Our Land at War

by Duff Hart-Davis

  The Zoo was obliged to accommodate some outsiders: the army annexed the tea rooms, and the Bristol Aeroplane Company, bombed out of its works at Filton, took over the Pavilion at twenty-four hours’ notice. Damage, however, was surprisingly small. One high-explosive bomb did fall in the gardens, badly injuring a keeper and wrecking the gatehouse, but the animals seemed little worried by the frequent air raids on the city and the docks, and they appeared to regard the noise as nothing more tiresome than a prolonged series of thunderstorms. As the Zoo’s historian related,

  One golden opportunity for escape was missed by some baboons when a great hole was torn in their roof; but they took no notice of it, and were found quietly seated in their quarters when their keeper arrived to survey the damage.

  Star of the show was Elizabeth the lioness, who in 1943 gave birth to five cubs, raising her total since 1932 to twenty-six. ‘It reads strangely today,’ wrote the historian twenty years later, ‘but is nevertheless a fact, that two Russian bears acquired in 1944 were named Stalin and Stalina in compliment to “our gallant ally”.’

  Feeding the animals was a problem, but the difficulties were eased by digging up flower beds and planting them with vegetables. Financial help came from an adoption scheme, similar to one in London, whereby Friends of the Zoo contributed to the upkeep of their chosen animals. This proved extremely successful, but in 1942 it was discontinued because, after a sharp fall in the two preceding years, the gate money had risen spectacularly, as people stayed at home for their holidays and had little else on which to spend their cash. Funds were further increased by the Government, which paid a substantial rent for the use of the tea rooms. From 1942, when Clifton College became the headquarters of the US V Corps and then of the First Army under General Omar Bradley, native visitors were augmented by American soldiers, many of whom came in the hope of spotting that well-known rarity and aficionado of the Zoo, Queen Mary, a sighting of whom ranked alongside one of a panda.

  Before the war Chessington Zoo, in south-west London, had become immensely popular. It was founded by Reginald Goddard, who began work in a pet shop but did so well that he was able to buy Burnt Stub, a Victorian Gothic house in Kingston-upon-Thames, on a site that had been a Royalist stronghold in the Civil War, and set up a private menagerie in the grounds. He several times travelled to West Africa collecting exotic animals, and he bred lions with particular success. In 1931 he opened his estate to the public and quickly drew large crowds; but his master stroke was to persuade the Southern Railway to build a special station only a mile from the Zoo’s gates, and to run coaches to and fro. This stratagem raised attendance to record levels, the peak figure being 38,000 in a day.

  By the end of the 1930s his show had become part circus, enlivened by animal acts – a monkey which walked the tightrope, bears’ tea parties, dog football and so on. Then came the war, and the Government’s ban on the assembly of large crowds. Chessington Zoo was in a particularly dangerous place, on the fringe of London, and Goddard had no option but to close it. Undeterred, he hired a train and set off westwards with all his evacuees, animal and human, to join forces with Herbert Whitley, who had founded another private collection at his home, Primley, on the outskirts of Paignton in Devon, and opened it as a zoo in 1923. In 1940 Whitley was about to close his establishment, but the arrival of Goddard revitalized him, and together the two ran the joint venture as the Devon Zoo and Circus successfully throughout the war, sustained in part by the patronage of evacuees who had landed in the town. As at Bristol, in the weeks before D-Day Paignton was invaded by American troops, who camped in the embryo nature reserve in Clennon Gorge, used enclosures intended for bear dens as cookhouses, and thinned out the flock of resident peacocks before departing for the Normandy beaches.

  Many other zoos survived the war, among them Chester, which had been opened in the early 1930s, in the face of determined local opposition, by yet another collector, George Mottershead. He came from a family of market gardeners and in 1930 bought Oakfield Manor, a large house and nine acres of land, in Upton, a suburb of Chester. His first animals, including a tapir, a polar bear and a chimpanzee, arrived in 1932. In the early days the Zoo was run largely by members of his family, and supported by generous local benefactors.

  One of his pioneering ideas was to establish an outdoor lion enclosure, surrounded by fourteen-foot wire mesh fences; but the Zoo council voted this too dangerous, and nearly half its members resigned. During the war – in spite of its proximity to Liverpool, and the risk of being bombed – Chester Zoo took in refugees from Bristol, Paignton and other collections: so popular was it that by 1941 its lion population had reached fourteen.

  Many travelling circuses were forced to close down during the war, depriving country children of one of their favourite summer or autumn delights. But some shows kept going, and when Frances Partridge went to one at Hungerford in the autumn of 1942 (‘too good a treat to miss’), she noticed a sharp division in the audience:

  At one end, on seats draped with red plush, sat the children of the upper classes, with their mummies and nannies. The children were clean and brushed, white as worms, and their clothes spotless and well ironed; their little legs hung down limply in clean white socks … The mummies and nannies pursed their lips at the clown’s obscene antics. The side benches were filled with the children of the proletariat, strong, active, brown and uproarious. It was the class war in concrete form, and I saw it with proletarian eyes. The war has greatly emphasised this war between the classes, while paradoxically enough reducing the difference between them … Of course this only applies to the quiet domestic scene; danger and fear break the barriers instantly.

  Of the shows which closed down, the largest was Bertram Mills, which for almost twenty years had travelled the country in summer and held its winter season at Olympia, in west London, with many star performers, not least Koringa, ‘the only female fakir in the world’, who mesmerized crocodiles into immobility, had a granite paving stone broken over her chest with 14-lb hammers and rolled with a naked back over freshly smashed glass.

  After the death of Bertram Mills, the founder, in 1938, his sons Cyril and Bernard had taken over, and they made valiant efforts to carry on after war had been declared. With their depot at Ascot suddenly requisitioned and turned into a prisoner-of-war cage, they had to scatter their animals to various stables and hide their vehicles and trailers in the woods at Pollards Wood, their home in Buckinghamshire. It was out of the question to keep using Olympia, so during the winter of 1939 they put on shows in big variety theatres, having made sure the stages would stand the weight of elephants. Setbacks did not deter them. During the blackout in Nottingham a horse went through a plate-glass window, and when the circus train was derailed on the outskirts of Liverpool, the lions in their travelling dens had to be carried 200 yards through eighteen inches of snow and dragged through a hedge before they could be loaded onto a lorry.

  In the spring of 1940 the Mills brothers were determined to restart their travelling show, but they had hardly opened in Worcester before France fell, and, as Cyril put it, ‘we knew we were beaten at last … Britain’s biggest-ever circus had been destroyed overnight’. Another blow fell when their elephant trainer, John Gindl, was interned on the grounds that, being Austrian, he might have Nazi sympathies. It took the brothers five days of negotiation to secure his release, and during that time his wife Gertie never left the pachyderms, as she was the person whom they knew next best. A few weeks later a bomb fell within forty yards of where they were stabled in Buckinghamshire: terrified, and trumpeting so loudly that they were heard half a mile away, they tried to break out; but when John ran out of his house and called, the sound of his voice immediately calmed them.

  For the rest of the war the Mills brothers had to be content with running the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden (on which they had a lease) as a dance hall, and hiring out animals to other circus men who were putting on stage shows. While their six elephants got through £11,000 worth
of food, Bernard went into the RAF, and Cyril became one of the MI5 case officers who ran the Double Cross agents. For a few weeks in April and May 1942 he looked after the master spy Juan Pujol Garcίa, known as Garbo.

  Twenty

  Slate Country

  Tramp up Snowdon with our woad on;

  Never mind if we get rained or snowed on.

  Never want a button sewed on.

  Go it, Ancient B’s.

  W. Hope-Jones, National Anthem of the Ancient Britons

  The war brought an astonishing variety of people and activities to North Wales. Normally that harsh, rock-bound environment, drenched by the highest rainfall in the British Isles, was inhabited mainly by slate miners and sheep farmers; but for five years it became a hub of the diamond-cutting world, the guardian of priceless works of art, the site of colossal bomb stores, the location of a huge factory making aircraft parts, and the home of the army’s top-secret school for snipers.

  On top of all that, in October 1940 a coded signal about a camel falling ill in London Zoo sent the Light Entertainment Department of the BBC scurrying northwards from Bristol to Bangor, on the coast. From there the quickfire Liverpudlian Tommy Handley broadcast the radio comedy programme, ITMA – It’s That Man Again – throughout the war, giving an immense weekly lift to the nation’s morale and causing people to go about loosing off the show’s catchphrases at each other – ‘This is Funf speaking’ (Jack Train impersonating a German spy); ‘I don’t mind if I do’ (Colonel Humphrey Chinstrap’s answer to any question that might get him a drink), and Mrs Mopp the office charlady’s ‘Can I do you now, Sir?’

  ‘Who in Bangor prior to the war would have dared predict that the city would have become a centre of the important diamond-cutting industry?’ asked the North Wales Chronicle on 21 March 1941. In fact a Dutch firm had set up shop in the High Street with a staff of sixty, among whom were spoken Dutch, English, Flemish, French and Welsh, the last by five local lads who were learning the trade. The company came from Brighton, where, after the First World War, the Government had started a scheme to teach disabled servicemen the art of cutting and polishing precious stones. In 1941, when the south coast became too dangerous, a Hatton Garden trader called Albert Monnickendam took several experienced diamond cutters with him and moved north. A similar enterprise was established at the seaside resort of Colwyn Bay by Gerrit Wins, a dealer from Antwerp.

  Diamond-cutting employed relatively few people – as did the storage of pictures in the Manod mine. In contrast, the factory established in enormously long sheds in the Dinorwic slate quarry, near Llanberis, needed huge numbers of workers. The quarry was the second biggest in the world, covering 700 acres, and the wartime factory set up within it, which made wings and other parts of aircraft, eventually employed 3000 people, many of them mothers and housewives. As the author Reg Chambers Jones remarked, ‘the role of the Unemployment Office was changed from finding work for people to that of finding people for work’.

  The factory lay in a dramatic setting, with ledges of bare rock – the result of quarrying slate – rising steeply in squared-off steps above it. Remote though they were, the sheds were guarded by machine-gun posts manned day and night, and employees were forbidden to speak to outsiders about their jobs. They worked in two twelve-hour shifts, with overcrowded buses ferrying men and women to and fro around the countryside. Until war came, most of the women had never had the chance to do anything except look after their homes and families, but after training they soon became expert at assembling aircraft components. Many local women worked in a subterranean explosives factory at Marchwiel, near Wrexham, manufacturing gun cotton by saturating cotton wool with nitroglycerine – a dangerous and unpleasant process, from which the fumes could turn skin and hair yellow.

  The Germans seem never to have realized that Llanberis was such a hive of production – and certainly they never attacked it. But the attention of Luftwaffe pilots might well have been attracted by the enormous Queen Mary articulated lorries which carried the aircraft parts to factories far afield. These leviathans, with their four-wheeled cabs and flat trailers sixty feet long, would leave Llanberis at 4 p.m. and grind southwards through the night, each piloted by two drivers, not reaching Weybridge in Surrey (for instance) until 10 a.m., so that much of their journey was in daylight, especially in summer. On the return trip they would pick up essential raw materials, but also, if they passed through the Vale of Evesham in season, baskets of fruit, which were eagerly bought by the workers in Snowdonia at 1s 6d a shot.

  With its wild, rocky mountains and scarcity of inhabitants, North Wales presented ideal terrain for military training: live ammunition could be fired with abandon, and the rough going, exacerbated by extravagant rainfall, was a challenge for the hardiest of soldiers. Units of the regular army were based at strategic points, because it seemed possible that the Germans might try to invade Britain from the west, using Eire as a springboard. Early in 1940, for instance, the 46th (Liverpool Welsh) Tank Regiment was stationed at Llandwrog, south of Caernarvon, charged with the task of guarding the southern entrance to the Menai Strait.

  Yet it was in Snowdonia that trainees really met their match. Among them were officer cadets from Sandhurst, who came by rail to Betws-y-Coed, were driven to Capel Curig and then pitched into a series of ferocious exercises, some of which lasted for days and nights on end and included a realistic ambush, rock-climbing and assault marches. Similar activities went on at the Command Assault School.

  Another lethal skill taught at Llanberis was that of sniping. ‘The sniper is the big game hunter of the battlefield,’ wrote Captain the Hon. Tony Wills in a substantial, sixty-five-page training manual which he composed for the War Office. He defined the sniper as ‘a soldier who is trained to locate an enemy, however well hidden … He must combine the art of the hunter, the wiles of a poacher and the skill of a target shot, with the determination to seek out his enemy.’

  Wills certainly knew his subject, for before the war he had devoted much time to shooting and stalking. At Eton he had been captain of the Shooting VIII for two years, and he had stalked deer in numerous Highland forests, making himself as proficient as any professional stalker/gamekeeper, not only in his experience of fieldcraft and firing a rifle, but also in the specialist skill of spying with a telescope. The close correlation between spying, stalking and shooting was recognized by the military authorities, and in 1942, at the age of twenty-seven, Wills was appointed Commandant and Chief Instructor of the Army School of Fieldcraft, Observation and Sniping at Llanberis.

  There were no deer in those wild and rain-sodden mountains – only sheep, which were supposed to be sacrosanct – but there was any amount of open space in which to manoeuvre and fire live ammunition. When ricochets whined away off rocks, there was no danger of anyone being hit, and Wills devised numerous routines to test his recruits. On the first day of a course he had twelve instructors go out and conceal themselves at various points in the training area, their hands and faces darkened with green and brown camouflage cream, their helmets garnished with grass and tufts of hessian. Also set out were twelve fence posts, each with an empty whisky bottle on top.

  Having explained that twelve men were hidden in the rock-studded landscape, Wills would challenge his recruits to spot them. Then he would blow his whistle. After a pause, with nothing seen, he blew the whistle again, whereupon rifle shots cracked out and all twelve bottles exploded in fragments. The instructor then suggested that the recruits search the ground in front of them more carefully, as in future their lives might depend on careful reconnaissance – and at a third blast of the whistle the instructors rose into view.

  Wills’s manual was extremely thorough, and emphasized throughout that the aim was to kill enemy. It taught men how to walk silently, how to crawl belly-to-the-ground, how to use natural cover, how best to carry out observation. A sniper’s objective, it said, is to kill with one round: he must be able to hit a man’s head regularly at up to 200 yards’ ran
ge, and a man’s trunk up to 400. A natural aptitude for fieldcraft is essential. ‘Stalking is the application of fieldcraft in its widest sense, to bring the sniper within range of his quarry.’ As for night work: ‘Man is not a nocturnal animal … Sight is largely replaced by hearing, so that silence is of prime importance.’

  Among the skills which the courses taught, they emphasized the advantages of using telescopes, which Axis snipers did not possess. A four-draw stalking telescope, with a magnification of twenty-five, was more powerful than any but the largest naval binoculars; in clear weather experienced users could see troop movements ten miles away, and at shorter ranges their ability to pick out fine detail was invaluable. Good observation, Wills wrote, was ‘the first step towards offensive sniping’.

  The shikaris of India, the trappers of Canada, the hunters of the European forests, deer-stalkers and poachers and all who have to pit themselves against wild animals, have retained the quick and perceptive eyesight that becomes of great value in war. But the townsman whose eyes need seldom exert themselves for day-to-day existence can only develop a keenness of vision with much training and practice.

  The reputation of the school spread quickly, and in an attempt to advertise the usefulness of snipers attached to any infantry unit, two-day courses were started for battalion commanders. As one expert recalled, ‘they came prepared to scoff, but stayed to applaud … When they left they were as excited as children who had discovered a new game … Their eyes were opened completely to the possibilities of this great sport of sniping.’ Enthusiasm for sniping permeated even the Home Guard in the far south, where one veteran claimed that in the First World War he personally had had ‘a bag of something like fifty Huns’.