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Encounters with the Locals.
The local population were in two minds about their visitors from abroad. Joyce Dickie (née Snow, Grace Barnes’ younger sister) worked at the telephone exchange in Bordon and recalls the first Canadian soldiers she met there: “They were all bad ones that they’d taken from prison – I got into contact with them quite a bit and they were really horrible.” She used to say this to her mother, but was told: “You shouldn’t talk like that, they’ve come over to help us.” Her mother ran dances and social evenings on behalf of the Red Cross in the Village Hall, which the War Office had commandeered. People promised to give a penny a week towards the cost, and Joyce went round the village to collect the pennies every Monday. There were plenty of young Canadian soldiers at these dances, and Joyce met one there who she later married. “So I changed my mind about them eventually”, she said.
Many villagers would invite servicemen in for a cup of tea on a more or less regular basis, and others organised small parties for them. “We used to have little parties up on Headley Down and invite the soldiers”, Joyce Dickie remembers. “We couldn’t get very many in because it was only a little hall (along Fairview Road, now a dwelling). We each used to ask one soldier, and we’d supply cider and crisps – we had some jolly good times up there.” Jim Richards told his sister, Betty Roquette, how he would go across from the huts at Crestafield to get fruit and fish & chips from Mrs Eddey, who had open house for the Canadians on Sundays. Mr Eddey also used to run dances.
Some of the Canadians remember the time when Jack and Marjorie Harrison invited them round to their house (in Reynolds, Standford Lane) for a corn roast. John Whitton, an officer in ‘B’ Squadron of the Garrys, recalls: “It was a very North American event. Marjorie was an American by birth, English by education, and had grown the corn at Headley from seed sent to her by her father in Connecticut. It was delicious.”
The soldiers held social events of their own. Joyce Dickie recalls: “They used to have parties in Bordon, and come round in a big truck to pick up all the girls. There was so much food, and we were rationed. They had lots of cigarettes with flip-tops, and sweets.” On a more formal level, some of the village ladies were invited round by the Canadians for supper evenings. Joyce Stevens remembers going with the rector’s daughter and others to The Mount, off Barley Mow Hill, where they were given what they assumed to be a typical Canadian meal – heaps of food, and all on one plate. John Whitton recalls the time the ‘A’ Squadron officers gave a garden party and invited all their neighbours round. “There was tea, sandwiches, punch and other refreshments. One or two of the elderly guests didn’t fully realize what the other refreshment really was – their systems weren’t accustomed to it and they were helped home with much laughter.”
Village men serving in the British forces returned on leave to find Canadians “all over the place” and were not altogether happy about the situation, but the local girls were of a different disposition. As Pat Lewis put it: “They’d been brought up on American movies, and they associated us with the Americans and the great prairies of Canada, and thought it would be marvellous to live out there.” Local girls remember being told: ‘Marry me – I own a gopher farm back home’. “If I’d been a young Headley village boy I’d have been very uptight about things”, said Pat; but he adds, “we fought more among ourselves than we did with the villagers.” Tom Webb of the Garrys writes: “I do know that the people of the village were most gracious and friendly to us, and even forgiving, for we were not exactly angels.”
Betty Parker (née Aldred), who lived then as now in Eashing Cottages, remembers going down the alley beside Belmont with a friend and putting sticks out for doughnuts – the Miss Laverteys used to scold them for it, she says. She was aged about 14 or 15 at the time. “We used to have good fun with their boxes of chocolates and cookies – we’d say ‘any gum chum’, and they’d give us a big packet of gum. We used to go up by The Chestnuts (now Hill Cottage, on Barley Mow Hill), and they’d say ‘mend my socks and you’ll get some chewing gum’, and we girls used to mend their blooming socks – darn them just for a piece of chewing gum. They were always chewing gum – always.”
They also had a reputation for drinking a fair amount. The pubs were very different to Canadian bars – and “they got so wild because they drank here as they never could in Canada – and they had more money than our men”, as one local remembers it. The three pubs in Headley seemed to be packed out most of the time. “It wasn’t just the troops based in Headley”, said Pat Lewis, “we had the Canadian Army women in Bordon plus the laundry (on Broxhead Common) which most of them worked in – for some reason or other they all seemed to be in the pubs at Headley, at least while we were there, so you had to hold onto your glass – if you put it down, it disappeared and you couldn’t get another drink.
“Sometimes you couldn’t get into the bar – there was a stairway in the first pub as you go down the hill (the Wheatsheaf) that went up to the snug – well that staircase, it used to be full – no room inside.” He was stationed in the huts on Ludshott Common by Seymour Road, and says he used to do most of his drinking in the Fox and Pelican at Grayshott, where it was quieter. Troops from his regiment were also taken by trucks to Haslemere and “dropped by the two hotels” there. More than once he had to walk back when he missed the return lift.
Betty Parker, too, recalls that the pubs were packed. She lived between the Crown and the Wheatsheaf, and remembers them charging 2/6d deposit on a glass, so her father used to take a jam jar along. Arthur Dean recalls that Mr Smallbone, the landlord of the Crown, would get two or three local lads to go round and pick up the glasses, so when the soldiers wanted another drink they had to go and pay their half crown again.
The troops would sit in a row opposite the Wheatsheaf, where the phone box is now, and Betty remembers the publican there following them up the road asking for their glasses back, and seeing them drop them on the road in front of him. John Whitton recalls: “I’ve forgotten the owner’s name, but his teen-aged daughter was called Jeannie, I believe, and while really too young to be drawing beer for us, she was very good natured and popular with us all.”
Harvey Williamson says: “‘Old Charlie’ played the piano in the Crown – not very well, not much more than ‘You Are My Sunshine’, but he’d keep playing so long as you put a pint on his piano.” Sometimes they’d send out the jeep to find out the opening times of the various pubs – it seemed that one would open as another closed. He admitted that when they went out, the emphasis was on the drinking. Tom Webb, of the same regiment, remembers good times at the three pubs, and “an unforgettable pint of Old at the Wheatsheaf after a drinkless trip from Glasgow. I still taste it”, he says.
Pat Lewis commented that with many Canadians it was the way they drank it which gave them problems with English beer – mixing it up with spirits or drinking whisky chasers. They were also “knocked around a bit” by the old ale which came out in winter time, but Al Trotter says he found his first Mild & Bitter quite potent enough, “much to my sorrow the next morning.”
Even those who couldn’t get to meet the locals still have their memories of them. Len Carter of the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion who, after taking a prolonged and unauthorised leave in London, found himself behind the wire of Erie Camp, remembers: “From those days I came away with an impression which has stayed with me all this time. Gazing one day at freedom beyond the wire, I saw this elderly grey haired lady, a stately looking person on a high-seated bicycle pedalling slowly, almost majestically, along the road with a cigarette hanging from the side of her mouth. I believe that if an army convoy had come along it would have pulled over to accord her right of passage, and I thought at the time it was she, not Britannia, who typified the Brits.” Many readers in Headley will have their own ideas as to who this lady might have been.

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