The men who provided an enduring image of Britain at war

Nov 8 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

A brief history of a Wirral Home Guard platoon has been republished to give us a poignant picture of the men defying Hitler. David Charters reports

IT SEEMS like a faraway country now that most of the heroes, from the old Scout huts, the parish halls and those smoke-fogged, dimple-glassed pubs, are buried beside their unassuming bravery in the good and free English earth.

But still their souls are felt by us, even those who came long after they had gone. For these men are forever England.

How strange then that it took an Austrian tyrant with a silly moustache to draw from our villages, towns and cities those qualities that have been distilled into a popular version of the phlegmatic British character.

This weekend we remember them, as well as the men and women from all the other services, who offered their lives to their country in the two world wars and subsequent conflicts. In return, all we have to do is wear the poppy.

But it is the Home Guard, dear old Dad’s Army, which has given us the enduring picture of Britain at war – otherwise peaceable blokes from potting-sheds, factories and offices, waiting along the coasts, on the heaths and the hills, to give that Mr Hitler a bloody nose, should he dare press a jackboot into our soil.

It was our national capacity to muddle through against the odds, which arose from a rigid class system with pomposity masquerading as authority, hopeless equipment, stifling bureaucracy; bluster, fluster and blunder, all washed down with cups of tea.

BEHIND it, though, was the indefatigable bulldog spirit. Pitchforks facing Panzers against a sepia sunset. The amateur matched against the enemy’s ruthless efficiency.

The mood was held in Dad’s Army, the beautifully scripted and acted BBC series, which itself is 40 years old.

The true genius of the writers, Jimmy Perry and David Croft, lay in providing familiar characters in Mainwaring, Wilson, Jones, etc. In this way, the show became timeless.

And Walmington-on-Sea, the fictitious town on the south coat, was very similar to Hoylake, Wirral, where, in May 1940, No 2 Platoon, “A” Company of the Local Defence Volunteers (later the Home Guard) met for the first time, under the chairmanship of Dan Tobey, at the Green Lodge Hotel, Hoylake, following a parade at Calday Grange Grammar School. Their self-appointed historian was Harold Jager, whose memories have just been republished.

This is real Dad’s Army stuff with “conscientious and industrious patrols” in the country “to the east and the west of the municipal links”.

“We retired to bed at home with alarm clocks set for such ghostly hours as 2 and 3am. Armed only with sticks and a kerchief round the arm, we sallied out into the pitch black night groping our way along obscure and unfamiliar lanes, stumbling over fences and ditches and often sprawling headlong into bunkers with eyes and ears agog for the enemy.”

After the fall of France, it was assumed we were next.

The book lists the names and addresses of nearly 300 men who served with the platoon. Some were subsequently killed while serving other branches of the armed forces.

By 1944, when there was no longer any threat of invasion, the Home Guard had almost 1.5m well-equipped soldiers.

The book contains poems and references to other gallant moments in British history. But its true appeal is in the humour that emerged from peril. A certain private followed up his attempt to run through one of his own men after unwisely using fixed bayonets during a search operation in total darkness, by opening the front of a grandfather clock at the Liverpool Golf Club, Hoylake, and attempting to climb inside it with the pendulum, under the misapprehension that it was the door to an orderly room.

Paul Johnson, 58, runs the Historia Press of Hull, which has reprinted the Home Guard book. Why do these men have such an enduring appeal?

“It is something to do with the amateurism,” he says. “The British are not a warlike race. We are always reluctantly dragged into wars. It is true in sport. The British are best when things are going wrong and we have our backs to the wall.

“The other thing is the Home Guard was very local,” adds Paul, who has an MA in Moral Philosophy and French from Hull University. “When you think of the war, it is of convoys in the Atlantic or battles in Normandy or North Africa, but this brought it home because there were people from local situations doing local jobs.”

Even so, they could be fierce chaps. “We derived great entertainment learning the correct methods of strangling, scalping, bone-smashing, face-stamping, kicking, scratching and generally making mincemeat of hostile sentries, paratroops or other enemy personnel,” wrote Jager. No wonder Hitler didn’t invade.

THE Wirral Home Guard (The Rise and Ascent of No 2 Platoon) is available at £7.50 from the Vis- itor Centre, at Birkenhead Park, or email historiapress@yahoo.com and www.historiapress.com, or call 01482 801205.

WATCH our Remembrance Day tribute in words and pictures at www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk

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