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Part one of an oral history interview with Mr. Ivor Chappell about his early wartime experiences when he lived in Kempston, Bedfordshire. The interview was conducted by Jenny Ford on behalf of Bedford Museum.

SEE ALSO memories previously submitted to the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ ‘People’s War’ website — ‘Joining the D.E.M.S.’, ‘Forever Young’ and ‘Some Christmas’s Remembered, 1942, 43, 44 & 45’ by Mr. Ivor Walter CHAPPELL about his time in the Royal Navy posted to D.E.M.S. gunner duties on board ‘Empire Spartan’ HMS Chrysanthemum and HMS President.

“I was born in Kempston Barracks on the 25th of October 1924. My dad did 22 years in the Beds. and Herts. Regiment. My father had the chance to run what they call the Drill Hall at Ampthill. He had the chance to take up employment out of the Army. He first of all went to the Britannia Iron and Steel Works, Kempston - actually it wasn’t called that at the time, it was called Howard’s. They made plough shares in the 1920s, I think. He got through World War I and all that stuff and my little mum looked after eight children and we were nearly all born in Kempston Barracks. I was four years old when we moved to Ampthill, we moved up Park Hill. My father was a Steward, still Army ‘ish if you know what I mean. All smart, moustache and all this stuff you know, he was proud of his 22 years. We all moved to Ampthill, eight children and mum and dad. Then dad was still working, it was in the middle of Ampthill and it was mainly T.A. which stands for Territorial Army and they used to have big ‘do’s’ in Ampthill. The Beds. & Herts. Regimental Band used to come and play the ‘Retreat’, it was a thing for us kids. Well I was moved there when I was four years old and for some reason known to themselves my mother and father decided to move back into Kempston. My mother was a Kempston girl. My father was an Essex man, well he was Essex Army so that’s how he met my mother in Kempston. So we were all Kempston kids. Then they decided to come back to Kempston so we moved into 26 Bedford Road, Kempston which is right next door to the Barracks.

My dad, he became chief cook at what was called the ‘Bovril’ factory in the 1940s, in Reddings Wood, in Ampthill, this side of Ampthill Hill. During the early part of the war they hollowed the centre of that wood out and they put this big building in and Bovril came from London. Bovril had been bombed I think, that was their chief depot in London. So dad took over the canteen. He had about 10 or a dozen women under him and he worked there from about 6.30 in the morning until about five or six o’clock at night.

And then in the early 1940s he volunteered for the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Guard. My dad was always a soldier, until the day he died. There was no way he was going to miss the war so he put himself forward as a ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Guard, well they were LDV at the time, Local Defence Volunteers. Then he became a ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Guard, he was back in khaki again, he had got his rifle and bayonet and that was it. The best part of it was he was right down the bottom of Spring Road, Kempston. We were right next door to the Barracks and he used to cycle down Spring Road, turn right in the Elstow Road and there’s a line of fir trees and they are still there actually - and they had a bunker built there and they had a machine gun. But for the start they probably had two rifles between ten of them, something like that until things got sorted out but it all took time. When the air raid sirens went my dad would have to ‘stand to’ at his post down Spring Road there in Elstow Road. He cycled there and then he’d do perhaps three parts of the night down Elstow Road, cycle home, quick swill, comb his hair or whatever, I don’t know if he’d have anything to eat or not, then he’d get on his bike and bike five miles to Ampthill, to the Bovril Factory. Then he left there. Then when they took over these fields opposite Chimney Corner there - that was a big armaments factory and they had got what they call a ‘hostel’ and they’d got Irish and goodness knows what else living there in this ‘hostel’ and my dad was running the canteen. So he was still cooking, he stayed there, it was hard for the times, he was there for several years. I think he gave up cooking for a while and I think he became a general labourer in Allen’s Engineering Works over in Queen’s Park, Bedford. And then he finished up, which I think he loved, as I say he was
always a soldier, he finished up a cook in the Sergeant’s Mess in Kempston Barracks! So his world had turned a complete circle and he had come back to where he started from 40 years ago, something like that. That’s marvellous!

I left school in December1937 and well, I was only a little fellow and mum bought one of my elder brothers — he’d got small framed bike, she bought it off him for £1 0s 0d for me. My first long trousers were a bib and brace overall and she had to turn up the bottoms about six inches. I was only about 5 foot tall, I’ve always been a little fellow. I went for a job interview at W. H. Allen’s over at Queen’s Park. I’d got a pal called Evan Smith. Mr. Smith worked in W. H. Allen’s, Evan went there for a job — got it! I went there for a job — did I get it? No!

So I went to Bedford Plough and Engineering which is right on Cow Bridge, it’s Ampthill Road, you turn right and go into Kempston, that’s under Cow Bridge or you turn sort of left, I’m going back years now of course. There’s the railway, here was a big gap and there was a kind of a factory, a foundry. I’d wondered into the yard and a young lady asked me what I wanted and I said, ‘I’m looking for a job.’ So she said, ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘hang on a minute’. And she went through this big door and she comes out and she said, ‘Come on’ and I went through. And sitting behind the desk is a man with grey wavy hair, glasses, collar, tie and suit ‘Come on in lad, sit down.’ ‘Now’ he said ‘what are you doing here on a day like this a little boy like you?’ So I said, ‘I’m looking for a job sir.’ He said, ‘Oh, are you?’ So I said, ‘Yes, Sir.’ ‘Aah, so when are you leaving school then?’ I said, ‘Christmas.’ He said, ‘Aah, I think we might fit you in somewhere lad.’ ‘Audrey’ he said ‘bring this lad a cup of tea and some biscuits.’ I never forget these things, so she came in with a cup of tea and some biscuits. His name was Mr. Shorten. He was a Scotsman and one of the best blokes I ever met at the start of my life. So anyway I had my cup of tea and two or three biscuits and it was lovely and I’d got a job! After Christmas, January 2nd or 3rd (1938) or whatever, I could start work there as a ‘core boy’ and that is what I did.

They made plough shares, they made parts for ploughs. This was 1938 because I helped the carpenter to build an air raid shelter for the men. They dug out all the ground out of the front there -I look at it now and think of it too. I went in the foundry. You won’t know what I’m talking about but I was a ‘core boy’. I used to make little sand things and I can’t recall the name but they were fitted into things and they were clamped on top. And they would get like a pot with a handle of molten steel and tipped it through this hole and it would go down and make a plough share. But in the middle of this share there’d got to be a bolt hole to fit it to the plough. I made little cores and that would be in there and the molten steel would run all round it - through the cap on top and they’d leave it for while, while the steel had set. Perhaps 20 minutes or half an hour and when they took the top off because it was all made with sand and stuff, there would be a nice plough share with all little bits and that sticking up and they had to grind them off, that was called ‘fettling’. Have you ever heard of a ‘fettler’? Well a ‘fettler’ was a grinder, he would grind the little steel bit that stuck up, the rough bits and my core would be in the middle there and that would make the bolt hole. I was only there for only 12 months because the fumes — they got my throat, I nearly choked one night and then I broke out in eczema. Because this stuff that we were using on making these sand cores, this sand had yellow chemical poured in it to make it go stiff and hard and I also had to get a sieve and sieve dried horse muck, it used to bind the sand together. So there was me up to my finger tips in horse muck! Anyway, that was my job. But the funny part about it was I was with this carpenter helping to make these air raid shelters out the front because war wasn’t declared, it was 1938 but it was coming. And he said to me one day - my father, his name was Hubert William Chappell and everybody called him ‘Bill’, I don’t know why. So some people that knew my dad as ‘Bill’ used to call me ‘Little Billy’ they called me and I liked that — anyway I lasted there a year.

And then I really jumped out the frying pan into the fire - I went as an Errand Boy in Bedford. You weren’t about but in 1940 we had blizzards I was trudging through two foot of snow with a basket over my arm — I used to deliver papers and books and magazines. I worked for a high class Newsagent — he used to mend fountain pens. And of course all around Lansdowne Road and The Crescent, Shakespeare Road, there was no end of posh people, they had cars and gardeners and chauffeurs and all this stuff. And that’s what I was delivery so the first Christmas I was there, I was a cheeky little sod, I’d knock on the door and the woman would come and say, ‘Yes, lad!’ I’d say, this is how I did it, I’d said ‘Mr. Pipler’s book boy’ and she would say, ‘I’ve already given to the newspaper girl!’ ‘Ah, yes madam, but I’m the boy, the delivery boy, I’m not the newspaper ‘ ‘Oh, hang on a minute, I’ll see what I can find.’ Perhaps if I was lucky I got six pence, maybe I might get threepence, but I asked for it! I used to do deliveries to all these posh houses you know, as I say they were posh. Of course no end of them up Lansdowne Road now, I think, are old people’s dwellings because they are massive houses. But nobody can tell me Jenny and they still can’t convince me to this day when you see it on television you see a twenty bedroomed house and there’s a man and a woman and two children, what’s this twenty bedrooms about and six bathrooms? And then there were people slogging away in the mill, down the mine for what - £3 0s 0d a week? Living like slaves. It’s a funny old world, that’s how I thought.

I started work at half past six in the mornings to get the papers, there used to be a wholesale paper merchant right next door to the Roman Catholic Church in Midland Road. I used to come down from Bromham Road with a great big truck, pulling it riding my bike, steel rims, rattle rattle — half past six in the morning! W used to get all the papers and that was the first time I ever saw girls being paper girls, because generally it’s paper boys and it was good. They’d got a set back doorway at Pipler’s, it’s an estate agents now I think, it’s almost opposite Holy Trinity Church that was or The Crescent. Right next door to The Crescent was St.Barnardo’s Children’s ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½, I don’t know if that’s still there or not, anyway this is the 1940s and all the papers that I was handling, all the war, all history, years, well months of history. Mr. Pipler, he was senior, Harold and he wouldn’t perhaps come until 8 o’clock and I’d been there since seven - so I’m selling papers. ‘Oh, I say old boy could I have an Express?’ ‘I say old boy have you got a The Times there?’ ‘That’ll be threepence,’ you know. Sometimes I used to think, if you’ll excuse the language, I used to think bugger you mate and I put threepence in my own pocket and buy threepenn’th of sweets from the shop down the street. But I was honest mainly. But that’s how I felt.

Another thing, this blizzard we had in 1940 I was trudging around those streets, I walked miles, I was wet through, I’m cold and I was going into this outhouse out there back of Pipler’s shop and there was Basil, the younger brother and his pal. They wrapping newspapers up and doing various tasks, they had got the gas fires on, drinking cups of Bovril they were — did they ever say, ‘Ivor would you like a drop of Oxo or Bovril?’ No. But I’m a tough little sod and I did it. So I carried on there and then one day, the thing that altered my whole life was an advert in the old Beds Times and it said, ‘Brickyard Labourers Wanted’ at Kempston Hardwick, Eastwood’s Flettons - £2 15s 0d a week. I was getting 15/- a week, 15/- for what would that be? Half past six, I would go home oh, about quarter to nine, this was cycling from Bromham Road over the bridges and back to Kempston Barracks and I’d have a quick breakfast there with mum, perhaps half an hour then I’d cycle like mad to get back to Pipler’s. Then I’d work until one, an hours dinner ‘til two and then finish at five, so how many hours is that - what, about nine hours. And I was doing that for six days a week for 15/-. And then I went to the Brickyard over here and it was very hard work — filthy, dirty, brick dust, coal dust you name it. I was working there and I was mixing with men like that and it was all hard work, hard graft and so forth.�

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