The following notes where written by Ernie and describe his life prior to joining the Army during World War 2 and then for a short period after the war. The notes where originally written for his children:

"CHAPTER I - Feb.1920 to June 1941

So you want my history. You asked and it shall be given unto you! Without consulting the Family Tree you are doubtless aware that I was born on l7th February 1920. That same document reveals that my parents were married about four months earlier on 4th October 1919. Society being what it was in those times it seems that such a scandalous occurrence resulted in Dad being sent away with the woman who had led him astray and I, the result of their wickedness, being taken in by my grandparents.

The household in which I grew up, at 24 St Johns Road Southall, consisted of the grandparents, aunts Edie and May and occasionally Jess. Jess was a children's nanny who worked for sundry wealthy families and was only at home between jobs. May travelled daily to London where she worked as a book-keeper with a publishing firm called Cable Press and Edie looked after the house.

Of course the aunts called their parents "Dad" and "Mum", so naturally as a small kid that's what they became to me. Now there was a certain "Uncle Ernie" who visited from time to time and who for some reason or other mended the odd toy, taught me how to tie shoelaces properly and the right way to aim a toy pistol in order to knock down match boxes. It was at the age of about five, when we were on holiday at Leigh-on-Sea, that I overheard a conversation between Grandmother and an old friend that she met there that put things in proper perspective. The friend enquired who the boy was and Grandmother, not realising how good my hearing was, said "Oh that's Ernie's, we've had him since he was three weeks old". Even then I must have been influenced by the Official Secrets Act for I kept the knowledge under my hat and it was only a few years later when Aunt Edie was lecturing me about some minor misdemeanour that I somewhat emphatically pointed out that she was not entitled to call me "my boy"! This nearly caused a Court of Enquiry to be convened to find out how I had discovered the facts.

Number 24 was (and still is) an old house worthy of some detailed description for reasons which, in addition to giving an idea of what life was like in those days, will become apparent later. Starting at the bottom, there was a cellar with two rooms, one of which was for coal which was delivered through a covered hole at ground level, the other just harboured junk.

On the ground floor were rooms known as Front and Back, a kitchen which served as the general living room and contained a coal range originally intended for cooking and had an internal boiler which was supposed to provide hot water for the sink and bath. Beyond the kitchen was the scullery which housed a sink, a gas cooker and a built in coal fired "copper" for boiling the washing. The mangle (wringer to you!) lived there too. Beyond that was the so-called pantry, a walk-in room with cupboards on one side and shelves on the other. Only such things as vegetables and firewood were kept there.

The first floor had three bedrooms, the main one at the front spanning the full width of the house, another just behind it and a third right at the back. There was a loo with a wooden seat which went right across the full width and permanently fixed to a front panel, also full width. This had a tendency to block up on account of the use of newspaper for toilet purposes and the resulting fluid would then accumulate behind the woodwork and drip through the ceiling on to some unsuspecting occupant of a chair in the kitchen which was immediately underneath. There was a characteristic odour which I do not forget. Adjacent to the loo was a bathroom with a chipped enamel bath and a hand basin which was cracked all the time I remember it, all equipped with massive brass taps which generally dripped.

The house, in common with several others in the road, was obviously designed to allow for at least one servant. In addition to the front door bell there were bells in the kitchen operated by a system of wires and cranks from the two main rooms downstairs and the main bedroom. An outside loo near the back door would also have been for the servants.

On the top floor there was one more habitable room, probably intended for the live-in maid, and a boarded attic accessed through another door and up about three steps. The attic covered the area of the two main bedrooms but was only used for storage and I never recall it being cleaned out.

Heating came from one open fire in the front room and the kitchen range. There were fireplaces in all the other rooms, but I never remember them being lit. Gas provided a bit of light from a double fitting with mantles, only one of which was generally used, in the front room and a single similar one in the kitchen. The rest of the rooms only had single gas jets without mantles and one usually went to bed with the aid of a tiny dim and smelly paraffin lamp. There were no wardrobes in the bedrooms and hanging space was created by curtaining the alcoves beside the fireplaces. I'm still not quite sure that the horrors that lurked behind those curtains were entirely imaginary!

There was - I keep saying "was" but it's still there about sixty feet of walled garden at the back with raspberry canes, a few flowers and a chicken house at the bottom. Later the chicken shed was demolished and the garden grassed over.

Based on discussions in later years I think the rent of that place was around ten shillings (50p) weekly.

The description of the house gives some idea of the living conditions. It's also relevant to the rest of the yarn in connection with the use of some of the rooms. My earliest recollection is of the back bedroom and the room on the top floor being let to a Mr & Mrs Sharples and their daughter Mary who was about the same age as me. At the same time the back room on the ground floor served for a few months as a bed-sit for a Miss Waite who was a teacher at a local school. The Sharples left and were replaced by Mr & Mrs Lewcock until about 1925.

It was around this time that Aunt Edie founded her school. The main bedroom was converted for this purpose by installing two large tables and a variety of chairs. A piano which had previously been downstairs was also moved in. Grandfather made a blackboard by coating a sheet of plywood with black ink and this was perched on a shelf. There were several schools like this in the town which catered for the children of local shopkeepers and the like who probably felt that paying a fee of between 1/6d (72p) and 2/6d (122p) per week made them feel somewhat superior.

Both grandparents died within a few days of each other in the early part of 1931, just before my 11th birthday. Bits of information that I picked up later point to the fact that my father came with a view to getting me together with the rest of the family which by then had grown by a further six. It seems that Aunt Edie had assumed proprietary rights to my presence by then and even went to length of seeing a local -JP to ensure this. Thus it was that my primary education in the three R's continued until mid 1932.

Now as it happened, as a very small kid I had displayed a tendency to taking things to bits and putting them together again. The result of this was that on my sixth birthday grandmother gave me a very basic Meccano set. Shortly after that I acquired a torch and with its battery, bulb and bits of wire discovered the elements of electricity. at various time during my engineering career I have remarked that I wished grandmother had given me a paint box, but in retrospect I'm not really sorry that it all started like that.

Quite naturally I wanted to learn more about things technical and the obvious immediate goal was the Technical School. A snag arose here as admission to the Tech was normally at age 12 by entrance exam from the ordinary elementary schools, a facility not available to the little private schools. The alternative was to pay, the fee as I recall being somewhere around £1.2.6 (112.5p) per term, three terms per year. An elderly relative, a cousin of grandfather, got wind of this and came up trumps. I had to do an entrance test in arithmetic and an essay. The Principal said that my arithmetic was poor but the essay, a summary of a book I had read, was very good!

I can still remember the book, "The Great Airship". Due to the negotiations taking a bit of time, I actually got in a whole term and about six weeks after the year, which commenced after Easter, had started.

On my first day in 1c - the bottom class of the first year - the form master detailed another lad to show me the ropes, what exercise books to use and so on. He was Frank Saunders, a name I will not forget although I lost touch with him after the first year. When the Roll of Honour appeared after the War, his name was at the top.

Things were a bit traumatic for a while. The general way of life was rather different and I also had to catch up with the others in the class. They had already been initiated into such things as geometry, algebra and trigonometry which were a mystery to me at first. However, by the end of the next term which together with the school year ended at Easter, I had managed to get promoted to 2b.

It was during that first term in the second year that we had an inspection by a doctor who decided that I had a palpitating heart and should not do PT or sports. There were two or three like who were given the job of tidying up various labs. At that time there were only two full time lab assistants, one in the electrical department and one in the heat engines lab. So, that was how it came to pass that I spent three periods every week pottering in the chemistry lab.

Despite not having a sporting physique, during years two and three I managed to obtain a certain notoriety, first by writing a short sci-fi story, which in fact poked a bit of fun at one of the staff, for the school magazine and in due course becoming editor of that journal. Somehow made it to form captain in the middle of the second year, prefect in the third year and also did a spell as house secretary. The "houses" were an even split throughout the school, just for competitive purposes, each form being roughly divided four ways into "Wren" "Newton" "Whitworth" and "Kelvin". It was only a fluke that put me in Kelvin - you probably know that he was an electrical type scientist. The house system had nothing to do with the educational side as everyone did the same subjects irrespective of their ideas for the future. At the end of the third year at Easter 1935, which was officially the end of the road, two or three of us who had no immediate job to go to were allowed to hang around for a few weeks. A third lab assistant, shared by the Chemistry and Strength of Materials departments, had by that time been employed. The chap who was doing it then decided to move on and the job was offered to me. The reward for this, apart from the magnificent weekly sum of 17/6d (87.5p) - less Health Insurance - was a free part-time HNC course, a perk which made the job worthwhile. The hours were 8.45 to 5.00 Monday to Friday and to 12.30 on Saturday. The part-time course took place from September to June on Wednesday afternoon, Saturday morning and two evenings 7.00 to 9.00pm. A considerable amount of homework was also involved. Hence the HNC which I just managed to scrape through by 1940.

Work in Chemistry consisted of keeping the lab and apparatus clean, keeping up stocks, brewing solutions and all the usual pottering jobs. In the Materials department I picked up a lot of useful information about testing the strength of metals and machining test pieces for that purpose. All this plus the electrical gen learned on the course proved very useful at various times in the future, of which more later.

Meanwhile, on the home front sundry things worthy of mention went on. The aunts had acquired a small sum of money, I think around the £100 mark, from a departed relative. This being a small fortune in those days, a deposit was put on a new house, 9 Thorncliffe Road, Norwood Green, Southall. Aunt Edie's school was transferred there in 1936 and initially everything in the garden looked rosy. However for some reason that I've never been able to fathom completely, but probably due to financial constraints, the school disbanded and we left that house. We occupied three different rented houses until early 1940.

Before the story progresses further, the connection with the Baptist Church is relevant. The grandparents and the aunts being staunch pillars of that establishment I automatically became part of it and among other things did every national scripture exam between 1928 and 1935, which accounts for the odd quotation that I come out with from time to time. There was a crowd of us young un's from the Church who went around together and following the natural inclination to form pairs, Mum and I have been together since 1936.

Aunt May was still working in London in the early part of 1940. One morning in February of that year she suddenly collapsed while getting ready to go and died in hospital in the evening. Edie went down rapidly after that and following a spell in an institution and a short while living on her own was finally taken into hospital where she died three months after May. Mum's parents found room for me at 16 Western Road , which was a big help. You've heard us make cracks about selling things for a couple of bob - an expression which originated from the sale of odds and ends after those events. Apart from all that, the dog I'd had for eight years and who tended to be more than unsociable towards strangers, had to go to the great kennel in the sky.

Despite these various distractions not being entirely conducive to concentrated study, I just scraped through my finals for the HNC in June 1940.

With the War getting under way in 1940, quite a lot of things seemed to occur in rapid succession. Among the funnier things was my surprise bout of measles. Lying in bed for a few days resulted in constipation. However, a stray AA shell decided not to go off until it came down on a nearby house and the resulting bang produced and instant cure for that affliction. Shortly after that we moved to Greenford. Mum's Dad was gardener for the Rector of Greenford and was offered a house next door to the new church which was under construction. He and I got a few odd jobs helping out with the labour shortage. Look at the front if ever you go that way and you will see some bottle-glass panes that I put in. As the building was nearly finished the wartime regulations were relaxed to allow it to be finished.

At work routines changed a bit. Air raid shelters were dug in a field where later college building now stand. All the staff did courses on fire fighting and antigas drill. Sometimes at the weekends we worked in the metalwork shops machining parts for the AEC bus works, a local factory that was doing armament production. Those of us who were liable for service put our names down to go before the Joint Recruiting Board, of which more in the "Diary". We built a shelter on the roof only to keep dry - and took turns in watching the sky for unwelcome visitors when there was a "Red Alert" on. It was during one of these that I saw a bomb drop through the clouds on to the local gasworks. Fortunately it was a dud and there was no bang. Another time I was doing "Firewatch" at night, backed up by two of the senior boys when one of them woke me with the interesting news that the other had fallen of the roof. They were actually banned from going up there and were only supposed to stay awake to warn me if there was a raid on. Again luck was with us and the lad had only dropped about twelve feet and knocked himself out, so with the aid of the fire brigade and ambulance we salvaged him with minor consequences.

Mum had been working at HMV for several years and with the firm going into armament production she was selected for a course the become an inspector of precision tools. (I express it thus as "tool inspector" invariably produces a dirty laugh!) She was working much longer hours than one would in peacetime but usually got off a bit earlier on Friday evenings. We took advantage of that by going for some liquid refreshment, at a pub called The Plough. One Friday we decided to go somewhere else for a change and that was the evening when a bomb dropped on a house opposite the pub just at the time we would normally have been leaving.

One memorable Saturday night in September 1940 - I'm sure you will find the actual date in a history book - we were leaning on a fence admiring the sunset when we suddenly realised that the glow was in the east. That was the night the London Docks took the biggest pasting from the bombers.

There were odd air raids around the area but we were lucky in not getting any damage apart from one small item Mum's father had left his wheelbarrow in the adjacent churchyard and Jerry scored a direct hit with a small incendiary bomb which burned a neat hole straight through it. The old boy was most annoyed about that, although everyone else was in pleats of laughter. That same night he and I had been out chucking dirt on odd incendiaries that landed in the roads and when we got back Ray came to the door with his tin hat on, rubbing his eyes and asking if there was a raid on. He was a "Boy Messenger" and was supposed to have been at the local ARP post.

Among other things I did a paper round for a while as the local newsagent did not want to risk having the young lads out at a time when sundry unpleasant things could happen. This enabled me to get a second hand Francis-Barnett 150cc bike for the huge sum of £2.10.0 (£2.50 to you). That was a bit of fun for a short while, bearing in mind that petrol was rationed. We had a run out one Saturday afternoon and the drive chain broke some back twenty miles from home. I managed to patch it with a nail and that got us back to within a few hundred yards before that failed but luckily the last bit was downhill and we coasted the rest of the way. The end came off the gear change lever on the same trip, so I passed it over my shoulder and said "Hang on to this until we get home". Mum still tells that yarn.

We initially intended to get married on the August Bank Holiday, which in those days was on the first Monday of the month, but this plan went wrong. Around the beginning of June 1941 the letter I had been expecting from His Majesty for several months arrived. This was the invitation to join his Army at Woolwich on June 19th.

For the next chapter go to "Diary of a D-Day Dodger". (published November 1998)

CHAPTER III - From August 1946.

As I said at the end of previous yarn I finally got home from Greece on 21st August 1946. Officially I was still in the Army until 19th November that year, which meant that I was getting paid until that date. This provided some thinking time about what to do next, so after a couple of weeks mulling over the situation I went to see the Principal of Southall Tech to discuss what was on offer.

The law at the time provided that survivors of the war were guaranteed their old job. Thus it came about that I became a Senior Lab Assistant in the Chemistry Department on the magnificent salary of £5 per week. Evening classes were just starting and so I was able to supplement this with one two-hour session for an extra 17/6 (87.5p). My old boss in Chemistry, who was also head of the Junior Tech, had retired at the end of the war and had been replaced by a younger man, one Dr Holroyd. He proved to have a much wider knowledge of the subject than his predecessor and so I learned some useful bits from him. He was the sort who was involved with a lot of public activities at which he had to make speeches. He soon discovered that I could use a typewriter and was able to transcribe his hieroglyphics into readable English, which resulted in my acting as a PA for him as well as looking after the lab, all of which was quite interesting.

Shortly after I started back, an evening class lecturer who was taking 1st year Engineering Science dropped out for some reason and the Principal invited me to have a go at it. This was worth another £1/2/6 (1122p) for a two hour session. There were two classes running and each had lectures and lab work on alternate weeks. This was good fun as the subject was one that I could handle quite easily. The students were keen to learn, about half were ex-service and the rest young apprentices who were anxious to progress.

Around the end of October I lashed out half my "capital" on a 150cc two-stroke Coventry Eagle, £40 with 946 miles on the clock. A few relevant statistics about that are rather amusing. Driving Licence, which had to be renewed yearly then, 5/-(25p), insurance £3.5.0 (£3.25) for a year. Road Fund Licence was calculated on engine capacity in those days and cost 10/4 (about 512p) for that bike.

The general idea at that time was to go on to full time teaching. With that in mind I first collected a bunch of references from members of the Tech staff who knew me well and all of whom wrote glowing reports. These are still around if you want a good laugh. Also signed up for a correspondence course to brush up the on technical matters with a view to eventually qualifying for CEng.

Robbie Burns said that the best laid plans go oft awry. The winter of 1946-7 was cold - to put it politely. Fuel for such luxuries as heating was still very restricted and by way of keeping reasonably warm the easy way was to light a number of Bunsen burners to raise the temperature a bit. These conditions coupled with the fact that I had spent three previous years in Mediterranean climate played havoc and I wound up with bronchitis and asthma."

While Ernie was away during World War 2, Daphne aquired the tenancy of a flat, 9, Goring Way, Greenford, Middlesex. The story of this flat can be found in Daphne's notes at it was she who organised the tenancy.

For about 6 months during 1947/48 Ernie worked at British Celophane in Bridgewater, Somerset. According to his Clothing Book we was lodging at 204 Bristol Road, Bridgewater, Somerset.

Ernie joined the War Department in November 1949 as a Technical Assistant, Grade III servicing anti-aircraft equipment at the RAOC stores.

In 1951 he was selected for duty in Egypt or more precisely the Suez Canal Zone. He sailed to Egypt in October of 1951 aboard the "SS Empire Test". While he was in Egypt the revolution started and it was for security work during that time that he was awarded the British Empire Medal. One other thing worthy of mention happened to Ernie while he was in the middle east, that is on the 26th February 1952 he lost tip of his right forefinger. This happened, according to the Injury Report, while he was involved in lowering a generator onto its road wheels and getting it trapped between the chocks and tow bar.

On 1st March 1952 Ernie was posted to Malta where he stayed, having been joined by his family, until September 1959.

In June 1963, while still working for the Ministry of Defence at 28 Command Workshop R.E.M.E, Hillsea Lines, Portsmouth, Ernie joined the Territorial and Army Volunteer Reserve, still with the R.E.M.E. Ernie was with 457 Royal Artillery Workshop R.E.M.E TA, Territorial Army Centre, Perrone Road, Hilsea. Although he was obliged to join as a private he was soon made up to his war time rank of Staff Sergeant, a rank which he held four the four years he served with the TA.

Twice during the 1970's Ernie and his wife Daphne (Law) where invited to the Distribution of Royal Maundy at Westminster Abbey, London. The first time was 19th April 1973 and the second was 7th April 1977.

On October 10th, 1988 Ernie made an appearance as a contestant on the television general knowledge quiz show "FIFTEEN to ONE" where he got through to the second round.

Between 17th April 1987 and May 1990 he served as a councilor on Calne Town Council serving the South Ward of the said council.

©Barry Miller 2005