Also at the Green was Charlie Fry, the local builder with his wife Emma and children Ruth, aged 9 and Edward, aged 5. Frederick Cleal, a builder’s mason was a lodger. Belinda Brocklehurst recalls next door to my grandparent’s house lived the Fry Family. Charlie Fry was the local carpenter and builder, and he had a huge builder’s shed. Their son Edward was a little older than me and my ‘best friend’ in the village- I’m not sure he would agree with that, but he was allowed to come and play in the garden sometimes. His older sister Ruth was very dear to us and sometimes helped our nanny, and her elder sister looked after Ginie for a short time when our nanny Winifred was called up for war service.

he Home Guard was set up in May 1940 as Britain’s ‘last line of defence’ against German invasion. Members of this ‘Dad’s Army’ were usually men above or below the age of conscription and those unfit or ineligible for front line military service. On 14 May 1940, Secretary of State for War Anthony Eden made a broadcast calling for men between the ages of 17 and 65 to enrol in a new force, the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV). By July, nearly 1.5 million men had enrolled, and the name of this people’s army was changed to the more inspiring Home Guard. The Home Guard was at first a rag-tag militia with scarce and often make-do uniforms and weaponry. Yet it evolved into a well- equipped and well-trained army of 1.7 million men. Men of the Home Guard were not only readied for invasion but also performed other roles including bomb disposal and manning anti-aircraft and coastal artillery. Over the course of the war 1,206 men of the Home Guard were killed on duty or died of wounds. With the Allied armies advancing towards Germany and the threat of invasion or raids over, the Home Guard was stood down on 3 December 1944. Charles Baumber from the Paddocks remembered that before Anthony Eden had finished his broadcast (May 1940) I had enrolled in the LDV (Local Defence Volunteers) at Litton Cheney Police Station, which PC Trevett can verify. I served throughout the war under the command of Colonel Duke of Martinstown, with Lt. Col. Newman as platoon commander, and I did not miss a parade or guard for three years and then it was owing to my daughter’s illness. After her death I continued parades and beach patrols as usual. Also, when we were expecting the invasion of our part of the coast and when “Jerry” used to come overhead with hundreds of planes bombing and machine-gunning. I carried a rifle or Browning automatic to and from work for two years with full magazines, ready for a low flying “Jerry”. When the Home Guard were stood down, I held the rank of corporal. William Watson of the Durham Light Infantry recalled one of the things I had to do was to liaise with the Home Guard and going back a bit, about 17 th July I went to Dorchester conference in the Assize Court with my Brigadier, Old Jackie Churchill, Jackie sat in the Judge’s seat in the Assize Court and I really think he thought he was Judge Jefferies sitting there dispensing justice. It was an extremely good Home Guard Conference. They were LDV, Local Defence Volunteers in those days and they all wanted to cooperate with us except for the MP, old Colfax, he really didn’t see much object in joining in the Home Guard cooperation. Eventually we got the Home Guard on a very high footing. My view was that no attempt should be made to make them Grenadier Guardsmen. They should be what they were, Home Guard and they should use their own ingenuity and individuality in the areas which they knew and to go further than this would upset the whole apple cart and upset the whole object of the force. They shouldn’t have military parades and all that sort of thing, they should be capable of dealing with tanks, surprises at the end of the village street, and search out any parachutists, which of course they did. Much more like a guerilla force. We were always helping the Home Guard. At the end of August Colonel Peter Jefferies was commanding the Battalion and he staged a tank trap so that the Home Guard could deal with tanks entering the village from various directions and we put that demonstration on, how to deal with tanks one evening, about 22 nd August. We had the whole of the Home Guard watching, and it was extremely successful, all went so well. The Home Guard were greatly impressed and afterwards they went through it all merely as a drill, not as an exercise. They chose the windows from the houses to throw the Molotov cocktails from and they went behind the hedges, behind the walls to toss the bombs and grenades into the approaching carriers. Our carriers had acted as tanks. Belinda Brocklehurst recalled my grandfather, a retired Indian Army Colonel, ran the Home Guard for the area. He ran exercises which involved his troop of quite elderly or unfit men crawling around the countryside and laying booby traps and ambushes. Sometimes I was allowed to join them. Eventually they were given guns and live ammunition, and he was able to have shooting practice in the garden. I used to love collecting the small golden spent bullets afterwards. He would take me out to ‘help’ him shoot rabbits and pigeon for the pot and to catch little brown trout in the tiny Bride River. They all helped to eke out our meagre food rations and were also given to the older people in the village. I remember an evening when the telephone went and everyone became very serious, there was a flurry of activity, and a label was tied round my neck. Apparently, a secret code word had been passed to the colonel of the local regiment who was dining with my grandparents, I think Operation Chamberlain, which meant the Germans were invading. My grandfather and mother (who had also joined the Home Guard) went off to fight on the beaches, leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves. Fortunately, this was a false alarm, and though a group of ships had been spotted, they did not invade. It was later thought to be a trial run. My grandfather was very busy running the Home Guard and had a lot of meetings in the house and firing practice on the tennis lawn when they used live rifles and shot at targets on the bank. Occasionally there was an exercise between the Home Guard and the local soldiers stationed in the village. One side was the Germans and the other the British. I remember a terrible occasion when the Home Guard were the British and the soldiers Germans were very much the winners. It was very realistic, and I found some of them crawling around in the garden and was told to run for it. At the end of the day, various members of the Home Guard were led off to be shot by the big tree at Cross Ways. One of these was Charlie Fry, Edward’s father, and Edward was sobbing his heart out as he watched his father led away. Occasionally I went with my grandfather to inspect points on the coast and some places where arms were kept. One day we went to see where some bombs had landed, two huge craters near the coast road above Bexington. We went down to Bexington where the fields on both sides of the village and along the coast were all heavily mined. Suddenly a small dog came running towards us across the mine field and I was thrown to the ground with my large grandfather on top of me, in case the mines went off. Fortunately, it was a very small dog, and nothing happened. Lt. Col. Drew of the Home Guard drew a map entitled ‘Litton Cheney Defence Scheme’ showing roadblocks, gun positions, anti-tank mines etc., mostly around White Cross and the Mount.

Alexander, a retired Indian Army Officer and Clare Harper were here in 1939 with their son Ian, a Lieutenant in the Cheshire Regiment and Sylvia Couzens, aged 87. Anne Griffith was a children’s nurse and Ella Bettsack a cook and housekeeper. The Harpers had taken in Ella, a Jewish refugee from Hirschberg in Germany. Born in 1896 she had been a shopkeeper in Germany. The Harper’s daughter and grandchildren, Belinda and Ginie came to live with them in 1940. Belinda Brocklehurst recalled her arrival at the Cottage in 1940 a s we ran into the house we found a haven of peace, despite the ‘dog fight’ going on overhead. My grandmother was in the drawing room pouring out tea. My grandfather sat smoking his pipe in a large armchair, his two dogs, lying at his feet. Great Aunt Sylvia sat in her rocking chair doing her knitting. The ‘Dog Fight’ was a fascinating and horrifying sight with our brave fighter planes swirling around above us in the blue sky as they tried to shoot down German bombers on their way to bomb Bristol and Exeter- the period was the height of the Battle of Britain. When the war started Colonel Harper took over the running of the Home Guard. He had a grey Singer car and later got petrol coupons because of this role. He belonged to ‘The Club’ in Bridport and every Saturday went there to meet his mates and have a pink gin with Captain Perry. George Innes Watson of the Durham Light Infantry was billeted here from June to September 1940. He recalled I must say about the kindness of the inhabitants. I moved my billet to the house of a man called Colonel Harper and his good wife slaved away at the little, tiny YMCA we had in the village, and he couldn’t have been kinder, I never wanted to move, he was a charming old man. He had commanded the 3 rd Punjabs and he had a son, who subsequently after the war was a brilliant polo player, he’d been in the Indian Cavalry, and he was an international polo player. He had another son, poor chap who was drowned in HMS Thistle and he had a married daughter. One day I went back to my billet to get something out of my room and I left my cap on the chest in the hall and I came down and I couldn’t find my cap, there was a cap lying there with a red hat band and I could hear the old man’s voice in the study talking away so I thought, oh well, there must be someone from District or Higher Command having a word with the old man, not a bit of it. I picked up the cap with the red cap band around and it was mine. The old man had put a red cap band round, I suppose hopefully thinking that someday I would actually be wearing one. It was a long time before I did. He was so kind to me. There were lots of little streams, coming down off the downs, chalk streams and there was one in particular that ran through a meadow just below the village and he took me out fishing there one day. I didn’t catch any, but he caught a beautiful trout out of this tiny little runner that found its way across these water meadows. He gave me a dinner party one night and attending it was a chap called Colonel Shute who I remember was 86. He said he was in the Bloody Munsters; he was a real Irishman and when he got really worked up you could hardly understand a word he said. His father had served in the 22 nd Foot, that’s a Cheshire Regiment in Hyderabad, one of their great battle honours of that particular regiment. He had a wonderful sense of humour that old Colonel Shute. He had very bad rheumatism in his knees, and he was quite certain that the surgeons would cut his legs off. Anyhow, this was one of the most interesting dinners I had during the war, old Colonel Shute could talk about things that one never realised that anyone living had passed through that particular period of history. Colonel Harper gave me a splendid dinner when I left for the last time, and I gave him before I left a dozen bottles of 1924 port, and I said to the old man you’d better keep it for a bit don’t drink it all, not one after the other. It was no good, he soon finished it. On another occasion, an orderly, the front door was left open all night, would come in and wake me and on this particular occasion there was an alarm, a false alarm at that, and the orderly ran into the old man’s room and was met with the old man sitting up in bed with the revolver pointing at the orderly as he broke in through the door. After the war I went back with my wife, and I called at the old man’s house and there he was in the garden looking very old and looking very aged. I said to him you won’t remember me sir, and he hesitated and all he said was “Watson and Jeffreys”, he remembered. I was so pleased and so was he. We talked about the old times of 1940. Kenneth Harper was the son of Lieutenant Alexander Forrest Harper of Litton. He died on 14 th April 1940 when HMS Thistle was torpedoed and sunk with all hands by a German U-Boat off Skudenes, Norway. The wreck of the submarine was discovered by a Norwegian survey team in the spring of 2023 at a depth of 160 metres.

Belinda Brocklehurst recalls across the road from my grandparents was Court Lodge, a large attractive house, where it is said the dreaded Judge Jeffries had court sessions in the 1700s. Mr and Mrs Newman lived here and were good friends and very long suffering about me going over and playing in their garden, watching Mr Newman and his bees, and the swan who used to come and pull a string by the back door to ring a bell and get some food. They were a lovely couple. He made me a beautiful replica of my grandparent’s house, which I still have 75 years later! Very sadly their super son Peter was killed in the war- like most families in the village, everyone seems to lose someone close to them. I still remember him well, he seemed so tall with wavy reddish hair and a lovely smile, and he was so patient with me, a constantly chatting skinny four to five-year-old. I think he was killed when I was about six.

The seventeenth century Court House barn was a stone building of six bays, a porch on the south side with a collar-beamed thatched roof. The costly maintenance of the thatched roof caused its gradual decay, and it became derelict after use by American troops in the Second World War. Some of the stone was used in the building of Tithe Barn House in Chalkpit Lane. Today only part of the walls remain.

The barns were used by the army in the Second world war. War time graffiti was found on the plaster of a barn and a vehicle inspection pit was present. It is likely that vehicle maintenance took place here.