On 24th August 19391 received my mobilization papers, went to work as usual and closed my file on Garage Requirements. After saying goodbye I took the No. 23 tram up Hanover Street and the Mound and walked up the Lawnmarket to the Casde. Lomax had gone to war.
Mills Mount was now a crowded and hectic base. Royal Signals reservists from all over the country were turning up, short of beds and equipment, and I found myself sending out more mobilization orders to other reservists. I was issued with full battiedress, all rough cloth and webbing – except for the trousers. There was a shortage of trousers. The guard commander, like most of his kind in Scottish regiments, couldn’t share our joy at walking around centaur-like in civilian pants.
I was sent down to the Assembly Rooms in George Street in Edinburgh to take charge of the confused lines of would-be signalmen of all ages and classes who were trying to enlist. Some had been sent by the BBC, the Post Office, the private electronics companies; they were to be the technical elite of the army. I was struck by how effective a single man in uniform, confident of his authority, could be in maintaining order over several hundred men unsure of their position.
Each night I would go back up the Mound, and walk inside the old black walls of the castle which dominated the city like a crouching beast, as it does to this day. It is difficult to imagine it now as anything other than a tourist attraction. Times change, and so do buildings. Changing people is harder, or so I have found.
In the barracks we had radios on all the time, as you would expect. At 11.00 am on 3rd September, we heard Arthur Neville Chamberlain say in his exquisite reedy voice that we were now at war with Germany.
Fifteen minutes later, the air raid sirens sounded throughout Edinburgh. From Mills Mount I could look down into the main streets of the city. On Princes Street, the trams came to a standstill; every motor vehicle stopped where it was. Passengers walked with a swift nervous urgency, making for the air raid shelters in Princes Street Gardens, through which the main railway line was sunk. It was empty and silent now. Within minutes the streets were deserted except for the immobilized vehicles, some with their doors open, stretching away down Princes Street. A hand had swept over the city, stopping its heart: the war came in this silence.
Nothing happened; there was no raid. I had tangled up the straps of my gas-mask, and had to be rescued by a company sergeant-major called Dennis Bloodworth, who really was as strong as he sounded. We went back to preparing ourselves for real battles.
Equipment now began to arrive in earnest. We already had a ‘Wireless Set No. 3’, a big and seemingly powerful thing, with controls on the vertical front; it was made of stamped grey steel with none of the ornamentation of domestic sets. This was a machine for keeping open a channel of communication between Edinburgh and London, in the event of telephone lines being broken, and it did not hide its function of grabbing electromagnetic waves as brutally as it could. Everything about it spoke of war and emergency. It was noisy to operate, it gave out heat, and I had to sleep next to it before I wangled a bed in the barrack block at the West End of the Castle. It was an austere place but at least I could sleep. I was learning that you have to survive not only in the face of the enemy, but also within your own army.
With this in mind I applied for a commission, and appeared before an interview board in the building owned by the Scotsman newspaper on the North Bridge. Washed and polished and eager to please, I was told by the major who interviewed me that the average expectation of life of a second-lieutenant on active service in the Great War had been two weeks. I said I wished to persist.
While I was waiting for my application to be processed, I volunteered to go to the Orkney Islands, where the battleship Royal Oak had just been sunk, in its base at Scapa Flow, with almost a thousand casualties. This was the first real shock of the war, and might have taught us more about the vulnerability of gigantic gun-platforms. People could hardly accept that it was enemy action that had sunk such a dreadnought; it must be sabotage, or some fault of our own. But of course it was a German submarine. In any case, our signals work clearly needed improvement.
We sailed from Scrabster Harbour, near Thurso on the north coast of Scotland. After the worst sea journey I could remember, a day of icy wind and pitching seas on a fifty-year-old steamer that lacked any suitable covering for the North Sea in late autumn, we arrived – Sergeant Ferguson and his squad of twenty, including me – in Stromness. We settled in and helped to control the local signals traffic, by radio, telephone and telegraph. We were part of the North Signal Section, one of His Majesty’s more remote garrisons.
I liked it on the cold, bleak island, working methodically every day in a requisitioned hotel. What I thought of as my developing gift for survival and adroit moves in large organizations made me the entrepreneur of the group. I did a deal with one of the cooks in the hotel by which she provided fined egg rolls and tea and I sold them to the men in the middle of the morning. I was much in demand.
On an island, you noticed people’s isolation more. When I distributed the mail for our little squad, I saw that some of the men could never conceal their distress when letters failed to arrive. And a couple of them looked almost terrified if mail did come for them.
I had considered volunteering for Shetland, but the thought of a 115-mile trip still further north by trawler in mid-winter through one of the worst stretches of sea in the world was too much even for me. The attraction of that Viking outpost was strong; my mother’s voice spoke whenever I remembered its harsh moorland and its ocean light. But the other voices were insistent, and I missed the chance that might have kept me marooned and safe on a little archipelago while the deluge lasted.
Orders arrived, in March 1940, instructing me to report for preliminary training before I could go to a Royal Signals training unit for officer cadets.
Sergeant Ferguson and I left Stromness on a fine March morning, and the St Ola, the same awful steamer that had brought us to Orkney, chugged out of the harbour into Hoy Sound where the wind, rain and sea ripped into us. In the huge sheltered bowl of Scapa Flow, with huddled islands all around the horizon, the weather was bearable, but once out of its shelter and into the Pentland Firth, the gale threw the steamer around like a toy. Ferguson and I settled down in the lee of the funnel, where there was a memory of warmth and shelter, and before long we were soaked through, frozen stiff and nauseated. I was violently sick over my sergeant’s greatcoat, but he didn’t seem to mind; he was in another world.
I had made my choice; I was to be an officer.
For two months I sat with a fellow NCO in an upstairs room in a drill hall in Edinburgh being given intensive personal tuition in radio work by a lieutenant in the Royal Signals. Our text was The Admiralty Handbook of Wireless Telegraphy, a theoretical tome in two volumes. Each radio set also had its own manual, and we worked hard, hard enough to satisfy our conscientious instructor. By the middle of May I was on my way to Catterick Camp in Yorkshire, the headquarters of the Royal Signals.
I arrived at the Mame Lines and was promptly stripped of my rank. I was now a cadet, my white shoulder tapes and cap bands telling the world that I was neither officer nor man. It had all been too much for one boy: I had barely arrived before I was turned out on parade with the other 250 cadets for a funeral. A cadet on an earlier course had shot himself after being told he was ‘RTU’d’, the worst humiliation: being returned to your unit.
With this sober beginning, we settled down to seven months of training intended to turn us into effective Royal Signals officers. It was the most demanding and intense period of study I have ever undertaken; the Royal High School seemed child’s play by comparison, and of course it was. We learned about radio, telegraphy and telephony to a level beyond the Post Office’s dreams, and were taught about military organization, how to use quite heavy machine tools and even about intelligence work.