T for Travels of my Father: A-Z Challenge 2020

T is for TRAVELS OF  MY FATHER  - a man typical of his generation,  and I look at his ordinary traveller's tales whether by horse & cart, his first motor car, his wartime journeys through Europe and India. 

As a child, I knew my father's job title was "Commercial Traveller" but could not puzzle this out.  My idea of a "Traveller" was someone like Marco Pol who centuries ago had crossed continents.  So what travels did Dad actually do?

Dad - John P. Weston  - was born 15th April 1912   - the night the Titanic sank.  He was quite happy to talk about his childhood and wartime experiences and I persuaded him to write these down  - they now form the basis of this post.

A Broseley Boyhood  - an early train journey and driving a horse & cart: 
Dad grew up in Broseley, Shropshire, across the River Severn from its more famous neighbour Ironbridge.   For a bank holiday outing,  Dad wrote 

"When I was about ten,   Charles, [brother]  myself, Dad and Mum went by train to Bridgenorth.  We  had a boat trip on the River Severn and later walked the 6 miles back home". 

 The family  travelled on the old Severn Valley Railway - now a heritage line, and Dad later taught my brother and I the names of the stations - we used to love reciting them as they had a rather poetic ring to them - Bewdley, Arley, Highly, Hampton Loade, Bridgenorth, Coalport,  Broseley.  I can still remember them!   

Dad, vice-captain  of the school football team - his passion. 

                      This is  the only childhood photograph I have of him. 
                                                              
Dad left school at the age of 14 to work in  a local grocer's shop:  

"I went to work at Walter Davis, grocer's, where,  still at school,  I had been an errand boy and also worked on Saturdays - with time off for soccer!   I then went out  on a horse and trap delivering orders (we sold bags of corn 80 plus pounds).  The pony, a Welsh cob named Tommy, was inclined to be lazy.  At night time I rode him bareback to a field!"    

This was  a surprising memory as Dad never gave any indication later in life of having the slightest bit of interest or affinity with horses!    Dad worked there until the family left the town in 1929 to move to Leicester. A change of occupation followed when Dad became a commercial traveller, calling on grocers and chemists to secure sales for his firm. 

A Hair-Raising Journey in His First Car 

Dad  wrote "I was given instructions to pick up a car at Derby and drive 90 miles north to a new position in Blackpool". He had never driven before and here is his tale of his first hair-raising journey.

"I had never driven a car before. On Boxing Day, I went to the British School of Motoring and said I wanted some urgent lessons. When I told the instruct,  I was driving to Blackpool the next day, he nearly had a fit. I collected my car - a four door Morris saloon which I was expected to buy on hire purchase at 18 shillings per week. It was a traumatic journey with me being a complete novice, having had no proper tuition. There was no heating, no radio of course to help pass the time, and the windscreen wipers kept seizing up. I had also been told that the tyres were awful for punctures. Still I made it, as  it was getting dark  - thank goodness, as I did not know how the lights worked!

Dad on the left with his brother Charles  c.1936 

A Wartime Journey 

Dad often talked about his war experiences and I am afraid it did provoke the reaction at times of “Not the war again, Dad”. We used to tease him about being in the Intelligence Service.  It was only later that we came to realise what a life-defining period it was and what we heard was very much a santized version of the reality.

Dad  served in the RAF Codes & Ciphers Branch,  training at Bletchley Park and Whitehall,  London and was seconded to General Bradley’s US 12th Army Group HQ. He landed at Omaha beach just after D-Day and advanced via St. Mere Eglise, Avranches, Versailles, Paris, Verdun and Luxembourg through to Wiesbaden in Germany where he marked VE Day. 

"The day came when we moved to Southampton.  There were eight of us in a team handling ULTRA intelligence. 

It was Sunday when we made our way in our operations vehicle to the harbour and boarded a landing craft vehicle.  We zig-zagged our way across the Channel  (to avoid enemy submarines)  and arrived off the beach at around 11pm, some distance off our landing point.  Sporadic bombing went on during the night from high level German bombers. We slept where we could on the craft.  Just as dawn was breaking,  at 04.00am the captain started up the engines (there was quite a roar) and we moved in  fast to the beach.  The ramp was dropped, we drove off.  I recall seeing a large sign OMAHA as we moved in.  Engineers had blasted a make shift road up the cliff. We were in France!

The first place we made for was Saint Mere Eglise, the first village to be liberated by the US 89th Airborne Division.  It was badly bombed and the roads rutted. We made our way to a little village near a copse – Laval. In a clearing the GIs had set up trestle tables to hand out meals. We had portioned trays, but the Americans just had billycans to hold the meal of chicken and peaches. There were millions of wasps committing suicide in the fruit juice.  I  was on duty the next day at 8a.m.to get our equipment organized for the advance through Normandy onto Paris."

"I got a lift into Paris  [From Versailles where e was stationed] to hear General de Gaulle make a speech at the Place de la Concorde.  I was stopped by a Frenchman who said in English “RAF Sir?  My name is Joseph Calmy.   I was the Shell agent here before the war”.  I offered him cigarettes and he then invited me to a building and gave me a bag full of Chanel perfume, toiletries, powder and cream – it lasted Mum for years.  I flew back with it when I got some leave in March ‘45."

We moved onto Luxembourg.   I became friendly with a former member of the government [Mr Battin]  and was invited to his house. He produced champagne from his cellar and served them with lovely cakes with kirsch in them"

"It was now December 1944 and bitterly cold – lots of ice and snow. Out of the blue at 4a.m. on December 16^th came a major attack on the American front.  It was pandemonium...... This was the Battle of the Bulge.  We carried thermite bombs in a safe in our operations vehicle to be used to destroy our codebooks and machines. We had rifles fully loaded with us at all times.......Anyone moving around that night not giving the correct password (which was Betty Gable), was shot on the spot......The weather did improve somewhat. We were dropped supplies of food and more important the GIs got further weapons and ammo. supplies. At one stage we  were being served up five boiled sweets for one meal".

This meal of five boiled sweets became an, often repeated,  apocryphal family story.  It was only much later that I came to realize it masked the awful scenes he must have witnessed. 

"I crossed into Germany at Trier. I recall that vividly. Patton’s tanks were ahead of us and were nearing the Rhine. His engineers threw a pontoon bridge across and we followed. I was driving our operations vehicle – there were GIs on the bridge with machine guns, urging me to push on quickly in case of air attack. We made it and an hour later drove into Wiesbaden to what had been the Luftwaffe’s former HQ.  I marked VE Day there  and the next day a signal arrived from London saying I was to go the Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean, where there was a tracking station"  

A Far East  Flight

Off on a circuitous route because we were not allowed to overfly certain counties.  My travel documents said I was priority three – there were ten degrees, with Generals number one.   We flew to Marseilles, then to Sardinia (refuel), over Malta to El Adam, near Tobruk., along the North African coast past Cairo and onto Palestine for a 36 hour break and went to Bethlehem.  Our base was Lydda right on the coast. The flies were a major menace!" We flew onto Bahrain in the Gulf and then to Habayra (RAF airfield in Iraq) – temperature 104F when we landed there at 4a.m.  I could hardly breath.  Then onto Pakistan, Bombay, Calcutta, Madras and across to Ceylon.  I went by train to Mountbatten’s HQ some 8000 feet in a tropical town of  Kandy.

My stay there was brief, but I remembered the good food.  I was told plans had changed and I was rerouted to Bombay.   It was take off in Colombo and we had almost reached the point of no return when the plane burst a tyre, which delayed us 24 hours. We took off at 4am on the second occasion." 

       

                    I only came across these travel papers after Dad had died. 

"In Burma things were moving to a close.  I was there at the ceremony in Rangoon when the Japanese capitulated.  I was based at the university.  We were always short of tea, which seemed odd in that part of the world, but there was plenty of cocoa.  I also had a ration of one bottle of gin and one of lime juice a month.  I used to drink that under my mosquito net at night watching the mosquitoes  run up and down the wall. 

In November 1945, I was called back for demob.  A driver took me by jeep to the airfield some 20 miles away.  I sat with a rifle (loaded) on my knee since we had to travel through some forests frequented by Dacoits (a terrorist organization in Burma).  The time was 5am. and we made it all right. I flew to Calcutta again and was there for some days.  Calcutta was an awful experience.    Flies crawled over people sitting in the gutters day and night.

We were due to take a train across the desert to Bombay, some 3000 miles.  But there was rioting against the English  in Calcutta and we had to return to camp.  Later we were taken by armoured cars to the station.  On the long journey across India, we stopped at stations to get some food.  We had this on trays, and as we walked along the platform back to the train, hawks dived down and snatched the food.  

I had a short break in Bombay before sailing on the "City of Asia" for Liverpool and home to Blackpool.  One of the first things I did was to cradle you in my arms – you were shy – no wonder!" 

 

Post war, life returned to normal for Dad as he resumed his work, with the furthest distance he travellede was some 100 miles north to Carlisle.  But in the 1960s he did take my mother to Normandy to relive his wartime memories

He died at the age of 91  - and I was so proud to have his memories written down for posterity.

     

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