HAMPSHIRE AT WAR
Also by the same author:-
Follow ‘Mee’ to Gloucestershire Hampshire Hauntings and Hearsay
HAMPSHIREAT WAR:An Oral History1939-1945
by
Patricia Ross
ISBN 978 1 872438 28 3 (Print)
ISBN 978 1 909548 22 0 (Kindle)
ISBN 978 1 909548 24 4 (ePub)
HAMPSHIRE AT WAR: AN ORAL HISTORY 1939-1945
is typeset in Times New Roman and published by
The King’s England Press
111 Meltham Road
Lockwood
HUDDERSFIELD
West Riding of Yorkshire
HD4 7BG
© Patricia Ross, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied or stored in any retrieval system without the express prior written consent of the publisher. This publication is issued on the understanding that it may only be bought, sold, lent or hired in its original wrapper and on the understanding that a similar condition is imposed on subsequent purchasers.
The author asserts her moral rights under the Copyright Acts as amended, and under the terms of the Berne Convention
Printed and Bound in Great Britain by 4edge Ltd,
eBook conversion by Vivlia Limited
DEDICATION
To my husband John, with love, and to all who lived and served in Hampshire in World War II.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Patricia Ross was born in Yorkshire but has lived in southern England for most of her adult life. Her interest in local history blossomed when she became a voluntary guide to the city of York and this has continued through research in several English counties. She is a member of the Educational Writers’ Association.
While bringing up her four children she trained as a teacher and taught English, Humanities and Special Education in schools for almost twenty years. She is an honours graduate of the Open University and lives with her husband and two cats on Hayling Island.
Previous publications include Plays For Junior Range (Pelham Puppets, 1965), Soltan in the Sandwiches (Outposts, 1974), Follow Mee to Gloucestershire and Hampshire Hauntings and Hearsay (The King’s England Press, 1994 and 1998 respectively) and Hayling Island Voices (Tempus Oral History Series, 2000)
FOREWORD by Captain Derek Oakley, MBE, RM.
I am delighted that Pat Ross has taken up the challenge of bringing the history of Hayling Island up to date to mark the close of the twentieth century. It is nearly forty years since F.G.S. Thomas penned The King Holds Hayling, long out of print but reissued in a concise form in 1978, and much has changed on the Island itself.
I first came to Hayling Island on a landing craft during World War II, never expecting to live here permanently some twenty years later. I have seen at first hand the whole social structure change, the population grow and the housing increase alarmingly. These matters are touched on in this book, as the author has gone to infinite pains in her extensive research.
The part played by Hayling in the Second World War is largely compiled from interviews and letters recalling the memories of those who took part. This is an important way of recording history before it fades into oblivion. The war-time memories are of particular interest to me, for the war had a profound effect on the Island in the years following, economically, industrially and socially. There is romance, humour and pathos in the recollections and much that can be read “between the lines”.
Derek Oakley
June 1999
Abandoned WWII pillbox near The Kench, Hayling Island
AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION
Hampshire and the Isle of Wight just before the Second World War were much more rural than they are now. The big towns on the coast included Portsmouth, home of the British Navy, with its Dockyard, a small airfield unequal to coping with large aircraft and a large corset factory; and Southampton with its large commercial docks for big liners and its aircraft factory from which planes emerged to take part in the Schneider Trophy. Lymington was a charming seaside town which made pistons and piston rings and Winchester was the historic county town. Gosport made big yachts and Haslar Hospital was the Navy’s. Petersfield was a market town as were Stockbridge and Alresford. Havant made gloves and nearby Hayling Island was very rural indeed, with a newly developed network of holiday camps to augment its oyster fishing and service for the well-off residents and holiday-makers who lived at the south of the island. Andover was a small country town. Aldershot, near Fleet and Farnborough, was very much an army town. The hinterland of Hampshire had many large houses and private estates. Hampshire was a quiet place on the whole.
It was not so much so when I came to live at Hayling Island, in the mid-1990s. Some of the holiday camps had closed down and post-war, as elsewhere, building had spread over the formerly rural scene. When I wrote a book of oral history about Hayling, I learned very little about the war here as people said, “It was all very secret, you know” and “Of course, there were the Marines”. I knew next to nothing about it and determined to find out.
As I realised gradually that Hayling had built sections (caissons) of the Mulberry Harbours, had two anti-aircraft gun-sites and a well-organised decoy site, and that her holiday camps had provided accommodation for the Royal Navy and Royal Marines, I began to collect people’s memories of those days. Hayling Island was a landing craft base, and taught many Royal Marines to man these craft, something they had never been expected to do before. There was a boat-servicing yard, Sparks, which was used to service landing craft. Many members of Combined Operations had set off from here for the invasion of Europe in June 1944.
Remnants of a section of Mulberry Harbour
The rest of Hampshire became an armed camp, especially when the Americans came, and the invasion of Normandy was planned at Fort Southwick. Gosport and other local towns had been made ready for large influxes of tanks and army vehicles making for the coast before the invasion of Normandy by strengthening and widening roads to embarkation points. The New Forest had housed army