, Bill Stone and Hedley Hayward. Obviously at this time there was much celebrating and bunting around the village. Ann also recalls bunting in the village when a local man S Chubb Snr returned home after he had been reported missing for some time.
Fred and Bill Stone also ran the local youth football team.
SADDEST MEMORY … Witnessing the bombing of Coventry
For Ann’s family the contact with the American troops did not end immediately after the war. Three of the troops used to regularly attend Sunday lunch with the family and Ann’s dad kept in touch with Horace Fisher, of the7th Armoured Division after the war, when he returned to America. After a while Ann took up the correspondence and in 1970 Horace and his wife visited England, and Ann and her husband met them at Dorchester Station. They spent time taking them to Godmanstone for the smallest pub in England, Cerne Abbas and back to lunch at the Brewery pub in Maiden Newton. On the way Horace called in to what is now Angel Autos on the Yeovil Road and found the area that had been the guard room when he had been stationed there prior to coming to Maiden Newton.
Pats Memories
Pat was born and brought up in Parkstone, she came to this area on December 16th 1947. Pat had wanted to join one of the armed forces, but she had been too young at the time and her father was reluctant to allow her to do this. Once she was old enough Pat took a day off work and along with her sister went to Dorchester, originally wanting work in a garden nursery, but eventually becoming a Land Girl and being allocated Lower Maiden Newton Farm as her place of work. Pat was issued with her uniform dungarees, hat, scarf, beige shirt, green jumper, fawn coat, fawn socks a boiler suit, shoes, Wellington boots and a form of “spats” to go over leather boots when rat catching, so that rats could not jump into the boots! The only job Pat would not do on the farm was rat catching in the barn, electing to do the milking instead! Pat was billeted with Charlie and Gladys Woodland in what is now 12 Newton Road and on her first night in the village was invited to the pub and there met her future husband, Roland. Pat came to the village when she was 18 years old, married Roland at 19 and has lived here ever since.
The Land Army issued Pat with a bike and she used to cycle to work. The farmer, Archie Parsons would occasionally play tricks on the girls. When the weather was hot, they would put their bottles of lemonade in the water trough to keep cool. He would send them on some task over the hills and when they returned he would have drunk their cool drinks and replaced them, with not so cool ones! Pat arrived to work on the farm just before Christmas 1947, she was allowed home on Christmas Eve but had to return to the farm on Boxing Day as the work had to be done, whatever the season. Although Pat was not in the village during the war she was told about the dances held in the hall above the current hardware shop and the band that included her future father-in-law Bill Elliott. Pat recalls some of the shops present at his time. Mr and Mrs House had the bakers shop. Another Mr House had a butchers shop. Mearns were coal merchants and also ran the Cornstores. There was a tailor’s shop just past the White Horse pub and there was a seamstress, Mrs Drewer-Trump in Dorchester Rd. Pat’s bridesmaids dresses were made there. On the corner of Church Road there was a dairy parlour run by the Mearns family. There was a Post Office and Ironmongers. The building,(currently Cheverels Nursing Home), was owned by the Legg family and they ran a nursery further down the Dorchester Road. By this time the station had a coal yard on the left hand side going from Bull Lane, this had a covered area with all different grades of coal stored there. The village school’s headmaster lived at 34 Dorchester Road. Pat recalls some of the local women doing the washing for the American soldiers, and sometimes they asked for blankets to make coats for themselves and their children.
Pat was still living in Parkstone at the end of the war, she worked for the brewery “Whitbreads”.One of her happiest memories is being given the day off work to join the celebrations.
A memory that is not so good is having to sniff the bottles that Whitbreads supplied to the navy. Once they had been used to drink from they were frequently used as urinals and the sailors took delight in watching the girls having to sort out the beer bottles on return to shore!
Pat has spent the rest of her life in Maiden Newton, from her current home she can see the house she was originally billeted in and another house where her own children were raised is nearby.
Wartime memories at Maiden Newton - George Greening
I first arrived in Maiden Newton in 1942 as a four year old, and stayed for three years until wars end. I was staying with Mr and Mrs Russel, my great Aunt Annie and Uncle Russel, in the corner cottage of Dorchester Road and Frome Lane. The cottage looks much the same now on the outside as it did then except the front door may have been moved a little. I have not been inside the cottage since 1948 and assume the interior has been completely renovated and modernised.
Until 1945 there was only oil lamps to eat and read by on the dark winter evenings. Electricity was installed in 1945. All hot meals were cooked on a cast iron range fired by logs. The kitchen had the old heavy china sink and cold water tap. Baths were taken in a tin bath on the kitchen floor. The toilet was a wooden seat over a pit at the end of a long corrugated roofed shed, some way from the back door.
It was mostly a happy time. My uncle ran a 1937 Austin 7 which he drove daily to Dorchester to work and made the occasional family Sunday afternoon trip. He also preached as a Methodist lay preacher in various chapels around the local area. I remember a red brick chapel on the way to Frampton, where he thumped the pulpit and spoke loudly to the congregation. This manner was most unlike his normal quiet friendly self. If this chapel is not just a figment of my imagination, it is not standing there today. My aunt was a happy friendly person and well known among the neighbours. She took me a couple of times on a day trip to Bridport mostly to buy shoes, on a yellow two carriaged streamlined train. It seemed very modern for its day. They both moved to Sydling St. Nicholas to retire around 1950.
My closest friend at that time was my next door neighbour. Her name was Rita but I have not seen her since I left the village. She saved me from many a telling off by not telling tales.
I attended the old school for infants and remember sitting with other children in what seemed a large room being taught by a pretty young teacher. Alas, I cannot recall her name. I also vaguely recall several skirmishes in the playground with the youngest of many brothers belonging to a family called Chubb.
The most indelibly stamped memories are those of the American soldiers billeted in the village. Also my first sighting of a German. Some German POWs were exercised in pairs with a single guard down the Dorchester Road in view of everyone. For me at such an age, these were exciting times. I was lucky being acquainted with several soldiers who showered me with all the goodies that they had so many of. Besides the chocolate bars and the chewing gum, I was given various presents, including a pair of genuine Texan cowboy spurs and bullwhip. There seems to have been regular knocks on the door with soldiers asking if I would like a ride in a Jeep or truck. Of course these invitations were often accepted. Their kindness so impressed me that I have never lost my affection for Americans ever since.
The saddest day of this time was when in 1944 the troops were leaving the village to assemble for the D Day landings. There was a long loud procession of tanks and trucks rolling down Dorchester Road. It was lined with men, women and children shouting, crying and laughing. I was catching the goodies being thrown down to us and waving good-bye to those who were on their way to war. The days after seemed empty and still. Life changed, the Italians arrived. They spoke words nobody understood. Rita and I sometimes sat opposite the entrance to Bull Lane speaking gibberish to the Italian guard who would become annoyed and chase us away down the road. No more chocolate and rides and having to adjust to a quieter life sometimes helping a farmer to guide his cows through the village for milking.
In the summer of 1945 my father came to collect me to return to London. Another sad time leaving what had become home for the unknown so far away. Reassimilating with new friends and a bigger school was challenging. In particular being asked time and again to repeat myself to Londoners what it was I was saying, having by then a broad Dorset accent.