Floss Carter let a bedsit to Leading Seaman Arnold Sharples of Southport and his young wife, at 18 Northney Road, where they remained for the birth of their baby. Three bombs fell just behind these houses, he recalls.
Doug Walters and family, of Ham and Manor Farm, were kind and hospitable to the late Lieutenant Commander Alan Love of Mount Royal, Quebec, Canada. When he came back to the UK after over a year in the Mediterranean, he recalled in a letter to me, he visited them again and they could not do enough for him. By then he was 60 lbs. lighter than when they had originally met. He and his wife visited again in 1970, when Mr Walters’ son Christopher ran the farm.
Leading Seaman R. Carford of Blyth, Worksop, and colleagues used to visit Mr and Mrs Burt who put his sister up when she visited him on Hayling Island. He remembers their delightful daughter, Ivy. Her father had a beard and salted beef in a barrel.
Three local ladies, the late Misses Rouse of Northney, set up the Meadowsweet canteen for servicemen at their bungalow at the corner of Clovelly Road, North Hayling. Many of my correspondents remember with gratitude its home-cooked food and peaceful sitting room for letter-writing and relaxation. A neighbour, Mrs Hedges, did most of the cooking, helped by local lady volunteers.
In 1942, food was supplied to Royal Marines at the Royal Hotel from the Shades (now the Royal Shades) until the hotel kitchens were usable.
During the war, Mrs Voller (née Mary Alice Tickner) used to help her parents, owners of a local guest house, to run the NAB Club at Eastoke Corner for service personnel. It later became Millers Nightclub.
Sailors at the NAB Club
Herbert Spencer of Kirton in Lindsey, near Gainsborough, was billeted near the NAB Club soon after call-up in 1943, aged 18. The NAAFI used to sell little round cakes with butter for their stand-easy. AB Bob Cheeseman RN remembers a café opposite his base at the Royal Hotel where he and colleagues would go for a cup of tea and a jam sandwich, which cost 1s. 1½d. The café was a wooden shack with tables and benches.
When he was 18 in the summer of 1942, W. L. Kirley of Penryn was taught Morse, semaphore and some basic radio procedures on Hayling Island. He recalls that everything was done in a rush and courses which in peace-time would have taken months were condensed into a few weeks. His unit was using an LCA (Assault Landing Craft) which, having been on the Dieppe raid, had bullet holes in it. One of the LCAs was rigged with a metal four-bladed windmill which was rotated by hand. In it, trainees used to run up and down the coast, rotating the windmill and hoping the signal would be picked up by a receiver on shore. He believes this to have been a primitive form of direction finding, possibly connected with the development of radar. The course completed, those who took part were classed as STN - Signal Trained, Northney. However, such a rushed course did not make the men experts, he says: they soon found out that the regular Royal Navy signalmen were more expert than they were.
He had been on a tank landing craft (LCT) which he picked up on the Tyne or Tees, brought to Lowestoft for practice landings then to Havant/Hayling Island. He and his group of 30 - 40 went to the landings of North Africa. The Battle of El Alamein, 30 October 1942, was the turning point of the war there. On 15 November, across the British Isles church bells were rung in celebration. Previously they had remained silent, to be used only as a signal that Britain was being invaded.
Lieutenant Joseph Stalker Robinson, RNVR, of Mundesley, Norfolk, lived in holiday camp huts on Hayling Island, he recalls, but he and colleagues used a house owned by a Mrs Burdon, or called Burdon House, as a wardroom plus accommodation. Their scant spare time was spent at cards, at the pub and going for walks. He recalls that enemy aircraft flew over Hayling to attack Thorney Island. He also remembers that one Sunday morning, while those in the wardroom were having a drink, the siren sounded and the local AA battery opened fire. They saw a single German aircraft fly over, very high. Four shells burst round it and the fifth hit; one wing fluttered down.
These and other recollections point to the fact that Hayling in war-time must have been a strange patchwork of those tasked with defending the home soil, and those actively working towards the day when they would once more set foot on the coast of France. Women, too, played a full part, as they did in other areas.
Dot Watson
Those at Sinah gun-site did not get out of the camp much. During training, the ATS girls had been encouraged to learn to perform shows because there was not much other entertainment on gun-sites. Dot Watson recalls that she was persuaded to walk on, at one of them, with a push-bike, to sing “Daisy, Daisy” and was furious because she was congratulated on her imitation cockney accent. The accent, of which she was proud, was her own.
She says the men with whom the girls worked respected them and treated them like their daughters or their sisters, but they had fun together and danced. There were some single ones but they were all very disciplined. The ATS worked hard. They would be up on the guns all night and come off in the morning to go on fire picket, fatigues or on the gate.
Mrs Norah McKenzie, born in Birmingham in 1921, was called up in 1942 and posted to Hayling Island in the January of 1943. She found herself at 602(M) HAA Battery as Private Norah Flynn W/209907 of the ATS. Her gun battery was at North Hayling near the southern end of the road bridge, over which the girls would walk to Havant when off duty. Close to their camp at Northney she remembers the ladies who made wonderful scrambled egg from powdered eggs at the Meadowsweet canteen.
Joseph Robinson kept farewell dinner menus from 1942 and 1943 for Captain Michell (Northney II) and Lieutenant Mariner RCNVR and Lieutenant Commander Besemer. Copies sent to me display wry naval humour.
Inevitably there were times when the jumpiness of the defenders led to false alarms, and in some cases, to actual action.
RM John J Cook of Tintinhull, ex-PO Dennis Murrell of Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada and E. Stott of Heywood, Lancashire each mention reports that a German submarine tried to land men, 1942-3. Marines were mustered in search of Germans but nothing was found. It was believed the submarine was intercepted in deep water, preparing to land possible spies, and sunk by a Royal Navy warship. Marines were also mustered at HMS Northney when the officers’ mess was set on fire by the cooks.
By and large, though, the forces gathered on Hayling tried their best, as human beings do the world over, to adapt to the circumstances in which they found themselves.
Mr F. C. Adams of Loughton, Essex, recalls that his unit, of the Anti Motor Torpedo Boat Battery, billeted at the Royal Hotel in 1942, trained mostly at Fort Cumberland, Eastney, Portsmouth. He and a friend noticed some sergeants had their wives with them on Hayling Island and were told they could do so too, surreptitiously. So they each booked a chalet on Seafront Estate at 12 shillings a week and wrote to their wives to bring the children. They had comfortable beds - though minus sheets - and the men stayed there with their families for three weeks. The other Marines helped them by saving them some of their butter ration and bread, and the cooks gave them sausages, tea and coffee, which made living relatively cheap.
When their unit was ordered to the Middle East without embarkation leave, the friends got their families to the station en route for London while kit was being packed. That December night, a bomb was dropped on the Seafront Estate.
Dieppe, 1942
Before D-Day could be accomplished, it was necessary for the Allies to try out several scenarios, including large scale raids on the enemy coast, from which lessons could be learned which would eventually save lives, and lead to the success of the final invasion plan. Hampshire, indeed the whole south coast, was heavily involved in the planning and execution of the Dieppe raid.