The Hampshire Family Historian | Volume 51 No.4 | March 2025

Member’s article

“Hello 2DP this is Mr Tranter speaking” Some of you asked me for my feelings about the war years. I left the secondary school at the age of 18 not long before the war. My ambition was to be a teacher and I should have gone on to the next day the prime minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich to negotiate with Hitler. Later he flew back waving a piece of paper and saying we have secured peace in our lifetime. In fact, the peace barely lasted a year. Next year Hitler marched into Poland and on the 3rd of September 1939 Great Britain declared war on Germany. I was at the house of a girlfriend. Can you imagine a lovely sunny morning and the family sitting around the

municipal college, but we knew a war was imminent, and so I was keen to join the RAF. My mother wouldn’t hear of this and refused to sign the papers. You may be surprised but can you imagine that in those days you couldn’t make decisions like this for yourself until you were 21, but she eventually agreed to let me apply for the RAF volunteer reserve. In the meantime, I took a job as a cost clerk with a local manufacturer. It was at this time that Hitler invaded the Sudetenland, part of Czechoslovakia, and war seemed inevitable. Two of the departmental managers at the Works were part-time air raid wardens. One job they had to do about that time was to give out gas masks in case gas was to be used against us and they asked me to go along and help. You all know Somers Town (Portsmouth), well where Somers Town now is, where all those flats are, there were rows of small very poor houses. I shall never forget calling at these houses seeing the large families, and the poverty. As we fitted them with their gas masks, I wondered at the marvellous calm of these ordinary people in spite of their obvious concern for their many children. The babies, by the way, were put into a kind of enclosed carry-cot which had a little window in front of it so they were completely enclosed and safe from gas. At this time a plane was flying overhead while searchlights swept backwards and forwards across the sky looking for it. It was a practice but it all seemed very real and very grim. The

radio and then at 11:00am the Prime Minister made his announcement saying that from the time of 11:00am a state of War now exists between this country and Germany and Italy. We were all very quiet with our thoughts thinking of the unspeakable horrors that war might unleash. We were wondering what would happen to all of us individually. My girlfriend’s mother sat there and just cried very softly. At first little happened although we did hear that ships were being sunk. The worst thing perhaps was the blackout. No lights at all could be shown. If you opened a door and let out the light you would hear the wardens blowing their whistles and shouting and you could be fined for this. Cars and even bicycles had hoods over their lights allowing only a slit of light out. Getting about you can imagine was very difficult. Cinemas and theatres were still open, you could still go to the pictures. To keep up their spirits too people held blackout parties, taking turns going to each other’s houses, singing around the piano and so on. Friends were beginning to show up in uniform. Later we would hear that one of them, perhaps so-and-so, had gone down with SS Rawalpindi or some other ship. The following year in June 1940 came the Blitzkrieg. Holland, Belgium, France were overrun and Britain stood alone. It was a strange feeling. We couldn’t see how we would ever beat the

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